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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 3749144" data-attributes="member: 2268">First, it's not the natural state of a soul. Souls in D&D have no natural state. Alignment is a fluctuating thing that can change over time, or quite fast. I could play a paladin who followed his code for 25 years before getting disappointed, falling, following temptation and turning into a blackguard for a year. The alignment of his soul would change from lawful good through various states of neutrality, to lawful evil in the end. Depending on the point on that timeline when he'd be slain, he'd go to the afterlife he "deserves" for the deeds that shaped his alignment.And honestly, if you can read through the descriptions in the MotP about what happens to souls once they reach each respective plane and still not see that good souls are rewarded and evil souls are punished, then you're either more jaded then I think you are, or we are simply discussing with two completely different sets of definitions where reward and punishment are regarded.In all the evil planes, most souls try to escape their punishment, either by fleeing the plane (Carceri, the Prison Plane), or by trying to claw their way up the power structure in order to be able to torture BACK. There is no soul who simply sits back there and goes "Ey, this is fun, just like I like it, bring on the acid vats and the burning pincers bub!" And most of them get abused in all kinds. Devils shape souls to their aesthetical pleasures, until they break and meld with the essence of the Nine Hells. Demons put manes on the frontlines, to be butchered by the devilish hordes in the Blood War by the hundreds...they even grind them into an ingredient to build demon ships!The fact that souls in those planes try to escape their fate at all costs should tell you that they don't get what they LIKE, but that they don't like what they GET, and try to get away from it. That's punishment right there, in the MotP. 3E version even. Compare that to the way souls are treated on the good planes, and then lets talk again about reward and punishment.And please, don't make me type out all the relevant quotes here, simply read them up yourself please. You'll save me some work. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> EDIT: Okay, one quote, because it's nicely short, and maybe gives you what you are actually looking for.Emphasis mine. See, it's right there in the "canon" text about what happens to souls in the D&D cosmology. Good souls go to their reward, evil souls go to their punishment. They can't get much clearer than that.I hope you won't start arguing now that "reward" and "punishment" are just relativistic expressions of "what the soul desires most", because that would go against EVERY definition of those words.So, I hope you're happier now. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />EDIT ENDHe's not being tormented anymore. He was tormented all the way up to the top, and he still has to fend off attacks against his power base on a constant schedule. If he gets ousted from his power, you can bet he will be tortured again, and much more cruelly than before he rose to power. Which is why he works with the motto "Do unto them before they can do unto you, and a hundredfold worse". All his hate, rage, etc is not his "ambrosia", it's his motivation for staying on top and torture those who tortured him for millenia.On the neutral planes, souls don't get rewarded or punished, simply because they haven't done anything to get rewarded or punished. On Mechanus, souls slowly lose their individuality and submit to the plane-wide law, in Limbo souls either dissolve into raw chaos or they continue existence as a blob of barely contained chaos (probably if they are stronger than usual). In the Outlands, souls adopt a "live and let live" lifestyle towards everybody, which means "Don't push me and I won't push you". That's what moral neutrality is about, after all, which emphasizes the reward-punishment dichotomy of the good-evil plane alignments.Relativity is in there only if you interpret it in. For the most part, it all sounds pretty clear cut. Good rewards, Evil punishes (and yes, torture, abuse and destruction counts as punishment to EVERYbody in my book), Neutrality doesn't do either. The reason why the designers don't write in an "Overdeity" that adjudicates it all and doles out punishment is for the simple reason that they don't want to touch that topic with a 10' pole, and I'm glad they don't. Where the D&D universe is concerned, the DM is that Overdeity, for his campaigns and PCs, and that's that. You are the one who writes "THIS is WRONG and THIS is RIGHT" over your campaign with finality, not the D&D designers.</blockquote>

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