D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Aldarc]

Worth repeating! At least in PS, all of these things have their origins in some validity. I am fond, for instance, of this interpretation of how each alignment sees itself. While I wouldn't necessarily claim it is authentic or canon or anything, I find it very much informs how I approach the alignments in D&D, and is a very thoughtful treatment on how one would "realistically" play these alignments (which are little more than short-hand for heroic and villainous archetypes, functionally).

This post highlights a problem I have with the D&D alignment system. If I'm playing, I'm playing a character and not an alignment. If the alignments are "little more than short-hand for heroic and villainous archetypes," then they strike me as being wholly redundant and unnecessary feature of gameplay, especially since classes and races/creatures often represent such archetypes in themselves. This is certainly even more true with 5E's introduction of 'backgrounds,' which help position the player's relation to society. Thus this idea of building a cosmology based around this redundant and marginally beneficial (with me being generous) feature of gameplay is detrimental to my experience of D&D, both as a player and a GM.

Part of what I really like about PS is that it takes the black-and-white, red-vs-blue, moustache-twirling ugly evil vs. pretty white glowing sparkly good that D&D is kind of made for (what with alignments and demons and all) and turns it right on its ear. It could abandon alignment, sure. It doesn't NEED to, and it actually USES alignment to help cement one of its big themes. When someone tells you that something is Good, it is up to the heroic PC character to understand that Good means different things to different people, and the glowing sparkles with the blue lasers doesn't mean that the person is RIGHT. The Ultimate Home of Justice And Good ain't all it's claiming to be, and only a fool would swallow the brand without question.

What I like about abandoning alignment is that it allows you to do all this and more in any setting, and not just Planescape. Hell, Eberron does a good job of this as well in its setting that marginalizes alignment, tosses the Great Wheel like yesterday's garbage, and involves practically no character planar travel.

Just to be clear, it's not that Planescape is a flawed setting or that it's badwrongfun to like Planescape - no more than those of us who dislike Planescape, the Great Wheel, and alignment - but that this is not our preferred means of obtaining the moral complexity that we want out of our gaming experience.

 

[Elderbrain]

Since I don't know that much about Planescape canon, do they actually do this in the setting? Do they actually have CG forces wiping out groups of paladins because they don't agree with the paladin's version of good? Do forces from Olympus invade Elysium and slaughter the people they find there in order to create a "More perfect good"?

I mean, that's what demons and devils do in the Blood War, right? Either side invades the other side and tries to kill everything so that the "More perfect evil" triumphs. At least, that's my pretty unnuanced understanding. But, I've never seen the Good side of Planescape start doing the same thing. Do LG forces team up with LE forces to forcibly convert CG forces?

I wasn't going to add any more here, BUT since you asked a question I know the answer to, then YES, Lawful Good types do sometimes try to forcibly convert NG and CG characters in Planescape (I'm not aware of any examples of NG or CG characters doing so.) Specifically, a Faction known as the Harmonium engaged in the kidnapping of NG and CG characters and took them to "retraining camps" on the third layer of Arcadia. However, this action resulted in that layer becoming LN, shifting away from Arcadia and becoming part of the Lawful Neutral plane of Mechanus. Also, a group based on Mt. Celestia is trying to poach land (and people) from the LG (N) plane of Bytopia. Hope that helps.

 

[Imaro]

Planescape uses, and indeed makes central to its cosmology, 9-point, 2-axis alignment.

In 4e the cosmology is completely independent of alignment (for instance, the word "evil" in the phrase "shard of evil" that is part of the story of the Abyss is just the word "evil" being used in its everyday sense - it is not a term drawn from a technical alignment lexicon).

The game does assign alingments to NPCs and monsters, but they are simple descriptors of outlook and allegiance. They are not presented as tools of moral categorisation (unlike 9-point alignment).

It's interesting you think that's how alignment was in 4e... but I've got to ask how do you reconcile that view with the fact that 4e does actually have alignment dependent mechanics...

The Purple Dragon Theme requires that a character be good or lawful good...
Corruption effects from The Book of Vile Darkness and some diseases affect alignment...
There are alignment requirements for certain epic destinies and paragon paths...

 

[Seethyr]

Sorry, I am a latecomer to this thread and what I have to say has probably been covered multiple times over 86 pages, but this topic is important enough to me to feel the need to respond anyway.

I think the best parts of all the different philosophies that gamers have on the planes could have been interconnected to make a majority of us happy. Some people seem to love the unique nature of the planar descriptions of their own setting and like to keep it unique. Others love the interconnected nature of Planescape (and Spelljammer). I can't see why these two major concepts couldn't be combined.

Maybe certain planets subscribe to the Great Wheel Cosmology (I'd go with FR and Greyhawk at least for these). They share gods and events in the planes like the blood war. This can help explain, for one, the seemingly infinite number of soul-origin critters in the planes like the tanar'ri. Could GH alone have provided so many souls for the Blood War alone?

But then, places like Eberron can have their own cosmology as well. I don't know that system well, but I remember reading up on their planes and it was cool as heck.

Why lose that? But here is the kicker, find some way to allow travel between cosmologies as well. If someone wants their character to head to Xyber (or whatever it is called) there should be a way to do so.

I have even used different cosmologies within the same world. As a Maztica fanatic (the Aztec setting from 2e), I have my own cosmology even though Maztica was on Toril. I HATED that Quetzalcoatl (called Qotal in Maztica) had a domain where he could stop by Bahamut's to borrow some sugar. There was just too much intermixing there for me.

Why can't you have the best of both worlds?

 

[I'm A Banana]

FWIW, I don't think alignments are any more integral to Planescape as a setting than the map of the cosmos as a Great Wheel is. That is, they are useful tools for doing what PS does (the Great Wheel makes Unity of Rings explicit; alignments help you to defy their expectations), but they're hardly essential for the setting's truest expression. Most often, I'll have PC's declare alignments in my PS games simply to make them think about where they might want to value and why, so that they'll ultimately have a context for some of the conflicts they'll be resolving and a declared stake in the results, but I don't use them as guideposts in play for anything functional.

The Seven Heavens is the plane of ultimate lawful goodness. It is already free of evil. As long as its denizens keep doing whatever they have done so far to render it the ultimate plane of lawful goodness, it will be free of evil.

And the same is true of Olympus (but substituting chaos for law).

Sure, but which one is free of evil in the best way? Utopia is one place, so clearly one must be better than the other, depending on your perspective. Heck, depending on your perspective, the Abyss might be more ideal as a society than any of 'em -- that is a utopia to those who are chaotic and evil, functioning almost how their perfect society would function.

There is also a puzzle in the notion of "the better good". Given that "better" is equivalent to "more good", the notion is equivalent to "the good that is more good". Well, neither is "more good", at least if I believe the Know Alignment spells, Detect Good spells, the effects of a Holy Word spell, etc.

If you want to say that "good" in LG means something different from "good" in CG, then you have to abaondon the notion of a single good-evil axis. (The same, mutatis mutandis, would apply to "lawful" as it figures in LG and LE.)

Good is not one thing. It is many things. Literally infinite things.

What would be the difference between wiping out all the paladins because you thing they're wrong about goodness, and the triumph of evil. How does a Planescape protagonist who thinks "all this purity and virtue isn't so good after all" differ from a NE or CE daemon/demon?

The difference is in one's perspective. The paladins might see it as a triumph of evil, but those who never believed their self-proclaimed goodness? They'd say this is a triumph of a greater good.

 

[Aldarc]

I wasn't going to add any more here, BUT since you asked a question I know the answer to, then YES, Lawful Good types do sometimes try to forcibly convert NG and CG characters in Planescape (I'm not aware of any examples of NG or CG characters doing so.) Specifically, a Faction known as the Harmonium engaged in the kidnapping of NG and CG characters and took them to "retraining camps" on the third layer of Arcadia. However, this action resulted in that layer becoming LN, shifting away from Arcadia and becoming part of the Lawful Neutral plane of Mechanus. Also, a group based on Mt. Celestia is trying to poach land (and people) from the LG (N) plane of Bytopia. Hope that helps.

So what you're telling me is that Lawful Good types aren't supposed to do this because it's not actually "Good"?

 

[Elderbrain]

Right, at least that the way the Planescape writers saw it, that it was evil for the LG Harmonium members to force Good but non-Lawful types to change their alignments against their will. That bit of evil - the coercion - was enough to move that layer of Arcadia one step towards evil, thus becoming part of Mechanus.

 

[pemerton]

YES, Lawful Good types do sometimes try to forcibly convert NG and CG characters in Planescape (I'm not aware of any examples of NG or CG characters doing so.) Specifically, a Faction known as the Harmonium engaged in the kidnapping of NG and CG characters and took them to "retraining camps" on the third layer of Arcadia. However, this action resulted in that layer becoming LN, shifting away from Arcadia and becoming part of the Lawful Neutral plane of Mechanus. Also, a group based on Mt. Celestia is trying to poach land (and people) from the LG (N) plane of Bytopia. Hope that helps.

So what you're telling me is that Lawful Good types aren't supposed to do this because it's not actually "Good"?

I'm with Aldarc on this one - if forcible conversion turns a plane from LG to LN then the one who did it weren't LG types at all!

Also, I'm not sure how this is meant to fit with the "good is whatever we make of it" vibe coming through in other posts expaining PS. It seems to fit with the objective conception of good and evil that is part and parcel of 9-point alignment.

Sure, but which one is free of evil in the best way?

This makes me repeat - what does best mean here? It can't mean "most good as in most free of evil", because both are free of evil. I can't see it as anything other than a type of aesthetic prefrence - "To me, order is more pleasing than chaos". That's not something that good people kill over, given they respect one another's dignity and hence differences of taste and inclination.

Conversely, someone who starts hacking into Olympians on grounds that they're not free of evil in the right way has revealed him-/herself to be less than fully good - a bit like the Harmonium!

I don't think alignments are any more integral to Planescape as a setting

<snip>

Most often, I'll have PC's declare alignments in my PS games simply to make them think about where they might want to value and why

<snip>

I don't use them as guideposts in play for anything functional.

That seems sensible enough. But I'm not sure how it fits with the Harmonium's activities being objectively judged as non-good (presumably evil?). That seems to be about using alignment in play for establishing and applying key features of the cosmology.

The paladins might see it as a triumph of evil, but those who never believed their self-proclaimed goodness? They'd say this is a triumph of a greater good.

When a Detect Evil spell detects them, then; or when they die and go to the Abyss rather than Heaven; what are they meant to make of that?

 

[The Shadow]

Good is not something objectively desirable.

...And here is the great divide. Here is the lack of contact between my (and I think Pemerton's) point of view and those of others on this thread.

My instinctive response is, "Of COURSE good is something objectively desirable! Otherwise it wouldn't BE good! It would just be a matter of taste."

As Pemerton said, however, the fact that it is innately desirable does not mean that it is, in fact, desired. That's what evil is all about: Pursuit of objectively wrong ends that are only superficially attractive.

As I said quite a lot of pages ago, one of my major beefs with D&D alignment is that it treats good and evil as in some sense equal; they aren't. The relationship is asymmetrical: Evil needs good things to desire in the wrong way or to the wrong extent, but good has no need whatever of evil. And worse yet, it treats the incoherent and made-up Law/Chaos axis as somehow equivalent to the crucial distinction between good and evil.

(A brief aside: Law vs. Chaos made some sense in Moorcock's universe, where they were the only games in town. There, the only sane option was to try to play the two off against each other, because they were both desperately evil. But once Gygax introduced Good vs. Evil in addition, Law vs. Chaos treated as forms of 'Neutrality' stopped making any sense whatever. How anyone can think that the Lords of Law and Chaos in Moorcock are anything but utterly evil bastards is beyond me. Good grief, any scene Arioch is in, he comes off as completely demonic - or diabolical, if you prefer!)

(Incidentally, it's the utterly bleak metaphysics of Moorcock's worlds that makes me rather loathe them in the end, despite his skill as a storyteller.)

But my main beef with D&D alignment is, as I have intimated, that it contributes pretty much exactly nothing. I've played plenty of other RPG's that had no alignment system at all, and they did not suffer for it in the least. The heroes were just as heroic, the villains just as villainous, the morally grey areas just as morally grey. Where is the value added of D&D's alignment system? Why bother with it?

I've been saying for decades now that if one must have a Detect Evil spell, why can't it just detect supernatural evil - undead and fiends? And I am glad to see that 5e at last agrees with me. Or, as Pemerton said, a Detect Enemy spell, that works fine too.

 

[Elderbrain]

I'm with Aldarc on this one - if forcible conversion turns a plane from LG to LN then the one who did it weren't LG types at all!

- Not neccessarily. Sometimes good people do evil things (which they don't recognize as evil, naturally) for good reasons. Anyway, if those Harmonium members DIDN'T value good, they wouldn't have bothered trying to convert people to Lawful Good. The Harmonium wasn't aiming at an inherently evil goal, just using the wrong means to bring it about (if they had tried gentle persuasion instead of violence and coercive magic, presumably the layer wouldn't have moved... or might have moved the OTHER way, towards Mt. Celestia.)