I think we may be getting unnecessarily sidetracked.
As others have said, Planescape and the Great Wheel do not necessarily promote a moral equivalence between good and evil. It's one thing to say that cosmic good and cosmic evil are equal in power - that's more or less indicated by their equal standing in the Great Wheel. It's another thing to say that every good action results in an evil reaction (or vice versa). The former is (essentially) true in Planescape; the fiends and celestials of the multiverse exist in a stalemate (as do the devils and demons for that matter). The latter, however, is not.
It is, however, preached explicitly in Greyhawk, explicitly
by the chief God of Good in Dragonlance, and
maintained by Ao, the Overgod in the Forgotten Realms. It is therefore the standing assumption in all the largest D&D settings. Unless the Planescape Great Wheel is mysteriously different from all other Great Wheels in D&D Cosmology that is what the Great Wheel means. And why throughout this thread I've been saying that the Great Wheel is a terrible fit for Planescape (and to be fair for almost all other settings).
What's more, I don't really see how the World Axis of 4e is any different. The gods have defeated, destroyed, or imprisoned most of the primordials but a great number of them still exist or on the verge of escaping.
The World Axis says "This is how the world is now." There's none of the essential symmetry that the Great Wheel mandates. The World Axis is inherently unstable.
Personally, I'm inclined to think mortals' understanding of the planes in any edition of D&D is probably a bit simplistic and flawed.
Indeed. Which is why I'm going by the word of Gygax, the word of an Overgod, and the word of the chief God of Good. Balance is King. And The Great Wheel is the sort of result where you get where balance and symmetry are in charge.
Quite right. I remember how shocked I was when reading the Gord the Rogue books (hey, I was young - and no, I can't recommend them now) and the protagonists were promoting 'Balance' between solars and demons. The sheer insanity of it took me aback.
The thing is that if we go by D&D's
initial cosmology a pro-balance agenda makes sense. That was a straight Law vs Chaos. And both were inimical to humanity and certainly to adventurers. Good vs Evil is an entirely different sort of conflict.
It's interesting that you bring up Star Wars. I hadn't thought of it in this light before, but you're right - the Dark Side is all about unbridled passions, lack of control. It's the antithesis of balance. Of course, Jedi philosophy is so utterly incoherent in so many different ways, it's probably best to leave it there.
Hah, yes!
I must object to (some) of what Permeton and The Shadow said. Evil is not merely the absence of good, nor it it less real than good. If it were, it couldn't hurt us... it'd be illusionary.
That's like saying that vacuum can't hurt us. I happen to think it's wrong, and that the worst evil tends to be a corruption. A cancer. And that some degree of self interest and group identity is
necessary for us - but most evil happens when one or other of those gets corrupted.
I must also point out that Aramis Erak's quote, if in fact from Planescape, would only reflect the viewpoint of a minority of characters, mostly petitioners from the Outlands and the Rilmani, who indeed are guilty of believing that good cannot exist without evil, etc. But the folks on the other sixteen planes of the Great Wheel sure don't agree.
So wait a minute. Paladine
isn't in one of the sixteen planes of the Great Wheel? Right.
The Archons of Mount Celestia certainly don't think evil is a necessary part of the multiverse, or else they wouldn't bother striving again it.
I don't think that water can be stopped indefinitely. That's no reason to not build a dike and so let Holland flood.
(For the record, I have never subscribed to the idea that good needs evil to exist. I agree, it's as screwy to me as to Permeton and The Shadow.)
Indeed. than a monster made of "fear" or "hatred". In a magical world, this happens all the time.[/QUOTE]