It's coherent because "good" in D&D terms means something very specific, as has been pointed out. And that specific value set may or may not be all that matters to a character.
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From the perspective of each of these other alignments, neutral good characters place an overly high value on certain virtues that are either incomplete (lawful good and chaotic good), insignificant (lawful neutral and chaotic neutral), or callow (evil).
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The entire point of having a perpendicular axis to good and evil is that law and chaos have equal value in the eyes of many inhabitants of the multiverse!
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good has a clear definition in the rules. But that definition leaves out several principles that many characters consider valuable.
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Only if you consider good to be inherently better than law and chaos, which isn't the way the nine-alignment system is designed; lawful neutral, chaotic neutral, true neutral characters are just as valid for play as lawful good, chaotic good, and neutral good characters are.
I guess this is a basic point of disagreement.
I think Gygax makes it clear that "good" denotes "contributes to human welfare", and that law and chaos are means to that end.
LN, CN and N are valid for
play. So is evil (qv assassins). But they are not
morally valid. Gygax makes it clear that to be neutral with respect to good and evil is to fail to prioritise human wellbeing (life, relative freedom and the reasonable expectation of happiness). The 3E/d20 system agrees (using the language of "respect" and "dignity" in lieu of the language of rights).
Where's the proof that Good is better than Evil in D&D? I don't see it.
I think that the rulebooks take it for granted that fostering human wellbeing, and treating others in a way that respects and honours their dignity as fellow-creatures, is a better form of life than treating others simply as ends to one's own purposes.
Actual arguments to this conclusion are available - and will be no less sound in a fantasy world than the real world - but my sense is that it would be a breach of board rules to run them!
there are some value systems where freedom has a higher premium than human life or the happiness of others.
Sure. They are flawed value systems (within the framework of D&D's 9-point alignment). Someone who supports freedom as a basis for human life and happiness is CG - s/he is committed to human wellbeing, and believes that social order is a threat to it. Someone who pursues his/her own freedom without regard to the welfare of others, except perhaps in hestitating to kill or destroy those who get in his/her way, is CN. By the lights of 9-point alignment, a morally flawed person.
I think it's entirely possible for a "broad definition" of good to include concepts that both chaotic good and lawful good characters value. Indeed such a broad definition seems otherwise useless.
Of course. My main point is that a CG person therefore has no basis for strife with a LG person - it's a dispute over taste and inclination.
My other point, to which this quote was a response, was that Gygax implicitly acknowledged that L/C and G/E aren't orthogonal, because he couldn't expound Good without reference to freedom. You can see the same thing in the d20 SRD:
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others. . . .
Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. . . .
"Law" implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability.
These aren't orthogonal and independent. For instance, a concern for dignity
implies a degree of truth-telling and trustworthiness. After all, lies and betrayal are one of the main ways of treating others as means rather than ends, and you don't have to be a full-blown Kantian to feel the force of this point.
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You do realize Detect Evil/Know Alignment are spells that can be removed just as easily right?
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Well "remove it" can work for any edition, see above... so what makes 4e different in this aspect?
OK, if you think it's as easy to remove alignment from the Great Wheel and still have it make sense, as it is to remove alignment from 4e, then more strength to your arm!
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The reason that it is possible for planes to shift in Planescape is because of the perspective of the rest of the people in the multiverse, not because of any intrinsic property of the act itself.
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what is good depends on what one views as good, so they've only revealed themselves to be less than fully good in the eyes of certain people. "Good" is subjective. And those views and perspectives can change, based on the actions of those with strong convictions.
Why, then, given their vast numbers, have the fiends of the world not succeeded in having the Lower Planes relabelled "good" and the Upper Planes relabelled "evil"?
I would say that, in D&D, the Good vs. Evil divide is a matter of taste insofar as there is no correct answer between the two, except for the belief of individuals on that count.
In the setup described here, there's no reason to believe in anything! Anything at all! It's just the arbitrary exercise of your will (shades of Nietzsche!). You choose something, and by your own sovereign ubermenschlichkeit force your vision on the world. What it is doesn't matter!
"Excercising your will" is going to involve running around casting spells and sticking swords in things and visiting dead gods and infinite trees and having tea with demons and the like, but I don't think that's an inaccurate characterization.
I agree with The Shadow that this seems a Nietzschean idea.
I probably differe from The Shadow in thinking that there are interesting, even plausible, elements to the Nietzchean idea (it sees development in a range of other modern philosophers: the existentialists; Foucault; Ayer and Russell; Simon Blackburn; etc). But it needs a lot of work - if value commitments are a
mere matter of taste, then killing in pursuit of them seems outrageous - it would be killing others simpy to satisfy one's own desire, which in D&D terms is practically the definition of evil. So
everyone woud be, in D&D terms, evil!
I don't think that D&D has the conceptual resources to easily articulate and make sense of a more sophisticated and plausible Nietzschean approach. And also, certain D&D character classes - especially paladins, monks and samurai - make no sense in the Nietzschean framework. It's no coincidence that fantasy authors whose outlook is closer to Nietzsche (eg REH, Moorcock) don't have paladins or monks in their fiction (in REH, for instance, there are no D&D-style priests, just more-or-less cynical magicians).
Planescape is D&D with plenty of grey shades, though. And ACTUAL grey shades, not just "I'm dark and broody and anti-hero-ish" aesthetics! It's morals and ethics in a funhouse mirror.
This language of "shades of grey" is a red-herring.
For a "shades of grey" political/espionage novel, I recommend Graham Greene's
The Human Factor and
The Quiet American. But Greene is not a Nietzschean - he's a Catholic existentialist. Here's a
link to an actual play report from my own game, which shows what GMing influenced by Graham Greene might look like. The figher/cleric in that episode found himself in a situation in which he could not realise both honour and justice, and so had to choose. (He chose honour over justice.) That's "shades of grey", but has nothing to do with "good is what you believe it is" - the reason the choice matters, and is hard, is because the character (and the player in playing the character) feels the pull of both values as real and g
I think it's actually quite hard to articulate how the PS idea is shades of grey at all - if good is nothing but what I desire, where's the grey? What's the measure by which the greyness of my desires might be judged?
This relates back to my comments about wish-fulfillment some way upthread: if good is whatever one wishes, it's a challenge to move beyond wish-fulfillment. And I'm not sure that D&D has the resources to do so.