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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mr Fixit" data-source="post: 6404206" data-attributes="member: 6779654">Conceive of themselves? No. Many generally "evil" people don't consider themselves such. Though I understand your point upthread on absolutism of D&D alignment. When a certain in-game mechanic absolutely identifies a being as good or chaotic for instance, it's hard, or even impossible, to allow for shades of gray. If someone's evil, he's evil in a provable way.I do, appreciate, however, 5E's efforts to circumvent this problem without abandoning the alignment system. Various detect and protection spells encompass all of the extreme philosophical alignment variations without necessarily tying the detect/protect effect to a specific one. You aren't detecting LG/LE/CG/CE beings, you're detecting celestials, fiends, fey and such. In a way, the names of the spells are really somewhat of a misnomer since they are essentially extraplanar detection and protection spells. It's their planar origin that is the salient point. "Mundane" Material Plane good and evil, as far as I know, can't be proven in this way. Alignment here remains in the eye of the beholder.I think this is an oversimplification. Communism may well be an enlightened ideology if viewed in the context of its post-industrial revolution origins. I find it very hard to accept Stalinism of WWII Soviet Union to be a fundamentally enlightened ideology (twisted in practice) as opposed to fascism and nazism as variants of state corporativism.Point is, state actors are willing to get in the bed with what they perceive as lesser evil to confront a great evil, just as they are willing to do the same with regards to order vs chaos. For example, and I won't go any further because of the board rules, was Allende's government evil? In the great scheme of things, I would say it was a progressive regime with "good" tendencies, especially considered in its historical, geographical, and socio-economic context. Yet certain powers deemed his government as too disruptive to the established geo-political order (chaotically-inclined, if you will) and supported the "evil" Pinochet regime that promised stability and order. The entire cold war could be simplistically understood that way, not as a conflict of good and evil--though there were elements of that--but as a conflict between revolution and counter-revolution (if your vantage point is in the East) or established world order and those who would usurp it. It's not that far-fetched to understand it as law vs chaos, though such real-world analogies are by their very nature flawed and shouldn't be taken literally.</blockquote>

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