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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6405095" data-attributes="member: 42582">You may be confusing me with [MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION].Upthread (post 767) I said:I don't think one would have to go this way: for instance, if you wanted to run a game that emphasised the ethos of Homeric heroism, you might want to frame the CE character as at least capable of self-assertion, whereas the the LE character might be somewhat weak and insipid. But what I do agree with in your post is that any coherent moral framework has to take some sort of stand on this. It makes no sense to say that the difference in outlook between the demon and the devil is evaluatively significant, and yet makes no contribution to the degree of goodness/evilness.My point is that, per the D&D rules, degree of evil is not a matter of perspective - eg Detect Evil doesn't yield a different result, when cast on a demon or a devil, depending on whether or not the caster is lawful or chaotic. I'm not saying this is coherent - my whoe contention is that this is part of the reason that the 9-point framework is incoherent.The point is, if the LG character casts Detect Good or Know Alignment on the inhabitants of Olympus, s/he is going to have to abandon his/her conviction that order is the best way to promote good - because here are all these non-lawful beings who are just as good as s/he is.That is completely coherent. The prominent contemporary moral and political philsopher Joseph Raz defends a view along these lines (it's called value pluralism). It's just that, if that were so, then there is no rational basis for the Celestians to quarrel with the Arboreans and vice versa. Because each is perfectly good.But D&D, in is 9-alignment/Great Wheel version, wants to assert both that all three are equally good, and yet that one perspective can reasonably regard the other as flawed. That is what is incoherent.What I said above, in response to [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION], is that I think most D&Ders tend to try to reconcile the incoherence in much the way that you describe, and hence draw the reasonable conclusion that the differene between law and chaos is not a very big deal. If you want to play a drunken barbarian, choose CG. If you want to play a stick-in-the-mud paladin, choose LG. But the difference between being drunk and being a stick-in-the-mud is a difference of temperament and inclination, not a difference of deep moral weight. Quite different, say, from the difference between being generous and being a thieving murderer.TL;DR: In 9-point alignment it makes no difference to a being's possible degree of goodness or evil whether or not it is lawful or chaotic. The two are independent. Hence, judging a being as morally flawed on the basis that it is lawful or chaotic is unwarranted. However, this is exactly what the game posits: that Celesitians judge Olympians as morally flawed despite the fact that they are fully good. This is incoherent. The standard way of brushing over the incoherence is the one that [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] pointed to: downplay law/chaos divisions (eg treat them as matters of temperament) and focus on good and evil as the meaningful conflict.This is why dwarves and elves can be friends, whereas elves and ogres can't be.</blockquote>

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