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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6408679" data-attributes="member: 2067">Perhaps they are not this way in broader D&D. But the alignments ARE this way in PS, and are presented as such. They are physical forces as well -- because people believe them to be. The Greeks believed that if you treated a guest poorly, the gods would punish you. That it was a horrible act. If that world functioned by the "belief makes reality" mantra and had alignments, this would mean that this was literally true, and is literally true only because people believed it to be the case. If someone in that world treated a guest poorly, a god would actually punish them, and this vile man who would not share his meal with his guests would be considered "chaotic evil." At some point in time, we stopped believing this to be true. Hospitality isn't quite as important now. So now, that person who doesn't share his meal with his guest might be, at most, kind of a jerk? But not "chaotic evil." Not worthy of divine punishment. If our world continued to function by the "belief makes reality" mantra and continued to have 9 alignments, and abandoned that moral code, they wouldn't really ascribe much of any sort of alignment to that action. Maybe a little Chaotic Neutral since it's a social faux pas? Kind of a stretch even there. So such a jerk would not be punished by the gods, and would not be dubbed "chaotic evil." In PS, the story of that transformation plays out as a fantasy story. It might be the story of a man shamed by the gods and destined for an afterlife he thinks he does not deserve because of his actions, who believes the gods are being far to cruel here. That man confronts a society that doesn't agree with him, a group of gods who wish to condemn him, and a universe set up for his failure, and through adhering to his strong belief in "Your definition of evil is wrong!" transforms the planes. There are inhospitable hosts burning in the pits of hell that he saves from that fate. There are proud gods whose codes he upends. There are rude guests who now have no claim to divine sanction. People believe evil to be a physical force, so it is, just like when people believe in gods, gods are created, and when people believe in a certain afterlife, that afterlife comes to be. If the belief changes, so does the reality. I think those limits only exist as much as a given person believes they do. The "here and now" in PS is a baseline world that you are expected to change. That might include the idea that peace and justice are "evil," or somehow undesirable, or whatever one cares to try and make true.One of the things PS is doing here is screwing with alignment. That's part of it's impetus to be "weird fantasy," and to give D&D stereotypes a kick in the nads. Alignment is designed as a tool for morally unambiguous cosmological conflict, and PS takes that framework and twists it so that it is morally ambiguous and about your personal philosophy. Believing alignments are objective is a hallmark of the Clueless, just another thing that "standard fantasy characters" don't realize the "truth" of (the truth that PS uses as part of its own unique take on what D&D is). I mean, without alignment, those planes can't rightly be called good planes any more, can they? And you loose the interesting tweak, that expectation twist. Alignment serves a purpose in PS. I won't say it's necessary, but it's inclusion is likely deliberate, to take people used to typical D&D/Tolkeinesque fantasy and show them that Lawful Good doesn't always mean what you think it means. That's part of the Wow Factor there, part of why PS is a unique D&D setting. The Great Wheel fits in a similar boat for me: not exactly necessary, but used to good effect, as it shows visually how every alignment is on par and, in fact, related to all the others. PS is a product of it's environment, and that environment is D&D. You could do a lot of PS-y stuff without that framework, but it's not necessary to ditch that framework to do PS. Quite the contrary, PS uses that framework to highlight and distinguish itself.Say that much louder, and I'm going to have to dust off an old campaign that never saw the light of day. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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