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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6412601" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] - thanks for actual play examples, which I find make discussion easier than abstract statements about what might be done with a setting.That all sounds like fun. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, but it seems to have a different character from the presentation of the setting that I'm discussing with   [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION].For instance, as you describe it these questions about the nature of sensation, its relationship to being, etc were treated as questions with real answers, in relation to which it mattered what attitude a person might take. It doesn't seem to have been presented as something that is true simply in virtue of people believing it to be so.This seems to combine something that is not itself be a moral view -  a view about the nature of perception and what experiences enhance the capacity to perceive - with a view about the value of perception, ie that it is a good thing to push the boundaries of percpetion, and experience more.How did this interact with the alignment system?I think the core D&D alignment system rules out a thorough-going Epicureanism, because pleasure is treated as a good, but not the sole good. (Eg dignity is a good in its own right.) So, by orthodox D&D standards, your Epicureans are probably neutral - perhaps CN, but the L/C axis can be rather unclear and unhelpful. (There is an Epicurean strand in Buddhism, for instance, but Buddhism tends to default, in D&D, to LN: Nirvana and all that.)The idea that Epicureans would try to persuade others of the sense of their teaching makes sense to me, but I don't have a sense of how that interacts with the "belief makes reality" aspect. In the real world, Epicureus begins from a situation of (i) believing that he knows what good is, and (ii) belieiving that others are ignorant about that. So he sets out to teach them. Whereas, at least as KM prestents it, in PS the dynamic is (i) Epicureus is wrong to think that wise pleasure is good, because popular opinion has defined "good" in classical D&D terms, and (ii) Epicureus sets out to correct his own error by changing everyone's beliefs. This dynamic is very odd to me, because it seems that either Epicureus starts out spreading what he knows to be error - which is very counter-intuitive - or else it turns out that the label "good" doesn't matter (upthread KM said it is arbitrary), in which case the "belief makes reality" thing seems pretty irrelevant - who cares about the labels - and the situation reverts back to the real-world one, of Epicureus having a conviction that he is trying to spread.In this latter case, I can see how PS might, via the Sensates, seed that camaign idea, but I don't see it's "belief = reality" part making an especially big contribution to that. It seems to be a campaign about moral argument.I can see that. But it seems to me the nature of their disagreement was not over who gets to enjoy the use of certain arbitrary labels, or even who gets to persuade the most number of people of the truth of their convictions, but rather was over the truth of their convictions in and of themselves: the Epicureans think the pleasure/pain-ers are needlessly cultivating suffering, while the pleasure/pain-ers think that the Epicrueans are slightly priggish opponents of mind-exapanding practices.That's a dispute that's pretty familiar (in one or another variation) from real life, and that makes sense and could certainly make for a fine game. But it doesn't help me make any more sense of KM's comments about the importance of PS's treatment of the alignment system for opening up the space for a campaign focused on moral disagreement. (Not that I'm sure you meant for it to do so.)To be honest, I'm not seeing anything at all in your description of your campaign connected to the subectivity or arbitrariness of moral labels. On the contrary, it seems to me to turn on a genuine disagreement, between the various factions within the Sensates, about the nature and value of various sorts of sensory experience.</blockquote>

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