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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6412795" data-attributes="member: 42582">That sounds like good stuff.The tropes are Planescape-y (a once-fallen deva, the River Styx, a memory-restoring flower, etc) but I'm not seeing anything here about obective vs subjective value as a key element of setting or of play. To me it just looks like good old-fashioned roleplaying: the players had goals and commitments for their PCs, the GM put these into (prima facie) conflict, and the players dealt with that conflict, in this case by coming up with an all-round satisfactory outcome.Whether the PCs did the right thing or not is not something that the setting and other ingame material gives an answer to - it's a matter of audience judgement, just as for any other fiction.I don't see the shaping of truth through the power of belief. This could in part because I don't know how the actions were resolved, and hence success achieved.Eg if, once the players have reached a mutually satisfactory settlement, did the GM just "say yes"? For me, that would be something that takes place at the metagame level - the interesting play material in the situation has been dealt with, so now we narrate the scene closed and move onto the next interesting thing. But maybe the GM "saying yes" is seen as corresponding to some actual even/causal power within the setting?The faction-derived powers also seem to have been relevant, but that would seem to be belief leading to truth only in an instrumental sense: conviction leads to faction-derived powers, and those powers then allow doing stuff, and so in that instrumental fashion belief shaped truth - but that is really no different from any conviction-derived powers (eg a cleric's spells in standard D&D).Maybe there's something else that I'm missing here?In real-world moral and political discussions that I'm familiar with, though, that woud prove the objectivity of the claims in question. Eg part of the claims of classical Marxism to being objective science rest in its (putative) capacity to anticipate and effectively manage transformations in social and economic life.That's certainly consistent with my encounters with Planescape materials.</blockquote>

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