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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6413931" data-attributes="member: 87792">And this is why Planescape is a morally bankrupt setting with no force in it other than "Might makes right" and that is by means of its very plasticity unsuitable for discussions as to the nature of good and evil or any other deep philosophy.If a hypothetical faction decides that raising humans in cages to render down for perfume when they hit the age of 16 is good and they become sufficiently powerful then in Planescape it is by definition good.  At that point you've destroyed any inherent meaning to the words "good" and "evil".On the contrary.  Planescape has the most cartoonish morality of all D&D settings I know of.  The idea that the PCs and limited NPCs have the idea to change the nature of good and evil is a level of protagonist centred morality that would make the writers of Saturday Morning Cartoons blush.If they were not using words in a directly contrary fashion to their normal meanings there would have been less of a problem.Planescape could work pretty well with a two axis morality.  Instead of Law and Chaos you get Keep and Change (i.e. do you want the current structure to change), and instead of Good and Evil you get Status Quo vs Revolution (do you think the current order within that structure should stay?)  So the demon who likes the current cosmology but thinks they should be in charge is a Revolutionary Keeper.And that makes for some very interesting alliances.Except it isn't a matter of opinion.  It's a cosmological force held by whoever is strongest.  You can measure what is good and what is evil.  You can then change that if you have the might - because that makes it right.But that isn't the world Planescape creates.  Planescape creates a world in which a conspiracy of mapmakers can turn the world into a Mercator Projection.  The Great Wheel is there.  Yes, you can say that Britain is more like Japan than it is like France - and in some ways you are right.  But there's still a lot of geography that matters.  The Great Wheel is like the globe in that respect.  Either that or you are massively undercutting what was the premise by not having beliefs actually change the cosmology.On the contrary.  It does everything to those meanings.  The world is an oblate spheroid.  Sure there are <a href="http://xkcd.com/977/" target="_blank">multiple map projections</a>.  And many more than that when we get into social geography. But the Great Wheel being core privileges a certain one in the same way that physics privileges the oblate spheroid.</blockquote>

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