NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7670793" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I'm a little bit confused because you handwave the issue in paragraph one by calling it "the testimony problem", and then seem to build on that to refer to alignment spells as epistemic truth in paragraph two. To me, paragraph one seems pretty fundamental: Know Alignment spells (which barely exist in 5E anyway, in fact I can only think of sprites and Robes of the Archmagi/Books of Vile Darkness/Exalted Deeds as being alignment-aware) are only epistemic truth if you accept them as epistemic truth. If I have the right personality for it, I can commit mass murder of thousands in order to perhaps save the human race from utter destruction[1], and if my Robe of the Good Archmagi ceases to function, who cares? It's just an object, and it's less important than my mission. [Or at least, that's one way a given character might view the situation.]The game posits an unmediated access to consistent effects, which get labelled as "good" and "evil" in the metagame--but there's no need for a PC or even a player to accept that label. If my DM says I'm evil (or good), and I disagree--well, he controls the world but he doesn't control my mind as a player. It's just a label.In practice I expect the DM/player disagreement to pop up more frequently with regard to "good" than "evil", since different people have various degrees of stringency with which they use the word "good." In my view, most (N)PCs are neutral unless they make a concerted effort to be selfless and kind--and my definition holds even if I'm playing in the game of a DM who makes most PCs "good" by default.And yes, that would apply equally to a "Detect Beauty" spell, or a "Detect Yummy," with the caveat that I'm reliant on the DM to transmit the sensory effects to me as a player before I can make up my mind about them. But if he says it tastes like woodsmoke, and I like woodsmoke, then it's yummy even if the DM intended it to be yucky.[1] Taravangian is who I have in mind.</blockquote>

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