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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4942513" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that what you are saying is a specific case of a more general problem people have with alignment - they want to make alignment conform to their own ethical precepts, instead of trying to fit ethical precepts within the alignment system.  Let's for the moment assume you describe the 1st edition cosmology well.Why would you say that it is 'unfair'?  Doesn't everyone get what they deserve?  The fact that they are predestined to get what they deserve doesn't make it unfair.  On the contrary, if everyone always gets what they deserve it is more fair.  It might be less just, it might be less compassionate, it might be less merciful, but its definately fair.Plenty of philosophies have described the universe as being predestined in some way or the other.  That you object to those philosophies in the real world is no reason not to deal with them in a hypothetical world.  Why not make what you percieve to be the injustice of the world to be the intellectual focus of the campaign?One thing you are hugely missing in your analysis is that in the 1st edition cosmology, all of the alignments are peers of the other and there is no preferential description of any of them.  All of them are equally 'good' and 'valid' as described by the system.  Good is no better than evil.  There is no inherent reason to choose any of the systems of belief.  There is no heirarchy where good is the 'best', nuetral is 'worse' and 'evil' is even worse, or for that matter where 'law' is the best and 'chaos' is the worst or vica versa.  For that reason there is no reason to describe any of it as a reward or punishment, and so no reason to suggest that an evil being has a worse destiny in the system than a good being.Note again your implicit heirarchy when you describe peoples motivations.  Evil people are motivated to be more evil, but good people... or also motivated to be more evil.  You are imposing real world philosophies on to the system.  There is no reason to suppose that Good beings won't be motivated to be equally one dimensional as their Evil counterparts (assuming that your description of one is true) to obtain similar rewards from their Celestial benefactors, because the cosmos as described was symmetrical and balanced.  It was a ring, not a ladder.  People don't 'fall' or 'ascend' in such a system.  Assuming your describe is correct, then absolutely, it is opposed to modern Western concepts.  However, it is not fundamentally opposed to historical and Eastern philosophical concepts, or internally opposed to itself.However, in addition to being a fundamentally non-Western, non-modern (non-Christian) conception of the universe, I think it also left alot more room for flexibility than you describe.  For mortals at least, morality wasn't an absolute.  It could drift.  You could change alignment, albiet at a cost.  Also, the system could be understood as more fair by a Westerner if you introduced an Eastern concept to it - reincarnation.  Perhaps the person was born with a certain predisposition because of what they'd done in past lives, and the most they could hope to do was change this karma a little, so that they'd be born with slightly different inclinations the next time.  That's just one way of looking at it.  In my campaign, many philosophers and theoretical magicians are somewhat consumed with the idea of obtaining the Unified Axiom, which you might think of as sort of a magical equivalent to the Grand Unified Field Theory - the foundation from which all other truth proceeds.   People in my campaign world believe that there are four sides to every coin - the positive, the negative, the anti-positive, and the anti-negative.  That is, for every thing there is a counterpart concept which is opposite but congruent to it, and two counterparts which are tangential to it but congruent to each other.  So for example, in this conception of the world, leisure is the opposite of industry, but they are congruent to each other, and sloth and drudgery are tangential to both but congruent to each other.   Many philosophers believe that you fold these concepts together in some fashion to show that leisure and industry are fundamentally the same things, or perhaps leisure and sloth are fundamentally the same things, to produce a binary two principle system which would reveal more basic and deeper truths than the 'obvious' four principle system everything is arranged according to.  A few nutcases go even further, and believe you can fold everything into a single principle from which all truth is derived.The various religions differ with each over how far this folding principle can be taken and what its end result would be like.  For example, intellectual neutrals believe that the world requires all four principles in some measure and shouldn't or can't be tampered with.  Intellectual neutral good believers on the other hand believe that the single underlying principle is in some fashion 'Good', and that eventually their will be a spiritual triumph in which the world will be perfected and fold back to its single original principle, after which time there will be a paradise.  Intellectual neutral evil believers, by contrast, believe the universe is derived fundamentally from 'Evil' and wish to bring about this triumph (which they generally believe will end all existence, and indeed it will all be as if it had never been which is as it should be).  And so forth.  And you can see that there are complexities like groups that may believe the other side is in fact right, and who - because they enjoy their own existence - are still trying to thwart the other sides triumph.  In any event, any sides triumph - if it were possible - would be an apocalypse for the other sides.  They would literally cease to exist.  So, the intellectual underpinning of the campaign, is that the players are supposed to take some sort of side in this debate.  Where do they stand?  ("Who are you?", "What do you want?", "Where are you going?")</blockquote>

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