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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Torm" data-source="post: 2056010" data-attributes="member: 12706">Part of the problem is the assumption that people are just automatically going to know how to define "Good" and "Evil", when some people study the matter all their lives! Many of us feel it. But put it in words. Hard, isn't it?I've studied it pretty long and hard, myself. I've spoken to ministers and Satanists, priests and Nazis, athiests and agnostics, and people of all stripes, and here's what I've come up with: Evil and Good are a scale that measures the distance between what one wants to do, and what one knows one should do, tilted on one end by layers of self-deception and on the other by higher duty. To illustrate: One sees a little old lady who wants to cross the street, but looks nervous about all the traffic, and one has time to kill. If one goes and helps her - the best use for one's otherwise wasted time, then one has done Good. If one pretends to go help her, then pushes her into traffic and takes her purse - well, that's pretty far from what you should do, and thus, Evil. If you do nothing at all, or maybe if you help her across but still take her purse, well, that's somewhere in between - for RPG purposes, we could call that more Neutral.Here comes self-deception and higher duty: On the Evil end of things, people sometimes convince themselves that they are serving some higher purpose in doing the things they do - the act of convincing themselves is, itself, pretty far from what one should do, and places a taint of Evil on everything that comes from that point. And on the Good end of things, people sometimes will do an Evil act in the pursuit of greater Good. And yes, these descriptions ARE very similar - the reason it is easier to become a great Evil from being a great Good than from a Neutral or Mediocre Good. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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