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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brazeku" data-source="post: 3579434" data-attributes="member: 48916">Under real world considerations, with no really apparent cosmic order, what you are saying makes sense.  But under D&D rules, with obvious alignments and mechanics to gain powers around them, I think the situation would be very different and doesn't open itself to post-modern interpretations of morality.  In my view, the good-evil spectrum of alignments absolutely does not represent philosophies, it is a scale of right and wrong, with physics surrounding them and very real damnation if you follow the evil path.  Good and Evil assume 'right' and 'wrong', so something which has the alignment 'good' is inherently 'right thinking' by nature.  Law and Chaos is different, it represents a scale of god knows what, frankly it's too vague to be of much use except as an indicator for procedural rigidity or respect towards authority.If the system had been intended to represent different philosophies as opposed to black and white morality, Good and Evil wouldn't have been the words used.Would people listen to them?  If it could be demonstrated that beings with world breaking intelligence and supernatural powers which served as paragons of the cosmic order actually existed and would answer questions and grant favor, wouldn't society have developed in such a way as to listen?  What would people have turned out to be like in such a situation?  It's an intriguing question. It can be an interesting game, the question it asks is are individually harmful acts which serve a greater good considered to be evil or good?  The answer varies, but the alignment system doesn't support this type of question any better than a motivation based or non-alignment based system.  Being able to determine what is and isn't a celestial being and agonizing over killing it to serve a greater good is a cheap plot device which would be better served by observing the being through actions, as opposed to assigning it a place in the cosmos by simply looking at it's alignment in a Monster Manual entry.Like I said above, just because good and evil aren't spelled out or placed on every character sheet doesn't mean they don't exist.  In fact ,I would say that in a system where good and evil aren't defined, when you come across a rare something which actually does have some kind of metaphysical effect based upon it's nature, the impact of that event is much greater.  D&D's system is too ham fisted to be used for serious moral quandries, it's like a pulp comic book or a bad movie.</blockquote>

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