Core Principle: Your Alignment System is Dumb

[Endovior]

You could always operate under the assumption that the gods aren't actually omnipotent and are bound by some form of celestial law, thus cannot overtly affect events on the PMP. Perhaps they are barred from leaving their personal demense, and are forced to act through agents such as angels, devils, clerics, couriers, litigators, insurance agents, etc.

Did you read the thread at all? This has already been investigated in detail. Long story short, it's not a great idea, because if true, then it means that whatever power the gods have is meaningless, and praying to them is not a good way to get things done.

[Grek]

Gods don't care if you are good or evil.... they care that you keep up your end of the deal.

This being true does not allow me to tell the stories that I want to tell. I want to be able to write up a character that is religious and have them think that their god really is righteous, wise and just without having that character also being obviously wrong and hopelessly insane. The only way to do that is for there to be multiple gods who each have plans for the world that are mutally exclusive, comprehensible-by-mortals and at least apparantly desireable for some portion of the population and then have people pick whether or not they want to worship a given god based on the god's stated plans for the world.

An example of a god that meets this criteria is Gruumsh. Gruumsh's plan of "make orcs rule over everything" is something that you can understand, something that causes conflict and something that is desireable to the orcish segment of the population. If you are an orc, worshiping Gruumsh is a perfectly reasonable and justified decision on your part, and if you aren't, then not worshiping Gruumsh is just as reasonable.

[Stubbazubba]

[quote="Stubbazubba]
Says the toddler when put in time out, yes, or when getting his kindergarten immunizations.

No. This is what the theist says when they see that the Gods allow murder, disease, famine and genocide to go on, not because they cannot stop it from happening, but because they refuse to in order to "teach us a lesson" about selflessness and the power of friendship.

After a certain degree of badness is reached, refusing to prevent bad things from happening to your children (or worshipers) in order to teach them a lesson about selflessness stops being a learning experience and starts being Evil with a capital E. Genocide is well beyond that point. Even murder is beyond that point. You don't let your kid get hit by a car just so that he'll know to look both ways next time.[/quote]

No, your perspective is short-sighted and juvenile. As Chamomile pointed out, all the suffering possible in the mortal world is about as significant to a god as burning your hand on the stove. Good deities won't put you to that extreme, but illness, injury, grief and suffering are like making your kid pull a few weeds on a Saturday morning or mowing a lawn, or doing their homework, or wash the dishes.

Seriously, what you are advocating is that every time a kid gets grounded the parents are Evil with a capital E because it's uncomfortable and not what the kid wants or even understands. That is retarded on a fundamental parenting level. I know we're talking about games and I'm not trying to say badwrongfun, but if you're talking about a morality that makes sense, it can't be based on hedonistic base desires. It has to demand more than that, otherwise it is worthless to the participant.

This is almost certainly false. Unless your campaign setting specifically says that the world is constantly getting better and the people in it are getting becoming more and more selfless with each passing generation, then the Gods that advocate such a policy are Evil. They are allowing objectively bad things to happen, despite being able to prevent them, in order to teach a lesson that is not being taught and would be of only questionable merit in the first place.

After a certain point, more harm does not mean more learning. If benevolent gods are real and powerful, they should be preventing anything worse than a broken leg, because allowing anything worse to happen is letting people get fucked for no good reason. Having a drought ruin your farm doesn't teach you anything besides "The weather will occasionally fuck me and my crops for no good reason. I should prepare for that before it happens again."

And that is completely aside from the issue that the Good gods would be better served by directly punishing killers, theives and other bad people, rather than letting everyone suffer due to things that are completely outside their control, or, at best, only marginally within their ability to influence.

To put it to a point, the gods you described are either too stupid to do what they actually want, or too evil to want anything remotely close to what humans want. In either case, acting based on what they say to do is a terrible idea.

No, you're just failing to realize that momentary discomfort, pain, or even death is not a big deal on a cosmic level.

Let's imagine a world where good gods for some inane reason have no other goal in mind than mortal comfort. No one would ever suffer more than maybe a broken leg, as you say. No one would be ill, or age, or ever get angry. We would be emotionally juvenile, our maturity would never get past that of a small child from a really good family background. It would be a world that resembled Barney or Teletubbies or something equally repugnant. Moreover, everyone would be the same. There would be no differentiating levels of compassion or callousness, there would be no distinction to being honest or benevolent, there would be no development as a human being. That is not my view of paradise.

Ergo good gods must not be devoted to something as short-sighted and meaningless as mortal comfort, but something far more intrinsic than extrinsic. Something about the character of mortals. Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, these people only became the paragons of what we can generally agree is "good" because of the trials by fire which they passed through. To deny mortals the opportunity to become something great, something worthy of inheriting divine qualities in the after-life by turning all mankind into emotionally shallow children who must make no hard decisions and hedonistically indulge in endless pleasure their entire lives is a far greater insult to humanity, and a far greater Evil, given the perspective that all mortal discomfort, pain, or death are temporary and inconsequential. And yes, that holds true even if the world at large is not "getting it" with every passing generation, as the comfort level of the world can swing back and forth like a pendulum, it matters not, but "good" =/= comfort, it's more about character traits and strong values, which so long as sentient races are, in fact, sentient, a god cannot magic in to you. Assuming good deities are in a struggle against evil ones for the hearts of mankind, and not their comfort (which both could easily supply), then the fact that the ratio of selfless to selfish waxes and wanes is exactly what you would expect.

The idea that what humans want is the same thing as what is good is extremely juvenile. Humans all want different things in the first place, most of which are not great for you in the long run. A smoker of 40 years wants to smoke more, despite the brutality it's putting his body through and the emotional pain his family has to go through watching him wither and die. An abusive husband feels like he must beat his wife and children to give them a healthy sense of respect, otherwise, chaos might ensue. A Nazi feels that society must be purged of impure elements in order to create a mono-racial utopia. No, Grek, human desires are not fit as a basis for "good." In fact, since my entire proposed morality system is based on selfless vs. selfish, that is the definition of "evil."

In fact, if human desires are the ultimate goal of immortal gods, then they are truly merely constructs of the human imagination, a philosophical embodiment of the lusts of mankind, and need no additional power than that. If deities do not make demands on mankind, to become something more than they otherwise would be, then they are so mind-numbingly shallow as to be useless in the first place. How could an immortal being, to which the lives of men are but eye-blinks in time, be that concerned with something so trivial? But, since there is an unquestionably real after-life, the character developed during that time does matter, because it lasts into eternity, which is really the only quantifiable measurement of mortal success to deities.

This obviously only works in a world with absolute good and evil. If that's not the case in your setting, then you don't have a god of good or a god of evil, in fact, morality cannot be an innate aspect of deities, since deities are, to mortal standards, absolutes.

Edit: OK, let's take your suppositions to their logical end, again, then. Directly intervening and stopping thieves and murderers and such. Assuming that good deities and evil deities are on anything remotely like equal levels of power, then the evil deities could similarly stop good people from saving anyone, and soon the world is incapable of much action at all, and it's just the gods duking it out to see who wins anyway. You get the same effect on mankind as if the good gods were dedicated to hedonistic indulgence; no decisions to make, no possibility of villainy, and no possibility of heroism. This is obviously a bad idea from a narrative standpoint, as this leaves nothing for your heroes to do. This makes inculcating traits like compassion, mercy, and courage to fight for the liberty to do so far more important a goal to good deities than simply trying to out-magic the evil gods. Simply put, gods, while they can be omnipotent, cannot exercise all of their powers to any meaningful end so long as they are opposed by more or less equally powerful gods on the other side. That balance kind of resembles the Cold War, and makes the conflict between good and evil taking place on earth even more logical.

[Grek]

Let's imagine a world where good gods for some inane reason have no other goal in mind than mortal comfort. No one would ever suffer more than maybe a broken leg, as you say. No one would be ill, or age, or ever get angry. We would be emotionally juvenile, our maturity would never get past that of a small child from a really good family background. It would be a world that resembled Barney or Teletubbies or something equally repugnant. Moreover, everyone would be the same. There would be no differentiating levels of compassion or callousness, there would be no distinction to being honest or benevolent, there would be no development as a human being. That is not my view of paradise.

That is not what I am arguing for and you know it.

I am advocating that the gods step in to improve conditions. For whatever value of improve that the gods personally cleave to. If I were a god, I would personally be working towards something without death, disease or famine, but which has meaningful challenges, personal self-improvement, a purpose to live for and other things along those lines. And, as a mortal, I would condem or condone the actions of the gods depending on how well they agree with how I think the world should be structured.

The evil deities are not the ones that want to kill people for shits and giggles. Those probably wouldn't even exist, since there's no reason to actually do that sort of thing. The evil gods would be the ones that favour the race of mindflayers, condone slavery and/or grant their followers super-malaria to use as a biological weapon against the infidels. Because they, as a god, love mind-flayers slavery and the killing of anyone that disapproves. The good deities would be the ones that go around sponsering healers, answering the prayers of orphans in a burning orphanage and trying to prevent wars.

The virtue ethics shit that you are espousing is a stupid means to a horrible ends. I honestly do not care about if "selfishness" or "selflessness" is what motivates someone to do something, no more than I care about if someone's actions are the result of "valor" or "temperance" or the old-school platonic virtues. The only modern organization that advocates that sort of thing is the Catholic Church, and even they make concessions for doing good works, despite the fact that their offical theology says that faith is the only important thing. As long as we assume that there are some people in your campaign setting that aren't retarded, they will realize this and act accordingly, rejecting any god that decides what to do based on virtue ethics and sign up with a god that has a more reasonable sounding plan like "carve out a kingdom for my beloved orcish creations" or "exterminate the zombies and the mindflayers, because eating people's brains just isn't cool"

[Stubbazubba]

That is not what I am arguing for and you know it.

I am advocating that the gods step in to improve conditions. For whatever value of improve that the gods personally cleave to. If I were a god, I would personally be working towards something without death, disease or famine, but which has meaningful challenges, personal self-improvement, a purpose to live for and other things along those lines. And, as a mortal, I would condem or condone the actions of the gods depending on how well they agree with how I think the world should be structured.

That's great, but why on earth would the god care how you judge him/her?Unless the god is empowered by people believing in him/her, which is a viable model, and in which case the god has an incentive to dish out as much direct intervention as is possible. But then the god also has an incentive to pander to the lowest common denominator of mortals and you're back to the "pander to mortal comfort" problem. Why does the god care about creating an Orc-ruled world? That makes no sense; there's nothing in it for him! I've simply been constructing a mythology where the gods actually have motives that make sense.

You say improve conditions, but what, exactly, would that amount to? Preventing evil? So is good merely a reactionary force of conservation? Then we're back with the problem that Frank started the thread with; the world sucks as is. Not making it worse is not good, you have to improve it. No death, disease, or famine, and in doing so you take away some of the meaning behind your challenges. The things you listed are non-specific, vanilla-flavor nice-sounding buzzwords that can be good when applied well, but without something concrete like "putting others before self," then all of those things you listed can be applied to evil just as much as good. The morality you are describing breaks down when either end goes to its extremes. It's only consistent over a fraction of possible scenarios, then good must re-define itself. That's not an absolute good.

[Grek]

That's great, but why on earth would the god care how you judge him/her?

If the god wants worshipers, they do. Otherwise, they don't care.

Why does the god care about creating an Orc-ruled world?

This is the motive of the god that created the orcs. He likes his orcish creations and wants them to be happy and loyal. It's also a motivation for a god that used to be an orc prior to becoming a god and still feels like tossing a bone to his old orcish homies.

You say improve conditions, but what, exactly, would that amount to?

This varies from god to god. Much like people, each of the gods have slightly different ideas of what constitutes an improvement.

If you look a few posts back, I did a writeup for a campaign setting with 9 distinct gods, all of whom had ideas for how the world should be restructured. It is fairly simple to figure out what sort of people would want to worship each god, ie. farmers worshiping the Sun King, Trickster and possibly the Lawgiver or Master Builder, while warriors would be interested in praying to the Demon King, the Queen of Gates or the Holy Crusader, depending on their own personal thoughts on how demons should be treated.

[K]

Gods don't care if you are good or evil.... they care that you keep up your end of the deal.

This being true does not allow me to tell the stories that I want to tell. I want to be able to write up a character that is religious and have them think that their god really is righteous, wise and just without having that character also being obviously wrong and hopelessly insane.

Aaaa, so you want monotheism. I can't help you there.

I don't think it's necessary. DnD has been tainted by Christianity for too long, and I think getting out of that frame of mind is more productive. The "one man/one god" model is especially limiting and DnD needs to cut that crap out.

Pantheons, especially unrelated pantheons, need certain things. They need a single afterlife for everyone regardless of god. They need gods that aren't an immediate no-brainer for anyone because then the logical reason is always going to be to kick out the Bhaalites and invite the Tormites.

I mean, it's boring as shit if every mage is a worshiper of the god of magic and every orc follows Gruumash.

It's more interesting if people in a city follow Bhaal because he does protect the city, even if he does ask for blood sacrifices at the appropriate times. That's a rational choice for anyone, even if Bhaal is kind of a douche.

I'm actually fine with characters being agnostic as a default since pantheons demand that. You pray to the god of war when you go to war and pray to the god of the harvest when you harvest. The only people that should be forced to pick a god are people who want some big favor like priests.

I find a lot more story potential if there are good-aligned priests of Death gods who preside over funeral rites and evil-aligned priests of the harvest who go all Wicker Man on people.

[Grek]

[quote="K]Aaaa, so you want monotheism. I can't help you there.[/quote]

Not specifically, no. I just want it to be so that at least some people pick the god or gods they worship based on the ideals that those gods champion, rather than the sorts of things they are willing to provide directly to the person praying. I also want there to be people who pray to gods specifically based on which one will give them the most power. Both of these things should be something that happens.

[Stubbazubba]

Oh, well, yes, in a world of relative morality, that's entirely true, picking one ideology over another is not good or evil, it's simply utilitarian. I was talking about motivations for absolute good and evil, which doesn't have to exist in a campaign setting, but if it does exist, it's difficult to do well.

If there's no absolute, then all that's left is utilitarianism, really. You define your own happiness, and hedonism or altruism are of equal value in the after-life because magic. That, however, makes people like paladins simply insane; why would you choose something far more difficult in mortality, if the after-life results are pretty much the same? Any religious ideology will probably pander to the lowest common denominator to survive, and converting another person from a different faith to your own has done him no good, the only benefit is to your deity/religious group, unless he had a good chance of being harmed in his former faith. That's assuming your faith is not OK with others being harmed, which I imagine most would be, as that's a human instinct, not an issue of dogma

Basically it means all goals of the gods are equally legitimate, and it's just personal preference as far as who wins out, if that's even possible. Otherwise every religion believes their dogma to be "good" and all others to be "evil," which simply means they're all wrong.

Moral relativism, though, doesn't make for good heroic narrative, in my experience. Hence absolute good and evil.

[K]

[quote="K]Aaaa, so you want monotheism. I can't help you there.

Not specifically, no. I just want it to be so that at least some people pick the god or gods they worship based on the ideals that those gods champion, rather than the sorts of things they are willing to provide directly to the person praying. I also want there to be people who pray to gods specifically based on which one will give them the most power. Both of these things should be something that happens.[/quote]

That's monotheism.

If all the orcs would be stupid to pick any god but Gruumish because they share goals and he gives the most power to orcs, then they don't pick any other god. They are a monotheistic society.

Like I said, it's boring as shit. There aren't going to be people that share goals with the god of death or the god of murder except the rare serial killer, regardless of the power they offer. That means you are just going to have a setting where the players assume anyone not worshiping the happy-good Sun god or the harvest god is evil because the other gods want evil things.... ie a basic monotheistic Christianity model.

It makes me wonder why you would even have more than one god if that is the story you want to tell. A cast of minor demons fills out the role of "antagonist-religion" just as well.

[Grek]

If you're an orc, worshiping Gruumish is an option. It is probably a good option. But you'll also want to give prayers up to the Sun God, so that your crops will grow properly, the God of Healing, so you can get healed at the temple, the River Goddess, if you care about fishing and Bhaal, because the Temple of Bhaal will send knights to go out and kill any manticores in the area if you do.

[jadagul]

K: monolatrous, actually, which is similar but different in a couple of important ways.

The early Israelites were monolatrous. They didn't say Baal didn't exist; they said he was an asshole, and his worshippers were assholes too, and their god was bigger and better anyway. Elijah's praying contest wasn't supposed to show that Baal didn't exist; it was supposed to show that Yahweh was stronger and better.

Modern Islam is monotheistic. It's "there is no God but God," not "Ignore every God but God."

Monolatry has examples in that you don't think people are crazy if they worship a different god. Cause he exists, after all. And if you're a farmer and an orc it can lead to some interesting tensions.

[Gx1080]

Moral relativism is also the cause of the gaping spiritual void of the modern world. Hence, it sucks hard.

In ancient tribal warfare, where gods are tied to races, it makes perfect sense to call the other gods and their worshippers assholes.

[Psychic Robot]

this thread is lol

Moral relativism is also the cause of the gaping spiritual void of the modern world.

and it just got loller

[Chamomile]

Stubba, Grek, if you'd like to carry this on in MPSIMS be my guest. This stopped being a discussion about D&D morality a while ago.

Stubba, your worship of God is not relevant in a world where mortals pretty much never ascend to a higher plane of existence with responsibilities any greater than what they had on the PMP anyway, nor in one where there are other Evil gods on hand who are just as powerful as the Good ones.

Grek, your worship of Eliezer Yudkowsky is not relevant in a world where there is no such thing as death because the afterlife is confirmed to exist and there's pretty much no way to stop someone from going there.

[Grek]

If the afterlife is a place, then it is perfectly natural for us to form opinions about whether or not we think it is a good place to live in. D&D Hades, for example, is a completely shitty place to spend your afterlife, and if you care at all about the sort of people who end up there, you would try to work out a way to make it less shit. Which is what I am saying that people in D&D land would be wanting to do. I have no idea why you think that being part of the afterlife gives a place a pass on being a terrible place to live, or what the specific realities dead in D&D has to do with the current trend of the conversation at all.

[K]

If you're an orc, worshiping Gruumish is an option. It is probably a good option. But you'll also want to give prayers up to the Sun God, so that your crops will grow properly, the God of Healing, so you can get healed at the temple, the River Goddess, if you care about fishing and Bhaal, because the Temple of Bhaal will send knights to go out and kill any manticores in the area if you do.

That seems different from what you are saying earlier, but it doesn't actually matter because any proof that you've been praying to Gruumush is still a "kill on sight" situation because his stated goal is world domination and/or mass genocide and anyone sharing that share that goal is evil.

I also don't see how things you do for the God of Healing aren't going to be diametrically opposed to the things you do for Gruumush or Bhaal. The goals of those gods are going to conflict.

The gods are better off as distant power brokers. Once you start letting them get involved in every little bullshit village with an altar and personal judgement of worshipers, the entire game starts to get so religion-centric it overtakes all other elements in the setting.

[Chamomile]

-snip-

You repeatedly insist that murder and genocide are absolutely terrible things that no Good god would ever condone. Except, if those murdered/genocided people are going to Celestia, this is actually a step up for them and the question becomes why the gods of Good didn't kill them sooner and more painlessly.

[Stubbazubba]

Stubba, Grek, if you'd like to carry this on in MPSIMS be my guess. This stopped being a discussion about D&D morality a while ago.

Half-agreed. The thread left D&D morality long before these pages, and we're talking about hypothetical alternatives, and their justifications. Why shouldn't real-world philosophy get involved, again?

Stubba, your worship of God is not relevant in a world where mortals pretty much never ascend to a higher plane of existence with responsibilities any greater than what they had on the PMP anyway, nor in one where there are other Evil gods on hand who are just as powerful as the Good ones.

Uh...wha? What is relevant is that mortals can ascend or descend to greater responsibilities as I have outlined. I'm outlining a new mythology which has at its center a conflict between a defined absolute good and evil, not trying to defend the ridiculously watered-down morality of the D&D pantheon. It's kind of agreed that that pantheon, with its attending morality, don't work. Whether or not it resembles any IRL belief is completely irrelevant, kind of like how all fantasy pantheons are typically cast in the mold of one or another previously existing religious tradition.

[Grek]

[quote="Chamomile]You repeatedly insist that murder and genocide are absolutely terrible things that no Good god would ever condone. Except, if those murdered/genocided people are going to Celestia, this is actually a step up for them and the question becomes why the gods of Good didn't kill them sooner and more painlessly.[/quote]

This is only true if all everyone that dies goes somewhere better than they are now. If that's true (which it most definately isn't in D&Dland), then, yes, the gods should go ahead and kill everyone. That leads to a bad game, so clearly it isn't going to be true in any sort of cosmology that you would want to design. Obviously, death should be a bad thing in any game where you want your players to try to avoid death.

[Chamomile]

It's true that all the Good peasants will go to a Good afterlife, and all the Neutral ones will go to a Neutral afterlife, and in both cases things are, at worst, a change in scenery. Further, "death" as we know it doesn't exist. It doesn't ever happen in any way, shape, or form. The only reason anyone considers murder to be an extremely bad thing is because it is, as far as we can tell, the end of a person's existence. In D&D-land, murder is basically just a really brutal assault and battery, and where the person ends up is a result of their own decisions and not the fault of the murderer at all. Death is a bad thing for the same reason deus ex machina is a bad thing. If I were a hero and I thought I'd lost and then suddenly it turns out there was a whole army we didn't know about that comes in to save us, that's a pretty lucky break for me even if it does ruin the story for my audience.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm actually fine with characters being agnostic as a default since pantheons demand that. You pray to the god of war when you go to war and pray to the god of the harvest when you harvest. The only people that should be forced to pick a god are people who want some big favor like priests.

I find a lot more story potential if there are good-aligned priests of Death gods who preside over funeral rites and evil-aligned priests of the harvest who go all Wicker Man on people.

In my home-brew, I made a half-assed attempt at that. In the primary human nation, the pantheon was all Draconic (was ruled by dragons tens of thousands of years ago. There weren't many dragons around today and none of them had any interest in ruling anything but their own domains, but the common speech was Draconic and most of the cultural and religious issues had draconic roots).

Anyhow, the chief deity was Io, and in every town there was at the very least a shrine of Io somewhere. The priests of Io had as a fairly important commandment that they had to make sure that there was a place for priests of EVERY deity of the draconic pantheon (even if nothing more than an alcove with an icon or idol of said deity somewhere in Io's shrine). The other priests were under command that they must defer to priests of Io in regards to holy wars, etc.

As a result, the people on the world would pray to Tiamat for victory over competitors, pray to Bahamut for bravery, pray to Garyx after a disaster for a swift renewal, and so forth.

At least, that's what I had written. It probably wouldn't hold up under intense scrutiny (and the players really tried to drive the priest of Garyx out of town despite him not really doing anything overly destructive), but I at least mad an attempt.

[Koumei]

I've always preferred gods as characters
...
Make the gods alien and concerned with their own plots. Mortals come to their attention because they are useful.
...
Priests are not direct conduits of divine power, but people who have contacted a god and pledged services for bits of magic lore.
...
Gods don't care if you are good or evil.... they care that you keep up your end of the deal.

So a Cleric of X could have any Alignment and even any set of beliefs, and not even like their god, they just make a deal where they get X power and in return use the power to promote the X agenda?

I like that.

[Maxus]

I've always preferred gods as characters
...
Make the gods alien and concerned with their own plots. Mortals come to their attention because they are useful.
...
Priests are not direct conduits of divine power, but people who have contacted a god and pledged services for bits of magic lore.
...
Gods don't care if you are good or evil.... they care that you keep up your end of the deal.

So a Cleric of X could have any Alignment and even any set of beliefs, and not even like their god, they just make a deal where they get X power and in return use the power to promote the X agenda?

I like that.

Wasn't there a Divine Assassin class around here that worked -similar- to that?

Person with the right skills basically gets touched by a deity and sort of press-ganged into being the spook.