The Gaming Den

Ok, what I've been talking about is not determinis, (as I understand the term). I'm talking about devils being predestined to do evil. I'm not a predestination type (as you might have noticed...) but it's a viable argument in D&D and fiends.

Basically either fiends are predestined, or they can make choices (Frank seems to imply that ability to choose and free will are not necessarily the same).
If they are predestined to do evil because they come from evil sand, then you can't blame them for the evil they do, and it's perfectly acceptable to have a beer with them, at least assuming they are capable of sitting down and having a beer. Admittedly, it also pretty much makes eliminating them on sight perfectly acceptable too.
If they are capable of choices, and there is a non-zero chance that a fiend decides to not do evil, then it is also acceptable to sit down and have a beer with one, unless you know for a fact that a given fiend was out killing orphans.
Is this any less ignorant/crazy/stupid? I've apparently been choosing words poorly.

Outside of this, the vast majority of the infinite hordes of outsiders spend 90% of the time in the blood war. Now, maybe the generals aren't meeting for a pint at the Bucket of Blood. But the rank and file? They probably could with little issue.

Prak_Anima wrote:If they are predestined to do evil because they come from evil sand, then you can't blame them for the evil they do, and it's perfectly acceptable to have a beer with them, at least assuming they are capable of sitting down and having a beer. Admittedly, it also pretty much makes eliminating them on sight perfectly acceptable too.
If they are capable of choices, and there is a non-zero chance that a fiend decides to not do evil, then it is also acceptable to sit down and have a beer with one, unless you know for a fact that a given fiend was out killing orphans.
Is this any less ignorant/crazy/stupid? I've apparently been choosing words poorly.

Well if they're predestined to do evil, there's no point talking philosophy with them as it's impossible to produce any result. Also, if they're compelled to that degree then they're probably compelled to making having a beer with them an evil experience as well.

As far as the other one goes - sure, if there's a particular demon that's not that bad, by all means go and hang out with them. If 99% of demons are that bad, then I don't think avoiding inconvenient questions and hoping for the best goes very far.


It's clear that a number of people do want to have a beer with devils though. In which case, I'd seriously just go with the "Devils aren't actually particularly bad, they just live on a plane with creepy decor and most of their leaders are blatant assholes" option. Sure, it's a bit odd having them not that near the top of the evil scale, but it beats trying to rationalize it the other way.

@Prak, no that's still, uh, misinformed. Deterministic things can be unpredictable (chaos theory, the weather, people) and predictable things can be non-deterministic (various quantum fluctuations, and thus things like the sun, which changes the weather, which influences people, eh).

So we are deterministic machines that can be influenced by non-deterministic and/or unpredictable inputs, and are largely unpredictable in any useful way on an individual basis regardless of all that.

Sort of, it's actually pretty easy to get people to torture each other if you structure the environment in a certain way, and that torture produces a predictable (if deeply flawed for any practical purposes) outcome in an unpredictable time frame. Torture's Evil because it hurts people for no good end, even though it totally works, and most people don't even mind doing it (even you and I, statistically speaking).
You know how some cultures are massively racist and sexist and homophobic? That's also Evil because it hurts people for no good end, but unless you know that fact and tell everyone it's not particularly obvious that irrationally bullying minorities is bad and you and I would both be doing that if we grew up in those cultures (as they all do). It's a fairly recent and complex proof that harming sub-groups is statistically bad for the rest of society too, that white people treating black people like shit actually hurts white people too.

Where was I? Right.

You think choice matters. It's actually an illusion, a nice story for your consciousness. Brain activity in people shows that when people are "making a choice" what's actually happening is their future actions have been determined already, are already being practiced, and your mind is trying to make itself feel good about what's about to happen by "making the right choice" with a fake internal debate, straw men and all.

Getting better at logic makes your internal debates sound smarter, but it doesn't change the outcome of them. What really happens is you just do what everyone around you does, as you're told to by your superiors. Like everyone, me included. Religion happens because people are surrounded by it.

Actual decisions take microseconds and are based on a bunch of very stupid crap that mostly isn't true and doesn't work well outside years of consistently objective feedback (that you manage to not lie to yourself about).



Note that failing to go through with the choice illusion is bad for you. Very stressful. Our brain benefits from nice, simple, closed loop stories. Justice, objective evil, things like that, makes it easier to keep making the next decision, getting out of bed in the morning and stuff. You can also do things like "choose" to be a better person in the future, though that's also an illusion and you've either done it already or you haven't.

You should, by the way. Be a better person. So should I.

tussock wrote:Torture's Evil because it hurts people for no good end, even though it totally works,

Wait, wait, wait. You're going to have to show me some kind of evidence that torture works for any measure that isn't 'amount of pain caused'.

Yeah, every study and history I've seen shows:

1) If you torture someone enough, they'll say anything to make it stop - even if it means making shit up or confessing to things they didn't do.

2) Torture distorts actual memories and makes witness statements even more unreliable.

From what I've heard torture works in cases where you basically say "if you don't give us the right information, we'll come back and torture you some more."

tussock wrote:What really happens is you just do what everyone around you does, as you're told to by your superiors.

I...What? People rebel against their superiors all the time. I mean, sure, a rebel movement or splinter movement gets itself new superiors in a hurry, but someone has to get the ball rolling and that someone decided to do something that did not involve following orders from his superiors, and did so without getting orders from a different set of superiors.

tussock wrote:Brain activity in people shows that when people are "making a choice" what's actually happening is their future actions have been determined already, are already being practiced, and your mind is trying to make itself feel good about what's about to happen by "making the right choice" with a fake internal debate, straw men and all.

The conclusion I think you should have come to from that is that your consciousness doesn't actually make decisions or think about things, it just figures out a way to describe the rest of your brain's thought process. The fact that I've wondered "now why did I do that?" before means I find this not entirely implausible.

tussock wrote:Getting better at logic makes your internal debates sound smarter, but it doesn't change the outcome of them.

I find your assertion that people who understand logic always make identical decisions to those who don't patently idiotic.

It doesn't mean they make identical decisions, but that logic doesn't have a large role in our brain's decision-making process.

Hell, logic and intelligence has very little to do with your preferences/beliefs/etc.

Like the Supreme Court hearings about DOMA and Prop 8 over the past couple of days--the conservative lawyer against gays getting marriage equality stood up and said that this wasn't really discrimination, it was just a legal thing and that was all right. And Justice Roberts was telling a gay-rights activist lawyer that anti-gay bigotry isn't a problem because gays now have good lawyers.

A couple of very educated people going through some serious cognitive hoops to try to justify keeping homosexuals as second-class citizens in federal law, by trying to claim that they weren't really discriminated against because discriminating against gay people is unpopular.

I could find other examples--the admin on the old D&D wiki whacks off to logic, but comes out the most unreasonable stuff (like not even letting a guy post that a TTRPG organization had nominated the wiki for an award because... "Think abstract")--but I'd have to get on my ass and -really- look.

We use logic and reasoning to work out problems, sure, but it doesn't seem to play much of a role in how our brain makes decisions or sets beliefs.

In a world with true free will where you make decisions before acting, in the same situation you will always choose do the same thing because you have the same thought processes and the same things affecting your thinking.

There's no visible difference between a world where you make decisions and act upon them, and one where you act and then create an explanation afterwards.

@Hey, AFK for a couple weeks there.

I...What? People rebel against their superiors all the time.

If you mean, every few generations a small portion of each population forms a new cult, but otherwise people just stick with the old one, sure. Most people don't even return broken merchandise unless the manufacturer demands it of them.

I find your assertion that people who understand logic always make identical decisions to those who don't patently idiotic.

You know who the loudest anti-climate change people are? Old meteorologists. They spent their whole lives learning that the weather is temporary and everything averages out in the long run. They're highly educated, smart people, who understand the affects of climate super-well, and use that to ignore the science super-hard because it "feels wrong".

As Maxus noted, smart bigots are wicked good at torturing logic to get their preconceived answer, sexists and racists and religious all the same. They don't use it incorrectly, they just have different propositions. Selection bias and confirmation bias are constant problems facing highly educated people in science fields because they want to be right. Economists desperately want to find that paying economists a lot of money and then taxing them very little is super-important for the economy, it's the core of their own theories that people act like selfish dicks and they totally do.

Wait, wait, wait. You're going to have to show me some kind of evidence that torture works for any measure that isn't 'amount of pain caused'.

It's hard to do double-blind studies on real torture, on account of the torture, but there's cases in WWII I've read of planting false information by giving it to an ally and letting them fall into the hands of the Nazis to be tortured to death. The standard military thing is you have to keep everything secret because everyone talks.

The problem with torture is that people who don't know anything make stuff up, and you can't tell the difference as the torturer because it's all sub-conscious and they basically believe it either way. Guilty people suddenly confess, and so do innocent people. People give up critical war secrets, and then go on to make up even more fake secrets to give up if the torture continues, just like the ones who didn't know any.

The same basic thing happens when police deny people sleep and keep on interrogating them for days on end, the victim's brain starts looking for a way out, convincing itself and everyone else that it's OK to sleep now, whatever that takes. Extreme pain and sense of imminent death is just quicker. That guy they water-boarded 300 times would have given up some new "secret" pretty much every single time.

So... you're saying that torture cannot reliably find information because of false positives?

Parthenon wrote:So... you're saying that torture cannot reliably find information because of false positives?

Are you trying to clarify his post, or are you questioning the legitimacy of his assertion?
That's actually one of the go-to standard arguments against it (well, in addition to the whole human rights thing)

More questioning the legitimacy.

If everyone gives secrets even if they don't know them, then it's only useful if you already know the secrets to verify the results of torture. In which case you are torturing people to find something you already know.

On the other hand, that's still shitty because if your intelligence before torture is wrong then you'll ignore the truth and think that someone making something up at random is the correct answer.

From every thing I've read/heard/etc., that is actually the empirical logic-based criticism of torture. And to those who are uninitiated in to the finer points of "sophisticated" torture, this actually seems correct.

However, for those that understand the most effective implementation of torture, this misses the point.

When done "right", information extraction isn't the "proper" purpose of torture. Done "right", the point of torture (within the context of gaining unmitigated compliance, that is) is simply to break the subject, and to identify when the subject is broken.
While in the midst of torturing your subject, you only want to ask question to which you already know the answers. The goal is to completely shatter the subject's psyche and, thus, his will to resist. Then, once you've identified and been convinced that the subject is indeed completely broken, that's when you can sit down with him over a cup of tea and actually discuss question to which you don't have the answers.

You want to know why KSM didn't provide any useful information during his waterboarding? Because the interrogators weren't asking useful questions. The waterboarding wasn't about gaining information; it was about wearing him down towards his break point, and the questions were only a tool in assessing his resolve. And the point of the waterboarding wasn't even about the physical aspect -- it was about building mental fatigue. His break point wasn't hit until his 180+ consecutive hours of sleep deprivation (which took place after the waterboarding) -- that was when he completely stopped resisting and started giving piles of useful information .... after which point they were very civil to him.

FrankTrollman wrote:You only have one history, one set of events and actions about and by you in the past.

That's totally not how human memory and the human mind works.

malak wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:You only have one history, one set of events and actions about and by you in the past.

That's totally not how human memory and the human mind works.

That is irrelevant, because as far as can be determined that is how time works and the fact that human memory can change how you remember previous events just means it's a shitty storage medium.

Frank Trollman wrote:Sigil is just a location in that campaign setting where they suggest you go if you want to "play politics" and then give you a bunch of characters and political factions for you to interact with if that's what you want to do. So far, so good. Then the Lady of Pain enters the picture in order to disable the "Head of State" achievement, the "major political reforms" achievement, the "control city maintenance" achievement, and even the "seriously alter the architectural styles" achievement. Because apparently what everyone wants when they "play politics" is to have an unkillable NPC disable most of the high end political achievements.

Agreed. Thats why I like the idea of making the Lady (and the dabus) those mythical figures from the past that know one knows for sure if really existed or not but still respect out of superstition and folklore. This would fix it, right ?

name_here wrote:

malak wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:You only have one history, one set of events and actions about and by you in the past.

That's totally not how human memory and the human mind works.

That is irrelevant, because as far as can be determined that is how time works and the fact that human memory can change how you remember previous events just means it's a shitty storage medium.

It is relevant in the context of meaning and having a free will. Even under the assumption that there is something like a 'classical' free will, even if you could take a 'free' decision based on whatever you deem important at that moment, your mind and memory will still make it an illusion soon enough.

silva wrote:Agreed. Thats why I like the idea of making the Lady (and the dabus) those mythical figures from the past that know one knows for sure if really existed or not but still respect out of superstition and folklore. This would fix it, right ?

What fixes it is eclectic use of those elements you like while completely ignoring at least 80% of all canon writings.

Like with almost all rpg fluff.

silva wrote:

Frank Trollman wrote:Sigil is just a location in that campaign setting where they suggest you go if you want to "play politics" and then give you a bunch of characters and political factions for you to interact with if that's what you want to do. So far, so good. Then the Lady of Pain enters the picture in order to disable the "Head of State" achievement, the "major political reforms" achievement, the "control city maintenance" achievement, and even the "seriously alter the architectural styles" achievement. Because apparently what everyone wants when they "play politics" is to have an unkillable NPC disable most of the high end political achievements.

Agreed. Thats why I like the idea of making the Lady (and the dabus) those mythical figures from the past that know one knows for sure if really existed or not but still respect out of superstition and folklore. This would fix it, right ?

Yeah, pretty much.

Basically, the biggest problem with the Lady is that she is actually sometimes proactive, like when she declared that there would only be 15 factions, but cannot be defeated or meaningfully pressured. So whatever you do in politics, she might unilaterally decide to knock over your sand castle for no reason. It'd actually probably be best to keep her around but mess with one of those axis if you want to force politicking.

In option 1, the Lady could explicitly give zero fucks about the factions and respond to any shit they get up to which does not threaten the integrity of the city with a shrug.

In option 2, the Lady is some invincible magic construct that works for the city government, with the result that outright winning at politics gives you control of her.

In option 3, she's not all-powerful and could hypothetically be defeated, so there is some actual constraint on her actions. Also, while people are correct that most campaigns won't get powerful enough to challenge the top tier of power, people resent being told something is impossible to defeat as opposed to just extraordinarily difficult.

name_here wrote:

silva wrote:

Frank Trollman wrote:Sigil is just a location in that campaign setting where they suggest you go if you want to "play politics" and then give you a bunch of characters and political factions for you to interact with if that's what you want to do. So far, so good. Then the Lady of Pain enters the picture in order to disable the "Head of State" achievement, the "major political reforms" achievement, the "control city maintenance" achievement, and even the "seriously alter the architectural styles" achievement. Because apparently what everyone wants when they "play politics" is to have an unkillable NPC disable most of the high end political achievements.

Agreed. Thats why I like the idea of making the Lady (and the dabus) those mythical figures from the past that know one knows for sure if really existed or not but still respect out of superstition and folklore. This would fix it, right ?

Yeah, pretty much.

Basically, the biggest problem with the Lady is that she is actually sometimes proactive, like when she declared that there would only be 15 factions, but cannot be defeated or meaningfully pressured. So whatever you do in politics, she might unilaterally decide to knock over your sand castle for no reason. It'd actually probably be best to keep her around but mess with one of those axis if you want to force politicking.

In option 1, the Lady could explicitly give zero fucks about the factions and respond to any shit they get up to which does not threaten the integrity of the city with a shrug.

In option 2, the Lady is some invincible magic construct that works for the city government, with the result that outright winning at politics gives you control of her.

In option 3, she's not all-powerful and could hypothetically be defeated, so there is some actual constraint on her actions. Also, while people are correct that most campaigns won't get powerful enough to challenge the top tier of power, people resent being told something is impossible to defeat as opposed to just extraordinarily difficult.

Just make her a 20th level wizard and be done with it.

Well, insofar as there is any point to having the Lady Of Pain, she does need to be able to punch out gods in order to justify having a major power center that is not controlled by or directly fought over by gods. But yes, giving her stats would be good.

Actually, maybe she could be a 20th-level wizard but Sigil itself is secrectly a magical superweapon. It can kill just about anything if properly focused and directed, but severe damage to the city could disable it, it's partially powered by the city population, and there are points in the city where it can't be targeted or methods of interfering with it. This suddenly explains everything:

• She protects the city from damage or civil war because that could shut down the weapon
  She operates somewhat hands-off because she needs people to voluntarily stay in the city
  She occasionally fucks with the factions because they could actually threaten her if they got their acts together and really tried but just smashing them all outright would cause people to leave the city
  She murders people who pry into her affairs so they don't figure out the secret, plus collateral murder so people don't realize she's murdering people for looking into the secret.

Well, that solves the problem of her having a reason to be beyond because the writers didn't want anyone changing their perfect setting but not of having an invincible, indecipherable, NPC you can't reason with, effect, speak to, or even look at who can and will at any time fuck over the party because they somehow managed to incense her.

And the fact is you DON'T need an all powerful NPC that can't even be interacted with to keep the gods out because the prime material does not have one of those and the gods keep out of that just fine.

If you want to keep the lady fine but don't try to feed us the like that "well the lady herself is just a 20th level wizard... but she has access to a super weapon that makes her indistinguishable from her usual description." Because the original Lady is bullshit but at least she's not disingenuous bullshit.

I think I understand why so many people are so cool with the Lady of Pain.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/commen ... _pcs_into/