The Gaming Den

Lots of games and lots of fantasy stories go to the trouble of color coding, or at least labeling their heroes and villains. And while that is helpful for purposes of deciding who the reader is supposed to be rooting for, it is in almost all cases something that does not hold up under even the most cursory of examination. The definitions of who is good or bad are generally either so superficial that "good" and "bad" may as well be hockey teams, or drawn so extremely broadly that it is difficult to imagine the world as a whole continuing on a day to day basis with evil so in-your-face. And honestly, the things the "good" team does in many series are so reprehensible that in many cases both are true.

The names used for good and evil aren't particularly important. Moorcock went pretty far with simply renaming Good and Evil to "Law" and "Chaos" - but aside from the most half assed defense of "balance" he wasn't fooling anyone. Sometimes settings will simply give arbitrary national names to the sides, but that doesn't change anything either. For the purpose of these discussions, we will talk about "good" as being whoever the sitting gives officially licensed white hats to, and "evil" as being whoever gets cast in the role of black hat wearing villain.

But before we get into too deep of a question about what good is, let's talk a bit about what it is not:

The Status Quo? It Sucks!
"The invasion is over! Everyone go back to their filth!"

Very often "good" gets saddled with simply righting the wrongs that the evil guys did and then setting things back to the way they were. But you know what? The way things were was probably pretty terrible! It's a status quo that among other things left who knows how many innocent people vulnerable to attacks by black hats. And in many cases, it involved a way of life filled with starving serfdom for the vast majority of people.

So when you "restore the balance" or some shit, you're setting up an incredibly shitty situation for a lot of people. In fact, you're pretty much guaranteeing that some time in the near future there will be a similar threat all over again and a lot of people will get fed to orangopoids.

Furthermore, most fantasy worlds have had a social order that is relatively stable. Borrowing a bit from Tolkien, things have usually been pretty much "like they are now" for "an age" - which in turn is generally a thousand years or so. But people are living as peasants, scraping by with a thousand calories a day. And while that would be horrible enough in a post-apocalyptic or after-the-revolution scenario, that's seriously just the way the system appears to work when firing on all cylinders. They can't even use the Deng Xiaoping excuse that "some people will get rich first" because the peasants are never getting rich. It has been a thousand years, and there still isn't a chicken in every pot.

So when you're working to restore the system from having been thrown out of whack, or you're working to protect the system from being destabilized - remember that the system itself is provably a bad thing.

Racial Intolerance is Bad
"No Goblins or Irish allowed in this bar!"

Many settings have evil characters of just about all the races. And also a bunch of evil races on top of that. This is because it's easy. Also, because that's totally what Tolkien did. But for all the admitted convenience of being able to identify enemies in need of killing by their skin color alone... that's actually totally reprehensible behavior. If some species is capable of choices, then they are capable of being good or evil (assuming those words mean anything). If they are not capable of choices, then they are just zombies or robots or something.

Look, Tolkien was personally an anti-Nazi, and a pretty vehement one. And good for him. But the fact is that he was a pro-aristocracy, pro-pastoralism, Catholic, British White Dude. His stuff reads exactly like pro-Axis propaganda because he embraced pretty much every single virtue they did except putty Gypsies on meat hooks. There's a reason that the friendly people on Stormfront have a LotR appreciation society, and that reason is because if you had wanted the moral of the story to be "small numbers of virtuous White people with pure blood have to destroy modern society that has been infected with industrialism and impurity by Jews and Colored People" then you'd have to change absolutely nothing. The entire Lord of the Rings narrative Godwins itself, because Tolkien was writing from exactly the same cultural and literary tradition as the Nazis were. The only reason those books aren't on the "not to be read" list is because in his private life, Tolkien happened to be a British patriot.

So when latter day hack writers try to copy that success with Trollocs or Draconians or whatever, it makes us really uncomfortable. And well it should, because even though intellectually we know that they probably aren't writing Neo-Nazi propaganda, the fact remains that the end result wouldn't be any different if they were.

The fact is that tolerance is a virtue. If the cities with black flags on them have humans and orcs in them and the cities with the white flags have only humans, then on at least that metric the black flagged cities are more virtuous than the white flagged cities are.

Being Religious Isn't Being Good
"The bishop says: burn the heretics!"

If you are reading this, then chances are pretty decent that you consider yourself religious. Good for you. But you know what? Your religious declaration doesn't make you a god person. It doesn't even make you a better person. Doing good things makes you a better person. Believing something super hard just means that it's hard to change your mind about stuff. If you happen to be doing good, then being stubborn about it is probably on the whole a good thing, if you happen to be doing bad things then being stubborn about it is bad. But in any case, being a devoted follower of someone else at best makes the ends that you are working towards as good or ill as the ends of the dude you are following. In many fantasy settings there are evil gods, or at least ambivalent ones, so worshiping at a temple is even more of a simple selection of political affiliation than it is in the real world.

But beyond that, even if you happen to pick one of the good gods (and assuming your setting has one), prayer in its direction is an entirely selfish act. You spend time and energy that you could have spent helping people or righting wrongs or something... doing what exactly? Trying to make sure you personally get a reward in the afterlife? That's just you asking to get paid. Whether you otherwise deserve the payment you are asking for or not, the actual asking isn't a particularly praiseworthy act. At the extreme end, people who spend their entire lives in prayer are selfish dicks. Actually good people go out and help others in some way. Any prayer they happen to engage in comes out of their selfish acts allotment right in there with eating and sleeping and all the other crap they do for themselves alone.

However, let's get this right out in the open: the very idea of there being any gods that are "good" is one that you should give the hairy eyeball - because it doesn't very damn likely. The Problem of Evil is a big deal, and after five thousand years of written apologetics, the greatest religious apologists in history have basically come up with "Herp!" and also "Derp!" Here's how it works:

• Your setting has some shitty fucking things going on it, right? Stuff so bad that it is convincing the protagonists to get off their ass and do something about it. People are being oppressed, monsters run amok, life is terribly shitty for a lot of totally innocent people and that is unfair. Right? How come? Why don't the "gods" do something about it? There are crying children right now who are in the prisons of the Bane Lords who are praying for an intervention that will not come. Why? There are three answers:
  • The Gods don't know about it - in which case they apparently can't hear your prayers either.
  • The Gods can't do anything about it - in which case praying to them is a waste of time.
  • The Gods could do something about it, but choose not to - in which case they are dicks.
  Seriously, that's the entire set of answers to that trilemma. Many fantasy worlds have an extra way around this by having good and bad gods who are only allowed (for whatever reason) to interfere in various tiny and nominally equal fashions. This allows some gods to have real powers and not be raging assholes, but praying to them is still a waste of time.

However, the core take home is that being "religious" just means that you have a side. And if it's anything like modern day religions, it's a side that you follow on faith rather than because of reason. So someone following a religion is just like them following a king in a completely unreasonable manner having total faith in every command the king orders no matter how ill-advised or wicked it might seem. What part of that sounds good? Even a little bit good?

Good Does not Balance Bad
"Yes, I did kill your son. But on the plus side, that sandwich I gave you was delicious, right?"

The ends justify the means. Every so often some whiny bitch who doesn't like to do things that are hard or gross will balk at this - but it's true. If you kill one person and save two people through your action you have in fact saved one person. Every course of actions you undertake will end with every single person dying, and depending on the actions that you take some people will die sooner or later and have more or less happiness in their lives before they go.

Right now, you could drop what you are doing, go to Sudan or the Congo, and hand out clean water and vaccinations and save peoples lives. The fact that you are staying home instead means that real people will really die who would not if you acted differently. In a very real way, your choices killed those people. And that's something that you should probably make peace with. You can't save everyone in the world, and it is your responsibility as a vaguely good person to make sure your overall impact is positive.

And yet, despite all that, fixing a bunch of houses or feeding a bunch of poor people does not excuse torturing any children at any point. Even though actions come in sets which have effects collectively, there are still individual decisions that can be evaluated individually. And taking time off from your day to be a total jerk in some manner that doesn't advance any positive goals? That's just you being a jerk.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of good things to be doing are actually expected of you. No one is going to give you a medal because you take care of your kids, people would be pissed at you if you didn't. The amount of villainy needed to shift you into the black hat camp is actually very small. Even the most horrible villains of history spent relatively few days actually raping or murdering anyone. A serial killer clown might kill 33 people, but in a life of 52 years that's a really long period of time in between homicidal rampages. Bad deeds simply count more than good deeds do, and any attempt to make good and evil equal and opposite is doomed to failure.

-Username17

More Laterz

Well, I can see one way the Good God knot can be partially untied:

The Good Gods cannot immediately come to your aid because they're busy with trying to counter the Evil Gods, who are just as strong and working against them.

But for this sort of thing, we'd have to put some sort of limits on what the gods can and can't do.

I would say that gods are not omnipotent nor omniscient--but they might as well be from the point of view of most people.

However, not even a god can keep up with absolutely everything that happens in the world. A lot of stuff slips their attention--but if they're taking an interest in you, I'd say it's a safe bet they can keep tabs on you no matter where you go.

Also, you may not be their highest priority at the moment. There's a lot of world(s) out there, and there may be something honestly more pressing than you out there.

This is off the top of my head, so it may not be very well thought-out, but the idea seems functional enough to include as background to setting. Who knows, if you're out there fighting the good fight (or the bad fight), the gods may take an interest in you and throw some help your way. Or put the word out to their own champions that you're being a problem, and you'll get attacked by level-appropriate adventurers from the other side of the fence.

Good read, though I'll disagree that the means always justify the ends, but that's a philosophical debate that doesn't fall along a good/evil axis, and falls more within a personal fulfillment capacity.

If you're going to accept an axis of good/neutral/evil, then there's something you have to accept: Good is fucked and gets the short end of the stick. Good can not do an evil act in the name of perpetrating good, a good act must be an end in itself.

Evil, however, can do a good deed to achieve an "evil" end. For "evil", the ends justify the means. You can spend a life doing good deeds, making friends, keeping the peace, if it contributes to the ultimate goal of taking over and (stereotypical evil) enslaving the population.

You see this in Tolkien. Sauron did many good deeds to gain the trust of the elves, so that he could forge the rings of power with them, which they assumed was also a "good" deed. However, it was a means to an end, the end being the forging of the one ring. This isn't the *only* separation between "good" and "evil", or even a major one, but it is a philosophical... litmus test... that has been applied in years past.

The problem with morality and good/neutral/evil is that you're placing an objective scale on something that, to the individual being measured, is completely subjective. I'm sure the Emperor in Star Wars saw himself as the savior of the galaxy. The price was high, but it was worth it. By the same token, the thousands of Stormtroopers that enforce his will all believe they're saving the galaxy from the ravages of another war that might rip the galaxy apart and destroy civilization. Since we already Godwin'd the discussion, Hitler himself believed what he was doing was good and right.

I enjoy In Nomine's (by SJ Games) approach to "good" and "evil" in the war between Heaven and Hell. They scrap it entirely. Instead, the distinction between an angel and a demon is selflessness vs selfishness. Angels always act in the name of a higher power: namely God. All their acts, when they aren't endangering their nature, are selfless and contribute to the structure of the universe. Demons, having rebelled, act out of pure selfishness. They reject that God is the final answer to all, and that humans should be the most cherished of all God's creations. Thus, everything they do, from the highest kindness to the deepest depravity, is done out of selfishness.

Maxus wrote:This is off the top of my head, so it may not be very well thought-out, but the idea seems functional enough to include as background to setting. Who knows, if you're out there fighting the good fight (or the bad fight), the gods may take an interest in you and throw some help your way. Or put the word out to their own champions that you're being a problem, and you'll get attacked by level-appropriate adventurers from the other side of the fence.

The problem with this is the question: What are the gods fighting over? Even in greek mythos they fought over the ability to fuck with humans and the earth in general.

At some point you have assume that the world is at least *a* prize. At that point, evil wins by diverting some of it's attention towards the terrestrial world, and then letting more evil propagate through the faults of metahumanity.

It's a handwave, but it's far better to say that gods are above and beyond anything us mere mortals can fathom and comprehend. Therefore, they are illogical beings, and act illogically. They have a set of morality that would be alien to us if we comprehended it in it's entirety. Which makes a D&D style morality system applied to the gods via religion complete bullshit.

I'm okay with this idea. In fact, it makes Paladins interesting characters from a background standpoint. Paladins are warriors who have accepted the morality code of their god to a zealous degree, making them strange, fierce, unsettling people.

The good gods thing is explainable. You just have to accept that the good gods aren't omnipotent and get their powers from having followers. Thus by serving or praying to a good god, you are increasing his power that he can use to do good things with it.

First of all you've got to ditch the idea that gods are omnipotent. They're not.

Now a good god can probably solve any given problem, but not every problem. So they naturally have to divide their resources. They also have evil gods trying to fuck shit up, so a lot of their effort is spent fixing what shit they do or just plain preventing them from doing it. Imagine a hero like superman staring at a big globe and everywhere there's a crime, there's a red dot that appears. Now imagine he's got multiple globes to watch, because there are multiple planes. In addition to that he has to worry about allocating spells to clerics under him. This guy just isn't going to get much done everywhere and a lot of injustice is still going to get by. In fact, he probably can't handle the small stuff.

Now if you're the average peasant, the one contribution that you can presumably do in a fantasy world is pray to a god and contribute your faith to increasing their power. In fact, it may well be the most important thing that you do, because lets face it, you yourself have pretty much no real individual power, but the idea that your prayers can actually become a flame strike cast by a high cleric of good somewhere is actually fairly significant.

Even if all gods of good do is maintain the spells of clerics, that's still a big fucking deal, since only clerics can resurrect people. This means that they are absolutely essential, because when your 15th level hero dies, you damn well better have a way to bring him back.

TheFlatline wrote:Good read, though I'll disagree that the means always justify the ends...

The results of the means are the ends. If Sauron does nice things and then mean things, the ends are "nice things and mean things" and you have to balance those according to your own moral calculus.

Your religious declaration doesn't make you a god person.

Hehe.

Anyhow, gods can be in all sorts of situations... They might be able to give out only a hundred blessings a day, or only help you before you step into the lands of mordor, or whatnot. The police might not be able to help you right this minute, or this time, but you still call them when you need their help or can help them. Of course, this all requires some sort of limit to their ability - just like we have a limited number of police, or limit their abilities with laws.

-Crissa

Maxus wrote: Also, you may not be their highest priority at the moment. There's a lot of world(s) out there, and there may be something honestly more pressing than you out there.

This gave me an idea for a god: he wants to save people who are in danger, but he can't save everyone on his own, and learned at some point that he can't go around and save everyone, because there will always be some other pressing matter. He then learned that he also can't just send a message to a nearby temple, because things get lost in the shuffle, or the temples have more pressing matters also.

On the other hand, he can split of lots of small pieces of his power with abilities ranging from "holographic message saying 'Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi" to a distinct personality with full sentience. So he split of one fairly capable aspect of himself the sole job of which is to personally combat high level threats that literally need a god's attention, and then the rest of himself is split into millions of hive mind messengers who go around bugging his paladins and adventuring clerics to save the people that need saving.

Random idea I thought was interesting, and a way for one god to solve the problem of "you can't save everyone". It's also good for "No direct acts" deals

TheFlatline wrote:

Maxus wrote:This is off the top of my head, so it may not be very well thought-out, but the idea seems functional enough to include as background to setting. Who knows, if you're out there fighting the good fight (or the bad fight), the gods may take an interest in you and throw some help your way. Or put the word out to their own champions that you're being a problem, and you'll get attacked by level-appropriate adventurers from the other side of the fence.

The problem with this is the question: What are the gods fighting over? Even in greek mythos they fought over the ability to fuck with humans and the earth in general.

At some point you have assume that the world is at least *a* prize. At that point, evil wins by diverting some of it's attention towards the terrestrial world, and then letting more evil propagate through the faults of metahumanity.

As much as I'd hate to give credit to Dragonlance for anything, I do think the aims of the good/evil gods* in there work out. Takhisis and her crew wanted to turn all the mortals into abject slaves and dictate everything they did. Paladine and the other good gods resisted them, wanting to preserve the free will and autonomy of mortals, letting them grow and develop mostly as they will.

Treating a person with objectively less power or ability than you as a person with their own rights, which yours do not overlap, is a pretty cool and righteous thing to do.

To put it another way: I could use that idea in a setting and feel comfortable with it. Usually, I just ignore religion in games unless it's involved with a PC.

*Or, at least, what a buddy in high school theorized to me at length that this is what the gods were really fighting about. I only ever really read the original Dragonlance trilogy and a few others, and didn't care to go beyond that.

Doesn't D&D imply a different conclusion than the three you posited? I was under the impression that they can't solve a problem because their power is diverted towards divine conflict, yet prayer is not meaningless because it gives them the power to be in the conflict. If a god's uncontested, then their agenda will be realized. This makes D&D's religion/gods a kind of prisoner's dilemma.

My assumption always has been that there is a balance of power which impedes the good gods from simply elevating their followers to a better life status... because if they did that, the bad guys would do the same and then the two sides go to a war of annihilation against each other.

And while the good gods may be good, they still fear getting their immortal selves destroyed... so they've accepted that the status quo must be protected, lest they run into danger of losing it all. There's a reason why Lathander ( of the Forgotten Realms ) calling a crusade against the evil gods was considered as a negative, rash thing by the rest of that pantheon.

My second assumption is that peasants in most fantasy realms are not on that 1000 calories diet. Modern fantasy RPG's mostly assume a good/evil morality more akin to our modern one than what really went down in the middle ages, so if we are going to handwave that aspect, we might as well do it with the pesky fact of malnutritition. Maybe the local cleric let's it rain pigs every now and again.

And as a third point, the alignment system makes perfect sense if one accepts the fact that gods are real in those fantasy worlds and they expect you to behave according to their dogma ( because that ups their own power level). Religion in our real world is a matter of making a leap of faith that there is some higher being who will reward you for behaving a certain way during your life.

Fantasy people don't even have to make that leap of faith, they know that there are real gods out there, one of whom makes their local cleric be able to conjure food and water and heal the victim of that tragic accident. They know, via that cleric, that behaving in a certain way will really make them go to heaven after they die. There is a real reward structure set up, and, let's face it, people are at their core selfish. If one of you would know ( not only believe ) , with certainity, that behaving in a certain way will bring you to paradise after you die, your incentive to be good would be much higher, right?

Of course that opens other cans of worms, like, why not go with the neutral gods? Or how informed are peasants of other religions? Or, most importantly, why would poor people live in domains where evil gods are worshipped and one can reasonably expect to be treated like dirt by everybody else?

But in the sense that gods are for real and the populace knows it, the alignment system makes perfect sense where it is applied.

FrankTrollman wrote: * The Gods don't know about it - in which case they apparently can't hear your prayers either.

* The Gods can't do anything about it - in which case praying to them is a waste of time.

* The Gods could do something about it, but choose not to - in which case they are dicks.

Well these aren't the hardest problems for a DM to write his way out of:

1) Perhaps they only hear prayers when they're given in the right location (such as a sanctified temple, or the top of a volcano, or wherever).
2) Perhaps they can't act directly, but they will (as is mentioned in the Tomes) direct their clerics to go knock over the evil overlord on their behalf.
3) Yeah, some people are just dicks. If you're made of Good Elemental energy and you're also a dick, are you a Good god or not?

I don't even need to introduce evil gods into the scenario.

magnuskn wrote: If one of you would know ( not only believe ) , with certainity, that behaving in a certain way will bring you to paradise after you die, your incentive to be good would be much higher, right?

Therein lies a paradox. If the required behavior was to be selfless, anyone with certain knowledge of how the afterlife progressed would almost, by definition, be damned for all eternity and be denied paradise, because at that point it would become impossible to *not* act selfishly to achieve paradise.

Most of the world religions speak highly of the concept of selflessness. Unless things work differently metaphysically, knowing what happens to you after you die would almost seal your fate.

Lokathor wrote: 3) Yeah, some people are just dicks. If you're made of Good Elemental energy and you're also a dick, are you a Good god or not?

Define "good" for a mortal.

Now define "good" for a timeless, immensely powerful being who operates on another plane of existence.

If you can answer those two points, then you can start to answer your question.

I seriously doubt that "good" is identical for Joe the Peasant and Tyr. In fact, Joe the peasant, Smitts the Paladin, and Tyr the God will have 3 different codes of morality that they adhere to, complicating things. And yet they'd all be "good". Hell all three would be "lawful good" and yet probably have only barely similar moral codes.

TheFlatline wrote:

magnuskn wrote: If one of you would know ( not only believe ) , with certainity, that behaving in a certain way will bring you to paradise after you die, your incentive to be good would be much higher, right?

Therein lies a paradox. If the required behavior was to be selfless, anyone with certain knowledge of how the afterlife progressed would almost, by definition, be damned for all eternity and be denied paradise, because at that point it would become impossible to *not* act selfishly to achieve paradise.

Most of the world religions speak highly of the concept of selflessness. Unless things work differently metaphysically, knowing what happens to you after you die would almost seal your fate.

Well, I imagine there would have to be "bounds of reason"... if you can't even indulge in the selfishness of being good for the sake of getting your reward in the afterlife, the standard is much too highly set. That'd probably work for an order of lawful good monks, but not for the common person.

virgileso wrote:Doesn't D&D imply a different conclusion than the three you posited?

D&D does not imply a conclusion at all. Each of the gods has an essentially, or indeed actually limitless army and an agenda they supposedly care about. Why Erythnul doesn't send a couple rampaging Balors to destroy your entire civilization yesterday is left completely unexplained.

I was under the impression that they can't solve a problem because their power is diverted towards divine conflict, yet prayer is not meaningless because it gives them the power to be in the conflict. If a god's uncontested, then their agenda will be realized. This makes D&D's religion/gods a kind of prisoner's dilemma.

Prayers from normal people don't apparently do anything for D&D gods. Prayers specifically from Clerics apparently allow those clerics to channel miracles from the gods in question without negatively impacting the gods in question at all.

But even before we get into the problem of evil for D&D gods, we have the problem of suicide bombers. That is: you have actual death cultists for whom blowing up the world is their actual goal. Ad they have the power to blow up he world. So... why is the world still here? It's not like an equally destructive power in the hands of the white hats would stop them from launching if blowing up the entire world was their actual plan.

Cold Wars and Detante only work if neither side actually wants everyone to die. Since D&D posits factions that do wan everyone to die, there is no cold war and no stare down. It's just everyone dying.

-Username17

TheFlatline wrote:

Lokathor wrote: 3) Yeah, some people are just dicks. If you're made of Good Elemental energy and you're also a dick, are you a Good god or not?

Define "good" for a mortal.

Now define "good" for a timeless, immensely powerful being who operates on another plane of existence.

If you can answer those two points, then you can start to answer your question.

I seriously doubt that "good" is identical for Joe the Peasant and Tyr. In fact, Joe the peasant, Smitts the Paladin, and Tyr the God will have 3 different codes of morality that they adhere to, complicating things. And yet they'd all be "good". Hell all three would be "lawful good" and yet probably have only barely similar moral codes.

In DnD-land, Good is an external and elemental force that's as much a part of the universe as Fire and Air are. You can literally kill things with nothing but Good energy. It's not a thing that people define, and that's something that usually doesn't sit well with players.

In D&D land you also get rewarded/punished for how good you were at your job. So if you were a good person, but you sucked, your soul ends up getting turned into a door knob in the celestial palace of something or other. If you were evil and you were really hard core, your soul gets to turn into an awesome demon.

Every so often a D&D author gets their Christian culture bias on and forgets that, but seriously the promise of the Great Wheel cosmology is seriously that it doesn't really matter whether the things you did were bad or good but merely whether they were well done. At least, as far as post-life rewards and punishments go. Chaotic People are judged by the gods of Chaos, Evil people are judged by the gods of Evil. And so on. If you were a bad man, the "sins" that count against you won't be the times you killed young boys, but the times you let young boys get away.

-Username17

The Great Wheel fucking rules man.

Lokathor wrote:I don't even need to introduce evil gods into the scenario.

Personally, I think I like the real polytheistic way of doing things: you have a god with a portfolio. The god isn't themselves good or evil, but the concepts in their portfolio can be used to accomplish good or evil ends.

In D&D magic exists. To cast magic Wizards master deduction regarding its effects. Clerics are masters of induction. Clerics, to oppose the uncertainties and doubts of their approach need to employ abduction reasoning. So religion is a consequence of the magic they have experienced.
In D&D magic influences magic. So, in D&D, gods will tend to be influenced by cultural magic dogma. Simple as that.

It's very odd that in a thread about "Core Principles", we've quickly devolved into discussing the weirdnesses of 2nd and 3rd edition D&D religion.

There are other games out there. There are other fantasy cosmologies. Many of them work better than the nonsense that is D&D. Could we go back to discussing core principles?

Hmm, I like cosmologies that involve cycles somehow. That is, things or matters naturally tending to be some pattern of motion and never trully stabilize or freeze on some linear principles. Cycles that reflect natural order rather than morals.

What fantasy cosmologies are you aware of that build on this?

Lokathor wrote: In DnD-land, Good is an external and elemental force that's as much a part of the universe as Fire and Air are. You can literally kill things with nothing but Good energy. It's not a thing that people define, and that's something that usually doesn't sit well with players.

You've managed to... not define Good at all.

That's like me saying "define electricity" and someone saying "it's an external and fundamental element of our universe. You can literally kill things with nothing but electricity".

Well, that's awesome sauce. But you've still not defined what Good actually is. Just that it "is" in a rational sense.

Otherwise, we've just established that moral alignment in D&D is not just a mess, but absolutely fucking pointless.