Distinct Upper Planes

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Post by Quantumboost »

Josh_Kablack wrote:Except that the sensates are not focused merely on pleasant, beautiful experiences, they seek new experiences of all types:
Dragon 287, page 48 wrote: , but those few senates truly in touch with themselves know that each event, no matter how unpleasant, can be a valuable learning experience.
Thus, despite their hedonistic recruitment drives, and succubi cleric spokesmodel, the Sensates value learning (ie the acquisition of knowledge) over beauty.
Point taken, Hacker Morality does match up well with Arborea then.
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Post by IGTN »

Each plane probably shouldn't only have one morality type; maybe two or three, ranked in order. There can even be some overlap, where one plane might be, for instance, Ab morality while the next one over is Bc and the one on the other side is Da, but that's not strictly necessary. You ca also have overlap between even supposedly opposed planes.

Beastlands needs a more chaotic morality type that to be pure Martyr's. Remember, it's as close to Limbo (with something like Giant Frog Morality: Giant Frog giant frog frog giant giant giant Frog frog frogiant) as it is to Celestia.

Ysgard, for instance, might be Draconian first and Famous second; the most important thing is to succeed, and then to be known for it. Those two are actually pretty closely related, so there's probably room for a third.

Arborea I can see with Hacker, Hedonistic and Aesthetic (the latter are very similar types, actually), maybe with the emphasis on Hacker. (Edited to re-arrange emphasis)

I like the Greater Good write-up of the Beastlands, except that it's supposed to agree vaguely with whatever theme we assign to Chaos; maybe assigning it something to match with Arborea (Hacker again, maybe, or Hedonistic) and a healthy helping of Jungle morality. You can contrast Martyr's and Flagellant's morality by assigning the latter to a Lawful plane.

Celestia and Bytopia could use a dash of Protective Morality to season whatever else they have. I'm not sure where it should be stronger; regardless, Protective seems like it might be the overlap that connects them.

Flagellant's morality might actually do really well on Bytopia; it's a land of plenty where people willingly do without. It also works nicely as a contrast to Protective morality; matching the two in any relative strength on the same plane could be interesting. I'm envisioning an ideal of a rugged frontier guard or Ranger Lord, with the ability to retire and live happily, peaccefully, and in luxury, but who instead chooses to live out of a tent in dangerous wilderness for months at a time, to keep the wilds away from others. As it turns out, Bytopia actually has the ideal design for this, too, with the peaceful and wild layers facing eachother.

You can also get tensions with the Kantians on Celestia in matters of methods, considering the difference between Gnomes (and hence Bytopians) and Kantians there: the Frontiersgnomes use double bluffs, illusions, ambushes, night raids, and so on to defend their people, while the Kantian Paladins see lying as wrong.

Also, a pair of conflicting moral systems. They're incomplete, but if we're matching two or more to a plane nobody will notice:

Traditional Morality: The old ways are best
The idea here is that doing things the way they were always done is inherently good on its own. Sudden changes always make things worse, and so the best way is to not make any changes at all; it's always best to go back to the ways that are tested and true.

Experimental Morality: At least we tried
The idea is that there's always a better way to do anything, and that good intentions and genuine effort are always pardonworthy, even if the results aren't as expected. Taking a risk and trying something new is always considered Good under this system, because otherwise you'll never find anything better.

Oddly enough, Traditional Morality could match both Celestia and Arborea, since one's home of the Elves and the other the Dwarves, and both are quite tradition-bound, although the Elves might be more utilitarian in their tradition boundedness. Giving Experimental Morality to a plane on the great wheel is substantially more difficult, since all three of the CG planes are defined in other ways (although I could see it fitting in any of them).
Last edited by IGTN on Fri May 01, 2009 6:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Draco_Argentum wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:While the "upper" philosophies should have things in common, I think it is important to stress the point that the Celestians are supposed to have more in common with the people of Acheron than the people of Arborea.
Correct. I tend to think that good should share goals while nearby good and evil should share methods.
That wouldn't work at all. Because people who share your methods and not your goals are your enemies. The LTTE doesn't get all buddy-buddy with Al Quaida just because they both use suicide bombing.

Celestians get along with Acheronians. This despite the fact that Celestians tend towards being Lawful Good and Acheronians tend towards Lawful Evil. The philosophies are specifically less divergent than Celestia and Arboria (3 shifts instead of 4). The Great Wheel isn't supposed to be a two party system with minor squabbling about methodology - it's a fucking wheel where everyone makes an argument for their personal spoke. And against opposing or even distant spokes.

It is also important to note that in the original conception, players could make parties out of people from different spokes of the great wheel. Indeed, if you had a Monk, a Barbarian, an Assassin, and a Cavalier, you were required to represent different wheel spokes. And still be on the same team.

IGTN wrote:Each plane probably shouldn't only have one morality type; maybe two or three, ranked in order.
If we were really clever, we'd put in several moralities into each plane where the residents themselves couldn't really tell the difference. So for example in Acheron we could have Glory Morality (value: praise) and also Sheep Morality (value: duty). Where some believe that the best thing to do is to achieve in the eyes of their fellows, while others believe that the best thing to do is to follow orders. In a militant and nationalistic society like Acheron it might be extremely difficult to tell whether some careerist soldier is working his way up the ranks in order to win praise from his unit or because it is his duty to do so.

But maybe Maglubiet gets to judge those who seek glory and Wee Jas judges those who are driven by duty. It's just that once they are actually on Acheron it doesn't really matter much who was judged by who, because it's all about making nation states on the giant cubes. And both moral systems are pretty much inline with that.

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Post by Grek »

I don't think Celestians should actually like with Acheronians. Not kill on sight, but not friends either. Actual friendliness should only go as far as two spokes in any direction. A Celestian and an Acheronian needing to deal with eachother should probably prefer to get some guy from Buxenus on Arcadia to serve as a go-between rather than deal face to face.
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:I don't think Celestians should actually like with Acheronians. Not kill on sight, but not friends either. Actual friendliness should only go as far as two spokes in any direction. A Celestian and an Acheronian needing to deal with eachother should probably prefer to get some guy from Buxenus on Arcadia to serve as a go-between rather than deal face to face.
That's an incredibly small and intolerant tent you got there. Are you seriously saying that Yugoloths should not be willing to deal with a Tanar'ri?

The maximum wheel distance between groups is 8. A distance of 4 is halfway across. And I think that should indicate that you are on opposite sides of issues as often as you are on the same side. A distance of 3 should therefore make you agree more often than not.

I mean seriously, that's the difference between a Slaad and a Daemodan. Or a Baatezu and a Daemodan. But perhaps most importantly, it's the difference between a Marilith and a Yugoloth.

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Post by Draco_Argentum »

FrankTrollman wrote:It is also important to note that in the original conception, players could make parties out of people from different spokes of the great wheel. Indeed, if you had a Monk, a Barbarian, an Assassin, and a Cavalier, you were required to represent different wheel spokes. And still be on the same team.
And I think thats kinda on the dumb side. If the characters don't have goals in common why are they together aside from contrived end of the world situations?

I think its rather the point that people sharing methods but not goals are enemies. At least it is if you want a game where the PCs are idealists who make the world a better place like Lago campaigns for. That way the philosophies on the old lawful side of the wheel can still be similar while explaining why they kill the shit out of each other.
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Post by Grek »

FrankTrollman wrote:The maximum wheel distance between groups is 8. A distance of 4 is halfway across. And I think that should indicate that you are on opposite sides of issues as often as you are on the same side. A distance of 3 should therefore make you agree more often than not.
Baatezu and Tanar'ri are four away. They hate eachother. At four away, you want to kill eachother. At two away, you agree more often than not. At three, it's about 50/50, I think. Yugoloths are originally from Hades, two away from both Baator and the Abyss, so they are still working both sides.

Honestly, with outsiders, the tent should be small and intolerant. That's why there is a Blood War.
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Post by IGTN »

Draco_Argentum wrote:And I think thats kinda on the dumb side. If the characters don't have goals in common why are they together aside from contrived end of the world situations?
If Law vs Chaos is a matter of method, there's less reason to be killing eachother over it, especially if evil (which tends more toward ends-justify-the-means). The pacifist protestor, the terrorist, and the uniformed insurrectionist are all on the same side, so there wouldn't be a Blood War under that system either.

Each spoke needs to be distinctly different in goals than the others, even its neighbors, but especially its enemies. Methods can vary or be similar (they should probably emerge from goals, actually), but goals absolutely must be different, even between Baator and Gehenna or the Abyss and Pandemonium.

Personally, for alliance lengths, I think that the tent should be only conditionally large at all. Adjacent planes are tolerable almost all of the time, two away most of the time, three away you could ally with or be at war with, depending on what benefits your cause the best, and four away you disagree with enough to hate. Good might have a longer range of polite tolerance (no face-stabbing) than evil, but they're still only being polite to their faces: a dedicated Arborean hosting a dedicated Celestian would be likely to spit in the latter's food, but would wait for provocation before stabbing.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Draco_Argentum wrote: If the characters don't have goals in common why are they together aside from contrived end of the world situations?
Why am I friends with people who I disagree with on major philosophical issues? Why are all of us Denners talking together so often? Because we are characters who are more than just our alignment. Our interest in playing Neil Young songs at open mic is greater than our differing religions. Our desire to talk shit about Pathfinder is greater than our political beliefs... IN THIS CASE. Overall, as a group, I'm sure, most of us who are Buddhists or Baptists don't want to hang out on that basis, and the same with Republicans and Democrats.

So if the fundamental conceit of roleplaying is that characters are more than just Race/Class/Alignment, we have to look at the greater goals of having a good story with fun interaction.
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Post by Midnight_v »

JigokuBosatsu wrote:
Draco_Argentum wrote: If the characters don't have goals in common why are they together aside from contrived end of the world situations?
Why am I friends with people who I disagree with on major philosophical issues? Why are all of us Denners talking together so often? Because we are characters who are more than just our alignment. Our interest in playing Neil Young songs at open mic is greater than our differing religions. Our desire to talk shit about Pathfinder is greater than our political beliefs... IN THIS CASE. Overall, as a group, I'm sure, most of us who are Buddhists or Baptists don't want to hang out on that basis, and the same with Republicans and Democrats.

So if the fundamental conceit of roleplaying is that characters are more than just Race/Class/Alignment, we have to look at the greater goals of having a good story with fun interaction.
just want to say that you have a valid and what I think is a much needed idea there.
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Post by Midnight_v »

double post
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Post by BearsAreBrown »

Doesn't Hacker Morality step on the toes of Mechanus? I mean, isn't the entire plane a gigantic fucking library? Or is it different than Mechanus because while Mechanus does it for the Greater Knowledge, Arcadia does it for the Greater Good?
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Post by Quantumboost »

BearsAreBrown wrote:Doesn't Hacker Morality step on the toes of Mechanus? I mean, isn't the entire plane a gigantic fucking library? Or is it different than Mechanus because while Mechanus does it for the Greater Knowledge, Arcadia does it for the Greater Good?
Mechanus is a giant fucking clockworks, not a library. There are libraries *on* Mechanus but it isn't a significant part of the plane's morality or anything.
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Post by K »

I think tying planes to complicated moral values is probably too.... complicated.

You can just shorthand the whole process by tying the planes to abstract ideas that are positive and/or negative. So the Beastlands is tied to "Growth", a generally positive thing, and the Hells are tied to "Pain" and Elysium is tied to "Pleasure."

Then you can have various gods with finite domains on those planes.

Of course, I still favor the "Dominions" versions of planes most of all. It makes a lot of sense to me that there are various "good" and "evil" worlds where a single powerful thing rose to godhood and now rules the world and it is worshiped on other worlds because it is trying to extend it's power into those worlds. So under that model, Hell is "evil" because it is ruled by Amodeus and that guy is a cock and his personality causes the sky to rain acid.
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Post by Maxus »

K wrote: Of course, I still favor the "Dominions" versions of planes most of all. It makes a lot of sense to me that there are various "good" and "evil" worlds where a single powerful thing rose to godhood and now rules the world and it is worshiped on other worlds because it is trying to extend it's power into those worlds. So under that model, Hell is "evil" because it is ruled by Amodeus and that guy is a cock and his personality causes the sky to rain acid.
I'm not terribly interested in Dominions, but I like that idea.
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Post by Username17 »

Making the Upper Planes somewhere you care about adventuring is a lofty goal. But I think this thread is more about making the teams be defined in a coherent way than simply doing a writeup on Bitopia where I care enough to set an adventure there.

A lot of people want alignments to be coherent moral philosophies so that we don't have to get into endless "Are park rangers evil?" or "Can I kill baby kobolds?" discussions. Flagging the wheel spokes as being specific moral theories rather than half assed perturbations about whether it is more lawful to follow instructions given to you by an angry mob or by a smaller number of police officers means that you could actually meaningfully include alignment in the game without it being a heavy handed wheel of morality.

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Post by K »

I don't think coherent moral philosophies will help people decide whether to kill baby kobolds. The average gamer is still going to be arguing about this unless you specifically say that killing baby kobolds is OK.

Making the Upper Planes a place you want to go is pretty easy. You just put some cool stuff there and people will want to go there.
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Post by Eikre »

TavishArtair wrote:
Grek wrote:Famous Morality: The Virtue of Glory
The idea is that Good is about people knowing and approving of your actions. The more people who want to act like you do, the more good you are. Doing things that make people happy is good because they will remember you for it. You fight Balors and Dragons because people will sing songs praising you long after you are dead.
Note that under this system, it might not be obvious but genocide is quite probably actually bad even if it causes you to become very (in)famous, because it reduces the number of people who can love/fear/respect you.
I think that's the wrong tack to take with it, I think it should be closer to what Machiavelli described as his endgame; The quote that everyone thinks he said about pragmatism was something more like "look to the end," by which he meant that everything you do will sum up in the history books and the goal here is to get consensus to say you were pretty cool.

So the idea is that we're not subjecting your actions themselves to Kantian analysis or rigorous philosophy, but there is still an element of righteousness in what you do, because you're trying to satisfy people. If you go back to what "Glory" was in the first place you end up with the god of Abraham, which I guess is pretty appropriate because there are plenty of moral dissenters (including Lilith, who's right there from the fucking start) who would suggest that even if that guy is "Good", he's still a total fucking asshole and you should hate him. And yet, there are way, way more people who don't hate him than those that do, even before the inclusion of the loving overtones that come with less strictly ecclesiastical portrayals of his being.

So is genocide bad? "Oh, no! Now there is a completely different arbitrary number of people to know about me-" okay look that's not the focus, as long as the people who are pleased with you outnumber the people who aren't, in the end. Here's the nitty gritty: displeasure with you is the enemy, and it's bad for everyone. It is literally Bad that anyone is upset about Hitler. But if Hitler kills everyone who doesn't like Hitler, then there is no source of dissatisfaction, you see? They were part of the problem. If it's not already clear, caricatures of this ethical quadrant far more hilarious than the others.

What is bad about genocide is that it's not going to fucking work. Hitler literally can't kill all those dudes, he's going to fuck it up, the rest of the world is going to stall him out and reverse his momentum and then it's just a matter of time before the writing on the wall materializes and then he's the villain. And then- hey what do you know- he was Evil all along.

Good is Machiavellian Virtu, Evil is straight-up megalomania.
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Post by Eikre »

double post
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Necro.

So I'm doing some Planescapey stuff, and I was thinking about how to show different takes on Flagellant's Morality. There's an adventure that's going to involve both the Shadow Plane and Bytopia. PCs will encounter celestial gnomes and Kyton chain devils. Both of these groups have a common thread in their philosophies in that they believe it is important to appreciate what one has.

Kytons believe that people should be "enlightened" by having suffering imposed on them, and that someone who has lots of stuff they don't appreciate deserves punishment. Kytons love creating fear because it makes others appreciate their lives while simultaneously reminding the Kytons of their power. Kytons don't go out of their way to harm people if they seem perfectly content and happy with what they have.

Bytopians feel it is important that civilization faces some threat for people to prove themselves against, and that one should be able to sally forth into the wild to face greater dangers for a chance at reward. There is an eternal frontier, and (though desirable) honest harmony means little if it doesn't get tested by the monsters and storms the frontier spawns to attack it. Bytopians think survival should never be guaranteed, because that would ruin heroism, but that people should have the freedom to choose peace over constant trial.

Do these beliefs seem like they could lead to both conflicts and agreements? I want the PCs to be able to influence things in multiple possible directions.
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Post by virgil »

The kyton philosophy seems to have too much potential for niceness. Part of the goal with the different moralities was that at a baseline Good is still largely recognized as good, and Evil as bad.
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:The kyton philosophy seems to have too much potential for niceness. Part of the goal with the different moralities was that at a baseline Good is still largely recognized as good, and Evil as bad.
That's not true.

Forty percent of Americans believe that within their lifetime the god they pray to will murder every living person, including them, and raise them all from the dead so as to be able to eternally torture all the ones that won't serve him forever. This is on the face of it the most hideously wicked plan that it is possible to have, and nevertheless a plurality of Americans believe it will be carried out "soon" and that it will be a good thing when it is.

When it comes to the works of gods and demons, people just plain don't make any fucking sense. If it turns out that any rational assessment of Angelic goals would determine them to be vile and worthy of opposition - well that's no different than what most Christians already believe. If it turns out that devils have a plan to make the world a better place, remember that Christians would oppose that anyway.

If you believe in divine mandate morality, then the devils are "evil" even if their goals are objectively better for everyone than the goals of the angels. Because simply by having different goals from those of the angels, they are evil by definition. That may sound insane to you, but remember that the two largest religions in the world teach as their official doctrine that following the orders of their god (as interpreted by shepherds in the desert) is good even when doing so measurably worsens the human condition. And I don't think it will surprise anyone here that in fact following those orders measurably worsens the human condition all the time.

As such, the angels and devils could value pretty much anything and could use essentially any methodology at all to accomplish those ends, and its chance of making more sense than the actual supernatural mumbo jumbo that people actually believe in would still be almost 100%.

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Post by DrPraetor »

This is true, but because humans do have an organic moral sense, you get a variety of arguments, which are directed towards that moral sense, layered on top of the crazy. Whether this increases or decreases the total level of cognitive dissonance is an exercise for the reader.

Thus, religious nuts can believe all of the above, and also oppose abortion, because they supposedly put such a great value on each individual human life. In practice, this tends to produce some variation of our favorite No True Scotsman argument, or one flavor or another of blood libel. Put another way, yes conservative Christians will oppose the environmental movement, but they think that the environmental movement wants to murder people as part of a one-world government. They think that without divine mandate morality, people revert to social darwinism, which leads to a whole other cognitive-dissonance crazy train. Hell, conservative christians even believe that Muslims aren't monotheists!

But all of that crazy is rooted, in one or another way, in a desire to co-opt the moral sense that people intrinsically have - you know that child sacrifice is wrong without being told, so accusing your enemy religion of child sacrifice is effective.

Now, the alignment system for Gods in D&D ultimately derives from Tolkien - in which Satan is real, he's a Dark Kantian, and the divine plan has been sanitized to conform to the sensibilities of an early 20th-century British country squire (still racist and possibly antisemitic, still authoritarian, but downplaying the whole wrath and tribulation thing.)

So there's an ongoing effort to make the Good deities better conform to our more modern sensibility of what is actually Good. But that's no hinderance in the game; the followers of Asmodeus could very well declare that he's "Good" and you are "Evil" for not doing what Asmodeus says; but while they're at it they'd probably accuse the followers of Hieroneus or whoever of sodomizing corpses before they went on to the cannibalism. Unless Asmodeus commanded them to do that, in which case that'd be okay and the Hieroneans would be awful for some other reason.
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Post by Whatever »

DrPraetor wrote: So there's an ongoing effort to make the Good deities better conform to our more modern sensibility of what is actually Good. But that's no hinderance in the game; the followers of Asmodeus could very well declare that he's "Good" and you are "Evil" for not doing what Asmodeus says; but while they're at it they'd probably accuse the followers of Hieroneus or whoever of sodomizing corpses before they went on to the cannibalism. Unless Asmodeus commanded them to do that, in which case that'd be okay and the Hieroneans would be awful for some other reason.
I don't think that they'd resort to that particular label for their opponents. In the real world, "good" means "stuff we like" and "evil" means "stuff we don't like". But in D&D-land, "good" means "stuff those angels over there like" and "evil" means "stuff those demons and devils like". So the Asmodeans would proudly call themselves "evil" because "evil" actually means "stuff we like" to them. Similarly, they'd have no trouble calling their foes "good" because "good" is associated with specific stuff that they hate.

A better real world analogy is how American Liberals and Conservatives proudly embrace the appropriate term for themselves, while using the other term as the most vile epithet for their opposition. Each term (loosely) represents a particular set of philosophical positions, just the way "good" and "evil" do for D&D-people.
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Post by Kaelik »

DrPraetor wrote:But all of that crazy is rooted, in one or another way, in a desire to co-opt the moral sense that people intrinsically have - you know that child sacrifice is wrong without being told, so accusing your enemy religion of child sacrifice is effective.
No it's not, because there is no such thing.
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