>alignment exists in this D&D fantasy setting
>there really is a cosmic war between law, chaos, good, and evil
>mortals know this due to portals to the Outer Planes and the outsiders that come from there, both of which are embodiments of alignment
>however, no magic can ever detect or trigger an effect based on alignment
>outsiders simply have impulses to "do law and good," "do chaos and good," "do evil regardless of law or chaos," etc., but they have no clue what this truly means
>the "itch is scratched" if they make a sincere effort to try to fulfill their impulse, but they have no way of telling if an action they just took was actually lawful, chaotic, good, and/or evil
>not even the lords of the outsiders or the gods truly know what actually defines law, chaos, good, and evil
>whenever someone dies (mortal or otherwise), a mortal with the right supernatural sense or an outsider can perceive a burst of color-coded radiance that determines what the person's alignment was at the moment of death
>this is an exception to the "no magic can ever detect..." rule above
>there is no resurrection magic in this setting at all
What sort of ramifications would this have on a D&D setting?
Not much. I mean, its not like most D&D settings did a good job of factoring the existence of the ability to detect alignments or resurrect the dead before.
How can outsiders have an impulse to do something when they don't know what it is and have no inherent sense of it? What if some diplomancer convinced all the demons that the color they thought was evil was actually good and the color they thought was good was actually evil?
>>46981386
The impulse is literally something like, for a trumpet archon, "I must do law and good."
If the trumpet archon makes a sincere effort to try to "do law and good," then the itch is scratched. However, they have no way of knowing whether their action was truly lawful and/or good.
An outsider's first days (or even weeks, months, or years) are awkward, to say the least, but they spend most of that time in the Outer Planes amongst other outsiders of their kind.
Fuck alignment
>There are gods.
>Every god has three to ten commandments.
>Commandments are open to interpretation: does "slavery is an abomination" mean that every slave-owner must be executed?
>Two similar gods, both claiming to represent Law and Good, can have contradictory commandments.
>Commandments can be strange things like "Honor the Sabbath" or "Slay no felines."
>Does Detect Evil exist in this game system? Now it only pings off people who have broken one or more commandments of your god.
>Obviously, non-clerics can't cast this spell, nor can they use this spell through the moral lens of any other god. Also, the spell is binary: it doesn't tell you WHICH commandment was broken, or how.
>Paladins can forge their own commandments to which they alone are beholden; their Smite power temporarily forces an enemy to be subject to their commandments, and scourges them in proportion to number and severity of violations of the paladin's personal code.
>Monks have a similar system; a vow is an amendment to their personal commandments in exchange for more power.
>Paladin orders and monasteries try to guide the choices of their disciples but ultimately can't force them to adopt a specific code.
>dude what if like morality was an objective cosmological force but at the same time it was relative individual choice?
Sounds half-assed to me.
>>46981311
>alignment exists in this D&D fantasy setting
>alignment exists
>D&D
>using good and evil
Alignment should be law-neutral-chaos like the megaten series.
>>46984959
Really the Megaten series is kidding itself pretending it has three alignments, because there are actually two: Douche (Lawful and Chaos) and Not Douche (Neutral).
The fact that some douches are in conflict with each other doesn't make them a different alignment; that's just what douches do.
>>46981580
Exelment
A meta-commentary on how alignment is nigh impossible to define even in alignment-focused settings like Planescape.
>>46984992
But then it doesn't look deep!
>>46981580
God-focused settings _in D&D_ are dumb.
