Our DM ditched allignments completely. Based or cringe? Playing 5e

... what happens when those deities' edicts conflict, either through DM fiat or canonical material?
Zeus says treating your guests badly is Evil as the God of Hospitality but then rapes everyone, meanwhile Poseidon regularly sinks ships (travellers in his realm) and Hades kidnaps little girls.

>Zeus says treating your guests badly is Evil as the God of Hospitality but then rapes everyone, meanwhile Poseidon regularly sinks ships (travellers in his realm) and Hades kidnaps little girls.

I really hate that people keep parroting these memes without understanding the actual context.

Zeus' infidelity is the result of storytellers compiling and syncritizing various local versions of the King of the Gods where his wife had various different portfolios. Hera ended up being the version of the wife to win out in the end and all his other wives became Zeus' conquests that later got bad ends to give Hera more religious cred.

Poseidon sinking ships was seen more as the result of the sailors failing to properly pay respect to the god a visitors to his domain.

The Hades and Kore/Persephone story is based more around marriage rituals than a kidnapping. Hades does not "kidnap little girls" he performed one of the standard marriage ceremonies of his culture only to have a mother with empty nest syndrome get mad about her daughter leaving the house.

Gods in D&D aren't moral arbiters. Good and Evil are cosmic forces, above the gods.

Yes, there are no objective moral arbiters for Good and Evil in the universe and in fact cannot be. Thank you for following along.

Read the books.

Nothing in the books solves this problem. It's not a problem of characterization, its a problem of square peg in round hole.

Why would other people abide by your schizo headcanon premise

It's a pretty entry-level analysis of the anthropological development of world religions

Why wouldn't morally opposed gods be in conflict with each other?

You need reading lessons because that's not the issue at all. Even a little bit.

>Yes, there are no objective moral arbiters for Good and Evil in the universe and in fact cannot be.
That's because it's not arbitrary in-universe. Dumbass. It's arbitrary in the real world, and the real-world arbiter is the GM, but in-world it's just another law of physics.

There is nothing canonical that arbitrates exactly what is Good and Evil for either players or player characters to use as their reference for what's Good or Evil. If there were, the infinite shitstorm about what alignments mean and what a Good or Evil character can or cannot do would not exist.

Detect Evil detects alignments. It doesn't tell you what actions fall under Good or Evil, moron.

Good beings do Good acts.
Evil beings do Evil acts.
Rare exceptions will average out over the long term.
Simple as.

>cast Detect Evil on a room full of moral subjectivists, nihilists, and solipsists
>overwhelming feedback

Good beings do Good acts.
Evil beings do Evil acts.
Rare exceptions will average out over the long term.
Simple as.

So we all agree there's no canonical Good and Evil arbitration and that if I, as the DM, say that burning down orphanages is Good in our game then it is objectively Good within the confines of our game.
Are we beginning to see how bumfrick moronic the D&D alignment system is?

I think you're a pretentious moron.
Perhaps if you stopped huffing your own farts you'd understand what we're trying to tell you.

The fact that DMs can break the system over their knee AND use it as a tool to force player behavior (your character sheet says you're Lawful Good so you have to murder baby Orcs) is the problem, geniuses. Its a problem of when, not if, something morally repugnant gets thrown on a player's lap because of what's supposed to be their character's personal moral code.

There's no upside to the system, though. Alignment literally ONLY allows DMs to metagame and break player characters or allows players to metagame and abuse naive DMs. That's why they cut it out of 5e in every mechanical way.

>Zeus says treating your guests badly is Evil as the God of Hospitality but then rapes everyone, meanwhile Poseidon regularly sinks ships (travellers in his realm) and Hades kidnaps little girls.

I really hate that people keep parroting these memes without understanding the actual context.

Zeus' infidelity is the result of storytellers compiling and syncritizing various local versions of the King of the Gods where his wife had various different portfolios. Hera ended up being the version of the wife to win out in the end and all his other wives became Zeus' conquests that later got bad ends to give Hera more religious cred.

Poseidon sinking ships was seen more as the result of the sailors failing to properly pay respect to the god a visitors to his domain.

The Hades and Kore/Persephone story is based more around marriage rituals than a kidnapping. Hades does not "kidnap little girls" he performed one of the standard marriage ceremonies of his culture only to have a mother with empty nest syndrome get mad about her daughter leaving the house.

All this to say that the Greeks had a dynamic and relativistic understanding of what was right and wrong which morphed over time as they syncretized their many Gods into fewer and more consistent Gods, and eventually adopted Monotheism when that became more internally consistent and engaging than their pantheon. Which was my entire point.

Show me the human society that has developed from monotheism to pantheism or from anthropomorphic pantheism to theriomorphic pantheism you donut.

New Age isn't a religion, anon.

Its an umbrella because nobody practices any of those hokey made up horseshit 'religions' and lumping them all together is the only way to lend them any credence.
>It also developed in societies (US and UK) that were, traditionally, STRICTLY monotheistic, not even henotheistic.
As a countercultural movement for the moronic and ill-adjusted, yes. You are describing a counterculture.
Next you'll try to sell me a bridge on the resurgence of Norse Paganism.

A bunch of hippies smoking dope in the 1960s isn't a religion any more than me raising a flagpole above my house makes me a sovereign state with a right to self-governance or putting on women's underwear makes you a biological woman. You can cry about it all you want.

>Pantheism inevitably evolves into or gives way to monotheism once the religious and cultural structures of Pantheism hit a point that the separate phenomena-oriented Gods aren't satisfying the theological questions of the people.
Japan disproves this. Japanese people have consistently rejected monotheism while clinging firmly to Shinto tradition long after most of them became unofficial atheists.
>For example, the Greeks and Romans both had a concept of a unified singular everything-god or Prime Mover long before Christianity, but Christianity as a defined monotheistic religion had to take root before that conceptual belief became socially canonized.
Well, you're also missing the immense influence that Platonic philosophy had on Christianity. The two deeply affected each other.
>Same with Buddhism taking root among Hindu and Shinto practitioners, etc.
Buddhism isn't that big in India. It also isn't monotheistic at all. Some types of Buddhism are atheistic, while most are polytheistic. But both forms are much closer to pantheism than Christianity is, teaching that all is one.
A major school of Hinduism (advaita aka "non-dualism") is monotheistic, but afaik this is largely irrelevant to non-scholars outside of Indonesia, where Hinduism was forced to become explicitly monotheistic for political reasons.
>but the belief system only sticks if it satisfies theological gaps in the native belief system. Otherwise it gets rejected and the native belief system continues its own internal evolution.
Are you just not aware of syncretism?

Its an umbrella because nobody practices any of those hokey made up horseshit 'religions' and lumping them all together is the only way to lend them any credence.
>It also developed in societies (US and UK) that were, traditionally, STRICTLY monotheistic, not even henotheistic.
As a countercultural movement for the moronic and ill-adjusted, yes. You are describing a counterculture.
Next you'll try to sell me a bridge on the resurgence of Norse Paganism.

>Its an umbrella because nobody practices any of those hokey made up horseshit 'religions' and lumping them all together is the only way to lend them any credence.
No, anon, it's an umbrella because it covers a very wide variety of religious beliefs and practices that are all clearly connected to each other. I don't have a very high opinion of it, either, but it's only grown in influence since Crowley.

>The Japanese are almost entirely on-paper Buddhist today
Bullshit. Everyday Japanese religion is a hybrid of Buddhism and Shinto. Worship of the kami is very much an ordinary occurrence. You can find Shinto shrines in the middle of major urban neighborhoods because Shinto practice is closer to the everyday than Buddhist practice, which is focused more on internal development (and funeral rites).
There is a saying in Japan that "everyone is born Shinto, marries Christian, and dies Buddhist" because they take the rituals for those life events from different religions.

>Hinduism hasn't been entirely subsumed by Buddhism, but that's in large part because there's no theological need to replace the various gods of the Hindu pantheon with one unified and internally consistent god.
I'm beginning to think you don't know anything about either of these religions. There's a form of Hinduism in Indonesia that was FORCED to become monotheistic, and it did so by embracing advaita vedanta, not by adopting Buddhism OR Islam (which is what the Indonesian government was trying to force on them).
Buddhism is not in any monotheistic. It's so distant from monotheism that I am genuinely curious what you think Buddhism is.
> the moral inconsistencies of pantheism don't appear as a problem to Hindus
Okay, it's now obvious you think pantheism is a synonym for polytheism. It is not.

Why are you ignoring that Buddhism is not monotheist? Buddha himself taught a form of atheism, and in those forms of Buddhism that worship him as a god instead of revering him as a teacher, they ALSO worship an entire pantheon of gods. Many Japanese gods, for example, are taken directly from Buddhism.
Hinduism has a completely separate tradition of pseudo-monotheism which you are also ignoring despite me having mentioned it twice now.
I'm genuinely disappointed by how totally ignorant of world religion you seem to be. I thought this discussion would be more interesting, but you seem to know nothing at all about non-Western religious beliefs.

>a singular God of All Domains
That only happened once. You're an idiot.

>I no read good, lot words make head ouch.

lol

Why are you ignoring that Buddhism is not monotheist? Buddha himself taught a form of atheism, and in those forms of Buddhism that worship him as a god instead of revering him as a teacher, they ALSO worship an entire pantheon of gods. Many Japanese gods, for example, are taken directly from Buddhism.
Hinduism has a completely separate tradition of pseudo-monotheism which you are also ignoring despite me having mentioned it twice now.
I'm genuinely disappointed by how totally ignorant of world religion you seem to be. I thought this discussion would be more interesting, but you seem to know nothing at all about non-Western religious beliefs.

>I'm genuinely disappointed
You shouldn't be though. Read his earlier posts again.

>This is a distinction that makes little sense to the Japanese
But it means a hell of a lot when you're talking about the development of theology within a population group. The fact that the Japanese do not actually look to the shinto faith to solve complex moral dilemmas or provide explanations for natural phenomena or even as general guidance for how to live life means we can see it as the endpoint of their theological development, effectively erasing itself. The attitudes of the individuals isn't relevant to charting the development of the religion because obviously everyone who practices Xism is going to tell you Xism is perfect and has always been and will always be.
Might as well ask for self-reported dick size.
Hinduism is on the up in India because of the growing nationalist movement.
My comment on Poseidon was deliberately simple as just a way to point out some examples of conflicting morality among the Greek gods, good job identifying an intentionally reductive example.

That wasn't a moral conflict, that was a turf dispute at best, it was really more like a turf dispute between humans and then some of the gods took sides because they had nothing better to do. Even on the human level it wasn't a moral conflict. What a puffed-up moron you are.

You may as well put on clown makeup and a wig because at this point it's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about.

How do you feel about codified moral systems in other games, like humanity in WoD? I would expect you to flail and complain in a similar way. The diversity of real-world moral and religious beliefs are beyond you, so speculative morality is way beyond you.
>Religion is defined by the active faith of the practitioner.
Faith is an English word for a Christian concept. You're a clown.

>You haven't even digested what my actual complaint with the D&D system is
Your complaint was that it's impossible to have objective morality when there's more than one god. We've already gone over that, and everyone agreed you were stupid.
>That's literally not even an argument. Are you claiming only Englishmen distinguish between true believers of religions? Do you think the English invented Initiation rituals?
Do you actually think faith is an important part of every religion? It's largely a Christian concept.
Most gods don't give a damn if their worshipers believe in them. I tried to make a point about this earlier when I mentioned that even the PRIESTS of Shinto shrines don't care if the visitors to those shrines believe the kami are real, but that went right over your head, because you are a moron with a high schooler's understanding of religion.

>Until the 20th century it was absolutely not the norm that entire national religions were made up of people hardcore LARPing.
L O L
O
L

>Why would I care about the game mechanics of games I don't play?
I don't know, but you don't play D&D either and you obviously care about that, I think you're just a culture warrior.

>true believers
Also a christian concept. Christians conflate "belief" with "noncriticism" in a very poisonous sort of way, and I don't expect you to ever see past that, not even for the sake of having fun or playing pretend.

>we can see it as the endpoint of their theological development, effectively erasing itself.
There is no endpoint.
You've also now changed your argument from "all religions develop to monotheism, and then possibly to atheism" to "all religions develop to atheism, but by many different routes." Do keep in mind as well that Japan actually DOUBLED DOWN on polytheism during the Imperial era, enforcing a system of so-called State Shinto to enshrine the emperor's authority as an unquestionable fact of life by emphasizing his descent from the gods and codifying ritual to encourage submission to the state. One could argue that the current trend of non-belief among the Japanese is in some ways simply a temporary overcorrection from this extreme religious fervor. The fact that all of the traditional ritual has remained intact suggests that the Japanese could return to belief at any moment, and could do so rather easily.
>My comment on Poseidon was deliberately simple as just a way to point out some examples of conflicting morality among the Greek gods
But it doesn't do that. Poseidon punishes sailors who don't show him the proper respect while within his domain. This has no relationship to Zeus's command of hospitality.

>I said Japan reached the point where its native religion isn't practiced in any meaningful, spiritual way.
Bullshit, plain and simple. You're inventing distinctions that don't exist in practice. Religious ritual doesn't magically stop being religious just because the person performing it is skeptical about whether or not the gods are actually listening.
Your ignorance of both religion and anthropology is incredible.

>active faith of the practitioner
Ah, so like practicing rituals? Sounds like you're looping on yourself. Practicing Navajo is practicing Navajo, and pretending you exist in a vacuum where your entire country isn't Navajo and nobody practices Navajo rituals because the Navajo empire totally didn't make it the state religion won't change anything

>Sure mate, I avoided calling them gods for the sake of ecumenical courtesy, but we were trying to talk in objective terms about the way religions change over time.
Right, which is why I ultimately agreed with you. I was just explaining why the idea hadn't crossed my mind earlier. The development was Hellenistic paganism > Neo-Platonic Early Christianity > Medieval Catholicism, with the degree of practical monotheism peaking in the middle, not at the end.
Not surprising that anon resorted to
>NOOOO IT DOESN'T COUNT BECAUSE THE POPE SAID IT DIDN'T!!!!
as if any religion is a monolith.

>As a gross generalization, it seems like a lot of religions become more 'practicaly monotheistic' in response to political action (as a way of consolidating moral authority), then relax over time (sometimes very quickly, lol@Aten).
Interesting observation. It's sort of the inverse of the point I was getting at: Early Christianity and Medieval Catholicism are both technically the same level of theoretical monotheism, as both believe in the Trinity and the non-existence of other deities, but in practice the medieval saints were revered in a way that resembled minor gods.
Meanwhile a polytheistic imperial cult not only acknowledges multiple gods but also actively worships them, but still elevates the emperor or his patron god to a special, higher tier.
Some academic has probably written a book about this already...

>but much of it comes down to semantics, what counts as "a god" and what counts as "worship".
From my perspective, the big difference is that in one case you have a nominally monotheistic religion acquiring polytheistic elements, while in the other case you have a nominally polytheistic religion acquiring monotheistic qualities.
The other main difference is that saint-worship is typically religion from below, while an imperial cult is almost exclusively religion from above.

Monotheism peaked 14th century BCE

It takes at least 3 generations to make cultural change stick, anything less and things tend to roll back to the "good old days" at nearest opportunity.

You suggesting the Catholic church is not monotheistic
A: is a point of solved theology within the Catholic church for over a thousand years. If there were going to be multiple Catholic gods, that would have been recognized universally by now. In other words, there's been no backwards development.
B: Not ultimately impactful to the argument, which is about whether or not there is an identifiable progression from disparate and conflicting spirits/animal gods/human gods into eventual total monotheism. Where Catholicism falls on this trend doesn't ultimately matter because at worst it simply hasn't hit the end stage.
You are too illiterate to breathe.

I'm sorry your brain tumor's acting up again but I don't see how that's my problem.

>You guys haven't even touched on the way that Catholicism accrues saints, or how local communities turn those saints back into local personal gods (like Malverde lmao).
True! My own Catholic upbringing has inclined me to be a bit defensive about viewing the saints as gods, but once you strip away the theological technicalities, the practice is quite similar, and there's been a long history of Church officials trying to explain to illiterate peasants that their outright worship of the local St. Sheepshagger of the Warty Genitals is technically blasphemous.
>Note the point where you brought up new wave religions, note how he dismissed your point (which he explicitly challenged you to make) and then started complaining about trannies, that really says it all.
That was clearly a different anon who started ranting about hippies. That's why I ignored him.
On the other hand, this anon simply ignored that I brought up the New Age. It's since become clear that he thinks pantheism means polytheism so debatably New Age wasn't a great example as they tend to be pantheistic, but I'm not sure if he even knows that.

Okay, was I claiming that religious development happens independent of societal circumstance or that religious development happens directly as a result of societal circumstance?

>The fact that DMs can break the system over their knee
Means that it's a TTRPG. Removing alignment doesn't change this, it's a feature of any TTRPG.
>use it as a tool to force player behavior (your character sheet says you're Lawful Good so you have to murder baby Orcs)
I don't think this was ever a thing. 3e and later games go way out of their way to tell you that this is wrong, and I don't think AD&D ever said this either (though it does occasionally tell you to punish your PCs in petty ways for 'doing it wrong').
>Its a problem of when, not if, something morally repugnant gets thrown on a player's lap because of what's supposed to be their character's personal moral code.
Works fine at my table. You're misunderstanding on purpose and then projecting that misunderstanding onto others. You do this because your own real-world morals are offended by the premise of fantasy morality.

>You unironically think that my criticism of a game design element
"A bad actor in the GM's chair can break it" is not a criticism of the system. A bad actor in the GM's chair can break anything. Also you should read the system before you criticize it.

>means I am immoral irl.
No, moron, learn to read. Your criticism comes from a moral place, you aren't criticizing the game as a game. The only valid criticism of the game that you have made is "it causes arguments", which is true, because sometimes there will be someone like you at the table.

There's no upside to the system, though. Alignment literally ONLY allows DMs to metagame and break player characters or allows players to metagame and abuse naive DMs. That's why they cut it out of 5e in every mechanical way.

[...]
All this to say that the Greeks had a dynamic and relativistic understanding of what was right and wrong which morphed over time as they syncretized their many Gods into fewer and more consistent Gods, and eventually adopted Monotheism when that became more internally consistent and engaging than their pantheon. Which was my entire point.

>There's no upside to the system, though
It's a simple mechanic which allows various items, creatures and locations to have different effects based on the alignment of the target. The simplest example is a sword that deals extra damage to evil creatures. This is fun, and the fun part is when you attack a neutral character and don't get the damage, especially if you expected it to be evil. Thinking in-world you can say "Oh, okay, this means that these creatures might not be as dangerous as I thought, perhaps I can negotiate with them in the future. Additionally: oh, god, what have I done?" But the real magic doesn't come from that ground-level stuff, it really comes from the associations between the cosmic-level setting elements and the ground-level stuff, creating the illusion that the PCs are participating in (or, at the very least, trying to navigate) a conflict that is much much bigger than themselves. It also has the benefit of filtering people like you.

>No, it deals extra damage to Evil creatures.
It's usually both but it depends on the edition. Rule text can reference evil alignment or [evil] subtype or both. You're an idiot.
>Creatures who definitionally must be comitting Evil with every act they do, because they are apparently objectively Evil at every moment of the day.
No, there are corner cases where you have the [evil] subtype with a non-evil alignment. More importantly, any creature can perform actions out of sync with that creature's alignment, and most do, which you would know if you read the books.
>This is the entire problem,
lol
>especially when Player Characters which are extensions of living humans and have actual complex goals and interactions have the same Good or Evil tag as actual unfeeling killer automatons or summoned spirits from the Plane of buttholery.
Why is this a problem? Would you feel better if there were a more granular 'evil score', like aura strength in 3e, or vile/exalted alignments? Where are you going with this?

I know, you dislike alignments and you think that your dislike is an argument, that doesn't answer my question. I want to know why it's a problem for a made-of-evil demon and a complex mortal butthole to both take the same 2d6 points of holy damage.

>No, it deals extra damage to Evil creatures. Inherently, uniformly Evil creatures which must be declared so by the source material or else the GM. Creatures who definitionally must be comitting Evil with every act they do, because they are apparently objectively Evil at every moment of the day. Even their babies and orphanages and their relationships are entirely Evil, because they are Evil.
>This is the entire problem, especially when Player Characters which are extensions of living humans and have actual complex goals and interactions have the same Good or Evil tag as actual unfeeling killer automatons or summoned spirits from the Plane of buttholery.
Did you have a point here or were you just flailing? You've done a lot of flailing. It's okay if you're just flailing, I was only curious about your point, if any.

Orcs are made from mud and corrupting elves they don't have babies.

White, rural people are not helplessly adrift and bereft of knowledge of good and evil, like much of the rest of the world is. Perhaps this is a culture barrier for you, or perhaps you're just uncommonly stupid.

>that's not the issue at all.
then there's no issue at all, good and evil was laid out in previous editions rather succinctly with in-game ramifications.

Why would other people abide by your schizo headcanon premise

I don't think he has a DM. Look at the way he keeps adjusting his argument as people teach him about D&D. He doesn't play.

I mean yes, they are. The catch is in how they decide who qualifies as human.

You can't even spell properly, NPC.

It makes more sense when you understand that Chaos and Law were intended to represent the hyper-reductive medieval understanding of Paganism and Monotheism. Pagans (Chaos) were brutal backwards savages, but OUR Pagans (Celts, etc) were noble savages and THEIR Pagans (Medieval European conception of Islam or really any other religion) are filthy demon-worshippers. So while Chaos would be usually interlinked with Evil there was wiggle room for Chaotic Good, and Lawful Evil would be like people who covort with Satan or the Antichrist.

Read 'Three Hearts and Three Lions', that's basically where the concept of Law and Chaos came from for Gygax et al.
Its a system that doesn't work AT ALL for D&D since the setting is inherently pantheonic and I imagine that's a big part of why the whole Alignment system got so muddied and stupid; the general audience isn't consuming all the same works as Gygax et al and doesn't necessarily want to play with the same base assumptions about the world.