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Do the planes have to be infinite?

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Tue, 2010-10-05 16:43
#52
Palomides
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

I guess the better question on this tangent (hope no one minds that a threadjacking has occurred), is how would a DM present such a skewered reality? How does one handle existant/non-existant beings such as "Scheodinger cats" (or men or orcs or whatever) to the PCs?

I can only imagine it in the same way as one would describe something we see out of the corner of our eye (except that in this case the PC might be looking directly at him).
Maybe the trick would be inverse concentration, if the PC does a broad glance across a bar, he would see an assortment of patron and staff; but when he focuses on a serving wench (in order to get her attention), she suddenly ceases to exist and for all intensive purposes, it will be as though she never existed.
But the moment the PC thinks about something else, she suddenly reappears and serves him his drink (which he would have ordered if she had always existed).
Such an arrangement could be very frustrating if tracking down a thief that has stolen your money. If the PCs start chasing him, he disappears. But if they forget about him, he reappears. (DMs choice about whether the PCs get to keep their money or if it disappears with the disappearances/reappearnces of the thief)

I'd also include some absurdly fanciful things (e.g. a golem made of gingerbread ready to attack with its fire-breath) but the moment the PCs draw weapons and focus on it, it ceases to be (and others will think the PCs are crazy to suggest that such a thing ever existed); but then once they stop thinking about it, it reappears and hits them. Then they refocus on it and it disappears; then it later reappears with the damage it would have suffered if it had always existed and had fought the PCs
It gets confusing, but for a brief sortie, it could be fun to mess with the players this way

Maybe a visiting Xaositect would get an advantage to have absurd but beneficial things exist for him while a more lawful mind (who couldn't help but focus on the "concrete reality") could never keep things the way she wanted

I had a brief comedy adventure where the PCs jumped around a number of bizzarre demiplanes where such a set-up would have fit right in.
I did include a Demiplane of Meta-Reference.
Everything in this demiplane had an arrow hovering over them that labelled them "fighter", "mage", "doppleganger posing as a cleric", etc. If they looked more closely at anyone or anything, more arrows would appear ("helmet", "sword", "bad teeth", etc.) and the more they focused on anything the more arrows and details they would see ("enamel", "cavity", "bit of spinach", etc.) And if the PCs looked at the descriptive arrows closely, they saw another arrow with the words "descriptive arrow" pointing to the first arrow (and itself)

I didn't have them stay too long in these absurd demiplanes but the brief visits were enjoyable.

Tue, 2010-10-05 18:15
#53
Jem
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

ripvanwormer wrote:
It'd be hard to describe a man who wasn't there but was there at the same time (though this is an advantage to a medium in which everything is words, not pictures). Imagining the person seeming to flicker as the PC's brain processes contradictory stimuli is the best I can do. You could figure out the effects, though: basically, every consequence of existing and not existing applies simultaneously. The man uses up air and he doesn't, he kills you and he doesn't, you kill him and you don't, and the characters see two overlapping realities simultaneously. Probably if he stays/doesn't stay for too long, the two realities are violently ripped apart.

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Ever met someone in a dream who was both there and not? Those were these people. The interfae exist only as interference patterns of identity that occur when two dreamscapes brush against each other. The fact that they have a continuous species at all is due to the fact that, while they exist, they manipulate the dreams they inhabit with the goals of ensuring that all participating dreamscapes have a future tendency to touch other dreamscapes again, in whatever manner gives rise to an interfae. The same interfae exists whenever the same set of people, usually a pair, touch dreamscapes, and only communication with an interfae during such a conjunction can access any memories of prior existences. It's therefore possible to have hosted more than one interfae in your life, and in fact theoretically -- with the right manipulation -- you potentially hold as many interfae as there are sets of other dreamers in the multiverse.

This tenuous hold on existence means that an interfae is neither alive nor really dead in between its moments in dreams. They're probably outsiders -- certainly no one has seen the soul of anything like an interfae in the Outer Planes. (Indeed, given their vanishing rarity and the difficulty of communicating with them, almost no one even knows the species exist. Naturally, being some sort of magical or psionic manipulator, some of those who do know regard them as parasites or a disease to be cured.) Perhaps they simply never exist again. The interfae themselves, asked about the matter, have an extremely vague religion about it which sounds mostly like wishful thinking: that perhaps when their hosts die and become outsiders who no longer sleep, their lost dreamscapes becomes a ground state where the interfae can exist eternally itself.

Quote:
If there are Platonic shapes, they probably exist on Mechanus (and, in "fallen" form, in Acheron; in "ideal" form in Arcadia, and I'm not exactly sure how an idealized shape might be different from a Platonic shape - maybe the corners aren't as sharp).

The Orb of Day and Night is probably a Platonic sphere. In Arcadia, the Platonic shapes are not so much idealized -- they're ideal in Mechanus -- as, so to speak, tainted with good. In this case, I'd say they're applied, i.e. put to good use, so that things that approach a Platonic form in Arcadia are able to be aided by the natural shape of events there.

Tue, 2010-10-05 19:58
#54
Idran
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

ripvanwormer wrote:
It'd be hard to describe a man who wasn't there but was there at the same time (though this is an advantage to a medium in which everything is words, not pictures). Imagining the person seeming to flicker as the PC's brain processes contradictory stimuli is the best I can do. You could figure out the effects, though: basically, every consequence of existing and not existing applies simultaneously. The man uses up air and he doesn't, he kills you and he doesn't, you kill him and you don't, and the characters see two overlapping realities simultaneously. Probably if he stays/doesn't stay for too long, the two realities are violently ripped apart.

I have to come to the same conclusion with that, yeah. Either that, or something along the lines of There/Not There.

Quote:
As for the variant mathematics, it may be self-consistent mathematically, but it would, I think, require a copious amount of handwavium to describe. And it needn't be consistent mathematically. How about a reality where one and one is three, five and four is twenty, and nine and one is also three, and the weirdness only kicks in when you encounter those specific operations? So if you see a crowd of four people meet a crowd of five people, that's twenty people, but it's three groups, and if you divide the twenty people into two groups of nine people and two groups of one, that's six people altogether, which is two groups of three, which is really three groups of three.

While I do admit that a reality like that would be a non-self-consistent reality, I think any situation like that would be way to involved to actually use in a piece of fiction more elaborate than a thought experiment, and so the point is fairly moot anyway.

Honestly, though, I think the same would be true for any system you could set up that was obviously, blatantly, and unpatchably non-self-consistent. It would be so indescribable beyond the premise that it would be impossible to use it in any medium as the basis for a piece of fiction, either present day or yet to be invented, except maybe direct telepathy. And even that...I mean, let's say you have a setting that includes the set of mathematical rules you propose. How would you use it in any piece of fiction - novel, short story, RP - in such a way that the premise solidly holds without being handwave-able?

Thinking on it, I guess that's a better presentation of the core of my argument. It's possible to describe or imagine a theoretical setting which would be too inconsistent to support a system of logic. It's impossible to create a piece of fiction undeniably in that setting, because it's impossible to describe it beyond the premise, and without describing it you as a reader could always replace it with a consistent setting with the same properties that actually are described in the work.

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Dreaming seems to me to be largely the process of rationalizing irrational events after the fact, imposing false narratives on chaos.

Do you mean recalling your dreams? Because definitely, there's almost definitely no sort of narrative going on during the process of dreaming itself, unless it's a lucid or near-lucid dream where you have some level of consciousness and awareness. That seems to force the randomness out of the dream for the most part. But standard, uncontrolled dreaming itself is probably just either mental feedback due to a disconnection from sensory input, a series of random connections between memories as the brain takes advantage of downtime to expand its network, or the brain's equivalent of garbage collection (in the Comp Sci sense). At least, those are the most prominent current theories, so far as I'm aware.

Tue, 2010-10-05 20:01
#55
Idran
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Palomides wrote:
I guess the better question on this tangent (hope no one minds that a threadjacking has occurred), is how would a DM present such a skewered reality? How does one handle existant/non-existant beings such as "Scheodinger cats" (or men or orcs or whatever) to the PCs?

I can only imagine it in the same way as one would describe something we see out of the corner of our eye (except that in this case the PC might be looking directly at him).
Maybe the trick would be inverse concentration, if the PC does a broad glance across a bar, he would see an assortment of patron and staff; but when he focuses on a serving wench (in order to get her attention), she suddenly ceases to exist and for all intensive purposes, it will be as though she never existed.
But the moment the PC thinks about something else, she suddenly reappears and serves him his drink (which he would have ordered if she had always existed).
Such an arrangement could be very frustrating if tracking down a thief that has stolen your money. If the PCs start chasing him, he disappears. But if they forget about him, he reappears. (DMs choice about whether the PCs get to keep their money or if it disappears with the disappearances/reappearnces of the thief)

I'd also include some absurdly fanciful things (e.g. a golem made of gingerbread ready to attack with its fire-breath) but the moment the PCs draw weapons and focus on it, it ceases to be (and others will think the PCs are crazy to suggest that such a thing ever existed); but then once they stop thinking about it, it reappears and hits them. Then they refocus on it and it disappears; then it later reappears with the damage it would have suffered if it had always existed and had fought the PCs
It gets confusing, but for a brief sortie, it could be fun to mess with the players this way

Maybe a visiting Xaositect would get an advantage to have absurd but beneficial things exist for him while a more lawful mind (who couldn't help but focus on the "concrete reality") could never keep things the way she wanted

I had a brief comedy adventure where the PCs jumped around a number of bizzarre demiplanes where such a set-up would have fit right in.
I did include a Demiplane of Meta-Reference.
Everything in this demiplane had an arrow hovering over them that labelled them "fighter", "mage", "doppleganger posing as a cleric", etc. If they looked more closely at anyone or anything, more arrows would appear ("helmet", "sword", "bad teeth", etc.) and the more they focused on anything the more arrows and details they would see ("enamel", "cavity", "bit of spinach", etc.) And if the PCs looked at the descriptive arrows closely, they saw another arrow with the words "descriptive arrow" pointing to the first arrow (and itself)

I didn't have them stay too long in these absurd demiplanes but the brief visits were enjoyable.

Everything in this post is awesome.

Jem wrote:
ripvanwormer wrote:
It'd be hard to describe a man who wasn't there but was there at the same time (though this is an advantage to a medium in which everything is words, not pictures). Imagining the person seeming to flicker as the PC's brain processes contradictory stimuli is the best I can do. You could figure out the effects, though: basically, every consequence of existing and not existing applies simultaneously. The man uses up air and he doesn't, he kills you and he doesn't, you kill him and you don't, and the characters see two overlapping realities simultaneously. Probably if he stays/doesn't stay for too long, the two realities are violently ripped apart.

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Ever met someone in a dream who was both there and not? Those were these people. The interfae exist only as interference patterns of identity that occur when two dreamscapes brush against each other. The fact that they have a continuous species at all is due to the fact that, while they exist, they manipulate the dreams they inhabit with the goals of ensuring that all participating dreamscapes have a future tendency to touch other dreamscapes again, in whatever manner gives rise to an interfae. The same interfae exists whenever the same set of people, usually a pair, touch dreamscapes, and only communication with an interfae during such a conjunction can access any memories of prior existences. It's therefore possible to have hosted more than one interfae in your life, and in fact theoretically -- with the right manipulation -- you potentially hold as many interfae as there are sets of other dreamers in the multiverse.

This tenuous hold on existence means that an interfae is neither alive nor really dead in between its moments in dreams. They're probably outsiders -- certainly no one has seen the soul of anything like an interfae in the Outer Planes. (Indeed, given their vanishing rarity and the difficulty of communicating with them, almost no one even knows the species exist. Naturally, being some sort of magical or psionic manipulator, some of those who do know regard them as parasites or a disease to be cured.) Perhaps they simply never exist again. The interfae themselves, asked about the matter, have an extremely vague religion about it which sounds mostly like wishful thinking: that perhaps when their hosts die and become outsiders who no longer sleep, their lost dreamscapes becomes a ground state where the interfae can exist eternally itself.

This stuff too.

Tue, 2010-10-05 20:54
#56
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Idran wrote:
It's impossible to create a piece of fiction undeniably in that setting, because it's impossible to describe it beyond the premise

You think so? I thought I did a pretty good job describing it (and I didn't stop with the premise, either; I took a few moments to detail some consequences). It doesn't make any sense, and may in fact be incoherent, unreadable garbage, but it's perfectly describable.

Your statement bothers me, because it's like you're absolutely surrendering not only your own imagination, but everyone's. That's clearly impossible to do, so you shouldn't even try.

Quote:
Do you mean recalling your dreams? Because definitely, there's almost definitely no sort of narrative going on during the process of dreaming itself

My experience with dreams is that they always involve narratives as they're happening. The plots are often extremely elaborate, but I'm coming up with them as they unfold, as a way of subconsciously rationalizing the randomness of them. But the general effect is like watching a very strange movie.

Quote:
But standard, uncontrolled dreaming itself is probably just either mental feedback due to a disconnection from sensory input, a series of random connections between memories as the brain takes advantage of downtime to expand its network, or the brain's equivalent of garbage collection

Yeah, I know, that's where the basic images come from. There's still almost always a connecting narrative.

Tue, 2010-10-05 20:49
#57
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Jem wrote:
Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Ha, yeah, that's what I was referencing.

Quote:
The interfae exist only as interference patterns of identity that occur when two dreamscapes brush against each other.

That's pretty awesome. You should make that a full article, rather than letting it get buried in a mostly unrelated thread. That's one of the best uses of Planescape's "dreamscapes" theory of dreaming that I've seen.

Quote:
The Orb of Day and Night is probably a Platonic sphere. In Arcadia, the Platonic shapes are not so much idealized -- they're ideal in Mechanus -- as, so to speak, tainted with good. In this case, I'd say they're applied, i.e. put to good use, so that things that approach a Platonic form in Arcadia are able to be aided by the natural shape of events there.

Yeah, Arcadia in general has a tendency to form Euclidean shapes; the mountains are cones, the fields and forests are grids. You're right that they are a bit "corrupted" compared to the perfect geometry of Mechanus. My term "idealized" wasn't very good. They're infected with organic life in the way that Mechanus's shapes generally aren't.

Tue, 2010-10-05 20:54
#58
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

NichG wrote:
. Also dealt with was the trouble with Electric Monks, when they found a plane where an inventor had created self-replicating artificial life forms that believed him into the status of a very poorly-formed and broken god, what happens when you have a normally uninhabitable world with only ten thousand people on it who are relying on their protector god to sustain life and have a religious schism, and what happens when you simultaneously speak a short phrase into the subconsciousnesses of every living being in the multiverse (which was the campaign-concluding moment as you might guess).

I missed reading this the first time around. Yes, it's very, very cool.

Tue, 2010-10-05 21:09
#59
Hyena of Ice
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Rule by the mightiest is simply another possible way to choose rulers, and a fairly logical one in harsh times.
Uh, no, there's no way that Might-Makes Right can be lawful. In might makes right, I can kill my neighbor and take his possessions if I want, provided I have the means to do so and get away with it. It doesn't matter if I specifically promised not to do so, unless my neighbor has the means to make me abide by this promise.
Asmodeus is a perfect example of why such a thing is not lawful. With Asmodeus's power and status, he can basically do whatever he wants. However, he would not be lawful if he did this. Instead, if he wants to cheat, then he has to exploit legal loopholes. The fate of the Hag Countess demonstrates the absolute limit of what Asmodeus and his daughter can get away with without breaking the system. The entire purpose of placing Levistus in power appears to be a long convoluted plot so that Asmodeus's daughter can get revenge on her mother's murderer. To that end, the Hag Countess bit the dust solely so that Asmodeus could put his daughter in power, for a combination of purely nespotic reasons and also (according to Fiendish Codex II) to put things in motion so that she can off Levistus without breaking Baator's laws.
In a Might-Makes-Right situation, Asmodeus would simply supply his daughter with a few artifacts and magic items to give her an advantage over Levistus and then allow her to kill him the old-fashioned way.
Also, in a Might-Makes-Right situation, a subordinate will kill their master as soon as the opportunity arises. This is also how it is in nature; if the alpha-wolves, meerkats, or whatever let their guard down, become sick, etc., then a subordinate will kill them and take the title for themselves.
Even the Yugoloths of Gehenna have to follow rules compared to simply literal, hands-on assassination-- generally they resort to non-personal means of assassination such as triggering a rockslide or giving their superior (or whoever) false information that leads to their death.

Intelligence is only another form of might, another weapon in a warrior's arsenal. A baatezu proving his fitness to rule through feats of intellect is no more orderly than one proving similar fitness through feats of strength.
That was indeed what I was referring to when I said "might". Another example would be the Yugoloths-- Might Makes Right in this instance refers to their ability to bluff and to trick other people into doing their dirty work for them.

Hardly. You can see examples of animal communities working in harmony throughout nature, from prairie dogs to elephants to schools of fish.
Perhaps to some degree for female elephants, but certainly not male elephants. The guy who gets all the tail is the biggest and strongest one, while the juveniles are usually bullied around and sex-starved. This is likewise the case with hippos and rhinoceros.

Exactly. And the glider doesn't have to repeatedly beat up the ducks to get them to follow, does it?
No, because he's basically dangling a carrot on a stick. Why bother fighting over who the alpha duck gets to be when you can mooch off of his air current?
It's the same with social animals. As long as they get something out of it, there's little reason to fight. Fights are more likely in true "alpha" species where the head mating pair monopolizes reproductive rights and has first dibs to food resources. Some animals (such as wasps) have little problem with the lack of production rights since their sister's or mother's genetic material is close enough to their own. For others (e.g. meerkats), this is not acceptable, and they'll kill the matriarch if the opportunity arises. It's also far more likely when resources are scarce, of course. Even wolves fight over a kill.

And it means that chaos has become order.
No it doesn't. It's just neutral. In a lawful society, characters adhere to law even when it's detrimental to them. They don't follow the law solely because it's advantageous to them.
It makes no sense for symbiotic/conjoined/colonial organisms to compete because one of them might find a massive resource that the other individuals cannot access. It's also pointless because it's an entirely needless consumption of resources to battle/compete with one another when you already share your resources. Of course this system can sometimes be flawed-- for instance, in kimaeric plants (kimaera by scientific definition-- an organism that possesses two or more separate sets of DNA, such as a variegated plant or a perfectly fused conjoined twin), sometimes the division goes wrong and the new member of the colony only possesses white or yellow. This member of the colony is purely parasitic because it's unable to produce chlorophyll. It survives solely because it can mooch off the nutrients of the healthy individuals.

Well, I understand the resolution to this problem when it comes to differing views of personal values, which is what separates the various outer planes. It becomes more difficult to explain when you are talking about competing views of the factual state of reality, which your explanation only somewhat addresses.
That's why I think the "equilibrium theory" I came up with is the best option. It requires the least work, and it easily overcomes the problem of "two people witness an event. One person claims it's lawful and the other claims it's chaotic". Obviously, there are clear-cut rules as to what consititutes law, chaos, good, evil, and neutral, but there are also various grey areas.

there are African cultures that count blue and black as the same color)
Originally, all cultures and societies considered blue, black, and green to be the same color. Originally, humans only recognized white, black, red, blue, and 'gold' as colors. Everything else (purple, green, orange, grey, etc.) fell under one of those five colors. This is a bit easier to see in eastern cultures than it is in western or (especially) middleastern. Western cultures have had words for purple for quite some time, starting with the Greeks and Romans. A word for "orange" however is fairly recent (I believe the west has only had a word for orange since the 14th century IIRC) The west has also had a word for grey since Roman times, and even a word for pale bluish/greenish grey since that time (which is the origin for the word "Glaucoma", as well as the word "Glaucous" used to describe a color of leaves.) Of course this doesn't mean that humans of former times were unable to recognize purples and greens, it simply means that they had no word for it, and instead would use "the color of ____" instead of "red" if they wanted to describe something purple, and this tends to be the origin of newer color names (such as violet, orange, ochre, lavender, etc.), both in English and in other languages. (In Japanese the newer colors include transliterations such as "canary color", "rose color", "lapis lazuli color", "ash color", "bitter orange color", "gromwell color", "persimmon color", "flesh color", "peach color", "decayed leaf color", "water color", "jade color", "wisteria color", "madder color", "crow feather color", "fox color", "mouse color". )

Tue, 2010-10-05 22:37
#60
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Hyena of Ice wrote:
Uh, no, there's no way that Might-Makes Right can be lawful. In might makes right, I can kill my neighbor and take his possessions if I want, provided I have the means to do so and get away with it.

Can you name a system of government in which you can't do whatever you want provided you have "the means to do so and get away with it?" With those caveats, you can always kill anyone, whether in democracy or dictatorship or anarchy. But if there are people (for example, police officers) with more might than you telling you not to, and you don't get away with it, you can't. This is as true in a wolf pack as it is in our own society.

Quote:
With Asmodeus's power and status, he can basically do whatever he wants. However, he would not be lawful if he did this. Instead, if he wants to cheat, then he has to exploit legal loopholes.

Asmodeus is not only the mightiest of devils, and not only does he control the military and the police, but he makes the laws. He's certainly a lawful being, but he doesn't have to rely on loopholes when he writes the laws in the first place. If there's a law that says he can't do something, it's because he wants there to be.

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The fate of the Hag Countess demonstrates the absolute limit of what Asmodeus and his daughter can get away with without breaking the system.

Nope. Do you know what he did to Moloch's predecessor? He ate him. He detached his jaws like a snake and straight-up ate the guy (this is described in Elminster in Hell, based roughly on events originally described in Dragon #76). He could have done that to Levistus, too, whose crime (murdering Bensozia) was worse than Beherit's (having a secret child). His scheme involving the Hag Countess, Moloch, Geryon, Levistus, and Glasya was more convoluted than that because it pleased him to be more convoluted, and probably because his true goals are less straightforward than simply executing a troublemaker.

Knowing Asmodeus, he might well have planned Bensozia's murder all along for the purpose of, through elaborate machinations that aren't yet anywhere close to fruition, eliminating the sahuagin god Sekolah or upending the yugoloth hierarchy in Gehenna. I don't think he sees Glasya as anything more than a means to an end, or he never would have fathered her in the first place.

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The entire purpose of placing Levistus in power appears to be a long convoluted plot so that Asmodeus's daughter can get revenge on her mother's murderer.

Perhaps. It seems unlikely that Asmodeus is that sentimental, though. How does he benefit from Glasya's emotional satisfaction?

Quote:
In a Might-Makes-Right situation, Asmodeus would simply supply his daughter with a few artifacts and magic items to give her an advantage over Levistus and then allow her to kill him the old-fashioned way.

He could, if he wanted. If he has the legal authority to devour Levistus whole right in front of his court (and he does), he has the authority to command his daughter to kill him while he's in a weakened state.

I'm sympathetic to the general idea you're promoting. Baator is ruled by laws. It's not an anarchy. And I'm not claiming it's an anarchy.

But a wolf pack isn't an anarchy either. Just because their leaders are the strongest members of the pack (which is also true for devils) doesn't mean that wolves aren't an orderly species. They're actually a remarkably orderly species compared to, for example, cats.

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Even the Yugoloths of Gehenna have to follow rules compared to simply literal, hands-on assassination-- generally they resort to non-personal means of assassination such as triggering a rockslide or giving their superior (or whoever) false information that leads to their death.

They don't have to. It's just that if you openly kill someone, their allies have a nasty habit of coming after you. So plausible deniability is desirable.

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No, because he's basically dangling a carrot on a stick. Why bother fighting over who the alpha duck gets to be when you can mooch off of his air current?

Self-interest doesn't make something less than lawful. Just about everything boils down to carrots or sticks, even in human society. Most of us engage in socially desirable modes of behavior because we're bribed (the carrot) or because we're threatened with punishment (the stick). Even private morality often boils down to the carrot of feeling good about yourself. It's really hard to divorce self-interest completely. If standing to benefit from orderly behavior means you're not actually being lawful, then no one's lawful. A lawful society is made lawful by the careful manipulation of carrots and sticks, whether among wolves, ducks, elephants, or human beings.

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In a lawful society, characters adhere to law even when it's detrimental to them.

Only if the consequences of not following it are worse. Show me a law that can be broken without any risk of consequences, and I'll show you a society where most people follow it only when it's advantageous to do so. Most people are certainly not going to adhere to a detrimental law if it's optional. Baatezu will, since they're malign order personified, but wolves and humans won't.

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It makes no sense for symbiotic/conjoined/colonial organisms to compete because one of them might find a massive resource that the other individuals cannot access.

Therefore they've become more orderly.

Tue, 2010-10-05 22:45
#61
Idran
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

ripvanwormer wrote:
Idran wrote:
It's impossible to create a piece of fiction undeniably in that setting, because it's impossible to describe it beyond the premise

You think so? I thought I did a pretty good job describing it (and I didn't stop with the premise, either; I took a few moments to detail some consequences). It doesn't make any sense, and may in fact be incoherent, unreadable garbage, but it's perfectly describable.

Your statement bothers me, because it's like you're absolutely surrendering not only your own imagination, but everyone's. That's clearly impossible to do, so you shouldn't even try.

Oh, no, I still consider that setting up the premise. You're still describing how things work, you're not setting up a plot or characters doing anything in the setting. I mean I don't see how it would be possible to, for example, write a short story there that does more than just establishes the immediate consequences. of the premise I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine it (though I do think it would be very difficult, just because there could always be somewhere where you fail to apply the rules just by the limitations of the human brain, just from forgetting to do it somewhere or by being unaware of a place where they should apply because it didn't occur to you), I'm saying it's impossible to compose fiction set there that does anything more than elaborates on the premise. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just don't think it's possible to have a story based on a logically inconsistent universe that enforces the logical inconsistency to such a degree that it can't be explained away with an alternate set of consistent rules without changing a single word of the story.

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Quote:
Do you mean recalling your dreams? Because definitely, there's almost definitely no sort of narrative going on during the process of dreaming itself

My experience with dreams is that they always involve narratives as they're happening. The plots are often extremely elaborate, but I'm coming up with them as they unfold, as a way of subconsciously rationalizing the randomness of them. But the general effect is like watching a very strange movie.

Okay, that's a very different experience from me, then. I can't remember any random dream of mine having an internal narrative, only especially vivid ones when I was close to waking up anyway, and my brain wasn't quite as unconscious. So I guess I can just chalk that up to a different set of experiences from you.

Wed, 2010-10-06 00:06
#62
Idran
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Hyena of Ice wrote:
Also, in a Might-Makes-Right situation, a subordinate will kill their master as soon as the opportunity arises. This is also how it is in nature; if the alpha-wolves, meerkats, or whatever let their guard down, become sick, etc., then a subordinate will kill them and take the title for themselves.

Hyena, I already pointed out that this does not happen in every species on Earth outside humans. There are plenty of species that present either altruistic behavior that helps to support the injured or weak, or a complete apathy to other individuals in their species both superior and inferior.

Also:

Quote:
No, because he's basically dangling a carrot on a stick. Why bother fighting over who the alpha duck gets to be when you can mooch off of his air current?
I mentioned this earlier, but you might have missed it because it was in a reply to Rip: There is not a single alpha duck in a flock. The frontmost duck rotates into the back ranks as the flight progresses and a new lead duck emerges, because that has a greater chance for the flock as a whole reaching their destination, and so the selection pressure when flock behavior first emerged was greater for that attitude than for ducks mooching off their alpha. Flock behavior is an emergent behavior resulting from a set of instinctual rules regarding only the positioning of a duck or other flocking bird to its immediate neighbor, with the duck falling back as it gets tired and the formation shifting to accommodate a new lead. There isn't a single alpha that guides the whole flock to a destination, just a bunch of ducks flying in the same direction to the same place with a set of evolutionarily formed rules that happens to minimize effort expended by any one individual duck. The behavior you're describing doesn't exist.

Wed, 2010-10-06 09:23
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

We should probably let this last point of contention drop

"Might makes right" may or may not or may not lead to a (relatively) stable social structure. While it definitely won't lead to the intentional hierarchy of Arcadia, Mechanus or Acheron. All systems tend to fall into some sort of equilibrium.
Even the chaotic slaad have a glimmer of order in their respect for a superior's strength. Whether you consider this "law of the club" or "law of the jungle" to be true law or not is kind of an arbitrary decision on how broadly one interprets the word "lawful".

I think we can all agree that in Mechanus, the explicitly stated laws take preceedent over the welfare of any given individual. But the more one moves away from this, the less absolute law is.
I usually use the evil of the Nazis as guidepost for the behavior of Baator. Here one can see an adherence to structure and "law" while simultaneously using "might make right" to eliminate those that opposed them. Was this "lawful" behavior? In many ways (excessive discipline of the troops, slavish devotion to the state-machine, etc.) is was. But obviously few of us would look to Germany of the '40s as a paragon of the virtues we usually assocaite with "law"

Personally, I think both sides in this argument have made very clear and succinct points; but at this point, I think everyone should just agree to disagree.

Wed, 2010-10-06 09:50
#64
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Palomides wrote:
We should probably let this last point of contention drop

"Might makes right" may or may not or may not lead to a (relatively) stable social structure. While it definitely won't lead to the intentional hierarchy of Arcadia, Mechanus or Acheron. All systems tend to fall into some sort of equilibrium.
Even the chaotic slaad have a glimmer of order in their respect for a superior's strength. Whether you consider this "law of the club" or "law of the jungle" to be true law or not is kind of an arbitrary decision on how broadly one interprets the word "lawful".

I think we can all agree that in Mechanus, the explicitly stated laws take preceedent over the welfare of any given individual. But the more one moves away from this, the less absolute law is.
I usually use the evil of the Nazis as guidepost for the behavior of Baator. Here one can see an adherence to structure and "law" while simultaneously using "might make right" to eliminate those that opposed them. Was this "lawful" behavior? In many ways (excessive discipline of the troops, slavish devotion to the state-machine, etc.) is was. But obviously few of us would look to Germany of the '40s as a paragon of the virtues we usually assocaite with "law"

Personally, I think both sides in this argument have made very clear and succinct points; but at this point, I think everyone should just agree to disagree.

The point of contention wasn't really if it leads to a stable social structure, though; I think all of us would agree it can. It was if law and chaos can be expressed by non-sentient species or not. Hyena is arguing no it can't, that all animal species outside humans live only by the law of "might makes right" and that no animal species can be described as lawful except hive insects.

Wed, 2010-10-06 10:22
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Idran wrote:
The point of contention ... was if law and chaos can be expressed by non-sentient species or not.

My counter-question is why do you (or your other debaters) care whether non-sentients are "lawful"? I don't see how it affects game play much

Wed, 2010-10-06 11:22
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Palomides wrote:
Idran wrote:
The point of contention ... was if law and chaos can be expressed by non-sentient species or not.

My counter-question is why do you (or your other debaters) care whether non-sentients are "lawful"? I don't see how it affects game play much

It started because of Rip saying that the L-C axis would have been more likely to emerge first than the G-E axis in the Planescape setting because G-E requires sentience and L-C doesn't, and Hyena disagreeing that L-C doesn't require sentience.

At this point, though, I think it's just a fun side debate, since it was relatively settled between them that both emerged at about the same time. At least, that's how I'm treating it. Laughing out loud

Wed, 2010-10-06 17:58
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Do you mean recalling your dreams? Because definitely, there's almost definitely no sort of narrative going on during the process of dreaming itself, unless it's a lucid or near-lucid dream where you have some level of consciousness and awareness. That seems to force the randomness out of the dream for the most part. But standard, uncontrolled dreaming itself is probably just either mental feedback due to a disconnection from sensory input, a series of random connections between memories as the brain takes advantage of downtime to expand its network, or the brain's equivalent of garbage collection (in the Comp Sci sense). At least, those are the most prominent current theories, so far as I'm aware.

Dreaming is basically (to put it in computer programming terms) the equivalent of our brain running Defrag. The images and events we experience in our dreams are essentially a manifestation of that. Therefore, the dreams contain themes resulting from our imagination, long-term memory, and short-term memory if there's significant stimulation going on (e.g. you're ready to have a bowel movement while asleep, or the alarm goes off but fails to wake you up. I hate when that latter one happens, BTW) Like the Disk Defragment program, this frees up available memory and allows the problem-solving protocols and critical thinking programs to operate much more smoothly and effectively.

My experience with dreams is that they always involve narratives as they're happening. The plots are often extremely elaborate, but I'm coming up with them as they unfold, as a way of subconsciously rationalizing the randomness of them. But the general effect is like watching a very strange movie.
Maybe if you're completely sane. I have some (mostly mild) psychiatric problems (and developmental-- asperger's), and my dreams... are weird as hell.
First of all, there's no continuity, and cause & effect is absolutely, mind-blowingly stupid. We're talking paranoid schizophrenia-level physics, here. Yeah, it's that bad. No, I do not have paranoid schizophrenia (paranoid ideations, delusions under severe emotional stress at worst).
Second of all, it switches between like-- I'm the one doing/experiencing things, to I'm writing a fanfic of a character experiencing things, to I'm writing a fanfic of MYSELF experiencing these things, to I'm playing a videogame, to I'm TRAPPED in a videogame, to I'm a character in a videogame. It switches randomly between all of these, sometimes blending two or more at once.
BTW, Lucid dreaming is boring as hell. I don't get why anyone finds it enjoyable-- you know exactly what's going to happen from that point onward. I dunno, for me, the fun I'm having in a dream is always ruined once I figure out it's a dream.
I also go into "semi-lucidity" far more often than lucidity. In semi-lucidity, I figure out that I'm dreaming, but still have no control over the dream, nor do I consider the idea that I can take control of the dream. This usually occurs during nightmares, and I'm stuck sitting/standing there waiting for myself to wake up. And yes, I do actually try to wake up in my dream. Generally doesn't work, sadly.
BTW, I really hate it when I dream that I wake up, and then another nightmare starts. Ugh. I've counted-- I think-- 12 times in a row, that occuring once, though I think 4-8 is the average.

Can you name a system of government in which you can't do whatever you want provided you have "the means to do so and get away with it?"
Tribal.

Can you name a system of government in which you can't do whatever you want provided you have "the means to do so and get away with it?" With those caveats, you can always kill anyone, whether in democracy or dictatorship or anarchy. But if there are people (for example, police officers) with more might than you telling you not to, and you don't get away with it, you can't. This is as true in a wolf pack as it is in our own society.
My point was that in modern human society, many people have the opportunity, and perhaps even motive, but they don't do it for either moral reasons or out of respect of the law.
In the animal kingdom, this reverence for leaders, etc. generally does not exist (or in the case of meerkats and wolves, is feigned)

Perhaps. It seems unlikely that Asmodeus is that sentimental, though. How does he benefit from Glasya's emotional satisfaction?
Increased obligation (e.g. "do as I say! Remember when I did this favor for you?!"). Granted, Glasya seems like too much of a spoiled brat to be that honorable. Or maybe the whole thing is just a distraction to keep her from lusting over his throne.

But a wolf pack isn't an anarchy either.
I'm not claiming it is. Even the Abyss is not anarchy. Sure, the Tanar'ri there would absolutely love if it was, but the Demon Lords will not allow for that. They need to establish a "rule of law" of sorts to keep their fiefdoms stable and in order to fight the Baatezu.

They don't have to. It's just that if you openly kill someone, their allies have a nasty habit of coming after you. So plausible deniability is desirable.
Well, not just that, but its just-- so low class. I mean anyone who's strong enough can just up and rip somebody's entrails out right then and there, but Yugoloth society favors the bluff and the scheme as an art. Killing someone outright, by hand, well... that doesn't take any talent whatsoever.

Only if the consequences of not following it are worse. Show me a law that can be broken without any risk of consequences, and I'll show you a society where most people follow it only when it's advantageous to do so.
The ridiculously sweeping/strict fireworks bans here in Oregon. The majority of folks do not adhere to these laws, but yet, there are also many people who actually DO, including people who would otherwise love to fire off the banned fireworks. Of course, due to the specifics of human behavior (herd mentality/behavior, specifically), most such people who obey the law but desire to use banned fireworks are short lived-- they encounter too many people who break the law and decide "well, everyone else does it, so I guess it's okay". That is beside the point of course, because the fact remains that they originally obeyed the law despite its detriment.
Because this law simply isn't obeyed, and doesn't inherently result in bodily harm or property damage, the threats by the police are entirely empty. Despite what they state on the 11 O'clock news, they aren't going to ticket anyone they see setting off fireworks. Not only is it a futile effort and hassle, but they have far more important things to leave themselves free to pursue, such as drunk drivers, drunks in general, and idiots setting off fireworks in highly unsafe ways (such as setting off a fountain adjacent to a wood-siding building, or shooting at one another with roman candles.) Unless of course, the person they see or get a call about setting off fireworks has a criminal record. Then it's police harassment time (Portland's police are pretty well known for being corrupt, esp. when it comes to harassing petty non-violent felons and suspected felons) BTW, supposedly, the majority of Washington states' fireworks sales come from Oregonians.
Another good example of a law people could easily get away with breaking is the endangered species act and migratory bird act. Of course, in this instance, the main thing that prevents various animal and bird species from being hunted to extinction is lack of motive by the citizens, combined with (in many cases) reverence for the animals. The plants and animals of the world are very fortunate that a species as destructive and predatory as humans have evolved an instinctual drive for animal husbandry and agriculture. As a result, our parental instincts expand to encompass plants and animals, even among those of us who live or our ancestors who lived in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. This trait is found in no other animal in its wild state save domestic dogs (in which case it is almost guaranteed to be the result of selective breeding by humans to aid in our animal husbandry.)

Idran: my bad about the alpha duck, then.

Thu, 2010-10-07 00:11
#68
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Hyena of Ice wrote:
Idran: my bad about the alpha duck, then.

And what about my other examples, dolphins and octopi? Sticking out tongue

Thu, 2010-10-07 03:20
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Archdukechocula
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

The hypothesis that dreaming is just a from of memory and neural cleanup is but one of many, and it is widely agreed that no particular explanation of dreaming thus far is comprehensive or 100% certain. Others include dreaming being a state of learning (people who do simulated games and then sleep immediately afterwords report dreaming of sensations similar to the simulation, and the following day complete the same simulation better than those who did not sleep). Others suggest it is when the brain does protein folding for the creation of new neurons. Another hypothesis is that dreaming is a form of mental resolution for the social events of the day. Some say it is for cleaning out useless connections. Possibly they are all true to varying degrees. The claim that dreaming has a particular function is a gross exaggeration of the current level of understanding about dreaming.

As far as the might make right thing, I do think that the attitude is hard to classify, but does lean more towards the chaotic. My thought is that those who believe in Law see it as valuable in its own right, and essentially as a system to curb raw power as the primary means of conflict resolution. IN other words, it tries to replace the sort of anarchic political system of Tests of Strength as a means of resolving disputes with a system of rules that indicates the proper resolution of a dispute.

The former system is more or less what made the Balance of Power system of the 18th to early 20th century such a constant low level back and forth. There wasn't any international law to settle disputes agreeably with, so disagreements were inevitably settled with tests of strength. There were alliances and treaties, but all mostly means of balance and counterbalance borne out of self interested parties trying to have sufficient powers to meet the interests of their nation. As is commonly known, this partially created the conditions of world war 1 (partly because power became increasingly difficult to calculate, and force mobilization became such an instrumental part of warfare that diplomacy wasn't allowed the usual leisurely pace.

By contrast the more Lawful system would be the tradition of international law borne out of Wilson's 14 points and the League of Nations. The ideal there was that there are immutable principles that should be upheld by law, and that those in violation of the law are unquestionably in the wrong, even if they have the greater power. Of course, this system indirectly lead to world war 2, partially because it was impossible to figure out an enforcement system divorced from the interests of nations.

Despite these two views seeming to fall into chaos and law respectively, no Law is meaningful without the strength to uphold and enforce it. So in that sense, might makes right even for the lawful system. International law is only really meaningful when the major powers are inclined to uphold it. If just one major power decides to back out, international law is just oh so much paper. A paper tiger in essence. The UN security council proved meaningless during the cold war when the soviets simply vetoed anything that didn't serve their strategic interests for example. All the lofty ideals proclaimed by America didn't count for much of anything when they couldn't enforce them, and on the few occasions they did (like the Suez canal crisis), it was only because the Soviets saw the American position as serving their interests because it caused friction in the allied cold war alliances and denied them access to a strategic international waterway.

Still, I think the difference in these two views should be emphasized. Might makes right is a belief that espouses might itself as the only standard of moral or ethical judgement. If someone has the might, anything they do is clearly in the right, because really who can say otherwise? If you believe that the Law is right in and of itself as opposed to just an extension of might, you must hold Law as a value above and beyond its means of enforcement. That is, a law is correct even if no one is able to enforce it. Now, any person that believes in the law probably wants an enforcement mechanism to go with it, but don't necessarily thing means and ends are so morally correlated. If everyone legitimately believed in the principle of Law in itself, it is perfectly conceivable to imagine forgoing their private interests in pursuit of a harmonious society. People can obey the law on principle alone, and on a plane made up entirely of lawful individuals, why wouldn't that happen really?

I would see a chaotic good person as one who disregards the law and who will use their power to affect positive change. They are willing to use might towards a good end and could care less about the law as a principle. They may hold of a bakery in order to give bread to starving children.

A lawful evil person sees power as an extension of the state (or whatever equivalent entity), but the state and the laws of the state trump individual power as a means in itself. So any particular law is important in principle even if you have the means to circumvent it. Rewriting the law simply because you can I don't think would be the tendency of a lawful evil person. I think they rewrite the law to further enhance a system of punishment because they think that produces a better state. Undoubtedly their own enrichment is often a part of that (I think the rational being that their enrichment is truly in everyone's best interest, as it gives them more ability to further the aims of the state) but I don't think it is the singular end of the lawful evil person. I think the law that enriches the strong, smart and calculating and that marginalizes the weak and unintelligent masses would be considered a social service in their view because it creates a stronger society. If the only goal of a lawful evil person was to subvert the law as soon as they had the chance, I think that any lawful evil society would disintegrate pretty quickly. If all support for law is purely contingent upon only public respect, law itself would be slowly degraded over time by the self serving and the powerful, until it was farcical in principle and upheld nothing with enforcement arbitrary and essentially chaotic in nature. Those systems breed revolution and social instability, seemingly the counter of what any lawful person would want.

On an international level (or interplanar in this case) I think things would completely devolve to a might makes right type situation, because there is no framework for any other type of resolution. Also, in the case of Baatezu and Tanarii, they both think their respective system is unambiguously correct, and can only establish their method through force. Inside their system, the Baatezu may be highly ordered, but I don't think they would see any reason to extend that view to anyone outside the "state" of the 9 hells.

A good example of someone who might be lawful evil like that would be Cardinal Richlieu. The guy utterly believed in the righteousness of France, and saw France as the best of nations, and was respectful of French traditions and laws as well as the Church. But when it came to international politics, he was completely ruthless. His invention of raison d'etat as a justification for limitless flexibility on the part of the state in international relations set the stage for the next 300 years of European power politics.

It may seem like something of a contradiction to uphold law internally on the one hand and ignore it externally on the other, but it makes a certain amount of sense if it is literally impossible to actually uphold the law on an external level. This would be the case between Baatezu and Tanarii, and I think explains why they resort to pure might in that particular situation. No alternative is present, and the only way to advance the cause of law in that case is through force as a last resort.

Thu, 2010-10-07 06:29
#70
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

I think this conversation is useful fodder for our Carceri thread, if nothing else. While I think the view of animal societies as nothing more than rule by strength is overly reductionist, Hyena's description seems accurate as far as how petitioners in Carceri might behave.

It's also true that our standards for what constitutes orderly behavior should be lower for animals than for humans. Alignment is arbitrary, so we may disagree on what the neutral baseline should be, but when we describe an animal society as being more organized than another we don't expect to see bicameral legislatures. In the context of the primal origins of law and chaos, it's sufficient to point out that there are many examples of cooperation in nature, even things as simple as two species in a symbiotic relationship is more orderly than two species competing. A crystal is more orderly than a pile of dust. Complex systems of laws, social mores, and taboos come much, much later. There seems to be a tendency here to give animals credit for what chaos they might unwittingly wreak but not to give them credit for instinctual law. It's a long-held conceit in D&D that normal animal alignments are neutral (sometimes written as none, nil, or unaligned), but I think it's unarguable that some are better organized than others. Assuming the baseline for an animal is somewhere between a cat and a dog, then yes, wolves are lawful by animal standards.

I wouldn't argue that a human society in which all disputes were decided by tests of strength was lawful by human standards, but I do think a society where people are controlled by internal guilt isn't fundamentally different than one that controls the behavior of its citizens through corporal punishment. The experience of living in each society is different, but in both cases people are avoiding negative stimulation and striving for positive stimulation. Baatezu who command their slaves with whips aren't less lawful than devils who have convinced their cultists to obey of their own accord, just less subtle. Tanar'ri mostly won't attempt to control their slaves at all, instead encouraging them to run amuck, fighting each other when not engaged in a specific task, and picking them off one by one in order to strike more fear and incite more chaos. Tanar'ri cannot cooperate as effectively as wolves, being creatures of raw urges and lusts they are unable to sublimate as well as well-trained canines. While wolves coordinate their attacks, tanar'ri can only hope to herd their minions in one direction and hope their hatred of the enemy is greater than their hate for one another. Slaadi can't cooperate at all. They fight as individuals, never as groups, even if you encounter more than one at a time.

Even in tribal societies, you can get away with anything you can get away with. I meant for the tautology to be more apparent. There must be some miscommunication.

Thu, 2010-10-07 07:20
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Hyena of Ice
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

A crystal is more orderly than a pile of dust.
Not necessarily. The crystal can have random, asymmetrical fractures, while the dust pile might have vivid and even (as in straight line, not even thickness) layer margins. Of course, not all crystals form via twinning patterns in the first place, so you can end up with an asymmetrical crystal growth.
Furthermore, crystals in nature tend to be filled to the brim with impurities.

It's a long-held conceit in D&D that normal animal alignments are neutral (sometimes written as none, nil, or unaligned), but I think it's unarguable that some are better organized than others.
I disagree. While I was arguing for chaos earlier, I was mostly playing devil's advocate. Self preservation at any cost is inherently neutral on the law-chaos scale. Besides that, the general premise is that animals lack a law-chaos axis for the same reason that they lack a good-evil axis: they lack the sentience to recognize morality, ethics, laws, etc.

but I think it's unarguable that some are better organized than others.
Some elementals are more lawful or chaotic than others, but they're still not chaotic or lawful enough to have lawful or chaotic tendencies.

Thu, 2010-10-07 08:09
#72
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Hyena of Ice wrote:
It's a long-held conceit in D&D that normal animal alignments are neutral (sometimes written as none, nil, or unaligned), but I think it's unarguable that some are better organized than others. I disagree. While I was arguing for chaos earlier, I was mostly playing devil's advocate. Self preservation at any cost is inherently neutral on the law-chaos scale. Besides that, the general premise is that animals lack a law-chaos axis for the same reason that they lack a good-evil axis: they lack the sentience to recognize morality, ethics, laws, etc.

Oh, that's just unfair, Hyena. That's not the general premise, that's your side in the debate. Rip started the whole argument out by claiming that sentience is not required for Law-Chaos. Sticking out tongue

(Besides, I'd say that presuming humans to be the only sentient creatures on Earth is fairly humanocentric. There's enough evidence out there for the sentience of gorillas, chimpanzees, and dolphins for me to consider them such. Maybe not intelligent, but sentient assuredly. Intelligence is not a requirement of sentience and...vice versa? Hmm. Actually, I wonder if something could be intelligent without being sentient; my instinct says "no", since self awareness seems to be an easy conclusion to draw, but I don't see anything innate about intelligence that requires sentience.)

Quote:
but I think it's unarguable that some are better organized than others. Some elementals are more lawful or chaotic than others, but they're still not chaotic or lawful enough to have lawful or chaotic tendencies.

That seems to go right against the very definition of "tendencies". Why can the archomentals be lawful or chaotic, but none of the elementals below them? I mean, they had to be normal elementals some time.

Besides, are you saying that elementals aren't sentient? And if they are, what keeps them from being lawful or chaotic? Yeah, the book says they're wholly neutral, but let's ignore that for a second. Outer Planar outsiders are very, very rarely a differing alignment from their formative plane, but that's because they're made out of belief, they're a solidified form of that alignment. Elementals are a mass of element, on the other hand. But so's everything on the Prime. It's just elementals are just a single element. So setting aside the alignment entry on their monster page, given that they are intelligent and they don't have anything forcing them to be neutral, is there any reason a priori to assume they couldn't be lawful or chaotic? Or as an alternate question, what would have to be true in order for them to be lawful or chaotic? (Not different, just true in general, whether or not it's already known to be true.)

Thu, 2010-10-07 17:57
#73
Hyena of Ice
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

That seems to go right against the very definition of "tendencies". Why can the archomentals be lawful or chaotic, but none of the elementals below them? I mean, they had to be normal elementals some time.

You misunderstod me. I meant that they're not lawful or chaotic enough to affect the alignment stat block in 2E and 3x. In 3x terms, they're still "usually neutral". I was not speaking of individuals, but rather statistics.

Thu, 2010-10-07 19:37
#74
Archdukechocula
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

AI think the question of whether Lawfulness has intelligence as a prerequisite. You have consider whether law is merely a byproduct of other behaviors, or if law is an idea in itself whose meaning is contingent upon intelligence. If it is the former, we almost have to attribute lawfulness to certain inanimate objects, particularly things which are designed and crafted. If it is the later, then most animals can't really be described as lawful since they aren't acting out of intelligence but rather by instinct. Strictly speaking, this distinction makes little sense in the real world (after all, everything we do is also ultimately driven by instinct if you accept a materialistic explanation of things), but in D&D and particularly in Planescape this distinction makes a bit more sense, since ideas have an existence all their own.

For example, a wolf pack may reasonably be described as orderly, but is it necessarily lawful if the wolves do not believe in law as an idea? If they conform to orderly behavior instinctively rather than on a rational basis, are they still lawful, or are they merely neutral beings whose instincts result in the appearance of order though the animal itself is indifferent to law as a concept? If we say the wolf is respectful of law as a principle, then I think we can reasonably describe it as being of lawful alignment. If not, then the distinction between a law and the aforementioned crystal becomes much more difficult to make. After all, a crystal displays orderly behavior by its nature, but certainly isn't willfully orderly. Granted the wolf in D&D has some sort of soul and the crystal doesn't, but the relationship to Law as an idea is the same. Neither really have any regard for the concept.

Thu, 2010-10-07 20:17
#75
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

I'm speaking here specifically of the primordial origins of order and chaos, the development not just of the conceptual form of these qualities but the origin of the forces themselves, before there were any outer planes, back when all that existed were elements and ether and concepts meant little or nothing.

The outer planes of law are all about law as a concept. But the concept of law isn't all there is to law. Even without sentience there's still a force that knits the elements into more structured forms and a force that dissolves and warps and twists.

Hyena seems to mostly agree with me.

Quote:
Not necessarily. The crystal can have random, asymmetrical fractures, while the dust pile might have vivid and even (as in straight line, not even thickness) layer margins. Of course, not all crystals form via twinning patterns in the first place, so you can end up with an asymmetrical crystal growth. Furthermore, crystals in nature tend to be filled to the brim with impurities.

So yes! We agree that some nonliving materials are more ordered than others, even absent sentience or thought.

The rest follows from there.

Thu, 2010-10-07 20:55
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

OTOH, it's good to bear in mind that some basic instincts (self preservation and competition particularly) transcend far beyond law or chaos-- even the Slaadi and the far-realm native creatures possess these qualities, because these are necessary for the continued survival of a species.
Greed and competition for the most part do not exist on the upper planes because one of the fundamental laws of physics is different-- on the Upper Planes, there are unlimited resources, meaning that competition (and by extension, greed) are no longer necessary in a species. This is the exact reason why EVERY SINGLE ORGANISM KNOWN TO MAN in real life is competitive. Competition is necessary for survival of a species in a world with limited resources.

Self-preservation is likewise necessary. If the species lacks self-preservation as a primal drive, then it will not survive as a species when times get tough.
Even the slaad do not wish to die.

There are of course, certain responses to competition and self-preservation with alignment traits, but self-preservation and competition in and of themselves are not associated with any alignment.

Thu, 2010-10-07 21:11
#77
ripvanwormer
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Quote:
OTOH, it's good to bear in mind that some basic instincts (self preservation and competition particularly) transcend far beyond law or chaos-- even the Slaadi and the far-realm native creatures possess these qualities, because these are necessary for the continued survival of a species.

Not necessarily true, if their home planes can spawn as many as they need to replace those that die. That goes back to the "unlimited resources" idea, I guess.

Far Realm entities, in particular, may not have any sense of individuality.

Apart from that, I don't remember anyone claiming that competition or self-preservation were associated with any particular alignment (except I suggested that cooperation was associated with law - an idea I stand by; with Bytopia, in fact).

Thu, 2010-10-07 21:29
#78
Archdukechocula
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

That is kind of tautological. All species that exist must do things that allows them to exist. You are more or less restating the premise. It is of course true that only things that have conditions that allow them to exist exist. Anything that doesn't meet the conditions for existence clearly does not exist. "Survival" is of course a precondition of existence for any living thing.

Now whether that drive for survival is conscious or not is a different matter entirely. Micro-organisms can't reasonably be said to "desire" to live. They just live and operate according to basic chemical and physical principles. I think the same can be said for lots of organisms up until you start having fairly complex brains (like at the level of a reptile brain at the least). Whether or not you have to apply that same standard to entirely fictional beings like Slaadi is really a matter of artistic license imo. Why for example would a thing need to want to survive if it is really difficult for that thing to die? I mean, a drive for survival becomes pretty unnecessary if a thing just pretty much survives by default. From an evolutionary perspective, all anything needs to do to be successfully is display differential reproductive success. So as long as it survives long enough to have more offspring than the average member of its group, its genes will continue to thrive (of course, I don't really think you need apply strict evolution to stuff in D&D either). So long as say a Slaadi has a few offspring before it dies, it did fine. Competition for resources only comes in to play if it directly affects that variable.

More generally, a creature can be indifferent to its survival but still manage to survive, so I think there is justification for attributing alignment to an attempt to survive a given situation depending upon the conditions. For example, an attempt to merely avoid being killed by itself probably shouldn't be labeled with a particular alignment, since the intent and effect is essentially neutral (or if you do give it a label, neutral is probably appropriate). But if the only way to survive is to drink the blood of orphans, well then survival might legitimately be called evil in the D&D view of things.

Thu, 2010-10-07 22:38
#79
Hyena of Ice
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

Why for example would a thing need to want to survive if it is really difficult for that thing to die?
It may be difficult for that thing to die, but being stabbed through the heart (or brain) by a pit fiend's sword is still going to kill it, as will falling into a pool of lava or coldfire. Whereas while drinking axiomatic water probably won't kill a slaad, it will likely make it sick (I imagine it's one of the few things that doesn't agree with them), which renders the slaad less able to avoid the pit fiend's sword. Slaad must also be fearful of other Slaad.

I mean, a drive for survival becomes pretty unnecessary if a thing just pretty much survives by default.
There isn't anything in the multiverse (other than megaliths) that "survive by default". Slaad are still at the mercy of one another, other outsiders, extreme environmental effects, and the powers. If humans are any indicator, sentient creatures are incredibly creative when it comes to devising means for harming one another.

So long as say a Slaadi has a few offspring before it dies, it did fine. Competition for resources only comes in to play if it directly affects that variable.
The greatest danger to the average slaad is other slaad. Given their impulsiveness and amorality, a slaad needs to be tough and possess a healthy fear of its kin in order to survive to sexual maturity.
Slaad are also well known for their gluttony, meaning that quality food is likely to be a scarce resource and major cause of fighting between individuals of the species.

More generally, a creature can be indifferent to its survival but still manage to survive
Not for long, it won't. A few generations down the line, the species may undergo a period of resource scarcity. If they remain indifferent to survival, then someone else is going to get those resources, because the members of that species did not care enough to fight for it. The species also won't care enough to fight back when attacked. This leaves said species a sitting duck for conquerers, for which most planes possess no shortage of. The species is also more likely to simply give up living when times get unpleasant (such as continued war, scarce resources, disease, or bleak odds for survival) Competition for self-preservation may not be necessary on the upper planes (due to unlimited resources), but self preservation most certainly still is, as fiends attempt to invade the upper planes all the time.

But if the only way to survive is to drink the blood of orphans, well then survival might legitimately be called evil in the D&D view of things.
That was exactly my point when I said that certain responses to self-preservation and competition possess alignment components.

Thu, 2010-10-07 23:01
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Archdukechocula
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Re: Do the planes have to be infinite?

If what you say is true, no creature without a substantially developed brain would manage to survive. The conscious drive to survive is completely unnecessary to the vast majority of species. Most things just survive by their nature. That is, the have a chemical makeup that facilitates their successful survival idependent of their having any feelings on the issue. Plants for example. Or microorganisms. Or rocks or planets even. They don't need to actively engage in some willful fight for survival to survive. They just do stuff by their design that results in their survival as a byproduct of their makeup. It is patently false to claim that things must want to survive in order to do so.

Quote:
That was exactly my point when I said that certain responses to self-preservation and competition possess alignment components.

Then we probably agree on that particular aspect of things.

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