Thank you, Armifer, and godspeed.

Altruism is dead.

Just as a basic personality thing, people typically don't do things unless they get some sort of emotional thing out of it. That thing might be base, sublime, or buried under seven layers of Freudian nonsense, but people work toward their own (sometimes demented) idea of the good. The essence of a good person is a person who through socialization or natural inclination has developed a taste for doing things considered good.

Paladins do good. That they have a strong internal reason to do good is just acknowledging they're human beings (and equivalent). That they have the potential to become demented, or self-destructive, or even wrong is simply human weakness.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

Joey Tribbiani is my moral philosopher.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>Is there such a thing as maniacal "good?" The sanctified soul sounds like an opiate.

Well there's fiery preachers, serpent kissers, tongues speakers, faith healers, and joyous martyrs. And that's just a selection off the top of my head of one religion in one country.

A friend and I talked about this topic recently, and he had a qood quote, "While there may not be a chemical component in the expression of the soul, a rush of Dopamine is a rush of Dopamine."

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

> On another note, I'm embarrassed to say I just realized how well this fits preexisting abilities. It sounds to me like Paladins, through soul sanctification, achieve some higher level of consciousness. That may mean different things to different people, but let's say this has an impact on their awareness of the physical world (6th sense) to the extent that they can, in a very basic sense, manipulate it (glyphs)? I'm guessing it'd also probably make them very effective cult leaders... Or, inspirational military generals.

Nice connection. I for one would love paladins to accidentally achieve what necromancers have been striving for. There's a certain ironic humor there. Where necromancers corrupt their soul in an attempt to to transcend the cycle, with mild success and still relying on demonic influence, paladins have successfully transcended through purification of that same soul. Maybe some innate connection, following the "true path", and without even trying. That would be funny.

>>My take on Paladins is "Heroic sacrifice tempered by human weakness." Because it's a fantasy setting where gods and magic and soul power is real that has certain physics implications, but they're just not going in the same direction.

IMO, there's also the whole "Would the Immortals ever allow Paladins to be more than what the Immortals would ever want them to be" thing going on. It's not like the Immortals are necessarily a welcoming bunch.

That would be a funny turn on why Paladins feel a bigger and bigger demand for sacrifice, too. Would the Immortals prefer their tools just burning out than burn too bright?

This is also my own view showing of how the Immortals are really just kings++ that act similar to how any mortal would act if given enough powers that go to the extremes of what's possible, though.

---

Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>>Like, well, there's a good case for there being no such thing as free will, but we're blissfully ignorant of that fact. We have the freedom to choose, but choice is influenced by at least some measure of external factors.

Just on a side note, if you're interested in the question of freedom Sartre's analysis at the end of Being and Nothingness is pretty good. He's pretty good at sorting out the notion of free will, free choice, and contingency (a term that encompasses both the brute facts of reality and accidents of birth).

The rest of Being and Nothingness is kind of a plodding mess I flavored Necros with, but the freedom stuff stands up well.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>The first Animal Behavior class I took back in high school laid out pretty sound reasoning for altruism not existing. It only gets more bleak.

I'm not an evo psych kind of person, but part of my theoretical baggage is Freud and the notion that everything that a human does they do for a reason. It might be a terrible reason or a great reason or a really confused reason, but there's not so much a RNG in the mind as there is a boggling complex set of inputs all leading to the output.

And again, I'll emphasize that just because people do things for a reason doesn't mean doing things is bad. It's part of a bizarre and damaging social narrative to believe that goodness is selfless, saints are flawless, and the perfect outweighs the good. People are people, and the only reasonable way to judge a human's goodness is on the condition of being a human.

>>It may be worth an observation here, but one of the things I've enjoyed most about DR cosmology as a whole is the very frequent underlines to the notion of almost everyone operating in a significant gray space. DR is not a game that makes 'good' and 'evil' a distinct binary.

I'm more okay with absolutes in terms of Not Human. For example, demons and specifically The Hunger. I am totally okay with saying the evil god-like thing from the depths of non-space a universe over is totally and irredeemably maleficent. But the undercurrent of that is that I'm saying such a state is alien and does not gel with how humans operate.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

> Eh, for all I'm glib about Necropaladins, I don't think it works for the two guilds to be in the same thematic space.

Yeah, fair enough. I do like some guild going equal and opposite with necros, but that's probably more cleric space anyway.

> In any case, why would a paladin want to?

I was mostly being funny, but it was more about a paladin perfecting their weaknesses. They aren't trying to be divine. They're just turning into it by virtue of what they're doing. Something like purging yourself of impurities with divine magic makes what remains a divine construct. The urge to purge more and more of yourself (sacrifice) is what lets them go further than others would.

> This is also my own view showing of how the Immortals are really just kings++ that act similar to how any mortal would act if given enough powers that go to the extremes of what's possible, though.

Yeah, I always saw them as super-powerful wizards. Full-metal alchemist hohenheim-like creatures. That's probably just my own mis-reading somewhere though.

> Professor X vs Magneto

I liked this too. Professor, despite all the glint and glamour, was not as good as he was portrayed. Magneto, despite the rhetoric and villainizing, wasn't as bad.

I guess, rendering that down, the question that I need answered before I can answer to that post is, "What is true virtue?"

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>I think the answer I like here is one that includes many possibilities, rather than one that dismisses virtue as a myth overlaying biochemical reinforcement.

The thing that I have dismissed is the notion that virtue comes ex nihilo (or that any human behavior does). Awarded Heaven, I doubt many of us would choose Hell to spite the God who in so doing undermined our moral integrity.

I'm not sure how common it is, but where I studied the term "metaphysical baggage" got tossed around sometime. The idea is that nobody is free of making presumptions about the nature of humanity and reality, and those presumptions found how they answer every other question. With introspection you can try to identify those presumptions, and with study you can choose them in a more informed manner, but they're always there. If someone believes they aren't doing it, that means they are doing it poorly.

Like, LOTR. It sometimes gets called Catholic fiction for a few reasons, but mainly because the story's metaphysical baggage is informed by the theological view of morality and religion held by its author. That's not bad -- there's quite a few Catholics in the world that are perfectly happy with their worldview -- but it should be understood to be an argument from a specific view of how the universe operates.

I, too, have a specific view of how the universe operates and I do not come into this thread offering cosmic truth. Instead, I am writing from a viewpoint informed by a formal study in Psychology with a lot of Philosophy baggage attached. That's my baggage, and it's neither great nor bad, it's simply where I come from.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>I think the glyph quests do a great job of answering that question. In short, I'd argue that virtue is adhering to your moral standards,

I've been assuming we've been using the term virtue in the past few posts in a more Christian sense of reality-defined morality. If I'm mistaken then I've been off the mark a bit.

That said, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Ancient Greek thing, which I think is what you're touching on. Arete and the idea of defining something's virtue as the excellence with which they accomplish their function.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

Sort of, not really, maybe relevant... I have a friend who's a very introspective dude with whom I often talk about stuff like altruism and selfishness. He does a lot of community service, which the humanist in me really prizes. He sincerely refuses to accept/acknowledge any compliments, however, because he sees it as something he does for himself. He does it in large part because he likes the person he is when he does those things, and he's one of the most sincere people I know. The thing is, that doesn't take away from the good he does. He sacrifices time, energy and money to help others, which to me is the epitome of altruism irrespective of his reason. For most, I'm sure that raises his human equity.

Now... There is one thing I found mildly unsettling but I planned to table it until future lore is released. The lore implies a puppetmaster about whom we know nothing, but who's more heavy-handed with paladins than other guilds. That may be misinterpretation on my part.

>Sort of, not really, maybe relevant... I have a friend who's a very introspective dude with whom I often talk about stuff like altruism and selfishness. He does a lot of community service, which the humanist in me really prizes. He sincerely refuses to accept/acknowledge any compliments, however, because he sees it as something he does for himself. He does it in large part because he likes the person he is when he does those things, and he's one of the most sincere people I know. The thing is, that doesn't take away from the good he does. He sacrifices time, energy and money to help others, which to me is the epitome of altruism irrespective of his reason. For most, I'm sure that raises his human equity.


I think there's a little bit of language bias and/or semantics at stake in discussions that toy with the notion of altruism not existing. From an Animal Behavior perspective, which is where I have more experience, the point isn't so much that 'organisms are incapable of 'intentionally' doing things that solely and only benefit other organisms', which is true, but that 'if you examine seemingly altruistic behavior in any organism, you'll likely discover some benefit to the organism'. Animal Behaviorists use the term altruism plenty, but it doesn't mean 'truly purely utterly selfless acts'. Accordingly, the notion of your buddy deriving some personal enjoyment, or even just feeling a reduction in the burden of responsibility to do nice things, that doesn't take away from or reduce the good deed. Mutualism is more commonly used to describe these relationships, and it doesn't have to be an even trade, AND, the more complex the organism, the more nuanced and unequal these relationships can become. Which is neat and also beautiful.

Back to Paladins, even if the drive to sacrifice and perform morally good deeds is driven by a cause, the fact remains that the very nature of the Sanctified Soul relies on that sacrifice and performance. I'd say.

>I think there's a little bit of language bias and/or semantics at stake in discussions that toy with the notion of altruism not existing. From an Animal Behavior perspective, which is where I have more experience, the point isn't so much that 'organisms are incapable of 'intentionally' doing things that solely and only benefit other organisms', which is true, but that 'if you examine seemingly altruistic behavior in any organism, you'll likely discover some benefit to the organism'. Animal Behaviorists use the term altruism plenty, but it doesn't mean 'truly purely utterly selfless acts'. Accordingly, the notion of your buddy deriving some personal enjoyment, or even just feeling a reduction in the burden of responsibility to do nice things, that doesn't take away from or reduce the good deed. Mutualism is more commonly used to describe these relationships, and it doesn't have to be an even trade, AND, the more complex the organism, the more nuanced and unequal these relationships can become. Which is neat and also beautiful.

I'm no biologist or psychologist, but it doesn't take a leap of logic to arrive at the conclusion fitness plays a role. Like you stated, that doesn't make good people any less good. It also doesn't make good people saints. And, yeah, I find that neat and beautiful too. FWIW, I don't think embracing that breeds cynicism so much as honesty. I have a bias against extreme anything, including extreme "good."

So, umm... I think paladins can be genuinely good. Whatever that means for you, them, Elanthians.

>>I, too, have a specific view of how the universe operates and I do not come into this thread offering cosmic truth. Instead, I am writing from a viewpoint informed by a formal study in Psychology with a lot of Philosophy baggage attached.

I really appreciate you discussing all of this stuff, and I totally get what you mean. It's just that GM posts are kind of as close to cosmic truth as it comes for DR, as they are super important to the perceived ontology of Elanthia, and underpin the in-game messaging and underlying systems.

I'm advocating for the possibility of selfless paladin because I like the idea of having the widest possible range of imaginative freedom in making characters and telling stories in Elanthia. A lot of subcultures exist in DR. Some of them involve necromancers snickering at the pathetic attempts of do-gooders trying to earn favor from their immortal overlords, and others involve paladins ridding themselves of base desires and the sad shackles of ceaseless egotism involved in attempting to tie one's consciousness to the Plane of Abiding forever.

I'm just hoping that in the end, there's enough wiggle room in the paladin lore to where neither viewpoint is more real or true than the other.

>>That said, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Ancient Greek thing, which I think is what you're touching on. Arete and the idea of defining something's virtue as the excellence with which they accomplish their function.

I like this too. I just worry that, with the emphasis on the rewards of the soul mixed with the (personal) excellence, one loses the sense of public virtue that was also an important part of the Greek concept. Aristotle and Plato write a ton about service to the state, to one's fellows and one's culture in the Ethics and the Republic.

You mentioned Obi Wan as inspiration for the paladin, which I think is an awesome model for the selfless paladin, along with a Zen Buddhist samurai that might've been the basis for the Jedi. The posts on the rewards of the soul, the mysterious entity involved with granting the paladin her powers, and the biochemical effects of paladinhood made me think a little of how cool I thought the Force was until the midi-chlorian stuff was written in to make it more realistic/material/believable. The more materialist direction is perfect for necromancers with their skepticism of the immortals and interest in hard truths that the sheep blindly ignore, but, since paladins are kind of the essence of an idealistic guild, struggling with embodying their ideas against the creeping hubris and egotism that comes from their moral and martial superiority, I'm really hoping that DR keeps the possibility of the dedicated idealist, Samurai Jack style paladin, even as it embraces the Judge Dredd and Batman types as well.

Thanks again for listening to these sorts of concerns, Armifer. Your posts are really interesting, and your work on the guilds is most appreciated!

>You mentioned Obi Wan as inspiration for the paladin

I must have missed this, but I think this is probably a really apropos view. The Jedi are chock full of issues, the least of which are their strict adherence to the ethos of the Light Side to maintain their abilities. Jedi that stop behaving morally and psychologically in line with the Light Side ethos start becoming 'Not Jedi'.

See, everything is DR these days offtopic sorrynotsorry.

>>I read the last lore posts as OOC and let my mind run through the stuff I found interesting were my paladin a person living in the USA in 2018.

I did too, actually. The past few days I thought I've been talking about real life concepts of morality and human determination.

I mean, there's no call to believe in a biochemical aspect to a Paladin's behavior because the soul is real and it's definitely doing stuff to the Paladin's mind (which, in DR lore, exists independently of their body). The Dopamine comments referred instead to the real life experience of spiritual experience among real, embodied human beings.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>FWIW, I will go on record to state I would prefer if there's more to this all than Paladin's feeding their soul for their own benefit. That's something else I tabled because I think there's still a lot more to unfold, but it may touch on the issues raised by other posters here. While I think that's too anti-climactic for DR or Armifer brand lore, it probably bears mentioning.

While I won't spoil where we're going yet, I will just emphasize the overall mood / thematic space I'm aiming for is "Heroic sacrifice tempered by human weakness."

Human weakness is my go-to for stories of morality and agency, questions which fit a guild like Paladins like a glove. Heroic sacrifice is the thing that defines a Paladin's particular slant towards that topic, unlike the Necromancers' quest for transcendental freedom or the Moon Mages' constant dealings with past and future sins.

And heroic sacrifice requires, well, something heroic to come into play.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino