lucius@tardis.UUCP (Lucius Chiaraviglio) (06/04/85)
_
I have been reading the discussion on how stagnating and unrealistic
alignments can be, when the following thought occurred to me on how to alle-
viate the stagnation and unrealism problem to some extent: make the align-
ments more relative -- if two forces, particularly normal people, are for some
reason cooperating, each of them will perceive the other's alignment to be
closer to their own than it really is EVEN WHEN LOOKING THROUGH A KNOW ALIGN-
MENT SPELL, AND EVEN WHEN USING TRUE SEEING -- after all, if you are insistent
on fooling yourself, even mighty magic will often give up the attempt to
rectify the matter, PARTICULARLY IF IT IS YOUR OWN MAGIC. If the deception is
really nasty, it could even distort one's perceptions so as to make one see
someone of opposite alignment to be a paragon of the one's own alignment, thus
leading to a great potential for unwitting yet in a sense voluntary alignment
change, for such self-deception is the fault of the one practicing it (the DM
must be rather careful in the judging of this, although it should not be
overbearingly hard for a good DM).
On the other hand, to quite a magnified extent, if two forces,
particularly of different religions or other similarly opposed factions
(sometimes including the political), but of not radically different
alignments, are fighting -- and the more jihad-like the war the better -- they
will perceive each other's alignments to be far more different than they
actually are. Also, if the actual alignment of one party is less extreme than
the other, and the one party believes itself to be the paragon of its
alignment, it will likely perceive the difference in alignments to be 180
degrees the opposite of what it actually is, so that -- for example -- a
Lawful Good party would perceive an enemy party of even greater Lawful Good to
be Chaotic Evil (assuming that their alignments were almost on a line on the
alignment graph with True Neutral). Of course, the ones making such a
misperception would have to be pretty stupid to make such a misperception if
they had any reasonable source of information, but history has shown that it
happens -- that people are stupid in the requisite way; thus, it is as
expectable in the AD&D world as it is in the real world to see Protestants and
Catholics, or Christians and Muslims, or Christians and Jews, or different
fascist factions, or. . .<you name your pair of forces fighting over something
stupid> slugging it out as if nothing else mattered. Sometimes, it even
happens to those posessing among the highest "intelligence" and "wisdom," for
these are only tools with which to prevent self-deception, not the prevention
itself -- they are resistance, not immunity.
When an alignments differ significantly along one axis but not greatly
along the other, the lesser difference will be the one most greatly magnified.
Thus, Lawful Neutrals tending towards Lawful Good fighting against Lawful
Goods are likely to see the Lawful Goods as Neutral Good, meanwhile seeing
Neutral Goods to be tending towards Chaotic (if they should happen to see
Neutral Goods at the same time and still not become aware of their folly), and
so on. Thus, usually it will be possible to see all alignments on the align-
ment graph, although in a much distorted view, except in those cases in which
perception of part of an axis gets reversed, or when the viewer's alignment is
changing because the viewer is being deceived (by self and/or otherwise).
It is possible, if one is in a web of self-deception, to see through
it, if the web of self-deception is not too strong, by using someone else's
magic (such as a Gem of True Seeing made by someone else); however, this
entails the risk of seeing with the bias of the one who made the magic. Hence
you will not be guaranteed to get your money's worth from True Sight unless
you know how to look for the truth.
People who are true paragons of an alignment or wield great knowledge,
and beings of subdivine and divine status, will be less subject to such
deception, but they will not be immune to it simply because of their status.
Whether or not they deceive themselves ultimately depends not on their
characteristic scores or power ratings, but on what choices they make as
thinking beings.
--
-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
{ seismo!tardis!lucius | lucius@tardis.ARPA | lucius@tardis.UUCP }