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It has been stressed a number of times that the story hasn't changed, only the clunky mechanics. I wouldn't have minded seeing a little emphasis on Law/Chaos but I've never really been able to answer "why would you want to have a mechanical option for this tiny niche?". Hellknights turning their swords into law-sabres doesn't really do what it used to--slay rabble-rousing anarchs without harming law abiding citizens, etc. because rule-breaking citizens no longer have a fundamental part of their soul that's different from law-abiding citizens.
Hellknights still care about the ultimate inflexible order of Hell and the crushing of corruption and demonism beneath their plated boots. I wouldn't mind seeing some option that allows them to devote themselves to law to a nigh-holy degree, but whatever way it manifests, it would be hard to give them weapons made of pure order without going back and defining chaos and basically reintroducing a super niche alignment-lite.
On the other hand... a Hellknight that could charge their weapon with spirit damage but only have that damage affect someone who has specifically broken a law in the last length of time... that would be neat. Avoids the question of good/evil (did you jaywalk? SMITE), avoids the question of innate disposition (law-abiding citizen bent rule just this once? SMITE) and avoids clunky mechanics.
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Welp, I started this post on one thought and ended with a sudden flash of inspiration. You'll have to excuse me
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With the news that Wizard subclasses are pivoting from old spell schools to new thematically-linked types of magical study (a civic mage, a war mage, etc), it gives me hope for Champions to get a little more than a new coat of paint.
If we’re getting more than just the six extant Causes, and instead get a new batch of more flavorful-and-flexible options, I’d be content enough.
In fairness, by that logic we don't have any clearly good or evil souls, either, since it sounds like holy and unholy are gonna be a different, though connected, thing.So in the end I guess it means that the Proteans and the Axiomites aren't recruiting.
I wonder what it'll do to their ecology. If we don't have an clearly lawful souls, anymore....
Probably Pharasma will still judges souls and sent them to celestial or lower planes depending from their action. So good and evil still exists and probably holy and unholy are associated to them. But until I remember there's no such thing to lawful or chaotic.
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Probably Pharasma will still judges souls and sent them to celestial or lower planes depending from their action. So good and evil still exists and probably holy and unholy are associated to them. But until I remember there's no such thing to lawful or chaotic.In fairness, by that logic we don't have any clearly good or evil souls, either, since it sounds like holy and unholy are gonna be a different, though connected, thing.So in the end I guess it means that the Proteans and the Axiomites aren't recruiting.
I wonder what it'll do to their ecology. If we don't have an clearly lawful souls, anymore....
Souls will still go to each of the 9 planes. But on a PC's level, only Holy/Unholy and Belief will truly matter.
Probably Pharasma will still judges souls and sent them to celestial or lower planes depending from their action. So good and evil still exists and probably holy and unholy are associated to them. But until I remember there's no such thing to lawful or chaotic.In fairness, by that logic we don't have any clearly good or evil souls, either, since it sounds like holy and unholy are gonna be a different, though connected, thing.So in the end I guess it means that the Proteans and the Axiomites aren't recruiting.
I wonder what it'll do to their ecology. If we don't have an clearly lawful souls, anymore....
This does not strike me as a meaningful distinction. To say that Pharasma will still judge good/evil actions and send souls to those planes but has suddenly stopped judging lawful/chaotic actions does not seem to follow with anything we've heard about the alignment change. The fact that clerics and champions can sanctify themselves to holiness or unholiness doesn't really change the fate of most mortal souls, which is to go to either their deity's domain or a plane which matches with their actions and ideals.
Again, the outer planes haven't changed without alignment. Rather it's more like the alignment seed that inspired each of the planes is more of a story element and a philosophical component than a bit of mechanical 'cruft'.
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Yeah, because there's no mess. It hardly changes anything, it's certainly not taking a "chainsaw to the setting" (like, honestly getting rid of spell schools is a bigger deal than that and that also barely matters).
No stories are lost, because why would there be?
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The issue is mostly that stories that intersect with "law vs. chaos" generally don't benefit from invoking the outer planes.
Like tradition vs. progress, civilization vs. wilderness, safety vs. freedom make sense in purely terrestrial terms.
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The issue is mostly that stories that intersect with "law vs. chaos" generally don't benefit from invoking the outer planes.
Like tradition vs. progress, civilization vs. wilderness, safety vs. freedom make sense in purely terrestrial terms.
The fight against the Worldwound comes to mind, and I definitely want more Monitor antagonists in the setting of every type.
Creative Director
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The iconic "Chaos vs. Law" story we've told that comes to mind for me is the "Hell's Rebels" adventure path, but there's plenty more. And those themes will continue, since they'll remain a part of the setting. We don't need a "chaos" and "law" tag to do those stories.
The concept of "good vs. evil" is a much more ancient one than "chaos vs. law" in any event, which is why that side of things is percieved as being more common in a TTRPG (and any) story.
But again... not having a chaotic or lawful alignment in the rules won't impact the setting's stories and tales at all, other than potentially letting us use those two words more freely without a rules implication, I guess.
Wait wait wait, isn't this effectively taking a chainsaw to the entire setting because they couldn't think of how to use their setting (10+ years in the making)?
They are keeping holy/unholy so there was no reason to get rid of axiomatic/anarchy. While saying "well those planes still exists" while actively removing everything that made those plane. It is like taking away everything from a rose except that stem and saying "here is this soft stick it was a rose".
All those stories of law vs chaos? Gone because there is no way to represent it. All class abilities, spells, and lore? Effectively gone because they would be impossible with the new rules.
Am I the only one seeing the mess?
Perhaps you weren't at the stream, perhaps you haven't read much into the actual reasoning and logic behind these changes (both with regards to the OGL and beyond that). Perhaps you have missed some of the discussion in this thread.
The answer is that, on the grand scheme of things, there are almost no stories which rely on law/chaos being mechanically codified, and there were already almost no law/chaos mechanics. In the stream they mentioned doing a count, and finding that law/chaos mechanics were barely utilized in any part of the rules. To my memory, the only things I can think of where law/chaos are used but not good/evil is the Inevitable's regeneration, and the weakness of the same alongside Qlippoth and Proteans. If humans aren't chaotic, there's no point in law damage except to kill a Protean or the like, and there was already barely any reason to pick up lawful-only or chaotic-only damage. It was kludgy.
... Oh! And would you look at that, I'm being ninja'd by James again!
TL;DR the story still isn't changing and monitors will continue to be lawful or chaotic, but those words being mechanical terms isn't a thing anymore, so maybe those beings will get a distinct weakness or maybe not.
Protean cycles of creation and destruction are still fine narrative regions to explore and people/worlds/cosmic beings that don't want the organization and building efforts that they have dedicated their existences to upholding don't need a cosmic existence of LAW to know that they have to do everything that they can to stop it.
This is where edicts and anathema are much better than alignment anyway, because it means that motivations and goals can be much more specific, but also open to complicated moral pictures. A lot of people might end up with an edict "to close the world wound" and be temporary allies in doing so, but realize that the means and methods that each is willing to employ is going to cross lines that others won't cross.
In that sense, you can pretty much just keep alignment as a collection of edicts and anathema that are generally recognized by people in world if your really want to and nothing about the game has to change at all.
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Hopefully the weaknesses of specific outsiders can work more like demon anathemas where specific acts have powerful effects over them, rather than just needing the right magical material to universally effect all X outsiders.
Errrr...this would definitely affect my stories but then again I can house rule it. Kinda like I can rejigger classes to suit via house rules.Yeah, because there's no mess. It hardly changes anything, it's certainly not taking a "chainsaw to the setting" (like, honestly getting rid of spell schools is a bigger deal than that and that also barely matters).
No stories are lost, because why would there be?
Having three Bestiaries (and more) tagged with alignment and relevant weaknesses means you won't have too much work, too.
Errrr...this would definitely affect my stories but then again I can house rule it. Kinda like I can rejigger classes to suit via house rules.Yeah, because there's no mess. It hardly changes anything, it's certainly not taking a "chainsaw to the setting" (like, honestly getting rid of spell schools is a bigger deal than that and that also barely matters).
No stories are lost, because why would there be?
I mean is "Proteans take 5 more damage from this attack" really that central to any plotline?
I just have trouble visualizing it as much of a big deal, much less breaking the setting.
I suppose my question for folks is, why is specialized damage necessary for good/evil? What's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.
Your point is a good one! I'm still going to answer the rhetorical question, and I just want to be clear that I've got no problem with your entirely reasonable view. I'm just taking the opportunity to ramble about good vs evil as opposed to chaos vs. order.
I think folks have in their head strong visuals of a holy cleric calling down divine light to drive back a demon, or to a lesser extent, powerful evil being acutely painful or dangerous to an angel. The visuals on order and chaos duking it out are certainly ones I can come up with, and I've seen a few TV shows that lean into that sort of thematic space a bit more these days, but it's stuff I gotta come up with. As far as mythology goes, "order vs chaos", I tend to think of Norse mythology, but that's a more of a civilization vs. the forces of nature vibe.
I guess, good and evil are something I'm used to seeing as embodied forces that fight one another with violence. (I also expect embodied good to heal, and embodied evil to corrupt or debuff.) Chaos and order are more... structural differences. I expect embodied order to use control and restrict movement and provide consequences for disobedience, and I expect embodied order to use random effects, to break free of restrictions, and to change the form of things. In my view, bonus damage doesn't add anything because I don't expect embodied chaos and order to be painful to one another the way good and evil are.
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I suppose my question for folks is, why is specialized damage necessary for good/evil?
Probably because "holy water damages demons and vampires but not regular people" and "this sword grows red hot when a bad person touches it" are things that are rooted really deeply in popular culture.
Like the change mostly notices that Good and Evil are opposed forces that fight each other, whereas Law and Chaos are opposed forces that rarely come directly into conflict. Like there's always angels/devils that want to lay siege to hell/heaven, but proteans and axiomites would mostly find their counterparts homes deeply uncomfortable and want to leave.
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While I absolutely, 100% get why this decision was made, it is also the only thing in the presentation today that disappoints me.
Not even from a mechanical perspective, since that's not that big of a deal (although I do have one issue with it that I'll get to later), but from a flavor perspective.
It makes it feel like Proteans and Aeons are less cosmically potent than Angels and Demons. Celestials and Fiends have these fancy, pretty tags that show how they're fundamentally holy or Unholy beings? A status that Champions and Clerics endeavor to be more like by Sanctifying or Unsanctifying themselves? Meanwhile Monitors get absolutely nothing equivalent? Kind of underwhelming to be honest.
Plus, it just feels like it limits design space. Which admittedly isn't that much of a problem except that it's concepts that people have been asking for for a while now. Champions of Law and Chaos. You're making I much harder to add those things in the future, without a way to make your Champions "Ordered" or "Entropic"
And I get that they're saying that their data shows players don't interact with Law and Chaos except as an extension of Good and Evil, but how can they when there are essentially no options in the game for meaningfully doing so and when the few ways to do so were massively disincentivized, since it was way harder to predict if Lawful or Chaotic damage would do anything?
I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, I really do love 99% of what's been revealed for the Remaster, but this hurts a lot.
But does pure chaos or pure law need to exist as an energy type? There are more ways for outsiders to be hurt by actual representatives of their anathema than having law and chaos be definable in world traits. PF2 Desmond already do this and it is cooler than a damage type. Needlessly destroying something of utilitarian value is a lot more narratively rich a way of representing a planar being being hurt by [chaos trait]
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As long as I still get to write more about my slithery, warpwavey babies the proteans, and as long as I have the possible option of expanding more upon axiomites (who, like proteans, have been purely Paizo content from day 1) I'm down with however Chaos and Law are handled. :)
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Basically, the developers looked back over the game that is in actual practice, and that they needed to actively get away from metaphysical baggage from D&D that isn’t necessary to PF2 , and they realized trying to defend a law/chaos dichotomy was not really with it to what has been built up, as well as the fact that good vs evil is not a dichotomy that any court or judge is going to give to one company, as well as the fact it is much more built into the system already and would be more difficult to take out. It is more a practical issue than a metaphysical one.
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It is not often that I agree with Temperans (likely almost never), but here I do.
I certainly feel that going Holy/Unholy only is the easy way.
And that what matters in our games is how things happen at the PC level. And while the outer planes and the cycle of souls stay the same, Unholy/Holy will be the only thing that matters there.
The stories of the setting might not change, but those of PCs surely do.
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There are more 'good/evil' creatures that are universally harmed by their opposite than 'law/chaos' creatures, so that isn't an equal comparison.
Yes but Law Chaos did give us a second dimension to differentiate on which helped make the differences in all the factions.
We have lost something mechanically here. As long as the edicts anathemas are done well we will be OK. I want to see real incompatiblity here between one good and another good set of these.
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As someone who is on record campaigning for Tenets of Neutrality, I don't want to come off indifferent to the plight of those lamenting the loss of chaos and law damage. Rather, this loss makes me doubtful we that Lawful/Chaotic Champion codes will ever be forthcoming, pending the future Champion rework's conscious uncoupling with the alignment system.
It is absolutely a fair question to ask: Why does good and evil get special treatment with regards to holy and unholy powers? If a cleric of Sarenrae can shoot holy beams to kill demons, why not a cleric of Abadar shoot... 'legal' beams (patent pending) to kill those selfsame demons, being creatures of both supernatural malice and disorder alike?
(The question was technically asked why they get specialized damage, which runs afoul of a small but significant distinction--according to what we know, holy and unholy are tags that can be applied to normal, unspecialised damage, namely spirit damage, though it's not impossible to imagine the future Flame Strike can deal holy/unholy fire damage, much the same way a cold iron longsword can deal cold iron slashing or piercing damage.)
Aside from speculating at the looming spectre of the OGL over any set of principles labelled with synonyms for Good/Evil/Lawful/Chaotic as a "Alignment is gone except not really" gotcha, it strikes me that there are two most pressing reasons.
I don't think it's too controversial to say that being able to sanctify your paladin's sword to holiness, or to shoot lasers of divine goodness represents a powerful character fantasy for many fans of divine type characters. Smiting a demon with the literal power of godly righteousness is a something which the game would be missing if it didn't have it, as both a common enough trope and something which already fits well within the Lost Omens setting.
But then why remove chaos and law? Could not the same be said for taking the raw energy of chaos and drilling it into the heart of an Inevitable to disrupt its perfect symmetry and unceasing regeneration? Absolutely! That sounds like a very cool power fantasy that I would have loved to see played out...
Unfortunately the problem is, that fantasy is extremely niche. Remembering that, as far as we know, this holy/unholy power only really matters insofar as fiends and celestials are each other's bane, a cleric sanctified to holy but who never meets a fiend is still only shooting perfectly normal spirit damage at any foe they meet. A cleric sanctified to chaos only really has exactly one kind of creature that is weak to chaos (aeons, incl inevitables). Even when the arbiters of law or the forces of chaos show up as antagonists, they pale in frequency to the conflict between good and evil, and the host of fiends that populate it. A chaos cleric is unlikely to feel their dedication well spent when it doesn't matter for most of their adventuring career.
Of course, no matter how niche, it's also fair to ask, why not throw it in? Why not give people the option to dedicate themselves fully, spiritually, to order, no matter how sparse the rewards for doing so? I thoroughly enjoy the conflict between law and chaos myself, so what is the cost of adding two more tags and letting law and chaos clerics have their nearly irrelevant damage?
I argue the cost is in words. The concepts of good and evil, of good versus evil, and of holy and unholy power need no introduction. They are ubiquitous in pop culture. Those of us in the ttrpg fandom are already used to thinking of law and chaos as a secondary axis to this conflict, but with alignment being entirely perfunctory in 5e, on-boarding newcomers to a niche damage type which has virtually no function in the game and which the developers admit was simply not being useful, centred around a conflict which, while cool, the players can't even agree on what each side belongs to?
The judgment call was made and it wasn't worth it. Maybe it was the easy way out, but perhaps it was also the only way out that kept the critical fantasy of smiting with holy powers but dispensed with the clunky baggage.
I do wish that there was a way to keep the conflict between divine chaos and divine law foregrounded in the mechanics, but that conflict still exists in the cosmos even if a cleric isn't going to gain bespoke powers for fighting in that conflict. I do feel something is lost if the alien qlippoth are weak to holy like any other fiend, rather than being creatures of incomprehensible chaos first that balk in the face of order.
It's sad, but those mechanics weren't really being used even after 4 years in the game, or at least not on the scale of good and evil.
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I suppose it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy: with no major Adventure/AP content dealing with Aeons and Proteans, and very few Chaotic and Lawful player options, those things then remain niche because they aren't supported.
A world where a hypothetical Hellknight book indirectly tied into a demon-bashing Sarkoris Scar AP would have a lot of reason to juice up Law stuff, but that's not what got made. While I don't begrudge anyone that... it's still a shame to confirm that these parts of the cosmos that feel more uniquely Golarion (Aeons and Proteans, rather than Celestials and Fiends) won't get the same mechanical emphasis.
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I mean, the reason why it's being dropped rather than included is probably at least partly legal. There's no way D&D can argue that the conflict between good and evil is something they uniquely brought to the TTRPG space. They have a lot more legal ground for "good, evil, law, and chaos are four axes of cosmic morality, resulting in nine planes". Just slapping a coat of paint on it with different names wouldn't work. My guess is that Paizo probably needed to drop good vs. evil, chaos vs. law, or redo the planes.
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Right, but the issue is that maintaining a 4 directional alignment grid felt like it might be a decision that invited legal recourse. Was an underdeveloped, under utilized aspect of the game worth risking the whole system over? There is other fiction than D&D that talks of the battle between law and chaos, but not a lot of it talks about pure energy of these ideas that can be used to hurt paragons of the opposite. In fact, most of the non-D&D fiction that even talks about Law and Chaos and doesn’t moralize this into essentially Good vs Evil looks at these much more as constructed terms that are defined by actions and not by innate principles. This just isn’t true of good vs evil. The underlying real world lore is deep and diverse enough to say “this isn’t copying off that game, this is both of us using older lore and legends.”
I totally respect how it can conceptually feel like a loss for now, but I think it has a strong potential to become something more interesting and developed in the future for what the battle between order and disorder look like in Golarion.
For example, there is no way Hellknights are going away. But being bound to getting “Lawful” powers when alignment is getting lifted from the system meant that their powers and abilities were going to affect a very minor subset of enemies. Now, with anathema and edicts rising to the foreground across the board. Hellknights could have a bonus to damage that comes just from having witnessed someone break the law of the land, or other order specific anathema or edicts. It can be based in actions and still be about a theoretical battle between two dichotomous forces, with cosmic beings fanning these flames but just be less rigidly defined into a cosmology that Paizo has very shaky authorial claim to.
Perhaps this feels like a victory for chaos over order in the moment but the room for order to regrow freed from these shackles is very promising. Am I only making these arguments as an active agent of Anarchy and Chaos in the world of Golarion? Maybe so, but I actually think this could be one not to completely disappear in the lore, but to let play out as as a change zealots of Order in world have trouble letting go of. “I swear! The LAW is real and cosmically present as real energy that you must respect, or it will be able to punish you…or at least it was! But since Aroden’s death, something has changed. It is just not quite working the same any more, and because I must be honest, it might not be working at all any more…except that the Law does still work if we believe in it, and if we stop we will lose everything that all of us have ever worked to build!”
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The point is not "What legal battles Hasbro can win" it's "What legal battles Hasbro is willing to fight." The goal is to avoid having to pay your lawyers for any legal fight over D&D's trade dress.
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There is literally nothing that DnD can copy right about "law vs chaos". Literally nothing. The argument that "its for legal reasons" is starting to sounds like copium.
Alignment? Cannot be copyrighted.
Law vs Chaos vs Good vs Evil? Cannot be copyrighted.
Damage based on alignment? Cannot be copyrighted.The only thing that DnD has a copyright on is the 3x3 grid and very specific wording.
TBH, the legal argument is the strongest one IMO for the loss of the axis in PC mechanics.
Because as soon as you have 2 axes with polar extremes, you have the 3x3 grid. And if you had mechanisms that enforce it at PC level, it does sound like a real risk.
I am definitely not happy about this and I am worried about the consequences, but this ship has sailed and will not come back.
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It feels like if they were going to do something really compelling with "law vs. chaos" they would have done so in the last 15 years. If you're doing a Hellknights book, the things you're going to want to fight are more "criminals, fugitives, and ̶f̶r̶e̶e̶d̶o̶m̶ ̶f̶i̶g̶h̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ terrorists" than "proteans."
Like in the actual "Chaos vs. Law" AP we did, the PCs were fighting "an oppressive government" and "actual devils" not "axiomites." A protean is still a terrifying thing to run into, but that's more because it's inherently unpredictable and capricious than antagonistic.
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I think the key thing the "Chaos vs. Law" thing misses is that the greatest enemy of "The Maelstrom" in the Golarion universe was not Abadar or someone else who lives in Axis, it was *Pharasma* who set up the whole system of mortal life and judgment in order to slow the Maelstrom's growth.
Pharasma was not lawful.
I think the key thing the "Chaos vs. Law" thing misses is that the greatest enemy of "The Maelstrom" in the Golarion universe was not Abadar or someone else who lives in Axis, it was *Pharasma* who set up the whole system of mortal life and judgment in order to slow the Maelstrom's growth.
Pharasma was not lawful.
I agree, I think when you look at the narrative of Golarion more closely, it is easy to see how a narrow Law vs Chaos spectrum didn't really need mechanical reinforcement to come alive. If for no other reason than Chaos doesn't actually even need intentional proponents to advance itself, and that it is more interesting for these creatures to have their own motivations.
I know that some people feel betrayed that Good and Evil haven't gotten the same treatment, but there are already a lot of stories in the game where that was already being used. Getting rid of them was going to be down right disruptive with how fundamental "doing good" and "doing evil" was built into certain creatures and multiple APs over Pathfinder's history.
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Like we can create the entire 9x9 grid by having "good", "evil", and "neither" and then posing the Maelstrom as one of the existential problems with reality.
The Maelstrom is neither good nor evil, but it does consume basically everything it touches and will eventually reduce the entire universe to undifferentiated potentiality- this is inevitable, but we can delay it. Pharasma created mortal life in order to sort energy that pours out of the Positive Energy Plane into types of energy that can be used to reinforce the non-Maelstrom planes. Energy that resonates with the Maelstrom is attractive to the Maelstrom, so any energy that resonates completely with the Maelstrom needs to go there. Energy that resonates somewhat, but not entirely with the Maelstrom gets put in the planes that border it, and energy that resonates not at all with the Maelstrom gets put as far away from it as possible.
Part of the reason Law vs. Chaos as a cosmic battle never really made a lot of sense is that we're pretty clear on who's going to win that one in the end. The forces of "Law" are mostly trying to build and organize what they can while they can, but the eventual victory of Chaos is more or less assured. It's just nice that since Chaos doesn't do anything on purpose, it's not in any particular hurry.
If you are not talking about Golarion, then you can completely just have Order and Disorder as traits or even LAW and CHAOS. In fact, you can use any existing creature that has those already and use them or use them as a base. Golarion is not going to use that any more so it makes sense for them not to set players or GMs up for failure by having these rules sit around that are not going to feature in AP or adventures.