"Good" or "Bad?" Everything is perception.

No, and I don't think you have to.

Virtues are virtues regardless of what path you follow or what path you make for yourself.

 

I can, because I am fish.

Don't ask me how because there is no answer.

 

Im an angel with bloodied wings, so i guess im either on the fence, or Chaotic Neutral!

 

those who benefit from the status quo will strive to protect the order. those who suffer from the status quo will create chaos only to change the order. this has been observed through the ages.

 

Good and evil are not relativistic. They are absolutes. Of course it is possible for someone who ascribes to evil to consider evil acts virtuous. However, no one cares what he thinks, the acts are and remain evil.

 

Chaos just is. That's why you can't define it and neither say something belong to chaos or not. Chaos just is.

 

LOL hate to keep beating a dead horse but, nobody was advocating what you said. virtue is the ability to execute without restrictions

 

Systems based on duality are simplistic and flawed - consequences are easily dismissed-overlooked ... actions are "justified" by what side of the line you stand on physically and philosophically (in the game world = griefing)

The concept of "chaos" rooted in a construct of duality is not simply the mere degeneration of lacking a stance (this is not neutral either) or barbarism

Chaos in the construct of duality; is existentialism - and existentialism does not preclude "belief" or adherence to codes of conduct ... and its characterised by neither being permanent, everlasting or even short lived ... it just is.

Chaos as a global concept is the absence of order but this does not inherently imply anarchy nor a world set ablaze ... you can sit at a park, while you have a cup of coffee and be sitting at the epicenter of chaos ... peace and chaos are not mutually exclusive

 

Who said that? You just made that up didn't you

 

That's not a denial.

Neither is that.

 

For people actually interested in philosophy:
http://philosophyforteens.pbworks.com/w/page/16440031/Problems with Relativism

With that out of the way, I think that using moral relativism or individualism as a motivation for chaos is not ideal from a gaming/immersion perspective. This is easily shown in that those who IRL actually advocate that position all organzie themselves into orderly organisations with very strict rules and regulations. Crowley had his Ordo Templi Orientis. Anton LaVey had his Church of Satan. Similar in vein but very different in expression you have objectivism with Ayn Rand and she had her Ayn Rand Institute. And so on and so forth.
They all seek/sought order. This is easily deduced from individualism and objectivism since if I want more power for me then I need an organization and a structure to convey and support that power. For that structure and organization to function I need order in the forms of rules and regulations.
Even anarchists try to unite...

The obsidian empire in BotA is an excellent example of this duality, in order to create order they broke against virtue. That doesn't mean that order is more or less virtuous due to their actions. If that is true then it follows that chaos shouldn't have to be more or less virtuos.
I think that is an excellent @RichardGarriott moment of showing that choices aren't always crystal clear when it comes to virtue.

So from a game meta perspective:
Why can't you be virtuos and advocate chaos at the same time? (I think that @Amberraine has touched upon this several times).
Is the fictional Robin Hood virtuos or not? Is Robin Hood on the side of chaos or order? etc
So while chaos can do unvirtouos acts that doesn't necessarily have to be so. You are not truly chaos if you consistently break the rules in the same way.

Me without knowing diddly about the upcoming lore for DarkStarr in SotA, I would advocate more of a trickster role for chaos. A balancing force so that not too much order quelch creativity, cunning and joy. Sometimes you need to break things to build up something better etc.
Pranksters, tricksters, vagabonds, all the "live this moment without a thought about tomorrow", type of archetypes are all over lore and culture. Those are much more interesting from a story perspective than an easy cop-out in the form of moral relativism.
(Non-marvel) Loki, Sun Wokung the monkey king and the coyote are all excellent examples of this.
Loki being a great example of a trickster who sometimes is the hero and sometimes the villain.
If you don't want to go to myth, then lots of scoundrels with a heart like Han Solo or our own @CaptainJackSparrow encompass this. They have a sense of virtue but not necessarily order.

That would be a much more interesting proposition for chaos in my opinion. Otherwise chaos=evil becomes a black/white norm without any shades of grey.

 

No, I think there's definitely a definition for what Chaos is.

What players and people do is use that to justify actions that they themselves choose to do.

Here are some more helpful definitions:

Evil - profoundly immoral and malevolent.
Good - that which is morally right; righteousness.
Virtue - behavior showing high moral standards.
Malevolent - having or showing a wish to do evil to others.
Immoral - not conforming to accepted standards of morality.

We can see that Virtue ties right into Good. Evil ties indirectly to Chaos via "not conforming to accepted standards". It's a loose definition. I don't like the use of it for this game, but there you go.

I don't think we need to pretend there's mystery around the actual definitions of the words. The interpretation of ones actions to fit into those words, sure that's up for grabs and relative to your point of view.

 

i would break it up into 4 categories:
Holy - actively virtuous
Good - passively virtuous
Bad - passively anti virtue
Evil - actively anti virtue

 

Here's a visual of my thoughts on the beautiful 'chaos' of multi-player games and IRL in general.

 

Don't we have any philosophy majors to sort this out?
In the mean time I really recommend these morality lectures from Harvard:

What was good [pun] with Ultima series lore was that Richard didn't use good or evil. If it is a black or white choice then it is really simple and boring.
But morality and virtues are not simple in real life, and Richard emulated that by making a grayscale with actual choices along the grayscale. (It wasn't perfect, but it was better than the black/white of most other games).
This is like comparing the morality of the characters in LOTR to those of SOIAF, while I love both sources, there is simply no comparison towards the ambiguity of human nature and the difficulties we have with morality.

So why would you try to implant the good/evil dichotomy on top of a lore which specifically tried to stay away from it? I don't get it.

Order can do evil and chaos can do good. I thought that the lore of the Skywalker family nicely settled that.

I really hope that that will not be true in SotA, since it certainly isn't true in real life.
Not conforming to accepted standards, is what has brought us forward in morality and virtue throughout the history of humanity.
If my greatgreatgreat-grandkids don't look back upon our current sense of morality and shake their heads just as much as we shake our heads at our ancestors who were arguing that this and that was not only OK but morality right.
For instance check out the "code of chivalry" for a quick refresher in barbarism to us, but still something which was a leap forward at the time.

 

Right, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as good and evil...only that it's based on accepted standards of the time. If the Nazi's had won WWII, for example, what might the accepted standards have been?

The game can have good and evil, life has good and evil. But it's based off of an accepted standard of morality. So who sets that standard in a game? Well I think that the virtues obviously set the standard for good. So it makes sense to me that the opposite of the virtues would set the standard for evil.

Spoiler

What I dislike about Chaos is that it's not an accepted standard, it's not even the opposite of whatever the accepted standard is. So it can't truly be Evil, though of course it can sponsor evil acts (and good acts). That's why I don't think it fits in well with the lore. Was the Obsidian Empire Chaotic, Evil, or Good? (This is left rhetorical for all you people that didn't read the book yet) If there are only two choices, Chaos and Virtuous. Does that even remotely make sense based on some of the things Tracy Hickman has mentioned about the Obsidian's?

 

To this I might agree somewhat. But I would have to put in a lot of caveats to do so. This since the eight virtues 'of old' were indeed inspired by the code of chivalry so they contain some things that isn't necessarily good.
Breakdown:

• Honesty
  Not good/bad.
  I can use honesty in very very bad ways if I want to and I can use honesty in very good ways.
  Someone who is always honest is usually not considered a good person.
• Compassion
  =good, agreed
• Valor
  Not good/bad.
• Justice
  Good for society, but not necessarily good when applied to the individual.
  The Ultimas have several moments where you have to decided between "what is right" and "what is just".
• Sacrifice
  =good, agreed
• Honor
  Not necessarily good/bad, but directly tied to order.
• Spirituality
  Not good/bad
• Humility
  =good, agreed

So in conclusion, most of the 8 virtues wasn't on the good bad dichotomy...

In SotA chaos is the opposite of order. But neither is necessarily good/ bad. Just like the virtues 'of old'.
That is why I think it fits nicely the lore.
But I might be completely wrong, depending on DarkStarr lore and behavior...

 

What we know of the Virtues in Shroud:
The Virtues are Truth, Love, and Courage.
The game is called Forsaken Virtues for a reason, but we don't know the reason.
The Oracle keeps track of our virtue, and will tell us if our actions match with what we say we are.

We have also just recently seen the introduction of a Virtue symbol. Out of game, I know the symbol is supposed to represent the harmonious existence of an individual among the entirety of the world.

I'm going to define Chaos using Darkstarr's motto:
No Bounds, No Judgment, No Cause.

I don't see anything incompatible among all of that.
I used to think of Chaos and Virtue as opposites, Chaos and Order, but that's not necessarily true.

It seems possible to walk a chaotic and virtuous path, or an orderly non-virtuous path.
I think we can discard good and evil.

I don't think Portalarium intends for things to be as easy as good/evil, chaos/order, us/them.

We'll each walk our own path, and see where it leads.

 

I think you're dead on, here. That's probably the intent.

You can make any of the virtues a bad thing. The paradox between making a decision between two equally horrible choices is a fairly easy thing to engineer.

Forget about choosing between something that is Right verses something that is Just. How about choosing between something that is Right and something that is Right (but the end result is wrong). What happens when you have two buttons you can press, one will kill a friend and the other will kill another friend? If you don't push a button they both die. Is your virtue coming out of that unscathed? I would argue that it's not.

Likewise, are people ever REALLY chaotic? I mean, free will is about making choices and in the words of Rush, even if you choose not to choose you still have made a choice. So good luck excluding yourself from some type of order.

That's why I'm not sure Good and Evil don't make for better paths. People can choose to be good and choose to be evil based on the accepted standards principle. If we look back at the two buttons scenario above, we can excuse a person that makes a choice about picking one friend other another in an effort to keep both friends from dying. We might even say that's good. But is it virtuous? If so, what virtue are they following? I can't find one that fits. Likewise, I don't see where a person in this situation could be Chaotic, they're making a choice. The choice could be random, sure, but they're still making it.

 

Frank, why do you think Richard and Starr are juxtaposed so much then? They do it, we do it, it's always Chaos verses Virtue. If Portalarium doesn't intend to make that a two faction system, they're not doing a very good job communicating that.

Also, I have my suspicions that the Oracle is a third faction of neutrality that seeks to keep the balance between Order (virtues) and Chaos. If that turns out to be true...then I think the system could work well.