"We can contest the specific points but I actually feel like trying to help Carissa out by giving her the correct set of rules and justifications for Good is not going to work? Since that is not actually how Good works?"

"Yeah, that's how Law works. Details about Pharasma's questionable sorting protocol in edge cases aside, the basic idea is that to be Good you have to prefer not to harm people. You are still allowed to do it if the people you are harming are themselves people-harmers and your instance of harm will get them to stop that and that's why you're doing it as opposed to just being opportunistic antagonism, and that can get a little crazymaking when you have vast symmetrical-looking wars between Good and Evil that go on for millennia, but the basic idea isn't following a ton of rules or where would us Chaotic Goods be."

"Is preferring not to harm people a different thing from not preferring to harm people."

"I think if you just go around not preferring to harm people you probably hit neutral. I mean, unless you harm people anyway, intent - contextualizes actions but doesn't count for much on its own, as I understand it. So you also have to act on preferring not to harm people - and preferring that people not be harmed, maybe I should have put it that way to begin with, like this is why charity works for Good points because you can just buy some people-not-being-harmed."

"Okay, well, I think that explains what Cheliax does that makes people Evil, it raises children to mostly worry about their own problems and let other people worry about theirs. There are a lot of people, you can't possibly be on top of whether a nontrivial share of them are getting harmed."

"It doesn't have to be a particularly nontrivial share. Random farmers can make Good afterlives if they, like, look after their neighbors and are kind to their families. Osirion has many flaws but their big advantage is that they very seriously study this thing - the aim is getting people into Axis but they still take data on who misses and winds up in Heaven."

"If I tried looking after my neighbors they would find that weird and scary and wonder what I was up to and why I was paying them particular attention and what I wanted in exchange."

"Yeah. It's hard to be Good in an Evil place, and riskier. I had that going on too, drow're generally Evil. What I'm not sure is why it would be having you count as Evil instead of Neutral."

It feels like a dangerous question to even consider but probably picking a bunch of people to defend from harm is giving up less of her than getting married, so it's worth possibly closing off that avenue if she has a real shot at a better one. She is not sure she believes she has a real shot at a better one. 

"Does it work if you are defending people from harm because you want to be Good or are you supposed to have an additional motive."

"It's hard to be sure. All the evidence is from people with enough levels to ping, right, and from random afterlife sampling. If I were making the rules I'd say wanting to defend yourself from harm too shouldn't cost you any points but I am not Pharasma and in fact kind of want to stab her, so."

There is something terribly pathetic about wanting to stab Pharasma, it's like believing you were stolen from birth parents who secretly love you and will come rescue you, or that your boyfriend really loves you and isn't seeing anyone on the side and testing the same lines on her, except - on a scale so much bigger than that she doesn't know what to make of it.

"Well. I guess I can - try to think about it and see if that is easier to work with."

"I hope it helps."

"Thank you. You are better at explaining it than the paladins."

"What'd they say?"

"Uh, lots of stuff. They did a bunch of claiming to prefer not to hurt me which seemed like a real waste of all of our time but which is easier to contextualize if that's required for Good, we talked some about how Cheliax - rewrites its history a lot, and about how it's not a place where it's smart to complain, which would've been more convincing if I were suddenly now in a place where it's smart to complain, which I'm not...we talked about whether torturing people is effective. They believe that it is not."

"If you want us to shoo Mahdi so his opinion of your eligibility will not be affected by your complaints about his nose we can do that. I actually think you could probably complain about your lot in life all day long and the paladins would - I guess maybe reassess their estimate of how likely you are to reform your evil ways? But not, like, hit you, I'm not sure what you're expecting. Torturing people might be effective in some situations? I kind of doubt that paladins checked, so I wouldn't take their word for it, but I'd expect Cheliax to consider it effective at something even if it's not effective at any of the things a normal person would want to do."

"They did not check. They were very sure despite not having checked. Also when they kidnapped me they wore the armor of the Hellknight unit that arrests dissidents and troublemakers and they showed up in our camp and blindfolded me and chained me up and took me away without saying anything and then asked all their questions while I thought they were my people, which was a very reasonable thing to do, I'm not objecting, but I don't see any kind of distinction between that and kicking someone."

"Did you ask them that? I don't know, like, the text of the vows of this particular order."

"I asked. He said that hurting a prisoner is a bright line in a way that everything that causes a prisoner as much distress as hurting them isn't, and the latter's unworkable as a rule, so they're not allowed to hurt prisoners, but you could just as easily say that the latter's unworkable as a rule so you should just give up on the idea that there should be rules about how you treat prisoners."

"I mean, you could, but they're paladins, they're Lawful and have rules about things. If you're going to keep prisoners at all - and you have to if you don't want to just execute people without even questioning them whenever it comes up - then you can't keep their chipper moods as a very high priority, since they're going to object to being kept prisoner even if you put them up in a nice hotel with fruity pastries and floral soap. But you can still care about it at all, and one of the things that you can care about quite a lot without making it that much harder to keep prisoners in the first place is not smacking them around."

"So it's like - they get the Good points for picking an element of the situation to care about, even if it doesn't matter? Can you be Good by caring very much about ...whether people get an afterlife, and not about other things about them?"

"Uh, maybe? If you... travel to one of the new planets with a wand of Malediction and start damning people because otherwise they don't seem to have an afterlife, then no, I bet you that would not, but if you... found some way to defend the river of souls? Went and did a term of service at the House of Oblivion and did this specifically because divs eat souls and that's fucked up? Got really offended at the grubs in the Abyss being gobbled up and resurrected some random dead drow? Might work."

"I guess I would be interested in doing those things, because people shouldn't stop existing... why does it not count in the Hell case, just because anything you do for Hell can't be Good?"

"Malediction's an evil spell, for one thing, and you can make a case that it shouldn't be if the person's otherwise going to vanish, but - actually you know what we should do is ask the person, whatshisface, for the name of somebody recently dead, see if we can scry 'em - but even if you construct the case for it, for practical purposes you need Pharasma's buy-in and that wouldn't be the way to bet. There's probably things you can do for Hell that wouldn't be evil. If you anonymously sent Asmodeus a nice cask of tea that would probably be more Chaotic than anything. But contributing to the general Hellish effort to do Hellish things is going to tend to be Evil since the Hellish things are."

"Sure." Sigh. "So once Asmodeus has conquered the whole world everything'll be Evil because it advances Hellish aims?"