Do your Political Views shape how your villains and heroes act?

Jhaelen said:

That's not quite true. I actually consider villains that are simply 'Evil' (with a capital 'E', no less) considerably less interesting than villains that are just misguided. Villains should have comprehensible motivations. If you want to be really clever, create villains with goals that aren't actually much different from the PCs. That's guaranteed to generate some interesting roleplaying opportunities.

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I can not think of any famous iconic DnD villain that is just a misguided good person.

Umbran said:

Yep. And with good reason. I cannot go into that reason in this venue, as my reason *is* political. So, we will have to just note we disagree with each other, and let it drop.

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Certainly, though with the understanding that this does, ultimately, only prove my point

This seems germane to the topic:

To Create An Enemy

Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.
-Sam Keen

BRKNdevil said:

Random thought that came through is that do the political views of the DM shape how the stories npc heroes and villains act? My villains tend to be not necessarily super evil, but more on the corrupt official lets get rich people to give me money and i'm decidedly liberal on a lot of my views.

Its just a bunch of already rich people trying to vie for more money and power while using fear and hatred as the main motivator to affect those around them. People aren't decidedly evil unless they worship an evil as all hell god, no matter the race and i try to play against the lets murder it simply because its there because murder hobos are kinda boring to play with.

So how do other people shape their heroes and what sort of campaigns do you play because of it?

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As an admittedly imperfect being, I believe a great many things affect the nature of my characters - from strongly held beliefs to how sucky the Cracker Barrel service was earlier in the day.

As long as it sets memorable and enjoyable tables for my players, it's all good.

Umbran said:

Well, there's a question as to what types of villains are interesting to experience in a story (say, a novel), and what kinds of villains are interesting for the player to deal with an in RPG.

There's also another question based on what counts as "misguided". There is one form of misguided, where the culprit isn't aware of the repercussions of their actions - and the only "evil" you may put on these is that maybe they should have done more work to alleviate their ignorance of consequences before starting. There's another thing I have heard of as described as "misguided" in which the culprit is fully aware of the consequences of their actions, but they don't feel they are significant. As in, "I am causing pain to 100,000 people, and I don't care - the ends justify the means."

The former is merely ignorance. It is uninteresting.

The latter is entirely human, based in interesting human psychology, visible in many places in human history, and also textbook capital-E Evil.

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Would you consider Thanos from the Avengers 3 movie to be a misguided villain?




And of course from the Justice League Movie is another sort of villain, Steppenwolf, he is a henchman of Darkseid. Darkseid just wants to rule, and is a bit more of a 2-dimensional villain than Thanos.

Gradine said:

Certainly, though with the understanding that this does, ultimately, only prove my point

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No, but the reason that it does not is not something I can go into, because the explanation is political.

I think I can hedge around it though by way of analogy. Whether or not one eats pork is not for most people a religious statement. But for certain religious groups, it is. Of course, one would expect a very pious religious person might declare that his every action was in some way a religious expression, because he believed that religion was an all encompassing all embracing all important aspect of ones life. And for that person, it would be certainly true that everything he did was religious. But one is not compelled to believe that that person's view is necessarily true.

Or, if that is still too controversial, imagine the situation of a highly fanatical sports fan who always wore his teams colors, decorated his house in his teams colors, attended every game, and largely arranged his life around sports and supporting his team. One could reasonably believe him when he said that everything he did revolved around sports. But one would not be compelled to take the same view of life.

Umbran said:

Popular or not, I think it is simply incorrect. Politics are those things concerned with governance of large bodies of people. The content of a game in your home, that is only seen by a half-dozen people, is not political. It has no impact or bearing on the governance of a nation, state, or even a town. When the impact of the choice is negligible on the scale of governance of our groupings, then the choice is aesthetic or personal, rather than political.

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To echo this, not only does not have an impact or bearing the policies of governing a polity, but it may not even be about the policies of governing a polity.

The vast majority of conflicts that I consider important aren't political conflicts. In my invented setting, the vast majority of invented governments have no bearing on nor are they intended to be comment on real world governments or my preferred real world policies or political structures. Indeed, many of the invented governments of my setting are literally impossible in the real world. For example, it is not possible in the real world - as I think most of us will agree - to have a government were the dead literally rule over the living, and where all legislative and judicial positions in the government are filled by ghosts. So questions about that form of governance really can't have direct bearing on the real world anyway (though of course, analogies could be found and explored).

But besides which, rarely do I have a player - even those with degrees in political science - who are mostly interested in exploring governance and legality in their play. Even to the most politically knowledgeable of my players, such matters are typically viewed only as a backdrop to the story of passing interest and not the core matters of play. I can't imagine most games of D&D are fundamentally about designing a perfect political system and/or passing legislation.

Thomas Bowman said:

Would you consider Thanos from the Avengers 3 movie to be a misguided villain?

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No, he is pretty much just Evil.

Shasarak said:

No, he is pretty much just Evil.

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Yes he's evil, but he rationalizes his evil, whereas Steppenwolf doesn't bother and doesn't care, he just wants what he wants.

Celebrim said:

No, but the reason that it does not is not something I can go into, because the explanation is political.

I think I can hedge around it though by way of analogy. Whether or not one eats pork is not for most people a religious statement. But for certain religious groups, it is. Of course, one would expect a very pious religious person might declare that his every action was in some way a religious expression, because he believed that religion was an all encompassing all embracing all important aspect of ones life. And for that person, it would be certainly true that everything he did was religious. But one is not compelled to believe that that person's view is necessarily true.

Or, if that is still too controversial, imagine the situation of a highly fanatical sports fan who always wore his teams colors, decorated his house in his teams colors, attended every game, and largely arranged his life around sports and supporting his team. One could reasonably believe him when he said that everything he did revolved around sports. But one would not be compelled to take the same view of life.

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The problem with these analogies is that religion and sports don't ultimately impact everyone (I suppose the argument could be made for religion in a metaphysical sense, but let's stick with just this plane of existence for the time being), and certainly not in the sense that politics do. And let's not forget that politics pervade religion, sports, what people choose or do not choose to eat... basically everything. Everything is politics.

Because politics are so ultimately pervasive, all-encompassing, and impactful, the method by which one chooses to navigate or engage with politics (up to and including the choice not to engage with it) is necessarily a political choice.

That's not to say that pop culture (including games) can't represent some form of escapism. Everybody needs a little escapism every now and then. But the act of choosing to engage in escapism is also, in itself, a political act. Not that that choice necessarily says anything about that person or their politics, that's always going to be contextual at best. But I've found the best way to move through life (more like the best way to continue to grow as a person, it's actually an extremely anxious way to move through life ) is to continually examine the intent and impact of my choices, as well as the way the rest of world has influenced my decision making.

In the context of the OP, it means sometimes asking: "Why did I design that villain that way? How did my players react to it? Why did they all come to such a quick conclusion that the character's actions were villainous in the first place?"

I mean, if we wanted to really strictly just look at D&D design and alignment, there is no universal morality nor ethics, and both of these concepts (and our practical applications of them, including the contextual exceptions we all make to them on a daily basis) tie directly into our cultural and personal politics. Without politics we'd ultimately have nothing to fall back on to determine what Evil even meant, or who could or could not be defined as heroes or villains.