Good, Evil, Nature, and Druids

[pemerton]

if you stipulate that nature "doesn't care", but then have an element where it effectively does, that's an inconsistency. If it has no sentience, it has no concept of beauty (because it has no concepts at all), and can't know when you have destroyed it!

Doctrines of karma may well be false. (I think board rules preclude us from expressing a view about that one way or another.)

Doctrines of karma may even be incoherent under analysis. (Ditto previous parentheses.)

But doctrine of karma aren't incoherent at the surface as you suggest. To posit a natural law that results in evil people being cut off from a certain source of power or wellbeing doesn't make it the case that nature is sentient and cares about things. Any more than a natural law in virtue of which (let's say) big things are more likely to break when dropped than small things must mean that nature hates big things.

Perhaps the nature of druidical power is such that only those who are open in a certain way, and transcend their own self-concern, can access and wield it. Evil people clearly don't manifest the correct openness and self-transcendence, and hence couldn't be druids. But not because any sentiend being wills such a thing. It's just how the natural system works.

There are real world philosophies and religions that posit this sort of thing, though normally the wellbeing or power they're interested in is not as flamboyant as druidical power in a FRPG. But changing the details for the purposes of fantasy fiction doesn't change the basic conception.

 

[uzirath]

And that's just one example. If I wanted to be more devious, I could muck them up much further.

Love the story; it sounds like a fun game. We did lots of things like that, too, and I've certainly played in sophisticated, morally complex games that maintained the traditional alignment system. Ultimately, though, my players and I found that alignment just wasn't adding value to our games. The GMs wanted to simply focus on developing NPCs with rich personalities, goals, and backstories, without worrying what the multiverse had to say about their moral characteristics. The players wanted to draw their own conclusions about the people they met in the game world. Being an argumentative group of wannabe intellectuals, it also cut down on a lot of endless philosophizing about what alignment was the right alignment for all sorts of complicated characters and behaviors.

 

[steeldragons]

Well, yes, that's one way of imagining nature. I didn't want to preclude the possibility of a personified nature, which is relatively common in mythology, folklore, and RPG settings (the Greek Gaia comes immediately to mind). As early as the mid-1980s, I played in an AD&D campaign where Nature was conscious and had a specific agenda; druids were its agents. (That, in fact, was one of the first campaigns where we dumped the alignment system.)

Indeed. It is quite common throughout history/mythology/religion/legend. My understnding of this thread/original post was you wanted to hear how people handled their druids and nature in their games.

As mentioned, there are many personifications of bits n' pieces of "Nature"...the god of the Sun, god of the Hunt/forests/"wild untamed Nature" [particularly wild animals], the god of the mountain/stone/[element of] earth, the goddess of the Moon, the goddess of the Oceans/[element of] Water, a quartet of lesser deities of other things that are held as lords/ladies of [among their portfolios] a season, the goddess of Growth/plants/agriculture ["tamed, beneficial" Nature]...That last one is generally viewed by people that worship the gods of Men (which druids do not) as "the" goddess of [all] "Nature," with other nature-related deities being somehow subordinent or related to her.

Again, that "personification" is not what druids do or worship. Those are the purview of clerics [who serve "the Gods of Men," the setting's pantheon]. There have been other "Nature gods" before this one..there are likely to be ones after...but "NATURE" will still exist, regardless of what face or name some folk want [or "need"] to give it to comprehend.

Druids connect/commune/channel with Nature, itself, not some face/facet/representation thereof. That connection requires a particular attunement and particular rite and incantation [in the druidic tongue, of course] to enact their magics and "invoke"/channel nature's powers....and to Umbran's comment below, part of that particular connection/attunement is maintaining a Neutral alignment.

It's that simple.

If you "stray," significantly and/or repeatedly, and your alignment shifts...think of it like... a lens going out of focus...or askew from the "window," so you can'tdon't "see" the full picture in frame...that state of being "off center/out of focus" prevents the proper channel/opening/connection to have nature magic/drudic powers "flow"/work properly...It's the same as -and a combination of- a misspoken magic word in an incantation can blow up a spell in a mage's face AND a cleric who acts against the teachings and beliefs of their espoused deity...the connection to the "divine energies" that enact the cleric's magic/powers is lost.

It could be fun to imagine a world like that of NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy (not much of a spoiler here, but I'm adding the tags to be extra careful):[sblock]In her universe, Father Earth, the conscious, living spirit of the planet, is actually opposed to life.[/sblock]

I suppose it "could." But that's not how I view it or have it viewed in my game setting...as well as inconistent with my understanding of what a "Druid" and [the powers/forces of] "Nature," generally, is meant to be/mean.

If nature does not care, then why does alignment enter into it? Why does an "evil" druid lose their powers?

See above.

I will add that for my game Alignment does matter. The alignment [traditionally] assigned to Nature and "natural" things, like animals, plants, base elementals is "true Neutral" because it is the system term/equivalent of, both, "Balance" and "UNaligned." Law Chaos, Good, Evil, they all exist. They all "matter" to those who seek the supremacy or one over the other. That is not a concern druids -in my setting/games- have. What druids care -because the patterns and cycles of "Nature/natural law" has shown them through the eons- is that NOT Law nor Chaos nor Good nor Evil become dominant and throw "the Balance" of Nature out of whack. Every imbalance "ripples," like a stone tossed in a still pond, and so is a threat to the whole of Nature/the Balance/creation, itself ..a.k.a. the entire cosmos/multiverse.

And, thus, "heroic" druid PCs acting within adventuring parties to prevent the rampant spread of Evil, thwart unfettered Chaos, fight against "Lawful" injustices, and keep a discerning eye on thriving Good are not some unusual thing, at all...Of course, Good holding an unhindered upper-hand is nearly unheard of for any significant amount of time, e.g. The goodly king who rules in peace and beneficence over his lands for the last 20 (or even 100) years, doesn't really outweigh/matter for the continent-wide organization of druids in the scheme of the countless servants of evil: orcs, trolls, demon-summoning cultists, raging dragons, monstrous ["unnatural"] abominations, undead, et al., inhabiting, spreading, and laying desolation in other lands.

Are not "good" and "evil" just two more parts of the Grand Scheme of Things?

Indeed they are..and neither is the concern of a druid or a "path" for a druid [in my world/setting] to pursue. They are to be watched/monitored and staunched when necessary.

Why does nature differentiate if it does not care?

See above re: the working of druidic magic/training/powers. Nature isn't "differentiating." The DRUIDS have to function within this particular ethos or be unable to properly access its power, which simply "is."

There seems to be difficulty NOT viewing things through the side/view of Nature, as an entity/personification, "giving" or "granting" druids power. Not "priests of nature" having to attune/connect to access [or "draw out/evoke," if you like] the power that Nature simply "is"/contains. The two are not the same thing.

In a game where there's no mechanical impact of alignment (so, you cannot magically detect good or evil) *how* does Nature differentiate those who have gone astray if there is no sentience of any kind to it to judge?

Well...again, see above. 1) No one said anything about a game where alignment has "no mechanical impact." 2) Nature doesn't "differentiate." 3) The Druid has to do things properly to gain Nature's power.

...Yeah. I think that covers it.

 

[Celebrim]

Ultimately, though, my players and I found that alignment just wasn't adding value to our games.

On the one hand, I have no real problem with removing alignment from your game if it isn't adding value.

I just have a pet peeve regarding the claim that people removed alignment from the game because it was getting in the way of their complex exploration of morality. This claim I find almost universally bogus, and is generally advanced because the speaker doesn't want to engage with the idea of morality in their game and feels its in some sense getting in the way to continually have to think of their characters as being good or evil or whatever when they want to be engaging in the game in some other way - such as kicking down doors, killing things, and taking their stuff or playing a game where the primary aesthetic of play was overcoming challenges through ruthless play without worrying about whether such ruthlessness labelled your character. As you put it, you didn't want to "worry what the multiverse had to say about their moral characteristics". That's perfectly valid.

It's just all too often, I feel like - to preempt the claim that their style and aesthetics of play are some how inferior or less mature than some one else - we get claims about how the group dropped alignment because it was kid's stuff, and no serious group would engage with morality in such a simplistic and trite framework. And while I could agree about the simplistic and trite framework, never once have I heard any group that bragged about how they dropped alignment because they were so sophisticated, actually then go on to approach questions of morality through a more complex framework. For example, I've never heard any group drag something like Pendragon's Virtue/Vice system into D&D to replace the "simplistic" alignment, or out of their supposed concern with deep moral complexity invent something even more complex than that.

Stereotypically, I refer to this argument as, "Arguing against the alignment system from within it." That is to say, almost invariably the intellectual justification for discarding alignment tends to be that morality is subjective anyway (an alignment claim, namely Chaotic), and that things like Good and Evil are merely human created ideas (an alignment claim, namely Neutrality), and so forth. In other words, while the real motivation is probably just, "Alignment is getting in the way of my goals of play in a dungeon crawl, which don't have anything to do with exploring morality", the intellectual claims to justify their preference are based on claims about the "real" nature of morality, that are no more complex and often less complex than the alignment system itself. The result always strikes me as rather like an NPC in a game world trying to convince a PC that True Neutrality, or Chaotic Evil, or Lawful Good, or whatever is obviously the One True Way. Isn't it obvious?

Not saying you are doing this - satisfyingly you've actually written in a way that suggests you aren't -- but it's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, that people who drop alignment tend to be snooty about it, and claim "badwrongfun" on anyone that doesn't.

 

[Umbran]

But doctrine of karma aren't incoherent at the surface as you suggest. To posit a natural law that results in evil people being cut off from a certain source of power or wellbeing doesn't make it the case that nature is sentient and cares about things.

"Technically correct is the best kind of correct!"

If your mechanic says your car doesn't care what kind of gas you put into it, and you put in leaded gas and kill your catalytic converter that costs $1K parts-and-labor to replace, do you think, "But the car isn't *sentient*, it doesn't have *opinions*," is a reasonable and sufficient defense for your mechanic to make? Do you think that would hold up in small claims court? Or would the judge look at the mechanic funny and call them out for sophistry?

In normal use, if one is told, "Nature does not care about X," a reasonable individual will take it to mean that X does not matter in relation to Nature. If you feel a need to later justify otherwise, I suggest your position is not as coherent as you believe, at the very least in the linguistic sense. If it is not posed in coherent language, we cannot accept that it is coherent logic, now can we?

I am not a practicing Hindu or Buddhist, so I am going to approach this more colloquially. From this direction, "karma" has two forms:

1) The Practical: When you do something morally bad, you set off a chain of events that will eventually come around to bite you on the butt. There's an actual literal chain of events that you could not foresee beforehand, but the evil you did can be traced from point to point until it comes back to you. In this form, a GM would actually have to have a chain of events and a mechanism through which the druid lost their powers as a result. The books do not give us such a mechanism I am aware of, and you'd have to do a bit of work before you aren't the mechanic above, saying, "Nature doesn't care, but...."

2) The Mystical: When you do something morally bad, your moral wrongness is enforced upon you (typically in your next life). In this case, there is a measurement that takes place - either there is a willful judgement by an entity, or (to mix my cosmologies) your soul is weighed against a feather, or whatever. In whatever manner the measurement is made, the end result is a system that discerns your moral state, and puts you in the appropriate state as a result - the system "cares", maybe not in a human emotional sense, but in a sense that there is a cause and effect that depends on your moral state, and saying otherwise makes you the mechanic, again.

In neither case, there's a cause an effect going on that, "nature doesn't care," serves to hide, rather than elucidate. Nature doesn't care, but it is apparently really good at obfuscation regardless? Is that where we are going?

 

[uzirath]

On the one hand, I have no real problem with removing alignment from your game if it isn't adding value.

I just have a pet peeve regarding the claim that people removed alignment from the game because it was getting in the way of their complex exploration of morality. . . . Not saying you are doing this - satisfyingly you've actually written in a way that suggests you aren't -- but it's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, that people who drop alignment tend to be snooty about it, and claim "badwrongfun" on anyone that doesn't.

I get that peeve. It's obnoxious when people manufacture overwrought arguments for simply getting what they want.

I love hearing other people's perspectives about these things. It's easy to imagine that our experiences are universal, but it just takes a few minutes on these message boards to see how it's not so. The gamer circles that I moved through in high school and college generally had no problem with alignment in standard dungeon crawl games. It was a great shorthand to remind you what type of character you were playing. And, if you wanted to be Chaotic Neutral, nobody would stop you (unless maybe the rest of the PCs eventually kicked you out of the Scooby Gang for being a self-centered git).

We found it more of a hindrance in games where there was a lot of social complexity: political factions, different motivations, people making do, striving toward heroism and sometimes failing, etc. It was fun to roleplay through the complexity, learning who you could trust and who you couldn't, developing alliances and relationships, occasionally having to choose the lesser of two evils, etc. For these games, having a spell tell you that so-and-so was this alignment or that alignment just felt goofy. We didn't want you to be able to check the alignment yellow pages to find out whether this god/religion was good or evil or lawful or chaotic. You had to make your judgments based on your interactions with them. This is not to say that PCs weren't held to a consistent ethos. They were, and XP was on the line if you diverged from your ethos with no reason.

Eventually, this led me to GURPS and its system of advantages and disadvantages to describe a character's motivations, aspirations, and weaknesses. But a number of the folks I gamed with back then stuck with homebrew D&D variations or jumped to other systems.

 

[Celebrim]

We found it more of a hindrance in games where there was a lot of social complexity: political factions, different motivations, people making do, striving toward heroism and sometimes failing, etc. It was fun to roleplay through the complexity, learning who you could trust and who you couldn't, developing alliances and relationships, occasionally having to choose the lesser of two evils, etc. For these games, having a spell tell you that so-and-so was this alignment or that alignment just felt goofy. We didn't want you to be able to check the alignment yellow pages to find out whether this god/religion was good or evil or lawful or chaotic. You had to make your judgments based on your interactions with them. This is not to say that PCs weren't held to a consistent ethos. They were, and XP was on the line if you diverged from your ethos with no reason.

In these cases, it's less of a problem that an alignment system exists, than that spells which let you obtain that information are so readily available and difficult to thwart without access to magic (which itself can be a telling sign).

Divination is far and away the most difficult school of magic for a GM to deal with. First, because you have to account for its presence whenever you are writing out a mystery and craft your clues, whether to be found or thwarted, accordingly. And second because many of the divinations spells require you as a GM to have considerable foresight regarding the future. Crafting suitable responses to divination queries can often be challenging, and in some cases downright impossible since you as the GM can't actually predict how events will play out.

I confess that in my homebrew D&D, spells like Detect Evil are subtly nerfed, both in that most mortals - even if they are evil - aren't evil enough to show up "on radar", and because detecting someone that is trying to hide their aura is an opposed skill check. This is done partially with a view toward simplifying my life as a GM with respect to plots with a lot of intrigue and treachery, and partially with a view toward putting skill monkey classes on a more level playing field with spell-casting classes. So similar nerfs also apply to things like "Spider Climb" so that it doesn't obsolete being able to climb, and so forth.

Generally though, I find that I can always use the labels to increase complexity, rather than decrease it. "Who you can trust" is not a simple matter of casting "Know Alignment". Lawful Neutral characters are not necessarily more trust worthy than Chaotic Neutral ones. The Lawful Neutral character could be a spy. Knowing his alignment doesn't tell you where his loyalty lies, only that it lies somewhere, and if you are not his liege, then he may not have the slightest qualm about lying to protect his liege. It might actually be right their spelled out in his code, so that he can lie with more confidence and less guilt than a Chaotic who nominally doesn't believe there is even such a thing as objective Truth. Likewise, the Chaotic Neutral character may be loyal first and foremost to themselves, but they may be in love with you and perceive you as the most valuable thing in the world other than themselves. A person's ethos, labeled in the simple axis provided by the alignment system, tells you something, but it doesn't tell you enough to fully understand someone. It only gives you some very broad understanding of how they are most likely going to leap with respect to particular issues when they are under stress.

Sometimes complexity comes about when players fail to consider that and simplistically imagine that you can solve all the world's problems by sorting the hats, as the above story indicates. (Incidentally, believing you can solve all the world's problems by sorting the hats is in my game a very Lawful Evil perspective, so the players were ironically engaged in the very behavior they condemned, ironically validating the evil businessman's world view.)

I try to have a campaign world which is truly polytheistic, as opposed to the henotheism normally seen in primitive D&D where every character worships a single god privately. As such, knowing which deity a character renders homage to, doesn't necessarily tell you what they believe - only that they are engaged in an act of corporate worship, or trying to appease someone they despise, or otherwise engaged in "developing alliances and relationships". Nor can you "detect alignment" on a deity, and while there are general perceived alignments for deities, even their own cults sometimes disagree over the particulars and nuances both of what the deity stands for, and how their dictates are best carried out.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If you have some sort of druid-type characters in your campaign (i.e., some sort of magic user who channels the forces of the natural world), how do they fit into your cosmology and metaphysics?

Back in the 80s, I was actually kinda into Celtic Mythology and fiction based upon it, so my sense of Druids is that they're mysterious (because few historical records and none of them reliable) tribal mystics - they were reputedly healers, judges, and lore-keepers, as well as credited with magical powers, particularly precognition and shape-shifting. Another layer of my thinking about Druids comes from the fact there have been at least two Druid revivals, one late in the 18th century in England, one more recently as part of the New Age and neo-pagan movements - in fact, I've personally known a neo-pagan Druid, and been to Druid rituals. I like the idea of the Druid, in fantasy and other RPGs, as a priest of an abandoned 'Old Religion,' perhaps vanished, perhaps working in secret, or maybe just marginalized by more modern religions and magical practices.
When the D&D World Axis/Dawn War cosmology started coming out, I thought the Druid should've been involved in the powers of the Primordials (maybe not worshipping them or fighting on their side, but mortals placating and calling upon them, perhaps, or drawing on their power indirectly), instead D&D came up with the 'Primal Spirits.' Meh, OK. Not as interesting as being with the runners-up in the cosmic war of creation.

Is Nature aligned with gods of Good or Evil? Does it have a moral component? Could you have an evil druid? Would Nature care about that? Or a druid of death (since death is a part of life)?

Druids in my old AD&D campaign world were, perforce, Neutral and devoted too moorcockian 'balance' between the extremes of law/chaos & good/evil. So nature did not have any moral or ethic components. A druid that turned Evil would simply lose his Druidness until he returned to the fold. And, sure, death is part of life - the sickle was a druid symbol, and also a symbol of death, for instance.

What about the trope of a tainted wilderness? Might there be druids who have strayed so far from Nature's path that the animals they create are warped abominations? What's the fluff behind this? Could there be a druid who is partial to Lovecraftian horrors (or demons, elementals, undead creatures, etc.), drawing power from a different "Nature" entirely?

Druid as defender of nature feels a little forced and anachronistic, to me - conservationism only dates to the 19th century, environmentalism to the mid 20th.

How do you imagine druids, Nature, and druidic orders and organizations in your game world(s)?

I think my favorite role for them is as the remnants of a pre-divine world order, calling upon forces older than the gods. Not quite lovecraftian (older still, & alien), though, if there were pre-human civilization, maybe the first humans to scrape together the supernatural power to stand up to them. Druids (& witches, shamans, etc) would exist in the wilderness and the smallest most backwards thorps & villages, the fringes & hinterlands of the divine-religion dominated strongholds of civilization, even further removed from the mainstream than wizards & sorcerers.

 

[MNblockhead]

For me it depends on the campaign.

In prior 5e campaigns, alignment had not mechanical effect. Druids were just generic nature worshipers that could be corrupt and villainous (like the Druids in Curse of Strahd), pro-civilization but wanted to shephard it into being better stewards of nature, or the classic 1e true neutrals. Players could play their druid's alignment and relationship to nature however they wanted.

In my current campaign, alignment matters. Alignment is associated with philosophical stances with allies an enemies. Even for non-clerics, acting for or against your alignment has mechanical ramifications as well as narrative repercussions. I use a boon and bane system on top of the reputation variant rule.

In this campaign, Druids can be any alignment. Nature is unaligned. Druids are drawing on an ancient magic power that may have been the original source of magic before divine and arcane magic. Nature doesn't care what Druids use their power for. But if nature is destroyed, Druid may lose their power. I say "may" because what does "nature" mean? I am inclined that it at least involves life. But this may be something Druids and scholars debate, along with whether nature is "the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations" or whether it includes humans. Read "humans" to include any "civilized" "peoples."

*MOST* NPC druids in my campaign value life, diversity, and balance. But that can lead many of them to be "evil" as alignment works in my campaign because they may release plagues on a city to cut down the population. Or decimate populations with violent and organized attacks, à la Thanos.

They have emotions. Drusilla, and important Druid NPC in the Rappan Athuk campaign, is stated as true neutral in the book. Yet because some humans killed her original animal companion 20 years ago, she is vengeful. Based on an add-on encounter with her in the Zelkor's Ferry booklet and how things played out in my game, I play her as lawful neutral. She will make and keep agreements with nearby settlements and groups in order to protect areas important to her, but is unlikely to be either merciful or cruel if those agreements are broken.

CE seems the most opposed to traditional Druidic philosophy, but I can see someone who chaff's at society and rules being attracted to the wild and that same person growing to hate and to seek to destroy everyone who represents the society he rejected.

 

[pemerton]

I've certainly played in sophisticated, morally complex games that maintained the traditional alignment system. Ultimately, though, my players and I found that alignment just wasn't adding value to our games. The GMs wanted to simply focus on developing NPCs with rich personalities, goals, and backstories, without worrying what the multiverse had to say about their moral characteristics.

I haven't played with mechanical alignment since the mid-1980s. In my 4e campaign the players gave their PCs alignments as per the rules, but this has no mechanical significance - it's a type of label.

I think the AD&D alignment categories can be rendered broadly coherent: it's not in doubt that selfishness, and disregard of the rights and wellbeing of others, is evil, while respecting those things is good; but there is a dispute over whether the pathway to goodness is through social order and self-control (which the LG and CE both believe) or is through individual self-realisation (with the CG and LE both believe).

What's not coherent, in my view, is the metaphysical presentation that reaches its pinnacle in Planescape, which suggests that LG and CG, so far from being competing claims about the pathway to goodness, are both correct (because in the metaphysical presentation both the Seven Heavens and Olympus are places where wellbeing, truth and beauty are realised).

If a game isn't focused on the disagreement between the LG and CG as to the proper pathway to goodness, than I don't think even non-metaphysical alignment has anything to offer. In my 4e Dark Sun game, for instance, we didn't bother with alignment for PCs because it's got no relevance to that setting and its themes.