Was V's act evil? (Probable spoilers!)

[Barcode]

Rich, as a storyteller, has portrayed this as an evil act. V is influenced by evil souls, he is casting evil spells, he looks eeeevil. The dragon, on the other hand, was in his last moments, given some sympathetic qualities - she surrendered, she was horrified. If genocide itself didn't ring any evil bells, the genocidal act was deliberately shown to have killed half-dragons who were possibly, even probably, innocents. As a storyteller, Rich has shown V as evil.

As a DM, Rich would be putting the V's player in a bad, and wrong, position, IMO. If you want to allow your players to have fun hacking and slaying the evil creatures of the world, you can't be giving them sympathetic qualities at the moment of death. You can't be pulling on the heartstrings of the players by illustrating the plight of the creatures children, orphaned by the PC's acts. You can't be making the players feel bad for following the core ethic of the system, killing things and taking their stuff.

D&D really needs a level of moral absolutism to be fun, and Rich as DM would have made a mistake in degrading that absolutism by giving irredemably evil characters sympathetic qualities.

Thank goodness that OOTS is not a campaign, Rich is a storyteller and not a DM, making this a good story and not a bad game.

 

[hamishspence]

Not everyone goes with- "kill things and take stuff" is primary- sometimes its secondary to "rescuing people from attack"

Some of the creatures don't even have wings (medium half-dragons shouldn't, but the one with axe and shield does, sugesting that OOTS half-dragons are winged)

If you just look at "Same as base creature" then you might say they are same morally, but if you read the actual sample half-dragon's alignment in MM- "Often Chaotic Evil" then killing them becomes even more dubious than killing the full dragons.

 

[Hejdun]

If you're playing the Dungeons and Dragons where the goal of your PC is to fastidiously avoid the accumulation of wealth and power in your pursuit to redeem the souls of evil creatures through... I don't know, tough love or something-- then you have deviated just a teensy bit from the core experience of seeking out evil creatures, slaying them righteously, and accumulating wealth and power so that you can slay ever more powerful evil creatures.

QFT. I think people are using a bit too much of their modern morality to judge this action, and that's also one reason some emotions are getting heated. There's a giant gaping chasm between saying "V's act wasn't evil" and "Hitler had the right idea." It seems like almost everyone who has responded to this is coming from a Frodo perspective. And it's fine that Frodo never killed anybody, but if Sam hadn't killed those Orcs, he'd never have rescued Frodo. And if all of Gondor was like Frodo, they'd never have lasted. It sure seems that almost everyone here as a vastly different DnD experience than I have.

I'm not too interested in what his motivation was. I'm far more interested in actions and results. From my perspective, an act is to be judged by what actions you took and what results were had. Motivations are important in-so-far as they give you insight into what that person is going to do in the future.

If you're an evil (maybe even black) dragon and you slaughtered a village because you were hungry and bored, then killing the village was obviously an evil act. If you're a band of adventurers and you had no way to stop the BBEG from destroying the world but to also destroy the village he's in, it's also evil to kill the village. They're just going to feel a whole lot worse about it. But motivation only matters in regard to future actions. In the dragon's case, he's obviously going to do something just as evil in the future the next time he's bored and hungry. You don't have to worry about the adventurers razing the next village they visit to the ground.

 

[I'm A Banana]

As a DM, Rich would be putting the V's player in a bad, and wrong, position, IMO. If you want to allow your players to have fun hacking and slaying the evil creatures of the world, you can't be giving them sympathetic qualities at the moment of death. You can't be pulling on the heartstrings of the players by illustrating the plight of the creatures children, orphaned by the PC's acts. You can't be making the players feel bad for following the core ethic of the system, killing things and taking their stuff.

D&D really needs a level of moral absolutism to be fun, and Rich as DM would have made a mistake in degrading that absolutism by giving irredemably evil characters sympathetic qualities.

Thank goodness that OOTS is not a campaign, Rich is a storyteller and not a DM, making this a good story and not a bad game

You're being WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too judgmental about people's games, here. A lot of games (mine included) get a lot of entertainment from playing with what it means to be cosmically Good or Evil against a practical or personal background, that conflict between this objective force in the world and your personal needs and desires.

I mean, the game plays the same whether you're Good or Evil or Neutral, so there is no "wrong alignment" to be. So V comitted evil. So their alignment might be evil. So they might have a damned soul. As far as the player is concerned: So what? Maybe that's more fun.

It seems like almost everyone who has responded to this is coming from a Frodo perspective. And it's fine that Frodo never killed anybody, but if Sam hadn't killed those Orcs, he'd never have rescued Frodo. And if all of Gondor was like Frodo, they'd never have lasted. It sure seems that almost everyone here as a vastly different DnD experience than I have.

What's wrong with some PC's not being Good?

It's a label. It's the old "would an adventurer by any other alignment not kick so much goblin butt?"

It doesn't matter.

I mean, if it matters to your character, then obviously you need to hold your own character to higher (or lower, or whatever) standards.

But it really, mechanically, narratively, doesn't matter.

V did evil. So what? It made for a more interesting game/story/plot, and so it was the fun thing to do. No one got hurt, no player experience changed, all that happened was that things got more interesting. Yay, yay for evil actions and evil PCs! Hooray!

Why is it a problem for V to be evil? What does it change?

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I think you misapprehend the core experience. The core experience isn't to seek out evil creatures, slay them, and repeat on an escalating scale. The experience is to stop evil, then stop greater evil.

In that case I'd say rather too much of the core rulebook is given over to ways to "stop" evil by killing it-- complete with rules on how to escalate in power, rules for ever more powerful tools for accomplishing the task of killing things, and rules for easily discerning the good guys from the guys you're supposed to kill.

But maybe I'm misapprehending the core experience. I'm a little too easily swayed by staggering mountains of evidence, I suppose.

 

[Maggan]

And it's fine that Frodo never killed anybody, but if Sam hadn't killed those Orcs, he'd never have rescued Frodo.

And what if Frodo hadn't spared Gollum?

/M

 

[robertliguori]

And what if Frodo hadn't spared Gollum?

/M

Sam: "I'm so sorry, Mr. Baggins!" *dropkick*

Everyone knows he was the real hero of the story, anyways.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In that case I'd say rather too much of the core rulebook is given over to ways to "stop" evil by killing it-- complete with rules on how to escalate in power, rules for ever more powerful tools for accomplishing the task of killing things, and rules for easily discerning the good guys from the guys you're supposed to kill.

You don't kill evil itself, you kill the things that commit evil, if that is the only way to stop the evil (and it usually is).

Evil isn't the bad guy. The bad guys are the bad guys. Evil is just what some of the bad guys happen to be. Not every Evil action is committed by an Evil thing.

The monster manuals have blink dogs, angels, faery spirits, crocodiles, vermin, and all sorts of non-Evil things that you kill.

The spells help you determine what is evil, but it doesn't tell you that killing such a thing is automatically permitted, or even much of a good idea.

Evil is in the action, not in the creature.

The core experience is not a fight against evil creatures -- the fights against giant beetles and mindles golems and angry crocodiles and vengeful angels and self-interested assassins and all sorts of other non-evil things argue in spades against that. Indeed, in OotS, it has involved fights against good creautres (Miko before her fall) as well as evil. You're not looking at all the evidence.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Imo, yes, it was an evil act. But if I was in V's shoes, I'd have done the same. If someone broke my children's legs, I'd visit so much hurt on them, it wouldn't even be funny. The law be damned. I'd hunt the person down. I'd break his arms, his legs, his fingers, his toes. I would in fact, make his suffering legendary. Then, if I thought there was a chance, no matter how small, some relative of the dragon would come seeking revenge on MY KIDS, not me, I'd genocide every damn one of them. My kids living is worth an infinite number of beings dying.

That said, it's still evil, no matter how you justify it. V knows this, and she chose to live with the consequences to protect her family. Now, might a red dragon come calling, he will know what fate is in store for his family, should he fail to take out V. She just cashed in the biggest insurance policy in history. An eternity in hell is a small price to pay for the safety of her family.

 

[Maggan]

She just cashed in the biggest insurance policy in history.

That's one way of looking at it. If I were the DM, it would be quite the opposite. It's not as if every lunatic and evil mastermind, be they dragon or not, has a family to worry about.

And if that person could control V, maybe through her family, then that person would become very, very powerful indeed.

Would the evil dude succeed in enslaving V? Maybe, maybe not. But boy would he try.

/M