The Problem of Evil [Forked From Ampersand: Wizards & Worlds]

[Hussar]

To be fair, Eberron also has the irredeemable evil types you don't have to worry when you put them to the sword. The Emerald Claw is to Eberron what the Nazis are to Indiana Jones. If the Quori, Daelkyr or Lords of Dust are involved, there's no question of their evil. The Aurum literally are Bond Villains.

Eberron's a bit of an odd duck to be honest. It really depends on how you want to frame your campaign. If you want the noir aspect to come out, I think you really have to avoid some of the more wahoo elements of Eberron - the Daelkyr and the Quori for example. The Dungeon adventures set in Sharn about the serial murderer (and I forget the names of the adventures) work very well for a more noir feel.

OTOH, doing straight up D&D in Eberron is very easy as well. The one campaign I played in Eberron didn't see too much in the way of moral relativism at all. The bad guys were bad guys and needed killing/stopping.

I suppose any campaign setting can be framed in a similar way. Greyhawk can certainly be seen as a morally relative landscape, or a very traditional one. It all comes down to how you frame the campaign, rather than the entire setting.

 

[Lord Zack]

This thread has made me think a lot. One the one hand I don't like the idea of evil, irredeemable, yet sentient and intelligent mortal beings. The alternative is to have orcs and like in fact not possess free will, and in fact be some kind of simulacrum that is a mockery of humanoids. That idea is not really appealing to me. I could also remove orcs and the like and instead use creature like undead and fiends in they're place. This is not appealing to me either. I like having orcs and the like as part of my campaign world. So the only remaining choice I see is to have them, but treat them like any other humanoid race where there can be both good and evil members of the race. This would of course mean no baby-killing, but here we run into a problem. Either I must have my players never encounter children in evil aligned orc settlements which is damaging to verisimilitude, or I run into the same moral dilemmas. There is the choice of never having the players attack actual settlements, instead always encountering evil orcs in warbands and the like without noncombatants. This whole idea is just headache after headache...

 

[xechnao]

This thread has made me think a lot. One the one hand I don't like the idea of evil, irredeemable, yet sentient and intelligent mortal beings. The alternative is to have orcs and like in fact not possess free will, and in fact be some kind of simulacrum that is a mockery of humanoids. That idea is not really appealing to me. I could also remove orcs and the like and instead use creature like undead and fiends in they're place. This is not appealing to me either. I like having orcs and the like as part of my campaign world. So the only remaining choice I see is to have them, but treat them like any other humanoid race where there can be both good and evil members of the race. This would of course mean no baby-killing, but here we run into a problem. Either I must have my players never encounter children in evil aligned orc settlements which is damaging to verisimilitude, or I run into the same moral dilemmas. There is the choice of never having the players attack actual settlements, instead always encountering evil orcs in warbands and the like without noncombatants. This whole idea is just headache after headache...

You'll have to accept it as... surrealistic. If not you should not have various races that create these verisimilitude problems IMO. Keep it sword & sorcery like Conan the Barbarian and no alignments -perhaps stuff like outlaw, citizen, adventurer and the like. Fantasy creatures are just wizard creations that want to kill people or help people.

 

[Dausuul]

And what about in cases where the PCs are the aggressors, like invading a dragon's lair in order to score its loot, dragon be damned?

Unless monsters are Out There Being Evil, then invading their dungeon for loots and xp is being the aggressive robber kicking in the door and killing the thing in their house.

Dragons fall a lot closer to the "always evil" area for me. (No, I don't have metallic dragons in my campaigns. Ugh.) The way I run them, they're forces of chaos and destruction; greedy, remorseless, and playfully cruel, like a cat with a mouse. They have no more conscience than a crocodile, though a lot more intellect. I doubt I would condemn a paladin to fall for killing a dragon hatchling, although part of that would be due to the hatchling actively trying to eat the paladin's face.

But in any case, I don't run campaigns about the PCs kicking in dungeon doors to score loot, and I don't even use XP any more - the PCs level up when I say they do, usually after achieving some important objective, and it doesn't matter how many monsters they fought on the way.

Even when I run a campaign for evil PCs, they usually have bigger plans afoot than mere plunder. The closest my games come to that type of thing is where the PCs have to go retrieve some sort of MacGuffin and defeat the monsters in between them and it.

Either I must have my players never encounter children in evil aligned orc settlements which is damaging to verisimilitude, or I run into the same moral dilemmas. There is the choice of never having the players attack actual settlements, instead always encountering evil orcs in warbands and the like without noncombatants. This whole idea is just headache after headache...

*shrug* Or you could let the PCs deal with the occasional dilemma. You've just taken out an orc settlement, killed the hostile warriors and rounded up the noncombatants; what are you going to do with the latter? Turn them loose to try and survive on their own? Try to find a local lord or temple open-minded enough to take them in? Take care of them yourselves? Or just butcher them all and accept the stain on your conscience?

Personally, I find choices like that, used sparingly, add a new level of interest to the game and give the players a chance to explore their characters. Obviously, not every adventure can or should be a big moral challenge; most of the time, it's "Here's your quest, there's the MacGuffin, monsters will probably jump you and try to eat you between here and there, defend yourselves as best you can." But once in a while, it's good to give the players a little more scope.

If you don't like it, though, then why do the PCs need to encounter orc settlements? Unless they intentionally set out to hunt the settlements down, they can just fight orc war parties and kill them all without a qualm.

 

[Hussar]

This thread has made me think a lot. One the one hand I don't like the idea of evil, irredeemable, yet sentient and intelligent mortal beings. The alternative is to have orcs and like in fact not possess free will, and in fact be some kind of simulacrum that is a mockery of humanoids. That idea is not really appealing to me. I could also remove orcs and the like and instead use creature like undead and fiends in they're place. This is not appealing to me either. I like having orcs and the like as part of my campaign world. So the only remaining choice I see is to have them, but treat them like any other humanoid race where there can be both good and evil members of the race. This would of course mean no baby-killing, but here we run into a problem. Either I must have my players never encounter children in evil aligned orc settlements which is damaging to verisimilitude, or I run into the same moral dilemmas. There is the choice of never having the players attack actual settlements, instead always encountering evil orcs in warbands and the like without noncombatants. This whole idea is just headache after headache...

When I ran the World's Largest Dungeon, they had a rather lengthy part of the module that dealt with exactly this. Their point was that because of the exigencies of the campaign, having to deal with orc babies was simply beyond the scope of the game. So, they removed all orc babies (or sundry other things).

Having played the module, I think the decision was a good one. It would just be too difficult to include. It would quickly be paralyzing for the players. Like I said before, in a combat heavy game like D&D, where killing is what the characters are expected to do regularly, you have to just bite the bulet and accept that some things just need killing. Otherwise, you chase your tail in circles as everyone tries to be "moral" about the game.

To me, D&D is the wrong vehicle for exploring this sort of thing. There are other games, particularly ones not so focused on killing.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So you would enjoy playing in a game that modeled the Israeli-Palastinian Conflict?

Sorry, I play games to escape reality, not model it badly.

Avoiding politics, let's put it this way:

I like the new Battlestar Gallactica more than the old one.

I would enjoy a game where the PC's had to choose sides between two forces that both had a strong case for why they are right.

To me, this is more enjoyable, usually, than basic hack-and-slay gameplay because it gets to the heart of playing a character, a role: divining their motives, their personality, what they hold dear and what they are willing to discard, what is an axiom for them, and what they might let slide.

It's not about modeling anything, it's about getting the great moments of role playing that are at the heart of what make D&D more entertaining for me than playing Diablo (where there are legions of things to kill without remorse and where it's a lot more fun, frankly, to do it).

I like a world that forces a character to re-examine everything they believe, and to enable my players to either affirm their belief, or to change.

After all, the core of conflict, of any kind, is change.

And resolving conflict is what is fun about most kinds of narrative entertainment (including most games of D&D). Since videogames do the unmitigated violence better, I prefer D&D to be more focused on the character experience, which is rather more unique to the medium because of the massive flexibility players have in creating avatars and the high level of adaptability of the world that no real videogame can model anywhere near as effectively.

For me, the days of D&D involving simple "kill or be killed" gameplay are over, and for the better. There are other things that do that better, if I want it (namely, videogames). I prefer to use a game for what that game can do that no other game can.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

So is washing my car.

I don't want Scott's moral relativism injected into the GAME I play. And I don't play well with players that would rather spend three hours discussing the nature of evil after my paladin has dispatched the orc women and children. Call it elitist or not, I do not play games when I want to analyze evil. I read Kant.

When I play D&D i want to rack up GPs, XPs, and tell stories about how it all went down. Anything else and I begin to think the GAME and its players are taking it/themselves too seriously.

If I ran a game, I wouldn't want players spending three hours talking about this stuff either. I want them to have fun, get loot, and rack up the XP.

I would like to weave the moral relativism into the story I told with the adventure taking turns and shifts jumping around in those shades of grey. My hope would be that like any good story the players would be engaged in the play at the table and have the "ah-ha" moments of pondering and reflection of the big picture in between games. Sort of like how watching a good movie captures something in your brain and you can't get rid of it for hours afterwards.

 

[Dausuul]

When I ran the World's Largest Dungeon, they had a rather lengthy part of the module that dealt with exactly this. Their point was that because of the exigencies of the campaign, having to deal with orc babies was simply beyond the scope of the game. So, they removed all orc babies (or sundry other things).

Having played the module, I think the decision was a good one. It would just be too difficult to include. It would quickly be paralyzing for the players. Like I said before, in a combat heavy game like D&D, where killing is what the characters are expected to do regularly, you have to just bite the bulet and accept that some things just need killing. Otherwise, you chase your tail in circles as everyone tries to be "moral" about the game.

To me, D&D is the wrong vehicle for exploring this sort of thing. There are other games, particularly ones not so focused on killing.

To me, D&D offers the possibility of both. If I want the potential for moral questions to arise, I have orcs and hobgoblins and drow. If I want stuff for the PCs to go out and kill without question, there are undead and demons and devils and golems and assorted unintelligent predatory beasties. I can have a game with plenty of straight-up combat, then throw in some moral questions for a change of pace.

Not that every story arc involving orcs creates moral questions. When there's an orc horde marching out of the wastelands led by an invincible warlord, the PCs don't have to worry about finding homes for the poor orc babies. They're too busy figuring out how to stop the orcs from killing them all. The orc babies are back wherever orcs keep their babies - the horde certainly hasn't brought them along.

(As for the horde itself and the hard life those orc warriors lead, stuck out there in the wastes... eh. Shades of grey are one thing, but I don't go in for moral relativism. Butchering villages full of innocent people is evil, no matter how hard a life you've led or what your culture says about it, and as far as I'm concerned it gives the PCs all the license they need to stop you with lethal force.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And yet earlier editions still had the "Killin' baby orcs is okay, yes or no?" argument.

IME, that depended upon your DM.

For those that ran creatures who were "Cosmically Evil" and thus, irredeemable, killing its offspring was OK- no more morally charged than killing a mound of fire ants that just showed up on your lawn yesterday because the question wasn't "if" said kiddies would grow up to be a hazard to those in the area but "when."

Prevention is, after all, easier and more efficient than remedy.

In campaigns in which MM alignments were generalizations, the answer was universally "No baby-killing allowed." At least, not for the LG types.

 

[pawsplay]

In my games, I assume the PCs are individuals of action, and hence must sometimes act with expediency. That sometimes means bringing the horrors of war. At the same time, I don't like to get mired in endless philosophical debates. I like to challenge my players, but I like to do it in such a way that they have to make a decision, and there are no easy outs.

Recently, my players got to wrestle with what to do with a women impregnated by a dark god whose demon child was able to possess her and control her when it suited its purposes (see Tainted Scion in Heroes of Horror). Initially, it seemed like they were going to simply smoke her and hope they got away with it, despite her being a highborn noble. But by the end of the discussion, they decided that even the Neutral characters were not okay with making her collateral as long as any other possible course of action existed. They took her into custody, kept her secluded until the child was born, and had the child adopted/imprisoned by a friendly NPC. In this way, they avoided killing the mother, and avoided killing a baby, even one that was really and truly cursed with evil. I was comfortable playing it either way, with the PCs as ruthless executioners fighting something evil, or with them deciding to act out of mercy. In the end, they decided to choose the take the hardest possible road, sparing the child because it was evil but still innocent. I thought that it was a very worthwhile play experience and a nice break from the usual Special Forces type scenarios I tend to have with my players.

I think there is value in having orcs that are dangerous but not intrinsically evil. I think there is also value in having them intrinsically evil. I think you can do a lot with making them basically evil but capable of more under the right circumstances. All of these are different stories, different opportunites.

Also, I tend to make a distinction between Good versus Evil and "right" versus "wrong." D&D spells out good as altruism and evil as psychopathy. I am very comfortable being that literally true in a fantasy world, with good or evil acts literally energizing you with some supernatural force. And yet I'm not going to say someone would always be "wrong" for choosing to perform a callous, selfish act that causes suffering. The world is a rough place. Likewise, is it always "right" to follow the dictates of alignment? What if Bahamut appeared in front of a paladin and informed him that so-and-so was completely evil and should be smote, but the paladin recoiled at the idea of assassinating someone and possibly causing a chain of events that led to the suffering of other people besides the named villain? What if a Good deity declared that the world would be better off without orcs? I mean, it might be true, and if you are a Good deity, you might be bound to act on that knowledge.