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

[Imaro]

I gotta side with Irda Ranger on this. D&D is a poor medium for this sort of game. Not that this sort of game is bad, it most certainly isn't. But, I do think it's bad for D&D. D&D focuses on killing, plain and simple. The entire game is set up that you are going to go out somewhere, with weapons, and kill stuff. This has been true of D&D since forever.

Yes, not every game focuses on combat, that's true, but, to be honest, that's certainly the direction the mechanics are pointing you towards. Heh, there's a reason we call it Kill XP.

I think there are games which can do this sort of exploration very well. I'm just thinking that D&D isn't one of them. It's a very poor tool for this sort of campaign.

See and I disagree, since the act of killing things and taking stuff has nothing to do with whether D&D is suited to exploring morality. I actually think it has more to do with the setting than the actual game mechanics... I mean honestly I feel like your ignoring Dark Sun, Planescape, Eberron, etc. all pretty popular D&D settings where moral relativity is actually a part of the setting.

 

[Rechan]

But, I do think it's bad for D&D.

Huh?

How is it bad for D&D? Is a morally ambiguous game going to poison D&D? Is how I play going to seep into your game? Will it infect your dice? Does it somehow degrade the books?

D&D is the most widely played RPG. People who have never even picked up a die know what D&D is. So it naturally can accommodate a wide assortment of games.

I understand when you say that D&D is poorly equipped, from a mechanical point of view, to handle many games. But I will fight you to the ends of the earth that it is poorly equipped story-wise.

D&D focuses on killing, plain and simple. The entire game is set up that you are going to go out somewhere, with weapons, and kill stuff. This has been true of D&D since forever.

What, you think there's no killing in morally ambiguous games? There's tons of killing. Usually it involves turning on your allies. Or killing some OTHER group after killing half of the FIRST group because it's the SECOND group whose really at fault.

"We're good, they're evil" is not the only excuse to throw down on a fight.

IF D&D is merely "The combat", then what goes on between the combats, and the reasons for those combats, is irrelevant. If it's irrelevant, then both moral absolutism and moral ambiguity are the same: window dressing.

 

[Rechan]

See and I disagree, since the act of killing things and taking stuff has nothing to do with whether D&D is suited to exploring morality. I actually think it has more to do with the setting than the actual game mechanics... I mean honestly I feel like your ignoring Dark Sun, Planescape, Eberron, etc. all pretty popular D&D settings where moral relativity is actually a part of the setting.

Not to mention, as Hussar himself points out, so does Greyhawk.

But, what Imaro said.

 

[Rechan]

Hell, many monsters in D&D aren't evil and you still fight them.

Owlbears aren't evil.
Ankhegs aren't evil.
Elementals aren't evil.
Gibbering mouther - hideous monster! Not evil.
Gorgon isn't evil.
Hydra aren't evil.
Lizardfolk? How many times have you fought Lizardfolk? They're NEUTRAL.
Mimic: Not evil.
Oozes? Not evil.
Otyugh? Not evil.
Spiders of all stripes? Not evil.
Golems: Not evil.
Wyverns? Not evil.
THE TARRASQUE: Not Evil.
All animals and vermin: not evil.

And yet, somehow, PCs find the motivation to fight and kill the above.

Regardless of if the enemy is good, evil, neutral, if their intentions mean well, or if they're wholly justified in their actions, if they were born evil or were raised evil... if they're trying to eat your face, you put your sword in them.

And delving into a dungeon in order to hack through its traps and defenders, for the loot? That's not inherently Good, nor Ambiguous. But many an adventure is just that. It wouldn't have changed the Tomb of Horrors if Acererak wasn't a lich, but just a wizard who built all those traps just to protect his loot after he died. The goal was to survive the gauntlet to get the payout, and have the bragging rights of surviving the Tomb.

 

[Jasperak]

Escapism is overrated.

Treating the PCs and their NPCs allies as a football team that you play for against the Evil Orc football team is all well and good, but you don't have to be "working through your issues" to want your games to take place in a more ambiguous moral or political landscape.

I am going to try and clear up this whole "working through your issues" bit people keep bringing up.

Although I have gamed with a few that wanted to play "Moral Dilemmas and Existentialism" for a short time. Those games tended to become more about individual players working through their own issues and bordered on "therapeutic role-playing." Those people would be better served by reading Sartre than playing in games that I enjoy.

I want to know why people think I am painting with a wide brush, people that want moral questions in their game by this comment. Do I really have to say "at my table", "in my experience", "your mileage may vary" when I said specifically my feelings based on the handful of people I've gamed with.

Or did I get closer with this?

I can see how what I have said may be taken that way, but it is not necessarily my intention. I have a big problem with DMs that want to explore their feelings about their poor orcs that only raid because they have been kicked out of their homeland.

What actually pissed me off in the past was an idiot DM that wanted to explore the Israel-Palestinian Conflict using Elves and Dwarves. He had no bloody clue about evil nor about geo-political issues. This was about four years ago; both of us were in our late-twenties. This guy had a problem with paladins killing babies. He feels sorry for serial killers because they "don't have a choice."

I do not play D&D or any other RPG so some one can work through their issues. If they want to have a conversation about politics, religion, or the meaning of life, fine lets go to the bar. But keep that crap out of the GAME. I do not play so I can feel bad about slaughtering orcs and taking their pie.

I tell a story about how one specific DM tried working through his questions on life in the game and then say "I do not play D&D... so someone can work though their issues." and I am labeled a BADWRONGFUN person. That guy needed a therapist! Again do I have to say AMT, IMHO, YMMV, etc..?

Do I have to spell out that for the first sentence that if a DM sets up a situation that is supposed to evoke pity and I don't buy it because of the melodramic BS (alluded to by my "their feelings for their poor orcs" comment) I am implying every DM. Does it really change anything if I remove the 's' from DMs and change the 'their' to 'his'? I would be pissed off at any DM that acted like this at my table.

I know I have said in later posts that one of the reasons I dislike the moral ambiguity questions is because I have never at my table, in my experience, and your mileage may vary, had a DM that could create a dramatic situation that properly evoked those feelings or questions. That does not imply that no one can play that way.

Some more

I have seen enough people try to work through their issues playing D&D that I don't think it needs to be actively encouraged by Scott and the design team, and that's what I think would be more likely to happen if his vision of evil was the default assumption.

WOW, imagine two Drizzit fanbois that not only have to deal with their character's heritage and naturally evil tendencies, but now are hamstrung because they have to question everything they kill. They cannot even rely on some good old orcs to kill because the DM is defining them in morally relativistic terms.

At my table I have seen one of these people go brain dead and unable to act. This poor kid shut down because he couldn't make a morally ambiguous decision. Seriously. He couldn't figure out what he wanted to do. The other guy was just shallow and as far as I know left the game.

Look I fairly admit I have seen the corner cases here. Most people probably haven't seen the absurdity I have seen that playing D&D can entail. But understand this, I mean what I say and have nothing to take back. I truly wish I was able to express my feelings about this question in a more concise manner, but it is what it is.

Seriously, if I mean to attack or insult anyone I will come out and do it. That was what I feared I would do when this thread started. I thought it was going to veer into real world morality. I am glad that it stayed in game, and hope that we can keep this discussion going for as long as we need to. We are all gamers and I think we can learn from one another.

 

[Jasperak]

Why is it important to your games that orcs are not people? I mean, I will absolutely accept an answer like "because Tolkien did it and we like Tolkien", but why not fight devils? Non-humanoid monsters which are just as intelligent as people, something like the xenomorph from Alien?

I'm just trying to grasp why it's so important to some people that there be things that look like people but don't count as people for them to kill in their games. Again, "tradition" is an acceptable answer, of course.

Truthfully I don't know. It may be because they are humanoid and can represent what our society would become if true EVIL took over. They may represent us if we lost what it means to be human and reverted back to our animalistic behavior.

Some people have mentioned that they use orcs as analogous to certain real world cultures. When that happens they should be treated like the rest of the demi-humans.

 

[Jasperak]

I would hasten to point out that Greyhawk is most definitely based in other genres than Heroic Fantasy. Greyhawk has LOADS of shades of grey and is much more heavily leaning towards pulp and sword and sorcery fantasy than heroic. Look at the actual city of Greyhawk and you'll see that. Zagyg makes himself a god by imprisoning demon lords and draining their power. And he's one of the (sort of) good guys in the setting.

Truth be told, I often lump Heroic fantasy and S&S together. We only played in Greyhawk for a few years, and when we did it was more Heroic than S&S. It had more Tolkien influences I think since I didn't get the hardback until long after we played 2e. Man that was the 80's.

EDIT: We have generally tended to play either highly moral games or amoral games. We have had very little success with the middle ground.

 

[pawsplay]

But if you really want to know: It's because D&D is a lousy medium for moral argument. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is lousy. If you want to explore moral issues there are just much better ways to do it. Read a book; take a class; debate your favorite Priest or Rabbi. Trying to develop your moral compass by playing D&D is most likely to result in both skewed ethics and bad gaming. Further, what are the odds that all the players at the table need to learn the same lesson? Slim to none, I'm thinking.

There are two huge fallacies in this line of argument.

1. That a moral argument means there is a "lesson" involved. In actuality, the whole point of an RPG is to see what happens, so a game can be illuminating without imparting any specific line of moral reasoning.

2. That because the purpose of game is "entertainment," there cannot be other dimensions to why someone chooses to play the way they do. I read Erich Fromm's Escape From Freedom "for fun," but that doesn't make it any less serious a work. I watch action movies "for fun," but I am definitely going to choose ones with moral content I can accept. For instance, a pro-Stalinist action film, no matter how well wrought, is just not going to be light entertainment to me. If I enjoy it, it's because it allows me to look into the mind of its maker, not because light-hearted Stalinism makes for a good action movie. Just because D&D is about certain kinds of adventures means I am required to deactivate my brain and have fun in only one of a number of prescribed fashions. Throwing in some moral content makes a fun game more fun, because a game with less moral content basically has less intelligence and just isn't going to give me what I want. That is not an argument for or against moral relativism in a game, but definitely against apathy. If someone else would rather play in a different fashion, power to them, but how can you knock someone for finding it entertaining if the GM weaves in bits and pieces of this and that picked up in literature class or ethics or Sunday school? I'm not a big fan of, say, football, but I appreciate it when I watch a movie about football and I can verify that football is accurately and intelligently presented for the purposes of the movie. Invincible is not a movie about football, it's a movie about a guy. But it would be less good a movie if football was presented in a rubbish manner. And that's how I feel about ethics. If someone runs a game and it becomes clear they couldn't be bothered to stay awake for the first 15 minutes of Ethics 101, it's just a little but of a letdown.

 

[WalterKovacs]

The question with the klingons is always: how to keep them from taking our stuff without resorting to their tactics. Those are the dramatic situations I like to see characters work through.

That is a HUGE moral question though.

If they did resort to their tactics, they would be no better than the Klingons. They would no longer be able to claim to be "good" at that point.

If both sides are just as bad as each other, it means that the Federation is only "good" because they are the protagonists. However, since it is in part their choices and actions that make them good.

Ultimately, if I am in the mood for "kill 'em and take their stuff" ... I play unalligned (formerly chaotic neutral). I have a character in one 4e game that is effectively LN. Ultimately, that is the "protect the city at all costs allignment." I like the unalligned characters and often have them do the right thing for the wrong reasons ... and the wrong thing for the right reasons.

If you are going to have the characters have allignments, they should probably mean something. A good character, especially lawful good, would probably have some kind of code of ethics. It's not just the ends that matter, but their means as well.

I like how 4e has gone. It's taken a lot of the mechanics of allignment out. The motivations of the players aren't just "I have to keep up my allignment" or "detect evil to see if it's ok to kill this guy."

The whole idea that it's okay to do ANYTHING to an evil creature, and that act won't be evil, seems to be a bit upsetting. In fact, evil creatures do evil things to each other all the time. So, evil is what you do, not just who you do it to.

If a player wants to play a paladin, and it's in a system where the paladin can fall, they are already putting themselves into a situation where they need to work with the DM to know what the paladin can or cannot do without getting powered down. It's not moral arguments ... it's about the paladin trying to find out what he can "get away with". Of course, the whole idea of the paladin is supposed to be a paragon of virtue, not someone looking to find loopholes in order to work the system to their favor. That's not lawful good ... that's lawful evil.

A character doesn't have to be good to get XP and GP from killing things and taking it's stuff. A monster doesn't have to be evil to give XP and GP when you kill it and take it's stuff. Good or evil, especially in a system that doesn't have magic based on seeking it out, isn't going to matter as much. If you went into an orc village and killed everyone, or only wiped out their warriors, and sent the rest packing ... the people in town will see you as heroes either way. Whether your motives were good (protect the town), evil (you just like to kill stuff) or indifferent (you seek adventure) you protected the town from orcs, so they will treat you accordingly. It's pretty much just what the party as a whole thinks about it.

It's likely a lot easier for characters to have motivations, goals, allegiances, than a vague allignment that they then have to disagree with their DM over what the consquences of the allignment are. You can have a party of "good" adventurers ... and if they are all motivated by "good" things, that's fine. If, on occaision, they end up doing something wrong, that's something their character may need to worry about, and as a good character, it may be something that nags at them. If they consistently do bad things, they may end up changing their allignment. It's up to players and DMs to discuss how they want the game to go, and how much allignment really matters.

Does it really matter, in the grand scheme of things, whether orcs choose to be evil but can be redeemed (albeit unlikely at late points in life), or they are born evil and can't be any other way, or are misunderstood and "equally good/evil" as the human/elf/dwarf/etc town they are attacking ... shouldn't really matter if the goals of the game are to save the town while killing orcs and taking their stuff. If they HAVE to be cosmically, absolutely evil ... then obviously, there is something more about the game than just beer and pretzels. It either doesn't matter, or it does. And if it does matter, than there should be a reason for it mattering. It may be "easier" to kill orcs if they are pure evil ... but then why not just have more unquestionably evil creatures, like demons and devils and undead or magical constructs? And, in that kind of game ... would there even be orc babies, let alone would be important to know that the orc baby was evil and SHOULD be killed in that type of game?

 

[Lanefan]

I have no great problem with the party finding itself in situations where there's a moral decision to be made; if only because the decision that gets made, along with the discussion leading up to it, tells me a lot about the players' ideas about how their characters think.

And it's not always a question simply of whether to kill the captives or not. My Sunday game includes a character whose past profession was slaver; leading to a third option sparked by her oft-quoted utterance "Stop taking captives and start taking inventory!".

This in turn led to a long debate (over e-mail between sessions, fortunately) as to whether slavery *was* considered evil in ancient Greek society (which is what the game's realm is based on)...never mind that one player - the one who plays the slaver, in fact - has a spouse with a Masters in Classics.

I'd say it all comes down to how *you* as a player decide to play your character in these moments of decision. Kill 'em all and let the gods sort 'em out? Cure 'em, tie 'em up, and turn 'em over to the authorities? Sell 'em to the slavers? Pat 'em on the heads and let 'em go? All are options. Pick one, after the requisite argument with the rest of your party, and get on with the game.

Lanefan