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

[Spatula]

Where did I say that?

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...ked-ampersand-wizards-worlds.html#post4655946

I want to know why people think I am painting with a wide brush

It could be because you've been lumping anything less than 100% absolutism into one bucket. While perhaps in your head you've only been badmouthing some know-nothing wanna-be philosophers that you've run into in the past, that's not who you're having a discussion with here. And those bad experiences in your past don't have much bearing on what the people who actually are in this thread are discussing.

I think the problem arises when the DM has a different view of the campaign than the player and of course vice-versa.

Well, that I can agree with. You should definitely find a group that matches your own playstyle if you want to actually have fun.

 

[S'mon]

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. .

You didn't like The Matrix?

I guess it was more Gramsci than Stalin though...

 

[Hussar]

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?

Please don't quote out of context and pretend I'm arguing something I'm not. It's not conducive. It's obviously not bad for D&D in that it will poison someone else's game, it's that D&D isn't particularly well suited to this style of game.

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.

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.

But, there's no moral ambiguity there at all. There's no "gee, I want to do the right thing, but, what IS the right thing". That's just playing an evil campaign. Being all evil and killing your allies is Paranoia, not moral ambiguity.

"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.

Again, please don't put words in my mouth. I said that D&D focuses on combat, not that this is the sole reason to play D&D. That D&D focuses on combat is news to no one, particularly you who have claimed the exact same thing time and again.

Again, I didn't say that you CAN'T do it in D&D. You obviously can. My point is, is that D&D isn't particularly well suited for it.

When the solution to almost every problem in D&D is kill it, there isn't a whole lot of room for moralizing of any kind. If killing isn't wrong, if ending the life of another sentient being isn't considered wrong in any way, then there is no moral ambiguity. And, let's face it, most D&D games do play this way. A stack of Dungeon magazine modules proves that.

It's pretty rare that the solution to an adventure in D&D isn't "kill everything in sight".

Yes, there are exceptions. And yes, you can do it. I'm just saying that there are BETTER games for doing it. Not that D&D can't do it.

Is that clear enough?

 

[El Mahdi]

... Do i really have to say "at my table", "in my experience", "your mileage may vary" ... ?

yes!

 

[Irda Ranger]

Yeah, but you have no right to tell me I'm playing the game wrong.

Sure I do. I just did. Sort of like how if you were using a hammer to put screws through drywall I could say "Dude, there's a better way to do that." The only "right" here is your right to not believe me or ignore me.

Okay, I want you to explain to me what you think a morally ambiguous game of D&D looks like. Go ahead.

There are plenty of examples in the thread. All the DM has to do is remove the concept of "Cosmic Evil" and start saying stuff like "You discover that the orcs are actually trying to recover treasure stolen from them the year before, and that prior to such theft they'd been idyllic pastoralists - until those nasty humans came along." Or whatever. Like I said, there are plenty of examples in this thread and I was responding to those examples.

From the way you talk, I expect your response to look like this:

DM: "All right, goblins charge from the underbrush towards the caravan. I'd like everyone to roll a philosophy check."
Player 1: "I got a 23. I understand the importance of self preservation in the desire for primitive humanoids to raid caravans. But, according to Aristotle, man does not need to infringe on another man for survival. There are, after all, non-lethal ways to sustain oneself, especially in a world such as this with magic that can grow and produce food. I should have a +2 to my next Talk Reason check in order to avoid a violent altercation."
DM: "Unfortunately, the head goblin rolled a 19. He counters your current Philosophy check with his Dodge Empathy skill. His band gains self worth from raiding caravans. The goblins pull out their weapons."
Player 2: "But wait. I want to quote Kirkiguard - can that give me a bonus?"
Player 3: "And I have this passage of 'The Republic', that should help."
DM: "One at a time, please."

I've never actually seen someone quote a philosopher at the game table, but I have I have seen dice put down for long stretches of time while the merits of wiping out a goblin village was debated. Boy was that fun. So while your example is extreme, yeah, that's what I'm trying to avoid.

And if someone did try to quote Plato to me at the table, I'd be happy to say "Stow it, Socrates*, we're playing D&D here."

*Using the Bill S. Preston pronunciation.

You say D&D is Epic fantasy, therefore it's not "not a coffee house in Prague." It's also a strategy game, but it isn't a Sun Tzu lecture or a Military Academy. </snip>

Who the hell is making an argument?

This is clearly what you're missing. "Argument" is a term of art. Building a philosophical argument has a lot in common with doing a math proof. Do you see a lot of math proofs in gaming? I don't. They've already been proved (or consciously ignored (cf., diagonal movement)). So there's no point asking questions we already know the answers to.

And that's fundamentally different from a fighting orcs or roleplaying out a discussion with Baron Bigimportant. Neither the players nor the DM know how that's going to play out, and the journey of discovery (and competition between the DM and players) is different than a Socratic discussion of some new objective moral truth.

Here, let me put it to you this way: D&D is a great medium for telling a story, and some stories can be morally ambiguous.

I think this is a major misunderstanding about RPGs. You can tell stories about D&D, but you can't tell stories within D&D. Playing a "human DM" RPG (as opposed to playing pre-defined game like Baldur's Gate II or Neverwinter Nights) is quite different than "telling a story." No one has editorial control. If the DM was just "Telling a story" there'd be no need for dice or character sheets. You can tell stories later about how the game went down, but you can't tell a story during the game. You can only explore possibilities and roleplay your character (as opposed to anyone else's).

That's why comparing D&D to Battlestar Gallactica or Watchmen ultimately breaks down. There's no Ron/Alan Moore equivalent who has control over where the story is going or how it's going to end, or when characters will die or redeem themselves.

I know what right and wrong is. I know what good and evil is. No matter what my character does in a game, it is not going to change my belief system. I don't use D&D to change anything about me, I do it because it's fun, and you know what? I find morally ambiguous games fun. It's that simple. And doing them with D&D is not hard and still enjoyable.

So if you already know what right and wrong are, what's the point of moral ambiguity in your game? Just to make people uncomfortable? Or do you get some sort of excitement from playing at being the bad boy (sort of how I assume whoever wrote up the Warlock class does)?

As I already mentioned earlier (both directly and by referencing Jasperak), putting dice down for an hour and debating the moral merits of various courses of action within a game is not fun for me. (Normally I wouldn't include those last two words, as "fun" is always subjective, but I guess we're having extra difficulty remembering that in this thread) Further, being evil or "delightfully gray" isn't fun either. If that's that extent of our disagreement I guess we're done here.

I do have a question though: What do you do when you decide that there's no moral course of action available? Have your PCs go home? Abandon the quest? Abandon morality and kill the orcs anyway, babies too? Because none of those sound terribly fun to me, even if occasionally those courses of action are necessary in real life.

Lastly though, if you have never actually encountered a situation in your games where the moral course of action wasn't (eventually) clear, I would suggest that you don't really have moral ambiguity in your games. You'd have faux ambiguity in that case; it's a sleight of hand by the DM that evaporates on close inspection.

 

[Irda Ranger]

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.

Indeed, I fully agree that "seeing what happens" is the fun that's unique to RPGs. But you can't "see what happens" in a moral argument; you have to either decide (make a moral decision) or abdicate (by either being amoral or allowing someone else to make the moral decision). You can't roll a d20 to discover the moral course of action.

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.

But if you play long enough you'll find your PCs in a situation with no moral course of action. What do you do then? It's bound to happen, unless (a) the DM never lets it happen (in which case there was never any ambiguity in the first place; it was all a charade) or (b) you use the concept of Cosmic Evil to take that possibility off the table.

 

[Mallus]

But you can't "see what happens" in a moral argument...

Sure you can, if that 'argument' takes the form of fiction, or a less-filling fiction-like substitute, such as RPG play sometimes is.

But if you play long enough you'll find your PCs in a situation with no moral course of action.

With my group this takes about 5 minutes. Make that three minutes .

What do you do then?

Laugh and start rolling dice?

(b) you use the concept of Cosmic Evil to take that possibility off the table.

I've never found the Cosmic Evil to offer much in the way of comforting rationalization when it comes to soothing the moral quandaries implicit in killing-heavy RPG play. It's indulges SF/F's ugly tendency of using the wonderful world of human imagination to imagine enemies that, while they look and/or act person-like, are, in fact, irredeemable un-people that can murdered without a second thought (or hand-wringing, or something).

Instead of Cosmic Evil, I prefer campaigns that either 1) admit that protagonists are essentially gleefully immoral freebooters--the standard S&S approach-- or keep the Cosmic Evil to a bare minimum, using plain old-fashion conflicting goals/desires instead.

 

[pawsplay]

Indeed, I fully agree that "seeing what happens" is the fun that's unique to RPGs. But you can't "see what happens" in a moral argument; you have to either decide (make a moral decision) or abdicate (by either being amoral or allowing someone else to make the moral decision). You can't roll a d20 to discover the moral course of action.

That is precisely why it so interesting to see what happens. For one brief moment, the PCs are the moral deciders whose next decision will determine what kind of world they live in.

But if you play long enough you'll find your PCs in a situation with no moral course of action. What do you do then? It's bound to happen, unless (a) the DM never lets it happen (in which case there was never any ambiguity in the first place; it was all a charade) or (b) you use the concept of Cosmic Evil to take that possibility off the table.

That's the good part. When you place someone in a situation where there is no really ideal solution, the answer they provide you tells you something. In a clear moral situation, many people will react in a very similar way. But in an ambiguous situation, you find out what people think is the most important principle to preserve. Now, you don't want to turn games into an endless series of no-win situations, but I think it adds something when they have to choose between two goods, or when they do occasionally have to choose between Gwen Stacy and a carload of teenagers.

What do you do then? You do something. That reinforces the best part of humanity, that when the chips are down, some of us resolve to do something.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I find people quoting and talking about Tolkien's orcs to be hilarious, because he had troubles for a long time with making a race that was considered cosmically evil. So in the end, he didn't. That's right, in Middle-Earth, orcs were born naturally evil, but he very specifically wrote that they weren't "irredeemably bad." He also stated "We were all orcs in the Great War."

In other words, stop using Tolkien for your moral absolutism.

 

[S'mon]

I find people quoting and talking about Tolkien's orcs to be hilarious, because he had troubles for a long time with making a race that was considered cosmically evil. So in the end, he didn't. That's right, in Middle-Earth, orcs were born naturally evil, but he very specifically wrote that they weren't "irredeemably bad." He also stated "We were all orcs in the Great War."

In other words, stop using Tolkien for your moral absolutism.

Like I said upthead, that's exactly what my orcs are like.

Though in my next campaign I think I'll base my orcs on the Cosmically Evil Pigmen of The House on the Borderland. So nyaah.