D&D General Worlds of Design: Is Fighting Evil Passé?

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (1975) I had a clear idea of what I wanted to be and to do in the game: fight evil. As it happened, I also knew I wanted to be a magic user, though of course I branched out to other character classes, but I never deviated from the notion of fighting evil until I played some neutral characters, years after I started.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” Albert Einstein

To this day I think of the game as good guys against bad guys, with most of my characters (including the neutrals) on the good guy side. I want to be one of those characters who do something about evil. I recognize that many do not think and play this way, and that's more or less the topic of this column. Because it makes a big difference in a great deal that happens when you answer the question of whether the focus of the campaign is fighting evil.

In the early version of alignment, with only Law and Chaos, it was often Law (usually good) against Chaos (usually evil). I learned this form from Michael Moorcock's Elric novels before D&D, though I understand it originated in Pohl Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. That all went out the window when the Good and Evil axis was added to alignment. That's the axis I'm talking about today.

This is a "black and white" viewpoint, versus the in-between/neither/gray viewpoint so common today. But I like my games to be simple, and to be separate from reality. I don't like the "behave however you want as long as you don't get caught" philosophy.

Usually, a focus on fighting evil includes a focus on combat, though I can see where this would not necessarily be the case. Conversely, a focus on combat doesn't necessarily imply a focus on fighting evil. Insofar as RPGs grow out of popular fiction, we can ask how a focus on fighting evil compares with typical fiction.

In the distant past (often equated with "before 1980" in this case) the focus on fighting evil was much more common in science fiction and fantasy fiction than it is today, when heroes are in 50 shades of gray (see reference). Fighting evil, whether an individual, a gang, a cult, a movement, a nation, or an aggressive alien species, is the bedrock in much of our older science fiction and fantasy, much less so today.

Other kinds of focus?

If fighting evil isn't the focus, what is?

• In a "Game of Thrones" style campaign, the politics and wars of great families could provide a focus where good and evil hardly matter.
• "There's a war on" might be between two groups that aren't clearly good or evil (though each side individually might disagree).
• A politically-oriented campaign might be all about subterfuge, assassination, theft, and sabotage. There might be no big battles at all.
• A campaign could focus on exploration of newly-discovered territory. Or on a big mystery to solve. Or on hordes of refugees coming into the local area.

I'm sure there are many inventive alternatives to good vs evil, especially if you want a "grayer" campaign. I think a focus on good vs evil provides more shape to a RPG campaign than anything else. But there are other ways of providing shape. YMMV. If you have an unusual alternative, I hope you'll tell us about it.

 

[pemerton]

Retributive violence can be carried out by vigilante heroes. It's just those heroes have an 'E' in the alignment section of their character sheet.

There are contemporary legal systems that inflict retributive violence. They are not universally regarded as evil either by participants or observers.

In the fiction of D&D, I think that it makes sense to be more permissive about retributive violence than one might be in the real world. And one of the AD&D level titles for paladins is justiciar.

I have put the word "vigilante" in square quotes, or have referred to "quasi-vigilante" violence, because the concept of vigilantism is not entirely apt in the D&D context, with systems of government and social order generally presented as pseudo-mediaeval rather than modern. In the Giants modules, the PCs are even agents of a king.

Consensual violence is a bit trickier. A morally good person would generally seek to avoid things like duels unless there was no other option reasonably open to them (and would seek a non lethal condition on the duel).

I think this is another point where, if contemporary standards and outlooks are just projected straight onto fantasy RPGing, most of the tropes of the game evaporate.

In romantic fantasy, the protagonists engage very often in consensual violence, and rarely as a last resort.

Good people try to avoid harming and killing others.

But in D&D, and romantic fantasy more generally, they also affirm truth, and beauty, and - at least some of them - honour.

In the Giants scenario, a paladin might wish that the giants would surrender and return the stolen goods and pay compensation for those they killed and help rebuild the villages they destroyed. But if the giants will not, the paladin is ready to mete out justice. And suppose the giant king suggested a duel to settle the point, I think a paladin woudl readily take up that duel.

D&D-type fantasy won't work in ways that emulate the source material if attitudes to permissible violence are not relaxed compared to many real-world conceptions. (Superheroes are the same, except that fantasy also needs to be more permissive in respect of lethal violence.)

By that logic, if (Nation X) invaded the USA, landed forces in NYC and stole the billions in gold from under Manhattan, it would not be a just war for the USA to deploy military assets to recover said gold, and/or take all such reasonable measures to ensure the leadership of (Nation X) could not do so again in the future.

Correct. The UN Charter permits warfare in self-defence (Individual or collective), not for recovery of stolen goods. Most contemporary philosophical writing about just warfare broadly corresponds to the Charter conception that only defensive violence is permissible in the international context.

This is why, in the real world, cross-border disputes over stolen assets are generally resolved through diplomatic means.

Some elements of these real-world conceptions and practices rest on understandings about institutions. For instance, invading a country to rob from it is iteslf an international crime, and the invaded country would be entitled to international assistance to resist the aggressor. If the aggressor nevertheless succeeded, the invaded nation could look for international assistance to achieve recompense, which might take place in ways other than a literal return of the stolen good (eg seizure of the invading country's assets in third countries and transferring them to the invaded country).

The world of D&D does not have these sorts of institutional structures. That's part of what makes it easy, in imagination, to apply a non-real morality that is more permissive in the use of violence than the real world while nevertheless maintaining a pretty recognisable contrast between what is good and what is not.

 

[Hoffmand]

I don’t think I’m being vague at all. I’m looking at it at its most basic.

Is the act of taking life good or evil?

If you think it’s good, tell me why.

If it’s only situationally good, then ask yourself if that means its good....or is it just a necessary evil?

I would say to look at the effect that killing, even a fully justified instance of it, has on the person who does it. See the effects and then explain to me how they are good.

The act of taking life is good to feed one self and to defend your life and family. It’s not rocket science.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

The act of taking life is good to feed one self and to defend your life and family. It’s not rocket science.

There's also that wrinkle to "killing is wrong" isn't there?

 

[hawkeyefan]

The act of taking life is good to feed one self and to defend your life and family. It’s not rocket science.

So orcs raiding as a way of living is acceptable?

 

[Davinshe]

I haven't read through all 14 pages of this, so sorry if someone has mentioned this already. I think 5th edition gave us a sort of compromise on the "orcs are inherently evil" via the half-orc entry in the PHB. There it says that half-orcs all experience a call from Gruumsh pulling them towards evil. One could infer in full-blooded orcs this call is nearly irresistable. This does away with an interpretation where the evil of races such as orcs, gnolls and goblins is purely sociocultural. While orcs are not mere evil made flesh (and thus the idea of slaying orc babies still is troublesome), evil races are born with an evil deity having the predominant claim on their soul and nature by default.

 

[pemerton]

It still looks very much like the PCs are the aggressors and behaving in an essentially amoral way, though, because they're attacking a settlement full of non-combatants. And there's kind of vibe to the module that it doesn't think the non-combatants are non-combatants because they're Giants, but it is ambivalent on the issue

I don't disagree with this. When I ran G2 in my 4e game, I ignored the non-soldier giants.

Pretty sure most ways this adventure turns out, the PCs are just "perpetuating the cycle of violence" (including the one I saw). Sure, they'll kill a lot of Giants, but I think most cases, the non-combatants and some others will escape (there are really a LOT of Giants in there!), and even if the Steading is burned down, they're going to either become a roaming band, or set up somewhere else with stories of the horrific violence inflicted on them for their traditional ways, and so on. It's not going to end well.

A lot of this is about how the GM eestablishes consequences - which goes right back to your earlier (very good) post about what sort of moral tone the GM wants to establish.

If the goal is a campaign that is recognisably romantic fantasy with simple/"ideal" morality, then it is on the GM to work with that. So if the players, in the play of their PCs, take steps to only attack combatant giants, and to return the treasure to its rightful owners, etc, then I think it would be a mistake for the GM to establish future evil being done by the giants that is easily attributable to the PCs' own handling of the situation.

D&D simply doesn't have the resources - conceptual or mechanical - to turn the G-series into an investigation of genuine diplomacy, establishing compromises that will satisfy all parties, setting up post-conflict tribunals to establish a just distribution of the disputed goods and territories, etc.

Also the quasi-medieval setting is I think too convenient an excuse a lot of the time. I'm not accusing you personally of doing this, you just reminded me, but we very frequently see this argument used by people in a way that is very inconsistent and appears to be based on whatever works right at that moment. If it's convenient to excuse D&D not being like the middle ages, well, it's only quasi-medieval, but if its' convenient for D&D to be like the middle ages to excuse some dubious element, it's quasi-medieval. You know what I mean?

I don't think I do know what you mean. I get the sense you've got some clear examples in mind, but I'm not sure what they are.

I think that there are clear literary/cinematic touchstones that can be drawn on to frame morality in D&D. Arthurian legend, LotR, films like Ladyhawke and Hero and even The Princess Bride, and to some extent superhero comics. (But with more lethality than is found in 4-colour comics.)

Good in this context is easily recognisable - it affirms life, wellbeing, truth and beauty as important values that must be respected and affirmed in one's actions. Evil, on the other hand, disregards and even scorns these things. But where I think D&D has to depart from some contemporary conceptions is being more permissive in its reconciliation of affirming life and wellbeing with the use of violence. Even in the real world most people aren't pacifists, but can conceivel of pacifisim and see how someone might be one, and so most of us are capable - in imagination - of stepping our threshold for permissible violence up or down. I think D&D requires stepping the threshold down a little bit: that makes jousting knights, honourable warfare, punishing the giants and retaking what they stole, etc, all OK, while still making the contrast between good and evil a pretty clear one provided the GM doens't go out of his/her way to sabotage it.

Conversely, if someone wants to run a game where vicious cycles of violence, the brutalising effects of warfare, chalenging trades-offs within and across lives, and the like are up fo grabs, that could be pretty interesting. But the D&D alignment system would add absolutely nothing to that game, and in fact would very much get in the way. Because that game would force its participants to consider moral questions that the D&D aignment system simply doesn't have the capacity to categorise, let alone to answer.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

I haven't read through all 14 pages of this, so sorry if someone has mentioned this already. I think 5th edition gave us a sort of compromise on the "orcs are inherently evil" via the half-orc entry in the PHB. There it says that half-orcs all experience a call from Gruumsh pulling them towards evil. One could infer in full-blooded orcs this call is nearly irresistable. This does away with an interpretation where the evil of races such as orcs, gnolls and goblins is purely sociocultural. While orcs are not mere evil made flesh (and thus the idea of slaying orc babies still is troublesome), evil races are born with an evil deity having the predominant claim on their soul and nature by default.

And it does say in the book that Evil deities essentially make the races they create slaves, while Good deities that created races gave them free will, because of the whole "doing good without free will is basically worthless" thing

 

[pemerton]

You know, hundreds of generations have spent hundreds of thousands of lifetimes exploring what is good, evil, moral, immoral, just, injust, and all the other abstract concepts we banter about here. And there isn't a lot of agreement in the end.

My suggestion remains: Don't tell your players what is good, evil, morale, immoral, just or injust. Let the NPCs in your world convey their own concepts of these things to the PCs. Let there be conflict between the NPCs. Avoid absolutism. Let the Gods of redemption and vengeance find conflict, even if they both consier themselves good. Let some of them believe their definitions are the only ones that matter, while others consider the views of all others. In short, let your fantasy world be as interesting as the real world.

This is a version of dropping D&D alignment. It's how I run most of my fantasy RPGs.

But I think D&D alignment can work fine provided (i) we become a bit more permissive, in imagination, about the use of violence, and (ii) the GM takes care not to establish situations and consequences that make a 4-colour sense of moral conduct break down.

To repeat a point I made upthread: when Gygax specifies what is good, he includes utilitarian (greatest good for the greatest number), Kantian (human rights) and Aristotelian (wellbeing) conceptions. WIthout distinction. This means that D&D alignment is terrible for doing philsophy, given that most moral philosophy involves debates between those (and other) approaches. D&D alignment will only work if the situations in the game are set up so that the issues that generate real-world debates don't come up in the game.

 

[pemerton]

Tolkien is regarded as a good two-shoes but does allow for some reasonable moral nuance between different groups in the Hobbit and LotR, but overall yeah, they're clearly following basically modern morality

I've just been rereading LotR. JRRT does not advocate "modern morality".

It is a world of just kingship, of a very relaxed conception of permissible violence (no prisoners are taken in the Battle of the Pelennor Field), a world in which socio-economic equality is not evern on the radar. Violence is treated somewhat as a last resort - though even that's not clear - but it is not abhorred. Aragorn banters with Sam about his first killing of an Orc.

This is what makes it a good model for D&D, although in the real world it would make even someone like Franco seem a radical democrat!

 

[pemerton]

(Total) Wartime morality tends to be different from peacetime morality . . .

If I'm intending to be Good, and I know there's a war on between good and evil, and my Good god says that the orc gods are Evil, and I should smite all orcs . . . then yes, I KNOW I'm doing the right thing, in a way no person in the real world can ever know.

How do you know you're not hallucinating?

In mediaeval times many claims to have received divine visions were treated with a high degree of scepticism by clerical authorities.

I don't think the reality of gods makes much difference to the issues in the fiction; and I don't think it's a very useful device at the table, as it just leads to the question who gets to decide what the paladin's god thinks - the player, or the GM?