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.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

All the dangerous people I see generally believe in shades of gray. Imho when people say something is a shade of gray they are normally just trying to justify something that benefits them.

So nobody can be doing things that they believe is good and runs contradictory to your morality makes them a bad person?

 

[Lanefan]

Strange, CN is the alignment that causes campaign crashes in my area. And I am not the only DM who banned this alignment from all his campaigns.

Boo! Hiss!

LG is the outlier around here, with LN a close second. Our parties claim to average CG but most often end up averaging around CN (maybe little-c, little-n).

Part of it is that Lawful-Chaotic is often equated with Intolerant-Tolerant. The few Lawful PCs I ever play often start with this as a basis - in one case in particular my LN PC's initial motivation for adventuring (before her adventuring career twisted her into something of a mess) was to impose, by peaceful means if possible but by force if necessary, Roman-style law and order on all the barbarians (i.e. anyone not Roman) out there.

 

[Lanefan]

Monks being lawful always made sense. And raging barbarians being chaotic also makes sense.

Good call on Monks, I forgot those.

Barbarian has never been a class in my games; instead it's a playable sub-race of Humans and though they trend Chaotic they can be any alignment. They cannot be arcane casters or Paladins, and are usually brought up in cultures that distrust and shun arcane magic.

 

[Lanefan]

And to forestall the next one: the restriction that Rangers had to be Good was one of the very first things I threw out when I started DMing, along with the silly restriction that said no more than three could ever operate together.

 

[pemerton]

It’s the difference between fiction like Star Wars and fiction like Game of Thrones. Both are fantasies, one is more simple and straightforward, and another is more complex.

What I find hard in Star Wars, if one applies any scrutiny, is the casual attitude towards killing vast numbers of soldiers and civil servants.

The tropes of aerial battles, dog fights etc are taken from war films, especially WW2 films. But in those real-world conflicts at least some aeroplane crews bail out and are taken prisoner; some naval crews evacuate sinking ships and are taken prisoner; etc. Because Star Wars (i) takes place in space, and (ii) works on a "big explosins" principle of visual storytelling, there are no survivors and no prisoners. It's actually pretty brutal.

 

[pemerton]

I wonder how many times I'm going to have to ask a simple question before anyone bothers trying to answer it:

If D&D's morality isn't supposed to have anything to do with real-life morality, why does D&D need to have a rigid and punitive morality system at all, in the first place? What is your justification for this?

I did post an answer upthread, which hawkeyefan has noted: in the earliest mode of the game, playing Lawful is harder because of the constraints it imposes on you when your goal is to rob dungeons and collect treasure; but you also get benefits of trustworthiness and access to healing and resurreciton magic.

If folks want to play a very good versus evil game where they don’t examine things a lot and the good guys and whatever they do are good, and the bad guys and whatever they do are bad, that’s fine.

This is also where alignment can serve a second purpose: it is a simple device for telling you who the legitimate targets of your violence are. It lets you play a dungeon-raiding game without having to swallow the possible implication that your character is a vicious mercenary rather than a hero.

Both the "challenge" rationale and the "morally justificatory overlay" rationale work best with a single axis, to set up good vs bad. And they can work well alongside one another.

I mean... if y'all are saying that alignment worked fine before we decided to have two separate axes, and then pretending we understood the difference... yeah, I feel ya. It was also before you had punishments for "not playing your aligmment right" and over half the classes in the PHB had alignment restrictions.

It's clear in Gygax's AD&D PHB and DMG that "playing your alignment right" is meant to have some sort of impact on your class progression, though there are technical inconcsistencies between the two books: in the DMG, which came out later, "poor" alignment play affects both training time requird and hence the gp cost of level gain, and also can cost you XP/levels if you undergo alignment change.

I think this (third) function of alignment is not a good fit with the other two: once a playaer of a NE or CN or whatever character faces the same strictures on "good roleplay" as does the player of a LG character, there's no particular strategic decision involved in choosing one rather than the other alignment. And once you have two axes of conflict, the alignment framework no longer provides a simple justificatory overlay of the violence inherent in the game. If people start playing games that don't necessarily involve violence as a default mode of resolving conflicts, the "moral justificatory overlay" also becomes less relevant.

Is it useful, in a RPG, to have a system of roleplaying constraints that has been adapted from an earlier system with a different purpose, and that is rather notorious for generating conflict at the table by inviting people to foreground rather than background their differences of moral opinion? Probably this is something on which opinions differ!

 

[Helldritch]

Boo! Hiss!

LG is the outlier around here, with LN a close second. Our parties claim to average CG but most often end up averaging around CN (maybe little-c, little-n).

Part of it is that Lawful-Chaotic is often equated with Intolerant-Tolerant. The few Lawful PCs I ever play often start with this as a basis - in one case in particular my LN PC's initial motivation for adventuring (before her adventuring career twisted her into something of a mess) was to impose, by peaceful means if possible but by force if necessary, Roman-style law and order on all the barbarians (i.e. anyone not Roman) out there.

Boo! Hiss! To you too.
In my area, we almost universally agree that CN equals unchecked carelessness. It is the character that does not care one iota about the adventure, his supposed friends/colleagues. They are there only for self gratification and it stops right there. It may be fun to play for the player playing the CN character, but the others get rapidly frustrated. At least a LG-N character can be reasoned with. The CN will not even agree with himself. The CN character is always about immediate self gratification and really short therm goals. Not my cup of tea.

 

[Oofta]

Boo! Hiss! To you too.
In my area, we almost universally agree that CN equals unchecked carelessness. It is the character that does not care one iota about the adventure, his supposed friends/colleagues. They are there only for self gratification and it stops right there. It may be fun to play for the player playing the CN character, but the others get rapidly frustrated. At least a LG-N character can be reasoned with. The CN will not even agree with himself. The CN character is always about immediate self gratification and really short therm goals. Not my cup of tea.

CN too often means insane do whatever stupid random thing you want and then say "I can't help it, I'm CN." Like decide to switch sides in combat just to see what happens. You know what happens? The other PCs decide you're an idiot and either kill you or never want you in the party again.

 

[Lanefan]

CN too often means insane do whatever stupid random thing you want and then say "I can't help it, I'm CN." Like decide to switch sides in combat just to see what happens. You know what happens? The other PCs decide you're an idiot and either kill you or never want you in the party again.

Unless, of course, the party loses the combat - maybe in part because you switched - and you're suddenly on the winning side.

That's called being a survivor.

 

[pemerton]

Monks being lawful always made sense.

Not really. Look at Gygax's description of True Neural in both his PHB and his DMG. It is a very natural alignment for a wise hermit type. In some campaigns such wise hermits might be druids or mages, but monks also fit very well.

And Gygax characterises Chaotic Good as the belief that individual self-realisation is the key to human wellbeing. This is an outlook that is easy to fit to some standard presentations of martial-arts oriented fantasy.

In the Jet LI film Tai Chi master, the protagonist undergoes a profound shift in world view that - in AD&D terms - could be framed as moving from a Lawful alignment to a Chaotic one. But this doesnt hurt his martial arts skills - quite the contrary!

I meaaaaaan Arthurian Legend, fighting evil? You read Le Morte d'Arthur right? Ain't none of those knights definitely "G" in alignment (not even my beloved Gawain). I mean later sources for sure though so I'm probably being ridiculous. Also I'm for any campaign that involves beating up Saxons in post-Roman Britain so I should be more positive!

I've not read the whole of Le Morte d'Arthur, but have read bits and pieces of it and other Arthurian stories in various compilations over the years. And also have my beloved Excalibur (John Boorman's 1981 film).

I'm not 100% sure I'm following your post, but to me you seem to have switched things around: you're brining some conception of good from outside the stories and applying it against the knightly heroes. Whereas what I think you have to do, if you want the D&D alignment system to fit with a broadly romantic fantasy game, is set it up by reference to the paradigms the genre provides us with.

To give a concrete example, and going from memory: I think it might be in one of Chretien de Troye's stories that Lancelot rescues Guinevere and kills 6 kinghts (? anyway, a relatively large number of them) in the process. Through a contemporary lens many would judge that as murder. But in the context of the story it's permissible consensual violence - it's knights doing what they do, and the number killed is as much a literary marker of Lancelot's prowess as anything else.

If the literary paradgims on which the paladin is based don't count as good, then playing a paladin becomes impossible except as an exercise in irony or deconstructionist criticism.

LotR though for sure, though it very much matches up with modern morality, I can't off-hand think of a deviance from fairly conventional/MoR 20th/21st-century Western morality. I mean, it's clearly not in favour of industrialization or capitalism I guess but that's about as unconventional as it gets.

As I've already posted, I disagree fairly strongly with your reading of LotR.

At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, no prisoners are taken. That is extreme even by the standards of the Eastern front in the Second World War.

Eomer, who is undoubtedly a paradigm of good in the story, pronounces Death take us all! when he discovers that his sister is fallen, and not long after again falls into a battle lust when he thinks that the soldiers of Rohan will be defeated by the Southrons (just before it is revealed that the black-sailed ships are Aragorn's and not the Corsairs').

The attitude to permissible violence in LotR is very close to Arthurian tales (unsurprisingly, given that JRRT was inspired by and self-consciously emulating to a degree the premodern works that were the objects of his study).

And that's before we get to LotR's theory of just rulership which, as I said earlier, would make even Franco blush.

I think those suggest a pretty consistent morality: wanton killing is evil; defensive violence is permissible (pacifism might be admirable in some contexts, but is not obligatory); retributive violence is permissible, at least against serious or inveterate evildoers; and consensual violence is not per se evil, though it might be problematic to engage in it too readily or too enthusiastically.

Unless your group RPs extremely atypically for D&D, I feel like the looting and personal gain associated with most D&D (including hard-baked into the rules of 1E!!!!!!! XP for gold value! Optional rule in 2E, perhaps to prevent things being potentially so mercenary), even if it's more of magic items and so on than those precious GPs tends to really undermine any attempts to claim this kind of delicate morality.

(not an insult to that morality - I think that is a fine one and works in some games - I just feel like in D&D the sheer amount of "I search the body" and "Ooooh nice sword! Mine!" and "How much are these horses worth?" kind of makes it look like a pretense a lot of the time!)

I'm not really sure where you're going or what you're arguing for or against.

It's a long time since I've played or GMed AD&D in any serious way. My last serious D&D campaign was a 4e one. We used the 4e alignment system because it provides some useful, or at least mostly harmless, labels for the game's cosmological conflict. The difference between Evil goblins and hobgoblins and Chaotic Evil gnolls manifested itself in play on both player and GM sides. We have four Unaligned PCs and one Good one. There was not a great deal of looting - 4e uses a "treasure parcel" system of wealth-based advancement and a challenge-oriented system of XP-based advancement and the two only need to connect in the sense that overcoming challenges => acquiring wealth. But the acquisition can be by way of gift, divine blessing, discovery, etc as much as looting.

If you're saying that the play of a typical D&D game makes it (near-)impossible for the PCs to be good, then that would be a sad indictment of the alignment system. I don't know enough about the typical play of the current edition to adjudicate the fairness of any such indictment.