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.

 

[clearstream]

What I am saying is that while people have the obligation-- and the capacity-- to seek survival through peaceful industry and trade, that tends to be something of a work in progress. People have a tendency to sneer at "economics" as something of a lesser concern or even a dirty business and not, say, the food on their plate, the roof over their head, and their pile of firewood heading into a long winter.

I guess I don't think of economics as any sort of business, but I do agree that people have the obligation and capacity to seek survival through peaceful industry and trade, and as you say that is a work in progress.

It doesn't matter what side of the equation you're sitting on-- if peaceful industry and trade isn't putting food on your children, you're going to pursue economics via other means.

I think this has changed over time. In the distant past, the labourer and the warrior could be one and the same. RPGs are seldom set in that time, which comes largely pre-agriculture.

For any game set in a knights and armour setting violence is more often by the property-owning classes in pursuit of more property. Hardly ever out of concern that a few peasants were going to starve to death! Inflicting starvation on peasants was one of the tactics employed FTM. I am thinking here of almost any war in the ADs, with rare exceptions that resound through history... simply because they were so exceptional.

Unsurprisingly, that which does not kill us leaves us maimed and incapable: starving peasants make bad soldiers.

The purpose of retaliatory strikes is to make the prospect of attacking your people again less attractive-- a lot of contemporary people have a lot of very stupid ideas about war, but I do think most of them recognize this as a negotiable middle-ground between "pre-emptive self-defense" and "actual self-defense".

This is what I originally replied to. The putative negotiable middle-ground - any kind of "preemptive self-defense" is almost certainly going to be a cover for violent attack in the service of theft. The modern wars of the US or Japan being shining examples (although they are far from alone in that distinction, and the pre-modern period saw many others set the pace!)

 

[Hoffmand]

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.

I don’t call them as more of berserkers than barbarians. And I would have preferred the rage ability be called berserk. Instead they named it a subclass

 

[Hoffmand]

No, it is called a turn coat... As all CN are.

CN is that crazy friend you go out drinking and chasing girls with and you never know what he is going to do. But he’s still a good friend. That’s why you keep running around with him.

 

[Lanefan]

Nobody does that. People don't do that. Not least of which because the party they're defecting to is going to kill them before the party they betrayed gets the chance.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

In a recent adventure I ran, where the PCs were in what turned out to be a hotbed of adventuring, they came up against several other not-friendly adventuring parties. Between one thing and another most of these interactions went south; but the PCs did take in some NPC survivors who (faulty!) detection showed weren't too awful.

Then, in one of the more incredible situations I've evern seen, the PCs fought another party - and participants from both groups ended up switching sides partway through!

Two of the NPCs* the PCs had taken in turned on them in mid-combat; while three members of the opposing party realized the PCs were way nicer than their party leader and turned against her - joining the PC party in the process. The PCs' group, bolstered by their sudden growth in numbers, easily won the day. The three newcomers hung around for the remainder of the adventure (and made themselves quite useful, too) then left to form a new party.

And as those three were local and the PCs were not, the PCs now have friends in an otherwise foreign city.

* - these two guys were batcrap evil but had ways of defeating the PCs' alignment detections; and the PC party needed their toughness at the time (one was a fighter, the other a war cleric).

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

In a recent adventure I ran, where the PCs were in what turned out to be a hotbed of adventuring, they came up against several other not-friendly adventuring parties. Between one thing and another most of these interactions went south; but the PCs did take in some NPC survivors who (faulty!) detection showed weren't too awful.

Then, in one of the more incredible situations I've evern seen, the PCs fought another party - and participants from both groups ended up switching sides partway through!

Two of the NPCs* the PCs had taken in turned on them in mid-combat; while three members of the opposing party realized the PCs were way nicer than their party leader and turned against her - joining the PC party in the process. The PCs' group, bolstered by their sudden growth in numbers, easily won the day. The three newcomers hung around for the remainder of the adventure (and made themselves quite useful, too) then left to form a new party.

And as those three were local and the PCs were not, the PCs now have friends in an otherwise foreign city.

* - these two guys were batcrap evil but had ways of defeating the PCs' alignment detections; and the PC party needed their toughness at the time (one was a fighter, the other a war cleric).

happens to gods and god like beings too. Demogorgon and azmodeus stopped fighting just long enough to teem up so that they could yeet vecna into the farplanes rather than have to fight him (after he had bodied the good aligned gods that wagged their finger at him) and as per their agreement they parted ways back to their strongholds after word with safe passage granted mutually. Cant remember where but i did also read a confirmation thay azmodeus gifted demogorgon some crazy number like a million nuperibos afterword to compensate him for the hundreds of demons demogorgon sacrificed to power up for the encounter too. Or something like that.

Relations in extreme opposition can change rapidly and civil agreements can indeed hokd fast for extended periods.

 

[pemerton]

In a recent adventure I ran, where the PCs were in what turned out to be a hotbed of adventuring, they came up against several other not-friendly adventuring parties. Between one thing and another most of these interactions went south; but the PCs did take in some NPC survivors who (faulty!) detection showed weren't too awful.

Then, in one of the more incredible situations I've evern seen, the PCs fought another party - and participants from both groups ended up switching sides partway through!

Two of the NPCs* the PCs had taken in turned on them in mid-combat; while three members of the opposing party realized the PCs were way nicer than their party leader and turned against her - joining the PC party in the process. The PCs' group, bolstered by their sudden growth in numbers, easily won the day. The three newcomers hung around for the remainder of the adventure (and made themselves quite useful, too) then left to form a new party.

These side-changers all seem to be NPCs. Have I got that right?

 

[FrozenNorth]

To be fair, you don't have to be like that if you're LG. But you kind of do have to LG to be like that.

Eh, I’ve been on the Internet long enough to meet many non-LG people who think their way is the One True Way and everyone else should be purged in fire.

 

[noko]

D&D early on doesn't seem to be about good vs evil at all. A number of the earlier/simpler editions only have L, N, C alignments. It feels like it was added on later, and it doesn't always work.

As Doug says, a lot of 1E and some 2E stuff makes the PCs look very much the baddies, or like certainly they aren't "goodies". In that they're invading places and slaughtering sapient beings which seem to be largely minding their own business (sometimes definitely so).

I mean, I remember this being particularly brought home by the Hill Giant adventure, whilst there might initially have been some vague backstory justification for dealing with the giants, and it was a good adventures, the PCs basically came across as home invaders/war criminals, whilst all having "G" written on their character sheets.

I think vanquishing evil can work, but it needs to actually be evil, not just y'know mass slaughter of sapient races who are supposedly "evil" if they're not actually doing anything.

2E got a lot better at this later on. Later adventures tend to be more nuanced and give you better reasons to do stuff than "those other guys are supposedly bad". I don't I've personally run a straightforward G vs E adventure for a long time, because people just don't engage with them. So in short, yeah, it is passe, because D&D's notion of evil tends not to be really evil-evil, but rather nasty-but-isolated beings.

@Doug McCrae - He did say that in Role-Playing Mastery, but that entire book is full of frankly "crazy nonsense" and just outright goshdarned terrible DMing advice that must not be listened to. It's a really strange book and conflicts with loads of other stuff he said, both later and before that.

Yeah, old Gary seems to have been a bit of an opinionated grump at times.

 

[noko]

I think that's problematic, actually, because I've seen some superb examples of trained assassins in fantasy who were much more Good than countless noble knights and other "heroic" figures. Being trained to kill particular targets, with precision, from stealth, does not, I think, make you necessarily non-Good. Your motivation and targets will surely determine your alignment.

Necromancers are a more complex issue that varies from edition to edition and based on the metaphysics of the setting (as well exactly what spells they are casting).



I would say that, historically, if we look at D&D across all editions, and if we use your particular delicate definition of Good (which again, I quite like), then yes, it's unlikely that they will really be Good by your standards, because their motives will be too impure. In 1E, in fact, the Gold = XP thing was specifically designed to motivate characters who were not noble heroes, but accidentally serves also to motivate you not to be noble heroes, by rather slayers who got through the pockets and belt-pouches, and make sure they loot every single tomb.

Later editions of D&D have gradually moved away from that, but there's still a significant focus on looting and reward and so on as motivating factors to the point where it's rather problematic.

I know this is true for 5E to a significant extent due to discussions on the 5E reddit, where a lot of people feel that, for example, if an LG mercenary (if such a thing can be conceived - but NG/CG also applies) wasn't paid to protect a village, which he knew would be imminently attacked by orcs and suffer many casualties (i.e. the people refusing to pay were idiots or didn't value human life), then he could just walk off and say "See ya morons, if any of you live!" and still be "Good". Which is definitely not going to work under your definition, nor, I suspect, most definitions.



Yeah, I get that you think that. I don't think anything Tolkien has written about LotR supports him being definitely LG, for example. I'm not denying he's "awesome", or "on the side of light", but I am saying that I suspect if Tolkien was forced, at gun point perhaps, to assign D&D alignments to his characters, he wouldn't necessarily be giving Eomer an LG (LN, certainly nothing Evil). I feel like your opinions on Tolkien are predicted on reading LotR but really not reading stuff Tolkien said about LotR. In that this is incredibly common and typically of probably 95%+ of people who "love LotR" or "loathe LotR", that is unsurprising and I can't really hold it against you, but I always find it a little disappointing.

Tolkien also allows for change and redemption, so perhaps he would say Eomer Eadig was indeed LG, even if earlier on he wasn't meeting that standard.



And which you are have failed to acknowledge, that in his letters and general writing, Tolkien was very clear was not his philosophy, and he didn't regard it as some sort of pure good (or possibly even good at all). He didn't think anyone who insisted on dominion over others was a wholly good person. That specifically included Aragorn. This isn't a matter of opinion, I would suggest. Tolkien was not unclear in his letters nor his opinions re: tyranny.



To be fair, you don't have to be like that if you're LG. But you kind of do have to LG to be like that.



PREACH IT BROTHER!

I just so happen to be re-reading LOTR (I seem to do that every decade or so) and he does make that point with Galadriel pretty clearly when Frodo offers her the ring.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Eh, I’ve been on the Internet long enough to meet many non-LG people who think their way is the One True Way and everyone else should be purged in fire.

Sure, but in D&D's alignment terms, LG promotes the notion of being the "one true way" above others, and attracts a lot of people with "one true way" sympathies (in my experience), even if their RL philosophy seems anything but that. Historically, especially pre-3E (but a bit in 3E too, and clearly still a little now), it's attracted DMs too into acting as if picking LG is signing up to be treated as if there's a one true way and only the DM knows it.

I blame the LG requirement on Paladins for a lot of this, because people start unconsciously conflating the Paladin code and being merely lawful and good.