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]

I don't either, mostly because I use Hobbits as the yardstick, not someone's prissy maiden aunt Petunia. There's no need for LG to be preachy, or completely rigid, or otherwise troublesome in a party. There's a big difference between L meaning respects the laws and values an ordered life, and would never under any circumstance break any law and will snitch on people who do.

In LotR Gandalf seems either LG or (perhaps) NG:

[T]he rule of no realm is mine . . . But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. . . . For I also am a steward. . . . To me it would seem not that a Steward who faithfully surrenders his charge is diminished in love or in honour." (pp 788-89, 888)​

He also returns the Palantir of Orthanc to Aragorn, bowing and saying (sincerely, as I read it), "Receive it, Lord!, in earnest of other things that shold be given back." (p 618)

Most of the sodliers and captains likewise. Which prominent character thinks that the good is best achieved through self-realisation rather than through honouring and restoring proper traditions and ways of living? Maybe Bombadil? If we go to the Silmarillion, maybe Feanor and Galadriel? But the latter, at least, has changed her mind and repented of her individualism by the time we gto to LotR.

The issue of obeying the law is a pretty secondary matter when it comes to LG, and in the context of a pseudo-mediaeval FRPG seems to involve an anachronistic projection onto the gameworld of contemporary state law that makes a content-neutral claim on obedience.

Tradition and community are the key notions.

Of course, if the gameworld reveals that honouring tradition and community will only lead to misery (eg tradition includes slavery and there seems to be no way of ending it) then the rational thing for a LG person to do is to renounce the lawfulness. This could make for interesting RPGing, but unfortunately the tradition in D&D is to penalise rather than celebrate playing out that sort of moral response to the revelationsof the fiction. I think it's a bit ironic, and mostly just a sad thing, that per canonical approaches to D&D we can't even play out the character arc of Sturm Brightblade, the iconic knight in one of the first D&D novels.

 

[pemerton]

A person who is LG should, broadly speaking, be putting the laws and traditions of an ordered life as an equal priority to good outcomes for people.

This is not what Gygax says in his PHB and DMG. And it doesn't really make sense.

What Gygax says, which does make sense, is that a LG person values tradition and community because those things lead to widespread wellbeing.

Gygax's alignment descriptions make it clear that for good people law and chaos are means, not ends. Of course there are LN and CN people who treat them as ends in themselves, but that's part of the explanation for why they're not good!

 

[pemerton]

Ugh alignment sucks

Well, alignment is meant to be a reasonably simple yardstick for fantasy adventure that is morally rather light, or at least relatively unambiguous.

What sucks is that people try to use it ways that it clearly isn't fit for.

For instance, it makes little sense to try to fit real world people and events into the alignment framework, because the real world isn't really an examle of morally light and unambiguous fantasy hijinks.

And anyone who wants to run a game with a moral context closer to modernist literature isn't going to find very much of use in the alignment system.

Another problem, which may be inherent to the mechanic for reasons I will try to explain, is that people seem not to be able to take it at face value. For the mechanic to work, good has to mean good. Which means that the non-good (LN, CN, evil) are wrong in their convictions and actions. (TN are different because, as Gygax sets it out, they are committed to not acting - they resemble certain real-world outlooks such as Stoicism.)

Because good means good, we have to explain other outlooks as flawed. The evil are selfish and don't respect other values (life, wellbeing, truth, beauty) in their goals and action. The LN and CN are fetishists of order and individualism respectively, who treat those things as ends rather than means.

But somewhere along the way the idea came about that eahc of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil is a coherent value in its own right. Which leads to statements like @Umbran's that a LG person might rationally will order even when that does not contribute to wellbeing! Which is to say that a good person might prioritise some other end over the good! Which is incoherent unless good means something other than good. But if it does then the whole system breaks down into a garbled mush.

Where does this idea of each end of the axis as a self-standing value come from? I blame Appendix IV of the PHB, which sets out the Outer Planes and correlates them to the alignments in a way that suggests that Law and Chaos are values or rational aspirations in their own right. I think this then gets taken up further in 2nd ed AD&D, and Planescape is it's culmination. In the 3E MotP we also see notions like NG being the "purest" or most absolute good. Which again implies that the LG are simultaneously committed to good and committed to subordinating it to some other value - yet are still good! Which as I've said makes no sense.

Gygax's PHB and DMG alignment descriptions are much clearer. NG is not more "pure" than LG or CG. Rather, the NG take no strong view on what is the best means to achieve the good. If we assume that, a priori, it's an open question whether tradition, self-realisation, or both can lead to wellbeing then the NG are no more or less likely to bring about the most good in the world than the LG or the CG. Which to me is much more sensible as a framework.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, alignment is meant to be a reasonably simple yardstick for fantasy adventure that is morally rather light, or at least relatively unambiguous.

What sucks is that people try to use it ways that it clearly isn't fit for.

For instance, it makes little sense to try to fit real world people and events into the alignment framework, because the real world isn't really an examle of morally light and unambiguous fantasy hijinks.

And anyone who wants to run a game with a moral context closer to modernist literature isn't going to find very much of use in the alignment system.

Another problem, which may be inherent to the mechanic for reasons I will try to explain, is that people seem not to be able to take it at face value. For the mechanic to work, good has to mean good. Which means that the non-good (LN, CN, evil) are wrong in their convictions and actions. (TN are different because, as Gygax sets it out, they are committed to not acting - they resemble certain real-world outlooks such as Stoicism.)

Because good means good, we have to explain other outlooks as flawed. The evil are selfish and don't respect other values (life, wellbeing, truth, beauty) in their goals and action. The LN and CN are fetishists of order and individualism respectively, who treat those things as ends rather than means.

But somewhere along the way the idea came about that eahc of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil is a coherent value in its own right. Which leads to statements like @Umbran's that a LG person might rationally will order even when that does not contribute to wellbeing! Which is to say that a good person might prioritise some other end over the good! Which is incoherent unless good means something other than good. But if it does then the whole system breaks down into a garbled mush.

Where does this idea of each end of the axis as a self-standing value come from? I blame Appendix IV of the PHB, which sets out the Outer Planes and correlates them to the alignments in a way that suggests that Law and Chaos are values or rational aspirations in their own right. I think this then gets taken up further in 2nd ed AD&D, and Planescape is it's culmination. In the 3E MotP we also see notions like NG being the "purest" or most absolute good. Which again implies that the LG are simultaneously committed to good and committed to subordinating it to some other value - yet are still good! Which as I've said makes no sense.

Gygax's PHB and DMG alignment descriptions are much clearer. NG is not more "pure" than LG or CG. Rather, the NG take no strong view on what is the best means to achieve the good. If we assume that, a priori, it's an open question whether tradition, self-realisation, or both can lead to wellbeing then the NG are no more or less likely to bring about the most good in the world than the LG or the CG. Which to me is much more sensible as a framework.

I had started typing something along these lines (not quite as well-said, but of the same gist) and then I deleted it all and then just went with the post you saw.

Seems to still be about the same!

 

[pemerton]

CN I've always found the biggest problem was that most people interpret it as either:

A) Just bonkers, taking random actions that make no sense (several descriptions of it in TSR books kinda support this interpretation, unfortunately).

B) Terminal refusal to follow or go along with plans or anything that has been agreed to. This is I feel a bit more on the player than the description of the alignment, but it is a problem that can derail adventures and split the party and cause absolute havoc.

To me this isn't an alignment problem. It's a social/cultural problem - as in, why does the hobby involve significant numers of participants who don't seem to want to engage in it and take pleasure in wrecking it for others?

I don't think angling clubs are populated by people who like tipping out others' tackle boxes and breaking their rods and flies.

Some of the answer might be because RPGing, more than angling, has a wish-fulfillment component. But I don't think that's all of the answer.

 

[pemerton]

Even if a Lawful character disagrees with the laws of the land, they would still try to work within them before resorting to extra-legal methods.

Lets take the slavery example:

A LG character is in a place where slavery is legal - they might try to influence the rules makers to change the law, they might try to put themselves into a situation where they could change the law themselves. If they have the means - they might buy as many slaves as possible and free them, etc. Their first go-to would not likely be to incite a rebellion against the legal authority to put in place a different one that agrees with their views.

This, of course, could get complicated if the LG character believes the legal authority is not "in fact" legal and needs to be replaced.

I think there is scope for a lot of nuance here.

In Iron Monkey, the title character has a companion who was a worker in a brothel before he paid for her freedom. But the same character robs from the corrupte officials and distributs that money to the poor. There character seems to be distinguishing between the brothel owner, who is not a nice person but engaged in legitimate transactions to acquire bonded workers, and the officials who do not have any just claim on the proceeds that they enjoy.

In the slavery context, it could matter a great deal whether slaves have been sold into slavery by their families in "legitimate" transactions, or are pirsoners of war, or have been kidnapped. And also there would be no reason to expect two people both of whom believe in the value of order and tradition to look at the situation in exactlyu the same way.

If a properly-RP'd LG character things a country's laws are vile and misguided, they have no duty to work within them, I would suggest, and DMs who insist they do, otherwise they're "not lawful" are exactly the sort of problem we've been discussing here.

It's one thing is a generally-just country has a few problematic areas, like maybe indentured servitude being widespread and perhaps abused, or debtors prisons (to an LG character, that's clearly "not okay"), they may well work within the law.

But if the country is broadly unjust, no matter how "legitimate" the government is (let's face it, it probably isn't very legitimate, whatever it is), I don't think there's any reason they'd follow the laws of that country (though they will still continue to follow their own internal code of ethics/mental laws/rules).

When Frodo and Sam go to Mordor, the idea of obeying the "laws" of Mordor doesn't really come up, They are dressed in stolen orc clothes, but seem unperturbed by that. (And I've never seen anyone who is commenting on LotR criticise Frodo and Sam for this theft. In the fiction itself, the only one to comment on it is Frodo and he feels sorry for Sam having had to rummage around the bodies of dead orcs to get the loot.)

In an RPGing context, a GM who sets up a situation where it makes sense to talk about laws at all and yet they are very unjust is simply making it irrational to play a LG character. Which may or may not be fair enough, depending on what the group is expecting. I think it's noteworthy, though, that most romantic fantasy doesn't put such situations in the foreground.

The shire has essentially no crime, and Hobbits have a treasure trove of traditions and societal connections they take very seriously. Things like hospitality, as a duty, and fulfilling societal expectations are pretty quintessentially Lawful. Just because they don't go in for a lot of legal bureaucracy doesn't make them not lawful. They don't have to because the innate qualities of their culture mitigate against needing it (and can be most useful indexed in D&D terms as LG).

I don't now if you're familiar with EP Thompson's Whigs and Hunters, which in its epilogue has a very famous discussion of the rule of law in 18th century England.

Thompson is writing a Marxist social history of the period, and so his discussion of the rule of law is nuanced - he describes the rule of law itself as an unqualified human good, but is very critical of the laws themselves and those who administered them. He also notes that the legal system had purchase even on those whom it harmed because they themselves lived in a world shaped by law and legal rights (various petty agrarian property rights, which the system of enclosure was dismantling).

The Shire is something like the world EP Thompson is writing about but shorn of all the actual events of history! I see this as part of what makes LotR a rather reactionary novel. But there's no doubt that it equally makes for excellent FRPGing!

EDIT: As I'm reading through posts I'm seeing an emerging dichotomy - if LG is not about the laws of a society than it must be about an internal code of ethics, which is no real constraint at all.

What's missing in that dichotomy is organic society - like The Shire that @Fenris-77 has described - which is external to the individual, but is not just a code of laws demanding content-neutral obedience.

If a group of RPGers can't take that sort of notion seriously - and I would understand why, for instance, some Americans may not be able to given that they live in the most modern society on earth - then it makes more sense that LG would be a problematic category.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Let's just agree to disagree on this one. Laws of the land may or may not inform the decisions of my PC.

If, for example, my background is "escaped slave from the KOE" I sure as heck don't support my homeland's laws. External laws may or may not be just.

To each their own.

So your evil kingdom is actually Lawful Neutral? Since my reply was to a quote of what Lawful Neutral encompasses?

 

[pemerton]

If we use your approach, just about every culture in human history is lawful, because your net is so broad.

But this is the right outcome! It's inherent in basically all non-modern cultures that they honour tradition and community.

The starting point for sociology and anthropology as fields of study is noticing that in "modernity" (roughly and imperfectly, industrial and post-industrial European and North American socieities and other socieities that resemble them) individualism starts to replace tradition to a significant extent.

 

[pemerton]

The degree which a particular culture in human history is lawful would very much depend on broader considerations of that culture. Vikings, for example, had very strict laws of hospitality, but also a culture of raiding and piracy. Law on the one hand and chaos on the other. Looking at the broader context in a particular case is where you'll find the knobs and dials to adjust putative alignment. In the case of Hobbits they have a peaceful, well ordered society, and no extraneous reason to count them as anything but lawful. This matched the write for Halflings in the PHB to btw, and that isn't a mistake.

I think this is where we see the limits of alignment.

Vikings are real. Hobbits and The Shire are not - they are JRRT's romanticised ideal of pre-industrial English society.

So it's no surprise that Hobbits can be fitted into the alignment system pretty straightforwardly, whereas Vikings - being actual people with an actual and complex history - cannot.

 

[Oofta]

So your evil kingdom is actually Lawful Neutral? Since my reply was to a quote of what Lawful Neutral encompasses?

Huh? I'm not even following. My opinion is that LG does not have to follow the laws of the land, even of their sovereign nation. The rules and code a LG follows do not, in my opinion, have to come from an external source.