D&D General The Problem with Evil or what if we don't use alignments?

[Cadence]

Having been in the real world told I'm going to hell and that I'm going to be tortured because God is good, no this isn't about the D&D term. This is about the core word.

I've never argued in the real world about the meaning of xenophobic. I've argued about the nature of goodness frequently and whether e.g. God is good. Or whether conversion therapy is good.

When D&D chose "good" and "evil" they chose intensely political real world terms.

Your argument before seemed to be focusing on that G/E and L/C didn't tell enough about how a character/group would act, and that other words were less ambiguous. I was addressing that. If you had previously centered it as being about your experiences with the words good and evil and religion in the real world I missed it. That certainly does change the discussion.

Most of them would be reasonable. They are all pointing in the same direction.

Is xenophobe in the real world seems like an erudite form of bigot which also seems politically charged in the real word.

In any case, since all of those choices of definition of xenophobe would lead to very different actions in many cases in the game, it feels like xenophobe is also not a very useful word for getting detail about a character in a useful way.

 

[Oofta]

One of my PCs has the bond "One day I will return to my guild and prove that I am the greatest artisan of them all."

That doesn't tell me much about how they'll go about achieving that goal. An evil PC may murder all the competition. A chaotic may outright cheat or bend the rules. A lawful character will play by the rules, although that may include some loophole or little used rule.

That's why I like alignment - it's an additional tidbit of information I can use. It doesn't even matter if anyone else agrees with me because it's a tool for my personal RP of that PC, NPC or monster.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Your argument before seemed to be focusing on that G/E and L/C didn't tell enough about how a character/group would act, and that other words were less ambiguous. I was addressing that. If you had previously centered it as being about your experiences with the words good and evil and religion in the real world I missed it. That certainly does change the discussion.

I have and have always had two arguments about alignment - and two that synergise with each other.

1: The 9 point alignment grid is toxic - in particular calling entire races good and evil is a bad idea.
2: The 9 point alignment grid is bad even at what its defenders claim it is good at because it doesn't actually say very much and what it does is trite, cliched, and doesn't provide much guidance.

So it's simultaneously toxic and pointless.

People have been trying to defend it from being toxic by saying it's useful. I've been rebutting that repeatedly by suggesting things that do what it claims to but far better.

The real world issues call into point 1.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

One of my PCs has the bond "One day I will return to my guild and prove that I am the greatest artisan of them all."

That doesn't tell me much about how they'll go about achieving that goal. An evil PC may murder all the competition. A chaotic may outright cheat or bend the rules. A lawful character will play by the rules, although that may include some loophole or little used rule.

That's why I like alignment - it's an additional tidbit of information I can use. It doesn't even matter if anyone else agrees with me because it's a tool for my personal RP of that PC, NPC or monster.

I still do not understand what you need the alignment for. How would absence of alignment prevent you from deciding whether your character is honourable or murderous?

This just seems so weird to me, but I feel this is again one of those ingrained D&D things that people who only play D&D cannot snap out of. Like people create characters in countless different games or in fiction all the time and manage to define their personalities just fine without bizarrely clunky nine-point system. Just decide what the personality and motivations of you character are, it's not hard!

 

[Cadence]

Counterexample: The Roman Catholic Church. Priests can be defrocked - but the sacraments are permanent. They just can't officiate on behalf of the church. Not losing clerical sacramental abilities at least until they are formally stripped is of course necessary in real world situations for any large church; if a heretic couldn't offer sacraments then there would be huge questions over whether people were married or (even more importantly) whether people had been baptized. The RCC is far from the only example - just I believe the biggest religious grouping on the planet.

The real world doesn't seem to have the equivalent of a 1 minute casting time commune or 1 action casting time zone of truth. It feels like those would make a difference in both theological debates and deciding schisms.

On the other hand, there are cases where the sacraments might be invalidated because of the status of the priest. In the news last year was one in Detroit who found out he wasn't baptized with the correct formula, invalidating his baptism, confirmation, and ordination, and invalidating the marriages and other sacraments he had performed (I can't find a story saying they changed course and didn't make those he married get remarried). Apparently one can get a plenary indulgence for attending a priests first mass - no word if that was invalidated too. The existence of annulments would seem to imply there is no immediate divine check on requirements for the sacraments - so not the equivalent of some D&D spells or a state based check in MtG.

A big thing here is that clerical magic in D&D isn't from exemplary faith or perfection. The class is cleric, not saint and perfection has never been required.

Who said "perfection"? It feels like there is a big difference between needing to be perfect to needing to not be evil in a good church. The later certainly has been disqualifying. And it feels like some deities demanding even more than rough alignment adherence has been a thing.

"A cleric’s alignment must be within one step of his deity’s (that is, it may be one step away on either the lawful-chaotic axis or the good-evil axis, but not both). A cleric may not be neutral unless his deity’s alignment is also neutral.
...
A cleric who grossly violates the code of conduct required by his god loses all spells and class features, except for armor and shield proficiencies and proficiency with simple weapons. He cannot thereafter gain levels as a cleric of that god until he atones (see the atonement spell description)." - 3.5 SRD

And in 1e the higher level spells came directly from the deity.

I'm fine with such cosmologies too - but not as the default. If you want to say that the deities of the Forgotten Realms are (a) unusually meddlesome and (b) petty enough to support the Wall of the Faithless then that's a specific setting conceit.

"Commissioner, commissioner, what is your response to the atrocities committed by the officers in the 12th precinct?"

"12th precinct? Is that one of ours in the city? They're still mostly getting bad guys and the station hasn't been burned down yet, right? <shrugs> Getting involved feels unusually meddlesome, let's let it ride."

But seriously, I'm kind of used to the PC clerics getting occasional dreams or visions from their gods even if it isn't in the rules. Is that meddlesome? Would it not happen in worlds where the gods were hands off about major schisms and heresies and the like?

 

[Oofta]

I still do not understand what you need the alignment for. How would absence of alignment prevent you from deciding whether your character is honourable or murderous?

This just seems so weird to me, but I feel this is again one of those ingrained D&D things that people who only play D&D cannot snap out of. Like people create characters in countless different games or in fiction all the time and manage to define their personalities just fine without bizarrely clunky nine-point system. Just decide what the personality and motivations of you character are, it's not hard!

If it's an NPC or monster? Yes it tells me a lot about what they will do to achieve their goals. For my own PCs? I like to play different alignments because it helps me put myself in different people's shoes and try to think outside my own mental box.

I'm not LN, but if I play a LN PC I'll try to understand how someone with that mindset would think and respond to different situations. It's just an RP aid.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Who said "perfection"? It feels like there is a big difference between needing to be perfect to needing to not be evil in a good church. The later certainly has been disqualifying. And it feels like some deities demanding even more than rough alignment adherence has been a thing.

This good/evil thing is again silly alignment-related cartoon nonsense. Pretty much all religions define themselves as 'good' and plenty of them do and teach things that a lot of people feel are 'evil'. That really is one of the huge issues with the alignment, it treats a relative thing as objective.

"Commissioner, commissioner, what is your response to the atrocities committed by the officers in the 12th precinct?"

"12th precinct? Is that one of ours in the city? They're still mostly getting bad guys and the station hasn't been burned down yet, right? <shrugs> Getting involved feels unusually meddlesome, let's let it ride."

That's totally the attitude the gods in my settings have.

 

[Fenris-77]

Oh god, not another one.

People, please stop beating on Psych 101 terms. They're already dead.

And even if you were using them correctly, pointing out a fallacy is not an actual valid argument.

Just saying writers do X without any attempt to dedemonstrate the truth or nature of the claim is, actually, gasp, not an argument either. Writers dont actually do that either, as a group, and it's arrant nonsense to claim otherwise. Which leads us back it being a fallacious statement, which it is.

Just because you think people overuse reference to fallacy, which I'd agree with, doesnt mean this isn't a valid place to deploy it, which it is. Nor, thank goodness, has anyone put you or your half baked sarcasm in charge of when I get to call a nonsense argument exactly what it is.

Pointing out that the comment was entirely fallacious wasn't supposed to be an argument btw, just a dismissal. And now we're back to 'moving on'.

 

[Neonchameleon]

One of my PCs has the bond "One day I will return to my guild and prove that I am the greatest artisan of them all."

That doesn't tell me much about how they'll go about achieving that goal. An evil PC may murder all the competition. A chaotic may outright cheat or bend the rules. A lawful character will play by the rules, although that may include some loophole or little used rule.

Except that murdering the competition doesn't actually make you a great artisan, let alone "of them all" because "of them all" implies both alive and dead.

There are two obvious questions:

1. "The greatest" in whose eyes?
   1. Popular acclaim?
   2. The guild itself?
   3. A wider circle of experts?
2. The greatest how?
   1. Winning a set competition?
   2. Creating something legendary?
   3. Making them irrelevant through invention (e.g. bringing steam hammers to craft armour)?
   4. Driving them out of business and having them work in my shop?

So the evil character in your example doesn't actually believe their bond. They will show them and crush them, but it's not about being the greatest artisan. And both the lawful and the chaotic one need to first define what they mean by "the greatest artisan of them all". Chaotic is more likely to want popular acclaim - but this is about as far as I can see it goes.

 

[Cadence]

This good/evil thing is again silly alignment-related cartoon nonsense. Pretty much all religions define themselves as 'good' and plenty of them do and teach things that a lot of people feel are 'evil'. That really is one of the huge issues with the alignment, it treats a relative thing as objective.


That's totally the attitude the gods in my settings have.

What makes clerics in your world any different than wizards with a club membership, different spell list, and being a bit in combat?