D&D General I can't help it - every pure wizard I ever make has turned or will turn "evil" (even if only in my own mind).

[Krachek]

I try the reverse, start with an evil guy in search of redemption.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I’ve played a few wizards:

My first wizard was a purely evil,power hungry megalomaniac. It was also my first character.

My last wizard was socially detached and pragmatic. But he did have a sense of morality. His pragmatism got him into trouble with the party though.

“You took over his body with magic jar!?!? You are turning evil”

But when I asked them what they would have done: “uh, probably fought him”.

So murdering your enemy was less taboo than taking them over in order to restrain them and bring them to Justice.

In the end, my character just backed one of the PCs who happened to be most morally humane and allowed my character to fulfill his own private goals (immortality, of course).

It’s almost impossible to play a ‘charitable’ wizard given the cost of material components of high level spells

 

[LordEntrails]

I don't see why any such code would survive learning how to bend the multiverse to your will.

That's your choice. Perhaps some reading up on real people who have had great power and used it for good might help? Or look to fiction for examples. Honor Harrington comes to mind, but pick one that resonates with you, not with me.

And, they don't all start selfish, in fact I've gone out of my way to give them reasons not to be but... dude, there's a multiverse out there! Also I can make copies of myself without free will to do things for me. And, of course, undead labor. See also: fireballs as war crimes. And how do we think the spirits we summon to die for us feel about it?

Oh I get it. But it's your view that the ability to bend the multiverse must be used for evil, or that there is no "good" use for such power. There are plenty of ways to use such power for good. Such as; feeding the poor, providing sanitation for a town, ridding the X of evil Y.

I can drive 130 mph on the street near me, but I don't. I can go into a convenience store, kill the clerk and rob the place, but I don't. It's a choice you make to play your wizard as turning evil. If you don't want that, then expand your view If you do want it, then go for it if it's within your group's acceptable play styles.

EDIT: poor? examples. They are an attempt to show that power does not need to be used, and it does not need to be used for selfish reasons.

 

[ph0rk]

That's your choice. Perhaps some reading up on real people who have had great power and used it for good might help? Or look to fiction for examples. Honor Harrington comes to mind, but pick one that resonates with you, not with me.

Oh I get it. But it's your view that the ability to bend the multiverse must be used for evil, or that there is no "good" use for such power. There are plenty of ways to use such power for good. Such as; feeding the poor, providing sanitation for a town, ridding the X of evil Y.

I can drive 130 mph on the street near me, but I don't. I can go into a convenience store, kill the clerk and rob the place, but I don't. It's a choice you make to play your wizard as turning evil. If you don't want that, then expand your view If you do want it, then go for it if it's within your group's acceptable play styles.

EDIT: poor? examples. They are an attempt to show that power does not need to be used, and it does not need to be used for selfish reasons.

It didn't take long for someone to get bent out of shape.

Anyway, none of those examples are really at the same level of inter-planar earthbending power. A small bit of power would only beget a small bit of "evil", or corruption, or selfishness. PCs exhibit that all the time.

Lets say I consider PCs to be constrained, only that Wizards can throw off the yoke of law. Without law, Bellum omnium contra omnes.

 

[LordEntrails]

It didn't take long for someone to get bent out of shape.

Nope, not me.

Anyway, none of those examples are really at the same level of inter-planar earthbending power. A small bit of power would only beget a small bit of "evil", or corruption, or selfishness. PCs exhibit that all the time.

Lets say I consider PCs to be constrained, only that Wizards can throw off the yoke of law. Without law, Bellum omnium contra omnes.

Again, you don't get my point. If you don't want to play a wizard who turns evil because of (any reason you want). Then don't. It's totally in your control, if you chose to.

 

[ph0rk]

Nope, not me.

Again, you don't get my point. If you don't want to play a wizard who turns evil because of (any reason you want). Then don't. It's totally in your control, if you chose to.

I have zero problems with it, as I've said several times already in this thread, and of course my characters are entirely in my control.

However, as characters grow more powerful, as I see it the frame of reference for their morality changes too. Just as is the case with regular people in the real world, their moral values change as their conditions do. And wizards grow quite powerful.

Couple that with how power acquisition is more or less at the core of the wizard archetype, a morality that seems at best strange and at worst evil to regular folks seems the most likely outcome. Compare with a character that never sought power, but found what was quite a lot: Dr. Manhattan. A striking shift in his moral compass followed.

Now imagine he started down that road seeking that power.

I don't see how acquiring it doesn't change them, and those changes are unlikely to be seen as mostly positive by those common folk whose moral compass has remained pointing in more or less the same direction, and on the same Euclidean plane.

I think power without corruption is a fantasy, and one that breaks verisimilitude for me.

 

[James Gasik]

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d2/c0/04/d2c004284d1c7169cb5c6e607d3a50ff.gif

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@ph0rk

I think, perhaps, that the problem may lie in the way you view the relationship between the wizard and their power? That is, it seems to me that you start off with the perspective, "A Wizard desires power, and thus pursues Wizardly ways because those are an excellent investment."

Would you describe any of your Wizards as the kind of people who investigate puzzles or enigmas solely because they are unsolved, without any consideration for the power or influence they might gain from solving them? If not, then perhaps that's an anodyne to this seemingly-inevitable march toward selfish lowercase-e evil. Pursuit of knowledge and magic, not because these things grant power, but because it's literally just a surge of sheer joy to have an epiphany or craft a new spell.

Part of why I say this is, you've noted that other spellcasters don't experience this process, making particular note of Sorcerers. A Sorcerer never sought out their powers in the first place (or, at least, the "expected" way of becoming one is a family-tree surprise), these powers just happened to them. As a result, while they might choose to explore those powers, their behavior is not in principle motivated by those powers. Compound this with the examples you already gave (they're social butterflies, thus inclining you to think socially; they're spell-limited, turning you away from pursuit of elaborate efforts and spellbook-filling), particularly given your statement that Bards could go in a similar direction due to their ability to pick up spells from other lists, and I think there's a pretty good case to be made for this. You see Wizards as, more or less, dragons of knowledge, already isolated from society due to their nerdy pursuits and ever-more-isolated due to their need to (literally) know it all.

I think it might be an interesting challenge for you to play a much more happy-go-lucky, "eternally wowed by the mysteries of the universe" type Wizard, the type that only researches a new spell because it tickles her fancy, or who dives deep into investigating the potential uses of seemingly-useless combinations. This contrasts very heavily from your extremely practically-rooted mindset you've described, where the thing that doesn't change is "I must acquire knowledge so I can acquire power, therefore I must acquire as much knowledge as possible so I can acquire as much power as possible."

If power never becomes a motive because "eh, power, who needs it? I just like looking for answers to weird questions," you might find yourself following a different track.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think power without corruption is a fantasy, and one that breaks verisimilitude for me.

I mean, Cincinnatus was probably a real dude (or, at least, that's the consensus among historians). Some details of his life may have been mythologized, but he almost certainly did actually serve as dictator twice, and we have no reason to believe he did not behave as described in the stories told about him.

Some people really can be given nigh-absolute power and no (external) reason not to use it...and still just walk away.

 

[TheSword]

Perhaps I should explain, and I love the “I’m the Sword” references btw!
@TheSword and I have been part of a face-to-face group for many years, with he and I sharing the DM-ing.
He’s an awesome DM and player, but we have a running joke that his spellcaster characters always start as decent enough, but always slide inexorably towards the sinister. The incident with the blanket springs to mind or the cutting off of the thumb or Gaunty in general.
Whilst my own characters are, of course, noble, decent, upstanding and honest, and I have a bridge to sell you!

You go to sleep for 8 hours and wake up to your name being taken in vain!

I am shocked… shocked I say… to discover that people consider TheSword’s characters to be in any way evil!

Sure I played a few necromancers in my time but one was a guardian of the divide between life and death… the one who stood between endless monsters of the abyss and reality. The only reason @GuyBoy called him evil was because he affectionately referred to his thief as ‘pumpkin’.

I also may have played a necromancer who had a darker side but in his defense it was @GuyBoy as DM who cursed him with vampirism half way through the campaign - and he spent the next five levels looking for a cure! A cure… I barely ate three or four people in that campaign.

And sure in Rappan Athuk my sorceress may have been a bit prescriptive, dare I say bossy… but those were dangerous times and really everyone’s life was on the line.

Finally, yes I did have a dwarven slayer-esq character who cut off a party members finger while they slept. (Which obviously woke them up) But that was seriously provoked. I mean I thought the dwarf was being quite restrained to only take a finger when an elf casts dominate on you!

All my characters are assiduously good. I wouldn’t dream of playing evil!

N.B although I have forgotten about any incident with a blanket and now am worried it was so bad I’ve blocked it out. It’s a possibility.