A game with good and evil but no neutrals?

[Particle_Man]

I was considering running a game where there are less shades of grey than usual. The basic idea would be that all player characters have to be good. (If they changed from good, they would become evil and NPC). All NPC's were either good or evil. All monsters were either good, evil or "non-sentient" (i.e. Int of less than 3 or else lacking the intelligence score). "neutral" would simply not be an option for NPC's.

Furthermore, when it came to monsters there would be no exceptions. Orcs would be evil, orc babies raised in a loving home would still be evil and grow up to do evil things, etc.

Basically, I am "Declaring war on the neutral planet".

Has anyone else tried this? Are there things I would have to watch out for?

 

[Crothian]

Is religion going to play a big part? It seems to me that with everone good or evil, the sides are clearly drawn and it could be leading up to something big. Especially if you had it where the nutrals were dieing out and people were unconsciously choosingsides.

 

[the Jester]

Sounds interesting. This kind of reminds me of the absolute morality style of LotR and the Thomas Covenant books.

 

[Andor]

Makes me think of Mercedes Lackys Valdemar series. None of the villians in that series have a single redeeming characteristic. There is just one who doesn't like torture, but only because he is squeamish, not because he has an ethical problem with it. Without exception they are all the sort of people who would cross the street to kick a puppy.

Now this always drove me nuts as a reader, but it would make sense in terms of a world that is supernaturaly polarized into GOOD(tm) and EVIL(tm).

Hmm... and it's interesting to note that a world where you don't have to worry about redeeming the bad guys would make Paladins much more of a 'boot the door and take heads' sort of class. None of that wishy-washyness so many DMs like to plauge them with.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

It might be interesting, but you'd then have to answer a number of questions that the neutral alignment lets other people dodge. For instance, assuming that good and evil can describe actions as well as people, are there any neutral actions or are all actions good or evil? (And if, so, what's the moral status of seemingly indifferent actions like eating Wheaties instead of Corn Flakes for breakfast or, for that matter, eating breakfast at all?) However, the biggest challenge would be evaluating the relationship between good and evil actions and good and evil alignment. How many good acts would it take to make an evil person good or how many evil acts to make a good person evil? I don't think there's an obvious answer to that unless it is that any evil act makes a (formerly) good person evil but no amount of good acts will make an evil person good. (This is especially true if you eliminate indifference or neutrality for actions as well since some evil people are certain to do the good thing when it comes to eating breakfast). That's a perfectly workable system, but it A. ceases to be alignment (since it no longer tells you about the relative tendencies of people) and B. ends up with rather a lot more shades of grey than you have even in normal D&D because nearly everyone will be evil but there is obviously some differentiation between the various kinds of evil people.

In any event, eliminating neutrality would force you to have a much more robust and coherent philosophy of good and evil than D&D currently has or than most people have IRL.

 

[Umbran]

I find it difficult to imagine a world in which folks who don't actually act Good or Evil must still fall under one of those two terms. I've always thought the system works best when it requires a certain amount of dedication or effort to sit at the ends of the alignment spectrum. YMMV, of course.

 

[sfedi]

I didn;t do that exact thing in my game, but I did make Evil and Good, unredeemable.
i.e. evilness or goodness was "genetically coded".

That makes Paladins a much more straightforward class to play (as noted in a previous post).

On of the consecuences that netural parties should face is that no Good or Evil forces approaches them, or trust them.

 

[Warehouse23]

"Either you're with us or you're against us." This type of sentiment is one of the classic mistakes of history which mankind seems so desperate to "learn from," but which it seems never to.

A Good-Evil world, with no other options (neutrality is sometimes just saying, "I don't want to chose sides here. I don't want to be involved. Take your crusade elsewhere, please") you will get a very polarized game world, which may quickly spiral out of control.

That could be kind of cool to play in.

 

[Nifft]

Monolithic polarity?

Is GOOD a unified whole -- is there no internal conflict?

Is EVIL a unified whole? I just can't imagine EVIL without internal conflict...

-- N

 

[Baron Opal]

I have, and it works fairly well. You basicly condense the available alignments down to the cardinal four: LG, CG, LE, CE. Or are you allowing CN and LN? Moral quandries can become a bit simplistic, but if that is not your cup of tea, things should run along fine. You should decide how well the corners get along, however. Do LG and LE characters leap at each other's throats like LG and CE do? How about CG and LG? Do they come to blows or do they at least try to be civil to each other? How much strife is generated by those of differing alignments in close quarters; can they work together at all if faced with a common foe?

Or, are you condensing things down to just G vs. E? In that case I would actually encourage some kind of third faction, like the Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic tricotomy present in OD&D. Having three basic forces in contention is vastly more interesting than two, I find.

Baron Opal