D&D General D&D doesn't need Evil

[BookTenTiger]

Without the evil, who is gonna stop the Goody Two Shoes king from spreading love and joy and peace around the land?
Bartender sloooooooooooowly lookstowards the group of PCs, who are known for doing things if Gold and (insert whatever) is inovlved.

It would be funny to have a group of "TRUE NEUTRAL" characters who are always trying to restore perfect balance between forces of Good and Evil, sometimes slaying an evil tyrant, and sometimes going Unicorn Hunting when Good becomes too powerful

 

[Weiley31]

Bards.

Of course it all makes sense now: DND was never about Orcs, Drows, and if Evil should be there. It was all about the unspeakable horror of the Bard and their drop dead smexyness!

The only upgrade from that path is the Bard Bunny Girls.

 

[Malmuria]

Continuing with the idea of Capital E Evil, I even think the idea of "evil gods" could be excised from D&D.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically in polytheistic mythology (such as Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt), there aren't really "evil" gods. There are gods in conflict, and trickster gods, and gods of war, but as far as I know there wasn't an Ancient Greek God of Evil.

To me, it's much more useful to have Gods with Motivations. What does Gruumsh want? What does Vecna want? Most likely they want things that are antithetical to the desires of the heroes and the cultures they come from. To me, that's enough, and far more interesting than just labeling them (and those who worship them) as Evil.

I'm hindu, or at least grew up hindu, and I can tell you that the way that planescape shoe-horned Indian mythology into the alignment system was clumsy at best. Actually, I would say that dnd polytheism in practice does not operate a lot like real-world polytheistic religions. Gods in dnd pantheons are siloed from each other in a way that makes god into a somewhat distinct religion unto itself. The sense of the interconnectedness of the pantheon, the necessary role of all of the gods, and the nuance of religious practice is lost.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Of course it all makes sense now: DND was never about Orcs, Drows, and if Evil should be there. It was all about the unspeakable horror of the Bard and their drop dead smexyness!

The only upgrade from that path is the Bard Bunny Girls.

Definitely on that last point.

I imagine it as the bard from the Witcher netflix show, always causing trouble by sleeping with the wrong people. That alone is enough to prevent peace, love, and joy from spreading across the world!

 

[GuyBoy]

Does D&D need evil? Probably not, in the sense that games can be constructed with all sorts of shades of motivation, but certain creatures (demons, aboleths, mind layers etc) seem to represent a pretty deep kind of Evil.

Bit the deeper problem is a definition of evil and it’s a problem that far more learned philosophers than myself have agonised over for centuries, so I’m not confident we will find an answer on these boards.
If we consider raising the dead to be evil, then the necromancer in the OP’s thread is evil, but equally, we’ve seen Dracula portrayed as a relatively sympathetic character in some interpretations....Gary Oldman’s for example.
An earlier poster said (totally correctly in my view) that murdering a roomful of schoolchildren is clearly evil. It absolutely is, but this gets tricky when we extend that to abetting such evil by (and here I could risk a warning) supporting NRA-type views.
Evil is also something of a journey. Was Hitler evil? I would say yes. Was Hitler evil as a child of 11 in Branau? I would say no. As a failed art student in Vienna? Probably not fully, but he was attending racist meetings. As a soldier in WW1? And who, later, was more evil out of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich? Probably impossible to answer with certainty.

I guess where I’m going with this is that we are all people in the real world, where evil is so very difficult to define, and is so very subjective.
So do we carry this difficult task into our worlds of D&D or take the option of ignoring evil completely or just play with whatever Monster Manual labels of evil we feel happy with?

 

[BookTenTiger]

Hey all, as we discuss the nature of EVIL, as the OP can I request we leave out Real World Examples as much as possible? That way we can avoid bringing politics or religion into the discussion.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I'm hindu, or at least grew up hindu, and I can tell you that the way that planescape shoe-horned Indian mythology into the alignment system was clumsy at best. Actually, I would say that dnd polytheism in practice operates a lot than real-world polytheistic religions. Gods in dnd pantheons are siloed from each other in a way that makes god into a somewhat distinct religion unto itself. The sense of the interconnectedness of the pantheon, the necessary role of all of the gods, and the nuance of religious practice is lost.

You are totally right about this! D&D basically presents multiple Monotheistic Religions rather than a Polytheistic Culture.

 

[Krachek]

I'm fairly certain that normal people don't sleep with their sisters and toss little boys off of towers to their deaths.

Not totaly normal, but not so rare.
In 2018, the US murder rate was 5.0 per 100,000, for a total of 15,498 murders.
And technically it was even not a murder, only an attempt!

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm hindu, or at least grew up hindu, and I can tell you that the way that planescape shoe-horned Indian mythology into the alignment system was clumsy at best. Actually, I would say that dnd polytheism in practice operates a lot than real-world polytheistic religions. Gods in dnd pantheons are siloed from each other in a way that makes god into a somewhat distinct religion unto itself. The sense of the interconnectedness of the pantheon, the necessary role of all of the gods, and the nuance of religious practice is lost.

Yeah, D&D religion seems to be a weird form of monolatry, where a broad pantheon of gods is near-universally acknowledged to exist, but everyone devotes themselves to the worship of a single god… for reasons… Which kinda makes sense as what you’d get from a monotheist’s (mis)interpretation of polytheism.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Yeah, D&D religion seems to be a weird form of monolatry, where a broad pantheon of gods is near-universally acknowledged to exist, but everyone devotes themselves to the worship of a single god… for reasons… Which kinda makes sense as what you’d get from a monotheist’s (mis)interpretation of polytheism.

That's why I like to break my settings' deities (and demipowers) into different "pantheons" that different peoples and cultures worship. In my world, the people that worship Vecna also worships his evil "pantheon" of demigod followers (including an Arcana-Domain Cleric Lich, an Allip with demigod powers, a Fallen-Solar Necromancer, and a Fallen Archon Death Knight.)