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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1551649" data-attributes="member: 3146">Quite possibly. However, I think there's enough information to conclude that none of the designers though evil to be a particularly rare part of the human condition. Often neutral, evenly distributed, 01-50 evil (LE, NE, or CE), whatever. In any of these models, a significant minority of a typical population group will be some kind of evil alignment. A population that was 12%-20% evil would be as much as could be reasonably expected under any of these models. (Of course, there would be a massive difference between an area with a 12% evil population and one with even a 20% evil population, let alone a 50% evil population, but then again, in D&D, there's usually a big difference between the Furyondy and the Bandit Kingdoms of any campaign world).While I agree that the bell curve makes sense. However, I think that with the descriptions I gave in my previous post, and a tiny smidgin of historical knowledge, I don't think the idea that 1/3 of all humans are willing to kill or degrade other people and would probably enjoy it is patently ridiculous. If anything, the figure is too low.You'd be hard pressed to find many people groups that haven't been involved in some kind of ethnic cleansing, purge, or genocide in the past 70 years. There are a lot of sociological and psychological experiments (the Stanford Prison experiment is probably the most well known) that seem to indicate that, given the appropriate environment and the opportunity to do so without punishment most people will behave in a manner corresponding to the PHB's description of evil. That shouldn't surprise students of history or anyone else. At the moment, westerners are fortunate enough to live in an unusually just (by historical standards) and free society where institutions of law and a historically religious culture have pressed most of us into a mold that enables us to live together in a reasonably humane and comfortable way. That, however, is the exception rather than the rule of human community. (And, given the direction our cultures have taken over the past half-century or so, is extremely unlikely to last).</blockquote>

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