Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3687766" data-attributes="member: 30001">Why wouldn't an evil deity genuinely reward a character who served him?  I'm not sure I see nihilism in the faith of Shar, for instance (who I'm only generally familiar with from modules and stuff).  Yes, a deity who says "I want to kill everyone and make them suffer, including my followers" would have a hard time recruiting anyone that wasn't insane - but for the example deities you gave I don't see it being an issue.No, but people don't serve deities in order to be caring/altruistic.  A deity of fortune, for example, might be CN - service would be in order to gain bonuses.  A farmer would serve a neutral deity in order for it to rain.Yes, I think most service of evil would be for selfish ends - even if such things were postponed during some sort of trial period (the noble in my example would probably have to perform a number of evil deeds before he could hope to have the goddess resurrect his lost love).  However, I can think of one evil "philosophy" that might transcend just selfish ends, and that is a characature of the Nietzsche philosophy.  Good coddles the weak, and therefore is an overall detriment to society.  The fear of being brutalized by your superiors causes people to work harder to become a superior.  The weak implicitly accept their station in life as being their own fault.  Important note:  I'm not saying that this actually is someone's real world philosophy, but it's been put in the mouths of enough fantasy characters to give you the idea of what was intended.And that brings up a number of points - fantasy by it's nature draws some pretty stark lines and turns the subtleties of real life into black and white issues.  Good guys and bad guys.  I think you'd be hard pressed to design a fantasy world with such stark divisions like good and evil and yet everyone has completely recognizable human motivations.  I think the more "human" you make your human NPCs, the more ambigious, and less fantasy, your fantasy world becomes.  So to some extent, maybe evil people are evil because they want to be that way, and if they thought of things the same way you did, you'd all have the same alignment.  One of the philosophies of the modern world is that everyone is basically the same and their environment and choices determine their fate.  This may, fundamentally, NOT be the case in a fantasy world.</blockquote>

Verification