Evil is cool

It's interesting to notice how the good/evil notion have influence over most of your games, or at least it's what I'm reading from this topic.

Avoiding games where good clashes evil is one of my favorite RPG goals. Npcs are moved among shades of grey, trying to sound like a Raymond Chandler's book.
 

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I hate to disrupt a perfectly good discussion about other things, but... where exactly is evil getting more powerful stuff in 4e? I haven't noticed any of that, at all. Looking at the Astral Seal example, there are six domains that potentially give it stuff, 2 sorta good, 2 sorta evil, 2 sorta unaligned. I'd say the top two in terms of power are Life and Tyranny, though Life is most likely more useful for a normal party and Tyranny more useful for a party dedicated to save ends effects.

They all give roughly the same types of bonuses and such. Except the two evil ones give a bonus to a skill that's not on the cleric's skill list, which seems slightly more dubious, but hey it's all good :)
 

Avoiding games where good clashes evil is one of my favorite RPG goals. Npcs are moved among shades of grey, trying to sound like a Raymond Chandler's book.

So, you are trying to claim that in Raymond Chandler books that there isn't a clash between good and evil?!?!?

Or are you trying to claim that the simple act of murder is all shades of grey?!?!?

Chandler's NPC's aren't moving among shades of grey - most of them are in shades of black. The trouble is finding which one is innocent admist all the murk and deception. But Marlowe, despite his tough guy outward appearance, is a 'White Knight' trying to discover goodness amidst the pain and sewage of life. He's always trying to do what is right all the time, regardless of reward and regardless of the objections of anyone else. If Marlowe were a D&D class, he'd be a Paladin.
 

to celebrim's points on evil being the opposite of good:

I may or may not be deviating from the RAW, too lazy to look and I prolly don't care... :)

Consider the under-cover Good cop. He wants to look evil, but he doesn't want to do evil. If he has to, he really feels bad about it, or he'll try to fake it.

An under-cover Evil person doesn't have those qualms. He's doing good things (or not doing bad things in public) to blend in. At most, he's not happy being constrained, and he'll take it out on somebody later. Bad guys commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. They're not agents in some black vs. white war of wills. Mostly they are self-centered sociopaths who don't mind killing (a sociopath is a psychopath who hasn't crossed the killing line, usually by fear of getting caught).

My general interpretation of neutral (right or wrong) is that they don't want to get involved. They also don't tend to be "doers" as that would mean taking a side. NPC hermits and the general populace who doesn't stand up to tyranny would tend to be neutral. Ever wonder why folks in the middle east put up with all the terrorists blowing up their neighborhood? Neutral alignment. They don't want to stand up, they keep their head down, and don't get involved.


Good has principles. It generally refuses to cross the line. Out of all possible actions, there is a smaller subset it is willing to choose. Good will have regrets over some of its choices.

Evil does not have principles. Out of all possible actions, it will choose any of them that suits it. Evil seldom has regrets, mostly being limited to tactical mistakes (I should have shot the guy on the left first, I'd have taken less damage).

What role does Neutral have? Beats me. I frakking hate Neutral for being so wishy washy.

Whether my interpretation is RAW or not, I suspect that when people choose Evil and say "so I can do whatever I want" they are viewing it the way I am describing it.

Side note: Over the editions (barring 4e which I haven't seen), my general impression is that the game is balanced around a Good Human as the standard. Alignment and charisma modifiers are all anchored around that. If you were a "Good" person reading the other alignments, they would sound right to you. But if you were Evil or Neutral, they wouldn't. The same with CHA modifier. Elves are prettier than humans, they get a bonus. Orcs are uglier, they get a penalty. Yet if you were an orc, none of that would even make sense.
 

Evil is restricted from doing certain things, and encouraged to do others. These things are reversed from the things good is encouraged to do. For example, evil is encouraged to be brutal and cruel, restricted from showing mercy. If you show mercy all the time, then another evil observer will say, "Hey Joe, you just aren't evil anymore. You are weak and merciful." That isn't to say that you can't ever show mercy as an evil character any more than a good character can't ever say, "Now you must pay for your crimes.", but there is a definate expectation within the ethics of evil that you will return your enemies every slight that they give you several times over. And, if you don't, you aren't adhering to the tenants of evil.

Likewise, in the ethics of evil there is the definate expectation that you will prey upon the weak and helpless - that that is exactly what the weak are there for. If you don't treat the weak as something to be trampled on, to be used as the raw building material by which you are constructing an ediface to the greater glory of evil, and if in fact you are actually being benevolant rather than malevolant then you are off the right path and clearly not evil. Your role with respect to the weak is to show them that they are weak and useful only in so much as they serve there purpose. Your role isn't to help lift them up and give them a false belief in their own value and worth. As an evil character, you are forbidden from doing that. That isn't to say that you can't use and manipulate people, but you do so only with the intent of knocking them down. You aren't ever practicing 'tough love' - love and all that crap is for the good guys.

Likewise, in the ethics of evil the only life you love is your own - and maybe not that. You can't value life as an inherent thing. If you are valuing life, practicing benevolence, and and being merciful you can't say, "Heh, I'm evil. I can do what I want, including being good.", because that's a ridiculous attempt to claim that good and evil are merely labels. Evil characters may believe that the only difference between good and evil is that good is a lie and a hypocricy, but they always believe that there is at least some important difference.

When players want an alignment that is "eh, whatever", they are really searching for neutrality. Incidently, nuetrality includes the belief that good and evil are merely labels and that there is nothing intrinsicly different between the two.

The "eh, whatever" alignment in 4e is Unaligned, which has the benefit of avoiding everything you've described in your post.
 

Neutral is not wishy-washy. You can be Neutral simply by considering each event on its own terms, by not getting caught up in ideas, that in the big picture don't amount to much. You can be Neutral and wishy-washy, but you can be Good and wishy-washy; ineffectiveness and indecision is not limited to any one alignment. Horror movies are full of Good characters making a mess of things by trying to be Good but being unwilling to make the hard choices.

As to why evil is cool... I think there is a temptation to push buttons and to look for egoistic wish fulfillment when a writer runs out of ideas for making principled living interesting. Honestly, action movies have lots of action for this reason; even nominally pacifistic characters are pushed into really brutal, violent scenarios so we can watch bone crunch. But Good can be cool and interesting. Batman and Captain America are perennial favorites, both very principled and disciplined characters. In the TV show House, part of the draw is his antisocial personality and personal flaws, but he is a sympathetic character because he is so relentlessly driven to seek the patient's best interest. Captain Picard... he is so upright his moral uppityness is a super-power. When Captain Picard says, "There are four lights," that's badassitude.
 

Consider the under-cover Good cop.

Right from the start, you complicate this discussion by making good synonymous with 'law enforcement' and later evil synonymous with 'criminality'.

I don't know if that is because of your bias or if you are just doing some handwaving here, but by know means must we assume 'police officer' implies 'good' or that his motivation to not break laws has anything to do with his goodness or his desire to promote goodness. The 'police officer' may believe 'law = good' (in the sense of right and proper behavior), just as in my prior example the champion of evil believed 'evil = good', but even that cannot be taken for granted.

So, we must pare down your example to its heart which is, "Consider the good person who is practicing deception in order to achieve ultimately some good end." To begin with, we might want to ask whether a good person is going to be doing this at all (Boy Scouts don't make good spies), deception not being a regular part of the tool set of good.

But, even if we assume this, I don't see how it follows that because the Evil person doesn't have the the same qualms as the good person, that they don't have qualms. The question you have to ask of people engaging in evil behavior is, "How easy is it for them to stop doing what they do, even when they know that stopping the behavior is in their best interest?" And I think the answer is pretty consistantly across the board, "They don't find it easy at all." In fact, they find it probably harder to stop being evil and do something good - even when they know that it would be in their interest to do so - than good people find it to stop doing good when they think it is in there interest. Someone said, "Good is hard. Evil is easy." And, that's true, but it cuts both ways. Stopping being evil is hard. When the evil person wants to stop their pattern of behavior, they find that they have serious 'qualms' indeed that push them to continue with at least as much force as the revulsion a good person feels when they are forced (or believe that they are forced) to do something evil.

In practice, we don't find that people who are evil really exhibit the sort of freedom of choice that gamers like to attribute to them. This is because evil does instill 'qualms' - a strong revulsion against performing some sort of behavior - in those that practice it.

An under-cover Evil person doesn't have those qualms. He's doing good things (or not doing bad things in public) to blend in.

That's not how evil tends to work. As Spock says to Kirk, "It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men."

At most, he's not happy being constrained...

At most??? At most?? He's not happy??? No, he's furious, and he's a person who is used to endulging his fury and who sincerely believes it is his right to do so. His inner being cries out for proper release. He has to supress (perhaps quite literally) a raging demon that is outraged that he's born insults against him, that's he's coddled the weak, and that he's acted fearfully in the presence of his enemies and humbly in the presense of his inferiors.

Bad guys commit crimes because they think they can get away with it.

Bad guys aren't criminals necessarily, and conversely criminals aren't necessarily bad guys. Neutrals commit crimes 'because they think that they can get away with it'. Bad guys commit crimes because they think that their victims deserve it, and because they think that they have the right to do so and they commit 'crimes' even when they can't get away with it because that's what they believe they must do. In fact, they often don't want to 'get away with it', they want to flaunt what they have done publicly to show everyone what happens when they are crossed and to preach how deserving their victim was.

They're not agents in some black vs. white war of wills.

How do you know?

Mostly they are self-centered...

Self-centered is Chaotic, not evil. Many sociopaths aren't self-centered at all, and not all criminals are sociopathic.

Evil does not have principles. Out of all possible actions, it will choose any of them that suits it.

Of course evil has principles - evil ones. Not having principles and not taking a stand on your principles is neutral.

Evil seldom has regrets, mostly being limited to tactical mistakes (I should have shot the guy on the left first, I'd have taken less damage).

What the hell is vengeance if not motivated by a regret? Evil doesn't 'sorry', but that doesn't mean that it lacks regrets. Evil is often consumed by regret, it's just not motivated to act in the way good is motivated to act when it feels regret.
 

Evil is restricted from doing certain things, and encouraged to do others. These things are reversed from the things good is encouraged to do. For example, evil is encouraged to be brutal and cruel, restricted from showing mercy. If you show mercy all the time, then another evil observer will say, "Hey Joe, you just aren't evil anymore. You are weak and merciful." That isn't to say that you can't ever show mercy as an evil character any more than a good character can't ever say, "Now you must pay for your crimes.", but there is a definate expectation within the ethics of evil that you will return your enemies every slight that they give you several times over. And, if you don't, you aren't adhering to the tenants of evil.

I don't think this is an accurate depiction of evil at all - or rather, I don't think there is any 'ethics of evil' that evil characters need to follow.

If a good character does an evil act - arbitrarily murders a child, for example - it pretty instantly alters who they are. If they then return to good ways, immediately afterword, that doesn't change what they have become. A good person cannot simply kill a child and then return to being good.

If an evil character does a good act - such as saving a child's life - that doesn't mean they are in nearly the same situation. An evil person could perform a good act for selfish reasons, of course, but I'm not really mentioning that - I'm speaking of a situation where an evil character feels like doing good, and does so, and then returns to looking out for their own self. That one act of kindness doesn't make them good, or undo all their other acts of evil.

You can say that a character that does both is unaligned or neutral, but... I've never really bought that. Someone who murders children isn't neutral because the next day they save an orphanage.
 

So, you are trying to claim that in Raymond Chandler books that there isn't a clash between good and evil?!?!?

Yes, I'm claiming that.

Or are you trying to claim that the simple act of murder is all shades of grey?!?!?

Chandler's muders are motivated by greed, jealousy, not by worshippers of bad gods or people doing bad things just for the sake of being evil. Chandler works with real world motivations, not the meta gaming idea of D&D evil. Franky, I haven't seen many people describing noir as good vs evil instead of shades of gray...

Chandler's NPC's aren't moving among shades of grey - most of them are in shades of black.

Strongly disagree. We have very different opinions about what is evil.

If Marlowe were a D&D class, he'd be a Paladin.

A paladin who lies to the legal forces all the time? Maybe in 4E. Are we talking about the same Marlowe?

Again, your definition of "evil" is very different than mine. I can't agree with that, sorry...
 

Yes, I'm claiming that.

You and I must have not read the same books.

Chandler's muders are motivated by greed, jealousy, not by worshippers of bad gods or people doing bad things just for the sake of being evil.

This is one of those times when I could probably just quote you and win the argument outright on the strength of your words alone.

Since when are 'greed' and 'jealousy' something other than evil itself? I mean really, what do you think 'evil' is - "just people doing bad things just for the sake of being evil"? Really?

Chandler works with real world motivations, not the meta gaming idea of D&D evil.

What do you think D&D evil is describing if not creatures prone to greed, jealousy, wrath, hate, etc?

Strongly disagree. We have very different opinions about what is evil.

Obviously.

A paladin who lies to the legal forces all the time?

Legal forces who are often corrupt and veneal or at best cynical and uncaring. Legal forces who often don't in fact uphold law or right, and are more than happy to pin the murder on the innocent and call it a day. Marlowe gets beat up by corrupt cops probably more often than he gets beaten by criminals.

Marlowe on the other hand - and in contrast to the police - always pursues the crime to the bottom, even after he no longer stands to profit by doing so, and indeed at considerable risk to himself. Marlowe can't stand to allow an unjustice to go unpunished, or an innocent to suffer, and he never lets anything get in his way. It's what continually gets him into trouble. Moreover, the easiest way to get Marlowe really angry is to try to corrupt him; seducers, bribes, attempts at blackmail, etc drive Marlowe into a rage. Underneath his hardboiled exterior, Marlowe is overflowing with concealed compassion.

Are we talking about the same Marlowe?

I don't know. What is the Marlowe you are thinking of like?
 

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