How evil is your evil?

[Wombat]

I find most people who put EVIL in their games do it as sort of a joke, or a Disney level of EVIL. Having read too much history (hey, the problem with being a history major now stuck in an engineering firm! ), my views of evil are at times more banal and at times more gruesome (especially in terms of scale) than most games I have seen.

I dislike seeing evil as something kewt or cartoonish to be injected into a game; when I put someone evil in a campaign, they are truly EVIL. Read biographies of a few self-justifying mass murderers, a few megalomaniac dictators, a few overly-righteous zealots (religious, political, scientific, you name it) and somehow the face of evil changes in games.

That being said, I think very few individuals would truly be evil; certainly very few people see themselves as such. Most people (see the poll on personal alignments) see themselves as basically Good; whether others would view them as such might be open to debate, but personal vision is important. When all is said and done, I think only about 5-10% of the population would be really evil (actively and knowingly doing harm to others) and an equal number actively Good; most people would be Neutral Selfish (and selfish is not necessarily the same as Evil) to Neutral Nice (which is not quite the same as Good) -- few people are truly Lawful or Chaotic, the first because it is far too constraining, the latter because it takes way too much effort to maintain. Most governments, conversely, are Lawful Neutral (as Law is almost tautologically connected with government and governments, by their nature, sometimes have to do Not Nice things to survive).

 

[Corinth]

Evil in my games is simultaneously banal and grotesque. It's also often subtle until after a point of critical mass, because evil--as with good--stems from the idea that Man is no better than an animal, trapped in his senses and unable to discover objective, knowable and provable truths of natural law about the universe, so it's all arbitrary and therefore what matters is having the power to decide what's what while fufilling one's pleasures and avoiding pain.

 

[shilsen]

I'll let Terry Pratchett handle it:

***

Let me give you some advice, Captain," he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"It may help you make some sense of the world,"

"Sir."

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," he said. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides."

He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window.

"A great rolling sea of evil," he said, almost proprietorially. "Shallower in some places, of course, and deeper, oh so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!" He slapped Vines goodnaturedly on the back.

"Down there" he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum everyday badness. Not the really high creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes but because they don't say no."

***

 

[Sejs]

porn...

Note to self: Avoid paladins from now on.

 

[Westwind]

Murder in mass, kids and puppies
Corruption in all forms
Cannibalism includes life drinking
slavery
porn
child labor
child porn
torture for pleasure and to make a point

Am I the only one who thinks that one of these things isn't quite like the others?

 

[the Jester]

Murder in mass, kids and puppies
Corruption in all forms
Cannibalism includes life drinking
slavery
porn
child labor
child porn
torture for pleasure and to make a point

Surely you don't mean to equate porn with... well, the rest of those?

Child porn, sure.

 

[Taneel BrightBlade]

the alignment system should have mild (most likely spelled wrong) alignments and major alignments.
PS: Hand of Evil's right 'bout what counts as evil. All of these things are evil (even if some are worse than others)

 

[Humanophile]

Hrmhhh. Perhaps I could have stated my opening position better...

Evil in the campaign world, like evil in the real world, is an issue of shades of grey. (Ditto could be said for good, lawful, etc.) There's nice, there's mean, there's saintly, there's diabolical. And if we were making a more "realistic" system, we'd have a complex alignment system that statted your progress along its axes by a system of points.

But we see many people in an alignment thread at the moment call themselves a good alingment because they're nice. And while being nice is certainly worth good points, I don't quite see it as being enough to completely ignore the effects of a Holy Smite spell. Ghandi could stand at Holy Smite ground zero with nothing more than a tingle. I'm nice, if we were playing in an alignment-points system I'd have some resistance to the spell, but I don't think I have the spiritual fortitude and convictions to just shrug it off.

So basically, at what point among the continum does a being lose the "neutral" part of their alignment and gain a (good/lawful/evil/chaotic) tag? It's not that neutrally aligned individuals can't lean towards an alignment; police tend towards law, bandits tend towards evil, but neither IMC is quite strongly aligned in my campaign for the vast majority of either to register to a Detect* spell. Perhaps I should have asked "at what point do personality traits become severe enough that they register to magic", since that seems to be the major mechanical effect of alignment. Sub-Evil evil in a campaign, well, that's what makes it fun.

 

[robberbaron]

I reckon that Paladins would sense "supernatural evil", e.g., anything with the Evil descriptor, but wouldn't really know if someone had bad thoughts (or liked porn?!). Why should a Paladin care if a merchant is giving short weights when he can smell a Demon in the next county? He could probably tell if there was a murderer in the room, though not who it was.

IMC evil is as evil does. You are evil if you don't particularly care what effect your actions have on others, good if you do.

You are Lawful if you follow the laws and Chaotic if you don't think they apply to you.

Therefore, most people vacillate between Lawful and Chaotic (pay taxes but drive too fast) and between Good and Evil (don't like hurting children or puppies but don't worry if the sewage farm you didn't want on your doorstep pollutes someone else'e river instead).

It's all a big grey area and everyone has there own ideas about it.

Edit: Oh, and I don't believe anyone could be True Neutral. It would need such detachment from real life as to make it impossible to play successfully (or enjoyably).

 

[James Heard]

at what point do personality traits become severe enough that they register to magic", since that seems to be the major mechanical effect of alignment.

At which point they serve the plot of course. Most people are Neutral with Evil tendencies, given to bouts of stepping off the deep end when they start trying to force everyone to be 'good' which of course means they're evil. Paladins really hate me in my games, they turn on their paladin radar and they find themselves spending the afternoon trying to 'right wrongs' like kids that have been beaten up by bullies enough that they've become murderous, fathers that are seriously considering leaving their wives with the children to raise, cart drivers in traffic, petty bureaucrats revelling in their power, and most everyone in any position of power that enjoys it at least occassionally. Since most of the time they can't do anything about those sorts of things without stepping off the road imediately and becoming non-good, they tend to end up at the very least waiting until something comes out with horns and cloven feet - and then hoping that it's not just a scared monster trying to leave. Lucky for them there are enough people and creatures that are seriously, no crap evil out there to smite. In general though, more paladins get arrested and sent to prison than any other class in my games. Except for the players who actually listened to my prep they seem to think that it's all black and white, and worse that their word alone would stand in court against people like Watchmen and respectable people who haven't killed people in cold blood. Sometimes it's a case of Lawful Stupid, but other times it's really just good intentions gone awry and frustration. I mean, a serial killer in my games is going to radiate at all times, but he might just be shopping for groceries and he might not do much but fantasize about it all the time.