How evil is your evil?

[Gez]

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.

Alignment in D&D is dictated by actions, not by thoughts. You can fantasize about killing people, raping children, or whatever other evil thing you want -- but as long as you restrain yourself and don't do anything of that, you aren't evil.

Otherwise, other people who would register as evil are anyone who try to understand an evil person's mindset -- for example, a profiler hunting a serial killer, or a novelist designing a great villain for his next best-seller.

 

[James Heard]

Nope, not buying it.

People who are neutral have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment necessary to make sacrifices to protect or help others

From my 3.5 DMG
It's all about intent and restraint factors into that, true enough. A serial killer actively revelling in his 'lack of compunction' sure enough radiates evil in my games. Good and evil in D&D is as much about the willingness to hurt others for no reason and selfishness than any actual actions, you could act like a saint but if you have sufficient malice in your heart you radiate evil.

 

[Gothic_Demon]

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.

Isn't that simply a case of a decision for the DM? In my campaign a characters alignment changes when the choices made when choosing a path become most commonly aligned to one side or the other. Quite simply if a person, 7 times in 10, chooses to do something good, for other people, then their alignment becomes good. The same thing for evil.
I also use a simple system whereby every action is evil or good, to a certain extent, and performing an action that is very strongly good or evil can push a character in that direction as though they had made 2-3 consecutive choices on the same path.
A person strongly aligned, in my opinion, regularly and willingly performs actions of a noble or dubious nature, pushing them in their chosen direction.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

The book On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony (Incarnations of Immortality,) provides an interesting illustration of evil and the soul that I like to parallel when dealing with paladins in my campaigns.

Basically, in the book, Death was charged with weighing a soul at death and determining whether that soul should rise up to heaven, or sink to hell. A soul, once freed of its body, looked like nothing more than a thin sheet of gauze, and for each evil thing that person had ever done, there was a bit of a stain on the gauze, while for each good act the gauze was slightly cleaned. So at the end of a long life, Death would examine this gauzy soul, and take a measure of how dark or light it had become.

I treat souls similarly in my campaigns for humanoid races and other intelligent creatures. Evil acts darken a soul, while good acts purify it. A paladin can, through his divine sight, examine the current state of a creature's soul, allowing him to tell whether it is mostly light, or greatly tainted.

The catch, of course, is that a soul is only truly judged at death. So even a very dark soul might still atone for the sins of the past and be reclaimed, and even the brightest soul might yet fall. This means that a paladin has to consider whether or not to kill an evil man very carefully, because he is denying that man a chance for redemption.

To frame it in the terms of the original poster: IMC, evil and Evil are merely a matter of degree. Demons are spawned 100% evil, while Angels are created 100% good. Mortals, however, find their own path. Some can be as terrible as any devil, others as saintly as a celestial. It's what makes Mortals so special. They get to choose.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

The subject says most of it. Whenever a Paladin thread or anything like that comes up, you have people pointing out that "evil need not mean torturing children, it may just be a merchant who cheats his customers" or somesuch.

Maybe it's the moral relativist in me. Maybe it's a deep-seated absolutist urge. But to me, the vast range of human behavior, the people you see all around you, should be neutral. Alignment should be an extreme case. Magic shouldn't be able to tell if I help little old ladies across the street, I should have to have a nigh-epic mindset before my soul resonates with the forces of Good enough to have tangible results. And at the same time, Big Bads like fiends aren't quite the same if all they do is kick puppies; I want my players, faced with an embodiment of evil, to have a deep personal investment in wiping this blemish from the multiverse.

But rant aside, how single-mindedly obsessed do you expect characters to be about their alignment? (Or conversely, how single-minded are creatures with innate alignments.) What are some good thresholds for changing from one to the other?

My game isn't exactly normal, but my evil is EEVEL with a capital double E. World destroying, town killing, slave capturing, child torturing evil. However, one particular EEVEL NPC is all the more disturbing because he's a nice guy. He just can't help being an evil, wrong, perversion of nature. It's grafted on to him now, he agreed to it, and the only way to wash away the pain is death.

There's some lesser evil with a single capital E. Living sacrifices, torture, and enjoyment of killing people and a society abound here. Most of the evil antognists not associated with the group above fall in here. There are also the supernatural predators in here, just because it's convienent for the overall feel of the game tol define them as Evil.

There are a few lower case e evil guys around. But we're talking racketeers, and people who profit from pain. You could smite them, but it'd be a waste.

Then, the vast majority of evil spelled with misguidance, ignorance, and cultural barriers. Still smitable, but definately not worth it.

Then, all the normal folk.

Lets say one of these supernatural predators decided to not torture humans to feed off of their fear, but instead took blood, damaging the host less, but being fed much worse off. Would they be Evil? They'd detect, but I'd probablly describe it as purple. Still dark, but different. Smitable? Definately. When do they become not evil? When I'm convinced and my players are convinced they're not. Hence, my leaning towards smiting nearly everything. It's our shared reality, I like to let them influence the governing of it, especially on things that make good story points.

edit: So, what I mean to say is: plenty of EEVELL for smiting, and lots of evil for doing whatever the party will.

 

[Hypersmurf]

The catch, of course, is that a soul is only truly judged at death. So even a very dark soul might still atone for the sins of the past and be reclaimed, and even the brightest soul might yet fall. This means that a paladin has to consider whether or not to kill an evil man very carefully, because he is denying that man a chance for redemption.

Yup.

So the only way to be sure is to redeem them... then kill them.

Immediately, so they don't have time to 'fall'.

These lazy paladins who smite anything that detects as evil are just swelling the hordes of Evil's army for the final battle. Real paladins only slaughter people who don't detect as evil.

-Hyp.

 

[DM_Matt]

Most of my evil is EEEVIL. In 2004:

I often let the PCs meet the widows and orphans, to see the devastation. I've had a baddie direct the tarrasque towards the home island of one of the PCs. I've had my baddies massacre villages while disguised as the PCs. Good NPCs they meet tend to die pretty terribly. Last session my baddies even used mind control to get children to gleefully murder their parents, and then slaughtered the kids in their jail cell to destroy evidence.

Then again, as a Neocon DMing a bunch of Liberals, I always get made fun of for being very easy on Pallys and exalted characters, since my RL threashold for violence against evildoers is significantly lower than theirs (What, you SPARED the Orc babies?).

In spite of the bad rap I get, though (I don't advocate killing Orc babies), their PCs still test my limits, which do in fact exist. I really frusterated my PCs recently when they found out that they couldnt use Sanctified only-hurts-evil area of effect spells in a bar because they would wind up killing meanies who havent done anytinhg that bad.

For their biggest slip as a mostly exalted or pally party, they roughed up a prisoner a little bit. She blackmailed them with it when released, then not only did she turn out to be good (her origional actions against them were on behalf of her country, which happened to be a different one than the PCs are from), but the PCs failed to stop the murders of NPCs that turned out to be her mother and sister, and they watched her get seriously hurt by an attack that was immune to clerical healing and had to take care of her for weeks. Power loss is a good punishment, but karma and guilt work, too!

 

[Goobermunch]

I go with evil the likes of which man cannot comprehend. Then again, my D&D game is heavily influenced by CoC. This means that your average evils are things that you might want to work with, just to prevent the really Evil guys from winning.

Of course, my PCs haven't had a chance to see the depths of the Evil in their world yet. They still think the big bad cult is, in fact, a charitable organization. They'll get their first view of evil in about two sessions, when they discover that the father of a child they just rescued is, in fact, a necromancer. Dad's turned himself into a ghoul and turned his daughter into a zombie (she was a little to active for him to deal with). He's also bound her (still good) soul into the zombie's body. She can't control the body, but at least she'll be able to look accusingly at the Paladin and say "You promised to take care of me . . . " just before the zombie body attacks him.

That said, your basic orcs, goblins, and gnolls are going to have an interest in fighting against the forces of the Mythos. Why? Because their relatively banal version of evil is going to be destroyed just as quickly as the rest of the world if the cultists win.

My campaign world really just goes from black to a light gray.

--G

 

[JDJarvis]

But rant aside, how single-mindedly obsessed do you expect characters to be about their alignment?

Players should play thier alignment how they wish. One of my players has decided his Wizard is going to be a big bad evil creep and try to despoil others and spread evil throughout the land. The PCs long term goals are enough to make folks at the table feel uncomfortable on occassion.
He discovered a couple of his fellow PCs were contemplating his murder (one PC too many was apporoached to join in on the scheme), he considered this a personal victory; if good (or formerly good) folks were secretly planning his murder then he was certainly achieving one of his PC goals of spreading evil.