How evil is your evil?

[Humanophile]

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?

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

My view on this is pretty simple. Most folk are neutral - 50%. That's on both the law-chaos axis and evil-good axis. There is a gradation of evil - there's a lot of banal evil out there - the guy who cheats on his taxes or on his wife and feels no remorse, the merchant who deceives his customers, etc. Then, of course, there is True Evil, people or creatures with little or no redeeming moral characteristics. I always keep the possibility of redemption in mind - I don't feel that any creature - any - is without the potential for redemption.

People often like to bring up Tolkien as an example of black and white morality, but redemption was a huge part of his stories. Melkor, Sauron, even Gollum all had the opportunity to be forgiven, and blew it. Gandalf was even willing to give Saruman a second chance. OK, I can't think of any successfully redeemed characters, but it was clear that one should try, and that's an attitude that I try to encourage in my games.

 

[Umbran]

Seems kind of like asking "How Chocolate is your chocolate?"

There are many variations among evils. Flavors and tones and degrees. I don't stick to only one for games, because that would be boring and predictable.

I don't expect my characters, or any characters in my games, to be obvsessed about their alignments. In fact, i tend to think that most of them don't know all that much about alignment. If you don't cast spells, it's mostly a non-issue for you. Even if you do, you may not know the details unless you've got the right Knowledges...

 

[Melkor Lord Of ALL!]

You don`t want to know....

Seriously, I have degrees of evil. Greedy merchant won`t radiate evil so every Paladin can sense him, neither will 1st level evil commoner, because he never had a chance to embrace his evil potential and commit trully evil acts.

 

[Virgil Sagecaster]

, When Im playing an evil alignment (usually CE), I try my hardest to do very profound acts of violence. The "Book of Vile Darkness" can give you a ton of new and interesting ideas!

 

[Gez]

How evil? It depends.

There's several shades of evil, from the Pyoure Eeeeeevol of fiends to the petty evil of the greedy man who will never help anyone unless he's paid a hefty sum for it.

Like in D&D's rules, alignments is dictated by actions. The worst the outcome of your action, the lower you fall.

So, if you take three merchants cheating on their customers. Let say they sell milk, and to increase their profit, they adulterate it with water. As the resulting milk is too clear, they need to add something else to hide their cheating.

Merchant A uses a product that's relatively harmless. He's cheating on his customers, but nothing too grave ensues. He's "a bit" evil, he'll probably stay neutral if he's not a complete bastard in other domains.

Merchant B uses a harmful product. Over the next years, his customers will suffer from various malaises, from light to severe, and his poisoned milk will be partly responsible for the death of some people with frail health (babies and the elderly, notably). Merchant B is plainly evil. If he does good things otherwise, then he's merely a hypocrit or trying to assuage his troubled conscience. As long as he continues poisoning what he sells, he'll stay evil.

Merchant C uses a product that turns all the drinkers into slave zombies under his control, who will then proceed to force feed the tainted milk to every other person they find. Merchant C is Eeeeeevol.

 

[Chimera]

Sir Simon Milligan 'Evil'.

(Kids in the Hall reference)

 

[adriayna]

I think there is a decently obvious line as to what is good and evil in a game. Things that border on that line (say, a merchant ripping off her customers) may not be "good" but certainly is a CN act at best. Evil should be reserved for acts that are usually deliberate in nature, harming or killing , torture, rape, widespread destruction, sacrifice.

I suppose like everything else, there are degrees of evil.

I suppose you won't really know how evil evil can be until you run an evil campaign. And let me tell you, in the evil campaigns I've ran, my players cooked up more evil than I could ever have DMing on my own.

 

[Staffan]

IMC, it won't take all that much for someone to be considered Evil. Being willing to harm others for your own benefit is basically it. A merchant cheating his customers qualifies (though there's a spectrum between "getting a good deal" and "ripping them off").

I mean, I allow PCs to be considered Good even though they don't spend all their time helping old ladies cross the street. It's only fair that I should extend the same courtesy to the evil part of the spectrum.

 

[Hand of Evil]

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