D&D General Inherently Evil?

However the core of the alignment matrix and what it means has stood almost unchanged since the AD&D PH. Deny that.
Sure. :)

1979's 1e AD&D 9 point alignment descriptions are a lot like the 9 point alignment descriptions in 2e, 3e, and 5e.

True Neutral from 1e is probably the biggest narrative change, but overall fairly consistent narratively.

1981's Basic Set, and the follow up BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia branch of D&D uses a three point system where Law and Chaos are fairly different from the 9 point system Law and Chaos. It harkens back to 0D&D and such influences as Elric and Amber. D&D elves are Lawful in 0D&D and Chaotic in nine point alignment D&D.

4e's five point line scale alignment with Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil is a weird mix of the two conceptually without actually having the Law and Chaos behind the three point alignment inspirations.

What alignment means though has changed a bit too though. In older editions such as 1e AD&D it was a thing you were cosmically aligned with that provided you with secret supernatural communication channels to other beings similarly cosmically aligned (alignment language) and provided consequences to anybody changing alignments (xp penalty, level loss).

In later editions this universal fundamental cosmic alliance with big forces aspect is dropped and the consequences are only for certain, but fairly common, classes and effects (3e), and later dropped down to only a few rare mechanical effects (5e).
 

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One way to look at alignment in sapient creatures would be to have it so when they are born, their brains develop in a certain way so they are either always at least 1 of the 3 -
1) Sociopath
2) Psychopath
3) Narcissist
or any combination of 2 to 3 of those.
That way despite having free will, they are incapable of feeling or understanding certain emotions or social cues. Maybe some develop a higher function, like a high functioning Sociopath, and those would be the "exceptions."
With this limit to their being incapable of feeling or understanding certain emotions, folk who do not have such a personality may see these peoples as evil.
They don't necessarily have to rob; murder; rape, they can act in a way outside of what a caring, loving, helping person may.
 

Warning: Long.

Morality is a rules structure used to maximize the survivability and sustainability of a social entity (eg: a family), while minimizing the energy expenditure (in terms of analyzing a social conflict and determining a proper action, keyed off of all possible rules the creature must adhere to) of the creatures comprising the social entity.

Good and evil are labels with respect to morality. Good is acting in accordance with the moral rules. Evil is acting not just not in line with the moral rules, but in such a way that the social entity suffers. Also, the harm may not be direct or explicit, but only understood after observing actions and their repercussions over time. Optimization of moral rules attempts to minimize the number of rules covering the greatest number of social entities that a creature is a member of, though that can also lead to an oversimplification that harms further development.

Creatures that take actions that harm the social entity while not in positive service of a higher-level entity (eg: the tribe vs the family) are also considered evil, despite not being part of the native social contract. This is largely in service of 'othering' said creatures, so as to amplify conflict-based actions by members of the social entity, and thus improve the social entity's chances of survival. This would be analogous to a body's immune response to a disease.

Note that there are a variety of moral rules structures, each trying to optimize the survival and development of the social entities that they are attached to. However there are some rules that are close to universal because they serve very basic needs in the survivability of most social entities.

From this, we can see that "evil" creatures are 'others' (not part of an aligned in-group) that violate the tier-0 common moral rules of other social entities. In order for evil creatures' social entities to survive, they must have found a survival mechanism that uses these otherwise-avoided interaction rules. This would be analogous to parasites in the animal kingdom which find an evolutionary niche that other creatures have left open.

Note that there is no violation of free will, here. An evil creature (as described above) has found a set of moral rules that benefit it and the social entities that it is a member of, and is adhering to those rules just as any other creature (such as a human with 'normal' moral rules) does. This is likely related to its biology (since different biologies allow for different types of actions), though it's just as possible for the moral rules to have influenced the creature's biology as it is for the biology to have influenced the moral rules.

This all works because social entities are in just as much an evolutionary competition as biological creatures are, and "survival of the fittest" still applies. Social entities will evolve to be well-suited for competition with similar social entities, but that will inevitably leave them ill-suited to compete with certain others. As nature abhors a vacuum, entities to fill those gaps will naturally arise.

So an inherently evil race would be one that can strongly and naturally benefit by taking advantage of the taboos of other races, while also not being terribly well-suited to the normal tier-0 moral rules.

As an example: Goblins have an extremely high birth and maturation rate, while not benefiting so much from long-term parental care (such as for education). There is low value per individual life, so murder is not much of a taboo (though their cowardice might arise because murder is so easy and casual). Their biology is adapted to feeding on raw meat (similar to carnivorous animals), and quickly expanding populations find 'civilized' races (which focus more on child care and education than raw survivability) incredibly easy prey. Thus cannibalism (in the sense of humanoid eating humanoid) can easily become a positive survival trait for the tribes. This can go further if they have traits such as seen in Goblin Slayer.

There's no strong incentive to try to interact with other civilized social entities, particularly as any breach of moral rules would immediately trigger an antagonistic response, which would return things to the original state. (IE: They are in something like a Nash equilibrium, where any change in the choices they make makes things worse if you can't move the entire society to a new moral state in one fell swoop.) For example, if you let goblins into town to try to incentivize them towards using the town shops, and one goblin decides to eat a child for lunch while he's there, the town will quickly reject them rather than figure this is just growing pains for goblin society. And even if goblins were adopted into 'civilized' society, that just leaves an evolutionary gap for another race to fill.

So really, it's not that hard to have inherently evil races when you have a large number of wildly varying intelligent creatures, each trying to carve out its own evolutionary niche. I mean, we already see a little of the overall concept even with the basic races, what with the stereotypical dwarf living under the mountain, or the elf living in the woods. The main thing you'd want to consider when creating such a race, though, is, "What is taboo to this race? What is it that this race considers an evil violation of their most deeply-held precepts?" Because the standard Good/Evil axis is pretty much entirely from the human social perspective.
 

So if I'm reading some of this right, "inherently evil" can't actually exist? That seems counterintuitive.

What term would you use in its place, for something that has no free will but is what would commonly be called evil?
The definition of evil is profoundly immoral and wicked.

So evil as a definitiin is going to be a cultural thing. generally in D&D evil is presumed to mean evil within the culturalnorms of the players. I strongly suggest DM's just accept that when they run thier games. Otherwise youll have a never ending argument over moral relavitism every time a player wants to bend the rules.
 

Oh, I definitely agree! I think it's very useful as an RP Tool. I think the OG writers who systemized it really hard kinda screwed it up.

Which is why -so many people- didn't bother with those aspects of the system.
I hear horror stories now and then, but we never strongly enforced alignment and I've never had a DM who did. The one time I did penalize a paladin for her actions was because she ordered the death of innocents by mistake. Even then it wasn't really an alignment infraction per se, more of a violation of her oath and a reflection of her guilt over a bad call.

But I keep wanting to ask people who are so vehemently against the basic concept who touched them in a bad place because it so rarely matters (especially now) in games I've played. I could count the number of times people have used the "that's what my alignment says I would do" on one hand and have a few fingers left over. If it wasn't for alignment it would be "that's what my character would do". I've never had anyone try to enforce their alignment on the rest of the party, but to think that getting rid of alignment would get rid of sanctimonious a-holes is a pipe dream.

The implementation of alignment may change, and in some cases should. But the core concept? I don't see that going away. Time will tell.
 

I personally wouldn't design a biological race to just be 'evil'. If they're just unthinking evil with no choice at all, then they're not an intelligent creature any more than a robot is. They're unthinking automata.

Evolved to exhibit behaviours which humans would consider evil is fine though. For example a species which evolved preying on other humanoids. They're not evil at all, anymore than a lion is evil when it kills a zebra. But to the humanoids which are preyed upon, they would be considered evil.

Creatures like angels and fiends which are 'programmed' to be aligned in some way wouldn't be considered sentient. They're essentially alignment robots, and not a biological species. If an angel did somehow fall, then its tag would be changed to 'fiend' as its very nature would change.
 

I hear horror stories now and then, but we never strongly enforced alignment and I've never had a DM who did. The one time I did penalize a paladin for her actions was because she ordered the death of innocents by mistake. Even then it wasn't really an alignment infraction per se, more of a violation of her oath and a reflection of her guilt over a bad call.

But I keep wanting to ask people who are so vehemently against the basic concept who touched them in a bad place because it so rarely matters (especially now) in games I've played. I could count the number of times people have used the "that's what my alignment says I would do" on one hand and have a few fingers left over. If it wasn't for alignment it would be "that's what my character would do". I've never had anyone try to enforce their alignment on the rest of the party, but to think that getting rid of alignment would get rid of sanctimonious a-holes is a pipe dream.

The implementation of alignment may change, and in some cases should. But the core concept? I don't see that going away. Time will tell.
In my experience as a DM the ones against Alignment want a morally grey game where they can justify what they do. In otherwords they are the moral relativists who have no morality other than taking care of thier own interests.
 

I'm with those that are saying "if it doesn't have free will, it can't be evil, and if it does, it's not 'inherently' any alignment".

Sure, Demons can be made of evil. They can be "Murder Elementals" as some have called them. However, that doesn't make them evil. It makes them like a predator. They exist to murder/eat, and it's essential to their existence. They're not evil, they're just made of it. I'm made up mostly of water, but that doesn't mean that I am water.

However, if there is anything close to "inherently evil", it's definitely wasps. Wasps are as close to evil incarnate that you can get.
Well... it also depends on how intelligent the creature is. Animals generally don't kill other animals for fun or to watch them suffer. Even cats just play with their prey because their instincts are wound up and they can't calm down when the hunt is over. Demons don't just kill, however. They also torture their prey, often coming up with ingeniously cruel methods for doing so. Now, it could be that demons require torture in order to survive. A demon that just kills a guy doesn't "eat," but one who tortures a guy does, even if (or especially if) the guy doesn't die. But if the demon enjoys the act of torturing people? If you have demons who torture and kill out of pure instinct but get no true enjoyment out of it... well, I'd question if they were actually intelligent beings, to be honest.

Although to be honest, a creature that tortures to eat--and I don't just mean "plays with their food" but makes tools like whips and chains in order to not only torture their prey but to make the torture last for as long as possible, or even potentially forever--I think I'd be pretty comfortable in saying it was "evil."
 

Another thing a fantasy race could do to qualify as "inherently evil" would be to behave like cuckoos. They are unable to raise their own youngs, because they just drop their young in the litter of another sentient species, known to raise children and provide them food. The innate ability for their young to reflexively cast illusion spells (or mind control spell, when hungry) is helping them, so the parents don't see that their baby was eaten and replaced by the competing young from another species. And when the young is mature enough, he eats the rest of the litter and run away to his original culture. This species has no way of feeding their own young, it was dropped somewhere on the evolutionary path (and they knowingly used extensive magical engineering to have dragonborn able to lactate despite them not being mammal only to have a larger pool of prospective parents).


I can't really find a consensus in the thread but I guess it would be close to inherently evil, except for those who prefer to define it as unaligned, since they have no mean of "not doing that" and keep surviving as a species.

On the other hand, I wouldn't advise using this idea in game, because it would spur moral discussions that one might want to avoid at the table (do we inform the Smith that young Tommy is actually a 7 feet high troll and they should really stop breastfeeding him? Do we kill the little troll despite him being an infant by his species standard? How will the village react since they are heavily enthralled by illusion spells to see the troll as young Tommy?)
 
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1979's 1e AD&D 9 point alignment descriptions are a lot like the 9 point alignment descriptions in 2e, 3e, and 5e.

Indeed, and as far as I've seen, it's been used fairly consistently the same way. 2e's "society relative" alignment did not even survive for more than the PH anyway.

True Neutral from 1e is probably the biggest narrative change, but overall fairly consistent narratively.

Even then there were variations about neutral, my first character in AD&D was really cosmic balance, but the "selfish" kind was already there, and I have quoted the AD&D PH sentences about alignments being each very wide already.

1981's Basic Set, and the follow up BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia branch of D&D uses a three point system where Law and Chaos are fairly different from the 9 point system Law and Chaos. It harkens back to 0D&D and such influences as Elric and Amber. D&D elves are Lawful in 0D&D and Chaotic in nine point alignment D&D.

Basic and then BECMI has always had Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic, actually.

4e's five point line scale alignment with Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil is a weird mix of the two conceptually without actually having the Law and Chaos behind the three point alignment inspirations.

It really was a minor variation, you could still see the matrix through that weird change, and wonder where the remaining boxes were. :)

What alignment means though has changed a bit too though.

I agree with the "a bit". ;)

In older editions such as 1e AD&D it was a thing you were cosmically aligned with that provided you with secret supernatural communication channels to other beings similarly cosmically aligned (alignment language) and provided consequences to anybody changing alignments (xp penalty, level loss).

I don't think I've ever seen that in play, actually.

In later editions this universal fundamental cosmic alliance with big forces aspect is dropped and the consequences are only for certain, but fairly common, classes and effects (3e), and later dropped down to only a few rare mechanical effects (5e).

It's been weakened, but the basic principles are still there.
 

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