D&D 5E Is it possible to have a good-aligned final boss in a good campaign?

[MwaO]

One way to go about it is that the good boss knows something the PCs don't know. He's trying to save the world, but if the macguffin is released, then everybody is doomed. But because he's trying to save the world, sometimes his actions might not seem good.

And of course, because the PCs eventually defeat the good boss, it then sets up the next campaign where the doom has been released into the world and the PCs need to stop it.

 

[evilbob]

Of course! Why couldn't you? Ultimately "good" and "evil" are just tropes. What matters is the perspectives of the characters and how they react to the world around them. It would be very easy to have a lawful good "boss" that simply had a different perspective of how the world should work than the players, and is trying to enforce that vision in a way that leads to conflict.

As you already suggested, anything that includes "but it's for the greater good" is a potential source of much conflict.

 

[delericho]

I'm not very familiar with Les Miserables but it seems like Inspector Javert (an officer hunting a criminal) and Jean Valjean (criminal who broke the law for a good cause) are an example of a Good vs. Good conflict.

Javert is pretty much the quintessential example of an LN character. Jean Valjean is CG.

 

[Dausuul]

Basically, I want the PCs to have plenty of motivations to stop this person, but to have this person fight for a cause that allows him/her to remain good-aligned. Possible?

Certainly. My recommendation would be to set up a situation something like what you mentioned: The boss must sacrifice a thousand lives to save the world. The PCs have found an alternative solution, which will save the world without having to kill all those people.

The PCs have proven to themselves that their solution will work. However, they have no way of proving it to the boss, who flatly refuses to gamble the entire world on an unproven hope. From the boss's perspective, the only responsible thing to do is to make the sacrifice and save the world in the way that is known and certain to work. (You might throw in that the boss is one of the people who will die in the "sacrifice to save" solution, so it's clear the boss is not just throwing away other people's lives - his/her own is on the line as well.)

If you don't feel like sacrificing a thousand lives to save the world can qualify as "good," then maybe it's not lives that are at stake: Instead it's a great library where thousands of years of learning are collected, or something of the sort. The point is that, if there were no alternative solution available, making the sacrifice would clearly be the correct thing to do. Since the PCs cannot prove their alternative solution to the boss, they have to defeat the boss instead.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

You could have a scenario where the big "bad" is assembling a "wine to water" magguffin that will turn all the booze in the world to water to "end the scourge of drunkenness and addiction." It is pretty easy to imagine a good party (especially in Pathfinder) who would be opposed to this strategy to achieve a good goal.

 

[SheckyS]

In a fantasy story, the villains are very often one-dimensional characters bent on destruction for the sake of destruction and no other reason.
In real life and any decently realistic literature, no person thinks of himself as evil. Good, believable, multi-dimensional villains ALWAYS believe that they are good and that they are doing the right thing. So a good villain is not only absolutely possible, it's entirely realistic and awesome.

There are many ways in which this could work. A villain could believe any number of things that would cause him to commit an act of evil while still being fundamentally compatible with his good intentions.

Perhaps he believes in a particular set of rigid rules that require him to do something, or prevent other people from doing something and the result is that lives will be lost for the sake of rules that don't necessarily make sense in a specific situation.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

In Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books, Lord Ruler is the bad guy. In the last book of the trilogy, the reader finds out who Lord Ruler is and was and why he's doing what he's doing. After reading his motivations, and the limited options he had to choose between, I call him "Lawful Good" by D&D alignment, though with a very strong draconic despotism.

Similar to situations posted earlier in this thread, the protagonists in the book have better solutions to the problem but Lord Ruler isn't willing to try them, because he doesn't believe they will work.

Another example from media, in the movie Hero, the emperor appears to be the bad guy, justifying an assassination attempt. As the story progresses and we learn more about the emperor, things become less black-and-white. The emperor's armies have done violent things, but the emperor loves his country and believes he is doing what is right for the good of the nation.

 

[Sunseeker]

Assuming you're okay with "good" being relative, then yes. It's not unreasonable to see gods or powerful minions of gods doing horrible things for the "greater good". Like....the orcs are usually the instigators of war in the world, say 7/10 of the wars in the last 1000 years were started by orcs. So the divine soldiers of good see them as evil and think the best solution is to kill them all.

 

[Paraxis]

Someone over at reddit just posted a 40+page pdf with new angels, lore, and items. I was trying to think of ways to use it effectively. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/3thxyo/homebrew_the_angel_compendium_settingagonstic/

 

[Saeviomagy]

In another thread here, we're debating a thing in FR called the wall of the faithless. Essentially it's a wall where, if you don't believe in a god or don't believe that the gods deserve worship, then when you die, you are mortared into the wall and gradually lose your identity while being tortured. The players could either be for tearing down the wall (siding against all the good gods of the pantheon, who currently seem to believe that it's a necessary part of the afterlife) or against it. Whether the wall is actually necessary or not is then up to you.