Is wanting to destroy the world really all that evil?

[Henry]

To me, destroying the right of others to exist is evil, and therefore the individuals doing so, be they Galactus for food, The Nihilus Society for their god, or Joe Peasant who wants to bring Nirvana into being, are without doubt evil. It's Biocide (with a capital B).

 

[Psimancer]

If you want the cult to be non-evil, then you may want them to take a Gnostic approach to existence; the universe is an evil illusion created by an evil god and the only thing good and pure thing is the soul - destroying existence would be nothing more than lifting the veil…

 

[Umbran]

I guess I disagree with all the people who say automatically evil. You talk about destroying the world and I think "crazy", or "demented", but not necessarily evil. Every reason I can think of why someone would want to destroy the world or all of existence basically boils down to a drastic overreactive solution to a problem. Kind of like killing the patient to cure the disease. Sure it technically works, but it loses sight of the object of the exercise.

I think that, by normal game definitions, losing sight of the object of the exercise so badly that innocents start getting hurt is evil. This would be a massive failure to care about the welfare of others. What you are talking about is, essentially, an extreme "ends justify the means" rationalization, which generally falls in the Evil camp.

 

[The Horror]

but I've always been of the mind that the good/evil scale in D&D is all about selflessness vs. selfishness. Now, the Initiative isn't selfless by any means, but they're not selfish either, so that would place them as neutral by my slightly-more-objective standards.

Interesting that you say that. Just two weeks ago I was asked to describe the different alignment options to my players. I described it as something like this: There are two scales. On the one scale you have people that believe in law, order and justice. They believe that there is a system in place and that the system is there to protect their rights. On the other end of this scale are the people who disregard the system. They may or may not understand the system that governs society, or they may see it as flawed and choose to completely disregard it in favour of their own judgement. In between the two extremes are people that understand the system and may or may not understand the need for it. However, these people also understand that rules and regulations cannot always be right and thusly may at times opt to break the rules if the situation warrants it.

On another scale you have good and evil. Good is defined as people who as a general rule place other people above themselves. It doesn't mean they give away all their possessions to more needy people or anything like that, but rather that they care about the wellbeing of their fellow man. Opposite to good is evil, that is people who overall place their need above those of others. Sometimes good people do selfish things, and sometimes evil people do selfless things, but overall they can be categorised as being either selfless or selfish. In between the two you have neutral people - people who may one day help a starving man but the next day take away his only piece of bread. They weight each decision on an individual basis, and cannot be said to overall be more selfish or selfless.

Anyhow, based on how I view alignments I would say that destroying the world would have to be either neutral or evil. You'll have to think about the group a little more before you can place them more precisely, but even if they believe they are doing good they could not really be classified as being good.

I can't make any guess towards their lawful to chaotic placement. Again, you have to think of how their organisation works, and of how they interact with their local systems of rulership.


The Horror

 

[Rel]

[Lebowski]Nihilists! me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos. [/Lebowski]

Note: This supports my theory that there is no D&D quandry without an appropriate Big Lebowski quote.

 

[Asmor]

On the one scale you have people that believe in law, order and justice. They believe that there is a system in place and that the system is there to protect their rights. On the other end of this scale are the people who disregard the system.

I dislike that definition of lawful and chaotic for the same reason I dislike the traditional definition of good and evil. It's just too subjective. For example, challenging someone to a duel in a kingdom where it's against the law would be a chaotic act by those standards, whereas challenging someone to a duel in another one where it wasn't illegal wouldn't be chaotic.

I'm really not sure how I'd describe in words my view of lawful vs. chaotic, but a lawful character is more likely to plan ahead while a chaotic character acts on whimsy. A lawful character would be happy staying in one place if his needs were met there, whereas a choatic character would have an insatiable wanderlust.

I'm starting to think my main problem with the D&D alignment system is primarily semantics... Maybe I should just rename them to orderly/chaotic and selfish/selfless...

 

[CockyWriter]

Actually, just as an aside (and not meant to mitigate your point), they're a secular organization which seeks to cease all of existence, including gods.

Okay, now you will need to explain to me the point of destroying everything then. Cleansing? Prophets? They were out of beer?

 

[Asmor]

Okay, now you will need to explain to me the point of destroying everything then. Cleansing? Prophets? They were out of beer?

They believe reality is fundamentally flawed. They believe it would be better off if it weren't. (Not "weren't flawed," mind you, just plain "weren't.")

 

[Henry]

In my current campaign I have a Warforged NPC who wants to destroy the world precisely because he cannot drink beer.

 

[Rel]

Dunno if this is helpful or not but the only "destroy the world" campaign that I ever ran was a Mage game.

The PC's were unwittingly duped, over a series of adventures, into aiding an insane Son of Ether (technomage) into initiating the launch of the United States' arsenal of nuclear missiles. The obvious net result that would be produced by this would be the vast depopulation of the world. Because reality (in the World of Darkness) is defined by the collective force of will of the world population (thus resulting in the predominance of the Technocracy), the reduction in the population would allow Mages to become much more powerful. When they started to show up all over the world, feeding the hungry and eliminating radioactive zones by force of magic alone, a new Golden Age for the Mages would prevail and the Technocracy would be defeated.

The PC's were able to discover and understand this before the missiles actually launched and they decided that, as much as they hated the Technocracy, they could not abide the murder of billions for the sake of their beliefs prevailing. They killed the mad Son of Ether and stopped the missiles from firing.

It was one of those fun moral dilemma moments and I actually thought there was a real (though comparatively small) chance that they would just let the missiles fly.

There is no alignment system in WOD games but I would certainly have considered the PC's to have been "ruthlessly in favor of 'the ends justify the means'" if not outright evil. Not that it really would have had an impact (particularly since that culminating moment marked the end of the campaign).