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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1924353" data-attributes="member: 27012">Yes.  And without changing the parameters of the opponents to make it morally OK to kill them, we are often left with either "Power Kill"/"Violence" or a game where the characters are expected to follow the modern rules of police procedures and/or warfare. Absolutely.  That's why the nature vs. nurture debate is so heated.  What offends people are the implications of arguing that things like intelligence, violence, etc. are a matter of nature is fairly substantial.  If, for example (and note that I do not personally believe this is ever the case with human beings of any race or ethnic group), it were shown that a particular ethnic group had a strong genetic predisposition toward being violent, it would have a profound impact on law enforcement and the way people viewed that group.  Simply consider how people behave when they wrongly believe those things about a group of people.Racism and profiling is offensive because we know that ethnic groups don't have inherent traits like that but what if they did?  What would change?  Racism can be persuasive to many because once you accept the premise that a trait is inherent in a group (generally an "All X are Y" premise), the conclusions are often quite reasonable.  In fact, that's exactly why the nature side of the "nature vs. nurture" debate has not only become associated with racism but why those who oppose racism are so adamantly opposed to any argument that any behavior is inborn.As I pointed out to a friend while discussing some setting ideas, if a race in the setting is inherently unstable and violent no matter how trained or educated they become, than racism against them would have a certain logical justification.  Why?  Because saying, "All X are unstable and violent," wouldn't simply be a vicious stereotype designed to cause descrimination.  It would be true.  And if it was true, it would be perfectly reasonable to act accordingly.If all Ogres ate human flesh like a drug addict takes drugs, would you want one as a next door neighbor?  Would you ever trust that your family wouldn't wind up on their dinner table?  How about a ghoul, who is also arguably sentient?  So what do you do with them if we don't kill them?  Put them on a reservation with a big fence around it?  Who is going to watch them?  Who is going to pay for it?  Think about the trouble society is having dealing with criminals who are unlikely to be reformed (predators).  Even if you have no particular malice toward a convicted serial rapist, do you want one living next door to you when he gets out of jail?  And is it rational or irrational to feel that way?Not at all.  When paladins start killing for pleasure and start torturing for fun, we can talk moral equivalency.  In my game, the PCs exterminated an entire goblin lair, including the women and children.  They did so because my setting's goblins are inherently Evil and cannot be reformed and they posed a threat to nearby settlements.  Did they enjoy it.  Not at all.  Rather than cheering as the last goblin fell, they all just kinda sat there silently and haven't really talked about it since.  It wasn't really fun for the players or their characters.  Somehow, I don't think that's how an Evil character would react.  Good should not get pleasure out of killing, in my opinion, though it may find pleasure in defeating Evil.You are assuming that Evil can be rehabilitated.  In a world where alignments can be detected, that's not necessarily so and that changes everything, leading down that slippery slope to Power Kill and Violence.  In fact, I'd go so far as to agree with you that if the Evil can be reformed, then Good should try to reform it whenever possible.  And that is exactly why much of the Evil in my game's world cannot be reformed, because the unreliable and difficult task of rehabilitation isn't a particularly fun one.  Just ask a mental health professional about it.  I know people who have left the profession due to burn out.  Not what most people want for their recreational activities. Also ask a real police officer or real soldier how much fun they have following the rules they are required to follow and what happens if they make a mistake.And if reforming Evil is made as simple as hitting Evil with a spell, that begs the question of why Evil even exists in the world anymore.  Of course if Evil can do the same to Good (Zap! and you are Evil), then we eliminate much of the free moral choice from the setting and create a situation where a failed saving throw will take a Good PC away from a player.  Not very useful, in my opinion.Absolutely.  People role-play as an escape from reality.  That means that they'd like to leave parts of reality that aren't fun behind when they role-play.There is also a big viceral element to all of this.  As I mentioned elewhere, there has been research into the parts of the brain that come into play during moral decision making.  One of the reasons why game theory fails to predict human behavior is because it doesn't take into account that fairness and revenge and pretty integral parts of the human psyche.  When we see a situation that morally offends us, we feel disgust.  That disgust can prevent us from doing something but it can also trigger a fairly strong desire for retribution or revenge, which gets illutrated in several game theory experiments that even can be demonstrated in monkeys.What thing that an inherent Evilness does is disengage the empathy part of our psyche that complicate the morality of a situation and give us pause about using violence in the real world.  This allows us to freely engage in the sorts of violent responses to problems that often vicerally feel good without the moral backlash.  Yes, this is pretty much the same part of the psyche that racists tap into as well as sociopaths.  Does this mean that role-players want to be racists or are sociopaths?  Not at all.  No more than the fact that a rock star taps into the same part of the human psyche that cult leaders tap into mean that rock stars want to be cult leaders.Indeed, I'd argue that the fact that role-playing games do need to explicitly make their villains into fantasy monsters and other beings so Evil that they cannot be reformed is a sign of the opposite.  If role-players were really racist or sociopaths, companies could save a lot of time and simply let them go to down slaughtering humans that simply belong to a different ethnic group.  That they need their bad guys to be a step removed from humanity and Good by making them monsters of horrible Evil suggests that they aren't and they know it.I do, however, think that some people are so sensitive to racism and cross-cultural bigotry (admittedly, with substantial justification) that they react badly to something that does look very much like racism.  But just as attacking an innocent person is different than attack back in self-defense, genocidal violence against a supernaturally Evil foe is different than hatred of another real-world ethnic or racial group.  Most role-players understand that changing that parameter changes what's acceptable for their characters to do and that if that parameter weren't changed, that what they were doing would be a great wrong. It's similar to what happens with paintball.  Paintball makes shooting someone non-lethal and that makes all the difference.  Just because a person enjoys paintball does not mean that they are going to pick up a real gun and stalk real people to kill them, even if paintball is tapping into the same "thrill of hunting a human" that a serial killer might experience.  And so long as the players can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, I don't think it's a problem.In fact, that's pretty much what an article on the psychology of Dungeons and Dragons said in one of the earliest issues of Discover Magazine in the early 1980s.  So long as the player can differentiate killing a monster in the game and slapping their brother in real life, they're fine.</blockquote>

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