The Problem of Evil [Forked From Ampersand: Wizards & Worlds]

[robertliguori]

So, question for the morally-absolute folks. What's stopping you from playing a morally-absolute character? Just declare you're right, and revel in it? The guiding hand of your deity encouraging you to spare/slay the orc babies? Wrong. The devils popping up to tell you "Rock on, buddy!"? Wrong. The cosmic forces of the universe stripping you of your paladin powers? Also wrong. (Plus, not possible in 4E, and avoidable by respeccing to a Fighter1/ClericX devoted to your moral cause in 3.5E.)

You don't want to engage in moral questions? Then don't. Accept that there are physical forces in the multiverse that call themselves Good and Evil and Law and so on, and that these forces do not necessarily correlate to actual morality, and that what is Good isn't good and so forth.


The real problem (I believe) is not the desire to play a morally-absolute character, but a morally-correct character, backed up objectively by the laws of the setting. And that's where you run into problems. What happens if a fellow player wants the same thing, but disagrees on what is properly heroic? As you can see, there is lots of flat-out disagreement about whether executing orc babies is nobly heroic or grim and dark; what's a DM to do when one player wants to be empowered by the forces of righteousness to slay orcs and orcspawn, and another wants to be similarly empowered to defend the helpless (including orcspawn)?

I don't think that swarms of objectively evil orcs make for heroic fantasy, myself. I think that it's actually pretty damn grim, and my bog-standard evil orcs do not attack in mindless, relentless swarms, but actually tend to rapidly rout and flee for their lives when faced with heroic opposition. I think that orcs for which going in and knocking heads is a functional solution without requiring total genocide is much more heroic than orcs-as-xenomorphs.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I've never found the Cosmic Evil to offer much in the way of comforting rationalization when it comes to soothing the moral quandaries implicit in killing-heavy RPG play.

It should also be noted that Cosmic Evil only provides moral absolutism right up to the point where fallible humans get involved.

For example, in our current campaign we're fighting chaos cultists. The chaos cultists worship Cosmic Evil Deities. There is no question that these Cosmic Evil Deities are Absolute Evil.

In this same campaign, however, we have an NPC friend who has joined a front organization for one of the cults. He's not a bad kid, but we're not sure how to deal with the situation. Like most teenagers he's given all sorts of indications that having the grown-ups tell him not to do something will only encourage him to do it. And if we do succeed in yanking him out (or convincing him to leave), the cultists might kill him as a deserter. OTOH, if we leave him involved in the organization he's likely to get pulled deeper and deeper into its evil.

We haven't had any Socratic philosophy debates, but this moral quandary is more interesting than "kill him and take his stuff".

Of course, some of the things being referred to as moral quandaries in this thread are hilarious. For example, when someone can assert with a perfectly straight face that any campaign in which the statement "we shouldn't kill the babies of the human bandits" can be uttered constitutes navel-gazing philosophizing, I have to seriously start questioning their sanity.

And this brings me back to another Jasperak alluded to: Most DMs aren't Alan Moore or Joss Whedon, let alone Thomas Aquinas. And the chance that the DM is exploring new ethical ground is pretty slim. That's some well covered ground, if you know what I mean.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be relevant. What "new ground" are we covering when the PCs go into the nearest cave complex to kill some orcs?

Treading new ground may occasionally happen in a D&D campaign, but it's hardly a common occurence. (And there's nothing wrong with that.)

But if you really want to know: It's because D&D is a lousy medium for moral argument. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is lousy. If you want to explore moral issues there are just much better ways to do it. Read a book; take a class; debate your favorite Priest or Rabbi. Trying to develop your moral compass by playing D&D is most likely to result in both skewed ethics and bad gaming. Further, what are the odds that all the players at the table need to learn the same lesson? Slim to none, I'm thinking.

I haven't actually seen anyone in this thread argue that D&D is a good vehicle for delivering moral parables. So this just looks like a colossal strawman to me.

In fact, the issue of including moral ambiguity and the issue of delivering a moral lesson via D&D seem like two almost completely separate issues. The delivery of most moral lessons require moral absolutism, not relativism.

Imagine this game session:

DM: The local lord wants to hire you to wipe out the Cult of the Lime.
Players: Why is the Cult of the Lime so bad?
DM: They wear the color green.
Players: And that's bad?
DM: Yup. In this campaign world it's unquestionably evil to wear green. There are no if's, and's, or but's about it.
Players: Well, let's go get the Cult of the Lime.

And then compare and contrast with this campaign:

DM: The local lord wants to hire you to wipe out the Cult of the Lime.
Players: Why is the Cult of the Lime so bad?
DM: The local lord says it's because they wear green.
Players: And that's bad?
DM: The local lord tells you that the Green Brotherhood once ruled this entire area of the world. They were murderous fiends and the wearing of green has been outlawed ever since.

The whole "Cult of the Lime" thing has been chosen to be deliberately silly, but I think it's clear that the campaign in which there is One Truth and All Must Accept It is going to be far more useful in conveying some sort of moral parable about the ethicality of wearing the color green than the campaign where the players are free to decide on their own how they (and/or their characters) feel about it.

I gotta side with Irda Ranger on this. D&D is a poor medium for this sort of game. Not that this sort of game is bad, it most certainly isn't. But, I do think it's bad for D&D. D&D focuses on killing, plain and simple. The entire game is set up that you are going to go out somewhere, with weapons, and kill stuff. This has been true of D&D since forever.

Your thesis seems to hinge on the premise that, "Who should we be killing?" isn't a moral question. That seems like a self-evidently weak premise to me.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I agree that D&D won't offer most people any new revelations on whether or not a particular real-world action is going to be morally good or morally evil. In that respect, no DM who enjoys more ambiguity is going to argue that they are Thomas Aquinas or any one of a hoard of other philosophers who have posed that same question to the Real World.

It's a real good thing that as far as I can tell no one in this thread ever said otherwise. No one is trying to use D&D for sermonizing here (that is a separate issue). Those who enjoy more moral obscurity in their games generally just want to have fun with a different sort of challenge or puzzle, one involving a dimension of right and wrong and good and evil, and how a character responds to the question of "what is a hero?" Which is a very...modern...way to look at the S&S genre, and, of course, has it ingrained into a lot of modern fantasy.

As a work of fiction, D&D can certainly engage the part of your brain responsible for making a moral decision, by asking your character to make a moral decision in the context of fiction. Just like the new BSG can, for instance.

It's really OK that if you don't enjoy that. It would be a bad thing if someone were to say that because you prefer more classical-style black-and-white morality that you are somehow doing it wrong. It's also a very good thing that no one is saying that, either.

So let's try and ratchet down the level of straw-men and hyperbole, here. No one running a game with moral grayness wants to be some sort of modern-day D&D parablist, and it's kind of condescending to say so. Instead, they want what everyone wants in D&D: to have a fun game.

You can have fun with black and white morality, and you can have fun with grey morality. The legions of fictional works that precede your campaign will give both sides a huge backing of citation support.

 

[LostSoul]

My argument is that the active party cannot let the dice decide a moral outcome. The other people at the table get to "see what happens" by watching him make that decision, but the particular player who makes the decision cannot roll a d20 to find out whether it's okay to kill the goblin.

What he can do is say what he believes and use his actions in the game to show it.

 

[pawsplay]

Yup.

As I understand the word the act of telling a story requires active and passive parties with the flow of information passing in one direction only. This is an accurate description of movies, TV shows, books, plays and verbally spoken tales (inclusive). RPGs are obviously different from these things in many respects (even if there are some similarities), as I think we all agree. We need to have a word that distinguishes between these activities, don't you think?

If you expand the word "storytelling" to include what goes on at a gaming table the word loses the characteristics that define what I consider to be "real" storytelling activities. If you want to use a different word to distinguish these very different activities you can nominate one and I'll consider using it, but I do believe storytelling is the best word for distinguishing Hamlet from Against the Giants.

Hamlet is a play, and hence, a step removed from simply telling a story. I'd argue that an RPG is closer to story-telling than Hamlet is. Novels, plays, and other "poetics" are a specific subset of storytelling. Improv, participatory drama, and, yes, the telling of stories are other varieties.

 

[Mae]

The real problem (I believe) is not the desire to play a morally-absolute character, but a morally-correct character, backed up objectively by the laws of the setting. And that's where you run into problems. What happens if a fellow player wants the same thing, but disagrees on what is properly heroic? As you can see, there is lots of flat-out disagreement about whether executing orc babies is nobly heroic or grim and dark; what's a DM to do when one player wants to be empowered by the forces of righteousness to slay orcs and orcspawn, and another wants to be similarly empowered to defend the helpless (including orcspawn)?

Thank you for phrasing this so well - I think you've described the biggest issue encountered in actual play, properly heroic being the keyword. While it comes down to what the character ultimately does, the reasons may vary, and motives can be attributed to many instances (player's vision of the character being the most important, IMO, and reasons possibly being in-/out-of game.)

What's a DM to do? Anything but wave his hand, really, because if the DM has presented a challenge like this, the players should be comfortable with it and get a chance to deal reason their character's view of the matter. Should a DM do this, tehn, and how often? Only if everyone's OK with it, and not that often, I think; I believe it's a great addition to the game, best used to spice things up - and therefore used sparingly.


For me, D&D is what you make of it: there's many options, each (in theory) as valid as the other, yet some being considered and employed in an actual game. YMMV, as it should. But I think it's a fine medium to explore the issue, else our discussions would have been something else other than unending.

 

[Parlan]

Good men can do bad things for the right reasons. Bad men can do good things for the wrong reasons. And being good doesn't prevent one from lapsing, and being bad doesn't prevent one from seeing reason.

/snip (good stuff)

That's part of the reason that Black and White doesn't do much for me: it breaks my suspension of disbelief. If something is too easily defined, then it feels fake. It comes across, to me, as just wishful thinking. Things just aren't that easy. The other part is it's boring to me. /snip (good stuff)

Well said. I don't want to have long philosophical debates about the nature of Evil at the table. I want the DM (myself or someone else) to make clear how he views the issue and leave it at that.

However, for my campaign at least, I want a little gray (it is Eberron, after all). So I want the players to negotiate a treaty with a tribe of Lizardmen. This "Good Tribe" will be weird culturally, but not evil. In short, it'll be similar to human villages (some lizardmen are Good, some Evil, most Unaligned). However, the players will deal with other tribes, 'Bad Tribes", that are committed to wiping out the PC's town.

Whether the Bad Tribes' intent makes them "Evil" or not is something I leave to the individual players. Certainly they aren't cosmicly evil, but just as certainly, the players will be justified in their lord's/gods' eyes in wiping the Bad Tribes out.

Negotiate with the Good Tribe. Fight the Bad Tribes. It gives some variety to the campaign and keeps it a little more interesting to me. That said, I think there's gonna be a lot more fightin' than negotiatin'

 

[haakon1]

Orcs in my world are EVIL. There is no psychological or philosophical discussion.

That's fine. It's a CHOICE many GM's have made -- to run a beer and pretzels game that doesn't care much about the nature of its world, or to run a black and white game where there's no shades of grey.

Recognize, though, that at least in 3e, by saying all orcs are evil, you are making a house rule, not following the RAW.

DMs that put those kinds of questions in a GAME belong in theology and philosophical classes at a local college not running a GAME.

Different people approach D&D in different ways, and many D&D players, being on nerds and therefore usually blessed with high IQ's, are also intellectuals. Some players may bring intellectual concerns -- like nature v. nurture -- into the game as a theme they want to play with. You're saying this is "wrongbadfunism" because you don't do it that way -- and I'm saying lighten up, "wrongbadfunism" is rude.

For what it's worth, my DM in college was a philosophy major, and now is a philosophy professor. He never noticeably cared about good/evil issues in game, but if he did, that wouldn't give anyone the right to say he should "not [be] running a GAME".

Personally, the world I DM doesn't have moral relativism -- good is good and evil is evil -- but I do have non-evil orcs and goblins, because I think it's interesting, and because it's RAW for my edition.

 

[Mallus]

That said, I think there's gonna be a lot more fightin' than negotiatin'

Good point. There's room in a D&D campaign for debates about morality and ethics so long as they're settled, nine out of ten times, with swords and weaponized philosophy (ie magic).

 

[Nightson]

Good point. There's room in a D&D campaign for debates about morality and ethics so long as they're settled, nine out of ten times, with swords and weaponized philosophy (ie magic).

There's room in a D&D campaign for debates to be settled without violence every time.