D&D General The Problem with Evil or what if we don't use alignments?

[Hexmage-EN]

By reading his description, you get LE. By looking at his 3e statblock, you get CE. Two very different ways to run Strahd. So what would you go by? His description or his actual stats?

I don't honestly know much about Strahd, but his 5E statblock at least has him as Lawful Evil.

Speaking of vampires and alignment, the final episode of Neflix's Castlevania pretty much has a vampire character and a human character having an alignment debate, with the vampire essentially claiming that vampires are inherently Lawful and both value and work to enforce stability upon an unstable world (for the good of vampirekind) while the human expresses skepticism.

 

[Minigiant]

Chaotic with a streak of Lawful in it sounds very Neutral to me.

I'm with the people who say that if alignment doesn't pen what you do into one box, then it's not actually very helpful. If you have the alignment but have to read the text to find out the exceptions and figure out how they work within the listed alignment, then you might as well drop the alignment altogether.

That's kinda the point.

Alignment is for nameless roaming monsters, extraplanar outsiders, and humanoid organizations. It is poorly suited for entire races of humanoids or anything with a proper name.

Once something has a personality over a few sentences, it's too complex for 9 point alignment.

 

[Yaarel]

By reading his description, you get LE. By looking at his 3e statblock, you get CE. Two very different ways to run Strahd. So what would you go by? His description or his actual stats?

I would go reading the description of the Darklord − then assign the alignment myself.

Evil is a given.

Chaotic versus Lawful depends on whether the Darklord is a "me" or a "we". In the case of the Darklord self-identifying with everyone in their domain, they seems more like a "we". So, leaning toward Lawful Evil.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that no matter what else changes, there will still be evil monsters as part of D&D. I know, radical.

Sure. Nothing wrong with having Always Evil enemies. The problem is when you pick natural, mundane creatures, like orcs, instead of picking things like fiends (which are made of literally pure, concentrated evil), constructs (which are programmed), undead (which are either mindless or tainted by evil energy), or fey or aberrations (which can have such alien mindsets that it might be impossible to to understand motivations and so you can only judge by results). Or instead of picking things like bandits, cultists of evil gods, slavers, and the like, which are mundane creatures who are actively choosing to harm other people for their own benefit.

In other words: Orcs should not be "always evil" or even "evil by default, some exceptions may apply." It should be Orc bandits, cultists, and slavers are evil, other orcs are just orc people doing orc people things.

Could you add some redeeming quality to each and every monster in the MM? I suppose you could. I don't see the point. The entries in the MM are the protagonists in the game. Are all orcs evil? Up to the DM and the setting. All trolls? Troglodytes? Meazels? Are you going to rewrite vampires so that some sparkle in the sunlight?

<sigh> This argument again?

OK, first, you have to look at the base lore of the monster and add in things like feeding and reproductive habits. Vampires historically feed on the humanoid blood, mind-controlling people so that they are "willing" to allow this. They reproduce by corrupting living people, turning them into undead spawn under their control. Vampires are, and have been for a very long time, a metaphor for rape. It may be possible to have vampires who work to non-evil ends, but their base needs require evil acts. Even if you had people actually willing to give up blood for a vampire, it would be difficult or impossible to tell if that person was truly willing or had been manipulated/brainwashed into doing this. (I would imagine you agree that nonmagical manipulation can be just as evil as magical manipulation)

You can take those two metrics--reproduction and feeding--and apply them to most creatures to help determine alignment. Troglodytes, orcs, kobolds, mostly reproduce and feed like humans do. So they might be evil--or they might not be evil.

And, well, as someone else said, chicken or egg? What came first, the alignment or the lore? I would imagine that the alignment came first (so you can kill them without feeling bad changing alignment and losing XP for doing so) then later on lore was built to justify that alignment. And that probably people didn't want to deal with having to figure out if a group of orcs was evil or not. Like, if your party came across a group of humans sitting around a campfire, you'd have to interact with them before you could determine their alignment. But if you came across a group of orcs doing the same thing, you can just kill them and take their stuff, plus free campfire.

So if it were up to me, I wouldn't find a redeeming quality, I'd make one. For trolls, they're very hungry carnivores and don't really think about anything else than eating. "Hungry" is neither evil nor good. It's possible to direct a troll into acts that are beneficial, just like you can direct one into acts that are malicious. Now, it's very possible that a troll mutate might become violent, cruel, and destructive, but that's like a dog going rabid. The mutation affected its brain in a bad way. Unless you have some sort of cure--which might be possible in a magical world!--you would probably have to put it down. (Of course, it's also positive that the mutation made it ultra-good/helpful. In the webcomic Freefall, some of the rebellious robots joined up in roving gangs, where they wheeled around town and committed acts of random construction. Humans were waking up to find (non-carnivorous) gazebos in their yards and that their cars had been fixed.)

How about instead they just make it clearer that alignment is just a default, that these descriptions are for the ones that the PCs are likely to face as protagonists?

What if they decided that humans were evil as a default?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would go reading the description of the Darklord − then assign the alignment myself.

But why though? What do you need the alignment for if you already read their description and know what they are like?

 

[Cadence]

And, well, as someone else said, chicken or egg? What came first, the alignment or the lore? I would imagine that the alignment came first (so you can kill them without feeling bad changing alignment and losing XP for doing so) then later on lore was built to justify that alignment.

I'm guessing the original came from Anderson and Moorcock (wasn't OD&D just L/N/C?).

What if they decided that humans were evil as a default?

So, make them have the views of most past civilizations as judged through modern western standards?

 

[Hexmage-EN]

So, make them have the views of most past civilizations as judged through modern western standards?

Yeah, I've been listening to a multipart podcast series on the Black Death and by extension European culture of the 14th century and even everyday life before all the plagues and famines and such sounded pretty awful. There was all sorts of casual cruelty that sounds like something a Chaotic-leaning Evil civilization in D&D would exhibit. Most D&D civilizations are extremely sanitized (both figuratively and literally) compared to the actual middle ages.

The podcast in question is making use of a book called The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century. I just ordered it the other day myself to see how backwards and awful the social norms of the time were.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

But why though? What do you need the alignment for if you already read their description and know what they are like?

For one thing, it's a quick indicator that given creatures might possibly work together under certain circumstances given certain common values.

For example, in A Paladin in Hell, the archdevil Geryon's council is made up of a variety of Lawful Evil creatures: an erinyes, a mind flayer, a beholder, and a medusa.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm guessing the original came from Anderson and Moorcock (wasn't OD&D just L/N/C?).

Of course, they had Law and Chaos as literal sides in a cosmic conflict (IIRC), not moral outlooks.

So, make them have the views of most past civilizations as judged through modern western standards?

Heh. Yeah.

 

[Greg Benage]

But why though? What do you need the alignment for if you already read their description and know what they are like?

In modern game-design parlance, alignments are "tags." They're used in two primary ways: as signifiers and as game mechanics. D&D is in the process of deemphasizing the mechanical component of alignments as tags, but they may remain helpful to some players as signifiers. A deeper justification for signifiers as communications tools would likely require a deeper discussion of language and linguistics.