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

[Cadence]

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

The set-up up to 3.5 was pretty much both cosmic conflict and outlook, wasn't it (the detect.and protection spells, aligned items, great wheel, being within one step of the deity, etc...)?

At the least, I wonder if distinguishing between the LAW, CHAOS, GOOD, and EVIL of the outsiders (and some of their most extreme human minions) and the lawful, chaotic, good, and evil tendencies of most mortals would be helpful.

 

[Yaarel]

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

For me personally?

The alignment letters (G, CG, C, CE, E, LE, L, LG) anchor the descriptions of the ethical system relative to other ethical systems.

The alignment is almost (exactly) like a political map.

• Up ≈ Good ≈ liberty
• Down ≈ Evil ≈ authoritarianism
• Left ≈ Lawful ≈ collectivism
• Right ≈ Chaotic ≈ individualism

Most political philosophies fall somewhere on the map among these two axes, some toward the center, and some toward the periphery. Each political philosophy is its own in-depth complex worldview. Yet where they fall on this map is a highly useful comparison.

 

[Faolyn]

The set-up up to 3.5 was pretty much both cosmic conflict and outlook, wasn't it (the detect.and protection spells, aligned items, great wheel, being within one step of the deity, etc...)?

At the least, I wonder if distinguishing between the LAW, CHAOS, GOOD, and EVIL of the outsiders (and some of their most extreme human minions) and the lawful, chaotic, good, and evil tendencies of most mortals would be helpful.

My take on is that 2e had very lax classifications and so 3x went overboard in the other direction and added tags to everything, and then added spells and magic items that would affect that tag.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For me personally?

The alignment letters (G, CG, C, CE, E, LE, L, LG) anchor the descriptions of the ethical system relative to other ethical systems.

The alignment is almost (exactly) like a political map.

• Up ≈ Good ≈ liberty
• Down ≈ Evil ≈ authoritarianism
• Left ≈ Lawful ≈ collectivism
• Right ≈ Chaotic ≈ individualism

Most political philosophies fall somewhere on the map among these two axes, some toward the center, and some toward the periphery. Each political philosophy is its own in-depth complex worldview. Yet where they fall on this map is a highly useful comparison.

A YouTuber I follow had a live stream a few weeks ago where he made this chart showing what he believed to be the political leanings of Batman villains (though he also made sure to point out that several characters have been written inconsistently, making it harder to label them).

If nothing else it's a fun thought exercise.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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

oD&D was just L/N/C and that axis makes sense for a very specific type of game of D&D. In particular if you are playing a Western where you settle in FrontierTown (or on the borderlands in the neighbourhood of a keep) then your town is netural on the axis. Chaotic is the untamed wilderness where people like Native Americans (or orcs) already live and that's dangerous for people from the town. Lawful is the more regimented or ordered City Back East that wants to send ridiculous number of peoples and some very suspicious people with money (or just The King) want to take over. And the overall conflict is between law and chaos and FrontierTown is at risk of getting squashed.

I didn't say I liked the LNC pseudo-Western game (or even Westerns in general) but it's actually thematically coherent and in such a setting whether someone is law-aligned or chaos-aligned tells you something very important about them.

In Dragonlance-style games whether someone's good or evil also tells you something very important - which alliance they support. But Good isn't good, Evil isn't evil (although there is some correlation) and in that setting Balance Between Good and Evil is vitally important for some bizarre reason, which demonstrates fairly categorically that Good isn't good and Evil isn't evil.

 

[Oofta]

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.


<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.)


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

None of the monsters I gave descriptions for were undead or fiends. But I'm also not saying they are always evil. What I am saying is that the entries in the MM are for the evil versions. The lore we have is for the evil ones. It should be reinforced that it's up to the DM and the setting if all are, if just a significant percentage are, or if they're no more or less likely to be evil than any other species. It says that now, but it's easy to miss.

The game will always have monsters. I don't think it's worthwhile to add extra fluff (and page count) to have examples of non-evil monsters because of page count. That, and I disagree: category of monster has nothing to do with whether they can be any alignment. If you want demons in your campaign that are sometimes good because it makes sense, it should be clear that they can be good. If you want trolls to be always evil, that should be a valid decision as well.

IMHO lore can and should vary. Goblins and trolls from the Feywild in my campaign setting are no more or less likely to be evil than any other creature, they tend to be neutral. There is a tribe of goblins in my campaign world where the majority are good (I've never decided about trolls). Orcs? Orcs are effectively grown similar to storm troopers and come out fully formed; there are no baby orcs or females. There's no computer chip implanted in their brains, but there may as well be.

This is not about any specific creature. It's about the role of monsters in the game. I think the game needs monsters.

Oh, and I don't support killing monsters just because their monsters. The game has evolved since the 70s. So stop bringing up that strawman.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

I have a very hard time believing that those monsters would work together outside of some Evil League of Evil.

Now, individual monsters might have a reason for working with Geryon--I could see a mind flayer and a beholder or a medusa choosing to align themselves with him for whatever reason--but I can't see mind flayers or beholders or medusae as saying "you're LE, I'm LE, let's work together."

 

[Hexmage-EN]

oD&D was just L/N/C and that axis makes sense for a very specific type of game of D&D. In particular if you are playing a Western where you settle in FrontierTown (or on the borderlands in the neighbourhood of a keep) then your town is netural on the axis. Chaotic is the untamed wilderness where people like Native Americans (or orcs) already live and that's dangerous for people from the town. Lawful is the more regimented or ordered City Back East that wants to send ridiculous number of peoples and some very suspicious people with money (or just The King) want to take over. And the overall conflict is between law and chaos and FrontierTown is at risk of getting squashed.

I didn't say I liked the LNC pseudo-Western game (or even Westerns in general) but it's actually thematically coherent and in such a setting whether someone is law-aligned or chaos-aligned tells you something very important about them.

It also works for something like 4E's default Points of Light setting, where history is marked by the repeated creation and destruction of civilizations and the current age is one where the fallen empire has given way to smaller, isolated city-states and communities trying to defend themselves against being destroyed like everything else has been (or, alternatively, being conquered by the would-be builders of an evil civilization).

 

[Hexmage-EN]

I have a very hard time believing that those monsters would work together outside of some Evil League of Evil.

Now, individual monsters might have a reason for working with Geryon--I could see a mind flayer and a beholder or a medusa choosing to align themselves with him for whatever reason--but I can't see mind flayers or beholders or medusae as saying "you're LE, I'm LE, let's work together."

I find it fun to invent reasons for these kinds of alliances. A medusa could petrify victims for mind flayers to store until later needed for food or ceremorphosis, for example. That way the mind flayers don't have to worry about keeping their future victims imprisoned or fed. Just carefully transport them and keep them in a spare chamber until needed.

 

[Faolyn]

None of the monsters I gave descriptions for were undead or fiends.

I didn't say they were.

But I'm also not saying they are always evil. What I am saying is that the entries in the MM are for the evil versions. The lore we have is for the evil ones. It should be reinforced that it's up to the DM and the setting if all are, if just a significant percentage are, or if they're no more or less likely to be evil than any other species. It says that now, but it's easy to miss.

It should be less easy to miss. And in future editions, the lore given should be for the average ones, not the evil ones. The lore should show how some are evil, yes, but shouldn't go so far as to say most are evil and only a small percentage aren't.

And yes, that applies to Good races.

The game will always have monsters. I don't think it's worthwhile to add extra fluff (and page count) to have examples of non-evil monsters because of page count.

Right now, orcs have five paragraphs on how evil they are. They're evil, and sometimes they band together into larger, even more evil groups. You can tell they're evil because they have evil names (I bet if there was a group of dwarfs who called themselves The Screaming Eye, everyone would think they're cool and not evil). There's also extra paragraphs on how their evil god Gruumsh makes them do evil things because of those mean old other gods taking away all that land.

So... how's about three paragraphs on evil orc groups and two paragraphs on not evil orc groups? And instead of saying "orcs worship Gruumsh, who makes them do X, Y, Z" it gets changed to "on many worlds, orcs worship Gruumsh, who makes them do X, Y, Z, but on other worlds, they worship other gods, or Gruumsh doesn't have as strong a grasp on the orcs, and the orcs on these worlds act differently."

Page count remains the same.

IMHO lore can and should vary. Goblins and trolls from the Feywild in my campaign setting are no more or less likely to be evil than any other creature, they tend to be neutral. There is a tribe of goblins in my campaign world where the majority are good (I've never decided about trolls). Orcs? Orcs are effectively grown similar to storm troopers and come out fully formed; there are no baby orcs or females. There's no computer chip implanted in their brains, but there may as well be.

But that's your campaign, which is a very radical change from the norm. Because the norm says that orcs are born like humans are and goblins are mostly evil. (Also, in my mind, your orcs are constructs, not humanoids; they're just fleshy constructs.)

The rules should at least try to encourage people to think about why they're using these monsters.

This is not about any specific creature. It's about the role of monsters in the game. I think the game needs monsters.

Oh, and I don't support killing monsters just because their monsters. The game has evolved since the 70s. So stop bringing up that strawman.

You don't. But how many other people do? Lots, or this sort of discussion wouldn't come up every time alignment is mentioned.

And I do agree that there should be monsters. I even agree there should be intelligent, natural monsters, not just unintelligent beast-monsters or unnatural entities. But I think that intelligent monsters should have a reason for being evil that's more than just "because D&D tradition" or "because their god/arch-fiend made them that way" or "because they're uglier and/or not the same color than the good guys."

And once you give intelligent monsters a reason, it no longer makes sense for every one of those monsters to share that reason.