What would you have done?

[John Morrow]

And the dispute was over what was good or evil in the context of a D&D game, so real world definitions don't really matter.

The dispute was emotional because the participants were discussing D&D alignments in a real world context, as well. It probably should have stayed a discussion of good and evil within the context of the game but it spilled outside of that. And as someone who runs games that follow real-world logic more than story logic, how D&D alignments survive contact with realistic moral problems does interest me.

 

[TimSmith]

Just to remind us all what the PHB says about alignments:-

"ALIGNMENT
A creature’s general moral and personal attitudes are represented by its alignment: lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good, lawful neutral, neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful evil, neutral evil, or chaotic evil. Alignment is a tool for developing your character’s identity. It is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two characters of the same alignment can still be quite different from each other. In addition, few people are completely consistent.

GOOD VS. EVIL
Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.
“Good” implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master. "

Now, the first paragraph would imply that there is a broad latitude in what you can do (as with most things 3rd edition- could those who are very prescriptive as to what the LG types can do be still thinking 1st Edition, I wonder?) As it states, there is a broad range of views even amongst those of a similar alignment, so maybe there would have been a difference of opinion amongst the party as to what to do with the prisoners? Also, few people are completely consistent and they were certainly under pressure. Finally, alignment is not a straightjacket...

The second paragraph, describing what D&D "good" is, makes no reference to sparing evil prisoners. It says "protect INNOCENT life" and "respect life and dignity of sentient beings."
The prisoners are certainly not innocent and respecting life is not the same as refusing to take it when necessary (as long as the creature is not debased in the process). In the RAW, what they did does not seem to be outside the bounds of the "Good" alignment at all.

The debate has inevitably drawn in our own real world morality, but as others have said, its a whole different ball game. (At least some of) these guys worship dark gods and perform unspeakable acts as a matter of routine AND they are part of a wider network with the will and capability to do it on a large scale. Real, pure, unadulterated EEEEvillll. Strong. Dangerous. They don't take prisoners (except maybe for sacrifice). The characters are NOT soldiers but commandos on a strike mission without any complicated support network. If they mess up, good innocent civilians will die, probably horribly. Is it right to expect a good character to spare prisoners in this case, when the probability is that these prisoners will tell tales and give them away? Would it even really be a "good" act to spare them, when the result is likely to be genuine innocents dying and the jeapordising of the mission against evil? If good guys always spare bad guys like that, the good guys and their way of life and those they are fighting to protect are on the way to the history books as a failed civilisation. Some good people would no doubt say "so be it" rather than stoop so low, but one has to assume that adventurers will, by nature, be more on the militant side of goodness. (Of course, playing pacifist characters might be entertaining, although I would expect the average adventure to be more of a challenge for them).

The game has room for many different interpretations of what is acceptable for a "good" character, and indeed our real world morality has plenty of room for debate even without the fact that D&D is a different reality to ours! The only way to deal with this is to make it clear what, in your world view, it means to be "good" if this is likely to be an issue. Or simply let the players define their characters' views for themselves

 

[Storm Raven]

Fair enough. Since you are more familiar with the classics of the genre than I am, do they often find themselves dealing with characters like the one in Firefly? If so, how does the movie resolve the situation?

It depends entirely on the movie. In some, such as Hang 'Em High, the hero takes the bad guys on a long and dangerous (for him) journey to the Federal judge for the Oklahoma Territory. The instances are too numerous (and varied) to generalize, but in almost all, the good guy doesn't kill captured bad guys, even when not doing so poses a significant and potential threat down the road.

I don't remember the bad guy shooting first before Ben started chopping arms, at least not in the original (I have no idea what unspeakable things the Lucasfilm elves have done to that scene since). Unfortunately, my LD player and LDs are packed away but maybe I can take a look at the modified DVD.

The sequence is this:

Bad guy menaces Luke.
Kenobi intervenes, tries to talk bad guy out of doing anything.
Bad guy produces gun.
Kenobi produces lightsaber.
Bad guy fires, Kenobi deflects blast.
Kenobi attacks.

I'm not trying to claim Han Solo is a Paladin. I'm trying to find out what you think a Paladin should do in situations like that.

Exactly how would a paladin get into the situation of owing a major crime lord money for dumping a shipment of contraband as a result of a failed smuggling run to begin with? It seems extremely contrived to have a paladin get into that situation and still be a paladin to begin with.

One possible answer is that Paladins don't work in a gritty setting and a GM should run a setting that can support Good heroes. But I'm more interested in what happens when a white hatted Paladin get's placed into a gritty setting (ala Last Action Hero) and waiting for the bad guy to shoot first results in a dead hero or dead innocent and letting the bad guys go means that they come back and hurt other people later. Is the sort of Paladin you envision viable in such a situation? Are they expected to accept the unfortunate consequences of their reluctance to act pragmatically as part of the cost of their alignment or should they adjust the parameters of what it means to be Good to suit their alignment?

A paladin may only work in a universe in which good is a force in and of itself, and not a somewhat flexible set of moral precepts. In standard D&D, good, evil, law, and chaos aren't simply moral choices, they are primal forces of nature. You can sense them, imbue objects with them, dispel them, call upon creatures that embody them, and so on. Good is objectively defined, and doesn't fluctuate depending upon the situation at hand.

In any event, think of a paladin in terms of the devout early Christans. Many of those people would rather suffer persecution and sacrifice their lives than violate their moral principles. A paladin is similar: obeying the code of the paladin is more important than mere expediency or practicality. That a bad guy might come back and kill him later is likely not a sufficient reason to justify killing him while he is helpless, because that would violate the paladin's code of good, just as giving lip service to the worship of the Roman Emperor while intending to go back to following the Christan path was insufficient for many 1st and 2nd century Christians.

(SOME MORE FIREFLY SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH.)

I'm not trying to be annoying. I'm trying to figure out how best to define Paladins in a morally complex environment without, in essence, leaving no good deed unpunished. And the reason why I don't think that's the only way to handle Good lies in the word "innocent" in the SRD. What makes action movie heroes the good guys that audiences cheer for, from James "License to Kill" Bond to Captain Mal of the Firefly is that they reserve their harse justice for the bad guys and do take risks to help the average innocent person. Mal will put himself and his crew at risk rather than keep medicine from sick townfolk but then he'll turn around and drop-kick a bad guy into his ship's engine. I'm trying to determine if it's possible for Good to maintain that distinction and still remain identifiably Good, distinct from Neutral.

The problem is that Bond, Mal, and so on don't live in a universe in which good and evil are palaple primal forces of nature. But, in any event, no, it is probably not possible for a "grim and gritty" protagonist to remain "good" as opposed to some strain of "neutral", because that's more or less the nature of "grim and gritty".

 

[gizmo33]

The dispute was emotional because the participants were discussing D&D alignments in a real world context, as well. It probably should have stayed a discussion of good and evil within the context of the game but it spilled outside of that.

Yes, it certainly spilled outside of that. The original poster called his players behavior barbaric, callous, and reprehensible. I think at that point it became less about how alignment is defined in the game, and more about how real people are going to treat each other during a roleplaying game. The original poster would have probably been better served with a discussion about why not to call real people that play role-playing games "reprehensible" based on the activities of their imaginary characters.

Distancing alignment from real-world discussions between DM and players IMO is helpful because then the players don't think you're making some sort of comment on their real-world morality. Plus, designing an alignment system based on the real world is like designing a combat system based on the real world. I don't think you can really get the results you want in one lifetime.

I think the best treatment of alignments in a real-world context would be to drop them completely. IMC I treat alignments as elements were in medieval thought, where a person is a mixture of all of them in different proportions. Demons, for example, are treated as "chaotic evil elementals".

If the real world had something like the know alignment spell, I think the real world would have nine different countries. Debates about morality that have fueled the political and religious history of the real world would be resolved with the casting of a few spells. You could never simulate anything like the Crusades with the DnD alignment system. An old dragon magazine article basically describes this.

Also - Something I strongly recommend is that people avoid handing out bonuses based on alignment. That's a hold-over from old-school DnD, where being a paladin got you all kinds of bonuses that made you better than a fighter (or at least that was the perspective). So people were taking the paladin character class for the power and then constantly skirting the line of what was Lawful Good. As long as being good within the system gets you benefits in the game, people will always have their characters try to be labelled as good regardless of what the DM thinks of their character's actions. The best way IME to reduce the number of arguments is to reduce the incentive for players to want to claim their character is something that it's not.

 

[twofalls]

It's a GAME

I keep allowing myself to return to this thread. I'm not even certain why.

At the time of the events that transpired in my game, I was personally disgusted by the actions of the characters, but (as John Morrow pointed out in the link to his article on how emotions strongly influence reasoning) I viewed the Zhents much like soldiers in the Third Reich. These soldiers didn't commit atrocities, they fought for their commanders because that was the culture they lived in, and their lives and the lives of their families depended upon their obedience. These were Zhent Soldiers not Zhentarim. The parallel between the two is similar to the difference between the common German Soldier and German SS or devout Nazi party supporters. I drew real life parallels and identified too closely with them, thus I was affronted when they where slaughtered rather than just blowing it off as part of the game and moving on (which I eventually did after an emotional firestorm).

As gizmo33 just stated;

Distancing alignment from real-world discussions between DM and players IMO is helpful because then the players don't think you're making some sort of comment on their real-world morality. Plus, designing an alignment system based on the real world is like designing a combat system based on the real world. I don't think you can really get the results you want in one lifetime.

I agree completely. I drug the RW into it by identifying with the NPC's, and my players did the same by bringing in the US military and using it as a justification. I did away with the Alignment system in a previous campiagn and it really didn't damage the game at all. I would still have reacted the way that I did because it was an emotinal response, I just wouldn't have had the alignment concept to use as a club to back up my disgust. However there are many game mechanics that make having the alignment system useful in 3.0, and when we started this game over three years ago we were all learning this new system and I decided not to make any uneeded changes until I knew it very well. Later on I just didn't bother with it.

Now regarding the part of this thread on sitting down and laying out the law in a list format about what can or can't be done by members of a certain alignment... give me break. How many GM's can, with any shred of honesty, tell me that they give each of their players a list of do's and don'ts before a campaign is started based on that characters choice of alignments? In all my nearly 30 years of gaming I've not once seen that done. The alignment definitions are in the books and people interpret them differently. Now I'm not saying that its a bad idea, or that I shouldn't have interjected and said "Hey, that’s an evil act and is going to get you into trouble", but I really do try to let my players do what they will and I didn't anticipate my own strong reaction to what happened after the fact. The argument that ensued after the session only made my feelings (and everyone else's) more intense. However, telling me that what I should have done is to give a do and don't list to my players before the game started is tantamount to telling our current administration that they screwed up for not mounting anti air defense missiles upon the top of the world trade centers. Who has a freaking crystal ball to foretell these events?

This isn't real life... it is a game. John... buddy... if I've learned one thing from this thread it's that it can be self defeating to model a game so closely after real life morals and expectations so that conversations like this get started on the web, because everyone has an opinion and more often than not they are different. You are searching for an answer to a question(s) that doesn't actually have one single answer to offer you, and never will outside of fundamentalism (and even they are fractured).

No, I've learned another thing. To lighten up, again, it's a game, its meant to be fun and getting upset with my friends and nearly breaking up my group wasn't fun. It was pure hell in fact. I still think what they did was evil and wrong... I don't think it will ever happen again with this group because of the trauma it caused, but it may with a different group I run and if so I will be better able to handle it because of my experiences the first time and this LOOOONG thread on Enworld.

Ultimately we view the game through the lens of our RW biases and moral character, we can't help it, even when we try to place a medieval colored plastic sheet over the lens we still are who we are. What I think this boils down to once all the hot air that’s been directed at it here boils away the fluff is that you wont find the answers outside of the group of people you are dealing with., and within that group you will require compromise. That, perhaps, is really the best thing to learn in the long run.

 

[John Morrow]

It depends entirely on the movie. In some, such as Hang 'Em High, the hero takes the bad guys on a long and dangerous (for him) journey to the Federal judge for the Oklahoma Territory. The instances are too numerous (and varied) to generalize, but in almost all, the good guy doesn't kill captured bad guys, even when not doing so poses a significant and potential threat down the road.

OK. Fair enough.

The sequence is this:

Bad guy menaces Luke.
Kenobi intervenes, tries to talk bad guy out of doing anything.
Bad guy produces gun.
Kenobi produces lightsaber.
Bad guy fires, Kenobi deflects blast.
Kenobi attacks.

OK. I forgot about the blast deflection. It's been a while since I watched Star Wars (Lucas' revisions have annoyed me quite a bit). Does this suggest that good guys, like Jedis, should have some ability to let the good guys go first without it being a stupid or fatal thing to do? This is something that D&D Paladins don't have.

Exactly how would a paladin get into the situation of owing a major crime lord money for dumping a shipment of contraband as a result of a failed smuggling run to begin with? It seems extremely contrived to have a paladin get into that situation and still be a paladin to begin with.

I'm not talking about every detail. Let me give you a specific example that's similar.

A Paladin has been working against an Evil Overlord so the Evil Overlord sends some bounty hunters out to get the Paladin. A Bounty Hunter sits down across from the Paladin in a bar and points an arrow coated in Deathblade poison at the Paladin and asks the Paladin to come with him. If the Paladin has the means to kill the Bounty Hunter then and there by surprise before the Bounty Hunter could fire, could he? Should he? Should he passively resist and risk being shot by a potentially fatal arrow? Should he go with the Bounty Hunter in the hope that an opportunity will present itself later? Does it matter if the Bounty Hunter is Evil or Neutral in the service of Evil?

A paladin may only work in a universe in which good is a force in and of itself, and not a somewhat flexible set of moral precepts. In standard D&D, good, evil, law, and chaos aren't simply moral choices, they are primal forces of nature. You can sense them, imbue objects with them, dispel them, call upon creatures that embody them, and so on. Good is objectively defined, and doesn't fluctuate depending upon the situation at hand.

I generally agree about alignment. What I guess I'm also asking is can a rigid alignment system work in a more gritty environment. I'm trying to have my cake and eat it, too.

In any event, think of a paladin in terms of the devout early Christans. Many of those people would rather suffer persecution and sacrifice their lives than violate their moral principles. A paladin is similar: obeying the code of the paladin is more important than mere expediency or practicality. That a bad guy might come back and kill him later is likely not a sufficient reason to justify killing him while he is helpless, because that would violate the paladin's code of good, just as giving lip service to the worship of the Roman Emperor while intending to go back to following the Christan path was insufficient for many 1st and 2nd century Christians.

Well, it's not the danger to the Paladin's life that's the problem. I think that's an easy enough call to make. The problem comes from letting a bad guy off the hook and having him come back to hurt another innocent person. If the Paladin thinks that there is a good chance that this bad guy will come back and hurt other innocent people (not Paladins, Clerics, or other adventuring types but farmers, schoolchildren, and milkmaids), should the Paladin really take that risk with their lives, because that's what he's doing.

The problem is that Bond, Mal, and so on don't live in a universe in which good and evil are palaple primal forces of nature. But, in any event, no, it is probably not possible for a "grim and gritty" protagonist to remain "good" as opposed to some strain of "neutral", because that's more or less the nature of "grim and gritty".

Thanks for the honest answer. I'm not giving up yet on seeing if I can figure out how to make it work, though.

 

[John Morrow]

I think at that point it became less about how alignment is defined in the game, and more about how real people are going to treat each other during a roleplaying game. The original poster would have probably been better served with a discussion about why not to call real people that play role-playing games "reprehensible" based on the activities of their imaginary characters.

To be fair, it sounds like the flashpoint came when the players said that they'd do the same thing in real life. He felt they were being reprehensible because they had crossed the line into the real world, too.

Plus, designing an alignment system based on the real world is like designing a combat system based on the real world. I don't think you can really get the results you want in one lifetime.

To quote the Rolling Stones, "You can't always get what you want but, if you try, sometimes you might find you get what you need." I'm looking for functional, not perfect.

I think the best treatment of alignments in a real-world context would be to drop them completely. IMC I treat alignments as elements were in medieval thought, where a person is a mixture of all of them in different proportions. Demons, for example, are treated as "chaotic evil elementals".

I think that alignment serves a purpose in the game and I also think it can function as a primative but useful set of personality mechanics. That's why I'd rather not drop them.

If the real world had something like the know alignment spell, I think the real world would have nine different countries. Debates about morality that have fueled the political and religious history of the real world would be resolved with the casting of a few spells. You could never simulate anything like the Crusades with the DnD alignment system. An old dragon magazine article basically describes this.

Actually, I disagree. First, the nine country theory supposed that none of those countries would care about what goes on in the other nine countries and that it would be trivially easy for each country to maintain a population of only one alignment. I don't really think alignment makes things all that simple.

Second, I think something like the Crusades can happen in D&D, though perhaps not in the way a moral relativist might interpret the Crusades. And of course nothing in the D&D alignment system excludes infighting between people of the same alignment.

The best way IME to reduce the number of arguments is to reduce the incentive for players to want to claim their character is something that it's not.

In the case of Paladins, it would really help if they existed, in the RAW, for all nine alignments rather than just one. Call them "Exemplars" or whatever, but a player should be able to play a Holy Warrior that is Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral or whatever.

 

[John Morrow]

This isn't real life... it is a game. John... buddy... if I've learned one thing from this thread it's that it can be self defeating to model a game so closely after real life morals and expectations so that conversations like this get started on the web, because everyone has an opinion and more often than not they are different. You are searching for an answer to a question(s) that doesn't actually have one single answer to offer you, and never will outside of fundamentalism (and even they are fractured).

There are some very specific reasons why I want to have an objective alignment system but also model real life morals. They have to do with the way my regular group approaches characters, settings, and campaigns. No, I don't expect what I come up with to work for everyone but I do expect it to help deal with some issues that come up with my regular group. If I write it up and it works for other people, that's a bonus.

Yeah, I know it's only a game. I've discussed plenty of real world moral issues, too, and I don't take any of it personally. And I'm well aware that different people have different ideas about what's Good.

In some ways, I think you are correct when you say that the only pure answers can be found in "fundamentalism", and I'd probably argue that's what you'll find along the outer edge of the alignment grid. What I'm really looking for are the lines inside, between Neutral and both Evil and Good. That most people enjoy action movies without feeling disgusted by the behavior of the protagonists suggests that there are at least some common ideas about this out there.

What I think this boils down to once all the hot air thats been directed at it here boils away the fluff is that you wont find the answers outside of the group of people you are dealing with., and within that group you will require compromise. That, perhaps, is really the best thing to learn in the long run.

I think it's quite possible to find insight into what goes on in your own group by talking to people outside of it. I've done quite a bit of that, actually. Haven't you gotten any insight into what happened from this thread?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

A little late to the game, I just looked at this thread today. I just scanned parts of it, didn't read every post.

As for what I would have done, I would have kept it all in game. Due to some mistakes in the past around issues such as this, I adjusted my thoughts on how people should play their characters. I would probably let the entire issue go - for the time being. It is not up to me as DM to dictate how a player should have their PC act.

I no longer ask for character alignments at all. My expectation is that people develop their character to be played a certain way most of the time. The situation in the original posting admitted that the PCs were tired, hurt and angry. So, maybe they were not acting in the way they do most of the time. Now, if I felt that the players were always changing their PCs personalities to be expedient, I might have a talk with them, and more likely I would start to have in-game consequences. The young kid they turned loose, against all odds, survived the woods and found refuge. He tells people he encounters what these viscious people did to him and his companions. Stories begin to spread, the party finds their reputation changing, less reputable people begin to look them up for shady jobs, people look upon them with suspicion etc.

Like I said I learned this from experience and still reget trying to force people to fit their characters to a mold of my making. When I as DM start dictating how the PCs should act, it is time for me to stop DMing and start writing fiction instead.

 

[Rel]

Now regarding the part of this thread on sitting down and laying out the law in a list format about what can or can't be done by members of a certain alignment... give me break. How many GM's can, with any shred of honesty, tell me that they give each of their players a list of do's and don'ts before a campaign is started based on that characters choice of alignments? In all my nearly 30 years of gaming I've not once seen that done. The alignment definitions are in the books and people interpret them differently. Now I'm not saying that its a bad idea, or that I shouldn't have interjected and said "Hey, that’s an evil act and is going to get you into trouble", but I really do try to let my players do what they will and I didn't anticipate my own strong reaction to what happened after the fact. The argument that ensued after the session only made my feelings (and everyone else's) more intense. However, telling me that what I should have done is to give a do and don't list to my players before the game started is tantamount to telling our current administration that they screwed up for not mounting anti air defense missiles upon the top of the world trade centers. Who has a freaking crystal ball to foretell these events?

twofalls, first up, I think pretty highly for the way that you've generally conducted yourself during the course of this thread in the face of some fairly intense (sometimes bordering on rude, nasty and inflamatory) discussion. I really think you are a good person to have around the boards. And just because I disagree with how you handled this incident in the past, and just because I disagree with some of your moral stance, doesn't mean that I think less of you as a fellow poster.

But this bit that I've quoted strikes me as a bit off. Of course nobody expects you to have known the future. And the bit about making a list of "do's and don'ts" is not something that I do literally. But what I DO do when we are sitting down to tuck in to a new campaign idea is have a brief metagame discussion about the themes, genre and tenor of the upcoming game. One aspect of this is to determine how "grim and gritty" the game will be and what sorts of things are going to fly and what aren't in terms of alignment.

When we have this chat, it isn't just me flapping my gums. I encourage and in some cases insist that the players give me feedback about these things. We get an understanding of each other expectations and have a collective agreement that we'll run the game in that general way.

I really do think that it helps to smooth out a lot of snags that are likely to come up in cases like the one you describe. Don't you think that it would have been helpful to have had the notion on the table that "Good guys don't kill captives. EVER."? And this type of thing is why some people are still knocking this discussion around long after we've gotten hundreds of answers about the original question and you've stated your intentions to bow out of the thread.

Many of us are trying to share ideas about how to avoid these kinds of situations in our own games. And, in my opinion, that is best achieved by having an understanding as a group of what the alignments mean, how they get bent and how they get broken.

I am by no means insisting that you or anybody else in this thread agree with me on what is Good, Neutral or Evil. But I do insist that everybody in the group having an understanding of what those terms mean to the GM and each other will help to keep conflict of this sort out of the game.