D&D General Worlds of Design: Is Fighting Evil Passé?

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (1975) I had a clear idea of what I wanted to be and to do in the game: fight evil. As it happened, I also knew I wanted to be a magic user, though of course I branched out to other character classes, but I never deviated from the notion of fighting evil until I played some neutral characters, years after I started.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” Albert Einstein

To this day I think of the game as good guys against bad guys, with most of my characters (including the neutrals) on the good guy side. I want to be one of those characters who do something about evil. I recognize that many do not think and play this way, and that's more or less the topic of this column. Because it makes a big difference in a great deal that happens when you answer the question of whether the focus of the campaign is fighting evil.

In the early version of alignment, with only Law and Chaos, it was often Law (usually good) against Chaos (usually evil). I learned this form from Michael Moorcock's Elric novels before D&D, though I understand it originated in Pohl Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. That all went out the window when the Good and Evil axis was added to alignment. That's the axis I'm talking about today.

This is a "black and white" viewpoint, versus the in-between/neither/gray viewpoint so common today. But I like my games to be simple, and to be separate from reality. I don't like the "behave however you want as long as you don't get caught" philosophy.

Usually, a focus on fighting evil includes a focus on combat, though I can see where this would not necessarily be the case. Conversely, a focus on combat doesn't necessarily imply a focus on fighting evil. Insofar as RPGs grow out of popular fiction, we can ask how a focus on fighting evil compares with typical fiction.

In the distant past (often equated with "before 1980" in this case) the focus on fighting evil was much more common in science fiction and fantasy fiction than it is today, when heroes are in 50 shades of gray (see reference). Fighting evil, whether an individual, a gang, a cult, a movement, a nation, or an aggressive alien species, is the bedrock in much of our older science fiction and fantasy, much less so today.

Other kinds of focus?

If fighting evil isn't the focus, what is?

• In a "Game of Thrones" style campaign, the politics and wars of great families could provide a focus where good and evil hardly matter.
• "There's a war on" might be between two groups that aren't clearly good or evil (though each side individually might disagree).
• A politically-oriented campaign might be all about subterfuge, assassination, theft, and sabotage. There might be no big battles at all.
• A campaign could focus on exploration of newly-discovered territory. Or on a big mystery to solve. Or on hordes of refugees coming into the local area.

I'm sure there are many inventive alternatives to good vs evil, especially if you want a "grayer" campaign. I think a focus on good vs evil provides more shape to a RPG campaign than anything else. But there are other ways of providing shape. YMMV. If you have an unusual alternative, I hope you'll tell us about it.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

How do you know you're not hallucinating?

In mediaeval times many claims to have received divine visions were treated with a high degree of scepticism by clerical authorities.

I don't think the reality of gods makes much difference to the issues in the fiction; and I don't think it's a very useful device at the table, as it just leads to the question who gets to decide what the paladin's god thinks - the player, or the GM?

option three. Be a cult leader who says he is a god. NOW HOW ARE YOU GONNA SAY WHAT GOD THINKS, CLERIC? In practice this causes utter chaos for the record. Doing this in a campaign is playing with fire. But can be a hilarious way to die.

 

[pemerton]

Wow. I feel like we just had this whole thread very recently. And it was exactly the same. Maybe the armchair moral reletavism will be more interesting the second time around. I love it when people descend down off their soapbox and take the time tell us plebs what to think. That's a whole semester of PHIL 101 I don't have to take.

An important skill for doing PHIL 101 is to be able to answer questions like "If Bentham's view was correct, then would such-and-such be a permissible action?" Some of the posters in these threads, though, seem to be very reluctant to exercise their imaginations in this way - whereas that's exactly what you have to do when you read LotR or watch The X-Men and cheer along with the heroes!

But I would say that I see very few people affirming moral relativism in any of these threads. Rather what I see them doing is projecting their own moral views onto the gameworld, with no mediation or stopping to ask How do I have to change my moral views - in imagination only, of course! - to make this game work? They seem to be able to do that when engaging with other fictional media, but for some reason RPGs cause a problem.

 

[pemerton]

My experience is that D&D with two-part alignments ends up one of two ways:

1) It acknowledges and draws from real-world morality of some kind (even if people are in denial about it, or have the classic problem fish/water problem).

or

2) Good and Evil are weird constructs that don't match up to real-world morality and thus no longer seem like they're actually Good and Evil in any meaningful moral sense, but rather Angel-side and Demon-side

This is why I am suggesting a (3) - look at the literary and other fictional works that D&D draws upon and in some sense aspires to emulate, and notice how they begin from (1) but vary it in certain ways that (i) reflect the pseudo-mediaeval context, and (ii) therefore relax the permissibility of violence in recognisable and far-from-unlimited ways.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

An important skill for doing PHIL 101 is to be able to answer questions like "If Bentham's view was correct, then would such-and-such be a permissible action?" Some of the posters in these threads, though, seem to be very reluctant to exercise their imaginations in this way - whereas that's exactly what you have to do when you read LotR or watch The X-Men and cheer along with the heroes!

But I would say that I see very few people affirming moral relativism in any of these threads. Rather what I see them doing is projecting their own moral views onto the gameworld, with no mediation or stopping to ask How do I have to change my moral views - in imagination only, of course! - to make this game work? They seem to be able to do that when engaging with other fictional media, but for some reason RPGs cause a problem.

This is also ironically compounded by people who are used to excercising that very skill but screw up, when seeing someone else has come to different conclusions through the same skill, and they assume by extension that those people have not excercised the same skill. This doesnt always happen, but it does happen and thus the amount of people getting into the weeds therein are multiplied by that secondary factor.

 

[DammitVictor]

How do I have to change my moral views - in imagination only, of course! - to make this game work? They seem to be able to do that when engaging with other fictional media, but for some reason RPGs cause a problem.

Because they're not expected to participate in other forms of media.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Because they're not expected to participate in other forms of media.

oh...yeah. I second this. Its a massive increase in agency. Many are not adjusted to applying that skill to an encompassing enough degree when the structure is more mutable.

 

[pemerton]

I do think that we can look at the act of taking life as being inherently good or bad. If a killing can be justified, it’s more a case of it becoming a necessary evil rather than being something good. Would you agree with that?

I think this is highly relevant to the issue of how fantasy relaxes the constraints on permissible violence. But getting into it does require a bit more philsophising!

I think that many (certainly not all) contemporary people would affirm that taking a life is an evil, and even when justified - eg in self-defence - it is a necessary evil.

But I don't think that fantasy adopts such a conception. For instance, once we allow for the permissibility of retributive violence - which JRRT does in LotR (as Gandalf tells Frodo, there are many who live but deserve death) - then some takings of life, namely, those which are the infliction of just punishment, are not evils.

Also, read JRRT's account of Eomer in the Battle of the Pelennor FIeld - Eomer comes under a battle-lust and a death-wish. Had he died, I don't think that would have been an evil. And had that death been an honourable killing eg by a Southron soldier, that would have been a sad thing but not an evil act.

Fantasy - if its standard tropes are to be upheld - needs these notions around honour and punishment that allow for some killings not to be evils. They might be regrettable in the sense that the world would be a better place with Eomer still in it, but that's a different matter.

You can also see that JRRT is very hostile to suicide. This is connected to broader ideas about the role of life and death in the scheme of the universe, which are different from some contemporary people's ideas but also help explain why not all death is an evil.

 

[pemerton]

This is also ironically compounded by people who are used to excercising that very skill but screw up, when seeing someone else has come to different conclusions through the same skill, and they assume by extension that those people have not excercised the same skill. This doesnt always happen, but it does happen and thus the amount of people getting into the weeds therein are multiplied by that secondary factor.

This is why, even if D&D alignment categories are being used in a game, I don't favour GM adjudication of alignment. Because that way conflicts and madness lie!

 

[pemerton]

Because they're not expected to participate in other forms of media.

The flipside is - if people playing D&D are really expressing their actual moral conceptions, then I'm suddenly very scared of all those D&D players!

Because D&D as typically played is permissible with respect to the use of violence, including lethal violence, to a degree that in the real world is almost unfathomable to me. Admittedly I live in Australia and not the US, but I would have thought the contrast with most of the US is also pretty marked.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I stopped using Alignment in my games shortly after I started playing D&D. All it seemed to do is cause arguments.

In reference to the "in a world where gods are real" train of thought... I can't imagine, in a world where gods are active and in direct contact with their servants, that they would not immediately and directly put down anybody trying to pretend to be or speak for them.