YAAT Good is just passe?

[JLXC]

With all the cries for doing away with alignment, and all the cries of "Good does not equal Dumb" I have wondered for a while if modern players are so awash in the morass of reality, so stuck in "It's all Shades of Gray", that they cannot fathom Goodness?

Goodness USED to be different in movies and books and in peoples minds. Here are some examples which I may or may not agree with:

It used to be Good to fight opponents without always killing them.

Now you must kill them because they'll probably come back and get you!

It used to be Good to TRY to hold back some enemies while innocents escape.

Now that is DUMB PALADIN thinking, and no sensible good person would throw away their life like that! What a waste! How moronic!

It used to be Good to do the right thing, even when it was bad
for you.

Now you should "Bend" the rules when needed because it's more important to WIN, than to do the right thing. If doing the Right thing stands in the way of your Good goal, then just ignore it because the Greater Good will be better served.

It used to be Good to do something even when there was no profit in it.

Now you should be Good, AND make a great profit, of course giving a little away to charity so you can still be "Good".

It used to be Good to show mercy.

Now, mercy is for the weak.

It used to be Good to risk your neck to help people, even when it is likely, but not for sure, that you will die.

Now it is dumb to take too many risks and there are some that you just "Cannot" save.

I'm not sure if ANY of the examples I used about are valid. I am just curious about what other people feel. I could spend time to think of better examples, ok, don't let the above examples put your thinking in a box all right? What do you think? Is Good about self sacrifice? Is Good about "how you think" not "what you do?" What do you think?


I personally feel people in the real world are so used to daily Evil that they think of good as dumb, and just are amazed when people do something good. Sure THEY say they are good, but they don't ever ACT on it. Just because you don't kick puppies does not make you good.

Examples:

D&D - A Group of Paladins and Clerics see a volcano erupting, a bunch of people they don't know are trapped in there, and rush in knowing that it could explode and kill them any second.

They all die when the volcano does blow up.

Are they dumb? Should they have "thought" of something else while waiting for it to go off then not responsible at all when it did because they were "Thinking" and there was "Nothing" they could do? Would your "Good" players have rushed in there? If you made it clear that there was no way to survive the blast if it went off would they go? Do you even HAVE Good aligned characters anymore in your Parties?
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Now replace Paladins and Clerics with Police Men and Firemen. Replace Volcano with World Trade Center on 9/11.

There are Heroes... and then there are HEROES. Do we even understand selfless good anymore?

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Hear hear.

One minor nitpick that is worth noting though.

Good is not about self sacrifice or selflessness. Instead it is about treating other people as we would desire to be treated (love your neighbor as yourself). This may seem to be a small difference but in reality it is quite significant. It is quite possible to sacrifice yourself for selfish ends or to make sacrifices that do not help other people. It is also possible to be selfless and deny yourself all sorts of things without actually helping other people. Neither of these is necessarily "good."

 

[Lord Ravinous]

Dude, I wanna shake your hand so bad right now it's almost unbarable. I think that the Administrators and Moderators should make an archive of threads and posts with worth while messages and real life meaning. And this should be the first one that they put in it. Bravo

 

[TBoarder]

I don't think you'll find anybody here who will argue with you about this. Your World Trade Center example is one of the biggest examples of "real world heroics" in memory, and should never be disputed. Note I mentioned that it's "real world heroics" though, and not simply "heroics"

D&D heroism is a completely different animal. People grow attached to their characters. They'll try to do "good", but they'll try to do it in such a way that they won't lose this character that they happen to really enjoy playing at this time. If a DM has a habit of pitting spared enemies aginst the characters, of course the players are going to start killing every bad guy in sight. It's meta-game thinking (And in-game thinking as well, if the same character has suffered for this decision before), but it's meta-game thinking that's not done maliciously, it's done to preserve a PC that the player is having fun with.

This is one of the reasons why I like spells like Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection. They give the player the chance to do selflessly heroic actions, yet also makes it less likely that they'll lose their characters in doing so.

Self-sacrificing death has its place in D&D, but only when the player feels he's ready for it, when he feels comfortable with ending his character in such a way, not on a DM whims. D&D should be about having fun more than anything else.

The way some DM's set up their campaigns though almost requires that PCs have this more "flexible" idea of what Good is in order to continue having fun with a character that they happen to enjoy playing. Does this mean that the players feel this way in real life? Probably not. None of us knows how we would react in a situation where we may be able to save lives, but likely at the expense of our own.

I believe that the World Trade Center attack showed that this kind of "good" is far more prevalent than anybody suspected before though. Just because we don't project that into our D&D games, where we're supposed to be having fun, doesn't mean that we don't have that kind of inate sense of good inside of us.

 

[Doc_Subtlety]

JLXC:
Nicely said.

You know, I don't actually mind when players act in self centered ways, either. I just mind when they do it, and write "Good" on their character sheet. All I ask is that they put down "Neutral," and don't act like they're better than that.

(I had trouble with a Paladin who thought it was okay to put his own interests above those of others, few months back. He lied by omission to a freaking *angel*. He retreated. I almost stripped him of his abilities several times, and he just didn't understand what the problem was. He wasn't trying to cheat - he just couldn't Get It. Had he just been a regular Fighter, I wouldn't have minded.)

Elder-Basilisk:

It is quite possible to sacrifice yourself for selfish ends or to make sacrifices that do not help other people.

Yep. I once played a remorselessly evil character who was extremely self sacrificing. He once stood at a Gate to Hell, holding stuff off so that a teammate could carry an innocent woman to safety.

*giggle*

It was a calculated move - he wanted to appear heroic in the public eye, and he wanted anybody who knew the truth to Owe Him Big.

That worked very, very well.

 

[Xaven]

The heroics displayed by the firemen and the policemen on 9/11 were truly grand. It is their job, they realize that that can happen to them, and they accept it, because they know that what they do saves people's lives. What bothers me is that they never really got recognition for what they did until 9/11 occurred. I believe that America and Americans are better now than they were before 9/11, they are more grateful for the people that risk their livs every day so the common person can live a life of luxury, so they don't have to risk their own necks. As you can tell, I am pretty pessimistic. I had absolutely no faith in the "common" american, I saw most as self-centered, money grubbing softies. Hopefully, now that their eyes have been somewhat opened, it won't soon be forgotten the principles by which this country was built upon. It is a shame that it took such a tragedy to remind people.

 

[Snoweel]

I once played a remorselessly evil character who was extremely self sacrificing. He once stood at a Gate to Hell, holding stuff off so that a teammate could carry an innocent woman to safety.

*giggle*

It was a calculated move - he wanted to appear heroic in the public eye, and he wanted anybody who knew the truth to Owe Him Big.

That worked very, very well.

This isn't sacrifice, it's risk.

Don't confuse the two. Sacrifice is a act ONLY of the Good, whereas risk is an act common to successful people.

And as we can see from the world around us, plenty of Evil people are successful.

Sacrifice means to give something up. Your character gave nothing up, in the end, and if he had have, it was essentailly for his own benefit.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I think the men who sacrificed their lives on 11/9 (we give the day then month here) were pretty attatched to their "characters" too. They'd certainly been "playing" them longer than any of us have run a character.

And I too was pleasantly amazed that so many modern-day Westerners would sacrifice their lives for others. To me there's no greater love.

 

[Tsyr]

Edit: Oh yeah, and I think the men who sacrificed their lives on 11/9 (we give the day then month here) were pretty attatched to their "characters" too. They'd certainly been "playing" them longer than any of us have run a character.

That "comparison" is so far fetched that it's all but impossible to argue it. All I can say is if you truely are comparing that to something that we do to have fun and enjoy ourselves during our spare time, your sense of priority is a bit skewed.

 

[TBoarder]

Edit: Oh yeah, and I think the men who sacrificed their lives on 11/9 (we give the day then month here) were pretty attatched to their "characters" too. They'd certainly been "playing" them longer than any of us have run a character.

Of course they were. I was trying to keep the thread in the context of how people play good in D&D. What the men and women who sacrificed their lives on 9/11 did was real life, what we do in D&D is for fun. There's no comparison. I was trying to emphasize the fact that the "good" that we play in D&D is inevitably going to be different from the "good" that we witness in real life. If D&D good seems less good than real-life good, it's not because of the players' morality, it's because of the fact that the players want to continue having fun with their characters, so they'll cut a few corners along the good/evil axis in order to keep them alive.

 

[Limper]

Blame it on Ignatious Lyola.... your troubles are founded in Jesuit ideology.

Also Good is about action its about what you do.

I do have an issue with Mercy though..... Its very hard for ANY player to seperate the knowledge that mercy WILL stab you in the back from character perspective. As a player of 20+ years and many acts of mercy.... they all came back to haunt me. Mercy is the favored tool of many a DM.... they love it when you, as a player, allow the foe to live. It gives them an angle to screw with your character..... after awhile you have to ask your self "Is it worth it?"