Tome of Extremes?

[Brobdingnagian]

You'd have to set a few ground rules...

For instance, killing. An argument I've had with myself many times. In a game like D&D, where the whole game is about breaking into people's homes, stabbing them in the face, and taking their stuff, is killing people really an evil action?

One could argue that by killing a person, you're speeding them to their ultimate fate and comitting a neither good nor evil act... but then, wouldn't Paladins focus almost entirely on killing good people and not killing the evil? They want more of the good to go on to a god's infinite army, not the evil...

But on the other hand, if killing is inherently an evil act, wouldn't that make giving birth an inherently good act? So that woman who's had twenty kids in nineteen years, is she exalted now?

As you can see, we're dealing with a very odd baseline. For this issue, the key thing to remember is that in D&D, by the time you reach a certain level, death is more a temporary setback than an actual eventuality that people can't avoid, and at an even higher level, it's merely a status effect that goes away at the end of the battle.

Then there's outsiders who may or may not ever really die, and intelligent undead and contructs that bring up the question "Is it really alive?", and awakened animals "It shouldn't be that smart! It's fur is as good as any other!" and dragonhide and a ton-ass crapload of other things.

Point being, Morality absolutely must have black and white rulings that everyone agrees upon, or else good and evil can't exist, let alone Exalted and Vile. Once those rules are set, then we can work on the mechanics.

[Iaimeki]

You're assuming deontological ethics, which is kind of begging the question in these circumstances.

[Brobdingnagian]

Yes, I am, since I'm pretty sure that's what we're talking about, and what question am I begging here? Sorry, maybe what you typed there is clear to most people, but I can be pretty blind sometimes.

[Prak]

well, we could conceivably discuss the meaning and consequences of V/E play in each of the various Moral options put forth already...

[Iaimeki]

If a villain is about to destroy the city (or the world) and a deontologist refuses to kill said villain because they believe in a duty not to kill, the utilitarian will call the deontologist's action evil. Likewise, when the utilitarian kills the villain in the name of the greater good, the deontologist will call that evil.

You can't define good and evil without first justifying a position on duties versus good. My sympathies, admittedly, lie with utilitarian philosophies, but both positions have problems. D&D, as usual, contains a mishmash of both ideas, while also adding in a helping of plain nonsense.

[User3]

Let me put it like this: the Rapture Seeker was a joke I came up with on a dull afternoon, and since it turned out to be not that funny unless you were extremely tired (as I was at the time when I wrote it), it never even got inserted into the working draft.

Real evil deals with things DnD doesn't need: for example, the physical and emotional tortures one has to inflict on the average person them into a pimp's prostitute doesn't need DCs or related spell effects. Its Evil with a capital E, and dwelling on it is not going to make a better game.

The symbolic (and thus magical) effects of atrocity, evil that transcends moral relativism, the individual degradations of the human soul....these are the things I'd put in my personal version of the BOVD, but its not the stuff I even want associated with a on-off internet pseudonym I once used.

[Brobdingnagian]

Ah, of course. I remember that part of the argument. Right, I probably should've covered that.

Let's assume, for now, that killing a person is inherently evil. If someone else plans to kill a great deal of people and to stop him, you'd have to kill him, then killing him is an acceptable action of good; however, if killing him could be avoided, say by incapcitating and imprisoning him, then killing him is no longer a good act, but simply a lesser evil.

Of course, one could argue that a life without choice, such as being imprisoned for life, is not a life worth living, and therefore just as bad as killing. Things like this make figuring out "right" and "wrong" very, very difficult. I myself am honestly at a loss to define what's good and evil. In certain instances, I can define lawful and chaotic (mostly on a basis of planar travel), but as far as alignment goes, perspective matters a great deal, and so to make things like Exalted and Vile plausible, perspective must be set down. Hard.

The simplest solution is to make it a deific proclamation. Whatever your god defines as good or evil is good or evil to you. Doing 'good' acts will bring you closer to your god, while doing 'evil' acts will further you from them. Of course, this effectively nullifies the ability to be agnostic, which is not something I approve of, so I'd prefer another solution if one could be believable.

[Username17]

Let's assume, for now, that killing a person is inherently evil.

OK.

If someone else plans to kill a great deal of people and to stop him, you'd have to kill him, then killing him is an acceptable action of good; however, if killing him could be avoided, say by incapcitating and imprisoning him, then killing him is no longer a good act, but simply a lesser evil.

Whether it is acceptable or not, the action is still evil. Inherently so as we conceded in part one. If we posit that an action can inherently be evil and that an action is inherently evil, then that is what it is. It doesn't stop being inherently evil just because for whatever reason you want to do it.

-Username17

[shirak]

1181197919[/unixtime]]Let's assume, for now, that killing a person is inherently evil. If someone else plans to kill a great deal of people and to stop him, you'd have to kill him, then killing him is an acceptable action of good; however, if killing him could be avoided, say by incapcitating and imprisoning him, then killing him is no longer a good act, but simply a lesser evil.

How does that work, exactly? Let's say that my character believes the villain is immune to ability damage and thus does not use Shivering Touch but rather swords him to death. It is later proved that the villain was not immune to ability damage. Am I retroactively Evil?

If yes, then the best thing I can do is destroy all evidence after I save the world to prevent some smartass from proclaiming me Evil.
If no, then the best way to deal with Evil tyrants is to have a tool go kill him because he thinks he can't be imprisoned/comatosed/whatever.
Both of these are problems based on the fact that the rubric for determining whether an action is Good or Evil is information. And you can totally control information.

1181197919[/unixtime]]Of course, one could argue that a life without choice, such as being imprisoned for life, is not a life worth living, and therefore just as bad as killing. Things like this make figuring out "right" and "wrong" very, very difficult. I myself am honestly at a loss to define what's good and evil. In certain instances, I can define lawful and chaotic (mostly on a basis of planar travel), but as far as alignment goes, perspective matters a great deal, and so to make things like Exalted and Vile plausible, perspective must be set down. Hard.

The simplest solution is to make it a deific proclamation. Whatever your god defines as good or evil is good or evil to you. Doing 'good' acts will bring you closer to your god, while doing 'evil' acts will further you from them. Of course, this effectively nullifies the ability to be agnostic, which is not something I approve of, so I'd prefer another solution if one could be believable.

This also has the problem of requiring an exhaustive list of possible actions. Or a set of rules. Both of these things are long-term projects of various smart people and they have been for several thousand years. This is not something we can win. I vote for getting rid of Alignments completely. They cause more problems then they solve.

[Draco_Argentum]

In D&D your life is worth less than your soul simply because one lasts longer than the other. So anything that damages a soul is automatically worse than killing. Here is where you can create Evil. Especially so if you don't believe in a soul IRL. You don't even need to describe anything in too much detail. You get to have something be horrible by definition, not level of detail like BoVD or the BoVD++ that we can all write.

This also makes barghests more evil than most demons.

[RandomCasualty]

1181206721[/unixtime]]
This also has the problem of requiring an exhaustive list of possible actions. Or a set of rules. Both of these things are long-term projects of various smart people and they have been for several thousand years. This is not something we can win. I vote for getting rid of Alignments completely. They cause more problems then they solve.

Yeah, nobody is going to solve the alignment problem, it just can't be done.

There are too many factors, such as intent and mitigating circumstances, to make any hard and fast rule work. Alignment will always be a matter of "DM decides" if it's in the game. Remember, we're talking about a game where the good guys kill and loot sentient species as a career. Trying to make sense of that in any moral system isn't going to work.

[tzor]

1181183856[/unixtime]]For instance, killing. An argument I've had with myself many times. In a game like D&D, where the whole game is about breaking into people's homes, stabbing them in the face, and taking their stuff, is killing people really an evil action?

The simple answer is yes. There is a problem with this, however in that one tends to look at good/evil in a binary way. Morality, even the D&D simplistic view of morality, is still a continuum between the completely selfish and the completely selfless. There are many times when the “lesser of two evils” is required. In other situations the principle of “double effect” comes to play; where an action has two effects, one evil and one good. Because of the necessity of doing the good effect the evil effect must be suffered.

Why are, for example, evil races so evil? It is because it allows you to hand wave a “just war theory” argument as a basic given. The idea is that the evil race is always evil; they will be invading eventually and killing all sorts of innocents so in order to save the innocents we have to attack them directly. Was it the case that the monsters only attacked when their food supply was low, then a whole moral can of worms can be opened and no one wants to do that! They just want to kill monsters.

A good example of this is in the life of St. Francis. The story has been blown massively out of proportion so it’s hard to tell what the actual story, if any, was. Basically there was this village that had a wolf problem. The villagers wanted someone to kill the wolf, but Francis insisted that he’s only going into the village because he was hungry. Feeding the wolf would be a simpler solution to the problem. They did.

Not that you can’t make that a good D&D scenario; making treaties with the orcs instead of killing them on sight, but it’s not the thing that most people look for in D&D. That’s why we have a ton of complex combat rules and one simplistic sucky one on diplomacy.

I understand why people still have a hard time with good and evil from a D&D definition. You just have to understand two important things. Good and evil have nothing whatsoever to do with right and wrong. Good and evil are also narrowly defined and as a result there is a plethora of things that are neither. Some of these things are really wrong to do. Some of these things are really right to do. They are still neutural.

[Brobdingnagian]

So are we voting to not make the extreme alignment rules because we can't make sense of regular alignment rules? Or what?

[Prak]

1181196045[/unixtime]]If a villain is about to destroy the city (or the world) and a deontologist refuses to kill said villain because they believe in a duty not to kill, the utilitarian will call the deontologist's action evil. Likewise, when the utilitarian kills the villain in the name of the greater good, the deontologist will call that evil.

You can't define good and evil without first justifying a position on duties versus good. My sympathies, admittedly, lie with utilitarian philosophies, but both positions have problems. D&D, as usual, contains a mishmash of both ideas, while also adding in a helping of plain nonsense.

Look, I think we can all at least vaguely agree that the primary duty of Good is to promote life and the aid of everyone, thus, one could say that anything which promotes or protects life in a vague way is good, and that more solid acts of promoting or protecting life are Good or even Exalted.
For example: Giving birth or impregnating a consenting woman is good(as in decent and benevolent, with some vague acceptance from the Forces of Good[FoG])
Killing a dragon that is attacking the town to protect everyone that lives there is Good(as in aligned with the rules and FoG.)
Detaining said dragon or making a deal with it that prevents many deaths, both dragon and human, is Exalted, because no one had to die, not even the evil one, and you've avoided using the methods of evil that even the FoG use.

By that same token, evil is selfish. So anything done for a purely selfish reason could be aligned as evil. Good side effects of an evil act may negate the evilness, or they may not, for example:
Rape is evil, it is a purely selfish act. If a woman became pregnant through rape, it would not negate the evilness of rape because rape always does more harm than good. Even if the woman carries the child to term, the fact that it is a rape baby will always weigh on it and it's mother, creating crushing despair for all involved always tempting them to take their lives.
Killing a dragon to takes it's stuff is also Evil, because you could just as easily steal it (possibly more easily).
Killing a town-attacking dragon and everyone that lives in the town to take their stuff is Vile because you are commiting completely unneccessary murder, all becase you desire more stuff.

how's that work for ya guys?

[tzor]

1181240195[/unixtime]]So are we voting to not make the extreme alignment rules because we can't make sense of regular alignment rules? Or what?

I would put it differently. I would argue that in general most alignment rules are built on a plethora of assumptions, designed to make normal complex decisions easy. The problem is that they don't extend logically ad nauseum or ad infinitium. They break down massively.

Both the BoED and BoVD suffer from this problem. There are literally several items in the BoED that are unjustifiable crap. The idea that of poison by some other name that only effects evil persons being good is utter crap. (The notion that poison is evil is just plain crap btw.) Anytime you take the base rules with their limited assumptions and extend them to any extent you will wind up with crap. The same crap that takes up most of the paladin threads about killing kobold babies and nonsense like that.

First of all, we need to define what is good/evil/law/chaos in such a way that they can be logically extended from neutrality to extremism. We need to take it to their extremes no matter how unmunchkiny it may result. (Extreme good would really annoy Patton. He wanted his men to make the enemy die for their country. In extreme good you die for your country and your enemy’s country!)

[shirak]

1181240195[/unixtime]]So are we voting to not make the extreme alignment rules because we can't make sense of regular alignment rules? Or what?

I don't know about you but I'm voting of getting rid of the whole legacy Good/Evil and Law/Chaos dichotomies. Start with a clean slate and make up an alignment system that makes some fucking sense. I'm making up my own system and as soon as I have a working draft I'll post it here for review. But, seriously, we have to get rid of the current system.

Hell, regardless of what you end up doing in your world, you should plain avoid using the words Good and Evil. Way, way too loaded with meanings you did not put there. As I said, start with a clean slate. Call them Harmony and Dissonance or something. But it has to be something that people associate with stone-cold bastards in armor, not the fucking Boy Scouts.

[Crissa]

I don't know what you're talking about.

Killing is not an inherently evil act.

It can't be. Not in D&D, and not in any world that requires the consumption of lesser life in order to 'live'.

-Crissa

[Endovior]

1181240469[/unixtime]]

1181196045[/unixtime]]If a villain is about to destroy the city (or the world) and a deontologist refuses to kill said villain because they believe in a duty not to kill, the utilitarian will call the deontologist's action evil. Likewise, when the utilitarian kills the villain in the name of the greater good, the deontologist will call that evil.

You can't define good and evil without first justifying a position on duties versus good. My sympathies, admittedly, lie with utilitarian philosophies, but both positions have problems. D&D, as usual, contains a mishmash of both ideas, while also adding in a helping of plain nonsense.

Look, I think we can all at least vaguely agree that the primary duty of Good is to promote life and the aid of everyone, thus, one could say that anything which promotes or protects life in a vague way is good, and that more solid acts of promoting or protecting life are Good or even Exalted.
For example: Giving birth or impregnating a consenting woman is good(as in decent and benevolent, with some vague acceptance from the Forces of Good[FoG])
Killing a dragon that is attacking the town to protect everyone that lives there is Good(as in aligned with the rules and FoG.)
Detaining said dragon or making a deal with it that prevents many deaths, both dragon and human, is Exalted, because no one had to die, not even the evil one, and you've avoided using the methods of evil that even the FoG use.

By that same token, evil is selfish. So anything done for a purely selfish reason could be aligned as evil. Good side effects of an evil act may negate the evilness, or they may not, for example:
Rape is evil, it is a purely selfish act. If a woman became pregnant through rape, it would not negate the evilness of rape because rape always does more harm than good. Even if the woman carries the child to term, the fact that it is a rape baby will always weigh on it and it's mother, creating crushing despair for all involved always tempting them to take their lives.
Killing a dragon to takes it's stuff is also Evil, because you could just as easily steal it (possibly more easily).
Killing a town-attacking dragon and everyone that lives in the town to take their stuff is Vile because you are commiting completely unneccessary murder, all becase you desire more stuff.

how's that work for ya guys?

I wouldn't define evil as merely selfish; as it's clearly possible to be selfish without being evil. Selfishness only becomes evil when the selfish one actually harms another. As such, consider a hungry man with a single piece of bread, confronted by orphans with even less food.

An Exalted man gives his bread to the orphans and starves himself.
A Good man shares his bread with orphans.
A Neutral man keeps his bread, ignoring the orphans.
An Evil man threatens the orphans, taking what little food they have for himself.
A Vile man kills the orphans and feasts on their bodies.

Sound better?

[ckafrica]

(The notion that poison is evil is just plain crap btw.)

Well as much as I'm not keen on the rules that poison is evil, it seems to me that using it against people has pretty much unversally been considered bad. Its the weapon of choice for usurpers and assasins, its secretive and cowardly. Even if it is deemed a necessary evil to be used for a greater good sometimes I don't think we'll find many cultures where administering it against others is deemed an openly exceptable way of dealing with someone. As a suicide agent and pest control, and hunting in a few rare cultures, its presence has some basis for acceptability, but considering all poisonous animals are symbols of conniving and evil I think its fair to say that yes most of the world clearly defines poison use as evil.

Which of course makes exalted poisons complete and utter crap

[shirak]

1181281269[/unixtime]]

(The notion that poison is evil is just plain crap btw.)

Well as much as I'm not keen on the rules that poison is evil, it seems to me that using it against people has pretty much unversally been considered bad. Its the weapon of choice for usurpers and assasins, its secretive and cowardly. Even if it is deemed a necessary evil to be used for a greater good sometimes I don't think we'll find many cultures where administering it against others is deemed an openly exceptable way of dealing with someone. As a suicide agent and pest control, and hunting in a few rare cultures, its presence has some basis for acceptability, but considering all poisonous animals are symbols of conniving and evil I think its fair to say that yes most of the world clearly defines poison use as evil.

Which of course makes exalted poisons complete and utter crap

D&D is, at it's heart, a wargame.That means that the notions of Good and Evil really don't apply. It's a fucking war, man. You kill people before they kill you and any atrocity is excusable as long as it works and the people don't learn about it. So really, Good and Evil has to go. If you need people to attack Orcs you should use the standard procedure used by governments since forever: Tell the people the Orcs burned Happy Valley, have a widow yell for their blood because they took her husband and are now coming for her child, talk about how the Orcs are aliens because they wear green pants and not red like decent people. Do it right and the conflict gets personal, the players want to kill the Orcs.
I will even argue that such tactics work better than the current system. They help people immerse, they give characters a context and they make some fucking sense. It's a win-win-win situation. And you don't have to get into arguments about poison:

It's a fucking war. I just saved your life by using Cloudkill. And instead of celebrating you think you can mouth off? If it wasn't for me you'd be lying in the belly of an Orc. So fuck off sonny cause you're not good enough to shine my boots. Join the Army and be a man, then come to talk to to me about good and evil. After you've seen what i have seen, then you'll understand what evil means.
Three cheers for the saviors of our village!

[Draco_Argentum]

1181281269[/unixtime]]Well as much as I'm not keen on the rules that poison is evil, it seems to me that using it against people has pretty much unversally been considered bad.

You're confusing honour with good/evil. Poison gets a bad rap because its a great tool for peasants to kill the nobles with. So they make up crud saying its a coward's weapon.

[Falgund]

]Let's assume, for now, that killing a person is inherently evil. If someone else plans to kill a great deal of people and to stop him, you'd have to kill him, then killing him is an acceptable action of good; however, if killing him could be avoided, say by incapcitating and imprisoning him, then killing him is no longer a good act, but simply a lesser evil.

In D&D, Good and Evil are real forces, so killing a Good person is inherently Evil, and killing an Evil person is inherently Good (And killing a Neutral person is ... Neutral?).

But the intent also counts. Thus a Good person can kill another Good person to save many other Good persons and overall the result is Good (even if a part is Evil). But a Paladin can't, because he can never do an Evil action, even for the greater Good.

[tzor]

1181261687[/unixtime]]Killing is not an inherently evil act.

Correct. I tend to simplify good and evil by the following oversimplification.

Evil is when self gains and the other looses.
Good is when self looses and the other gains.

(Loose as in being lessened, not as in completely loosing.)

Anything else is neither.

Thus killing is a loss to the other. Only when it is a gain for the self does the "and" clause make it an evil act.

What happens when the self and the other gain? That's nice.
What happens when the self and the other lose? That's dumb.

[Fwib]

That means it is evil to kill a monster and take its stuff, since it loses and you gain.

But it is non-evil to go around killing poverty-stricken children, since you gain nothing from it.

[Brobdingnagian]

I didn't really mean that I personally believed killing to be an evil act in D&D, I was just using it hypothetically. I could have used stealing, rape, or any number of other examples, killing just seemed a simple thing that caused a lot of confusion, so I picked that.

Also, Fwib: What if it gains you lunch?