Fuchs wrote:
Heroes do save people, maintain the peace, and provide security for the commoners. They usually have a strict defintion of enemies as well - those who attack them, or plan to, or did in the past.
...which applies just as much to Justice League of America as to the NKVD.
This is a downright pathetic code of heroism. You need to do better than that. Almost anyone can fulfill this laughably low standard of goodness.
Fuchs wrote:
So, where's your problem with D&D morality? Can't have them killing orcs, why exactly?
Many, many problems. It's an ever-expanding fractal.
1. That these particular raiders, rapists, and arsonists deserve death. They might be under mind control by the Bog Witch and if you kill her instead you'll not only save the town's lives but their lives, too. This particular mook might have been faced with the choice of 'guard the doors to the kiddie harem or get charged with desertion and we kill your whole family'. And of course they could just be 'freedom fighters' that just happen to be dirty and uncouth, but they're still technically serving the interests of good. If your go-to response is to kill these people then sooner or later you're going to kill someone innocent. And if the body count is high enough it starts to really raise questions about just how heroic you are, especially when their deaths might have been able to be avoided with a little effort on your part.
2. The assumption that raiders, rapists, and arsonists deserve death. See discussions about the death penalty for more information, that's beyond the scope of this particular post, but do realize it's not exactly a settled issue.
3. That there's no better way to deal with raiders, rapists, and arsonists than killing. I cannot stress this enough, D&D world is a really shitty place where you're faced with the choice of letting orphans starve to death in the streets so you can upgrade to a +3 sword or having the city burned down in two months because without said sword you can't hurt the werewolf king. D&D needs a huge overhaul anyway to reduce this grimdarkness.
But even so, the number of killing-alternative solutions is still pretty broad. You can turn them all into harmless forest critters. You can roll hardcore on your diplomacy check and get them to turn themselves into the proper authorities. You can produce a Tree of Life along with a new lake in the middle of the desert to give the raiders some other source of food and water. You can put them all in a Mirror of Entrapment and turn them over to the proper authorities once the adventure is done. Whatever.
Yeah, when you're at the Mundane Sword Hero level you seriously don't really have much of a choice other than to sword bandits because you can't subdue them nonlethally and even if you could you don't have the time nor resources to watch them while you deliver news about a ghoul attack back to town. That sort of no-real-victory situation is appropriate when you're barely above dirt farmers and can actually be a dramatic impetus towards gaining power. But it's really telling that D&D's go-to solution for dealing with criminals is 'kill em all', especially at higher power levels.
4. That killing raiders, rapists, and arsonists will make things better off even if they deserve it. Easy example: desertion. Traditionally, the penalty for desertion was death, which of course quickly drove deserters past the criminal horizon in order to survive. Meaning that it's realistic that if you come across a band of deserters in the forest they've probably done death-worthy things.
HOWEVER if you actually want to make the world a better place you would seriously rescind the death penalty. Depending on how bad the problem is it might even seriously be best for you to forgive wholesale any deserters if you have the authority except for maybe the absolute worst ones. Yes, this will probably lead to hundreds if not thousands of murderers getting off scot-free but in the long run this will save lives because you're not forcing the 'kill or die' choice on everyone.
5. That killing raiders, rapists, and arsonists is enough to call yourself a hero. The whole Superman-ish 'I don't really do a lot with my vast powers except defend the status quo, which mostly entails fighting shocking if transient public issues everyone can agree on like crime' kind of works without painting him as a dick. This is mostly because the world that Superman lives in is pretty okay. I mean people do live to be a decent number of years old, there are hardly any lynch mobs, and most children get fed. Even though there's some serious discussion about whether Superman could really be doing even more with his powers like using his heat-vision to provide free energy or using knowledge from the Fortress of Solitude to cure more diseases, it's not as though there's any real pressing need.
The D&D world is not that kind of place. It's incredibly fucking shitty. If you as a super-powered wizard could build interdimensional castles with golem armies (a fair assumption in 3.0E D&D at least) and your rap sheet was mostly 'saved the world from immediate destruction several times, killed a bunch of criminals' then you're either incredibly retarded, incredibly limited in scope of power, or you're incredibly selfish. A
real D&D hero-- not a phony sociopathic murdering hobo that masquerades as one--should be spending most of their time building aqueducts and researching disease cures and running agricultural colleges and writing philosophy treatises and organizing protests and all that shit.
Now there is an easy out of all this. It's that the D&D world would completely fall apart without your efforts, but demands so much of your attention that you cannot do anything other than adventuring and the world sucks so much that even with you building orphanages as fast as you can they get torn down so fast that even with you and hundreds of thousands' of others' vast cosmic power the best you can hope for is a stalemate consisting of a dirtfarm. That's incredibly, incredibly grimdark though; I think even Games Workshop would tell you to ease off of the angst a little bit.
But anyway, the point is that unless you go that far, you wanting to kill raiders, arsonists, and rapists is just mostly a distraction. Which is fine as long as the other 4 assumptions hold, but D&D structures its adventures and game mechanics so that your small-time crimefighting is your major way of being a 'hero'. Which also isn't bad in of itself, you could just justify it with the anthropic principle, but somewhere along the way someone forgot that 'oh yeah, small-time crimefighting isn't going to be enough to make me a hero' so focuses the gameplay overly on small-scale melee squad combat while also going out of its way to piss on alternate problem-solving mechanics. Because if someone decides to talk the orcs into not raiding the town anymore then they missed out on a fight!
Of course all of this goes away if you just look deep within and admit that what you really want to do is roleplay a selfish murderous hobo like Kratos or Caim. You can even give yourself a hypocritical and self-aggrandizing moral code like the Punisher; apparently bastards throwing up arbitrary standards to justify their bastardry is a lot more common and 'realistic' than people just embracing the bastard within.
