Good and Evil in D&D

[silva]

You know I sort of agree with silva's general point that D&D alignments are kind of derpy.

Fortunately, Planescape Torment simply ignored that shit

No, it didn't. It specifically (and often really explicitly) took the latter option and dealt with the issues raised by objective good and evil. That the game's focus was on a different thematic issue doesn't matter (though it often hits the issue as well, particularly with the Asshole Incarnation); all sorts of game elements revolved around good/evil (and even law/chaos).
The Lawful Good succubus wasn't just there for you to fap to, after all. And neither was the entire subplot about sliding an Outlands gatetown into whichever plane it was attached to.

PS:Torment central theme is belief and the seek for identity, and its characters and plots are driven by known human issues like regret, faith, greed, death, loss, love, etc. The alignments are so sidelined that they feel tacked on when they come into play (like item X which only works with alignment Y).

And the city-sliding subplot is more about treason and betrayal than anything else. And thats the point right here: by the time the game opens up a new dimension of known human issues, the alignment concept is made totally irrelevant, because whatever alignment Morte is is irrelevant, in the end he is a fucking cheater with a secret that helps you out regardless because he likes you, and the Gith is a broken soul seeking redemption, and the Nameless is seeking his identity, and the Night Hag is after you for love, etc. See ? cheater, redemption, identity, love. THAT is what matter to the game, and why its writing is praised everywhere. What label those things get in the Good vs Evil scale is irrelevant and could be purged from the game without any prejudice. But try purging those individual issues and you dont have a game anymore. See? The alignemnts are purgeable, the individual issues dont. WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT THEN ?

(compare this to the way Baldurs Gate series handles things with its stereotypic characters out of a cartoon - or a mexican soap-opera in the case of BG2 - and you begin to understand the genius of Torment )


P.S: by the way, the more I keep playing Baldurs Gate 1 the more I think this game is extremely overrated.

[silva]

By the way, here is a treatment of the Planes thats much better in my view:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?625 ... nts-(long)

Instead of axis which treats law and chaos as fundamental principles, the outer planes are divided along the lines of social order vs personal freedom. And instead of good heavens and evil hells, the division between the upper planes and lower planes is one of peace vs violence.

Instead of axis which treats law and chaos as fundamental principles, the outer planes are divided along the lines of social order vs personal freedom. And instead of good heavens and evil hells, the division between the upper planes and lower planes is one of peace vs violence.

Good and evil, then, become positional. Baator is the plane of social order enforced by violence, and they think they are the ultimate good, because they have strong values, and the courage to defend them. They like Mount Celestia, because it is a place where filth and corruption are expunged from the souls of petitioners, but they don't respect it, because Celestia doesn't force anyone to climb its slopes, and it offers its benefits to enemies and allies alike. They view Arborea as the ultimate evil, because it represents decadence, where any perversion is indulged, and the utter lack of discipline has made its residents weak and puerile. The Abyss is hated, because they too represent the destruction of civilization and order, but they are marginally respected, because they at least have the backbone to fight back.

In this imagining, the lower planes view themselves as the armies of the upper planes, holding back the tide of fascism/anarchy that would swallow those peaceful places whole. They view the upper planes as their natural jurisdiction and territory (although in different ways - Baator would unite the "lawful" planes into an Eternal Order ruled from the heart of Malsheem, whereas the Abyss would have the "chaotic" planes as their own borderless playground), and will get around to subjugating them once the threat has passed.

The upper planes view the lower planes as a regrettable necessity, and terrible tragedy. They could all be saved, reformed, and enlightened, if they would just put aside their hatred and fear, but because they can't, it's inevitable that they would find each other to fight. Because they're defined by peace, they don't necessarily wish to exclude the "other side," but they certainly believe that their partisans are closer to salvation (for example, Arborea thinks that the Abyss would be fine if the Tanar'ri could learn to do their own thing without hurting others, whereas Baator is practically built out of the sort of coercion that is anathema to them).

[Voss]

Ah, silva, still an idiot. Just because something isn't vital to the central theme doesn't mean it is purgeable, especially not without consequence.
'Cheating' isn't central to Morte. Being ripped from his punishment in the Abyss is (and thus the nature of punishment and evil). I don't even want to speculate were you pulled 'redemption' from for Dak'kon's character. Faith is his issue, not redemption. And you can push him so far down any path you like in the name of chasing faith. Evil will be his good if you can master his faith.

And if you think 'love' is central to Ravel, than you have no ability to read beyond what is fed to you, and absolutely no capacity for subtext. Aboutness doesn't boil down to a single, easily labelled issue.... unless you're dealing with a saturday morning cartoon of course. (And even then, you obviously aren't watching the good ones).


As for BG, you're getting way too worked up about the text of a note. Is some of it about evil with a capital E? Sure. For the kind of stories being told in BG, obvious evil fits in quite well. But the crux of the story isn't Sarevok's motivations (which are quite understandable in the metaphysical context- he wants the power of the god of murder, so fucking killing people is something he quite willing to do to grab that power). What matters are your motivations in trying to stop him, and those can get quite complex. Revenge, justice, heroism (in a true sense, not just a D&D sense), freedom from the ties of your heritage or acceptance of same, all of those and more for a decently complex web all the way from the beginning to the end in throne of Bhaal. Not just your choices by _why_ you choose them. And they hit them again and again in various sub-plots and mini-arcs, including otherwise boring dungeon crawls like Durlag's tower. They could make some of it more obvious (and certainly in some places it could be better written, like the hamfisted 'encounters' with Elminster), but making it obvious would undercut it; and devolve to a bit of flavorless decision tree where you're supposed to choose 1 for revenge, 2 for justice and etc. Which would be terrible and dull.

By the way, here is a treatment of the Planes thats much better in my view:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?625 ... nts-(long)

That is shit, frankly, and should be treated with contempt. He's replaced law, chaos, good and evil with order, freedom, peace and violence, and is fapping to a really simplistic view of the world, where he just expunges anything that doesn't fit with his simplistic view of freedom and nice-nice play.

The upper planes view the lower planes as a regrettable necessity, and terrible tragedy. They could all be saved, reformed, and enlightened, if they would just put aside their hatred and fear, but because they can't, it's inevitable that they would find each other to fight. Because they're defined by peace, they don't necessarily wish to exclude the "other side," but they certainly believe that their partisans are closer to salvation

This in particular is an extremely contemptible attitude, with 'good' as a completely passive philosophy that does nothing to improve the world around it, just a passive-aggressive moaning about how violent people are so far from salvation; pity for the abusers, and no help at all for the victims.

Its also fairly contemptible just for the fact that you can replace Baator in his example with Nazi Germany and see the author making a case for Nazi Germany being the pinnacle of civilization because of its 'strong values' and social order enforced by violence. Any atrocities committed, are in this system, absolutely irrelevant compared to the value of social order. Its fairly weird and frankly fucking abhorrent that the author's intent was apparently to remove any sort of moral judgement or moral philosophy- even a simplistic moral philosophy is superior to this sort of self-indulgent crap.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Freedom is not the opposite of order. Even if we ignore the fact that the word freedom is 'just a buzzword; it doesn't mean shit', if you probe deep enough into most laypeoples' definition of freedom what they probably mean is 'not being subject to the whims of arbitrary and unfair power'. In which case freedom is actually dependent on certain implementations of order.

[echoVanguard]

like, "Oh com all over me!" and then "I cant, miss, Im lawful-good"

So, in this particular example, is the act in question being categorized as evil, or as chaotic? And what on earth could your rationale for that possibly be?

echo

[Korwin]

like, "Oh com all over me!" and then "I cant, miss, Im lawful-good"

So, in this particular example, is the act in question being categorized as evil, or as chaotic? And what on earth could your rationale for that possibly be?

echo

No he cant 'miss', it would be cheating because he cant miss comming all over her.
He never fails to hit the mark hole.

*runs away*

[silva]

That is shit, frankly, and should be treated with contempt. He's replaced law, chaos, good and evil with order, freedom, peace and violence, and is fapping to a really simplistic view of the world, where he just expunges anything that doesn't fit with his simplistic view of freedom and nice-nice play.

Oh sure, because the original alignments are not simplistic at all, and are totally deep and adult and unambiguous.

Voss, dont know if you got it, but: ANY behavioral model system is better than D&D default alignments system. Yeah, the shit is THAT bad.

Its also fairly contemptible just for the fact that you can replace Baator in his example with Nazi Germany and see the author making a case for Nazi Germany being the pinnacle of civilization because of its 'strong values' and social order enforced by violence. Any atrocities committed, are in this system, absolutely irrelevant compared to the value of social order.

And thats the point, really - purging moral absolutes so Good and Bad goes back to being positional/relative.

And yes, its totally coherent for the Nazi Germany heads to think that what they were doing were seen as good/positive in their own opinions. Whats abhorrent is to think that a Nazi German head should think "Oh Im so Bad! MWA-HAHAHA! LETS TAKE THE WORLD AND TURN IT INTO A EVIL PLAYGROUND WHERE WE EAT CHILDREN FOR BREAKFAST!" ..thats the entire point of the new model - to turn the Planes/Great Wheel model away from He-Man like infantile logic.

But if you like your bad guys behaving like Skeleton from He-Man, well, suit yourself.

[Prak]

Look, Silva, I get it, you're comparatively new here. You want to feel like you're contributing to discussion.

But you're not. It's not like you're imparting deep esoteric truths when you say "Shit's that bad, gais." We've discussed that. At length. Use the site search for Alignment, and you can see. The board has basically settled on two options-- remove alignment completely (have paladins just detect and smite heretics or wrongdoers or whatever) or just roll with it.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

You don't have to be evil to work for vampires... but it helps!

[ishy]

That is shit, frankly, and should be treated with contempt. He's replaced law, chaos, good and evil with order, freedom, peace and violence, and is fapping to a really simplistic view of the world, where he just expunges anything that doesn't fit with his simplistic view of freedom and nice-nice play.

Oh sure, because the original alignments are not simplistic at all, and are totally deep and adult and unambiguous.

Voss, dont know if you got it, but: ANY behavioral model system is better than D&D default alignments system. Yeah, the shit is THAT bad.

Sure the alignment stuff D&D uses is far from perfect, but why replace it with something that is bad?
Either replace it with something that is actually worth the time and effort of you and your other players, or don't bother.

[silva]

Sure the alignment stuff D&D uses is far from perfect, but why replace it with something that is bad?
Either replace it with something that is actually worth the time and effort of you and your other players, or don't bother.

Sure, the proposed model is not perfect either, but at least it replaces the infantile and ambiguous objective truth of alignments by something more relatable and adult. in other words: "Good" is what I do/my religion says/my elders tell me, no matter what. Its a much more anthropologically grounded logic than the Disney World one from default alignments. And no extrapolation or explanation will save the original Alignment concept from being crap. The only thing it will do is making the whole process look like a teenage virgin nerd convincing itself that it has a deep meaning about human morals.

tl;dr: Alignments = shit.

[nockermensch]

You don't have to be evil to work for vampires... but it helps!

Meh, Touhou vampires are about as evil as Disgaia devils. For all her posturing, when Remilia actually decides to act, what she does is to build a magical rocket to go on a Moon adventure.

[NineInchNall]

I mean, I know D&D (and Forgotten Realms) has in-world objective tools for detecting alignments like spells, powers, items, etc. but does this mean people actually talk like that in the world ?

So, is it the game thats like that ? The setting ? Or people actually play D&D like that ?

Yes. In fact it's worse than that. It's not just objective morality, it's objective realist morality. That is, Good and Evil are not merely adjectives for which objective correctness criteria exist. When something is correctly described as Good, there is literally, non-figuratively, something in that thing that is made of good. There's physical goodstuff in it.

No, I'm not joking. There are actual metaethical frameworks that work that way. People have, for instance, suggested that there are things called "normons" that are the source of normativity. They're dumb, and no one except for the hyperreligious actually thinks that way, but that's a real thing and it's how D&D works.

[Prak]

I think it's better, and vaguely less stupid, to think in terms of Transformer sparks. There is a semi-tangible sphere of energy in D&D beings which is basically the soul/heart and to a small extent mind. Maybe it's tiny, maybe it's grapefruit sized or larger, fuck, maybe it sits in hyperspace inside a person and varies in size comparative to how good/evil the person is so that 20th level good clerics have alignments the size of beach balls that just sits in an unperceivable dimension. Maybe detect lets you perceive that dimension.

[DSMatticus]

You don't have to be evil to work for vampires... but it helps!

Meh, Touhou vampires are about as evil as Disgaia devils. For all her posturing, when Remilia actually decides to act, what she does is to build a magical rocket to go on a Moon adventure.

To be fair, you shouldn't trust the moon. It has a rap sheet the size of Mars.

[Voss]

Sure the alignment stuff D&D uses is far from perfect, but why replace it with something that is bad?
Either replace it with something that is actually worth the time and effort of you and your other players, or don't bother.

Sure, the proposed model is not perfect either, but at least it replaces the infantile and ambiguous objective truth of alignments by something more relatable and adult. in other words: "Good" is what I do/my religion says/my elders tell me, no matter what.

No. That is not more adult. That is explicitly childish, because that is exactly how you brainwash children into a fucking cult. You teach them from day one to not question and just accept whatever bullshit is handed to them, and explain that reason is the fucking enemy of faith. You end up with brain-dead hordes of faithful imbeciles.

The proposed model is trash, and your ideas are even more simplistic and childish, to the point of rejecting logic and reason altogether.

[nockermensch]

I mean, I know D&D (and Forgotten Realms) has in-world objective tools for detecting alignments like spells, powers, items, etc. but does this mean people actually talk like that in the world ?

So, is it the game thats like that ? The setting ? Or people actually play D&D like that ?

Yes. In fact it's worse than that. It's not just objective morality, it's objective realist morality. That is, Good and Evil are not merely adjectives for which objective correctness criteria exist. When something is correctly described as Good, there is literally, non-figuratively, something in that thing that is made of good. There's physical goodstuff in it.

No, I'm not joking. There are actual metaethical frameworks that work that way. People have, for instance, suggested that there are things called "normons" that are the source of normativity. They're dumb, and no one except for the hyperreligious actually thinks that way, but that's a real thing and it's how D&D works.

Goodons: Beings with a high Goodon count enjoy helping others.
Evilons: Beings with a high Evilon count enjoy taking from others.
Orderons: Beings with a high Orderon count believe that patterns, hierarchies and bonds are always desirable.
Chaosions: Beings with a high Chaosion count feel that patterns, hierarchies and bonds are always undesirable.

Most people don't have enough a count of any of these to actually register in the scale.

There, I fixed D&D alignments for you. Paladins gaining scouters to measure Evilons is optional but highly recommended.

[Omegonthesane]

I mean, I know D&D (and Forgotten Realms) has in-world objective tools for detecting alignments like spells, powers, items, etc. but does this mean people actually talk like that in the world ?

So, is it the game thats like that ? The setting ? Or people actually play D&D like that ?

Yes. In fact it's worse than that. It's not just objective morality, it's objective realist morality. That is, Good and Evil are not merely adjectives for which objective correctness criteria exist. When something is correctly described as Good, there is literally, non-figuratively, something in that thing that is made of good. There's physical goodstuff in it.

No, I'm not joking. There are actual metaethical frameworks that work that way. People have, for instance, suggested that there are things called "normons" that are the source of normativity. They're dumb, and no one except for the hyperreligious actually thinks that way, but that's a real thing and it's how D&D works.

Goodons: Beings with a high Goodon count enjoy helping others.
Evilons: Beings with a high Evilon count enjoy taking from others.
Orderons: Beings with a high Orderon count believe that patterns, hierarchies and bonds are always desirable.
Chaosions: Beings with a high Chaosion count feel that patterns, hierarchies and bonds are always undesirable.

Most people don't have enough a count of any of these to actually register in the scale.

There, I fixed D&D alignments for you. Paladins gaining scouters to measure Evilons is optional but highly recommended.

"Vegeta! What does the scouter say about his Goodon level?"

[deaddmwalking]

Goodons and Evilons have the same problem that Mitochlorians (sp?) have. It's not as rewarding if the bad guys couldn't choose their path. Rather than defeating evil, better to change the cycle of birth.

[Koumei]

The particles and the actions actually attract one another. So while a Devil is built out of Orderons and Evilons, and therefore is compelled to do Lawful Evil acts, a regular person who ends up doing enough Lawful and Evil things draws so many Orderons and Evilons to themselves that they gain the alignment.

So murdering someone draws more Evilons in, but by the same token, a high gathering of Evilons draws murders nearby (typically by motivating creatures that have those Evilons).

[Prak]

My proposal allows that a person's spark can change allegiance given appropriate action/choice.

[Omegonthesane]

My proposal allows that a person's spark can change allegiance given appropriate action/choice.

"Have you seen Paladin Atkins' new Evilon detox program?"

[Prak]

Yeah, it's called a scroll of Atonement.

[Omegonthesane]

Yeah, it's called a scroll of Atonement.

That's both less funny and costs more XP than people selling diet books on how not to be Evil, however.

[Prak]

Fair.