Making D&D morality less repulsive.

[Fuchs]

Very good post all in all, and that line sums it up well:

And really, that's all I've ever argued. That there is a middle ground between "heroes who don't kill" and "evil bastards who do kill".

[FatR]

My argument:
1) There were valid moral justifications, from the perspective of the average German citizen, for WW2 that we would emphasize with. (These justifications happen to be paying off the reparations.)

Who are those "we" you are talking about?

Besides, this was not the justification Nazi used to take control (this was merely justification short-sighted people in the West used to not make Germany compensate the damage it inflicted on other nations), nor this was the source of economic troubles that gave Nazi popular support (the Great Depression was). Said justification was roughly: "Filthy Jews and commies stabbed our valiant army in the back, and denied our nation the spoils of victory". Hitler wasn't exactly hiding the fact, that his goal from the beginning was leading Germany to plunder other nations by military force. To not notice this you needed to be an idiot, or a cynic who thought this is merely a populist propaganda, but after the war has indeed started, just an idiot. And of course reparations had fuck-all to do with the conflict that served as an immediate cause for WWII.

[DSMatticus]

Okay, we know Germany in the 1920's was having economic problems, while for everyone else it was called the "Roaring 20's." The Great Depression is usually cited as starting in 1929 for most countries, and the prices of basic goods and foods had been high in Germany for the entire decade prior. The Great Depression hit Germany nearly an entire decade earlier than anywhere else.

But we can argue about whether it was the Treaty of Versailles or the Great Depression that ruined the German economy and gave Hitler his leg to stand on, but in the end it really doesn't matter, because the only thing that actually matters is what the average German citizen thought. Because being wrong makes you stupid, it doesn't make you a bad person.

We have the benefits of 70 years of hindsight and economic data to parse out what really caused the situation leading up to WW2 (and we know Germany was in bad shape economically even BEFORE the Great Depression hit, and then the Great Depression made it even worse), but what really matters is the perception of the German citizen. And the German citizen knew two things. A) the Treaty of Versailles asked for a lot of money and imposed a lot of harsh penalties they all hated, and B) they were having trouble paying for bread, and their quality of life had been steadily decreasing since the end of WW1. Not just when the GD hit in 1929, but since the early 20's.

Hitler showed up and said, "put those two things together. See where I'm going here? Also, Jews suck, now let's invade Poland." Yes, he had a lot of racist rhetoric, and a lot of other bigoted rhetoric, and he used a lot of colorful language like "this is the greatest nation, and the greatest people on this planet!" Listen to any American politician talk - they'll say the same thing. "We are the best nation, the greatest nation, blah blah blah." It's rhetoric, meant to rile people up and make them feel nationalistic and proud and get them into a mood that encourages groupthink and "us vs them" attitudes.

But if people weren't totally PO'd by the economic shape of Germany, they never would have listened to Hitler. Hitler got elected because he basically promised to take a big dump on the Treaty of Versailles, and restore Germany to its pre-WW1 glory. German citizens wanted both of those things. Some got swept up in the racism, some actively were racists, some ignored the whole racist bit and focused on the "well, my life sure does suck, and he says it's Europe's fault. I mean, that is a really big number there in the Treaty of Versailles. Look how much I could buy with that."

So, yeah, I really don't care if it was all the Great Depression (it really wasn't), or if it was some mix of the two (the Great Depression was the cherry on top). Hitler came along and provided a scapegoat, and promised to make the scapegoat pay and return Germany to its former glory. He added colorful rhetoric that doesn't really mean anything, and some techniques of which are still in use today. He added a lot of racist overtones, but the people of the era weren't exactly enlightened. The U.S. didn't have the 'Voting Rights Act' yet. And we threw the Japanese in internment camps and made racist propaganda cartoons about how horrible they were and why we had to keep fighting them. Hitler did not have a monopoly on racism. Certainly, he took it to an entirely new (and horrific) level, but he provided plenty of other reasons for going to war. Just like we had plenty of other reasons for declaring war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Racism was not the reason Germany started WW2. If you think German citizens got up and started fighting because they just couldn't stand the fact that the Jewish people existed, I have no idea what's going on in your head. Hitler used existing anger about the economy to turn the citizens against the Jewish, and there were plenty who thought the whole "hate the Jewish" bit was crazy, but still picked up guns to fight for their country because they thought they deserved better than the economic situation they were in, and they thought (correctly or incorrectly doesn't really matter, because again, being mistaken is not a moral wrongdoing) that situation was the rest of Europe's fault.

[DSMatticus]

And sorry for the double post, but let's just forget the Germany thing. I keep trying to bring it back to the Star Wars example, where it's nice and fictional, and because it's fictional we can define the context to any arbitrary circumstances we desire. And this is much better, because there's no room to bicker about historical fact - there is just whatever fictional facts we decide are true. If any argument about facts comes up, we can propose the necessary changes and agree to them. Hypotheticals are so much more flexible that way.

And it is clearly the case that we can come up with a fictional Bob the Deathstar supply officer who thinks the rebels are crazy terrorists. Because I made Bob up. And we can pretend (realistically) that the Empire's propaganda talks about the rebels like the U.S. talks about the Al-Queda. It totally makes sense in the setting.

To Bob, the rebels really, really are the bad guys because every piece of evidence and information he sees or hears about tells him the rebels are the bad guys. Unfortunately, though, Bob is unwittingly working for the real bad guys - the Empire. This makes it okay to shoot him (because he is working for the wrong side, even if it is unwittingly, and it's far better to shoot him and defeat the bad guys than it is to let him live and the bad guys destroy planets). But it doesn't make Bob a bad person. In the exact same way that when a Paladin is tricked by the evil wizard into killing Sir Saintly the Kind, it doesn't mean the paladin has just turned evil. It means he had a warped view of the circumstances that caused him to perform an evil act. At the time, he probably thought he was stopping Sir Saintly from killing babies, or whatever the wizard told him Sir Saintly did.

[Dominicius]

And really, that's all I've ever argued. That there is a middle ground between "heroes who don't kill" and "evil bastards who do kill".

Except that playing the first variety of hero in D&D is pretty much impossible even though it is a vital part of being good for many people. The closest you can come to is a murdering hobo with good intentions.

[PoliteNewb]

And really, that's all I've ever argued. That there is a middle ground between "heroes who don't kill" and "evil bastards who do kill".

Except that playing the first variety of hero in D&D is pretty much impossible even though it is a vital part of being good for many people. The closest you can come to is a murdering hobo with good intentions.

Okay, I guess I'm arguing something else: killing is not incompatible with being "good", provided it is justifiable killing.

I have given numerous examples in this very thread of killing that is entirely justifiable, and depending on circumstances, can even be considered just, moral, and heroic. There are times when refusing to kill makes you evil, and killing makes you good.

[PoliteNewb]

I've touched on this topic several times before but I strongly feel that games shouldn't have these morally objectionable issues even at the cost of gameplay. If you REALLY want to have it out I suggest bumping the 'making D&D morality less objectionable' thread and we can have another round. It kind of got derailed by a discussion of the Milgram experiments and it aborted before I got done saying my peace, but, ehn, effort.

All right, let's bump. I definitely want to make sure you get done saying your piece, but I think your claim that the thread got derailed is a little bullshit. I think you just stopped coming up with answers to what people were saying, because your position is unreasonable.

So let's try again. Here's my position as to why there is nothing particularly wrong with D&D morality.

1.) In the D&D world, there is good and there is evil.

2.) In the D&D world, as in any world, a not-insignificant portion of people (of all races) will choose to do evil...not because they are made of evil or genetically encoded for evil, but because evil is the best/fastest/easiest way to get what they want.

3.) People generally do not perform evil because they are forced into it, but because they choose to.

4.) Many people perform especially evil acts, like rape/pillaging/murder.

5.) It is acceptable to use violence in defense of self and others (including your country/nation/city) from enemies who want to rape/pillage/murder.

6.) It is also acceptable to use violence to kill destructive beasts who are not people, in defense of self, others, and property.

7.) It is also acceptable for certain persons to use violence to enforce the law, and "right wrongs" (returning stolen property, evicting intruders, repelling invasions/incursions, and so on and so forth).

8.) In all of the above situations, there is nothing EVIL about using violence under acceptable circumstances. Further, it is in fact a GOOD act to use violence in defense of innocents, especially those who cannot defend themselves.

9.) Because the characters do not encounter every single person in the world, it is entirely possible (and even reasonable) for every person they encounter in a "villain" role to be a legitimate villain in need of killing. There are plenty of these people around.

So: it is entirely possible to run a D&D campaign where every single act of violence (of which there can be many) is entirely acceptable, and can be done by a person of LG alignment. It is possible for good characters to advance in level and wealth without being horrible bastards.

The only thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to play characters who are terrible people. And that is fucking all.

Rebuttal is, naturally, welcomed. If you disagree with my premises, please explain why.

[Chamomile]

Every D&D campaign I've run has been a morality play. I've run a campaign where I tricked my players into committing Kobold genocide, and the NPC who'd tricked them explained himself by saying that it's a war of mutual genocide where one side must wipe out the other because the actual cause of the hatred was lost to time centuries ago, so he picked the side that wants Elves to still be alive at the end. My players weren't satisfied with that answer, so they went off to try and stop the remaining Kobold clans from joining the war and getting themselves annihilated. Somewhere along the way, they forgot all about their desire to put a stop to the war, and instead got caught up in the narrative, since the Tenebrous Imperium was trying to kill them 'cause of their skin color and the Western Alliance was not. By the time we got to the point where the Alliance had struck deep into Imperium heartlands and began leveling cities, my players had replaced their altruistic intentions with purely selfish ambitions.

In the game I'm currently running, the world is trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty and death that we're all familiar with from Frank and K's Iron Age musings, every nation is either oppressive, xenophobic, or both, war is ubiquitous, racial hatreds equally so, and the whole thing is slowly being eaten by the goddess of corruption and decay. Half my players are bald-facedly uninterested in making the world a better place, and the other half are, truth be told, more interested in killing people whose actions have made them angry than they are interested in actually relieving the suffering of the world.

Both of these games were set up with the intention of the players trying to fix the world, and the first one was started by throwing the inherent problems with the world in the player's face in the most heartwrenching way I could manage, and it worked pretty well. In both cases, however, my player's greed, apathy, and/or ambition has rapidly overwhelmed any desire to do good. And this is the problem. People suck. A good DM isn't going to make players overthrow the oppressive, ultra-wealthy nobles when they'd rather be the oppressive, ultra-wealthy nobles.

[DSMatticus]

(Moving this from the other thread to here, since someone went and bumped it.)

Therein lies the problem. Should there even be a happy medium in the first place? You didn't really solve the underlying problem here, you just did a song and a dance to misdirect people and say that it's rude to look back upon what's going on. I personally think that if your enjoyment is predicated on not thinking about what you're doing and ignoring cognitive dissonance then something is deeply wrong.

There is no underlying problem. This is a game. I have killed more people in videogames than the entire population of the world. In that I have played games where I literally destroyed worlds. I have also played games where I deliberately snuck up on people and shot them in the back of the head for wearing the 'other guy's uniform,' and little other perceptible reason because FPS's aren't so great on 'plot,' usually, but nevermind that.

I did not do these things to explore the narrative concept of feeling bad about it afterwards. Now, you can make a game where you explore that concept. But you can obviously have games where you don't and just gloss over it. And that's exactly as true for TTRPG's as it is for videogames.

So the question is then just, which do you want to do for your game? And I don't think anyone who looks at D&D is looking for that grim moral perspective on their actions. There is no 'objective' which is better, but there is a potential objective alienation of consumers.

[Neurosis]

Let me be brief and simultaneously restate the obvious, with emphasis.

Remove alignment....at least remove the inherently racist concept of entire races being BORN evil or good. (Always Chaotic Evil.) Make it like SR where you can have evil Elves, good Orks, and everything in between with equal frequency, rather than saying all Koreans are evil and all Indians are good.

I think something that simple would go a long way to fixing the D&D morality problem.

[hyzmarca]

The only thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to play characters who are terrible people. And that is fucking all.

That isn't true at all. The thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to deal with game scenarios that more more complex than He Man vs Skeletor.

Alignment is a tool for simplifying morality. If it detects as Evil then you should kill it. It only works as a moral yardstick if you reduce your characters and your narrative to that of a Saturday Morning action cartoon from the 70s or 80s.

If you want something more complex then you need to abandon Alignment as a yardstick for measuring morality altogether. You can do that by abandoning alignment altogether or just by downplaying its importance in determining character actions. The latter is especially useful if you still want to use the Great Wheel Cosmology.

Let me be brief and simultaneously restate the obvious, with emphasis.

Remove alignment....at least remove the inherently racist concept of entire races being BORN evil or good. (Always Chaotic Evil.) Make it like SR where you can have evil Elves, good Orks, and everything in between with equal frequency, rather than saying all Koreans are evil and all Indians are good.

I think something that simple would go a long way to fixing the D&D morality problem.

The problem here is that alignment is being used to represent two different things, both personality traits and social prejudices. The guy who has an evil personality can be expected to perform the sudden but inevitable betrayal. The guy who have evil social prejudices could be perfectly nice and altruistic yet hold beliefs that a fundamentally incompatible with acceptable morality (women should stay barefoot and pregnant, slavery is for the savages' own good).

The only sane way to treat racial alignment is to present it as cultural alignment instead.

Incidentally, treating Alignment as representative cultural prejudices rather than innate personality traits also lets you have evil parties and mixed parties without the sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

[PoliteNewb]

The only thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to play characters who are terrible people. And that is fucking all.

That isn't true at all. The thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to deal with game scenarios that more more complex than He Man vs Skeletor.

That's hyperbole. There are plenty of reasonable, complex, and intelligent scenarios wherein you can kill people and be in the right.

If you mean "more complex" in the sense of morality, hey, have fun with that if you want to. But that won't make the morality of the game "shitty", as Lago has claimed. It will make it complex. Just like the real world.

As for the rest of your post (and to some extent, Schwartzkopf's above): I said this before, and it bears repeating if we want to have any discussion whatsoever of morality.

FUCK ALIGNMENT. Ignore alignment. It has no bearing whatsoever on what we are discussing.

Good and Evil are real terms in the English language, that can be discussed independently of game terms like alignment. And I suggest we do so. Because while there can be disagreements and debate over what concepts like "good" and "evil" mean, there is common ground there. But game alignments are a cluster-fuck, and trying to include them will do nothing but muddy the issue.

You can play D&D without alignment, and many people have. Therefore, it is irrelevant to any serious discussion of D&D morality. If people insist on mixing it in, I guarantee this thread will go absolutely nowhere.

[CapnTthePirateG]

The only thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to play characters who are terrible people. And that is fucking all.

That isn't true at all. The thing that makes D&D morality shitty is people who want to deal with game scenarios that more more complex than He Man vs Skeletor.

That's hyperbole. There are plenty of reasonable, complex, and intelligent scenarios wherein you can kill people and be in the right.

If you mean "more complex" in the sense of morality, hey, have fun with that if you want to. But that won't make the morality of the game "shitty", as Lago has claimed. It will make it complex. Just like the real world.

As for the rest of your post (and to some extent, Schwartzkopf's above): I said this before, and it bears repeating if we want to have any discussion whatsoever of morality.

FUCK ALIGNMENT. Ignore alignment. It has no bearing whatsoever on what we are discussing.

Good and Evil are real terms in the English language, that can be discussed independently of game terms like alignment. And I suggest we do so. Because while there can be disagreements and debate over what concepts like "good" and "evil" mean, there is common ground there. But game alignments are a cluster-fuck, and trying to include them will do nothing but muddy the issue.

You can play D&D without alignment, and many people have. Therefore, it is irrelevant to any serious discussion of D&D morality. If people insist on mixing it in, I guarantee this thread will go absolutely nowhere.

But it does, and I think this is what the whole argument is about. The alignment system IS supposed to simulate morality. I mean, they use the terms "good" and "evil", and explicitly link it to morality. Nevermind that their idea of morality seems to be "all these ugly or dark-skinned people have some kind of inherent evil, cuz we said so" and that's the problem.

If they made the alignment system "the superego" and "the id" and EXPLICITLY made it clear that neither has a moral superiority, but are just forces striving against each other, I think that a lot of these problems would go away. The arguments that I (and a lot of other people) have against D&D morality aren't "it's wrong to kill the slavers attacking your village," it's that the system OKs genocide against drow and orcs as holy war. However, several other, more idiotic things are evil. Creating some mindless skeletons to build an orphanage? Evil. Enslaving a sentient elemental in a case of metal to build your house? A-OK! Using poison is wrong, unless it''s good poison! Using magic to meddle with peoples mind's is A-OK if you make them "good!"

And that's honestly what's wrong with the system, is that the authors put this morality system in everything to the point where it doesn't make any sense and falls apart under its own contradictions. None of the authors can seem to agree on what's evil or not, and the fact is, maybe the system shouldn't comment on morality. I mean, in Goldeneye or some other FPS there isn't some morality system going "remember, you need to act like a good person" and maybe reminding you that that guard had family, but in D&D this is crap you need to consider because either the designers are shoving it down your throat, or you have some bullshit where you need to hold an alignment to keep class powers. ("Oh shit! To be an anima mage I need to be nongood, but I just donated money to an orphanage! I better use some evil spells to kill the balor eating Farmer Joe, thus saving the rest of his family from being eaten...yeah, that'll do."). The game expects you to maintain this moral code for just about every other class or PrC you take, possibly even feats and I suspect those dumbasses at WoTC tried to figure out a way to put alignment into skills.

Tl;dr - The game assumes morality is part of alignment, thus I don't think we can separate the two.

[FatR]

The only sane way to treat racial alignment is to present it as cultural alignment instead.

Or to accept that a certain race (or category of entities, for lack of better word) must destroy other sentients to feed or breed. Or that a certain race was created by Lord Soulfucker the Big Bad to help him turn the entire planed into a never-ending torture camp. It is trivially easy to imagine beings that can't ever be dealt with peacefully and fiction provides tons of examples. DnD just wasn't ever very good at giving reasons for that.

[DSMatticus]

must destroy other sentients to feed or breed

Guilty vampire. So you have to kill people to live. You don't like killing people, but you don't want to die. It's selfish to keep killing people, certainly, but selfishness is less a moral fault than being a homocidal maniac. Really, it's all very tragic that you have to kill people. And it's very tragic that to save people from you, the heroes have to track you to your lair and murder you. Fate is cruel, but you never asked for it.

created by Lord Soulfucker the Big Bad to help him turn

Evil kitten-crushing robot stops and asks why one day. Flees with bag full of uncrushed kittens. Be free, kittens, be free!

Now yes, you can make examples of genetic evil. Maybe the aforementioned vampire really is a homocidal maniac, and something about being a vampire makes everyone who is one a homocidal maniac. Maybe when Lord Soulfucker made those creatures, he imbued them with pure evil.

But I'm pretty sure 'genetic evil' is just plain terrible writing for most of the sentient races you go around stabbing in D&D. Actually, genetic evil is actually a hell of a lot creepier than the idea of two cultures locked in a pointless, inexplicable war that has made them hate eachother for no good reason.

[FatR]

must destroy other sentients to feed or breed
Guilty vampire.

All actually guilty vampires have taken a walk under the sun long ago. Those who don't are no less worthy of death, and also are filthy hypocrites.

Evil kitten-crushing robot stops and asks why one day. Flees with bag full of uncrushed kittens. Be free, kittens, be free!

Then his master remote-detonates him. Note, that in this scenario individual evil minions certainly can try to find redemption (likely in death), but the race as a whole cannot exist without being tools of a malevolent will. Oh, and if Sauron was smart enough to ensure that his destruction will fry brains of his minions, why other evil overlords can't? Assuming said brains don't simply run a complicated program that enables limited adaptation to the environment, but will reproduce the same standards of behavior no matter what. In the world where actual malevolent gods roam free it is frighteningly easy to imagine races that have no way out of doing evil, short of external magical changes to their nature that will effectively make them no longer the same race.

Actually, genetic evil is actually a hell of a lot creepier than the idea of two cultures locked in a pointless, inexplicable war that has made them hate eachother for no good reason.

"We want your stuff" is a good reason. At least it was for many RL cultures, those that needed to be crushed and assimilated for any sort of long-term peace. Accidentally, more intelligent description of DnD orcs and whatever tend to emulate those savage societies. Now yes, once you postulate that there are intelligences in your setting that see humanity and the like as all-you-can-eat buffet, things suddenly get a lot darker. DnD has them too, though.

[Gx1080]

Ok, let's go through basics:

*In wars and in medieval times people tend to die. There's no way around that.

*"Hero with moden sensibilities". Please. Your character isn't in modern times and I want to see how "modern sensibilities" do in a warzone.

Both out.

Trying to replicate "complex morality" in a game system specifically designed for dungeon crawl and hack & slash seems like putting a square peg in a round hole. And people really don't care about their characters slaughtering thousands of mooks, see: Every MMO ever.

Also, "complex morality" seems to devolve very quickly on grimdark and/or lolmurderrape. People have expectations of D&D and neither of the above can run with said expectations.

[Chamomile]

All actually guilty vampires have taken a walk under the sun long ago. Those who don't are no less worthy of death, and also are filthy hypocrites.

There's no denying that the vampire is a hypocrite, but actually feeling bad about being forced to kill other people to stay alive, and then doing it anyway because you're more of a selfish dick than you are a good person, makes for a more satisfying villain than a kitten-huffing madman. Especially if he's totally aware that he's being a selfish dick, that he deserves to die, and the only reason he keeps running from and fighting the heroes who come after him is because he's a coward who's afraid of death.

Then his master remote-detonates him. Note, that in this scenario individual evil minions certainly can try to find redemption (likely in death), but the race as a whole cannot exist without being tools of a malevolent will. Oh, and if Sauron was smart enough to ensure that his destruction will fry brains of his minions, why other evil overlords can't? Assuming said brains don't simply run a complicated program that enables limited adaptation to the environment, but will reproduce the same standards of behavior no matter what. In the world where actual malevolent gods roam free it is frighteningly easy to imagine races that have no way out of doing evil, short of external magical changes to their nature that will effectively make them no longer the same race.

You've set up a lot of assumption to defend the notion of Orc genocide. You assume they were directly created by an Evil god to do Evil things. You assume this Evil god was heavily invested in making sure that all of them remain Evil, instead of just allowing the forces of peer pressure and society work their magic. You assume that hardwiring a race to be Evil is even possible when there's no reason to believe it is. A race that's Evil because all dissidents are hunted down and killed, possibly by supernatural force, is interesting. A race that's always Evil because shut up is not.

[hyzmarca]

I want to see how "modern sensibilities" do in a warzone.

Quite well, actually. There is a reason that the laws of war exist and thrive. They work. Armies with a reputation for following modern ROEs are, by and large, going to be more successful than equivalent armies who do not.

Armies who structure their logistics according to modern sensibilities are going to be a fuckton more prepared than armies who do not.

Armies who structure their forces according to modern sensibilities will have better morale, and better loyalty than armies who do not.

Modern sensibilities do have their disadvantages, of course. Pillaging is just easier than maintaining a log logistics train and cheaper than actually buying stuff, but in the long term pillaging just poisons the populace against you and makes occupation that much more difficult.

On the other hand, a logistics structure designed around modern principles and sensibilities will actually improve the local economy to the point that the locals will likely be sad to see the occupying army go.

A willingness to take prisoners can be abused by fake surrenders, but the fact remains that it is much easier to win a battle by forcing an enemy to surrender than it is to destroy him outright. A reputation for treating prisoners well will generally result in shorter easier battles. When you're dealing with people who have medieval sensibilities it is also pretty easy to flip them and add them to your army.

And, of course, the depredations that generally accompany a sack simply destroy the value of your newly conquered city, turn the populace against you, and play holy hell with military discipline.


As a general strategy, modern sensibilities work better than all others. Following the Geneva convention works better than failing to do so, even if your opponents spit on the document. Going beyond the bare minimum required by law works even better.

When dealing with guys with swords its even easier, because communicable diseases and waterborne parasites are seriously bigger killers amongst both armies than enemy weapons are.

[kzt]

Following the Geneva Convention with people who spit on it means you just shoot them. If you want formality you run a summary court martial. Not complying with the laws of war makes you an outlaw, beyond the protection of the law.

The reason why the laws of war exist is to avoid the depredations of the 30 years war. You want people to follow the rules. Hence you have to punish people who chose to ignore them. If you don't deal with people who violate these rules the entire structure will eventually collapse.

Running POW camps is expensive and it even more expensive when it's full of people who have demonstrated that they have no honor or sense of morality.

[Midnight_v]

Murder hobos. Man, it certainly does have traditionon its side. Horay for the iron age, I suppose.

[DSMatticus]

Chamomile, you quoted FatR with my name. Fix that! Right away!

Especially if he's totally aware that he's being a selfish dick, that he deserves to die, and the only reason he keeps running from and fighting the heroes who come after him is because he's a coward who's afraid of death.

Yeah, that's almost my point. Being afraid of death is not something we consider morally repugnant. Being a guilty vampire who takes a walk under the sun is being a hell of a moral activist. If I had to kill someone to save my life, I've got to admit it would be a tough decision. Especially if I got to choose who I killed, because I can think of plenty of people I don't feel morally bad for killing, but that's a different topic entirely (antiheroes, blah blah blah).

The players are going to kill that vampire. They have to, if they can't fix him. But damn, they should feel really bad about it because he was just an average guy with a disease that he never wanted and a desire to not die. You can't fault him for any of that; the only fault is that him not dying requires someone else die for him.

Then his master remote-detonates him. Note, that in this scenario individual evil minions certainly can try to find redemption (likely in death), but the race as a whole cannot exist without being tools of a malevolent will.

This is the guilty vampire. "Do evil or die." They aren't necessary bad people, they could be ordinary people in an incredibly tragic situation who are afraid of death.

Keep in mind, you are talking about sentient races and cultures. Orcs. Goblins. Kobolds. You are saying they are basically tribal people, except they're genetically evil, so it's okay to take them out of their cribs and beat them against the nearest wall. This is infinity times more horrific to players than the idea of culture-locked war. It actually makes sense if they are in fact genetically evil, but the problem is that portrayal is super-mega-fucking-unsettling because we abandoned the idea that races were genetically predisposed to behavior a long time ago because it is barbaric, creepy, and way too eugenics-y.

"We want your stuff" is a good reason. At least it was for many RL cultures, those that needed to be crushed and assimilated for any sort of long-term peace.

Lolwhat? Are you implying that every sentient agent in every war since the dawn of man has had the sole thought, "I will take the enemy's things."

The people on the front-line of the crusades Star Wars galactic war did not give two shits understand shit about Jerusalem the plight of the rebellion and the evil of the empire and its senator-sith-ruler. The people behind the lines did, and the people at the front were idiots. Some were poor and destitute, and there because "free bread! See the world galaxy!" Societies have wars, people fight them, and because societies do not have hive minds societal rational =/= people rationale.

The people at the front lines of wars are average guys killing eachother, and they often aren't sure why. You cannot attribute the mentality of their rulers to them.

[Chamomile]

Chamomile, you quoted FatR with my name. Fix that! Right away!

Eheh, yeah, sorry, fixed.

It actually makes sense if they are in fact genetically evil,

Just stopping to point out, it only makes sense if you decide magic works that way. There's no spell in the PHB I know of that says "target creature and all his descendants are CE and can never change their alignment no matter what they do."

but the problem is that portrayal is super-mega-fucking-unsettling because we abandoned the idea that races were genetically predisposed to behavior a long time ago because it is barbaric, creepy, and way too eugenics-y.

Also, it's dull. Maybe it's just because I'm a tragedian, but cartoon supervillains are way less interesting to me than villains without a choice. I love to create tragic villains.

The people on the front-line of the crusades did not give two shits about Jerusalem.

Oh, no.

[DSMatticus]

The people on the front-line of the crusades did not give two shits about Jerusalem.

Oh, no.

You're actually right. I'm going to change that, I should have learned this lesson last time I was in the thread.

Edit: There. Now it's a Star Wars reference. Much easier to work with.

[hyzmarca]

Following the Geneva Convention with people who spit on it means you just shoot them. If you want formality you run a summary court martial. Not complying with the laws of war makes you an outlaw, beyond the protection of the law.

If you make that a standard policy then no one will surrender to you and your battles will all be that much harder. Sun Tzu figured this out 2500 year ago. Its not a difficult principle.

If they know that defeat means death then they're going to fight you tooth and nail. They have nothing to lose by trying. If they know that you'll treat them well then surrender will probably seem preferable to continuing a futile battle.

And besides, blaming individual grunts for command-level decision-making and overall policy is counterproductive. When people are prosecuted for violating the laws of war, it is almost invariably officers of significant rank and authority.

Running POW camps is expensive and it even more expensive when it's full of people who have demonstrated that they have no honor or sense of morality.

Not really. You can substantially reduce costs by using the prisoners for labor.

More importantly, you don't need to imprison everyone you capture. You can always integrate captured enemy forces into your own units, so long as they're willing and able to follow your policies. In fact, it is often more efficient to do so.