Being Good in D&D: this one's for you, K and Frank

[Lago_AM3P]

These recent rewrites of core concepts of 3rd Edition are awesome. However, one thing that leaves me profoundly unsatisfied is how 'good' is portrayed in D&D.

So far, FrankTrollman seems to have largely adopted the Red vs. Blue concept of good and evil. In a way, several concepts of D&D make this unavoidable to an extent(killing monsters and looting) but...

I think that when a lot of people want to play 'good' they don't want to be 'good' in the sense that they're protagonists and wear white and fight for the beautiful people or believe that they're the Punisher and want to clean up the truly evil people.

I believe that when a lot of people want to play 'good' they want to do things like end the centuries-long culture wars and they want to make life genuinely better for everyone (instead of their own race/country/whatever).

Unfortunately, I believe that this option isn't really reflected in most of these recent rewrites. Being 'good' in the sense that you show mercy to your enemies, truly reform everyone except the truly evil bastards, and fight for more than the glory of your own people is really, really hard if not downright impossible AFAIK.

FrankTrollman and K, do you think it's possible to expand on your little blurb in the Dungeonomicon and maybe make an enhanced way detailing a way for people to roleplay 'good' characters and their options? I think people who genuinely want to be 'good' need a shit-ton of extra options to balance out the fact that the entire system and culture of D&D is working against them. Or at least some guidance on how do to this. What do you say?

[dbb]

the entire system and culture of D&D is working against them

That's a real problem right there, and it's not a small one. Under nearly all D&D settings, the bad guys outnumber the good guys; they often outpower the good guys; and they are usually largely comprised of things that are bad by nature, and hence essentially unreformable.

But okay. The key here is that what you want is for the characters to be the good guys, and we can do that, but it means finding an existing storytelling paradigm and adjusting the game to fit that. For instance:

Superheroes. That's the kind of stuff Superman and Captain America and the Legion of Super-Heroes do all the time. And when it comes right down to it, Captain America could just be a D&D character. You just need a world where Evil comes in small but virulent doses, can be fought and defeated in a non-lethal manner, and generally can be constrained by the vast majority of ordinary Neutral and Good-aligned people after the good guys have defeated it. You'll need to drastically reduce or eliminate the whole notion of whole races that are intrinsically evil, so most of the bad guys are probably going to be either humanoids, constructs, or mindless undead. On the flip side, making life better for everyone is something high-level spellcasters can just do, as long as the GM isn't stealth-nerfing their prowess, so that part should be just fine.

Star Wars. The players are a small group of heroes struggling against the awesome might of the Evil Empire. The Empire is really evil, and most of the big heavies who work for it signed up voluntarily because they're really evil, and the ones who aren't can probably be turned to your side once they're convinced you aren't hopeless. You can travel all over the world trying to recruit allies to your cause and getting the locals to stop fighting each other over who owns which pasture and start dealing with the real threat to their way of life. You make life better just as part of the nature of your struggle, because, honestly, the Evil Empire is just that evil -- removing their yoke is certainly among the best things you can actually do to help the average guy in the street.

Star Trek. You're explorers on a mission to map the world beyond your homeland, learn about foreign cultures, and so forth. You probably need to be fairly low-level to make this work, or else be a very low-magic group, because high-level magic kind of negates the whole premise. Your enemies are more likely to be ignorance and misunderstanding than to be a big hulking brute whose job is to just be Evil. You want to make a good impression on everyone and help improve their lives, because that makes them inclined to join the Confederation of Independent Principalities or whatever it is you represent, or at least trade peacefully with them. You may encounter representatives from the Hobgoblin Empire or from the Orcish Tribes every now and then, but just slaughtering them out of hand will make you look like the aggressor, so you have to deal with them more subtly and cleverly. And maybe learn to live in peace with them, too.

Making the default damage from spells be non-lethal will go a long way, but there's no easy way around the fact that swords make people bleed and bleeding makes people die. Unless you're prepared to come up with some reason why everyone's weapons are Merciful by default, which, now that I think about it, sounds a little like Asheron's Call.

--d.

[squirrelloid]

Here's a hint. Ignore that alignment blurb on your character sheet.

Problem 1: what is 'good'? I suggest you choose a moral philosophy. Have your character act on it. Your alignment could be N/E, but you'll still think of yourself as good by the standards of your moral system.

Basically, why does 'good' the alignment have anything to do with how your character sees his or her actions. Look at the alignment thread. Most people seem to really want alignment to just be red team or blue team. We don't even know what lawful and chaotic means, and i'm not convinced i could tell you with 100% certainty whether any given action was good or evil according to D+D morality. And the red team/blue team people don't want to define it.

Further, D+D alignment cannot capture most moral philosophies. So just ignore it. Choose an alignment for the team you want to be on, choose a moral philosophy that your character actually cares about, and the second is the one your character is going to be conscious of. So if you want to play a Neiztchean superman, great, you can be 'good' in your own way. Or a Kantian categorical imperativist - great, you have a better guideline for determining whats good than anything in D+D. Or maybe you're a Lockian natural rights person. Good for you. All of these define 'good' in very different terms. Choose something. Don't rely on D+D to tell you what is good.

(Unless you actually want absolute alignment. In which case i think you're basically stuck with Kant).

[Username17]

Rather than simply expand upon the Dungeonomicon, we're going to actually write an entire book on Good, Divine Power, and Extremism called the Tome of Virtue. I predict quite confidently that it will be our most unpopular book that will draw the most criticism. And you should see the heat that the Fighter revision is taking at WotC.

Heh. Regarding Good:

Let's make a wild and crazy assumption about Good: being Good means that you're making the world a nicer place. People live longer, have more fun, are less afraid, enjoy their surroundings, and their company a little more. That's Good. Sounds like a pretty valid assumption, neh? It's unprovable, and that's why it's an assumption, but as assumptions go it isn't bad.

Here's where things get unpopular: You know how when you're driving a car you can choose to turn right, you can choose to turn left, and you can choose to go straight? What do you do to the steering wheel to go straight? Nothing. And if you hit someone by not turning the car, that's an action on your part, right? Doing nothing is a choice, and it's an action, and the consequences of that action are on your conscience. And here's where things get even more unpopular: There are people getting mutilated and starved by a genocidal regime in Sudan right now, and you aren't doing anything about it. That's right, you could drop what you're doing, go to Sudan, and smuggle in food and weaponry so that the Black Africans could cling to life, but you aren't doing that. And because of your choice to watch a rerun of ER instead, people are going to die.

But the thing is, you can be a Good person in spite of that. You don't bear sole responsibility for the genocide in Darfur, and you may not have the training or equipment necessary to do anything about it anyway. Heck, if you left, a hurricane could easily come to your home and kill people while you're gone. There's no guaranty that going away and helping some people is going to help more people than staying where you are. In fact, since travel is expensive and time consuming, you have to weigh carefully the potential benefit you can bestow by going anywhere to accomplish Good ends.

Further, you have to sleep. Also you have to relax sometimes. If you run yourself ragged all the time, then you won't be any good when we really need you. The ambulance doesn't just drive around, it sits in one place until it is called upon and then drives to where it is needed. So doing the best you can still involves you personally taking some time off to go surfing and hiking and talking with your friends and drinking some fair trade coffee and looking at pretty girls. Really, in order to do the most good, you'll still have to do some of that other stuff.

So being Good doesn't mean that you solve all the problems, it means that you actively solve more problems than you cause by a substantial margin. That you don't shrink back from doing Good for others, that you take some responsibility for making the world a better place.

But you know what it doesn't mean? It doesn't mean "doing what god XXX tells you to." Really, it doesn't mean that. Not just because there are an equal number of gods in D&D that are specifically evil as there are which are good; but because in the real Earth there are no examples of any major religion where following their precepts consistently makes you a good person. And that's honestly going to be the most unpopular truth of all: YHWH, God, Allah, Krishna, whatever, the major gods of the real world aren't good.

I mean come on – the major precept of Christianity is that anything bad you do including being born invalidates any good you could ever do in your whole life and means that you'll get cast into a lake of fire for your transgressions. But if you participate in the proper symbolic blood drinking ceremony (don't worry, it isn't real blood right now) you get forgiven for everything – even throwing children and live hand grenades into wells (you can even get beautified by the Pope after doing that). Do you see how completely not associated with Good or even OK that religion is? The fact is that the first commandment is "don't follow other gods", not "don't be a genocidal asshat". In fact, being a genocidal asshat is explicitly encouraged.

I'd like to be able to report that the major Religions of Earth are simply meaningless diversions. But the sad part is that's not true. The God of Abraham is an evil god. And every time they revise the doctrine he gets a little worse. Go read the story of Abraham again and tell me that's not Hextor doing the talking. Go ahead and try.

Now, in D&D, everyone is redeemable. But it's really hard. Not just because the followers of the black clad priests who worship a torture implement and demand their followers participate in weekly flesh-eating ceremonies are convinced that as long as they keep doing the dark bidding of their evil gods they'll be granted eternal rewards after they die – that's true of the normal everyday world that we live in. No, in the D&D world they're right! You can actually just go to the afterlife and watch it in action. Those who follow the path of Evil faithfully are eternally rewarded, and those who shirk from their duties and allow the heathen to live in peace amongst them are cast into a lake of fire. So the fact that your opponents can agree that your way is better, and get an atonement slapped on them and re-dedicate their lives to the forces of Good isn't really that helpful. People simply are not going to often accept an atonement because they know that if they just hold out and act totally evil until their dying days that they'll get a bunch of virgins in Carceri.

Now, that isn't to say that when we write the paladin that he isn't going to get atonement as a spell-like ability at first level. Because, hey, I don't think you can even do real Good if you can't do that. But it does mean that we're probably going to be holding out on the Tome of Virtue until the end. It'll quite possibly get Keith banned from the WotC boards – once we tell people that not only are they not Good, but that chances are they follow a religion that is also not Good – well, that's going to start a big fvcking flame war.

Anyway, Good is hard. That's why more people don't do it.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Now, that isn't to say that when we write the paladin that he isn't going to get atonement as a spell-like ability at first level. Because, hey, I don't think you can even do real Good if you can't do that. But it does mean that we're probably going to be holding out on the Tome of Virtue until the end. It'll quite possibly get Keith banned from the WotC boards – once we tell people that not only are they not Good, but that chances are they follow a religion that is also not Good – well, that's going to start a big fvcking flame war.

That's fucking awesome Frank. That's so awesome that my motherboard is starting to smoke and

[Lago_AM3P]

Sorry. My previous computer just exploded.

You can actually just go to the afterlife and watch it in action. Those who follow the path of Evil faithfully are eternally rewarded, and those who shirk from their duties and allow the heathen to live in peace amongst them are cast into a lake of fire. So the fact that your opponents can agree that your way is better, and get an atonement slapped on them and re-dedicate their lives to the forces of Good isn't really that helpful. People simply are not going to often accept an atonement because they know that if they just hold out and act totally evil until their dying days that they'll get a bunch of virgins in Carceri.

Well, this is probably not the time to start talking about it, but I have some BURNING QUESTIONS that may or may not need to be answered.

1- Spells like polymorph any object and awaken and awaken construct and awaken undead... is forcing existence onto something a good, neutral, or evil act? Should druids and clerics go around doing things like giving trees and skeletons the ability to think for themselves?

2- Are there going to be any rules for uprooting evil deities/major demons/whatever and then having the world hold together once your plucky band of heroes banish/kill/convert the fuck out of the evil pantheon?

3- Is there going to be any spells or whatever that mass-undo a lot of signature 'evil' acts? Like a cleric can cast a spell that creates a magical pool that gives any undead creature whose corpse didn't die from old age his original life and soul back?

4- The current paradigm of D&D seems to be that evil people (especially PCs) get the cooler toys because roleplaying evil is a hard thing to do. There's a lot of sweet artifacts and spells out there that only work if you're evil. Not because the base equivalent hasn't a good equivalent or you can't think of good uses, it's supposed to be because it's a nice tool you get for being evil (like sadism or power leech). In actuality, it seems that roleplaying good needs to get the extra bennies IMO.

Which paradigm are you going to uphold? Good gets you extra swag, evil gets you phat benefits, or neither?

5- How do you reconcile the existence of good and redeemability if you're playing with the idea that the power of good or evil are tangible things? Like you have a positive or negative energy plane that actually makes you good/evil?

More later. I'm still gushing over Street Magic. Tee hee.

Making the default damage from spells be non-lethal will go a long way, but there's no easy way around the fact that swords make people bleed and bleeding makes people die. Unless you're prepared to come up with some reason why everyone's weapons are Merciful by default, which, now that I think about it, sounds a little like Asheron's Call.

dbb, if you read fantastical works (such as things like One Piece or X-Men) then you can see that the protagonists in these works have the ability to shatter diamonds with eye lasers or punch an entire ship in half. And turning these same powers on human beings doesn't have to kill them.

[squirrelloid]

1155165727[/unixtime]]

Now, that isn't to say that when we write the paladin that he isn't going to get atonement as a spell-like ability at first level. Because, hey, I don't think you can even do real Good if you can't do that. But it does mean that we're probably going to be holding out on the Tome of Virtue until the end. It'll quite possibly get Keith banned from the WotC boards – once we tell people that not only are they not Good, but that chances are they follow a religion that is also not Good – well, that's going to start a big fvcking flame war.

That's fvcking awesome Frank. That's so awesome that my motherboard is starting to smoke and

Quoted for Truth, with a motherfucking capital T.

[Draco_Argentum]

I feel like that kid who starts fires, pretty flames. Should be amusing.

Honestly I'm suprised the piece on honour didn't cop any flack.

[dbb]

1155166695[/unixtime]]
dbb, if you read fantastical works (such as things like One Piece or X-Men) then you can see that the protagonists in these works have the ability to shatter diamonds with eye lasers or punch an entire ship in half. And turning these same powers on human beings doesn't have to kill them.

Well ...

a) Colossus doesn't normally go around punching human beings; through the most extraordinary coincidence, there usually ends up being an enemy brick for him to fight. That is, the X-Men don't usually fight "human beings".

b) Even in the X-Menverse, edged weapons (canonical example: Wolverine's claws) have a special "these really do kill the fvck out of people" exemption.

That's ultimately not the point, though. So yeah -- hitting someone with a sword doesn't have to kill them. If you have players who are okay with that scheme, then more power to you. You could even resurrect (no pun intended) the old AD&D notion that you don't actually do physical damage to someone until they're down to their last few hit points -- although this still doesn't help if you have people with very high damage outputs, because of course the difference between "incapacitated" and "dead" is really, really small for the amounts of damage people routinely hand out in a level 10 game, so you may also want to adjust the death threshold, or just make -10 "mortally wounded" instead of "dead". Or both.

--d.

[Lago_AM3P]

Rather than simply expand upon the Dungeonomicon, we're going to actually write an entire book on Good, Divine Power, and Extremism called the Tome of Virtue. I predict quite confidently that it will be our most unpopular book that will draw the most criticism. And you should see the heat that the Fighter revision is taking at WotC.

Give me a link or I will eat your brain.

[Dragon_Child]

Not his braaaain...
http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.p ... r][br]I've got to say, it's going to be a shame to see both you and K banned from the WOTC boards, Frank. However, things seem so much different with the posting of the tomes - like the idiots have been thinned down, and there are more people who aren't totally retarded.

[User3]

But it does mean that we're probably going to be holding out on the Tome of Virtue until the end. It'll quite possibly get Keith banned from the WotC boards  – once we tell people that not only are they not Good, but that chances are they follow a religion that is also not Good  – well, that's going to start a big fvcking flame war.

*raises toast to K and Frank* This is all very true, and needs to be said.

[MrWaeseL]

We need to stick it to people that their religion is not Good?

[Crissa]

Some people say that their god is Jesus Christ, but those guys are usually the ones most likely to act on the old-testament god rather than Christ's actual words.

If anything, I'd say his words were about Goodness, Love, and Kindness.

Can dieties change alignment?

-Crissa

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I believe that the Gnostic Heresy claimed that the God of the New Testament was sent to replace the evil God of the Old Testament.

I can't back that up though.

[Ramnza]

[Assistant Fence Builder Speaks]
Ok folks, let's get back to topic. This isn't a Bible study.
[/Assistant Fence Builder Has Spoken]

[Crissa]

But Gods replacing other gods and changing alignments was the topic before, and this gives some insight into a situation (or result) of that happening.

-Crissa

[Oberoni]

Now, that isn't to say that when we write the paladin that he isn't going to get atonement as a spell-like ability at first level. Because, hey, I don't think you can even do real Good if you can't do that. But it does mean that we're probably going to be holding out on the Tome of Virtue until the end. It'll quite possibly get Keith banned from the WotC boards – once we tell people that not only are they not Good, but that chances are they follow a religion that is also not Good – well, that's going to start a big fvcking flame war.

Words cannot express how abyssmally terrible of an idea this is.

[User3]

1155425648[/unixtime]]I believe that the Gnostic Heresy claimed that the God of the New Testament was sent to replace the evil God of the Old Testament.

I can't back that up though.

"Gnostics did not confine their studies, or their teachings, to any one religion, but borrowed illustrations from all that were accessible to them. This caused them to be considered by Christian heretics, Jews who were trying to undermine Christianity, remnants of the Persian sun-worshippers."
-"Secret Societies: A History"
Which is a wonderful little book full of bullshit, and a wonderful resource for campaign building.

"Throughout history, followers of various incarnations of Gnosticism (particularly Christian persuasions[citation needed]) were persecuted by those who held the opposing belief that salvation came through faith in particular religious concepts or figures rather than personal knowledge of them. There is no evidence that followers of these earlier Gnostic belief systems ever characterized themselves with the word "Gnostic"."
-Wikipedia

I'm not saying you're wrong. I've never heard of anything called the "Gnostic Heresy," and it could certainly be what you say it is.

[Lago_AM3P]

We need to stick it to people that their religion is not Good?

Clerics and paladins are usually the classes upheld as the paragon of good (read the fscking Book of Exalted Deeds and Furries if you don't believe me).

The thing is, despite usually being in a setting where there's a pantheon of completely unChristian deities, you can't divorce the Abrahamic overtones from these classes.

For example, cleric staples such as flame strike, raise dead, and sticks to snakes harken directly to famous stories from the bible. The paladin is obviously a direct pastiche of a Crusader.

But these are only incidential connections. Here is the real reason we are going to have to confront this issue head on:

The first thing to do is state that being good has little if anything to do with being religious, ESPECIALLY in D&D. In D&D, 2/3rds of the pantheon don't give a rat's ass whether or not the majority of society is living free, fed, and decent lives for people outside of their areas of concern. And half of these people are actively working against it. Even with the 'good' deities there's no guarantee that working for them will bring peace on earth. Do you think that Corellan Latheron is going to shed a fucking tear if all of the orcs get eventually pushed off into the desert and die of exposure and hunger? Do you think that Kord is going to help you in your efforts to organize a massive disaster relief program, or do you think that he's going to oppose it because it's coercive government support for the weak and downtrodden? People are going to claim that since they do religious things, they automatically are working for the forces of good. And when you tell them 'no', you're going to have to explain to them that just because you're working for a religion doesn't fucking mean that you're bringing good to the world.

In case you didn't know, this causes all sorts of fucking problems for people who follow Abrahamic religions but they're not the only offenders. I'm looking at your syphilis-ridden ass, Hinduism.

[Crissa]

Lago, and Furries?

*earperk*

-Crissa

[Lago_AM3P]

Lago, and Furries?

*earperk*

-Crissa

One of the things I hate about the book of Exalted Deeds is how lame the paragons of good are.

Check out the back of the goddamn book. Like half of the new monsters and more than 2/3rds of the demigods are fucking furries. I don't know of any other book in the history of D&D that has this many fucking furries.

So Book of Exalted Furries is my derisive name for it. Sort of like how FrankTrollman calls Sandstorm/Frostburn/Stormwreck It's Hot/Cold/Wet Outside.

[Josh_Kablack]

That's even funnier if you've ever had an actual Hindu D&D player rant about just how poorly D&D pseudo-pantheism models real world polytheism.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Yeah. It kinda bugs me that in D&D you pick a patron deity when as far as I know, in the real world you pray to each god as needed, even the evil ones. Of course, with the evil ones, you're usually asking for mercy, not help.

-Desdan

[Crissa]

I'd say that priests choose a pantheon and then at some level choose a diety to be closer to...

...Until they have the ear of whoever, it really doesn't matter who the local priest is aligned with, because you want them for cures and blessings and general stuff, not Hakkor's special. ...Unles you can afford to have a priest serving each of the dieties - no reason to upset one more than the other, ya know, down here...

-Crissa