Why is D&D against people actually doing heroic things?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Oct 10, 2008 11:35 pm

I mean, the game gets all obsessive and droning about how the game needs heroes and you'll get to be a hero and all that bullshit. Hell, it's in extra big letters on the backs of the 4th Edition books.

But in all of the game settings I've seen in all of the editions, the games have been disgustingly quiet on the topic of people actually increasing the amount of good in the world.

There's plenty of information and resources about how to make an artifact-level sword, how to become a hero, how to start up your own guild, all that crap. But except for an extremely poor and haphazard effort in Book of Exalted Deeds, there's just no information on how you can actually increase the amount of happiness and decrease the amount of suffering in the D&D verse.

I mean, sure, such a thing gets hinted at. Like when you read a writeup on the Red Wizards of Thay, you get a lot of information on their motivations, organizations, the evil deeds they're doing, and whatnot. But the amount of heroism you get from beating them up is only implied.

There's no sense of stakes and no sense of accomplishment from actually being a hero. But someone in the design process thought that people wanted to play D&D in order to simulate being a real hero, so what the fuck gives? Mutants and Masterminds d20, flawed as it is, goes into detail about how you can be heroic and the ramifications of you trying to do good things. It also points you in the right direction in-universe style if you want to increase the amount of good in the universe.

Dungeons and Dragons? Completely silent on the issue. I guess you might want to join the Harpers or the Knights of the Rose or the Dragonlance Wizard's Penis Guild one day. And while there are detailed words on how to join and how they operate, there's very little on how this improves anything.

K · Post by K » Sat Oct 11, 2008 12:04 am

Well, DnD is based on "threat-based morality". This means that if the Thayans attack your country, killing them is good.

The problem is that when the devils launch an interplanar invasion, the Thayans who stop them are "good."

DnD authors like Salvatore want you to think that evil guys constantly betray each other and are terrible bastards all the time, even when they are the protagonists of the story. That's just not true, since those guys are killing baddies and in DnD land that makes you good. They may still be bastards, but the baddie killing is all you need to be firmly in the good camp.

Sadly, overthrowing the Red Wizards would probably caused more suffering in the short and long term because they won't be around to deal with threats, so increasing the "good" for the people is a very relative thing.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 1:06 am

DnD authors like Salvatore want you to think that evil guys constantly betray each other and are terrible bastards all the time, even when they are the protagonists of the story. That's just not true, since those guys are killing baddies and in DnD land that makes you good. They may still be bastards, but the baddie killing is all you need to be firmly in the good camp.

Sadly, overthrowing the Red Wizards would probably caused more suffering in the short and long term because they won't be around to deal with threats, so increasing the "good" for the people is a very relative thing.

So why doesn't the game just come up and say this or at least make it a goal? If the game's viewpoint of 'killing evil things makes you good' is supposed to be the highest pinnacle of good, why don't they just fucking say it and explain this point of view? I mean, the rules and settings already support it. I just want the confession.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 1:12 am

Are people against heroics?
I have yet to play RPGs with those kinds of people.

Perhaps you play with Gygaxians.

"Oops! You pulled the lever. Everybody dies lol."

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 1:17 am

Are people against heroics?

Of course they aren't. The DMs aren't, the players aren't, the fluffers aren't, and the game designers aren't.

So it's just baffling to me that D&D would make it so very hard in telling people how to be a hero and what heroism means in the setting.

I mean, Frank and K went into detail what 'honor' means, what are the ramifications of it, and how to go about achieving it. And honor is a much easier concept to grok and less complicated to implement than being a hero, so I don't know what gives.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 2:10 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote: So it's just baffling to me that D&D would make it so very hard in telling people how to be a hero and what heroism means in the setting.

I mean, Frank and K went into detail what 'honor' means, what are the ramifications of it, and how to go about achieving it. And honor is a much easier concept to grok and less complicated to implement than being a hero, so I don't know what gives.

Honor is culturally relative and pretty much provided to members of one like a kind of social template, but if an individual doesn't understand or accept such conventional definitions nor make them up on their own there's really no helping them.
If a writer is honorless or doesn't perceive honorable behavior in their own mind it's an obvious conclusion that their work will flail for definition as result.

The RoW definitions are fine, but they are very human-centric, culture-speficic, and would not apply equally to many "demihumans" in whole.

I'd rather that honor be defined in broad terms of about 2-3 specific definitions for a handful of cultures in an RPG.
One might have universal assumptions for humanoid behavior but those would be few in number. Special cases would be less common and either add to that list of defaults or include exceptions that counter or alter the assumptions.
Eating of your own dead, for instance, would be a near-universal default... although there are always exceptions. We even have those cultural exceptions on Earth, today.

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 3:38 am

Because if PCs got the idea to actually try to improve the world, they might do something silly, like use their huge amounts of magic to approximate an industrial society instead of kill stuff.

A mid-to-high (we'll say 12th) level wizard can, in core:

Make a Decanter of Endless Water. Putting this at the highest point on a city, braced, on Geyser, can supply water to anywhere in the city. This invents running water and puts the town water-carriers out of business.
Use a Decanter of Endless Water, a difference in height, and the Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering) skill to set up a water wheel. This can mill grain and/or lift things anywhere in the city, with a bit of set-up.
Use the laborers whom you've rendered unemployed to dig ditches with which to haul away your excess water/sewage over to your farmlands for irrigation (or Move Earth the ditches into place his/her self), and aqueducts to send the farmers clean water.
Create a Permanent Wall of Fire. If you stick a piece of iron in it long enough, it will melt. If you empower it, it will melt much faster (average 4 damage per round, with half damage, hardness 10, and CL 12). This can be used to make a foundry.
Run the foundry on conjured iron thanks to Wall of Iron
Provide streetlights to the city by binding a lantern archon to use its Continual Flame SLA, or just by repeatedly casting it.
Conjure new buildings, walls, dams, and bridges with Wall of Stone.
With the DMG2 Mentor/Apprentice feats, have his first apprentice's new apprentice use Locate Object to locate lost items and eliminate medium-profile theft. With Leadership (and, we'll say, a Stronghold, reputation of Fairness and Generousity, and at least 10 CHA, or 12 if followers died in service), he's got a follower who can do this. Add in the possibility of wands (90 GP a charge, or free in the Wish economy), and a 1st-level wizard can do this job; Leadership + Wish Economy could well eliminate petty theft.
Open schools to teach basic literacy throughout their city (Followers who are willing to go into battle for you are certainly willing to teach for you), and provide reading material by Fabricating up huge piles of books and inventing the public library. At 4 books/cubic foot, that's 40 books per level per casting, or 480 books per casting at 12th level.
Open a bank to store the city's gold where it will be safe from theft. You don't need to collect up everyone's coins and exchange them for banknotes if you don't want to.
Scry-and-die the leaders of criminal organizations in your city.

At 13th level, you can do even more stuff, like:

Control the weather so that bad weather never affects your city.
Create simulacra of yourself (6th level) to oversee administrative tasks and do deal with issues that need magical attention that they can handle.

Other classes, sometimes working in concert with the wizard, can:

A cleric can run perfect trials, with Arcane Sight to prove that those under cross-examination aren't using magic and Discern Lies and Detect Thoughts to prevent perjury, and Speak With Dead to allow even executed criminals to snitch. Being an absolute dictator, of course, you don't technically need any of this stuff, but your rule is more efficient if you're sure you aren't executing the wrong guy.
A druid can Soften Earth and Stone to provide the city with an unlimited supply of clay thanks to Wall of Stone.
A druid can build an airship by hanging the ship from (or building it atop) a group of elephants given Air Walk shoes, then using Control Winds to adjust its course, as needed. The elephants can carry a light load of 3200 lb, or a heavy load of 9600 lb, for a total lifting cost of 8.75 GP per pound of cargo to be lifted, discounting the cost of the elephant. This is the cheapest emergent airship that I've found, but I haven't looked very hard. It's also the funniest useful emergent airship. I suppose Overland Flight on a whale would be funnier, and cheaper, but seeing as to how the Soarwhale is an actual monster in an actual book. . .
Because of the way Plant Growth is written, a druid can multiply your farmers' crop yields ridiculously by chain-casting the Enrichment version. Don't ask about the Overgrowth version.

Naturally, if you're willing to use skeletal laborers, a whole mess of new options open up; this is something that a good guy might do while proud of his image. There's also a whole mess I haven't thought of.

Once you have your town set up like this, at minimum you have a water monopoly empire that manages cold running water in every house (if your aqueduct network is good, this can go out to the farms); hot running water isn't much harder. You have good mills, cranes for construction of your cities buildings, unlimited iron, unlimited irrigation, an education system, and some basic control of crime. If you want one, you have an education system.

Putting people out of work, increasing your food supply, and getting an unlimited amount of iron, of course, almost necessitates going to war. Which is fine, since adventurers will be trying to take your stuff anyway, and you need mooks to hold on to their stuff once you take it.

Once the wizard in charge dies, some of this can continue. The water monopoly with an infinite supply, of course, continues until someone steals the decanters. The furnace, likewise, keeps working until someone dispels it. Your supply of iron drops off immediately, with repercussions throughout your economy (everyone was using it, because it was made cheaper). Crime control drops way down, too, since the guy scry-and-dying all of the mafia bosses is gone; the streetlights are still there, until stolen (although, of course, they needn't be easily moveable), and you've still got your item-finders. All the problems here can be fixed by finding an appropriate heir, of course, or by just becoming a lich.

Actually, the archmage of a benevolent magocracy dying seems like an interesting adventure hook; or at least the place where it happens would be interesting to adventure in. Likewise, the ruins of such a city would be an interesting dungeon.

ludomastro · Post by **ludomastro** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 4:51 am

IGTN wrote:Because if PCs got the idea to actually try to improve the world, they might do something silly, like use their huge amounts of magic to approximate an industrial society instead of kill stuff.
<SNIP>

Yep. Pretty much. I have a city like this in my world along with the dwarf version using pure tech.

----

To answer the OP: The game has never really been about heroics unless your DM made it that way. It has always been - at a fundamental level - a kill things and take their stuff out of the dungeon kind of game.

The quick fix - but not for everybody - is to implement the concept of absolute Truth and Good in your game. Then award the PCs accordingly. Killing the wizards of Thay is just fine under this system. Let the Angels deal with the demons afterward.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sat Oct 11, 2008 2:29 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote: So it's just baffling to me that D&D would make it so very hard in telling people how to be a hero and what heroism means in the setting.

I would say it's mostly because of a couple reasons:

-People already know what a classical D&D hero is. If you've seen any kind of action movie, you know it's about killing the bad guys and saving the girl.

-Making the world a better place on a global scale can be complex, and D&D wants to be able to have good characters like Elminster that sit on their hands for esoteric reasons.

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 4:14 am

I suppose a solution to magifying everything would be to institute "Magic goes Away" a la Larry Niven novel of the same name. The idea being that magic drains the mana out of the world slowly and so any city that based it's who economy on magic would find it's magic reserves quickly drying up.

Because otherwise it is hard to explain why there aren't magical utopias, unless you just accept that everyone is a dick

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 7:28 am

ckafrica wrote:Because otherwise it is hard to explain why there aren't magical utopias, unless you just accept that everyone is a dick

How so? Magic in D&D is largely based on personal awesomeness. And it is a lot easier for it to destroy than to create. Dropping a group of villagers such that you can slit their throats is a first level spell. Actually making a cabinet requires a set of two fifth level spells (wall of stone + fabricate). The number of people who can build society up are very small and not immediately replaceable, and the number of people who can tear society down are very large, and some of them are just born that way (see manticores).

Frankly I'm not sure how any civilization of any kind flourishes. It's really hard for me to see any kingdom lasting more than 3 generations, and wyvern raids would jut plain extinct most sapient races. The tribal populations of goblins and gnomes posited by D&D are incredibly low and the world is so prone to extinction level events that I can't see how they persist generation after generation. The rate of extinction amongst sapient races must be astronomical.

About the only thing that I could see lasting is the support village for a lich's wizard tower. He's going to personally last for hundreds of years and can personally fight off ankheg assaults on his villagers. The only problem with this model though is that as a powerful lich he really doesn't need that many people to do things. He fabricates his own modest needs for furniture and can even set up music and ambiance with programmed illusions. Honestly the entire population of goblins and stuff are mostly just kept around for company, so I can't really see our death lord carving out a niche for that many of them to be safe from purple worm raids.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 8:59 am

What if we had it so that the gods gathered around their favorite races and when they got too threatened, they start going medieval on the asses of the threats to civilizations?

For example, the sahugin haven't taken over because they pissed off Neptune a long time ago in some shaggy dog Tree of Knowledge incident. Part of their punishment is to live in an Aztechian super-advanced civilization that lacked the key components to conduct mass warfare. If he notices anyone except for his personal representatives casting spells, he nukes the entire village.

The various gods of the races like Lolth and Corellan Lotheran... rather than being the hate-filled rivals that struggle together to kill the heathen race actually have a situation going on like Mario and Bowser. Oh, sure, they act like they're always going for the throats of each other when Princess Peach is watching, but the truth of it is that all of the major gods are best friends with each other. Think about it. There's only a handful of games now where Mario actually fights Bowser. Most of the time he's riding go-karts, playing golf, soccer, tennis, baseball, or even helping him rebuild his army! Hell, in Super Mario Galaxy, Bowser admitted that he actually likes having Mario as his enemy! And the situation in the godplanes are the same. Pelor can get a booty call from Shar whenever he feels like and then play Smash brothers with her and Tiamat afterwards. Garl Glittergold and Vecna used to be boyfriends but are still close and even have their weekend ritual of watching MST3K and eating bacon cheeseballs.

The races, instead of being their avatars and chosen ones, are more like how we treat the characters in Team Fortress. You might think that Gruumsh is intentionally driving his race to ruin because of his own stupidity, but truth of the matter is that he's intentionally taking a handicap because he likes a challenge--plus, he thinks it's hilarious when the other orcs pluck their eyes out. The other gods would let his orcs suddenly get a rush of brains and power and start conquering other lands if he felt like it because they're best buddies and don't really give a shit about their races. But right now, the orc race to Gruumsh is like a game of Dwarf Fortress or SimCity; he finds it more amusing to watch them fail than to succeed. And if he fucks it up, he can always just ask his buddies for some new orcs. After all, they enjoy the experience of playing with their BFF more than 'winning'. Because they don't really give a fuck about their charges.

The other gods of sapient creatures, like the Great Mother and the Ultra Brain, just don't get it. They've been kicked outside the circle of friendship awhile ago for trying to cheat, being annoying, and various other bits of stupidity. The gods will tolerate them to an extent--allowing a wyvern attack here and a horde of manticore there--but if they get too frisky the gods just up and curbstomp the people not in their clique until they play the way they want them to. While said uncool gods are recovering from the beatdowns, their races spontaneously die off from being cut away from their gods. The bigger the shunning/gangbeating they get, the greater the extinction-level event. The Aboleth god must have REALLY pissed the cool kids off if he has such a kickass species but they're largely ineffectual.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 12:48 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:What if we had it so that the gods gathered around their favorite races and when they got too threatened, they start going medieval on the asses of the threats to civilizations?

Nah I hate that, because it trivializes what the PCs do, and just leads to a standstill setting. You generally don't want to make the world about Elminster and that other bullshit, and instead should make it about the PCs themselves.

"The gods did it" has always been a pretty lame fantasy excuse.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 4:17 pm

Yeah, I know, it's pretty terrible, isn't it?

It's pretty damn hard to justify how lethal the setting is with puny civilizations where all of the citizens can't even shoot fireballs. I also had the idea that civilization used to be the puny races of humans/elves/orcs/kobolds/etc. but there was a monster population explosion due to rifts in the space-time continuum. The monsters are winning handily and you're actually working to save what's left of civilization.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 4:38 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote: It's pretty damn hard to justify how lethal the setting is with puny civilizations where all of the citizens can't even shoot fireballs. I also had the idea that civilization used to be the puny races of humans/elves/orcs/kobolds/etc. but there was a monster population explosion due to rifts in the space-time continuum. The monsters are winning handily and you're actually working to save what's left of civilization.

It actually made a bit of sense in older editions, where monster ACs didn't get insanely high, so that your average group of archers could still hit most powerful monsters. An old 2nd edition hill giant had 3 AC, which meant that even the most incompetent archer with no attack modifiers was hitting on a 17 or better. That's actually not bad, and we can believably see a force of about 40 basic human archers taking on a giant.

Stuff like dragons, while extremely brutal and terrifying, were rare in number and took hundreds of years to mature, so we could also see it possible that dragons may not have totally covered the world. And even something like an adult dragon was killable by human archers. And given that human reproduction could be pretty prolific, we could see humans surviving in such a world,since at the very least, if a hill giant decides to pick on your town, you can kill him (although at considerable loss). There were somethings you needed heroes for, like the creatures that required magic weapons, but a lot of the races that were organized could be taken out with simple numbers. And that was always the classic example of kobolds and orcs, who got by almost solely on having large numbers.

Back in AD&D having a bunch of low level followers would actually help you out quite a bit, at least unless you were fighting a high level wizard, but against most monsters you'd be OK bringing 300 archers and 200 infantry to a fight.

3rd edition basically skewed that pattern, and just went straight into the superhero paradigm, where low level guys were total shit and the only way that the human races survive would be to train high level people. And it also makes the races like orcs and kobolds which rely on numbers, into total shit and you really can't believe that they're still alive at all because they have few superheroes and numbers mean dick.