Mean Girls, Part 3/3
BAM! Evil party out of freaking nowhere! Of course, if you’ve followed along on the latest Patreon poll, you might have guessed. When the question is whether the comic needs an Assassin or an Antipaladin, you know that evil is afoot!
We’ll have plenty of time to talk about evil parties in the coming months, but today I’d like to dip one last time into the dark, salty waters of alignment debates. In particular, I’m curious about something that came up during discussion of Mean Girls, Part 2/3. The question is whether “good” and “evil” are actual, tangible things in your world.
If you look at lore, it’s tough to dispute that tangible evil exists in-game. There’s been a Temple of Elemental Evil since 1985. Spells like protection from evil and good and dispel evil have a direct, measurable impact on the game. If you’re playing AD&D, then you’ve got to come to grips with the bizarre notion of alignment languages. (Laugh all you want, but these last still linger in the form of the secret Druidic language and thieves’ cant.)
The Handbook of Heroes may trade on mashing up in-game and out-of-game dialogue, but whether or not today’s exchange between Witch and Necromancer qualifies as one or the other has a lot to do with your opinion of “elemental evil.” Speaking for myself, I’ve always liked to imagine “alignment readings” to be like astrology in-game: “Sure lady. I’m aligned with the gods of chaos. And also the mysterious spheres of neutrality. Best two copper I ever spent. Thanks for wasting my time.”
We’re getting into head-canon territory here, but it amuses me no end to imagine paladins and clerics and other alignment-detecting folks taking “elemental evil” very seriously, while the common rogue rolls his eyes and does his best Han Solo impression: Hokey religions are no match for a good dagger at your side, kid! In my D&D games alignments may be real, but not everyone can perceive them, or even believes in them.
What about the rest of you guys? How do you treat the notion of “elemental evil” in your games? Do your PCs know what their alignments are? Let’s hear it in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
Ugh, this is the eternal debate at my table. With one particular player i had we had lengthy debates on alignment, particularly in relation to the objective cosmic “good and evil” and the relative mortal “good and evil” the particular situation in mind being, whether or not his lawful neutral rogue was acting in character by wanting to harvest solidified dark magic and sending it to the underworld to gain boons from the infernal entities that live there. I said no, thats evil because it involved demonic pacts and actively giving them additional power, he said yes because he’s a rogue who just wants advantages in life.
Well I mean… Even if you’re doing evil acts on a regular basis, I think you can maintain a neutral alignment. You just have to find a way to balance it out in a cosmological sense. If he harvested that evil material by destroying evil creatures or sent equivalent amounts of “good ingots” up to the archangels, he might have a solidly neutral business plan!
I always disliked the thought that to be considered evil you have to do horrible things to such a extent that you actively harm yourself and your purposes.
I enjoyed playing a Chaotic Evil Rogue in a party once that freaked out the GM. Not because I did anything particularly evil (until the fifth session), but because he knew I was chaotic evil the whole time. When he asked me why I would be adventuring, the answer was “break into people’s houses, kill them, take their stuff and get paid by other people to do it? Sounds good to me.” Why I don’t rob or kill my comrades? “I gotta sleep sometime.” What do you do inbetween adventures? “I teach the orphans I grew up with in the orphanage how to take care of themselves.” Finally, he gave me a confused why are you evil? “Because of what I am willing to do.” was the only answer he got.
Fifth session rolls around and the plot involves this crime lord trying to threaten the orphanage to coerce my character into doing something for him. So I crept into his home, past all his guards, and into his bedroom. Then, I described how my rogue slit the dude’s wife’s throat. Then I crept down the hallway to his son’s room. Finally, I left a note in blood that said not to threaten “my kids” anymore. My GM was stunned. The cleric in the party asked why I wasn’t chaotic evil out of character, at which point I replied I was with a smirk. Put my party in a bit of a spot where they had to choose to bring me in to stand trial (Stupid Divination) and implicitly help the Crime Lord and leave the orphans defenseless or side with me and stand by the brutal methods my character had demonstrated.
I would say thats more neutral evil then chaotic, but i dont know what other actions your character has performed besides that.
I can see that. It was a little too thought out, considering her rationale was that killing the Crime Lord would have caused a power vacuum where the next guy was trying to make his name by offing her whereas the original was hopefully too scared of me to threaten me again. It was mainly her beliefs on personal freedom that made me side with Chaotic over Neutral Evil, though that particular action is probably more Neutral.
My party was particularly confused when I encouraged one of the orphans to join the church of Iomedae because that was what the kid actually wanted to do.
The point of the character besides the dark drama was to challenge the preconceptions of evil vs good. She wasn’t evil because she enjoyed evil. She wasn’t even particularly selfish, though if you weren’t a child she expected you to take care of yourself. She had the people she loved and took care of and everyone else. And Woe be unto you if you were Everyone else and threatened one of her loved ones. She tended to assume everyone else was just as vicious as she was though, and thus tended to go further than most people would.
“Hokey” is a good word, and sometimes the alignments are treated like that- as if evil is a physical substance (or at least a miasma) that you can detect with the right radar. You can see if someone’s got to much evil built up in them, and restore the proper balance of bodily humors with a good session of bloodletting.
🙂
I’m more for alignments being intrinsically linked with biology when it’s for a creature like an Outsider or Dragon, and humanoids tend to be more…flexible. It’s your actions that define you, not what you write on your character sheet; some people think of themselves as good, but very few people think of themselves as evil. Some of them are wrong, obvi, but self-image is usually whatever plays into your ego, and nearly all PCs and NPCs of consequence have very healthy egos.
Which in a way brings me back to the Necromancer (and similar classes). In 3.5 certain classes are required to have a certain alignment, and if you no longer meet the alignment requirement you often lose access to some or all of your class abilities. For “Good” classes this is usually pretty straightforward: lean to far towards morally gray and you fall. But there are also classes that are required to be “Evil”- I think the Dread Necromancer from Heroes of Horror is one. You could say since necromancy is “evil” and you cast necromancy-spells that’s evil, but it sounds kind of circular to me. Suppose you had someone in your game who was playing an “always” evil class but didn’t act evil? Would they “rise”? The situation never came up with my groups but I’m curious if anyone else has had any experience with that sort of thing.
I had two alignment shifts in the same session in my dragon riders game. Check out the draconic essences over here:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/rite-publishing/draconic-exemplar/#TOC-Draconic-Essence
Like the rest of the party, the gold dragon was sworn to protect the royalty of the setting (it was a Musketeers themed game). When the princess turned out to be possessed by evil, our regal gold was happy to watch the spoiled brat die:
“She’s bad for the country anyway!”
In consequence, she molted and became a neutrally aligned magma dragon.
Since there was now a power vacuum, the party’s scheming blue dragon decided to perform a ritual to permanently alter her form to silver, taking on the princess’s appearance and making a bid for the throne. Unfortunately for her, that change came with a new draconic essence: Silver dragons “must make a Will save to deceive another creature.”
The players were on board in both cases, and I thought it came off pretty well.
Players and NPC’s generally do not know their own alignment unless they seek it out. Ofcourse someone who pings as “good” just means that they are selfless, while someone who pings as “evil” could just equally be selfish. So if an evil-aligned NPC goes up to fortune teller to have their aura read, the fortune teller will “reveal” that they are selfish (because being told that they are “evil” may very well have some nasty consequences).
In addition to alignment, I also have my players pick 3 Conflicts (from Mutants and Master Minds) and 3 Loyalties (from Pathfinder Unchained).
My campaign setting also has removed all Good-aligned gods (because the concept of an all-powerful and all-good being of power just doesn’t make sense), and replaced all Evil-aligned gods with Elder Gods (who are less evil, more incomprehensible). Good aligned clerics and paladins gain their divine powers through virtuous philosophies (instead of divine beings). Celestial creatures (such as angels and archons) still exist who are seen as exemplars of a specific virtue. Fiendish creatures also exist, but are beings of a specific vice (instead of virtue).
I might actually place an “Alignment Readings: 2 cp” booth in a game now. I am increasingly amused at the RP potential.
As for the problem of Marcus Aurelius gods, I’ve always been on board for the idea of “cosmic balance.” The gods have a gentleman’s agreement not to interfere because all the other gods would interfere in turn. Balance of powers and all that.
If fiends exist, then there is objective evil.
I don’t care how much of a moral relativist you are, I don’t think there’s a circumstance where torturing people for funzies is good.
Did you just presume the hobbies and past-times of fiends in every setting?
Demonic z-snap: “You don’t know me!”
In D&D the hobbies and past-times of fiends is well defined.
Devils like controlling things, and don’t care who they step on to do it.
Demons like hurting/killing people/destroying things.
Daemons (Yugoloths if you’re the kind of person whose pet rocks die of boredom) like anything that benefits them, and they don’t care who they step on so long as it doesn’t have long term consequences to them benefiting.
Again, that is mostly setting specific. Most systems be it D&D or Pathfinder have a default setting. Mechanically, there is very little that dictates what gives pleasure to creatures of a specific type or subtype. This information is instead dependent on fluff and/or the default setting.
Fiend stands up: “Look nobody enjoys torturing people. But if you have to torture people, well you might as well enjoy it.”
*fiendish murmurings of approval*
Maybe it’s my brain filling in blanks, but it would appear that Witch’s speech balloon is covering up some skull-shaped smoke.
The tragedy of word balloons and panel composition. The skull-shaped smoke was my favorite part.
Another fun bit of trivia for you. In the first draft of the script, I had Oracle saying from off-panel: “Seriously. I give it two days before Paladin smites the eyeliner off her stupid face.” That might have worked drifting in from another panel in a conventional comic, but some things just don’t fit Handbook’s style. Wrestling with that is part of the challenge (and the fun) as a writer!
You could always do a SMBC where you’re mostly single panels, but you do multi-panels when you need to.
Laurel would beat me savagely for making her do the extra work.
Besides, brevity is the soul of wit and all that. I wasn’t just whistling Dixie about the fun and the challenge. It’s interesting (if occasionally frustrating) coming up with ways to make gags work with such limited real estate.
Props to you in that. I’ve always thought it remarkably that you pull off single panel gags so well.
Aw shucks, Pennomi. 🙂
You could always provide the pre-comic script so I don’t have to pry it out of you by analyzing the art. Maybe in the blog, maybe as a Patremon?
Patremon is the evolved form of Patrini.
My wordplay was Wintentional.
Oh, so
I take that as justification for Paladin’s actions. In my case i was a it sad with this panel because Mr Lawful Jerk now has a justification for smiting her which i feel it is less interesting, so i will wait and see how things develop.
If it helps, I’d intended her turn to evil as a consequence of Paladin’s actions.
In any case: please enjoy your binge. 🙂
One of the issues I think with D&D alignment is that it is posits that there is definite good and evil (by the evidence you’ve outlined) but they are very fuzzy as to what makes things good or evil. Is good and evil based in utilitarianism? Aristotilian virtue ethics? Natural law? Some other form of ethics? The official response seems to be shrug which might be why the Book of Exalted Deeds is one of the most frustrating WotC supplements I’ve read. I understand why they do this; if they posit that, say, Objectivism is the standard of good and evil more time would be spent arguing about the “official” ethics than playing the game. On the other hand you get the issue of a DM and player arguing about whether something is good or evil when they have completely different starting points as to why something is good or evil, and both can pull from official material as evidence because the official material is fuzzy too.
Which leads to my response to your question: though official D&D ethics is fuzzy, there is definitive good and evil, which means there must be a definitive standard for good and evil. And just like in real life, there will be people in setting who disagree on why something is good or evil, and others who have simply ceased to care. What’s more, with different deities backing up different alignments, followers of each can make good arguments that good and evil is less “good and evil” as we think of it and simply doctrines that align and don’t with their faith. I’d imagine a follower of Hextor would think of “evil” as we think of good and “good” as “what those idiotic devotees of Pelor think.” And the conflict between a definitive, measurable “good” and “evil” and people’s alignments has interesting if complex story potential. Imagine a D&D setting based on natural law ethics where a utilitarian wizard, “evil” by the setting standards, decides the cosmotic morality is stupid and if he wants to use bound devils to build and police a glorious utopia then that’s “good” by his standards, and the cosmos’s standards can go to the Nine Hells.
I love that summary of the issue to pieces. In particular I appreciate your empathy for the difficulties that go into the design end of the process.
Uff, My characters are almost always True Neutral, unless i am playing someone Evil of course,… My True Neutral Fighter for example was a practical kind of Dude, who always tried to see all sides of the Issue and came up with compromises between the more,… Radically Aligned Team Mates. He wasn’t really big on HEY NEUTRAL BALANCE AND STUFF. He was a rather passive kind of Neutral. He was rather religous, but he wasn’t preachy, he had his belives and was totally okay, if others beleived something else. Why would he care? This kind of mindset is right for him, doesn’t mean it’s the same for others.
My Chaotic Neutral Necromancer would go something like this: “Good? Evil? What the Hell Guys, it is Simple! You have buddys. They are on your side. There are Guys who try to kill you. They are your Enemies. You don’t need Religion to figure that out. Really it is that simple. ”
My Chaotic Evil Self appointed High Cleric of Zura: “YES THE POWER OF ZURA FLOWS THROUGH ME! WE SHALL VANQUISH ALL LONG-LEGS AND RAISE ARMYS OF UNDEAD IN ZURAS AND GOBLIN KING BOOMIES NAME. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH” Yes he does enjoy being Evil. Being in an all Evil Goblin Party, he was the most openly Evil dude.
Here’s a mind-bender for you: What would happen if you touched an ingot of pure Neutrality? Laurel and I argued over this at dinner last night. I think you’d just adopt a surfer-bro attitude: “Sure man. Whatever. It’s all good to me.”
Interesting Question. I think you would turn into an Agent of the Aeons.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/aeon/
Good? Evil? Who cares! We got a whole Universe to keep running! There are always these damn High Lvl Mages distorting reality and weekening the Fabric of the Universe. They must be hunted down.
Thats what i think would happen.
I’ve never played much with Aeons, but I’m powerfully reminded of the old gods from The Magicians.
I think you would become Swiss
“…In addition, you may add 1 lb. of chocolate and your choice of lederhosen (exceptional quality) or a cuckoo clock to your inventory.”
“Laugh all you want, but these last still linger in the form of the secret Druidic language and thieves’ cant.”
These aren’t really anything like alignment languages. Secret organizational jargons/codes/means of communication are easily believable and exist in the real world. They don’t share the things that make alignment languages weird. Like how you know them in the first place. Or the suggestion that everyone would actually have to be explicitly aware of their “alignment” in game–or else what is the explanation that I share this means of communicating with a person from the other side of the world? Or what on earth happens if someone changes alignment.
Copying a comment from over here.
Here’s an answer from Gary Gygax on Dragonsfoot!
My point was that Druidic / Thieves Cant are not some surviving vestige of alignment languages. Alignment languages (which are odd and problematic) grew out of the idea of semi-exclusive languages like Druidic or, as Gygax says, Latin/Hebrew (which are not odd or problematic).
So I don’t think it makes sense to say that alignment languages “linger.” They don’t really. It’s just that a solid concept existed, then it inspired a weird concept, but then the weird thing got tossed. And yeah, unsurprisingly the solid concept is still around.
So basically what became Infernal and The Dark Speech, and Celestial and the Words of Creation
If it ends up being the antipaladin I DEMAND that their introduction in some way involves piglet-kicking.
For the uninitiated:
http://78.media.tumblr.com/4d225b53b75197719b2acd01a9e2a69b/tumblr_nf9niyMhul1r3sy6wo1_500.png
If AP gets the nod, I’ll see what I can do. 🙂
Honestly kicking puppies is a time-honored trope as an indication of chaotic evilness. Have you done a comic on that yet?
Well I mean, we’d need a Chaotic Evil character first. >_>
Like saaaaayyyyyy the first character introduced in your comic?
What? Lumberjack Explosion is a paragon of virtue! 😛
But what aboot Lumberjack Explosion’s sidekick?
Most evil of all, that AP is Left Handed. They’re completely irredeemable.
As a guy that plays a lot of Planescape games, knowing one’s alignment is an integral part of the game. If you were once a Neutral-Good creature but drift to Chaotic-Good, your next trip to Mount Celestia might make you fundamentally uncomfortable.
The planes in that setting each have effects that differ based on your alignment. In the Good planes, Evil creatures take penalties; in Lawful planes, Chaotic creatures take penalties; and so on and so forth. This matters moreso for creatures that have an alignment subtype. As far as I know, there are no ways to get out of having to deal with these penalties aside from being aligned with the plane on a fundamental level.
Getting into conversations about evil parties will be rough for me, since I absolutely hate playing an Evil character, and in most parties I will be playing the “Good-est” character.
I share that “evil is hard” struggle. Without spoilers I’ll say this: the theme is likely to come up.
Also, if they need a 4th person for the Anti-party, I’m pretty sure Gunslinger is desperate enough to join.
If summoner joined, I’m pretty sure Witch or Necro would kill him shortly after the first instance of sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment: too evil for the evil party.
Being evil doesn’t mean you shouldn’t observe basic workplace etiquette.
You have to work with these people, and evil isn’t necessarily the best at restraining its’ urge to poison you or have you devoured by undead. Best not to give them a reason.
I’ve been running alignment-less games for my last few pathfinder games as an experiment. For most classes, alignment means diddly-squat, but for those that care, I use the following:
You alignment is your characters view of the world and what is just and right. When using alignment-detecting spells or effects, any reference to evil refers to someone/something who’s own view directly contrast your own, good refers to someone who’s views align with your own and who deeply care about them, and neutral refers to someone who’s views lie on some other axis – they don’t really care about your views at all.
So for example, lets say there’s a hobgoblin paladin from a society who holds the view that forced indentured servitude is the most important way for the strong to prevail over the weak, which causes society to ultimately progress (“If the weak masses are allowed to stand alongside the strong few, how do the strong thrive? How do they struggle with each other and by doing so forge a more powerful society?”). If this paladin casts a Detect Alignment spell, another member of his society that strongly holds those views registers as good, a member of his society that could not care less whether slavery was a good thing would register as neutral, and someone from another society that feels that slavery is a terrible thing that destroys the lives of people would register as evil.
Undead are almost all detected and handled as evil, as they are the essense of unlife, and most living things with thinking brains and moralities consider being living a good thing, but alignment becomes very wishy-washy once you get into civilizations, especially with views across civilizations that are diametrically opposed to each other governance-wise. The society that believes strongly in democracy views monarchies as evil, and vice versa.
It also opens up my alignment-oriented classes quite a bit. A paladin becomes not just a “champion of kittens and fuzzy things”, but a crusader for his faith – regardless of how “good” you feel his crusade is, he believes it is good and has justified his actions to himself.
Do you still use the term “good” when referencing an antipaladin’s view of herself? How do you handle the philosophies of angels and fiends?
Angels are outsiders who’s morals closely align with our morals (albeit a bit extreme – angels would see a lot of humanity as intrinsically evil where most clerics and paladins would not), demons are outsiders who’s morals do not align with ours at all (Usually because they REALLY enjoy causing pain and suffering for their own amusement, which resonates as pretty evil when you’re not the demon who is causing the pain and suffering).
Antipaladins are….. okay, you got me there. I’ve never really used antipaladins in my game, and they wouldn’t really have a place in in the alignment system I’ve set up. Maybe an antipaladin is someone who has so fallen into the whole undead/demon mindset that their powers shift to align more closely with those factions? Talkig out my ass here, but you can’t always win with modding when the whole world/ruleset is based around the rule you’re trying to change.
And there’s the rub! Three comics and a couple of hundred comments later and we finally got there! We are trying to apply system and mechanics to a deeply subjective piece of setting lore. The question of good and evil is best left to an audience to decide, but the game designers are giving us a game designed around pre-existing answers. Thus the years of debate on the subject. We want to impose our own vision on our own fiction, but we feel like this one mechanical aspect of the game is intruding on that right.
Alignment is almost entirely ignored at my tables. Good and evil are relative, even in the outer planes.
So is Hell where you go if nobody liked you? Or is it more, you go where your soul would feel most “at home”?
The Hells are where devils come from. Only those that sell their souls to the devils go there when they die. We use the Forgotten Realms model of afterlife instead, where all departed souls go to a single plane to either be picked up by a deity or to languish until they fade from existence.
Heh sounds like a purgatory auction house…
Is it an effort to avoid the alignment argument, or do you find that alignment actively gets in the way of character development?
It’s not so much an effort to avoid it, as simply not taking the effort to implement it.
However, the whole game does improve when alignment is no longer involved. You know how Drizz’t is a special snowflake because he’s CG in a race of CE? That’s not a problem anymore because Drow aren’t obligated to be evil. They are evil by circumstance, and that’s understandable for a culture formed out of spite by a race of refugees forced to live in an underground death world. This is but one example.
That’s not to say all lore is thrown out though. Devils still want to make crooked deals, demons still want to kill everything, etc.
I’m not sure that’s quite enough to save Drizz’t, but I get your point. The GM and the players get to judge for themselves whether something is good and evil rather than letting a stat block do it for them. There’s creative freedom in that.
Yes, that’s an entirely more eloquent way of saying it. 🙂
We are more loose about alignment restrictions. Feats and class restrictions that are dependent on alignment are bent or outright broken if the re-flavor can explain it. Locking something that mechanically fits a character behind a wall of “Must worship an evil god” takes some fun out of it, and is needlessly limiting.
As far as what they know about their alignment goes, there is knowing what alignment they have, and believing what alignment they have. For our games, a character has an idea of what they are, but that’s all.
I mean look at Paladin last comic. So happy to “help” her fit in. Many could argue that kind of manipulation would be evil (or at least borderline), but he didn’t loose his powers over it.
Maybe there should be personality alignments too… though a “Bubbly Bane Longsword” sounds kinda funny.
I think confining the whole of the human race to nine squares on a board is impractical, but in a game of numbers, that may be the best they could do at the time.
As it happens, I know of a dramatization of this point.
Heh nice.
One fun thing we like to do is try to put preexisting characters into an alignment.
I think my favorite so far is a friend of mine said Judge Dread was Lawful Neutral. There is no good or evil motivation. The law is the law, is the law, is the law, is the law…
Another thing I thought was funny about this system was in Pathfinder Mythic, there is a character option that simply makes them have no alignment, good, evil, lawful, chaotic, or neutral. In fact a detect alignment spell would return nothing at all.
I just thought… this breaks so many things right here…
I prefer systems without an alignment system, actually. For example, my favourite system of all time is Alternity, which had no alignments. But in DnD/Pathfinder, I do like the idea of Good and Evil as real tangible things. Though I remember at some point someone brought to my attention an alternate alignment system that replaced Good and Evil with Light and Shadow, removing morality from the alignment equation.
Any links to the light and shadow thing? I’d be curious to do some reading.
Some interesting revisions in Paizo’s Unchained as well:
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/unchained/gameplay/removingAlignment.html
I’ve looked around for it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Sadly my friend never linked it to me, just described it.
Well hey, thanks for making the attempt!
I’ve seen very little good come out of alignments personally. In the D&D game I run there aren’t any alignments at all. “Evil” and “Good” are up to people or what a particular deity likes or dislikes. It’s honestly more interesting that way since it means that the “good” and “evil” gods aren’t always always always on the same team and instead are all simultaneously working with and against each other regarding different things.
As an example, Melora the goddess of nature is always a bit at odds with any of the four gods who lays claim to a season since in her view they all rightly belong to her. But on the other hand the five of them are all on the same side in regards to threats to nature itself.
I’ve even got Vecna, Lolth, and Ioun all in on some grand cosmic secret together.
Another little twist for my homebrew setting is that all gods can create and command angels and even more powerful angels that specific represent that particular deity. Even Asmodeus.
As for Law vs Chaos in my setting… that really doesn’t even touch the day to day lives of mortals. It’s basically a big cosmic concern that more accurately boils down to “Things of Creation or Things of the Primordial Chaos”.
As for playing in other people’s games, I’ll really only put down an alignment if forced. Otherwise I just think about what kind of person my character is rather than “do they as a rule follow any random rule they’ve heard of or not” which is a nonsensical standard for behavior or such. Can you imagine a paladin walking into a town that had declared it’s illegal not to be perfectly hairless and going along with that without any kind of reasonable explanation simply because they’re “lawful” and it’s not a question of good or evil? Because apparently a “lawful” character would, but few actual characters with actual personalities would actually go along with that.
And “good” and “evil” are entirely subjective outside of a rulebook saying “X thing is evil”. Which is still often pretty debatable. Mindless undead and baby goblins are somehow inherently evil while cats which kill things just for fun aren’t? That’s absurd. How can something without thoughts or life experience be “evil”? This gets even weirder when someone plays a character that’s a supposedly “evil” creature and, reasonably, elects not to be of evil alignment.
As a side-note, this viewpoint also means the idea of an “Antipaladin” makes no sense unless you’re somehow drawing divine power by refusing to respect any/all of the gods. Since otherwise an “evil” paladin is just a paladin who serves an “evil” god.
I’ve always found the old “paladins are lawful good” idea to make very little sense in what has always been settings with pantheons. I’m fairly certain Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena don’t entirely agree on what “good” and “evil” are.
I’m beginning to suspect that, in 3.X terms anyway, they settled on “orcs are always evil” as shorthand for “I don’t want to argue about this anymore.” In fact, I’ve got a Monte Cook blog post kicking around somewhere on my hard drive that says exactly that.
At the end of the day, I think “alignment as game mechanic” and “alignment as value judgement” are the thing in conflict here. The designers see interesting potential in the former while players are left to endlessly question the latter while all anyone really wants to do is kill a few monsters without going to debate club.
For the record though, your homebrew solution sound reasonable to me. It means you’ve got to reflavor a few things, but that’s what DMing is all about.
With the “lawful” argument, I’ve never understood that a lawful character always obeys the law. I see it that a lawful character believes that rules and structure are important in creating a prosperous society. They support the ideal of lawfulness and do somethings they don’t otherwise agree with to fit in with that, but that doesn’t mean that they will follow any law just because it’s there.
In the same way I see chaotic characters as holding value in ideals of liberty, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will then break as many laws as possible just for the hell of it.
The lawful phrase I’m most familiar with is from the Pathfinder paladin: she must “respect legitimate authority.” There’s some important wiggle room in there. The 5e palaind oaths are chock full of “try your best but don’t sweat it” language. As best I can figure, the game wants you to consider alignment without going nuts about it.
I don’t use “good vs evil” alignment, because there are too many cases where it is either arbitrary or subjective. In order for anything to work as a game mechanic, it needs to follow consistent and preferably absolute rules.
I like seeing how different people will react to being put in a tough situation, because it brings out the question of good, and we can see how subjective it is. Say that you know, with absolute certainty, that one of the orphan children in this room will become an evil overlord, under whose rule millions
of innocent people will suffer and die. One fireball can prevent it.
This scenario, while somewhat contrived, will lead to a beautiful discussion of ethics out of a game. But if we have “good” and “evil” as things in the world, then one of those choices must be the “more good” option. If the game mechanics are consistent, then whatever system of ethics we used to find the “good” must be objectively correct. The only other option is the “neutral” cop out, but if every tough decision is just neutral, regardless of the outcome, then “good” and “evil” could be replaced by “planar origin” to accomplish about the same effect.
Which bring me to how arbitrary the good/evil system is. “Necromancy is evil” is the best example here, because there is nothing evil about it. Some might say that it hurts the soul, but we know that the afterlife is a thing in d&d. After a dead person’s soul has been claimed by whichever god, do we really think a 3rd level spell is going to take precedence over the god’s will? Some other might say that I am creating an inherently violent creature, to which I say ‘so what’. A chainsaw is inherently violent too, but a tool has no morality. If I raise a skeleton and have it run a soup kitchen, how is that evil?
tldr; Good vs evil should sometime be a hard question, it shouldn’t always be clear cut. I replaced that axis of alignment with Self vs Others, because then it works in a consistent enough manner to be a game mechanic.
Seems like a fair replacement to me.
Would you rather future editions remove alignment entirely?
Given the baggage that alignment comes with, I’m inclined to say yes. I still occasionally get some people who use “CN” to justify being stupid, but I know that a player can portray a virtuous and steadfast paladin perfectly fine without “LG” written on their sheet.
That being said, I don’t mind having shorthand descriptors sometimes. I think that if they are going to act as game mechanics, though, then they should have full / proper documentation in the books.
Any thoughts on what a mechanically well-defined version of good an evil might look like?
This took some thinking, and I’m not sure if I can give a good answer. Philosophers have been looking for a rigorous definition for thousands of years, and I don’t think I can do much better. That being said, there are many well-defined ethical theories we could chose from to define good vs evil, but most that are easy enough to use at the table also have the occasional case where they get weird. I was thinking utilitarianism might work, because with divination magic we can actually see in advance if actions will serve a greater good, but people might take issue with greater good anyways. My other go-to ethical system is Kantian, which boils down to “do unto others and have good intent”, the problem here is that it has a much wider grey area, because in this system, because good is self-descriptive.
The other way I can see for implementing a good/evil system, that I think would work better in d&d, it to essentially just rename it to light/dark. As I complained about before, raising undead is not inherently evil, and calling it such is arbitrary and degrading to all the good necromancers out there in the world. I have no issue at all with saying that necromancy is dark magic though, because “dark” is essentially meaningless without context, and so it works well as an arbitrary descriptor (we could just as easily call this alignment axis “bacon”). We can, if we want, include a table in the book that gives examples of “light” actions and “dark” actions to set guidelines and also specific traits. This is a minimalist solution; it mostly just lets a well-meaning necromancer do their job without being called evil and getting attacked by every passing paladin.
I‘ve had to put together a little text for my players what I consider to be Good and Evil. With emphasis on the capital letters. Because I banned Evil PC‘s from my table. Especially the „lets burn down this forrest (home to fluffy, joyful creatures) for profit“ type of evil.
Some of the wishy washyness in the books may come from conflating good with Good. A good cleric of a capital E Evil god is very likely evil. The god saying „killing half that village was good“ does not make it Good.
“And lo did she stand upon the scales of Anubis, and her heart was weighed, and she was damned. So it was that, as the cleric’s soul went down to Ammit, there to be devoured and forever destroyed, she was all like, ‘I thought it was a typo! Your capitalization is weird! Aaaaiiieeee!'”
Well, I like the way 5th edition goes where the alignment is much more… Not. Paladins no longer detect evil, but outsiders, zombies, etc. The paladin doesn’t need to be lawful and/or neutral, so long as they follow a personal code. Many spells and other classes have gotten similar overhauls.
I also DM shadow of the Demon Lord, which doesn’t care about alignment. Not even a thing on the sheet.
It causes so many arguments online AND at the table, it’s not worth dealing with any more. Maybe I’m getting old, senile, but I don’t think alignment, morality as subjective as it is, has a place in my rpg. I’d rather characters don’t fall into the trap of “but I’m lawful, I can’t go along with that.”
I remember way back in a high school game, a freedom fighter type of NPC waylaid us on the road and asked us the join his group instead of the tyrant king who had hired us. To my everlasting shame, I actually said the words, “Alright everyone. Check your alignments.” The stalemate ended the session, and if memory serves the campaign.
I recently played a paladin in a 5e campaign. Had always wanted to try my hand at one, but the whole lawful good or bust thing always put me off. Now that I could be a Vengeance Paladin though I reveled in it. I followed the “by any means necessary” part of the tenets more than any others.
Batman paladin is best paladin.
Alignments in my games have slowly transmuted from classic Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic to something more resembling Selfless(Good)/Selfish(Evil) and Civilization(Law)/Barbarism(Chaotic).
I’ve also made Neutral play a larger role, acting more as a third point of a triangle than just the midpoint of a spectrum. Most actions are Neutral, being mutually beneficial, reciprocal, or non-confrontational.
The change is fairly subtle but it seems to ease alignment arguments and moral relativism at my table. It also makes it more effort to play a character as anything other than Neutral which is where most of the arguments take place.
The “third pole” of neutrality is interesting to me. Any examples of a three-way good, evil, neutral conflict?
A notable NPC is a Life Oracle who once was a normal woman with children and a loving family. She was possessed by a spirit of Good and quickly set out to balm the ills of the world leaving behind her family and giving away her possessions to anyone she meet becoming the archetypal traveling medicine woman.
If the PC’s encounter one of her children they will offer an reward for exorcising their mother so she will return home. The twist is that the child is getting the money from a disguised plague demon who doesn’t want a healer interfering with its plans.
The demon is obviously evil, but the child is ignorant of its true nature and only wish for their mom to stop hurting herself trying to help everyone and come home. Even if it means abandoning strangers to the whims of fate.
I wrote a long essay on this, which brought me to a new realization about the alignment grid. However I don’t know that anyone cares to read the thought process of me getting there, so I’ll put it in as a summary, here.
Basically, alignment shouldn’t be treated as a static grid. Rather, it’s a flow, running counterclockwise. Neither Good nor Evil is a singular ‘thing’. Rather, they are what defines the direction of the flow. They are the dynamism necessary to make the balance between Law and Chaos work.
LG ⇐ NG ⇐ CG
LN⇓ — N — CN⇑
LE ⇒ NE ⇒ CE
Good is the effort to move things towards order, law, and structured society, for the benefit of society. Since society defines what is good, by its very nature it sees that which moves towards a more well-structured society to be good, and that which moves away from that as evil. Thus the labels for those flow directions.
Breaking down society, and pushing it towards Chaos, is necessary for the proper cycle of the universe, particularly since there is no single “best” society or Lawful realm. You try, and try again, and try yet again, each time improving on the last attempt. But you can only keep trying by moving away from the last, and moving away is by definition Evil. You need to move towards Chaos before you can move towards Law again. At the same time, Chaos needs the stored potential of Law to keep it moving; otherwise it pools into a stagnant, flat-entropy universe.
Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral are the static alignments — the ones that sit on their laurels, as it were. They are preservationist in nature, in that they take known forms and strictly adhere to them, either in following a fixed code, or luxuriating in pure selfishness. The Neutral ends do not want to change. Good and Evil, however, require change.
One of the criticisms of Lawful alignment is that it’s static and brittle. Trying to see that from the perspective of the grid, it’s easy to see that when Lawful Good achieves its goals, it stagnates, and transitions to Lawful Neutral, which attempts to preserve things in their current state. Lawful Neutral, meanwhile, provides fertile ground for its own destruction by being unable to adapt, transitioning to Lawful Evil. Lawful Evil leads to the breakdown of the current Lawful ideal, pushing back towards Chaos. Evil evolves towards the independent, individual, selfish end of the spectrum, until it loops around to those who try to put something new together again.
This doesn’t solve the Paladin/Necromancer thing, though, which still runs headlong into “is” and “ought” discussions. It also still doesn’t explain why animating the dead is evil, except perhaps that the undead cannot contribute to society of their own will, or maybe that they contribute to the breakdown of (traditional) society in the same manner as automated machinery. “Robot skeletons are stealin’ our jobs!” Yeah, I could see that as following the Evil axis. Likewise for a society that has embraced the ‘sacred’ nature of a person’s remains. Violating that would disturb the established Lawful realm, and pushing away from Law is by definition Evil.
So spells that are defined as Evil require an assumed Lawful realm that doesn’t wish to change. The only real problem is the rules defined for the Paladin that penalizes him for associating with Evil. The only way that works is because the deity is so short-sighted that he/she cannot allow the natural cycles of the universe to advance — which would actually not be that surprising, all things considered. People don’t like change, but gods really don’t like change.
What do you mean by the Paladin/Necromancer thing running “headlong into ‘is’ and ‘ought’ discussions?” I’m having a little trouble getting a concrete hold on that point. Any examples?
The Is-Ought problem is the foundation of a large portion of arguments in ethical theory. Check the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
As a simple summary: “Hume calls for caution against such inferences [that ‘is’ implies ‘ought’] in the absence of any explanation of how the ought-statements follow from the is-statements.”
In this particular case, Paladin says that necromancy ‘is’ evil, and thus ‘ought’ to be avoided/purged/punished/etc. Necromancer, meanwhile, views necromancy as her toolkit (‘is’), and thus ‘ought’ to be used to solve problems that it’s appropriate to.
It’s an interesting problem to think about, and I’ve wondered on occasion whether a formal ethicist perspective could improve the game. What do you think? Would the game improve if the core rulebook had a more scholarly explanation of the alignment system?
I feel like Necromancer made a decision to oppose Paladin as a means to retain a little of her dignity, and chooses to be (ostensibly) Neutral Evil to reject Paladin’s identity as the embodiment of Good. Not committed to evil for evil’s sake, or out of apathy for the wellbeing of others as a whole, just as a denouncement of Paladin’s apparent ideal. I think she would get along with Rogue (who does what she does for her own benefit, but isn’t evil aligned) but still probably not with Fighter (who’s a dick by anyone’s measurement). It’s more like Neutral Vengeful rather than Neutral Wicked.
So…I guess, if we mean ‘elemental’ as in ‘a tangible concept vital to intelligent existence’ then yeah, sure, why not have there be a bunch of Hells and Demon Pits. It’s certainly not Elemental in the way that Water and Earth are elemental…those are objects with discrete states. Ma’ti was really pushing it with Heart.
It seems that rather than forcing the concept of Evil into a set of behaviors, we take the example of a certain creature type (Demons and Devils) as the label for Evil: The Things We Don’t Want Done To Ourselves. Some people see what they do and actively strive to undo or mitigate or counter those. We can call that Good: The Things We’d Like Done To Ourselves.
And the people that don’t involve themselves, out of apathy or a perception of balance, we simply call Neutral.
Unfortunately, Paladin set a bad example for Good, so it’s pretty natural that Necromancer would reject that behavior and choose to be it’s opposition, Evil. This doesn’t make Paladin directly responsible for her alignment shift, as it’s a choice made of her own accord, but his oversight and intolerance absolutely contributed. Since the Gods (and/or DM) generally have an all encompassing view of the situation when they care to look at it from on high, this isn’t ‘fall’ territory, but Paladin deserves a sternly worded celestial letter and an archon giving him a disapproving frown.
Also, I vote Assassin. That’d definitely be more dynamic in terms of character interplay, moreso than ‘That guy, but opposite.’ (You really missed your chance to roll out Antipaladin when you did the goatee panel, sad to say)
I think you mean Rouge. We haven’t really seen her alignment yet:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unconventional-mount
😛
I kind of want to run a kineticist that shoots people with alignment-based blasts now. “Eat room temperature neutrality, scum!”
Stooooop confusing me, I had a hard enough time with Rog…oh crap, I -did- mean Thief, didn’t I? I have way too much trouble with that. Cripes.
I thought Rouge was the eidolon, though? I was very careful not to misspell that, at least.
Well you said ‘Rogue,’ so I assumed you misspelled ‘Rouge.’ I mean, how the heck would you mean to type ‘Thief’ and wind up with ‘Rogue?’ That’s an epic typo!
:3
Edit: BRB. Turning Rogue/Rouge/Thief confusion into a script.
It should be mentioned BTW that the name “Temple of Elemental Evil” is formed using a postpositive construction and is more properly a Temple of Evil Elementals
So you can tell that I’ve never actually played, eh? I always assumed that there were evil ingots or a river of evil or maybe an evil fruit tree down there. Sad times.
I think that if good and evil have concrete existence in a setting then they should be treated as things that have concrete existence. There could be people in the world who study things like “High-Energy Metaphysics” and “Experimental Hamartiology”.
In fact, here’s an excerpt of some of my responses to a thread on Giant In The Playground about magical treatises and books that might be on a wizard or cleric’s bookshelf:
*Experiments in Practical Hamartiology
*Acceleration of Karmic Particles by Means of Prayer
*The Physical Biology of the Soul
*Metaphysical Chemistry
*Pataphysical Chemistry
*On The Elementary Quanta of Matter and Spirit
*The Technical Writing Edda
*Particle Metaphysics
*Principles of High Energy Metaphysics
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?483064-What-s-on-the-Shelf-1001-Essays-Treatises-and-Books-on-Magic
Well then. That was an awesome thread.
I just realized that the Witch is kind of standing on her cloak as well as her own hair.
If HoH could somehow have blooper reels, I feel like this scene would have lead to two or three of them.
Necromancer flubs her line as mascara gets in her eye.
The word-balloon wrangler is called to task for covering up the skull and crossbones smoke.
Break for lunch while some poor PA has to run out and buy more double-sided tape.
Etc.
Alignments are a relic of the past, best discarded for something that is not so subjective and vague in terms. Character Traits and Beliefs.
Argue all you want, but there are objective definitions to greed, charitable, kind, envious, zealous, cynical, brave, craven, honest, deceitful, trusting, paranoid, patient and wroth.
Or heck, just stick with Traits, Bonds, and Flaws. The only good thing alignment ever did (aside from enforce genre tropes and mark some monsters as not OK to kill) was force people to put a bare minimum of thought into their characters’ inner lives.
I ignore alignment when possible. And it’s possible a lot of the time.
Most of the groups I’ve played with, alignment was a footnote on the character sheet and nothing more. Other times, there was debates on what did and didn’t apply to one alignment or another. My personal opinion? I’ve spent time looking into alternatives and methods to replace it that wouldn’t almost completely require a good portion of the rules and spells and classes to be rewritten, so I’d rather just try an alternative. Alignment is my least favorite part of the system, really.
“Elemental evil” sounds forced, characters might not “know” their alignment but if it’s an absolute “thing” measured by some outside force then they should at least be aware of a 2×2 they’re likely in, because they know how they act and probably know what those actions are. Even if the characters don’t know, it’s a measure for the player to help track the general idea of the character’s response, more than something for the character to know