Evil party quite good; Good party just... terrible

[ErgoBibamus]

I've run two campaigns with virtually the same group over the past six months. In one campaign, their party was led by a Paladin and worked to uncover a secret organization weakening planar bindings to ultimately allow a cult of shadow fanatics to permanently overlay the material plane with the plane of shadow.

In the other campaign, the party was led by a NE mortician necromancer of Urgathoa working to con and kill their way into power with the end goal of over throwing the deities and turning all mortal kind to permanent undeath.

Here's the thing though...

Party #1 was responsible for: burning down a forest, sending hired adventurers into a suicide attack on the sixth level of hell, murdering a squad of guardsmen, permanently blinding a group of priests, and starting a brawl in a brothel after refusing payment for a six-hour "servicing."

Party #2 was responsible for: hunting down and clearing bandits from around a small town, uncovering an evil orc army and alerting local paladin orders in time to save a small city, and clearing evil forces out of a critical fort guarding a much needed trade route.

Party #1 was working at all times for "the greater good" as they saw it. Party #2 was working at all times out of purely rational self-interest and self-centered pursuit of power (both treasure and political influence).

Have any of you ever noticed that Good doesn't always serve "right" and Evil doesn't always lead to "bad" outcomes? How have you adjudicated role-playing alignment when things get grey?

[DM Nate]

Sounds like being "Good" is a rationalization for quite a lot of behavior.

{{scrubbed}}

[Ravian]

Seems like the good party feels like they don't have to try as hard, and are a little murder hoboish. It's not uncommon for a party to feel like they have more of a blank check on their actions because of "The Greater Good" and the label under the alignment line. The evil group meanwhile are acting purely rationally, and are likely given to not try and reveal themselves as evil to the NPCs.

Sounds to me you need to tell the good party that they can't just wave their alignment around like a badge to do whatever they want. Besides which, I've always felt the guy who did bad things for "The Greater Good" was at best neutral. You should definitely try to knock them down a few pegs if they keep it up. (Not to mention I'm pretty sure at least half of those actions would cause a Paladin to fall.)

[Slipperychicken]

It's not uncommon for a party to feel like they have more of a blank check on their actions because of "The Greater Good" and the label under the alignment line.

This is one of many reasons I favor banning alignment entirely. If someone wants to demonstrate that his character is fundamentally a good person, he should need to point to that character's actions, not to two letters on a sheet.

[Inevitability]

'The Greater Good' isn't inheritely Good. If anything, it's Lawful; justifying your actions by comparing them to the bigger picture. In this case, the 'good' party would probably be Lawful Neutral/Evil, while the 'evil' party seems more like Chaotic Neutral to me.

[Sith_Happens]

Alignment is an effect, not a cause. Based solely on the information provided, both parties should have been told by now that theirs have changed (and that Paladin should have fallen several times over).

[awa]

I don't entirely agree good and evil are not balanced saving 1 orphan does not balance out killing 1 orphan.

So if a serial killer likes saving people to throw the cops of his trail he does not stop being a serial killer and he doesn't stop being evil

[jedipotter]

Good has a huge amount of bias against it in a RPG. Just take the most basic idea, the idea that some published settings are built on: the PC's are the only good guys around. So whenever evil does anything, only the PC's can do anything. There are no good groups, orders of knights or anyone good that can do anything. Evil does not have this problem. The world is full of tons and tons and tons of evil.


And there is often a lot of DM Bias: lots of DM's make being good hard...but make evil easy. Good is all full of can't and can't and can't, while evil is just ''do whatever you want''. How much of the stuff the good group did on porpoise, and how much did the DM do? Take blinding the priests. Did the good guys say ''lets go blind some priests'' or was it more like the DM says ''you open the orb of light...and the secret curse..shoots out blinding light..and all the NPC's go blind!'' Same way did they set out to burn down a forest or was it ''the fireball goes wild and hits a couple trees and...starts a forest fire!'' And it's not like the evil group did any good. They killed bandits and evil castle folk.

But in any case, D&D is an action adventure game, so both groups will do mostly the same things: combat, kill monsters, kill foes, destroy things. You can't compare: good is ''feeding the hungry'' and evil is ''killing a monster''.

[emeraldstreak]

One thing you have to understand about Evil: Evil spends 90% of its time fighting rival Evil, and only 10% fighting Good.

[Erik Vale]

Why did they burn down the forest? Where the Guards corrupt/other? And priests of what gods doing what? Done in broad strokes good is sounding very evil, but they could be exonerated. If the Adventurers knew it was a suicide mission and it was to accomplish something, not just kill them off, then there is no evil, and the Brothel is more Chaotic than Evil.

And Yes, Evil party sounds good... but they need to get in power first, and that's harder to do if you can't get someone to like you, and if you do it right, you don't risk betrayal at every corner.

[stitchlipped]

I am in an evil campaign where we have done practically no evil things - but we are evil to the core, we're just smart enough to realise advertising it to the world would be unwise. Many of our actions are therefore to better the lives of the people around us, as the more they like us, and take their eyes off us, the more we can get away with when it comes time to pursue our selfish goals.

Meanwhile in our group's good campaign we have done a few questionable things - but mainly because the GM makes it so hard to be good, so I agree with a previous poster on that one.

[Telok]

Heh, when my guys play DnD they have almost no tactics, no plans, can't cooperate, and friendly fire each other regularly. When we play Paranoia I see planning, tactics, cooperation, and surprisingly few friendly fire incidents.

In Paranoia they accomplish missions quickly and almost efficently. In DnD they take two week long side trips to murder people who might have some money.

[Ettina]

The Evil team could still be evil, as long as they had the right motivations for what they did. The Good team probably isn't really good.

[Tengu_temp]

Party #1 really sucks at being good. It's not a case of "sometimes evil is better than good" or other cynical bullcrap, these people are just bad at living up to the alignments they're supposed to have. They think they're good, but they're not.

[Dycize]

Let's just look at those faults the good party made :
1/ burning down a forest : unless they blatanly threw a torch at the trees, they're probably not fully responsible, or maybe didn't even realise it ("I cast flammable sphere!" "Well now the forest is on fire." "Oh crap we're in a forest I forgot.")
2/ sending hired adventurers into a suicide attack on the sixth level of hell : that... Sounds rather worrying, and I wonder what lead to hiring people for a trip to hell. Unless they were completely aware this was suicide, this needs more context.
3 /murdering a squad of guardsmen : again, context, but this sounds the most like the no-no that should have geared them at least to neutral.
4/ permanently blinding a group of priests : context! we're just gonna assume those priests were not evil, but then how do you blind a group of people permanently?!
And 5/ starting a brawl in a brothel after refusing payment for a six-hour "servicing." : okay, that one is just "what the heck were they thinking" territory. On an adventure to save the world, and you're going to spend 6 hours getting serviced and not paying? Then picking a fight? What?!

If anything, your party sounds like they suffer from a case of murderhoboism, where killing stuff is an acceptable solution and what's the rules for non-lethal damage already. You'd think they are different people from Party #2. Also there's quite a bit of emphasis on #1's mistakes and #2's achievements.
And if the games were ran with Party #1, then ended and Party#2 started, your players may have just gotten more savvy from the 1st experience. It just sounds like there's a strange switch in mindset when they went evil.

[Segev]

I think this expresses something that stems from the same source as the dichotomy of action you're seeing:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The good party felt they were the heroes. Their actions not just justified, but just. Perhaps they were making a hard decision that had to be made in burning down the forest (we could use some clarification on most of these incidents to know why they did what they did).

The evil party were pragmatists, seeking to achieve maximum gain for themselves while making as few enemies as possible. Well-played evil PCs will often look this way, with their "evil" coming out only in small ways, or at key moments where they take the pragmatic step. Not to burn down the forest, but to murder the guards so the party doesn't have to deal with legal repercussions, perhaps.

The motives of the evil party should be somewhat revelatory, as well.

There's a reason rational self-interest is held up as a good thing by many people; it does NOT encourage wanton harm to others, but rather fair and honest dealing and a "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" attitude, precisely because it is rational to sow seeds of goodwill to reap the harvest in the future. Rational self-interest doesn't know an alignment, honestly; an evil man can exhibit it for all his own selfish reasons, while a neutral one will live it because he cares mostly about himself and his family even if he doesn't WANT to cause harm to others and would avoid it except in dire need. Even a good man can easily live by rational self-interest. It is in his rational interest to help others both because his generous soul feels better doing it, and because, like the evil man engaging in philanthropy, he can reap the harvest of goodwill in the future when he needs it. Whereas the evil man will be abusing it later on, the good man will only use it for the right reasons, and will sometimes see it multiply where the evil man had to expend it.

But in all cases, rational self-interest tends to lead to what looks like good behavior, at least under most conditions. It's one of the reasons I tend to think that we have secular evidence for objective morality: those things which are "good" generally can be shown to be efficient and fruitful behaviors, and you tend to see patterns in nearly ever non-degenerate culture's moral codes. (A degenerate culture is easy to identify: it is one which is failing or is only succeeding by feeding parasitically off of others and would swiftly die out without the slave/prey culture to drain. Raider cultures tended to be this way, and only those which developed codes of honor and respect survived; they'd tapped into the moral codes which allow other cultures to succeed.)

In a D&D sense, one could attempt to classify rational self-interest as Lawful, but it needn't be. It can be a loose set of principles around which a chaotic person defines his life choices, as well. The rationally self-interested chaotic individual will be less concerned about the letter of an agreement and more about his reputation for honesty and fair dealing and getting the job done and done right. He will rely on others' ability to appreciate a whole context when he feels he must break a deal; he isn't prone to doing so just on a random whim, but he'll not feel bound to it if the context changes to the point that it's not a fair deal anymore. Likewise, because he expects others to treat him this way, he will tend to be lenient and willing to forgive somebody doing their best when a deal's context changes to make it unfair to the other side, as well.

The CG person does this out of generosity, and is more likely to hold himself to it if it is crucial to somebody else. But still will often justify, "bah, he can afford it, and it's no longer fair to me. Though I might be able to get him to pay more for the original deal now..." The CN person is going to think of it less in terms of how badly the other side needs it. That is, he considers how far it is TO HIM, and then, if he thinks the other side needs it badly enough, he'll renegotiate for a more fair result and back out of he doesn't like what they have to offer in the new context. The CE person will be ruthless in his dealmaking, but his rational self-interest still will cause him to pause and consider allowing the other side to weasel out if they can't do it. He just will want something...else...in exchange. Remember, the CE person is only caring about his reputation, here, not about the other guy, nor about keeping the bargain for the bargain's sake. He's not going to worry about "exact words," but about how the whole context is perceived, and part of his reputation is "powerful enough to not be messed with."

This isn't to be confused with the renegotiations that Lawful types perform. Where the CE guy will allow renegotiation, the LE guy is going to drive a hard bargain and require everything in detailed writing. The CE guy is prone to "changing the deal" where the LE one is going to exploit every loophole mercilessly. Both, if rationally self-interested, will see value in allowing the deal to change...for the right price. But the CE one is far more interested in the spirit of the agreement, both before and after any changes.

Strangely, it's the CE one who might come off as more easily dealt with, here, in some cases. "This wasn't the bargain; you owe me all of this, too!" "Yeah, well that was before we knew what all of this was! You can have this part; it's what's key to your plans, anyway, but the new deal is that you leave the rest of this alone! Take it or leave it." The CE guy is, provided he doesn't find the prospect of the fight to take it all worth the risk of damaging or losing what's still on the table, is far more likely to laugh and accept, making a show of magnanimity for his reputation's sake (if nothing else). The LE guy feels bound by the agreement, even now, and will attempt to hold the other side to it. To change the agreement would require a full renegotiation, with new terms and fully-stated exchanges of rights to the old agreement.

In a way, it's in the LE guy's rational self-interest to "leave it," even losing what's on the table, in favor of preserving his reputation as fully honorable and orderly...and then send forces based on his rights in the contract to extract what he wants by other means.