Application of philosophy in a D&D game?

[Thealtruistorc]

I am a person who likes his media to be rather cerebral in nature, and D&D is no exception. I like to try and tie my campaigns or characters into philosophical ideas and concepts, but that frequently goes over the heads of the other players. One example from a recent adventure was a homebrew monster that was meant to be symbolic of the modernistic idea of man's natural inhumanity towards man, but that just resulted in the party complaining about it being to hard to kill (missing the point, I suppose). Another instance occurred when I created an Antipaladin character built upon Camus-style absurdism and 50s-era societal opposition (I named him Holden, after the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye). Of course, people took him to be just another rabid-evil antipaladin.

Do you folks ever try and illustrate philosophical concepts through your characters and actions in D&D? I'm curious to know how often you folks go beyond simple escapism with your gaming.

[Snowbluff]

Um, pretty much constantly. I'm expecting about 90% of what's going on in my game to go over Kele's, Elric's, and Eggy's heads, philosophical or not. :smalltongue:

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Thealtruistorc
One example from a recent adventure was a homebrew monster that was meant to be symbolic of the modernistic idea of man's natural inhumanity towards man, but that just resulted in the party complaining about it being to hard to kill….

This quote is just priceless. If I ever start having a sig, this goes on the short list.

:smallbiggrin:



I think you know that your players aren't going to get any of this. Your description suggests your players wouldn't know a modernistic symbol if it hit them over the head, which it probably did a number of times while they were trying to kill it.

I learned long ago that it takes a special calibre of player to even engage meaningfully with in-character philosophical issues, much less apply any sort of meta-analysis to the DM's choice of creature in context of the story arc. It sounds like you're not working with that kind of player, so might be better to ease off on the inscrutable subtext.

[Snowbluff]

This quote is just priceless. If I ever start having a sig, this goes on the short list.

:smallbiggrin: I'm surprised he had to homebrew one. You fight an aberration in one of the PF modules that's pretty much an evil orgy or something. Our whole team was pretty creeped out.




I learned long ago that it takes a special calibre of player to even engage meaningfully with in-character philosophical issues, much less apply any sort of meta-analysis to the DM's choice of creature in context of the story arc. It sounds like you're not working with that kind of player, so might be better to ease off on the inscrutable subtext.

Well, there's not really a reason to take it ease for any other reason beyond saving the effort. If it clicks with the party at a certain point, it'd be a good thing if you at least put in the effort to at least be consistent.

[NoseFeratu]

I encourage my players to give me any philosophy books they may be reading- That way, I always know what they'd understand. Of course, as a nihilist myself, I tend to push a bit more of Also Sprach Zarathustra than anything else. It makes for an enriching experience on both sides of the table, and if you're in the mood for in-character debates about the meaning of life (beyond getting psycho), I'd suggest reading lots of Nietzsche.

[Telonius]

I like to sprinkle the game with a few moral dilemmas (whether or not there are any Paladins in it). Otherwise I've never gotten too much into philosophical representations. I'd be kind of concerned the players would try to argue that ranged combat doesn't work due to Zeno's Paradox, or that they could argue Asmodeus into nonexistence based on Descartes' Evil Genius argument.

[Ken Murikumo]

Yeah, i tried a silent hill style campaign (modern level 1, zero leveling up, just surviving a session gave you 1 point to add to whatever).

It was awesome at first. I didn't tell the players it was a silent hill campaign, just a modern at level one. I emphasized being real people surrounded by tragedy, not murder-hobos. I made them write decent back-stories with specific criteria: 5 key points of the characters life, an addiction, and the intentional/unintentional cause of somebody else's death or something equivalent in dramatic magnitude. I then gave each of them another 5 key points of there life, ones they have no control over (much like real life). I also emphasized not sharing any details outside of game. All info they learned about each other was by roleplaying. It kept them untrustworthy of each other and made them think before opening up, ie: did Rob really want to tell Jon he worked as a hitman in his younger days. To top it all off, i had connected there back stories, like: the person Rob killed was Jon's employer and he was fired because the firm sank and Jon took his rage out on the co-founder, who was not at fault and was related related to another character, where it all circled around to the the gang related murder of Rob's son who sank into depression because of it. With this wealth of character info, i crafted 3 creatures for each player that represented and highlighted their negative points, based on what they told me. They each also had boss monsters (like pyramid head from sh2) that represented there own greatest inner demon. All actions in the game would reflect whether they could escape or would be trapped in a recurring nightmare.

It started very philosophical at first. when they realized they were trapped, they wondered if it was religious based or they were being punished by something. Killing the creatures made the sick and uneasy (a game mechanic i added, along with a fear and sanity system) and some of them felt familiar, like they were connected to the creatures in some way. Eventually the cat was out of the bag and the players realized it was a silent hill thing. Things went ...ok for a few sessions and it eventually turned into: lets watch one player kill every monster we encounter and now were bored.

[Kazyan]

I'm a usually a very straightforward DM. If there's a philosophical point to be made, it will not be subtle. Usually, my games are just escapism, rolling dice, and steering the players towards something interesting.

[gorfnab]

Here you go: Existential Comics #23 (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/23)

http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/dungeonsAndDragons.jpg

[BWR]

I like my D&D philosophy to be of the Planescape variety: you argue vehemently ideas you don't really understand and bash eachother's heads in when they disagree.

I could totally go for games (http://dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dungeons-and-discourse/) like these (http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/), however.

[KillingAScarab]

I like to sprinkle the game with a few moral dilemmas (whether or not there are any Paladins in it). Otherwise I've never gotten too much into philosophical representations. I'd be kind of concerned the players would try to argue that ranged combat doesn't work due to Zeno's Paradox, or that they could argue Asmodeus into nonexistence based on Descartes' Evil Genius argument.In other words, your players would want Dungeons & Discourse (http://dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dungeons-and-discourse/) or ADnDis (http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/).

Edit: Ninja'd due to enjoying Tiny Carl Jung (https://twitter.com/tinycarljung).

[NichG]

Yeah, I do this kind of thing, but its generally at the campaign level rather than in the form of specific philosophical expys. I think if things are too specific or short-lived, you don't have that much time to get across a very complex idea to people who aren't familiar with it and won't get the references. Thats why your anti-paladin is just another anti-paladin. But if you have a recurring theme over a number of games, the players can actually put things together and start to figure out things about your campaign as a whole, and in the process explore the idea.

This kind of thing is actually a pretty good self-test to see whether you understand a idea deeply, or simply recognize its importance through the works of others. If you can understand the underlying reasons for why a particular idea is compelling, then you can set up situations or scenarios which explore those underpinnings and within which the players will draw their own conclusions and formulate their own philosophies.

The other thing that's fun to do is to take advantage of games as a form of what-if. There are things which we either know are true from a small set of axioms, or which are just imposed by the world. So you can relax some of those constraints and re-imagine a universe without them - then try to see if you can get it to still end up making sense. Usually such things have a breaking point, because you're building them in a non-self-consistent way, but the inconsistency lives out in a very abstract space so its often hard to actually find, or may not even come up at all over the course of a campaign. Case in point, I ran a campaign where the premise was 'only what people remember is real', with a cast of amnesiacs. The PCs discovered that by causing themselves to recover bits of their memories, they were actually able to change the past (or more specifically, they could use the present to constrain the possible pasts and thereby choose the past they wanted to have). In the long run, that dynamic was eventually going to create an inconsistency where two such things couldn't both be made true - but over the course of the campaign, it wasn't an issue.

[Anlashok]

Yes, but usually within the context of the game itself or on a campaign level. A homebrew monster "symbolic of the modernistic idea of man's natural inhumanity towards man" sounds more obnoxious than thought provoking and is too meta for my tastes. You're not really applying philosophy to D&D at that point, you're just using D&D as a pretext to push whatever it is you're looking to push.

I guess it does kind of make "Grappling with the tough questions" take on a whole new and interesting meaning. Make sure to give those monsters Constrict.

[daremetoidareyo]

I would consider myself a cerebral DM as well, but I do something far different. I remove the Judeo-Christian morality from the game. Nothing is evil, just self interested. Then, I craft campaigns that wind up pitting the PCs into a place where they have to make moral decisions, where there are more than one "right-true way." That way, it is the PCs who wind up making the philosophical statements and premises. So, like that webcomic above, imagine if Foucault was DM instead.

PCs are commissioned by elves to run a village of orcs out of the edge of the forest, where they have been felling some trees. If PCs just attack with no reconnaissance, just let them slaughter. If PCs investigate, or god forbid approach the orcs, they will see that their leader is a half-orc who has discovered a fish that can literally eat any organic matter and grows to huge sizes in a just a couple weeks. They have dug aquaculture pits and are building a village. The leader wants peace with the elves so he can focus on exterminating the dwarves of the nearby mountain stronghold, with whom he has ancient beef. This leader has to routinely squash insurrections of his group and fields accusations that he is betraying gruumsh almost daily. He reasons that gruumsh, if he really cares about the orcs, would rather that they, as a race, should build rather than scavenge. The resolution isnt planned out, the PCs need to figure out how to manage the situation; do they exterminate the orcs for the elves, do they broker a peace treaty, do they tip off the dwarves? I don't know. What would your PCs do?

An Ur priest has hired a bard to stand in the village square and talk about how the gods power is derived from the people. So in a very real way, it is we who create the gods. If we all turn away from them, the sentient races of the world will be free. The local priesthoods of multiple religions are looking to kill this urpriest and bard for his heresy. The Ur priest is a CN radical, and if PCs don't stop him here, eventually he begins blowing up churches and using magic items to set up illusions of orators claiming that the gods are powerless to stop these "tragedies" without making the people do the dirty work. The PCs are hired by religious organization to find this guy and track his movements for a few days so that an ambush can be set up by an elite squad of clerics/archivists. What are they gonna do?

Anyways, I find that the biggest rewards are in what the PCs teach you, not what you teach PCs. Even if they aren't feeling the deconstruction of D&D reasoning, they are signalling to you that they prefer the pre-ordained morality. Then you start throwing really weird shades of grey borderline cases at them: Demon possessed child, no way to get rid of this particular demon without killing the child. Elves and halflings are fighting over turf and each side has grown more and more feral, committing acts of undeniable evil directed at each other, to the point where it is hard to distinguish the "good side" of each group, though the individuals of each race are good people who feel entitled to the limited resource that sits between them. Even your meanest hacknslasher finds nuance in these situations and finds some way to sew it all up.

[Elder_Basilisk]

I'm voting that the original poster was just trolling. Seriously, a monster symbolic of man's inhumanity to man? That's just obnoxious. (Also, there is little need for symbolism--most D&D adventures are straightforwardly about man's inhumanity to man. The evil overlord? Yeah, he's a man (or woman) being inhuman to other humans. Shocking).

That said, I think there is an interesting intersection of D&D with philosophy in actualizing thought experiments much in the same way that Quentin Tarrentino does in many of his films. (Pulp fiction contains at least two: you are a bad man and have an inexplicable experience (an enemy missing six shots at point blank range) that could be attributed to divine intervention or coincidence--how do you respond? Your enemy is taken to the basement by a pair of sadistic rapists, do you rescue him?; Inglorious Bastards centers around the question: is it worth letting a wicked man go free/unpunished in order to kill Hitler and save a lot of lives). One adventure I wrote focused on a question: should you sell a powerful magic weapon to someone who is probably a bad guy if he'll pay you more for it than anyone else? And, does it make a difference if you already committed to the sale before you found out what a bad guy he is?

Of course, if you try to instantiate actual philosophical thought experiments in the game, you will probably find that players do their best to break them. That, in itself is philosophically interesting and demonstrates that most of the thought experiments even in professional philosophy papers are highly contrived, unrealistic, and overdetermined. (Both Hodgson's thought experiment regarding Jim, the South American Death Squad, and the Indians and the so-called Parable of the Fat Man both come to mind).

[VariSami]

While I agree wit Elder_Basilisk on the possibility that the original post may be intentionally exaggerated, the topic itself is interesting. A student of philosophy by trade, I must admit that there some of my campaigns may have contained inquiries into the principles of metaphysics and ethics. Personally, I enjoy taking D&D's assumptions at face value and seeing the results, then adding a twist. My favorite example of this would likely be a scenario I DM'd last summer:

The child (or something of her stature) of a single father who lives near a village hidden in the depths of a marsh has been spotted wandering at night. Not only this, there were marks of a giant brute having followed her. When the party locates the house of this family, they find out that the father has died and arisen as a ghost. After this ghost of the man tasks the players with finding his daughter, they find her having a tea party in the depths of the marsh with a cloaked figure and an ogre. The truth of the matter? The girl had died long since from the abuse and neglect she suffered under her father. Back then, she arose as a Slaymate (see Libris Mortis). Her company consists of the animated and awakened remains of an ogre warrior and her now dead father. (She had looted his laboratory for the necessary magic items to accomplish this feat.) The zombie created from her father's body lacks wits and can barely speak but seems to have become a caring father figure for the girl, one the actual father never was while alive. The ogre is a gentle protector despite bearing all the ruggedness of a brutish ogre warrior which it must have been while alive. Really, the idea is not all that complicated: what is the relation of identity between a disembodied spirit and an intelligent undead entity into which the spirit's body has become? As a last twist, the party soon after encounters another ghost in their dreams: the soul of the little girl, with the appearance of the young woman she might have become, had she not died prematurely. Having already associated the identity of the girl with the Slaymate they first encountered, this case brings another angle in play. Nothing too complicated but eery and, from what I hear, thought-provoking.

[Zanos]

Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and agree that the original premise seems...questionable. I don't mind a bit of moral quandary in my RPGs, but a direct expy of a very specific philosophical concept would probably be lost on anyone that wasn't a philosophy major. I can almost imagine someone tsking and criticizing the uncultured swine for their ignorance of the finer intellectual pursuits.

[Bohandas]

Thought about incorporating philosophy, but never got the chance because I haven't been able to find a gaming group since college.

I think a lot of discordian philosophy would pair well with the Planescape setting

[Eisfalken]

Here's problem #1 with this concept: philosophy means different things to different people. Your symbolism is destroyed by the fact that those other people either misinterpret it, or correctly interpret it and simply utterly reject it as valid.

Let's pretend I'm a person who thinks abusrdism is a pedantic philosophy for terminally depressed or insane people. I might destroy your embodiment of philosophy as being intellectually devoid of significant meaning. In fact, you may say that my ruthless destruction without comment of your "symbol" is itself a philosophical statement: I reject your premise and everything about it, give my XP and treasure for being a fool.

Does that make you feel good or bad for me to reject that premise? Doesn't matter. Not. One. Bit.

Because you see, problem #2 exists: you don't appear to have discussed any of this "philosophical exploration" with your players. You presented them with a monster that they know NOTHING about, then somehow actually expected them to divine some semi-mythical "meaning" out of the creature?

That was stupid. The PCs don't care about sitting at a table for hours trying to figure out what was on your mind when you made that opponent. They're worried about overcoming the challenge it represents. You created a combat mook instead of a puzzle. What in the world did you actually expect to happen, tea and crumpets with a talk about existentialism? All that makes you look like is pretentious, not deep. They overcame your challenge. If you're unhappy about that, that's on you, not them.

But don't think that I'm only here to chastise a flawed premise. You want them to confront philosophical concepts? You need to embody the specific concepts, not the abstract body of them.

If I was to make a statement on absurdism, I'd have a monster that has a strong attack, but does less damage to divine and arcane spellcasters (i.e. belief in the transcendental, which is actually a physical reality in D&D), and less damage every round that passes without someone attacking it (i.e. acceptance of the absurd for what it is, which stops having the power to hurt you); you could even say that hitting it triggers fast healing, but not hitting it causes automatic (increasing) damage per round. Once the PCs kind of figure it out ("don't attack it and it becomes a non-threat"), you reward them for defeating it. There, I just created something that kind of makes them think about it at least a little: why did casters have no threat to begin with, why accepting its attacks make them hurt less, etc.

There is nothing wrong with a sideways-thinking challenge like that one above. In fact, that's the kind of stuff that D&D was partially built on, otherwise it is literally nothing more than a tactical wargame with fantasy draped over it so nobody sees us jacking it to rolling dice and adding up numbers. It's the kind of challenge that stumps munchkins who think they have all the answers, and rewards role-players who like challenges that aren't just "roll initiative, roll attack, roll damage x1,000,000".

But if you ever hope to present that kind of challenge, it is helpful not to delude yourself into thinking that your players are capable of reading your intentions. I know you don't want to hear this, but it is best in most cases to dumb this crap down to a basic level, with a few subtle things thrown in as a reward for the smart guys at the table. If you actually have to sit there and explain what a given philosophy is to anyone at the table, STOP. DON'T. Just say, "It's this philosophy thing, you can Google it later," and move on with life.


P.S. Seriously, you actually named an NPC Holden?! Jesus Hubbard Christ, have you got any possible idea how ridiculously redundant allusions to that novel have been for at least the past 25 years? Why don't you just go down to the bookstore and get a copy, then duct tape it to a baseball bat, and just beat the hell out of everyone who gives you a blank stare about something you did they can't quite figure out. That'd still be more subtle than naming an NPC Holden. More original, too, since you'll be factually beating the subject matter into your audience.

[Inevitability]

Tales of Wyre (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?58227-Tales-of-Wyre) should probably be mentioned here. It starts off with a paladin trying to redeem a succubus, which of course raises all kinds of philosophical questions. As the story progresses, philosophy and religion get more and more connected to the main plot.

[ThisIsZen]

Tales of Wyre (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?58227-Tales-of-Wyre) should probably be mentioned here. It starts off with a paladin trying to redeem a succubus, which of course raises all kinds of philosophical questions. As the story progresses, philosophy and religion get more and more connected to the main plot.

Sepulchrave is legitimately the ideal towards which I try to craft myself as a DM. Wyre is such a good read, very much suggested to anyone who hasn't yet.

[Seto]

Tales of Wyre (http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?58227-Tales-of-Wyre) should probably be mentioned here. It starts off with a paladin trying to redeem a succubus, which of course raises all kinds of philosophical questions. As the story progresses, philosophy and religion get more and more connected to the main plot.

Yeah. This is an awesome game. (Though philosophically more on the mystical than cerebral side).

Philosophy is my major, so of course I pretty much inject it into everything to some degree. D&D is no exception. My players are brainy-types as well, so if I feel like my philosophical easter-eggs go too unnoticed, we discuss them post-session.
However, my focus is the narrative. Philosophy, dilemmas, and metaphors are the icing on the cake. Thinking, representing and deconstructing concepts ; that's secondary to having a fun game and a compelling narrative experience. I'd rather have a simple engaging game than an brilliantly-built metaphor of society that's actually boring to play in.

Last example to date, the party fought a Necromancer. (The session was designed as a strategic battle). When they defeated her, they found, as part of her loot, an essay that she'd written herself (gotta do something with those 16 INT). It was called Obituary Musings and contained meditations about death, the undead, how she came to practice necromancy and whether it was morally justified. I'd written extracts. If players were interested, I'd give them and they'd read them. If not, fine, that's optional and not at all the focus of the session.

[Hiro Quester]

I often try to embody particular philosophical approaches to ethics or life in my character's approach to life.

E.g. I'm playing a Druid who started out as a true neutral Nietzschean zealot, who thinks that the entire natural world depends on the strong exploiting the weak. Traditional conceptions of "good" and "evil" he maintained, are just categories imposed by the strong and the weak towards behaviors they want to encourage or discourage. His moral approach tended towards chaotic neutral, except for the fact that he believed that this exploitation was part of what he thought of as the Law of Nature.

But after 8th level or so he had a moral epiphany and realized that such exploitation, when it comes to humanoids, is morally problematic. Animals can't choose not to eat they prey. But humanoids and other intelligent creatures can and should know better.

So now he is neutral good, and channeling contemporary ecofeminism, often preaching that humanoid exploitation of nature is an outgrowth of humanoid exploitation of other humanoids. So to encourage respect for nature, he also thinks it important to encourage humanoid respect for one another and for life.

On another related matter, If you are interested in thinking about philosophy through the lens of D&D, there are two different books out there on D&D and philosophy that link D&D to all kinds of philosophical topics from ethics and existentialism to racism and analysis of the alignment system.

Check out "Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks" and "Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom".

There is also more in the Existential comics series on "Dungeons and Dragons and philosophers". There are at least five of those. Web search on that phrase turns them up easily. They are all pretty funny. Especially so if you have taken a philosophy course or two.

[Full disclosure: I'm a philosophy professor IRL.]