Heroism, Traffic In Violence, Inherent Assumptions, And Getting Players On Board

[Kalaska'Agathas]

I've a question for you, Playground. Or a problem, really, which I've both experienced as a player and which I anticipate soon facing as a DM—namely, how do I get my players on board with the notion that, within the setting of this game, the use of violence is often the right answer, both in terms of practical utility and moral/ethical virtue, and therefore it is not inherently Evil to regularly traffic in violence? Because lately I've often found that my own notions of heroism/Heroism (and those of the people with whom I play) seem to one degree or another at odds with the assumptions inherent in the settings and rulesets we're using. For context, while the impetus for this post comes out of D&D 3.5/Pathfinder, and the issue isn't exactly system-agnostic, I'm asking this here because it's an issue that isn't unique to those systems (or D&D more broadly). I'm planning a sort of back-to-basics, aesthetically retro campaign, wherein the players are Heroic Adventurerstm and they delve into Dark Dungeons to unearth Magical Treasures, because my friends and I are jonesing for that sort of play, but I also know that, in other games, we usually prefer diplomacy and discussion to combat because we feel that wandering-around-killing-sentient-creatures-and-taking-their-stuff-because-they-have-green-skin-and-fangs-and-we-don't (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0013.html) seems less heroic than like our caps have skulls on them. (https://youtu.be/rWvpvlT9pJU)

D&D (of basically whatever edition) has a great many rules and options for actions in combat with claw or sword or spell, but it doesn't seem to offer similar levels of rigor and robustness for "combat" with words and wits around the dining table, or in the royal court, or solutions for issues that don't involve violent defeat of one belligerent or the other. This, I suspect, is largely an artefact of D&D being an adaptation of a tabletop war game and the fiction (and the broader cultural milieu) it was influenced by and originally intended to emulate; D&D owes much to Homer, Howard, Tolkien, Burroughs, Moorcock, Virgil, Vance, et al., to La Chanson de Roland, Le Morte d'Arthur, Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, the Völsunga Saga, the Poetic and Prose Eddas. And there is something in that aesthetic tradition which my friends and I find appealing: we want to play in a world of virtuous knights, eldritch mages, scheming lords, great battles, monsters, mystery, treasure, and yes, dungeons and dragons. That is not to say that we don't also want our characters to have concerns and aspirations beyond dungeon delving—if we wanted to play a murderhobo campaign, we could (and indeed have)—but we want to indulge in acting out that sort of fantasy. The problem seems to be that, when confronted with actually doing so, we find it difficult to accept that within the secondary world it is not generally, or at least immediately viable to find a solution to the issues between the village and the goblins which would satisfy both groups' needs and desires. We feel that the heroic (or perhaps Heroic) thing to do isn't slay our enemies, but rather to find a way that peaceful coexistence is possible. And that is, I think, an admirable urge. But it isn't one that fits the aesthetic I'm looking to cultivate with this campaign, and it isn't one that feels supported within the rules we're using.

Now, perhaps we just need to get comfortable with the realities of playing around in a pseudo-feudal medieval-esque fantasyland, and one in which there is some degree of moral objectivity to boot, but I neither desire nor feel like it would be particularly effective to just tell my players "Look, this is the immutable nature of morality and the world, no matter what you do you cannot change that, just roll with it." So how do I present them with a world that feels neither incredibly and oppressively bleak nor hopelessly naïve, while still having whole species/races/creatures who are reliably (and objectively) monstrous and from whom it is generally virtuous to defend others by violence, political hierarchies which are inherently unequal but do not demand immediate overthrow to the exclusion of all other concerns, in which there is a meaningful difference between the paladin slaying legions of orcs or the rogue assassinating the evil vizier and those same orcs slaying legions of humans or the evil vizier assassinating Good King Such-And-Such? Because while I can think of ways to do so on a case-by-case basis, I'm struggling to see how to establish that tone generally.

I'm not sure if this is a worldbuilding issue, or an above-the-table-expectations issue, or if me and my friends are just suffering from a tension between these stories we love and by which we are deeply influenced and the morally odious implications we sometimes infer from them, or a tension between satisfaction with the heroism of slaying the orcs and saving the blacksmith's daughter and being named a knight of the realm and the Heroism of finding a way for the orcs and villagers to peacefully coexist and...I don't know...overthrowing the feudal system to replace it with a Tippy-esque arcano-anarcho-syndicalist (https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng) utopian society (setting aside the open question of whether one or another political system is morally preferable, come see the violence inherent in the system, etc. etc.), but I'd like to believe there's some way for my players and I to assuage those broader, admittedly somewhat atemporal (or perhaps just contemporary) misgivings with the underlying assumptions upon which the whole aesthetic seems predicated, without feeling like we're just sweeping the issue under the rug. Or, put another way, we'd like to find a way to have our Sword and Sorcery cake and eat it too.

Post Scriptum: It's worth noting that none of this is meant to express or imply that there's something morally or ethically wrong with Sword and Sorcery-style TTRPGs in general or D&D in particular, or with enjoying the same. Were that the case, I wouldn't be here. This question has just been stewing since my "Paladin" (actually a Bard/Hexblade pretending to be a Paladin, but that's neither here nor there) reflexively tried to redeem an "Always Lawful Evil" Green Dragon who'd been murdering travelers/attempting to "Conquer All the Land" in lieu of slaying him, and nearly got a face full of breath weapon as a result, along with prep I've been doing for an upcoming campaign.

Post-Post-Scriptum: Having typed this all out, I'm beginning to think that the answer may just be that we have to be game to lean in to the tenets of the genre, warts and all, and recognize that our outlooks are necessarily as fundamentally different from our characters' as our respective realities are. It's just a game, after all, and part of the wonder of TTRPGs is experiencing those fundamentally different realities. But as I'd still appreciate your collective thoughts and insight, I've posted this question anyway.

[NichG]

I'd say use a mix of favoring non-sentient forces, forces which are immediately aggressive or not empowered to make the decision not to be aggressive, creating personal conflicts rather than ones that are about 'sides' (e.g. if there's someone who actually just wants to kill a PC and the PCs know it, that's going to be very different than abstract 'should we try to negotiate with this particular ogre?'), and learning how to recognize the potential for irreducible conflicts - that is, situations where there are real reasons why peace and compromise actually can't work. Similarly, avoid things where the only true reason for conflict is a meta-game one of 'well, you're supposed to fight'.

Because ultimately, for fiction to feel living and breathing, it can't just tell you that something is how things are, it has to make that feel like it actually makes sense. Saying 'this is a setting where goblins are always Evil and its always okay to kill them' invites 'well, prove it to me!'. So don't do that, use things where people can recognize the 'why' of it instead and where that 'why' hangs together enough that a player would come to that conclusion on their own being shown the other parts of the story. That can require creativity but also restraint - maybe you can't have 20 different kinds of designated sentient targets, maybe you only have two or three different kinds of justifications that are really hard to find a way around and that's what you're stuck with.

Incompatible needs are a good way to build irreducible conflicts. If someone absolutely needs to murder individuals of another species on a regular basis in order to survive, you might have one or two of them living off of condemned criminals or the terminally ill, but a population even 5% of the size of the prey species is not going to be able to negotiate a true compromise (if that need can't be circumvented at scale with magic/etc). A construct literally built to kill anything that enters a given area could be very smart, but there's no reason why that intelligence has to also touch on the points that make others feel that it has moral weight or that cause others to empathize with it. A devouring swarm where the individuals aren't even intelligent on their own, and where the swarm as a whole sees humanoid life the way that humanoids see ants could be collectively very smart but also could quickly force life-or-death confrontations where negotiation isn't really practical - it might not even have the concept of a sentient 'other' or of language or anything like that.

Similarly, for something like systems of governments, non-catastrophically-harmful change to something better often has a lot of prerequisites that will not be met with the current circumstances and which might take decades to achieve. If you want to pull down the nobles and have a self-governing society of equals, first you're going to want to raise the general level of education. And you'll have to remove power from everyone under the current king before you remove the king, because currently the king is what's keeping those feudal lords from taking 40% of their serf populations and sending them out to kill each-other to expand their territories. That doesn't mean shutting down a 'I want to reform the government!' objective from a PC, or trying to OOC argue with them why it won't work. Rather, it means being prepared to actually plot that out and give visible form to all of the things that would need to be done rather than letting it collapse to 'we just need to oust the king, right?'.

[Jay R]

Don't worry about it. Play the game, and let what happens, happen.

If the PCs can stop the raid / rescue the princess / get rid of the dragon / end the unjust rule without combat, great! Last year, I was in a game in which a large band of goblins had barricaded themselves in the mine, and were using it as a base to raid the human village. Our party wound up hiring them as miners.

[Of course, this requires being consistent. We don't also break open tombs to rob them, and we don't kill people for having green skin and fangs. If the inhabitants of the ruins are co-existing peacefully, then we shouldn't go after them.]

All this requires is for the DM to provide some actual villains. That way, when the ogres attack the party, or the dragon starts eating villagers, or the necromancer demands tribute, pretty much anybody will figure out that it's Clobberin' Time.

[Mechalich]

Incompatible needs are a good way to build irreducible conflicts. If someone absolutely needs to murder individuals of another species on a regular basis in order to survive, you might have one or two of them living off of condemned criminals or the terminally ill, but a population even 5% of the size of the prey species is not going to be able to negotiate a true compromise (if that need can't be circumvented at scale with magic/etc). A construct literally built to kill anything that enters a given area could be very smart, but there's no reason why that intelligence has to also touch on the points that make others feel that it has moral weight or that cause others to empathize with it. A devouring swarm where the individuals aren't even intelligent on their own, and where the swarm as a whole sees humanoid life the way that humanoids see ants could be collectively very smart but also could quickly force life-or-death confrontations where negotiation isn't really practical - it might not even have the concept of a sentient 'other' or of language or anything like that.

Along those lines, also consider intrinsic corruption. Finding moral clarity fighting orcs that are just a green-skinned sapient species with some dental variations is going to be tough. Fighting orcs that are essentially living bioweapons supported by the dark lord, with a whole package of unnatural endocrine modifications and unable to resist their master's dread commands, is going to be easier. Especially if these beings are entirely incapable of actually forming a society of their own and just go berserk in the absence of their dread master's guidance. Trollocs, from the Wheel of Time, are a highly effective example of this kind of humanoid monster. Another way this can manifest is as 'demonic taint,' wherein the monsters are inherently opposed to the biosphere and cause destruction of the natural world wherever they spread, leaving behind only wastelands (this is also a useful modification to apply to undead).

[NichG]

Along those lines, also consider intrinsic corruption. Finding moral clarity fighting orcs that are just a green-skinned sapient species with some dental variations is going to be tough. Fighting orcs that are essentially living bioweapons supported by the dark lord, with a whole package of unnatural endocrine modifications and unable to resist their master's dread commands, is going to be easier. Especially if these beings are entirely incapable of actually forming a society of their own and just go berserk in the absence of their dread master's guidance. Trollocs, from the Wheel of Time, are a highly effective example of this kind of humanoid monster. Another way this can manifest is as 'demonic taint,' wherein the monsters are inherently opposed to the biosphere and cause destruction of the natural world wherever they spread, leaving behind only wastelands (this is also a useful modification to apply to undead).

I considered suggesting this, but for some groups that's going to paint those creatures as victims, which gives a particular taint to being in a situation in which they're forced to kill them that might not be compatible with what the OP was going for. I think you could still thread that needle, but you'd need to aim for something like it being really clear that the modifications or corruption led to irreversible personality death or soul death and that what remains is effectively a different kind of animated corpse.

[Satinavian]

Now, perhaps we just need to get comfortable with the realities of playing around in a pseudo-feudal medieval-esque fantasyland,
The first thing i would do is looking a bit closer at real world feudal realms. That is not just knights fighting stuff. There is a lot of diplomacy going on and people looking for nonviolent solutions first in quite nicely there. Sure, stories about the huge wars and the martial heroes of the past do contain a lot of war and fighting but that is not exactly all that was going on.

Another thing is the idea of a just war which is basically old as dirt. You don't have to have enemies being unredeemable monsters to wage a just war against them. Time appropriate reasons for war are a bit different than those from nowadays, but there is still much overlap if the players don't want to adapt to an archaic code here. But again, diplomacy even during an ongoing war is a thing. It happened before every other battle.

And it pays too look at the good side of feudalism when you don't want your players to want to overthrow it. It is a really cheap gouvernment that saddles the warriors with all the administrative and bureaucratic duties as well. It is nearly the only gouvernment that can be afforded when most of the population is basically subsistance farming. Of course having your warrior elite do bureaucracy introduces a lot of potential incompetence and you are skipping any seperation of power opening yourself to nepotism and corruption. But there is not just enough money going around to pay full time experts for each task and control them through independend structures.

[Tanarii]

Have your dungeon dwellers be Team Bad Guys, and you're good to go. Nothing says the entirety of any given species represented in Team Bad Guys has to be Always Bad Guys. Just these ones. Moral complexity averted. Your murderhobos are now murderheros.

[False God]

Don't.

Let your players play however they choose, and let the world react accordingly.

Maybe the party is seen as the one true heroic ray of light, maybe they're seen as a bunch of non-violent weirdos.

You can convey that the world thinks violence is a go-to answer for everything, without needing your players to share that sentiment.

[Pauly]

I think this is very much a result of the heroic fantasy setting. You go back to King Arthur, Chuhulainn, Beowulf and Charlemagne (the one of legend not history) and instead of mowing their way through endless ranks of “greenskins” they’re mowing their way through endless ranks of “people not like us”.

Heroic fantasy is very much a power fantasy where you project yourself as smiting people who desperately need smiting, saving the kingdom, winning the princess’ hand in marriage. Rules for heroic fantasy are designed to allow this to happen. You also find in other genres like supers and space fantasy (eg Star Wars not hard sci-fi).

If you want to play a more morally grey, gritty and deadly world then there are games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun

It all comes down to the fiction that supports the genre.

[Slipjig]

Let the players always try to negotiate. And sometimes, the negotiations work! And sometimes negotiations fail, even if both sides show up hoping to reach a deal. And sometimes the Black Dragon responds to your overture with a blast of acid. And once in a while, the Bad Guys ask to negotiate, but it's a trap (not all the time, but it's always a risk).

Consistently looking for a peaceful solution is a Good thing. But sometimes there simply isn't a solution where everybody gets what they want. And sometimes the bad guys just need to be stomped. And the fact that the Bad Guys know the PCs are a real threat is the only reason they'll negotiate, so combat with some mooks or the villain's champion might be a prelude to negotiations.

If you want a straight dungeon crawl adventure, instead of filling it with goblinoids or kobolds (both of which are now problematic to massacre), use evil cultists, fiends, or unintelligent creatures.

And if you are using intelligent creatures, have most of the RUN AWAY or surrender once it's clear the PCs are going to win. The kind of fanaticism where people (or even animals) fight to the last man is extremely unusual in the real world. Even if they now hate the PCs, they are not going to stick around and throw their lives away for no purpose.

[Faily]

As the GM, you can say to the players ahead of the game: "hey guys, I'm planning on running an old-school dungeon-crawl kind of game. Where you kick in the door, fight monsters, and haul the treasures back home. Nothing deep or complicated, pretty much beer-and-pretzel game that's laid back and with lots of dice-rolling."

I kinda feel like that should put it on the tin what it's all going to be about without having to go into a long descriptor of complex morality in the game.

[Catullus64]

I'm intensely sympathetic to the question being raised here, but I don't know that there's a great answer. Adventure fantasy is, as you seem to be keenly aware, rooted in the value sets of our ugly, violent historical past, and you'll never be able to completely scrub the genre clean of that influence without scrubbing out the basic, primal appeal as well. For someone who doesn't share those antique values, and who doesn't want to tread the path of out-and-out deconstruction, I think the best you can achieve is a kind of well-constructed illusion, where the implicit values behind the violence and adventure are not sanitized away, but neither are they put into focus by the scope and framing of the narrative. In other words, you tell a story whose values wouldn't hold up to serious scrutiny, but which works at a pace and tone where you never feel the need to apply that level of scrutiny. Of all the influences you mention, I think Howard pulls this off best, although never perfectly*. Tolkien and Moorcock are much more deconstructive, which is amusing considering their radically opposed philosophical positions. Burroughs, for me, was always a little too comfortable with the ugly elements for my liking. The other sources you mention, being a lot closer to the mythologized past (although still entire centuries distant for sources like Mallory and Vergil), tend to unironically share the values of their heroes.

The character of Conan is usually a little incongruous with himself. At his core, he represents the author's vision of uncivilized man, all primal instinct and rugged self-determination, with all the bloody manifestation thereof. But Howard never seems comfortable fully embracing this, particularly when it comes to Conan's treatment of women; this chivalrous streak reads less like a natural facet of his character, and more like Howard simply wasn't comfortable having his hero treat women a certain way. I'm not saying that this was a bad decision; it's necessary in order for him to be remotely sympathetic and the stories to be any fun at all, especially since many of the stories are written from a female character's perspective. You can see the airbrush marks where the character's rougher aspects have been smoothed off, is all. You can sorta see a pre-airbrush version in The Frost Giant's Daughter, one of the lesser Conan stories in my estimation.

I grapple with this problem a lot in my hobby of writing short stories. On the one hand, I want to write enjoyable works in which the swashbuckling hero and his adventures can be a source of unironic fun. On the other hand, I want to write intelligent stories which reflect maturely on the history and myth that inspire them. If I follow the former instinct too much, the stories start to feel cheap and sanitized; the warrior-hero sacrifices a certain authenticity for the sake of being sympathetic to a modern reader. Certainly this approach demands a great deal of dehumanization, either literal or literary, of those on whom the swashbuckling violence is to be inflicted. Follow the latter instinct too much, and the stories instead start to turn into grim meditations on very un-fun subjects, particularly whenever dynamics of class, slavery, ethnic bigotry, and gender come onto the scene; if you examine too closely the motives inherent to a warrior-hero, it starts to feel like cheating to portray him as anything other than rapacious, self-aggrandizing, and cruel, and that's not the sort of hero I want to write about.

The best approach, as I alluded in the first paragraph, is in framing, though of course if I had mastered this myself I'd probably be published by now. I try to construct my plots such that the hero's violence is directed sympathetically, and justified (to the reader) by the circumstances. At the same time, I am careful to include language, incidents, and characterization which remind the reader not to be too comfortable with the hero; little touches to momentarily alienate the audience from the hero and his values, before they get back to enjoying his adventures. But that alienation is kept to the backdrop; it is the texture rather than the structure of the story. In the main action of the story, the hero acts sympathetically, even if only circumstantially. It continually tests my powers of invention to prevent that foundational contrivance from wearing thin.

In applying these principles to roleplaying games specifically, there's good and bad news. The good news is, players tend to instinctively sympathize with characters they control, in a way that's much easier than in passive media. The downside is that actually constructing a plot is far more loose in an RPG. Players like to experiment, to feel out the edges of the world that's been presented to them. It's a lot harder to keep the unsavory implications of the genre firmly in the background, when the players' actions could, at any moment, turn background into foreground.

The best advice, pat as it may seem, is to talk with your players. Explore this tension together so you can all try to navigate it carefully. For the past year I've been running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in a mythical version of a real-life historical setting, and I've talked a lot with my players about the uglier elements that necessarily go with that setting (details necessarily omitted for the sake of compliance with Forum Rules). Those discussions have allowed them to do a fairly impressive job of addressing and incorporating those elements, while keeping it an action-packed adventure and not a sad sociology lecture. The four of us together have done a better job of telling a story which threads this particular needle than I've ever been able to tell on my lonesome.

Still, your players probably do need to be comfortable with their characters being at least some degree of jerk.

[Thrudd]

I've a question for you, Playground. Or a problem, really, which I've both experienced as a player and which I anticipate soon facing as a DM—namely, how do I get my players on board with the notion that, within the setting of this game, the use of violence is often the right answer, both in terms of practical utility and moral/ethical virtue, and therefore it is not inherently Evil to regularly traffic in violence? Because lately I've often found that my own notions of heroism/Heroism (and those of the people with whom I play) seem to one degree or another at odds with the assumptions inherent in the settings and rulesets we're using. For context, while the impetus for this post comes out of D&D 3.5/Pathfinder, and the issue isn't exactly system-agnostic, I'm asking this here because it's an issue that isn't unique to those systems (or D&D more broadly). I'm planning a sort of back-to-basics, aesthetically retro campaign, wherein the players are Heroic Adventurerstm and they delve into Dark Dungeons to unearth Magical Treasures, because my friends and I are jonesing for that sort of play, but I also know that, in other games, we usually prefer diplomacy and discussion to combat because we feel that wandering-around-killing-sentient-creatures-and-taking-their-stuff-because-they-have-green-skin-and-fangs-and-we-don't (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0013.html) seems less heroic than like our caps have skulls on them. (https://youtu.be/rWvpvlT9pJU)


Now, perhaps we just need to get comfortable with the realities of playing around in a pseudo-feudal medieval-esque fantasyland, and one in which there is some degree of moral objectivity to boot, but I neither desire nor feel like it would be particularly effective to just tell my players "Look, this is the immutable nature of morality and the world, no matter what you do you cannot change that, just roll with it." So how do I present them with a world that feels neither incredibly and oppressively bleak nor hopelessly naïve, while still having whole species/races/creatures who are reliably (and objectively) monstrous and from whom it is generally virtuous to defend others by violence, political hierarchies which are inherently unequal but do not demand immediate overthrow to the exclusion of all other concerns, in which there is a meaningful difference between the paladin slaying legions of orcs or the rogue assassinating the evil vizier and those same orcs slaying legions of humans or the evil vizier assassinating Good King Such-And-Such? Because while I can think of ways to do so on a case-by-case basis, I'm struggling to see how to establish that tone generally.

I'm not sure if this is a worldbuilding issue, or an above-the-table-expectations issue, or if me and my friends are just suffering from a tension between these stories we love and by which we are deeply influenced and the morally odious implications we sometimes infer from them, or a tension between satisfaction with the heroism of slaying the orcs and saving the blacksmith's daughter and being named a knight of the realm and the Heroism of finding a way for the orcs and villagers to peacefully coexist and...I don't know...overthrowing the feudal system to replace it with a Tippy-esque arcano-anarcho-syndicalist (https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng) utopian society (setting aside the open question of whether one or another political system is morally preferable, come see the violence inherent in the system, etc. etc.), but I'd like to believe there's some way for my players and I to assuage those broader, admittedly somewhat atemporal (or perhaps just contemporary) misgivings with the underlying assumptions upon which the whole aesthetic seems predicated, without feeling like we're just sweeping the issue under the rug. Or, put another way, we'd like to find a way to have our Sword and Sorcery cake and eat it too.


Post-Post-Scriptum: Having typed this all out, I'm beginning to think that the answer may just be that we have to be game to lean in to the tenets of the genre, warts and all, and recognize that our outlooks are necessarily as fundamentally different from our characters' as our respective realities are. It's just a game, after all, and part of the wonder of TTRPGs is experiencing those fundamentally different realities. But as I'd still appreciate your collective thoughts and insight, I've posted this question anyway.

I think there are a lot of world-building options that can facilitate the old school swords & sorcery adventure beyond purely fairy tale-esque pseudo-feudal absolute monarchies. The post-post scriptum for sure is useful- I mean, there is bound to be inequality, exploitation and oppression in this fantasy world, in almost any governmental system you come up with- because at the end of the day, it has to make sense that there are adventurers/"heroes" wandering around with work to do. That isn't going to be the case in any place where everything is mostly "ok-ily do-kily".

D&D works great when you have small areas of civilization separated by tracts of mostly lawless wilderness. The reach of any given government/ruling group is actually pretty small (which is realistic for the ancient world). As wandering adventurers, the PCs will likely encounter many different types of societies and government systems. You can have a city-state where the government is democratic, and protects the rights of its citizens and encourages commerce, maybe this is where the PCs are from. The next city over might have an absolute monarch who rules by threat with his gang of loyal brutes. Another is an anarchic port-city controlled by some wealthy pirate barons. There might be an insular theocracy, where strangers from other cultures are eyed suspiciously. A strange cult-like society that listens like a hive-mind to psychic commands from a big orb in the middle of the city. Get crazy with it. A world tour-style campaign can be fun as they go from pace to place figuring out how to navigate these various sorts of societies.

There is absolutely no reason to have "always evil" races of sentient creatures, nor to use any particular group of sentient creatures as enemies automatically. Maybe you still want goblins and orcs in your setting, because tradition, but there's no reason they can't be negotiated with. Just make sure that they have a reason to be where they are and something they're trying to do (which might or might not be directly opposed to what the players are trying to do). If you want a mostly "evil" species of sentients, consider having them use other sentient species as food (doesn't have to only be mind flayers). Trying to negotiate with them, they'd look at you like a pig was trying to negotiate with the butcher. At best, you might convince them to let you go, but you aren't going to convince them to stop eating pigs, that might not even by biologically possible for them. Of course, if those guys aren't on a hunt, they might not attack a group of strong-looking humans right away- but can you risk letting them wander around close to human settlements?

Also, use a hearty dose of non-sentients, beasts, and magical creatures other than sentient humanoids. The weird, magical, or ancient technology-filled places your characters are delving into are likely not populated primarily by orcs and goblins, but by slimes, carrion crawlers, ropers, creepy horrific things like beholders, living fungus, undead, constructs etc. In fact, running into some orcs in a place like this might actually be a relief...you can actually talk to them! they might actually be in as much trouble as you are, and will cooperate until you can all get into a safer place- if you promise to pay them enough...but how long can you trust them not to stab you in the back?

In general - "Heroic Adventures"tm don't need to be thoughtless killing. Every creature in the world wants something, it's doing something for a reason. Even an animalistic beast wants something- usually food. Give it enough food, and maybe it will go away and you won't need to kill it. But should you risk letting it hang around the area, where it inevitably will come back and probably eat somebody later on?

The orcs are murdering and pillaging villages. Sure, maybe you can convince one band of them to leave this particular village alone for today. But what makes you think they won't go down the road to the next place? maybe they aren't orcs, maybe it's human bandits. or elves! doesn't need to be predictable. Bad guys can be drawn from any sentient race, it's what they do that makes them identifiable as bad guys, not what they look like. They murder, rape, enslave, etc., so the PCs know they need to be stopped.

A heroic adventure game needs to take place in a somewhat lawless place with lots of people and creatures that do not hesitate to kill. Heroic adventures make little sense otherwise. Your players might want to make sure they absolutely have no choice before they start killing, but those they are facing might often be far less scrupled. There's nothing wrong with that.

However, I would also consider adopting rules for morale. Most creatures do not stick around for a fight to the death when it looks like they might lose. Sentients especially - many times it could be possible to face a band of orcish bandits, kill a few of them, and the rest turn tail and run. Some might even surrender. Now, you have the real ethical dilemma...let a guy go who is probably going to rejoin a gang of bandits and attack another town? Even animals, after they've been hurt, don't often keep fighting unless they are trapped or so hungry they're going to die anyways.
Having creatures run away when it looks like they're losing might allow your players to feel that they aren't killing more than necessary.

Yes, I would adopt a more robust system for social situations than the rules as written in D&D. Actually, I think adapting something similar to the The Giant's Diplomacy Skill homebrew is a good idea. https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?172910-Articles-Previously-Appearing-on-GiantITP-com. You don't want too much complexity, I don't think it should be like a combat mini-game, since talking to people really is not at all like fighting. But something more involved than just single rolls, for sure.

[KorvinStarmast]

Simplest way to solve your problem: stop putting humanoids in the dungeons that guard treasures and use all of the other monsters in the MM to guard and protect them, and traps. When monsters mean monsters, and not some variation on a human, then the danger changes in nature in that your party may not be able to negotiate with them. But they may be able to drop some food for a beast, or what have you, to distract them.

When the humanoids (let's say Hobgoblins) are the army of an evil wizard who is trying to do {x evil thing} then your party's battles with the hobgoblins will have a contextual purpose. If all you do is set up a room full of hobgoblins waiting for the Party to show up and fight, you are back to the video game style.
And, if the hobgoblins are the servants/minions/loyal soldiers of the evil wizard, or the evil high priest, or even the evil druid, then the party may have to fight them but there is also some room for the party to try and convince some of the hobgoblins to desert, switch sides, help them with a side quest, and so on depending on what occurs to them.

Lastly: use more undead in old tombs and ruins. Use shape changing fiends like Succubi as leaders or dangerous opponents (that's a kind of low level BBEG who can do a lot of mind messing). As they go up in level there are some great fiends (Rakshasa's and Vampires among many others) who are devious by nature and who allow you to add a lot of layers to peel through.

Extra Credit: xenophobic elves. One of the things EGG did that I liked was that he created an isolated valley with Valley of the Mage elves who were xenophobic; kind of like the way the elves of Lorien would not let any pass their boundaries into their realm, but a much nastier and prone to shoot first and ask questions later community of elves. Drow are another version of xenophobic elves whose theme was ruined by the Marty Stu called Drzzzt.
There is room with them for 'kill on sight' as well as room for 'parley first' ... let the party steer how that goes.

[Tanarii]

Worth noting that even if the enemy is Team Bad Guys, that doesn't mean Heroes can't interact with them in non-violent ways. Or even work with them towards a common goal.

You just might not be able to trust them, in the short or long term. And trying to 'redeem' them may be naive and fully deserving a face full of dragons breath / mind blast / disintegration eye ray / orc axe / goblin arrow.

[Martin Greywolf]

My advice is, if you are inspired by Song of Roland or Arthurian legend, actually read those stories, not summaries written by modern people with who knows what political agenda.

Let's take Mallory's Le Morte Darthur as an example, since I've recently finished reading it. You could write a plot summary all day and not get to the core of what the book was about, because the book was mostly about Tristan and Isolde. Once you start to look at what causes the various conflicts in it, you arrive at three possibilities:

Someone is genuinely a terrible human being, with two foremost examples being king Mark and Breunis. Cowardice (massive no no for a medieval noble), treason, breaking their word, swearing oaths while intending to break them and so on. It bear mentioning that at no point is there a group of people that are all terrible - king Mark has some nobles at his court that oppose him (and sometimes die for it), and... hm, can't talk about this because of forum rules, but look up Palomides - he's very much a good guy character.

Second reason is the clash of virtues. Lancelot loves Guenevere, but is also genuinely, faithfully serving Arthur (again, in Mallory version). Nobles under king Mark see that Tristan is a better eprson and a better knight than king Mark, but they have sword fealty to Mark and can't freely act against him.

Third reason is accidents that demand satisfaction - accidentally accusing someone, or killing or badly injuring someone at a tournament. A large reason for the titular death of Arthur is that when Arthur ordered Guenevere to be executed (with the full knowledge that Lancelot will come to get her out of it), Lancelot accidentally kills brothers of one of the Arthur's knights, and this knight refuses to let this go and keeps prodding Arthur into war.

All you have to then do is apply this across the board. The kobolds are here because these are their ancestral lands, but it is your PCs duty to fight them. And so on and so forth.

[Devils_Advocate]

So, here's the a thing:

Historically and currently, human beings have not and do not come very close at all to valuing everyone's well-being equally. The misfortune that a social unit of humans is willing to inflict on others for some benefit to themselves will, as a rule, greatly exceed what they're willing to endure for that same benefit. The main factor that mitigates this is accountability. It tends to be relatively easily for equally powerful neighbors to play nice with each other because of how the threat of retribution, whether from relatives or from some controlling authority, factors into the ol' cost-benefit analysis. Conversely, there's a lot less disincentive to behave compassionately and/or ethically towards powerless strangers in a distant land. They're no one you know, they probably won't ever realize that you're indirectly screwing them over, and they're not in a position to do anything about it if they do! And yet it's entirely likely that you still care about them. Just not very much, and certainly not nearly as much as you care about those who you really care about.

It's weird to seriously try to minimize the overall harm you do, or the overall harm to people, or the overall harm to innocents, or anything anywhere near that broad. Societies and institutions that do that aren't going to look normal. They can exist in a fantasy world where Good is an active supernatural force, but they're going to be different. Like, the peasants under the rule of the Good King aren't going to live on the edge of starvation, because the aristocracy isn't squeezing them for as much as they possibly can, and the Good King can manage that because he has the magically empowered clergy of a genuinely benevolent deity backing him up.

But under the assumption that humans in general are still basically like humans from real life, there are going to be nobles looking into replacing the king and the church with more favorable (you know, to them) ones. And a lot of other monarchs are probably going to want to get rid of the Good King for making them look bad by comparison. And the main sticking point here is that if that's "evil", then evil is totally normal and unextraordinary. Like, "99% of human beings in the real world are of evil character" unextraordinary, though how obviously much damage we do varies with circumstance. Combining that with the assumption that genocide of evil races is justifiable and indeed virtuous leads to a fascinating syllogism that I leave as an exercise to the reader.

But the whole privatio boni thing doesn't really work for Dungeons & Dragons anyway, because its alignment system doesn't use a good/evil dichotomy, it uses a Good/Evil/Neutral trichotomy. And if it's totally possible to be not Good and also not Evil, then obviously Evil isn't just a lack of Good. More likely, it's the opposite of good. And that's pretty much what I found back when I looked through the 3rd Edition Monster Manual. Creatures that just want to kill and eat you are Neutral as a rule, regardless of intelligence. Evil creatures are mean. And in a fantasy world where Evil is an active supernatural force, an unrealistically large number of creatures can be unrealistically malevolent. So that's the most obvious source of the most obvious bad guys.

But that still leaves us with all of the Neutral people who try to kill you and those you love for the benefit of their families, societies, cultures, or whatever. How can you possibly justify using violence against them when their behavior is a product of their circumstances, and their fundamental moral nature is essentially the same as that of those who you want to protect? Well, you can justify it pretty easily, as it happens. See, they're using violence. And trying to make as many of the negative consequences of violence as possible fall on those who initiate it works to reduce violence overall. By changing the cost-benefit analysis, you see.

So that's how that works.

As a rule of thumb, negotiation is for enemies who lack either the immediate motivation or the immediate ability to do serious irreversible harm. If you're not sure, try to change things so that you are sure. Like, get out of range or turn invisible or do something that prevents them from killing you as soon as you announce your presence, for example.

[Dr.Samurai]

I would suggest that if this much thought and reflection goes into morality, there is no reason to stop at this point and not also reflect on how the D&D world is different from our own.

When various groups in D&D worship real actual evil gods and can perform evil profane rituals to enact real evil power, to me the conversation changes. I don't get the appeal in being concerned over this to only the degree that it causes angst. In our real world, humans are violent against other humans for a multitude of reasons. If our real world included real evil gods that could give you real evil power for doing real evil things, you can rest assured that would be a reason to be violent towards them.

As the DM, you can make things justified. If life is so precious that you can't even defend yourself or others against conquerors that will enslave you or eradicate you, then you're a pacifist, an extreme one at that, and I'm not sure what you're doing adventuring lol.

If the problem is that this group has evil gods and does evil things, and this group doesn't, I like Korvin's suggestion of just using monsters, and not humanoids. That's one way that works.

Another is simply to mix your towns and villages with demographics, so it isn't solely one group of people that does some thing.

Another point is that many groups that do things we would consider bad do them to their own people, so you could be saving orcs from other orcs.

If heroism is what you're after, I think D&D does a great job of facilitating that. For my part, facilitating negotiations doesn't scream "hero" to me. If two groups are at a place where they can negotiate, what's the concern? "I mediated a conversation between two entities that were reasonable enough to come to the table and sit down for arbitration" doesn't sound heroic. "I stayed behind and slowed the advance of the slavers' army so the villagers could get away" sounds heroic.

[White Blade]

I'm not sure if this is a worldbuilding issue, or an above-the-table-expectations issue, or if me and my friends are just suffering from a tension between these stories we love and by which we are deeply influenced and the morally odious implications we sometimes infer from them, or a tension between satisfaction with the heroism of slaying the orcs and saving the blacksmith's daughter and being named a knight of the realm and the Heroism of finding a way for the orcs and villagers to peacefully coexist and...I don't know...overthrowing the feudal system to replace it with a Tippy-esque arcano-anarcho-syndicalist (https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng) utopian society (setting aside the open question of whether one or another political system is morally preferable, come see the violence inherent in the system, etc. etc.), but I'd like to believe there's some way for my players and I to assuage those broader, admittedly somewhat atemporal (or perhaps just contemporary) misgivings with the underlying assumptions upon which the whole aesthetic seems predicated, without feeling like we're just sweeping the issue under the rug. Or, put another way, we'd like to find a way to have our Sword and Sorcery cake and eat it too.
This sounds, to some extent, like a world-building issue. In Tolkien, the Orcs aren't bad via fiat, they're bad because they're invading peaceful lands in service of the devil's third lieutenant. They're also coincidentally a very nasty people, but that's not the problem. If an orc encampment blows into town, raiding and attacking an otherwise fairly peaceful group of peasants, trying to steal their land to set up their own farms or their corpses to bolster their necromantic army, the players can try negotiating and then discover that, hey, these people are dirtbags and righteous smiting can ensue. Some of this may be coding, e.g. people typically code orcs as "barbarians" (i.e. non-agrarian peoples) instead of coding them as "imperialists" (e.g., settlers clearing out Native Americans, Genghis Khan, or the British East India Company).

Similarly, if you want to make the local nobility not noxious enough to overthrow, perhaps on the day of worship/rest they and their vassals meet in the town hall and the lord swears an oath on the 1/day Lesser Geas to protect the peasants, to provide them justice, and tell the truth so long as they remain in office. If you let them act like real medieval lords (much less Game of Thrones style medieval lords), then players are gonna hate their guts unless they primarily encounter them as allies against some wider threat.


Post Scriptum: It's worth noting that none of this is meant to express or imply that there's something morally or ethically wrong with Sword and Sorcery-style TTRPGs in general or D&D in particular, or with enjoying the same. Were that the case, I wouldn't be here. This question has just been stewing since my "Paladin" (actually a Bard/Hexblade pretending to be a Paladin, but that's neither here nor there) reflexively tried to redeem an "Always Lawful Evil" Green Dragon who'd been murdering travelers/attempting to "Conquer All the Land" in lieu of slaying him, and nearly got a face full of breath weapon as a result, along with prep I've been doing for an upcoming campaign.
This, however, is a roleplaying problem - The Green Dragon is actively involved in horrific crimes! If the best method the players have for dealing with the Green Dragon is to try to convince it not to do those things, okay, sure - One has to work with what one's got. But if "putting an arrow through their eye" is an option, then the effect becomes almost comedic. Imagine a scene in a movie where the police are chasing down a serial killer and they corner him and then say, "John, is this really what you want to do? Surely there must be some way to get what you want without killing and skinning them." If players are accustomed to NPCs having sympathetic motivations, actual history is replete with people's whose motive was profit or wounded pride or racial hatred. GMs should try to make sure some people have sympathetic motives even in D&D, but they should also have a fair number of people who true understanding makes you want to punch them in the face even harder. The crimes that humanity committed in pursuit of rubber or cotton boggle the mind.

[hamishspence]

But the whole privatio boni thing doesn't really work for Dungeons & Dragons anyway, because its alignment system doesn't use a good/evil dichotomy, it uses a Good/Evil/Neutral trichotomy. And if it's totally possible to be not Good and also not Evil, then obviously Evil isn't just a lack of Good. More likely, it's the opposite of good. And that's pretty much what I found back when I looked through the 3rd Edition Monster Manual. Creatures that just want to kill and eat you are Neutral as a rule, regardless of intelligence. Evil creatures are mean.

While the Monster Manuals tend to be written that way, campaign setting splatbooks tend not to portray NPCs that way - with plenty of examples of evil-aligned NPCs whose evil is fairly petty - the aristocrat who loves malicious gossip, the claim-jumping miner, and so on. Not just Eberron (which has a strong "Evil beings don't necessarily deserve to be attacked" message in the main Campaign Setting book) - but Forgotten Realms as well.

[Quertus]

Awesome topic!

So, um, I think that the first step in a situation like this needs to be a step back, to evaluate the problem.

So, what do I mean by, “a situation like this”? Well, I think our one where the actions and reactions of the players and/or their characters is not conducive to the expected core gameplay loop of the system, setting, or scenario. Does that sounds like a fair definition for the category into which this question falls?

So, if the GM advertises a political game, and the players murderhobo the world, and salt the earth, there’s some mismatched expectations here.

And that, to my mind, is the more general heading that this falls under: mismatched expectations.

So you thought you ordered the soup, but your server brought you a steak. Now what?

Well, now you do the complex and personal calculus of determining cost/benefit analysis to this situation. And, while I could say a lot here, really, I just want to make sure that the folks at home know that this step exists, and don’t skip it out of hand.

But, if you’ve decided to do something about this, how do you take action? Well, it depends on what your priorities are. As I read it, we’ve got modern sensibilities getting in the way of the core gameplay loop of killing sentient beings. Change any one of these three, and you’re back in business.

Talk to the players, explain that this is a roleplaying game, and their modern sensibilities have no place in fantasy world. Get them to play more realistic characters, and the problem goes away.

Change the core gameplay loop, let the game be about befriending the Pokémon, and the problem goes away.

Or make the monsters be true monsters: mindless undead, mindless beasts, mindless politicians, and the problem goes away. (Until they realize that Bambi and Godzilla actually have thoughts and feelings, at least)

If you have to use sentient beings, capable of planning and abstract thought, to keep your content from being samey, be sure to make them unrelatably, undeniably, irredeemably evil. Like beholders. They have an unchanging image of “beauty” (ie, themselves), and kill everything that looks different. … Kinda like adventures, actually. :smallconfused:

So, yeah, original D&D really felt like various world cultures “goblinized” (similarly to Shadowrun), and the “allied races” were genocidally murdering the rest of the world. If that is a problem for your players, build your content such that the PCs aren’t required or expected to go around killing relatable, humanized opposition.

[Anonymouswizard]

Have your dungeon dwellers be Team Bad Guys, and you're good to go. Nothing says the entirety of any given species represented in Team Bad Guys has to be Always Bad Guys. Just these ones. Moral complexity averted. Your murderhobos are now murderheros.

Honestly this even kind of works with humans. I'm sure we've all seen a Pink Mohican Shadowrun game where 'corporate goons' are treated as simplistic baddies.

But if this solution doesn't work I'm not sure any worldbuilding will. In that case save the mindless slaughter for undead, golems, and other mindless entities.

[BRC]

Part of it is certainly just knowing what your players will agree with. Some might be too sympathetic towards the socioeconomic conditions that lead to Banditry, and might instead want to start on mindless evils like Skeletons.


I kind of break things down into a few categories

1) Assumed Evil: This is the classic fantasy "Oh look, Goblins! Murder Them!" thing, where you have sentient creatures presented as evil in this world.

2) Nonsentient, Non-Harmful: This is where the motive is profit, "Hunt down this Creature for magic item components" or what have you, even if the creature in question isn't actively harming anything, but it's not sentient, so you're still well below "Murder For Hire".

3) Active Evil:Bandits, soldiers of an evil empire, and the like, creatures actively DOING something bad right now, but whose behavior might be excused by circumstance.

4) Enthusiastic Evil: Cultists, raiders, ect. Creatures that are engaging in evil acts, but are more enthusiastic about it. A random soldier might be a conscript, a bandit might be driven by desperation. A Cultist, or a Raider traveling from abroad to kill and pillage, can be a bit more assumed to be explicit.

5) Bestial: Nonsentient, not even necessarily EVIL, but certainly DANGEROUS. The classic example would be if there's an overpopulation of Wolves driving them to attack local humans. The wolves are not EVIL per say, they're just hungry animals, but they're presenting a clear and present danger.

6) Inherent Evil: We kind of loop back around here, with Undead and Fiends, creatures supernatural enough that "Oh yeah they're inherently evil and malicious" becomes a fantasy element in of itself. There's a clear line between "People" and "Evil Things", there's no Evil Things that are just "People But Evil".


Getting a sense of what your party is comfortable with is key.

[Tanarii]

Honestly this even kind of works with humans. I'm sure we've all seen a Pink Mohican Shadowrun game where 'corporate goons' are treated as simplistic baddies.
Definitely, I intentionally wrote it to apply to any species, including Team Bad Guys humans.

[Wintermoot]

As a DM, you control the legions of the disposable enemies. So you can make them unequivocably bad so that the moral issue doesn't gain traction. It's one thing to say "all goblins are bad" but its another to say "The goblins in this mine that you are raiding are bad"

Before they get to the mine, they see the local farms pillaged and raided, barns burned, farmers left to rot in the tilled earth. When they get there, they find the cages of soon to be slaves, the beaten prisoners, the ill-kept dogs, the signs of depravity and evilness that mark THIS particular group of goblins.

You don't throw catch-22s at them. No Goblin children, no "but the farmers started it" gotchya moments. You just treat the enemy the PCs are going to be facing as evil and skip the moral commentaries.

It only becomes a problem if you make it one as the arbitrator of the universe.

There's nothing wrong-fun-bad about goblins being evil for the sake of clearing out the dungeon full of them as long as that's what you and your group are there for.

[Rynjin]

If you (and your players) want to seek nonviolent solutions to problems, you'll need to put in the effort to do so. it's as simple as that.

That's the core of the problem I'm reading. It's not an issue with the system, by any means. It's an issue with you and the players, when the chips are down, not being willing to put in the effort to seek a more complex solution, or provide a more complex context.

This is, by the way, perfectly fine. There's nothing saying you HAVE to have moral complexity in your game. But there's nothing that can be "enforced" to make the players do it. They just have to...do it. It's a choice that can be made situationally, dependent on the personalities of the characters involved.

A quick example from two games I'm currently running. These are the same players in both games mind you.

Jade Regent (Pathfinder): a group of goblins attack the town in the night, shooting fireworks everywhere. There are a few injuries, but no fatalities. The party are sent to wipe out the goblin tribe, and will be paid a bounty for every goblin ear they bring back as proof. They drag along the leader of the goblin raiding party as a guide to find the village hidden in the swamp.

When they arrive at the village, it has already been attacked by the undead. A lot of goblins were killed, including the captive goblin's pregnant wife and one of his friends.

Rather than fight the remaining goblins of the village (who are still ready to tussle), they together seek out the truth; the goblin chieftain brought down a curse on the village with his greed and generally has no care for the dead. He is dispatched and the party team up with the "goblin heroes" to solve a greater threat (a large roving band of undead within a few miles of their home town).

On my end as the GM, I set up the goblins as humanized, both through events in campaigns and in the "prologue", a short adventure called We Be Goblins involving the same tribe's quest to secure the fireworks they used to attack the town.

On my players' parts, they chose to take the path of less violence and put aside their characters' prejudices.

Savage Worlds RIFTS Homebrew: Party is a part of a pseudo-military organization that views themselves as the rightful government. They are sent to retrieve a shipment of goods from some merchants a day outside of town, who the city has had a falling out with recently.

They arrive and demand the goods be surrendered. The merchants refuse, though do (reluctantly) counteroffer that they can sell the goods to the Brotherhood if they're willing to pay.

The party aren't interested in parleying, as they are mostly very loyal to the organization and have been trained not to question their orders too much. They slaughter the merchants to the last man (even those who flee or surrender) to ensure none escape to inform their own organization what transpired.

On my end, I made sure to mention a bit of the merchant's culture in the debrief and portray them as fairly reasonable unless angered.

My players were not interested in pursuing a diplomatic solution in this game, and thought it would be more in=character (and more fun) to kill them all. So they died.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Nor should you try to. If someone isn't interested in a specific option, don't chide them for not taking it. Just make sure it's always on the table so they have the choice.

[KorvinStarmast]

Just make sure it's always on the table so they have the choice. This is the key; leave open the choices for the players to make. +10, nice post all around. :smallsmile:

[Devils_Advocate]

While the Monster Manuals tend to be written that way, campaign setting splatbooks tend not to portray NPCs that way - with plenty of examples of evil-aligned NPCs whose evil is fairly petty - the aristocrat who loves malicious gossip, the claim-jumping miner, and so on. Not just Eberron (which has a strong "Evil beings don't necessarily deserve to be attacked" message in the main Campaign Setting book) - but Forgotten Realms as well.
That's not incompatible with Evil being fundamentally malevolent (rather than just selfish). Most people aren't really in a position to keep several captives in a dungeon to torture regularly. Doesn't mean they aren't doing the worst they can under the circumstances. Not that most Evil characters are going to be close to Pure Evil. Some of them may even regard behaviors past rather arbitrary lines as "going to far". Doesn't mean that they're not hateful. And, let's be honest, most "restrained" Evil characters would change their tune a great deal if granted the power to do far greater evil and get away with it scot-free. There's a fair bit of sour grapes there.

The main point against evil being more than just selfishness, rather, is that... it's been described as selfishness across multiple editions. But if evil is selfishness and good is selflessness, what does that leave for neutral? Well, I have already noted that humans as a rule don't care for everyone equally. So maybe good characters care about others in general, evil characters don't care about others in general, and neutral characters don't have one general attitude towards everyone who isn't them?

That makes sense, but it also means that evil isn't necessarily worse than neutral. It can be in the interest of a selfish person to cooperate with others and treat them well. Conversely, people can slaughter their way through masses of non-combatants to bring glory to their god, king, country, kin, or whatever. And if they're neither selfish nor hateful, they're indeed not evil in any D&D alignment sense I'm familiar with. (Also, if we want "evil" to distinguish someone as different from most actual people, there's the issue that hurting and killing innocent creatures is fairly normal human behavior.) But in that case, I really don't like saying that a harmless functional sociopath is evil.

Conversely, if doing harm is the difference between evil and non-evil for a sociopath, then it should be the difference for everyone else too. 3E tried to have it both ways, but most actual human beings in the real world are frequently willing to harm some innocents in some ways in some circumstances and frequently willing to make some sacrifices to help some others in some circumstances. Making Neutral "unwilling to harm innocents but also unwilling to make sacrifices to help others" turns it into its own weird specific thing, leaving us with no alignment for the majority of realistic characters. Which is the problem we were trying to get away from by changing it from that weird "preserve the balance" philosophy. Aargh!

Having Good and Evil be opposites of each other seems a lot better to me for multiple reasons. Likewise Law and Chaos. It's more in keeping with their role as cosmic forces, without which there's not much point to having the alignment system at all in my opinion.

[hamishspence]

3E tried to have it both ways, but most actual human beings in the real world are frequently willing to harm some innocents in some ways in some circumstances and frequently willing to make some sacrifices to help some others in some circumstances. Making Neutral "unwilling to harm innocents but also unwilling to make sacrifices to help others" turns it into its own weird specific thing, leaving us with no alignment for the majority of realistic characters.

Late 3.5 at least acknowledged this in Heroes of Horror, with the "flexible Neutral antihero" (person who does some evil deeds, but normally has good intentions")

[kyoryu]

That's not incompatible with Evil being fundamentally malevolent (rather than just selfish).

Selfish isn't enough to be Evil, in any regard. If two people are vying for a job, only one can get it - trying to get it is selfish, but it's not Evil. It's just Neutral. You're not taking anything from someone that they have an inherent claim on. Most people are neutral most of the time.

To be Evil, you have to be willing to step on the rights of others - not legal ones, but generally natural ones - your time and your body, and the results of those (typically your stuff). Buying the last loaf of bread? Not Evil. Taking someone else's bread? That's an Evil act.

Of course, people are not two-dimensional, and can do a variety of acts - most people do some neutral, some good, some evil things. It's how and why and how often that determines alignment. Unless you're a paladin (prior to 4e, anyway), a single minor Evil act doesn't make you Evil.

Exceptions made for self defense or the defense of others.

Not saying that this is the be-all, end-all of how to view Good/Evil, of course. Just saying that "Evil is selfish" is a bit of an over-simplification of that line of thought.

[icefractal]

To be Evil, you have to be willing to step on the rights of others - not legal ones, but generally natural ones - your time and your body, and the results of those (typically your stuff). Buying the last loaf of bread? Not Evil. Taking someone else's bread? That's an Evil act.This feels like it's smuggling a specific ethical system (property rights exist, theft is wrong) into a universal definition, under the guise of "natural" rights.

But while I think that's a defensible ethical system, and one I agree with to an extent, it's far from universal. In a strict consequentialist system, if you take bread away from someone who's not starving and give it to someone who is starving, that's a net good. Even if the not-starving person is still hungry and suffers, they suffer less than starving to death. Of course then you have to factor in secondary effects, like "if taking people's bread is a common thing, people will hide and/or guard their bread, resulting in wasted time and energy that could exceed the positive effects of bread redistribution". Ethical calculations usually aren't simple.

And for that matter, I could imagine various situations where buying the last loaf of bread is (what I'd consider) evil. For reference, I do subscribe to a "sufficient indifference counts as harmful action" model, where for example - seeing someone drowning and choosing not to throw the life-preserver which is next to you and you could trivially toss them with no loss on your part - that's an evil act. So similarly, buying the last loaf, when you don't personally need it and know the results will be harmful, means you are doing something harmful.

[Tanarii]

Drawing from 5e, the following are Evil typical but not consistently required associated behaviors and Ideals.

Lawful evil (LE) creatures methodically take what they want, within the limits of a code of tradition, loyalty, or order.
Neutral evil (NE) is the alignment of those who do whatever they can get away with, without compassion or qualms.
Chaotic evil (CE) creatures act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their greed, hatred, or bloodlust.

Ideals:
Greed
Might (as in Might makes Right)
Power
Mastery (effectively Might again)
Retribution

The last one may have unwritten context by being tagged as Evil, the Ideal is "Retribution. The rich need to be shown what life and death are like in the gutters. (Evil)"

[Duff]

If I've understood the OP correctly, you want to play D&D, but your group's fondness for non-combat solutions and D&Ds relative lack of support for those options are making it less appealing.

If you want to run a dungeon bash, the best option would be to introduce that in session 0
Then if your players are not keen, you can take that on board. Maybe that means a different game or a different style.

If a dungeon bash would be fine but you need enemies that can be bashed with a clear conscience, undead, demons and constructs might be the way to go.

If you want to just reassure the group that it's ok to fight and kill sometimes, that's probably

[Devils_Advocate]

To be clear, I wasn't trying to make a case for what good, evil, and neutral alignment "canonically" are in Dungeons & Dragons. To the contrary, the problem is that the official material has always been all over the place. (So... it's stayed consistent, in a way.) And as a result, the default is that what it means in practice to be good-aligned is to have "good" in the alignment section of your write-up, and what it means in practice to be evil-aligned is to have "evil" on your character sheet or in your stat block or whatever. But while replaceable, non-binding "fluff" may work for other mechanical traits, it feels like doing that with alignment defeats its point.

There are a few criteria that I think are necessary for good, evil, and neutral alignment to fill some of their commonly intended roles:

1. Good-aligned characters reliably act in good ways. They do good things because they fundamentally are good, not because they're driven by motivations that could just as easily cause them to do bad things under different circumstances.

2. Evil-aligned characters reliably act in bad ways. They do bad things because they fundamentally are bad, not because they're driven by motivations that could just as easily cause them to do good things under different circumstances.

3. Having neither good nor evil alignment comes with no special added requirements. No character is excluding from existing. Certainly psychologically normal people aren't all excluded from existing.

But let's be clear that there are a bunch of commonly intended roles for alignment, some of which are directly at odds with each other. I know that a lot of people want alignment to be "karma" that doesn't describe characters' internal natures at all! My main point here is that how you distinguish different alignments from each other should facilitate whatever roles you want them to serve. And that they do need to be distinguished from each other in the likely event that some of those roles involve there being known differences between them.


Selfish isn't enough to be Evil, in any regard. If two people are vying for a job, only one can get it - trying to get it is selfish, but it's not Evil. It's just Neutral. You're not taking anything from someone that they have an inherent claim on. Most people are neutral most of the time.

To be Evil, you have to be willing to step on the rights of others - not legal ones, but generally natural ones - your time and your body, and the results of those (typically your stuff). Buying the last loaf of bread? Not Evil. Taking someone else's bread? That's an Evil act.
Eh, it seems more to me that you're describing the difference between Lawful and non-Lawful alignment than non-Evil and Evil. Law cares about "right" and "wrong", while Good cares about good and bad. So Lawful Good endorses the rules that it thinks will result in the best consequences; Chaotic Good opposes rules so there aren't loopholes to hide behind; Lawful Evil endorses doing bad, bad things in the "right" ways for the "right" reasons; and Chaotic Evil is like "How dare you try to take away my freedom to own slaves?!"

Which brings us to the point that major "property rights" are all about impinging on natural rights, not protecting them. E.g.: You can't make land, and you can't carry it with you, so the only way you can come to own it, and all that owning it even means, is that others are coerced to not interact with it in various ways. Deprived of their natural freedoms to move about unmolested, make use of natural resources, and so on. And while there may be some justification for dividing land up amongst people — the tragedy of the commons, and all — this is generally not done in an equitable fashion for the mutual benefit of everyone. More likely, it's done for the benefit of a tiny minority at the expense of the common folk, with an elite owning more land than they can personally work and the underclass forced to sell their labor for access to the means of production.

So, given how they prosper through the threat and the use of force against others at their expense, decapitating them all isn't necessarily worse than the nobles deserve, but — getting back to original topic — that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. The problem with a Glorious People's Revolution is that, without solid planning about what will happen afterwards, political power may well be assumed by a group that, as it turns out, is not much better than the old rulers, and possibly even worse. Whoops! Turns out that it's not enough to kill all of the bad guys, you also need to put measures in place to prevent someone else from doing the same stuff in the future. Hindsight is always 20/20, amirite?

I take it that you meant that the results of your time and your body are typically your stuff, not that your stuff is typically the results of your time and your body, and I don't want to conflate saying that we're entitled to the products of our labor with... well, with sentiments that tend to be at odds with that in practice. Rather, that's my point: "Your stuff" can cover a lot of different things acquired through a lot of different means, so there's not necessarily a ton of ethical common ground to "taking someone else's stuff without their permission" or "defending your property", outside of a context where those terms have specific restricted definitions. That seemed worth pointing out.


Not saying that this is the be-all, end-all of how to view Good/Evil, of course. Just saying that "Evil is selfish" is a bit of an over-simplification of that line of thought.
Of what line of thought? I was responding to statements in the vein of "Most evil creatures do not seek to harm others as in end in itself, but simply do not care about the suffering that results from their actions". I don't think that it's unreasonable to characterize that as describing evil creatures as selfish. And I addressed the possibility that doing harm could be considered a part of evil (rather than just an occasional result), so I'm not sure what more you want from me here. Like, if your point is that I wasn't responding to the position that you took in your post, that's because you hadn't said that yet, and I'm not a future psychic. :P

[Morgaln]

Drawing from 5e, the following are Evil typical but not consistently required associated behaviors and Ideals.

Lawful evil (LE) creatures methodically take what they want, within the limits of a code of tradition, loyalty, or order.
Neutral evil (NE) is the alignment of those who do whatever they can get away with, without compassion or qualms.
Chaotic evil (CE) creatures act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their greed, hatred, or bloodlust.

Ideals:
Greed
Might (as in Might makes Right)
Power
Mastery (effectively Might again)
Retribution

The last one may have unwritten context by being tagged as Evil, the Ideal is "Retribution. The rich need to be shown what life and death are like in the gutters. (Evil)"

The interesting thing is, by this definition lions are evil. Neutral evil, to be exact.
Lions will take food from weaker predators without qualm. They will take all of it and eat as much as they can (greed). They do this by being more powerful than the other predators (might, power; literally might makes right). The most powerful (male) lion leads the pride and is replaced if it loses a battle against a stronger lion (might, power, mastery).
Retribution is the only thing that doesn't really show up in their behavior; unless you count a male lion killing the offspring of his predecessor when he takes over a pride.

This is by no means exclusive to lions but pretty common in nature. By extent, that makes nature neutral evil. And what does that say about druids, then?

I anticipate that someone will argue that nature is not sapient and therefore cannot be evil; to that I counter: are the universal forces of Good and Evil that make morality objective in D&D sapient? If not, we have proof that sapience is not a requirement for alignment.

[Rynjin]

I anticipate that someone will argue that nature is not sapient and therefore cannot be evil; to that I counter: are the universal forces of Good and Evil that make morality objective in D&D sapient? If not, we have proof that sapience is not a requirement for alignment.

It's not an argument, it's literally in the description of alignment.


Animals and other creatures incapable of moral action are neutral rather than good or evil. Even deadly vipers and tigers that eat people are neutral because they lack the capacity for morally right or wrong behavior.


Most creatures that lack the capacity for rational thought do not have alignments—they are unaligned. Such a creature is incapable of making a moral or ethical choice and acts according to its bestial nature. Sharks are savage predators, for example, but they are not evil; they have no alignment.

So no, we don't have "proof that sapience is not a requirement for alignment"; in fact we have the exact opposite.

[KorvinStarmast]

If a dungeon bash would be fine but you need enemies that can be bashed with a clear conscience, undead, demons and constructs might be the way to go.
If you want to just reassure the group that it's ok to fight and kill sometimes, that's probably
And oozes, monstrosities, aberrations.
At low level a Gibbering Mouther or three can make for some spooky encounters. There are also some cool, albeit nasty, fey in Volo's Guide (like the red cap) to put the fear into the PCs.

The interesting thing is, by this definition lions are evil. Neutral evil, to be exact.
I always thought that lions were alignment 'hungry' :smallbiggrin: (Yours was an interesting post, but I'll not follow up further).

[Vahnavoi]

@Morgaln: 3rd edition explicitly states that creatures of below-human cognition (below INT 3) are neutral by virtue of not being capable of ethics. It then goes and defines all mundane animals as having below-human cognition. Apparently 5th edition continues the trend, substituting unaligned for neutral.

This is chiefly a WotC-era thing - in AD&D, animals had more variance in cognitive ability, with some having near-human or human-equivalent cognition, and some also had alignment other than neutral.

Alignment can function either way. It is possible to do away with sweeping statements about animal cognition & alignment and evaluate each species by mythological or real life standards. The end result may well be a world where cats are indeed Evil, bees are Lawful Good, so on and so forth, and druids are True Neutral by virtue of trying to conserve ecological status quo between all these different animals.

Personally, I consider the WotC sweeping statements about animals to be poor fit for fantasy. Myth and fantasy often have animals, even mundane animals, be intelligent, with their own languages etc., and holding them morally responsible is not at all odd. Even historically, some animals have been prosecuted under law just like people, and on contemporary note, further studies on many kinds of animals have shown them more aware and capable of thought & emotion than they are often given credit for. The idea that animals are just machines acting on instinct, with no moral quality to their actions, is a particular trope from particular era of history that can be trivially done away with for purposes of a game.

[Tanarii]

I always thought that lions were alignment 'hungry' :smallbiggrin: (Yours was an interesting post, but I'll not follow up further).Animals and similar intellect creatures can't have alignment. Alignment is moral and social attitudes, which has an associated typical but not consistently required behavior. The key being it's moral and social attitudes that determines alignment first, and behavior tends to result from that. It is not that behavior causes alignment.

So these creatures can't have alignment, because they can't have moral and social attitudes.

-----

Edit: That's not to say that (in universe) someone can't look at overall behavior and guess alignment, or divine someone else's alignment (in editions that allow that) and guess at how they'll likely act and what they might hold as an ideal.

Or similarly, that's not to say that a player should pick a good or neutral alignment for their PC then consistently have them behave in a manner associated with an evil alignment. That's not picking an alignment for the character in good faith.

[Vahnavoi]

So these creatures can't have alignment, because they can't have moral and social attitudes.

Animals definitely have social attitudes. Following 1st edition's definition of the conflict between Law and Chaos as that between large organized groups versus the individual, there is no problem classifying, say, hive insects as Lawful, highly solitary animals as Chaotic and those that shift between loose packs and solitude as Neutral. The determination is clear and simple to make.

The question of whether animals have moral attitudes goes back to my previous post.

[NichG]

For the OP's question at least, the way antagonists hash out on the D&D alignment chart is not really a good way to create antagonists that that group of players, with their specific moral views, are going to feel okay with killing. That's kind of the point, honestly, that if you approach that situation from the view of 'all I need is to be able to slap an E on it and you should be okay killing it', that's going to clash with 'well, whatever you or the D&D cosmos might say, that act seems reprehensible and doesn't fit into my image of the character I'm playing'.

So a better analysis would be to ask, what in particular are that group's lines for things that okay to kill at will, things that are okay to kill at need, etc. Then make sure most things are solidly over that line. The line might not be about moral or ethical culpability, but could be about different valuations of different kinds of existence - for this group, maybe sapience matters a lot more than morality as to whether something deserves life. Maybe the level of cognitive sophistication matters more than, say, whether the thing is an 'abomination' according to in-D&D belief systems. Maybe power relationships matter more, or imminence of threat, or being seen being callous or dismissive of the value of life. Maybe its even just something like, they don't want to think of themselves as people who fall to stereotypes and treat all X the same, even if D&D's rules assert 'all X are in fact the same', and so just having a history with the antagonists would be enough to say 'okay, we're not killing orcs, we're killing the Azthag war band and we saw the sorts of things they do before'

But basically, that sets the boundary of what that group is going to feel good about subjecting to home invasion and subsequent murder, and what they won't. That's more important than G vs E.

[Vahnavoi]

Anyways, to answer the question:

I basically never get a table full of committed pacifist nor tables full of happy genociders. Occasionally one player might want to hug all the monsters, and another might want to commit warcrimes on goblin children. I have no reason to stop them as long as actions taken remain within parameters of a game. What I do myself, depends on what I'm aiming for. If I want to make a point about some particular moral system, I'm fully capable of moral flat-earthing - that is, playing out character beliefs that explicitly clash with those of a setting, even if the setting's morals adhere to what I really believe. My favorite is probably variations on the theme "humans are all evil and deserve to die". Close second is "all routes lead to doom eventually so either everything is meaningless or consequentialist ethics are horse manure". If I want for others to try playing according to some set of virtues or ideals, I will lead by example, doing my best to play a character who follows those virtues and ideals.

Typically, one of these approaches will be enough to either encourage or discourage violence, whichever it is that I desire. I can do this with reasonably unburdened conscience because I think art doesn't have to reflect my own values back at me to be worth perusing.

[Psyren]

For the OP's question at least, the way antagonists hash out on the D&D alignment chart is not really a good way to create antagonists that that group of players, with their specific moral views, are going to feel okay with killing. That's kind of the point, honestly, that if you approach that situation from the view of 'all I need is to be able to slap an E on it and you should be okay killing it', that's going to clash with 'well, whatever you or the D&D cosmos might say, that act seems reprehensible and doesn't fit into my image of the character I'm playing'.

So a better analysis would be to ask, what in particular are that group's lines for things that okay to kill at will, things that are okay to kill at need, etc. Then make sure most things are solidly over that line. The line might not be about moral or ethical culpability, but could be about different valuations of different kinds of existence - for this group, maybe sapience matters a lot more than morality as to whether something deserves life. Maybe the level of cognitive sophistication matters more than, say, whether the thing is an 'abomination' according to in-D&D belief systems. Maybe power relationships matter more, or imminence of threat, or being seen being callous or dismissive of the value of life. Maybe its even just something like, they don't want to think of themselves as people who fall to stereotypes and treat all X the same, even if D&D's rules assert 'all X are in fact the same', and so just having a history with the antagonists would be enough to say 'okay, we're not killing orcs, we're killing the Azthag war band and we saw the sorts of things they do before'

But basically, that sets the boundary of what that group is going to feel good about subjecting to home invasion and subsequent murder, and what they won't. That's more important than G vs E.

Basically this. If you're worried that "these are the baddies, out sword" isn't enough to avoid your game devolving into a moral philosophy class, figure out what would make villains unambiguously worthy of violence and make yours be that. Or you can lean into the philosophy bit if your group finds that more fun, just be clear that that is probably going to pull a lot of time away from rolling dice.

[Devils_Advocate]

It's not an argument, it's literally in the description of alignment.

So no, we don't have "proof that sapience is not a requirement for alignment"; in fact we have the exact opposite.
You seem to assume that the description of alignment is internally consistent. But if the alignment section says that sapience is required for evil alignment and that evil alignment is something that in no way requires sapience, that's obviously not the case.


3rd edition explicitly states that creatures of below-human cognition (below INT 3) are neutral by virtue of not being capable of ethics. It then goes and defines all mundane animals as having below-human cognition. Apparently 5th edition continues the trend, substituting unaligned for neutral.

This is chiefly a WotC-era thing - in AD&D, animals had more variance in cognitive ability, with some having near-human or human-equivalent cognition, and some also had alignment other than neutral.
I had thought that 5E had moved back away from this, but apparently not nearly so much as I had imagined. It looks like primates are the only real non-humans with Intelligence scores over 3, and even they are "unaligned". They probably should have been recategorized and reworked as humanoids instead of as "beasts", considering.


Personally, I consider the WotC sweeping statements about animals to be poor fit for fantasy. Myth and fantasy often have animals, even mundane animals, be intelligent, with their own languages etc., and holding them morally responsible is not at all odd. Even historically, some animals have been prosecuted under law just like people, and on contemporary note, further studies on many kinds of animals have shown them more aware and capable of thought & emotion than they are often given credit for. The idea that animals are just machines acting on instinct, with no moral quality to their actions, is a particular trope from particular era of history that can be trivially done away with for purposes of a game.
I know that people like to pretend otherwise, but Dungeons & Dragons isn't really a terribly generic fantasy game. It has plenty of idiosyncrasies. Every edition has had its own that aren't sacred cows central to D&D's identity, even. Still, there are arguments for cutting back baking setting assumptions into the system.

But you don't seem to be considering the possibility that the trope is itself for the purposes of the game. There's nothing inherently invalid about deliberately oversimplifying something. It's a question of whether it's worth modeling in detail.


Animals and similar intellect creatures can't have alignment, because they can't have moral and social attitudes.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Unless you're talking about setting conceits. It's often noted that the people in many games are fairly "dumbed down", e.g. fighting losing battles to the death for no apparent reason; within that context, realistic predator behavior is probably too much to hope for. ;) If that's the desired level of simplification, then sure, it's perfectly reasonable for "beasts" to have no moral nor social attitudes and way fewer personalities than one per species.


Alignment is moral and social attitudes, which has an associated typical but not consistently required behavior. The key being it's moral and social attitudes that determines alignment first, and behavior tends to result from that. It is not that behavior causes alignment.
I mean, yeah, on the one hand alignment has always been described that way, but there has also been advice to DMs to track player character behavior and base alignment on that, even going so far as to say that a DM should ignore players' statements of intention. So it's not like the whole "alignment as karma" thing was fabricated entirely by DMs and/or players.


that's not to say that a player should pick a good or neutral alignment for their PC then consistently have them behave in a manner associated with an evil alignment. That's not picking an alignment for the character in good faith.
Oh, hey, speak of the devil!

Part of creating an environment where good faith is expected is to assume good faith by default. At the very least, you should be willing to listen to players' explanations for their characters' behavior. And then, if you think that those explanations don't make sense, explain why you think that. There's a good chance that you and a player don't share the same understanding of e.g. what evil alignment is. Figuring out where your assumptions differ is the first step to getting on the same page.

[Tiktakkat]

I've a question for you, Playground. Or a problem, really, which I've both experienced as a player and which I anticipate soon facing as a DM—namely, how do I get my players on board with the notion that, within the setting of this game, the use of violence is often the right answer, both in terms of practical utility and moral/ethical virtue, and therefore it is not inherently Evil to regularly traffic in violence?

Ultimately that is a problem of altering beliefs external to the game rather than internal to it.
For me, the best answer to that is not to try. This is supposed to be a game, not an indoctrination tool.


That was my biggest issue with the Dragonlance setting when it was published. It rather explicitly declared that the point of the game was to make players make the "correct" moral choice, and hardwired that assumption into the game rules with the "Good redeems its own" and "Evil turns on itself" standards, instructing the DM to give divine plot armor to the good guys and have anyone playing a bad guy automatically get betrayed. Yeah, no.



This, I suspect, is largely an artefact of D&D being an adaptation of a tabletop war game and the fiction (and the broader cultural milieu) it was influenced by and originally intended to emulate;

Mostly it is because it is a war game, which requires rules for resolving combat. For the interactions, no rules are required as that was left exclusively to imagination and personal ability.
The inspirational literature merely provides the sort of adventures that go with a combat-based system. Despite that, much of that literature contains a sizable amount of personal interaction where the choice not to kill and make friends is a significant choice. In the Lord of the Rings, having and showing mercy to Gollum is a major plot point, and even someone like John Carter of Mars routinely makes friends and allies in the midst of enemies with major consequences. Those encounters may simply seem less relevant because of the excitement of the fighting action, but they are very often critical to the story.


Now, perhaps we just need to get comfortable with the realities of playing around in a pseudo-feudal medieval-esque fantasyland, and one in which there is some degree of moral objectivity to boot, but I neither desire nor feel like it would be particularly effective to just tell my players "Look, this is the immutable nature of morality and the world, no matter what you do you cannot change that, just roll with it."

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Some game systems do lend themselves to particular attitudes toward violence (In general, the more lethal combat is, the less attractive combat is as an option. There are exceptions.), as do some types of game. But those can easily be overruled by player choices and preferences. It just depends on how things are presented.


When it comes to game thematic morality, I always think back to my Champions group.
During one campaign a player cold-bloodedly killed a villain after we had defeated him. The rest of the team all had codes against killing of one degree or another, and we all, completely in-character, reacted negatively, and made it clear it was not to happen again, "or else".
While that was a one-off situation, later on the "Dark Champions" supplement came out, with rules and a setting to reflect the then-current trend to vigilante and anti-hero characters in comics like the Punisher. The whole group jumped at the chance to get beyond the "boring" goody-two-shoes archetype - for about 3 months. Then most of realized that we were playing the game precisely for that sort of morality as opposed to the murder-hoboing of D&D. None of us wanted to stop killing critters and taking their loot in D&D, but most of us also did not want to stop being the thoroughly good good guys in Champions.



So how do I present them with a world that feels neither incredibly and oppressively bleak nor hopelessly naïve, while still having whole species/races/creatures who are reliably (and objectively) monstrous and from whom it is generally virtuous to defend others by violence, political hierarchies which are inherently unequal but do not demand immediate overthrow to the exclusion of all other concerns, in which there is a meaningful difference between the paladin slaying legions of orcs or the rogue assassinating the evil vizier and those same orcs slaying legions of humans or the evil vizier assassinating Good King Such-And-Such? Because while I can think of ways to do so on a case-by-case basis, I'm struggling to see how to establish that tone generally.

Well, the first thing I would suggest is move beyond the need to have whole species/etc. that need to be destroyed and simply not include raiding their homes and destroying their families and what not. While having women and children in lairs was a thing back in the day, and even still appears in certain monster entries, there is really no need to include them. Just do not do it. Anything encountered can simply be presented as an active raiding force, out to inflict harm and all that, with no extraneous considerations of killing orc children and smashing kobold eggs and such.
As for political hierarchies and similar elements, the simplest thing there is making it clear that countries/counties/villages have functioning power structures, and at low levels a full-frontal assault on them is a great way to end the campaign with a TPK. Of course, at some point if you push that restriction, you should make it possible for the PCs to achieve some change, just ask them to take some time and engage the campaign and background before doing it. As to how to make them see a difference, that requires making an engaging setting and making the villains villainous enough to incite some real player loathing.
Make the evil really evil, and keep the bad guys to actual bad guys and not bystanders or collateral damage.


I ran two campaigns where this became an issue. (Names and details glossed to avoid spoilers.)
The first was using some modules set in a logging camp run by a vicious boss, with a good number of Old West tropes of the nasty boss oppressing the locals. The thing is, the locals are mostly CN and not particularly decent themselves. I had given the players a mission above those in the modules to try and subvert the locals into joining another kingdom. The players first had to deal with not being strong enough to take out the boss as I note above, but also had to deal with the locals being too callous to help. And then there were more sub-plot elements making that even worse. Until at one point the PCs were discussing what to do and one suggested just burning the whole place to the ground and starting over a mile down the river. And the paladin, who was playing an excellent paladin, agreed! I had made the bad guys THAT bad.
The second was running an adventure path featuring a villain who had effectively enslaved the PCs who managed to escape. That villain then disappears into the background for several levels in the adventures. Despite that, the PCs, despite being evil themselves, aided and abetted by a few choice references to the villain, conceived an extreme hate for him, to the point that I had to hard-railroad them not to derail the entire adventure path and pursue said villain prematurely. On re-running that same adventure path with a number of tweaks so that the villain was less relevant, I hit a point where I had to focus the players on him. A few spontaneous tweaks to an otherwise minor encounter and once again I had the PC hate for said villain soaring into the stratosphere.
With some plotting and good role-play on the part of the DM, it is not that hard to get players to accept that some villains really do need to be dealt with harshly.

[Tanarii]

Assumes facts not in evidence.
Actually, it just assumes the 5e version of alignment.

[Quertus]

Right. I now have to add “animals” to my list of “things noted otherwise” for “like the real world, unless noted otherwise”. :smallsigh:

[Tanarii]

Right. I now have to add “animals” to my list of “things noted otherwise” for “like the real world, unless noted otherwise”. :smallsigh:
Alignment doesn't exist IRL.

[Quertus]

Alignment doesn't exist IRL.

I meant more in terms of their reasoning for animals being disqualified from being moral agents. Or animals being dumber than humans.

[Rynjin]

You seem to assume that the description of alignment is internally consistent. But if the alignment section says that sapience is required for evil alignment and that evil alignment is something that in no way requires sapience, that's obviously not the case.

Well tell you what, why not quote the relevant text that says evil alignment doesn't require sapience?

[Tanarii]

I meant more in terms of their reasoning for animals being disqualified from being moral agents. Or animals being dumber than humans.
Ah. I don't see any conflict then.

[Devils_Advocate]

Well tell you what, why not quote the relevant text that says evil alignment doesn't require sapience?
The description of neutral evil alignment doesn't explicitly say that it doesn't require sapience, there's just nothing about what it describes that does.


Actually, it just assumes the 5e version of alignment.
Whether or not animals have have moral and social attitudes is something about animals, not something about alignment. (If you'd said "It just assumes the 5E version of animals", I'd have agreed with you.)

If the PHB's descriptions of the alignments aren't the 5E version of alignment, then what the heck is? And if they are the 5E version of alignment, and at least some of them don't require rational thought, then saying that nothing without rational thought has an alignment is a whoospy doopsy, now isn't it?!

[hamishspence]

Well tell you what, why not quote the relevant text that says evil alignment doesn't require sapience?

The description of neutral evil alignment doesn't explicitly say that it doesn't require sapience, there's just nothing about what it describes that does.

...

And if they are the 5E version of alignment, and at least some of them don't require rational thought, then saying that nothing without rational thought has an alignment is a whoospy doopsy, now isn't it?!

5e's portrayal of zombies as both NE and as incapable of rational thought might fit. Lemures (LE) being Int 1 might also support that. Very much a "creatures imbued with evil can be both mindless and evil-aligned" thing.

[Rynjin]

The description of neutral evil alignment doesn't explicitly say that it doesn't require sapience, there's just nothing about what it describes that does.

"The rules don't say I can't" is never a valid answer. The system is permissive; if it doesn't say you CAN, then you cannot.

Re: Undead: Explicit exceptions to a rule do not constitute inconsistency or ambiguity.

[Satinavian]

5e's portrayal of zombies as both NE and as incapable of rational thought might fit. Honestly it was much better when zombies and the like were true neutral in 2nd.
But then some people wanted a simpler game where the good paladins smash the evil zombies.

[Vahnavoi]

You seem to assume that the description of alignment is internally consistent. But if the alignment section says that sapience is required for evil alignment and that evil alignment is something that in no way requires sapience, that's obviously not the case.

This isn't a matter of inconsistency - the clauses about animal cognition are independent additions to basic definitions of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil. The rules interpretation is perfectly straight-forward: if a creature does something that would indicate alignment in a human, but is an animal, then the creature remains True Neutral / Unaligned because animals are not considered aware enough to be aligned.

As noted, it's trivially possible to just ditch any sweeping clauses about animal cognition and accept some animals are in fact intelligent, and thus capable of being aligned one way or another.

It's the same situation as with Euclidean geometry and the parallel axiom; the axiom is independent from other postulates of geometry and it's possible to just accept non-Euclidean geometries, such as ball geometry and hyperbolic geometry, are a thing.


I know that people like to pretend otherwise, but Dungeons & Dragons isn't really a terribly generic fantasy game. It has plenty of idiosyncrasies. Every edition has had its own that aren't sacred cows central to D&D's identity, even. Still, there are arguments for cutting back baking setting assumptions into the system.

But you don't seem to be considering the possibility that the trope is itself for the purposes of the game. There's nothing inherently invalid about deliberately oversimplifying something. It's a question of whether it's worth modeling in detail.


I know what kind of people the idea of all animals as non-moral operators appeals to, and why. But the trope doesn't really do anything for the game and the game was already filled with tropes that clash with such sweeping statements. D&D posits some characters have unusual empathy and ability to communicate with animals (ranger & druid class features, Speak with Animals spell etc.). It inherits plenty of animal stereotypes from earlier fantasy and has no problem using them for fantastic creatures such as Drow (spider people in elf skin), Formians (ant people) or were-creatures. Doing away with the sweeping clause about animals does not in any significant way increase the amount of detail or effort required - on the contrary, it means you can say (for example) that Formians are Lawful Neutral because they act like ants, without having to add "but ants themselves are True Neutral because they're too stupid to know what they're doing".

[Tanarii]

- on the contrary, it means you can say (for example) that Formians are Lawful Neutral because they act like ants, without having to add "but ants themselves are True Neutral because they're too stupid to know what they're doing".
Conversely, you have to add to animal entry alignments "but unlike the real world, animals can have social and moral attitudes despite not being sapient*."

*exceptions for some animals that are borderline may not apply, but those are typically given stats in D&D higher than 2 Int.

[TyGuy]

D&D and its peers are games about heroic violence.
Perhaps some people want more than that. Perhaps some newcomers don't fully understand this because they watch professional voice actors spending 75% of their time role-playing.
A table can go long stretches without combat, the group can shirk it all together. That doesn't change the fact that the bulk of resources (rules, stat blocks, inspirational content, etc.) revolve around adventure and combat.
How the violence is handled can vary greatly. And perhaps that's an important topic for new tables these days. Games about violence aren't for everyone. And not all flavors of violence are suitable to every person that has interest in a game about violence.

[Vahnavoi]

Conversely, you have to add to animal entry alignments "but unlike the real world, animals can have social and moral attitudes despite not being sapient*."

*exceptions for some animals that are borderline may not apply, but those are typically given stats in D&D higher than 2 Int.

False. People do not have any trouble attributing social and even moral attitudes to animals. Both "unlike the real world" and "despite not being sapient" are thus ill-established. This is especially true for social attitudes along the Law-Chaos-axis; who exactly doesn't understand the real world basis for saying eusocial animals (like ants) are Lawful while solitary animals (like polar bears) are Chaotic?

The only actual game changes would be to put something else than "True Neutral" or "Unaligned" in the alignment entry of a creature description, insofar as such an entry is used, as well as sometimes giving an animals intelligence scores above 2.

[Tanarii]

False. People do not have any trouble attributing social and even moral attitudes to animals. People attributing human thinking to their pets (or other animals) doesn't make it False. It just means they're incorrectly attributing something that doesn't actually exist.

[KorvinStarmast]

People attributing human thinking to their pets (or other animals) doesn't make it False. It just means they're incorrectly attributing something that doesn't actually exist. Then how did my dogs lay that guilt trip on me yesterday when I cam home late and they had not had their breakfast yet? (I was at church early working some charity stuff and it ran long).

[Clistenes]

Couldn't you just have the denizens from the dungeon come out at night to capture, kill and eat the villagers in the vicinity? Let them try to use diplomacy if they wish (it would probably have to be Dreadnought Diplomacy, as in, try to make their way to the boss at the bottom of the dungeon, and put a sword on their neck to make them swear not to kill humans anymore...), and have the monsters keep eating people the next week after the adventurers leave the dungeon...

[Jedaii]

Ok so the OP hasn't even responded. They summoned the "D&D is ALL combat" argument ignoring the fact that the system has social skills and PCs get XP for defeating challenges. As if certain challenges can't be overcome with social skills or player cunning.

This dated depiction of D&D is tired.

[icefractal]

Well it's not all combat, but the general assumption is that there will be at least a moderate amount of combat. While not impossible to run a non-combat campaign in D&D, it wouldn't be the system I'd choose*, and players would have to build their characters with that in mind, because many options and even entire classes will be near useless in such a scenario.

So the question of who the PCs are fighting and why (and whether the "why" is a good reason) is going to be applicable in 99% of campaigns.

* Exception: A campaign that's about fully utilizing magic on a large scale - building the Tippyverse or something like it - could be interesting, not involve any combat, and yet be particularly suited to D&D. You'd need to figure out how you're handling unbounded loops and such though.

[KorvinStarmast]

This dated depiction of D&D is tired. Plus elventy-:smallsmile:nine.

[Beleriphon]

Then how did my dogs lay that guilt trip on me yesterday when I cam home late and they had not had their breakfast yet? (I was at church early working some charity stuff and it ran long).


Your dogs still feel emotions, but they aren't making a moral judgement about your character. They're just sad you didn't feed them like you normally do. You're the one feeling guilty because the dogs are hungry and sad. It doesn't help your guilty feeling that humans have bred dogs to do stupid stuff like make us feel guilty.