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Thread: Why is creating undead Evil?

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    Ettin in the Playground
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    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Why is creating undead Evil?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Look I'll be honest with you:
    the only reason why anything is evil in DnD is because the creators think you need a clear visual indicator of Acceptable Enemy Target to kill things mindlessly like a murderhobo. to put it bluntly in tvtropes terms DnD is an action game and thus needs mooks for that action to happen on

    Problem is my experience the only people who actually need such clear visual indicators are DnD players. I don't see this attitude from Skyrim players-they just kill whatever attacks them without worrying much about it, they kill both human bandits and draugr by the truckload. like open world videogames shows very much that people are willing to kill whatever fictional thing without guilt. while superhero and action hero stories are full of people who are just normal human criminals get punched out by the capes or shot down by some guy with a gun. in short, DnD has this weird hang up that I don't see anywhere else.

    but still, DnD has it and thus zombies are made to be mooks so that you, the hero of the story and thus the most important person in that story can slaughter them without a second thought, term jersey morality is wrong because it assumes that Good is somehow narratively equal to Evil: its not, Evil exists to be Good's punching bag and foe and thus lesser than Good by being incredibly obvious to spot. I personally find this superfluous and unneeded. I can create my own black-and-white morality narrative thank you very much, and I don't need flashing neon signs to determine whether something is evil and kill them without guilt. If human bandits are attacking a caravan a detect evil spell is being overly cautious. A world where a necromancer has no alignment but still uses undead to do various horrible things so it can take over the world or something is still objectively evil. If you don't want moral complexity or well intentioned extremists, don't include them, its simple as that.

    in short, creating undead is evil because of this weird DnD attitude of being broken up about the things you kill if they don't have the right visual indicator flagging them as guiltless when the true guilt is self-created. Other franchises don't need such indicators, when I kill a raider in Fallout, I don't get broken up about how that raider was a living human who was trying to get by through taking stuff by force from others. Why would I? Screw that guy. I don't need him to be undead to kill him, loot him and be on my merry way. He attacked me, he deserved what he got.

    Meanwhile if I'm playing evil why would I care at all?

    the only reason the undead exist is to fulfill an enemy role in a combat game, when that role can be really be fulfilled by any mook without much trouble, as a lot of media demonstrate and the only reason it doesn't is because DnD is weird and builds a strange overwrought system of morality to do what other games accomplish without it; it thinks too much on why when good proper mooks aren't about why they are mooks, they just exist and attack then die. thinking on the why of a mook exists is already thinking too much. what matters is they do exist, they are attacking you and they're not going to stop attacking you.
    It is false for the fallout example: in the early fallouts there was options in order specifically to reduce the number of killed raiders so it means that people are supposed to care about the raiders.
    It is just that the modern fallouts tries to encourage you being an horrible person: the vast majority of the population are raiders and you kill way more raiders than there is non raiders people (if you play long) so you had a really negative effect on the global population: you killed more people than the number of people you helped.
    It is the same problem as in GW2: char separationists represents way more population than the people you protect from a war between the chars and the humans: you kill way more char separationists than there is chars or of friendly people that would fear a war with the chars so it is obvious that the players are the bad guy in killing megatons of char separationists even if as a whole they are up to no good it is impossible that each of them was so awful that it justifies incredible mass murder.
    Also it is quite odd that the char separationists are a mix of char and humans that works together and are ready to die in droves for their common goal while their objective is supposedly to cause a war between chars and humans: it makes you wonder if it is their actual goal and if you are not being misled by someone or something else.
    If two countries have all their population except for 100 persons ally together in their quest to get war between the two countries then by killing all the people except that hundred person you are just making a bigger war in order to "prevent war".

    Now I wonder if the small farm that gets attacked by "bandits" every 30 minutes actually stole the cattle from the "bandits" and are in an everlasting feud to get the cattle except that the adventurers then murders all the people who wears bandit clothing.(Personally I think it would be hilarious to see a speech going the following way "all of your ancestors, thousands of them died in order to get back those specific animals so let us follow the manifest goal of our entire bandit civilisation and try to take back those cattle or die in the process")

    It is just that videogames by trying to make unlimited amounts of mooks just breaks their settings badly.
    If they used only undead the heroes would not be evil people: the villains would be just reusing the same minions and reanimating them over and over and it would be a select few that suffers from the wrath of many.
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-21 at 12:30 AM.