Making D&D morality less repulsive.

[sabs]

I thought Barbarians were not allowed to be Lawful in D&D?

[JigokuBosatsu]

That's a rule that barbarians don't care about. They can be lawful if they want to!

[shadzar]

I don't know how the hell this turned from a morality dispute to an alignment dispute. The 2 often have nothing to do with each other, and the fact that they both use terms like "good" and "evil" and mean entirely different things is going to automatically muddy the waters. Every time I've used the word "good" in this discussion, it was in the moral sense, not the alignment sense. I don't give a fuck what's written on your character sheet...if you stab baby orcs, you're not good (and you're probably evil).

Because of the terms used.

Morality is personal beliefs and subjective, while you could claim nature sets the part of alignment up as good and evil. Morality deals with what is good and bad...

Same problem with the word short...what is the opposite of the word short? Is it long or tall?

This is why many other countries HATE the English language cause it reuses words when it could make another, and makes synonymous words when existing ones are fine.

Morally killing kids may be bad, but in the context of the game, you have to leave real world morality out, like many other things. Thus why if people don't like a game, they just simply shouldnt play it, or play it the way they like. Do what you want with Free Parking in Monopoly as long as the other players agree, no one can tell you you are playing it wrong with your group...just remember when you step outside of your group, you method may not be the same as others, so choose what you talk about and dont get mad if you open a can of worms with a topic best left out of your discussions or others.

[shadzar]

I thought Barbarians were not allowed to be Lawful in D&D?

-1st UA introduces them as any non-lawful alignment.
-I dont recall complete book of fighters having any alignment restrictions in 2nd
-3rd brought them out of sub-fighter or kit-fighter and followed the non-lawful alignment.

Other than that, barbarian shouldnt even be a class, as it is a way of life such that huns and vikings and mongols were barbarians....

Barbarian is just a term for the less than "technologically" civilized.

But this probably better for the class fixing related thread as it just shows how adding a name to something doesnt always make sense because a barbarian shaman is no different form a human cleric of another religion.

I never used them personally and the times the kit was used in second, they were just specialized fighters.

[JigokuBosatsu]

It is kind of interesting to think that somewhere in the distant past, when everyone was a fighter, someone created a Barbarian prestige class that was as optimized as you could get.

[tzor]

I thought Barbarians were not allowed to be Lawful in D&D?

Barbarians were just some bad joke invented by the Greeks and Romans to put down foreign invaders. The whole class reflects Roman snobbery.

Not allowed to be lawful
Not allowed to be literate
etc.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, I'll bite...WHY are you opposed to killing faceless goons and still calling yourself a hero? If those faceless goons are part of the Nazi war machine that slaughters jews and steamrolls over Europe, you ARE a hero for killing them. If they are part of the evil Empire that blows up Alderaan and enslaves wookies, you ARE a hero for killing them.

That's an interesting, if depressingly common, point of view. So if I have a bunch of Nazi prisoners I got the drop on, it's okay for me to torture and kill them instead of bringing them to a PoW facility because they're Nazis? How about if I meet a couple of guys while infiltrating a Stormtrooper bar who says that they're in charge of making sure that food and clothes gets to the crew of the Death Star? Is it okay for me to kill them, too, even if I could sabotage the shipment of supplies without ganking the Supply Officer? Actually, why did they let so many concentration camp guards go after the war? Can I machine gun all of the pre-teens in the Hitler Youth organization, even the ones that are talking about how much they're going to enjoy being a soldier and are the top of their class?

I personally find this an extremely troubling point of view. I mean, no one would support you indiscriminately killing German citizens--even those openly professing the virtues of Hitler--in the 50's and 60's. But a lot of these people were Nazis during WWII. And you might well go 'it's okay to kill them then, but not kill them now', then what was stopping you from indiscriminately killing German citizens back then?

I didn't say a word about spandex. I'm saying playing a character like Superman in the sense that "I'm a big bouncing boy scout who helps old ladies cross the street and [important here] doesn't kill my enemies" is not an archetype supported by D&D. Not by the rules, and not by the setting. So why are you doing it?

Because as much as you keep trying to deny it, Dungeons and Dragons does try to support these kinds of characters, to the point where it's a default assumption about any 'good' organization. There are literally entire orders of religious sects and paladins who don't have much of a description beyond 'tries to help everyone in need'. The minutae comes as an afterthought. The first thing you hear about these people's goals is how much they try to uphold justice and civilization and hope and all that crap.

But this is completely at odds with the default assumption that it's okay to kill hundreds of faceless goons when you didn't have to. Not killing people you don't have to (and unless you know anything about them other than Random Guard #12 or Orc Hunter #8, how do you know if they're deserving?) is a direct consequence of wanting to uphold justice and civilization and hope without being a hypocrite. Your question seriously makes as much sense as saying that heroes that don't own slaves isn't an archetype supported by D&D; owning slaves or killing people isn't just some strange cultural twist like not swearing or brushing your teeth or eating vitamins or staying in cool, it's something you have to do in order not to be a bastard. And considering that the game says there are entire organizations that aren't just are not bastards but paragons of morality, the bridge is pretty easy to make, isn't it.

What the fuck? You seriously put concentration camp guard # 9 on the same level as Blurt the orc baby in his diaper? And you call ME a monster?

No, really, I really am. You're applying a dehumanization label out of convenience rather than looking at the nuances. That directly leads to things like killing Blurt the orc baby. I mean, really, what's the difference between going 'Nazis are uniformly evil, therefore I can kill anyone with membership' and going 'orcs are uniformly evil, therefore I can kill anyone with membership'?

I find this kind of hypocrisy depressing and amusing. I mean you objected to Blurt being killed because that aside from being nauseating there are a ton of mitigating circumstances; Blurt hasn't exactly done anything evil yet, there's a chance that he might grow up to be good, at this young age all of these evil acts like eating mashed halfling heads he can't control, etc.. So why does this suddenly not apply to Nazis or palace guards or whatever? Hans the random Nazi guard might have just been conscripted into service, he might actually believe all of the propaganda about this being good for the world, he might have just been a reserve guard and has never fired his gun outside of a firing range, etc.. The only reason you'd think automatically that a Nazi, even a concentration camp guard (because they all had such a great choice about where they were being assigned) = baby-raping evil is by buying all of that propaganda.

The only reason why Blurt gets a pass but Hans doesn't is just because of sensibilities. Which has nothing to do with reducing evil in the world, you're just holding a double-standard out of squeamishness. If you don't want to have this double-standard then you have to acknowledge that without knowing anything about Hans he doesn't deserve to be
killed just for wearing a Nazi uniform and being somewhere you don't want.

It's wrong to kill infants because they are helpless and innocent. Literally. It is IMPOSSIBLE for them to have committed a crime worthy of death.

But they're orcs. It's only a matter of time for them to someday go around killing innocent people or burning forests or whatever, because they're orcs. You not killing Blurt is just condemning some other family to die 10 years in the future, because orcs are inherently evil and have no other choice or chance of redemption. It's either that, or you realize that all of those other orcs you met were babies at one point had this state of innocence, too, so it's not too hard to assume that there may be some orcs that have held onto this innocent state, still. So why doesn't it trouble you that when you're destroying an orc camp or busting up a celebration you're probably killing a few orcs that haven't drunk the evil Kool-Aid?

Is it because babies are cute and grown ups are not so cute? Great consistency of moral values thar.

Guards who have killed people (often innocent people) and would happily kill you, given means and opportunity, are not the same thing. They are not even close...not the same ballpark, not the same league, not the same fucking sport.

Read up the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Hofling Hospital Experiment sometime. This is behavior pretty much indistinguishable from some of the worst results of that vile ideology and in fact is pretty much the reason why it was able to work as well as it did. While thankfully no one died in these experiments it's pretty easy to see that if they had gone on far enough they would have crossed the line. Why aren't all of these future Nazis in jail or executed? I mean, if it's okay to kill Nazis at the pub playing with their children because you know they'll be torturing prisoners later, why isn't it okay to put a bullet in the brain of everyone who went through with shocking someone to death at the orders of someone in a labcoat?

It's comforting to think that Nazis or whatever are uniformly complete monsters that have something 'wrong' with them where you can make life-or-death decisions without knowing anything other than their affiliation--because they're monsters and can't do that better. But it doesn't work that way and has never worked that way. With some very few exceptions most of the people you're gleefully killing, even the ones for some reason or another are shoving prisoners into trains to Dachau, are normal-ass people.

So as much as you'd like to deny it to hold onto your puerile power fantasies, yes, they are in the same league and sport. Maybe not in the same ballpark to use such a tortured analogy (since it's impossible for Blurt to have done anything irredeemibly evil and it's POSSIBLE though unlikely for Hans to have been a cannibal serial killer beforehand), but it's not immediately worthy of dismissal.

The "just following orders" defense didn't work at Nurnberg, and it doesn't work in Flaeness.

Uh, yes, but these people had actual trials and shit. A lot of them even got off scot free even though they spent years putting the idea that it was okay to kill undesirables into the minds of hundreds of thousands of people. No one just rounded up a bunch of suspected Nazi officials and started putting bullets in their brains because the results wouldn't have been any different and they could go home early for tea.

Are you denying the existence of a middle ground, or not? And if so, which side do guys like Lancelot and Han Solo fit on?

While it would be preferrable to spare the crew of the Death Star, debrainwash them, then make them get all real jobs it was just not an option. I don't have a problem with Luke killing the hundreds of millions of people onboard the Death Star, probably even some visiting families or prisoners, because there was really no other way. This would even be true if there was a reveal that all of the crew was being mind-controlled by implants. Even in small-scale confrontations, the margin of error between 'able to fight and do evil', 'disabled but alive', and 'dead' is just impossible for humans, even the best of Vanilla Action Heroes, to meet. Same goes for Lancelot. He's a pretty low-level hero so he can't pull his punches. He gets a pass as long as he does his best to keep down the needless killing, which means no provoking people or looking for fights. But once the violence goes down and is unavoidable, there's just not much he can do with his sword and his knowledge of medicine to nonlethally disable the bandits.

This reasoning does not apply to D&D heroes. A lot of people have pointed out that it might be too much to expect people fighting in a heroic fantasy pastiche to faire much better than Lancelot and Conan (where even if they wanted not to kill everyone in a swordfight they couldn't, because they're vanilla action heroes) but I find it a really flimsy excuse that you can control your sword manuevers enough that you can cut holes in space time but you can't avoid killing faceless goon #9.

Re: Dark Lord's Guards...what compartmentalization? Again, see the part where people are held accountable for what huge evil organizations they choose to belong to.

This holds up for some organizations. If some mercenary group won't let you into their gang unless they have magical-sworn proof that you tortured and killed a child, you can pretty much assume that everyone is evil. But I find it stupid to reflexively apply this same standard of responsibility to Ravagers as to some random guards, like you did right here. 'Oh, they're working for the Dark Lord? It doesn't matter that I don't know anything about their membership requirements or individual behavior, they're working for someone evil so I can kill them!'

Honorable guy who doesn't agree with the Dark Lord, but is apparently still willing to stab babies for him (or at least, look the other way while others do the stabbing). I say fuck that guy.

Because everyone knows that military staff get to pick their positions and are allowed to leave if they disagree morally with their bosses' position, especially in Iron Age times when most people were little more than slaves. And this goes double for Dark Lords. Riiiight.

Guy who was duped by the Dark King. This is fairly valid...but why do you hold the PCs to a higher standard than this guy? They have no way of knowing he's an innocent dupe...but you'll hold them guilty for killing him in self-defense, whereas you won't hold HIM guilty for fighting for an evil person?

You didn't actually refute my argument, you just twisted it so that it said 'I know you said this, but what if this detail I added completely twists your point around, huh?' You know, a strawman. I said that the guard didn't know that his employer was evil, but then you said that he should somehow be held guilty because he was fighting for an evil person--forgetting that the original argument was THAT HE DIDN'T KNOW THAT HE WAS FIGHTING FOR AN EVIL PERSON. Who cares if the PCs actually know that he's been sacrificing villages to Cyric? The guards sure as hell don't, so why are they being punished for doing their jobs?

Guards who would rather die fighting than traitors/deserters...if they would put loyalty to country or whatever so high that they will go along with evil atrocities, sorry, they don't get a pity pass in my book. "Wanting to look good" (not be a traitor/deserter) is not a valid excuse for "works for murderous evil". It's barely more acceptable than "wants to earn a big paycheck".

It's not that simple. Being a traitor or deserter, especially in these times, isn't just a matter of political party or whatever where you just walk away from it and everything is okay. First of all, being a traitor might actually be the more evil decision because it'll put your family under undue stress and torment depending on who you work for. And if you're fighting in D&D times, that punishment could very well be 'family and friends get killed to set an example', like what actually historically happened.

Secondly, even if the person committed suicide upon learning of their new assignment that wouldn't make things better. The position of Throne Room Guard still needs to be filled and at the very least all you've done is make it so that your friend or squaddie or whatever has to be faced with this awful decision. Or they could pull a Xykon on you and resurrect your corpse as a guard, meaning that you'll do just as much evil but without the chance for redemption. Sucking it up and condemning yourself to a life of evil may in fact be the best decision on a strict 'lives saved in the short and long run' scale.

It is of course your job as the superpowered PCs to kill the Dark Lord and spare Steve or Hans of this awful fate. If you just knock him out, then when this whole mess is over they can go back to their family shop and raise babies and do whatever.

It's a fantasy game...in real life, everything you're saying is valid, and situations are muddled and morally ambiguous. But I play fantasy exactly because I want a nice, clear-cut situation where monsters deserve to be killed, and that's a valid solution.

Then why do people get up in arms about FATAL and Racial Holy War? What are my options if I want to play a game where people of the wrong race get killed or gender and it's the right, clear-cut solution? Why does Exalted: Lunars get taken to the task for providing me with the fantasy of conquering the world through slavery and mass rape and presenting it as if it's a good thing?

Name me 10 fantasy novels/movies predicated on either of those concepts (or even which involve them heavily). 'Bad guys who really aren't so bad' is a standard gambit, I admit. It should crop up roughly 1 in 40-50 or so D&D adventures, and you have a good time with it, and then forget about it.

They don't feature in them BECAUSE THIS ASPECT OF FANTASY MORALS SUCK AND PREACHES A BAD MORAL STANDARD. It's not integral or anything, it's just an embarrassing thing that keeps popping up because people don't know any better. Frank already mentioned this in the past that this is just circular justification about why something should be in a fantasy story, so I'm just going to give a mini-rant here.

I am really tired of 'it pops up in fantasy, so we should do it here', even if it features heavily in it. We are not beholden to the stupider fantasy tropes like compartmentalization or the gleeful dehumanization of the 'wrong' sorts. I don't need to do routine animal sacrifice or uphold the Sabbath to be a modern Christian or Jew, even though the Old Testament goes on and on about these things to the point where they form the backbone of several stories. This is because modern followers of Abrahamic religions realized that these old-style fetishes were stupid. We don't need this shit to have modern fantasy stories and if it's really that integral, so be it.

I can still have the stories about armies of pegasus knights and castles made of solid gold and forests sprouting up overnight from nothingness and ghosts bandits haunting the city and whatever the fuck without all of that crap you're reflexively spouting. Fantasy is more complicated than 'find massive hordes of people you don't like, then kill them!', even if people have gotten stupid and started focusing on the symbols rather than the gestalt lately.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Maybe there's just a disconnect about what D&D morality is. I don't see it as any worse (in general) than "kill bad fuckers who do bad things". If someone would like to point me to where the game encourages you to butcher orc babies or sow salt on the orc's fields, let me know.

Complete Champion. Look up the writeup of Corellon Larethian's church. You have to kill drow as a holy duty, because Corellon wanted to send them all to hell, but Lolth somehow prevented this. So because they aren't in hell, and your god wanted to send them all there, it is holy to kill every drow you meet. Also, it's holy to kill orcs and drow with a bow, because God said they're evil! Which is kind of like Lago's point of "murder all the Germans" above.

Being an ur-priest is starting to look more and more attractive.

[Prak]

Actually, one could change the drow flavour a bit based on that, and it would totally be fine. If you focus on the "Corellon wanted all the evil elves to plunge into hell, but lolth spent some of her magic and corrupted them so they didn't go to hell, so they're still around" and change things so they only reproduce through the corruption of other races, preferably surface elves, and don't die of old age, then a bunch of the drow around are still around from their corruption, and the others are corrupted elves, or the demon spawn rape children from Drow forcing themselves on captured surface elves. With this, it is then actually perfectly fine as a holy mission to slay their asses, because you're slaying quasi-demons that denied your god's will. It's not precisely good, but it's not so terrible anymore. It's more akin to running around staking vampires in the Buffyverse.

[FatR]

Okay, I'll bite...WHY are you opposed to killing faceless goons and still calling yourself a hero? If those faceless goons are part of the Nazi war machine that slaughters jews and steamrolls over Europe, you ARE a hero for killing them. If they are part of the evil Empire that blows up Alderaan and enslaves wookies, you ARE a hero for killing them.

That's an interesting, if depressingly common, point of view. So if I have a bunch of Nazi prisoners I got the drop on, it's okay for me to torture and kill them instead of bringing them to a PoW facility because they're Nazis? How about if I meet a couple of guys while infiltrating a Stormtrooper bar who says that they're in charge of making sure that food and clothes gets to the crew of the Death Star? Is it okay for me to kill them, too, even if I could sabotage the shipment of supplies without ganking the Supply Officer? Actually, why did they let so many concentration camp guards go after the war? Can I machine gun all of the pre-teens in the Hitler Youth organization, even the ones that are talking about how much they're going to enjoy being a soldier and are the top of their class?

This is intellectually dishonest to the extreme. In almost every example you are replacing killing people who, you know, are explicitly a threat, with killing people, who have explicitly lost the capacity to be a threat or contribute to a threat. Except with supply personnel for the Death Star. These are OK to kill, and, in fact, if you can, you should, because there is fucking total war going on here, and mercy to them is cruelty to the people the Empire routinely exterminates. No, there are very little to no viable justifications for them not deserting to the Rebels, they know they are helping making the flying genocide machine run smoothy, and, in the very best case, they chose to do so, to save their hides, and they will almost certainly continue to do so if you don't deprive them of capacity to take actions permanently.

Now, when they are safely imprisoned, or when the threat presented by their side is neutralized - and I mean neutralized entirely, by forcing a surrender or otherwise removing the capacity to wage war - the way of good guys is to show mercy even to such shits. But only when. Before that the good guys simply literally cannot afford the luxury of liberally showing mercy to the enemy who has none. Indiscriminate carpet bombing of German cities, often with the explicit goal of killing more civilians, was considered totally OK before 9 May of 1945, and, frankly, if not for strong arguments for its relative military ineffectiveness, compared to the other ways to expend same resources, I would see no reason to revise this stance today.

(and unless you know anything about them other than Random Guard #12 or Orc Hunter #8, how do you know if they're deserving?)

Exactly the same way anyone in feldgrau is deserving, if his hands is not firmly in the air, and we're in 1942.
Well, except that atrocity escalation in a world where there are actual forces of supernatural evil will be way worse, with correspondingly heavier burden of guilt for random guards and orc raiders.

But they're orcs. It's only a matter of time for them to someday go around killing innocent people or burning forests or whatever, because they're orcs. You not killing Blurt is just condemning some other family to die 10 years in the future, because orcs are inherently evil and have no other choice or chance of redemption.

And if orcs are actually such (now, why you are posing this setup which isn't even true in most versions of normal DnD, in fact, almost everywhere where the authors put some actual thought in that, I don't know), yes, I'm fully supporting total orcocide. Anyone with a brain will. It is literally no different from disabling killer robots or eliminating smallpox. And unless you actually believe that smallpox should be set free to ravage humanity again, saying that there is anything wrong with this approach is hypocritical on your part.

[FatR]

I should perhaps add that I'm not exactly happy about things working the way described above. I would much prefer to keep walking equivalents of smallpox to nonhumanoid monstrosities, like mind flayers, and in lighter/softer settings they should not exist at all. Similarly, total wars where no peace is possible until one of the sides is completely crushed, are by definition grimdark affairs, even if PCs' side is very clearly in the right, and authors should not put conflicts like this in their settings without reason. However, that's does not change how conflicts like this should unfold in a world that keeps as much connection to real-life logic and consequences of violence as fantasy usually does.

[DSMatticus]

No, there are very little to no viable justifications for them not deserting to the Rebels, they know they are helping making the flying genocide machine run smoothy, and, in the very best case, they chose to do so, to save their hides, ...

I'm sorry, but that post just shows a remarkably deep misunderstanding of how human conflict ever plays out. Deeply, deeply mistaken.

Do you honestly think one side EVER sees themself as the bad guy? "Yep, I know what I'm doing must be wrong! I just can't do anything about it. A shame." That's a minority. Except both sides have that minority. During WW2, we called those people draft dodgers. In Germany, they threw those people on a train to the concentration camps, because they didn't have a friendly Canada to the north to run to. There were people who disagreed with the war and killing jews thing, but their options were A) get sent to a concentration camp, or B) get shot in the back of the head by their officer for disobedience/cowardice, or C) get taken prisoner by the allies. Propaganda by the German forces probably suggested getting taken prisoner resulted in immediate execution, or even torture for information. And there were probably cases where getting captured did result in those things. Especially on the Eastern front. You didn't do that on the Eastern front.

Then there were people who wanted to fight. And their motivation wasn't, "I'm racist against Jews," or "I want to kill people." Their motivation was that the German youth was unhappy because they were suffering through a massive economic depression as a result of the WW1 reparations. They were being forced to pay for the mistakes of their fathers. That is something you and I both (should) agree is morally wrong - if my father is a gambling drunk, and stumbles in front of a bus after losing a 10,000 dollar bet, it shouldn't be my responsibility to pay that debt. That's just wrong.

And that's what the rest of Europe was doing to the youth of Germany - forcing them to pay that. The only reason the Jewish people ended up in concentration camps is because Hitler took that anger everyone was feeling about their unfair treatment after the end of WW1, and blamed it on them. "The greedy Jews are the reason they're making us pay reparations!" Some people bought that propaganda, and blamed it on them. Some didn't buy the propaganda, and still blamed it on the rest of Europe. The former were gullible. The latter were right.

And let's face it, they were right - the reparations were a bad idea. They punished people in Germany who had nothing to do with the decisions behind WW1. And it lead to WW2. To most of the people in Germany during WW2, Europe was "the bad guy" who wouldn't stop showing up and demanding money from them at gunpoint. And to the rest of Europe, Germany was "the bad guy" because it kept attacking them for no reason.

Human conflict is complicated. It is not like one side is the hero, doing the right thing. It's not a war movie, where you see it all through the eyes of your favorite side. Star Wars example: To the citizens of the empire, the rebels are equivalent to organizations like Al-Queda or Taliban. That's the kind of publicity they get inside the empire - they're treated like backwater extremists. They do not have a good PR campaign. For the deathstar supply officer to sympathize with the rebels is like you sympathizing with a compound of armed radical constitutionalist skinheads in the woods.

The only reason it's okay to kill Empire soldiers is because there's really no other choice - they're enemy soldiers, and you think your cause is the right cause. But the Empire soldiers have the exact same thing going through their head - "you are the enemy, and my cause is just." And unless you're watching the supreme ruler force lightning puppies, like the viewers of the movies [hyperbole], you've got no reason to be in doubt as a citizen of the Empire.

[FatR]

And let's face it, they were right - the reparations were a bad idea.

No. Letting Germany not pay them in full was a bad idea. Giving Germany rather lenient peace conditions, instead of just cutting it into smaller states was a bad idea. Leaving in potential condition for Round 2 the country, which leaders consciously and deliberately decided to solve all of its problems with neighbours by military force, and which political climate allowed such leaders to come in power and stay there, was a bad idea. And leting said leaders to get away unscathed, to actively participate in laying foundations for a much worse regime was a bad idea. This is yet another case of fake mercy. "But these people weren't at all responsible for the decisions of the government, which aggression most of them whole-heartedly supported until things went all pear-shaped" is a position that was proven to be crueler to everyone, including the people in question, in the real life. So excuse me if I won't support it in fantasy, when we're not talking about random civilians, but enemy soldiers who are either actively trying to kill PCs, or would try, if they knew who they are.

[fbmf]

This has devolved into an alignment discussion, and so it's going to go nowhere.

D&D works a lot better if you largely ignore alignment. We all know this.
Why is this discussion happening?

Especially when both sides arguments boil down to "No, my definition of good (or evil) is the right one?

Game On,
fbmf

[Lago PARANOIA]

D&D works a lot better if you largely ignore alignment. We all know this.
Why is this discussion happening?

Especially when both sides arguments boil down to "No, my definition of good (or evil) is the right one?

No offense or anything, fbmf, but you really need to read the last few pages. No one is choked up over the definition of evil or anything. What is under consideration is:

1) How appropriate it is to have entire races of critters whose overriding concern is making the world less safe and happy and the ramifications of this.

2) For critters that don't default to evil but are part of an overwhelmingly evil philosophy, how much individual responsibility any particular actor bears and thus whether it's appropriate to kill them.

The current discussion is centered on the problems you have assigning whole groups of things the 'evil' tag to justify things like killing them and then zooming in on individual members to see how this macroperspective holds. The fact that whether it's true (orcs) or false (Nazis) is not necessitated on any alignment system. These problems would still persist even if you took it out of the game but still had people devoted to upholding concepts like justice and peace.

[norms29]

Guy who was duped by the Dark King. This is fairly valid...but why do you hold the PCs to a higher standard than this guy? They have no way of knowing he's an innocent dupe...but you'll hold them guilty for killing him in self-defense, whereas you won't hold HIM guilty for fighting for an evil person?

You didn't actually refute my argument, you just twisted it so that it said 'I know you said this, but what if this detail I added completely twists your point around, huh?' You know, a strawman. I said that the guard didn't know that his employer was evil, but then you said that he should somehow be held guilty because he was fighting for an evil person--forgetting that the original argument was THAT HE DIDN'T KNOW THAT HE WAS FIGHTING FOR AN EVIL PERSON.

No, he didn't add a detail, you mental-midget, he just applied your agrument both ways. if it's ok for him fight the PCs because he doesn't know he's sided with the bad-guys, why isn't ok for the PCs to kill him be cause they don't know he's an oblivious dupe? if it's not okay for the PCs to kill the guard because he doesn't know any better, thus upgrading his moral standing from "active malevolence" to "armed and dangerous retard", why is it ok from him to "do his job" as a guard without similar moral hand-wringing?

or was it your intention that the PCs knew he was a dupe (which you never specified)? in that case, why do they know that? why can't they convince him of that, and if they can't, what do you think it changes?

Guards who would rather die fighting than traitors/deserters...if they would put loyalty to country or whatever so high that they will go along with evil atrocities, sorry, they don't get a pity pass in my book. "Wanting to look good" (not be a traitor/deserter) is not a valid excuse for "works for murderous evil". It's barely more acceptable than "wants to earn a big paycheck".

It's not that simple. Being a traitor or deserter, especially in these times, isn't just a matter of political party or whatever where you just walk away from it and everything is okay. First of all, being a traitor might actually be the more evil decision because it'll put your family under undue stress and torment depending on who you work for. And if you're fighting in D&D times, that punishment could very well be 'family and friends get killed to set an example', like what actually historically happened.

Secondly, even if the person committed suicide upon learning of their new assignment that wouldn't make things better. The position of Throne Room Guard still needs to be filled and at the very least all you've done is make it so that your friend or squaddie or whatever has to be faced with this awful decision. Or they could pull a Xykon on you and resurrect your corpse as a guard, meaning that you'll do just as much evil but without the chance for redemption. Sucking it up and condemning yourself to a life of evil may in fact be the best decision on a strict 'lives saved in the short and long run' scale.

It is of course your job as the superpowered PCs to kill the Dark Lord and spare Steve or Hans of this awful fate. If you just knock him out, then when this whole mess is over they can go back to their family shop and raise babies and do whatever.

the fact remains that the evil guards are choosing to do evil, the fact that they have motives beyond "for teh evulz" doesn't change that. it might ameliorate it by degrees. he's not killing babies for fun, he's doing it to put his kids through college. THAT ISN"T ENOUGH TO MAKE IT OKAY!

[norms29]

Also

Honorable guy who doesn't agree with the Dark Lord, but is apparently still willing to stab babies for him (or at least, look the other way while others do the stabbing). I say fuck that guy.

Because everyone knows that military staff get to pick their positions and are allowed to leave if they disagree morally with their bosses' position, especially in Iron Age times when most people were little more than slaves. And this goes double for Dark Lords. Riiiight.

actually... yes. assignments like that realistically are given to troops selected for some level of political reliability. it's assumed even by the "bad guys" that not everyone can be trusted with those kind of orders.
the big bads personal body-guards are going to be genuine believers in whatever he's doing, that's the only way he'd feel safe. A guy won't be sent to stab babies unless the boss thinks he at least won't mutiny over it.

as an aside, I'm surprised no one has objected yet to you equating Wehrmacht regulars (who your arguments thusfar might have some relevance to) with concentration camp guards, who were (try hard to follow this) GUARDING CONCENTRATION CAMPS. and thus knew more then enough to make their continuing cooperation unarguably evil

[FatR]

And because I forgot it...

"Being superpowerful" by itself does not logically or plausibly lead to combat being less lethal, if you are fighting other supermen (and for playability reason it is safe to assume that any rolled fight will be at least somewhat challenging/threatening/resource draining). In fact, a lot of signature DnD powers can make fights more deadly. In fact, they often do. Please, stop sneaking cartoon logic into DnD Lago. It does not belong here. Not without toning down the overall level of brutality and danger far below normal fantasy thresholds, so stakes in normal fights aren't even high enough to warrant lethal force in the first place.

[DSMatticus]

No. Letting Germany not pay them in full was a bad idea. Giving Germany rather lenient peace conditions, instead of just cutting it into smaller states was a bad idea. Leaving in potential condition for Round 2 the country, which leaders consciously and deliberately decided to solve all of its problems with neighbours by military force, and which political climate allowed such leaders to come in power and stay there, was a bad idea. And leting said leaders to get away unscathed, to actively participate in laying foundations for a much worse regime was a bad idea.

You are completely missing the point. Let me phrase out my argument a little better.

My argument:
1) There were valid moral justifications, from the perspective of the average German citizen, for WW2 that we would emphasize with. (These justifications happen to be paying off the reparations.)

2) Because there were valid moral justifications from their perspective, they are not the bad guys. Neither side was the bad guy, because they weren't doing anything except try to put a stop to some morally wrong thing that was happening to them from the other side (reparation fees for Germany, being invaded for England)

Your response:
"Well, if we had been a lot harsher on Germany after WW1 and basically tore it apart and pushed it into a third-world economy, they never would have been able to act on their perceived moral justifications." That isn't a response at all - you did absolutely nothing to address the fact that the German citizens had morally valid justifications (not wanting to pay ridiculous sums of money to people who contributed nothing to their society - see colonial revolutions, including the U.S.'s). You simply told us how to rule them with an iron fist such that they had no hope of ever revolting. What you did would have made a German revolution even more morally acceptable, only harder to do. The even easier solution in which no one's a bad guy? Never put the reparations on Germany. And probably prevent them from maintaining an advanced military for awhile, out of necessity, and imprison any of the political troublemakers. Those are givens, just to stop war from starting right up again.

But let's look at the Empire case. It's very, very clear in that case that Bob the Deathstar Supply Officer thinks the rebels are a bunch of backwards terrorists. He is not a bad person. To him, the rebels are the bad people. And to the rebels, he is a bad person for helping a giant planet-destroying machine run. Neither side, with the perspective and knowledge it has, thinks it is evil. It turns out to us, from the outside, by being able to watch the Sith dude force lightning puppies [hyperbole], that the Empire is evil. That feed of him force lightning-ing puppies is not broadcast through the Empire. There's absolutely no reason the average Empire citizen has any reason to believe rebels are anything more than crazy radicals trying to tear down their way of life. Why on earth does he have a moral obligation to surrender?

[fbmf]

2) For critters that don't default to evil but are part of an overwhelmingly evil philosophy, how much individual responsibility any particular actor bears and thus whether it's appropriate to kill them.

The current discussion is centered on the problems you have assigning whole groups of things the 'evil' tag to justify things like killing them and then zooming in on individual members to see how this macroperspective holds. The fact that whether it's true (orcs) or false (Nazis) is not necessitated on any alignment system. These problems would still persist even if you took it out of the game but still had people devoted to upholding concepts like justice and peace.

So we are talking about the definition of "Evil" then, or at least the definition of the [Evil] alignment tag.

Creatures of Team Evil can gleefully kill members of Team Good, and vice versa. So high elves kill drow on sight, and vice versa, unless there is some plot reason not to. What's the problem?

I understand the real world have shades of grey, and that is replicated in D&D by an "evil" creature having the "plot relevant" tag so your characters hear him out.

I have never seen "Can we kill the baby kobolds?" argument end well or be good for a gaming table to have, so it's best just ignored by assigning the black and white answer of "Yes, because they're from Team Evil."

Game On,
fbmf

[PoliteNewb]

So if I have a bunch of Nazi prisoners I got the drop on, it's okay for me to torture and kill them instead of bringing them to a PoW facility because they're Nazis? How about if I meet a couple of guys while infiltrating a Stormtrooper bar who says that they're in charge of making sure that food and clothes gets to the crew of the Death Star? Is it okay for me to kill them, too, even if I could sabotage the shipment of supplies without ganking the Supply Officer? Actually, why did they let so many concentration camp guards go after the war? Can I machine gun all of the pre-teens in the Hitler Youth organization, even the ones that are talking about how much they're going to enjoy being a soldier and are the top of their class?

If any of those guys have guns and can shoot you, then yes, you kill them without qualm. If they surrender, and you don't have good reason to believe they'll break parole (or have a way of dealing with prisoners), you don't kill them (if you want to be a hero).

I have made it clear I am talking about dealing with enemy combatants, not "prisoners" or people who aren't capable of hurting you. I also have used the term "kill", not extending that to torture, mutilation, or rape (for instance).

I personally find this an extremely troubling point of view. I mean, no one would support you indiscriminately killing German citizens--even those openly professing the virtues of Hitler--in the 50's and 60's. But a lot of these people were Nazis during WWII. And you might well go 'it's okay to kill them then, but not kill them now', then what was stopping you from indiscriminately killing German citizens back then?

Well first, we did indiscriminately kill German citizens back then...ever hear of the Dresden bombings?

And second, as I reiterated: you kill combatants. Because they can kill your ass (and by their membership in an evil army, have given at least basic indication that they are willing to do so).

Because as much as you keep trying to deny it, Dungeons and Dragons does try to support these kinds of characters, to the point where it's a default assumption about any 'good' organization. There are literally entire orders of religious sects and paladins who don't have much of a description beyond 'tries to help everyone in need'. The minutae comes as an afterthought. The first thing you hear about these people's goals is how much they try to uphold justice and civilization and hope and all that crap.

I am calling bullshit, and welcome you to post quotes supporting this. I especially call bullshit on:
a.) that this is the default assumption about any 'good' organization
and
b.) that these organizations do not believe in killing their ideological enemies.

Pacifist organizations, or those which prefer to convert their enemies rather than beating them on the battlefield, are exceptionally rare in D&D world. I cannot recall any offhand.

But this is completely at odds with the default assumption that it's okay to kill hundreds of faceless goons when you didn't have to. Not killing people you don't have to (and unless you know anything about them other than Random Guard #12 or Orc Hunter #8, how do you know if they're deserving?) is a direct consequence of wanting to uphold justice and civilization and hope without being a hypocrite.

This is not true, except in your weird brain. There is nothing hypocritical about wanting to uphold justice and civilization and waging war on established evil organizations/nations...and by default, the members thereof.

No, really, I really am. You're applying a dehumanization label out of convenience rather than looking at the nuances. That directly leads to things like killing Blurt the orc baby. I mean, really, what's the difference between going 'Nazis are uniformly evil, therefore I can kill anyone with membership' and going 'orcs are uniformly evil, therefore I can kill anyone with membership'?

The fact that membership in the nazis is something you choose, and defined by actions/ideals, whereas membership in the orcs is something you do NOT choose, defined by accident of birth? You're seriously making a claim equivalent to saying that because it's okay to say "the KKK are all racist" it's okay to say "black people are all criminals".

I am not dehumanizing people; I am judging them. I am judging them by their actions (both observed and inferred), by their ideals (both professed and inferred), and their associations. Making moral judgments about organizations defined by their ideals is not wrong, nor is it equivalent to racial stereotyping.

I mean you objected to Blurt being killed because that aside from being nauseating there are a ton of mitigating circumstances; Blurt hasn't exactly done anything evil yet, there's a chance that he might grow up to be good, at this young age all of these evil acts like eating mashed halfling heads he can't control, etc..

More or less correct. Not only has Blurt "not exactly done anything evil yet", he literally CANNOT have done anything evil yet. He's a baby. He has no moral agency. He likely doesn't even have the ability to do anything, evil or otherwise.

And as regards the "chance he might grow up to be good", whether or not he will "be good" at a later point in his life is based on so many factors and projected so far into the future (years) that you cannot make any accurate prediction.

So: the likelihood of his already having done evil is nil, and the likelihood of his doing evil in the future is unknowable. Therefore, you don't kill him.

Hans the random Nazi guard might have just been conscripted into service, he might actually believe all of the propaganda about this being good for the world, he might have just been a reserve guard and has never fired his gun outside of a firing range, etc.. The only reason you'd think automatically that a Nazi, even a concentration camp guard (because they all had such a great choice about where they were being assigned) = baby-raping evil is by buying all of that propaganda.

Hans, unlike Blurt, had the ability to choose his course of action, and to make intelligent decisions. Further, he is an adult who has presumably taken actions in his life.
Now, while you present a possibility (maybe he never shot anyone, etc), be honest: what is the likelihood of this?
And how long is a guy going to last in an evil organization, unless he's willing to do evil? This is the problem with police infiltrating gangs and criminal organizations...sooner or later, you have to get your hands dirty.

So: chance of having done previous evil is likely, and chance of doing evil in the near future is also likely. Add in the fact that he has moral agency (which a baby does not), and he is in an entirely different situation from Blurt.

And be even more honest: if you, the GM, place Hans in an adventure, you KNOW exactly what the odds are of his being a bad guy: 100%, or 0%. And as I said before, if you intentionally place a "not-so-bad-villain" in your heroes' path, you are doing it with the intention of making them wring their hands over the morality of killing villains. WHich you don't need to do. Any evil army will have evil, hard-hearted bastards, and you could very easily make all the guards those kind of guys, who the PCs can kill with a clear conscience.

The only reason why Blurt gets a pass but Hans doesn't is just because of sensibilities.

Horseshit. I explained the difference above.

But they're orcs. It's only a matter of time for them to someday go around killing innocent people or burning forests or whatever, because they're orcs. You not killing Blurt is just condemning some other family to die 10 years in the future, because orcs are inherently evil and have no other choice or chance of redemption. It's either that, or you realize that all of those other orcs you met were babies at one point had this state of innocence, too, so it's not too hard to assume that there may be some orcs that have held onto this innocent state, still. So why doesn't it trouble you that when you're destroying an orc camp or busting up a celebration you're probably killing a few orcs that haven't drunk the evil Kool-Aid?

Of course all those orcs were babies and innocent once, and killing them then would have been wrong. But as they grow up, they either accepted a culture of murder and pillage, or they didn't...and if they didn't, they wouldn't be sitting in an orc camp full of human skulls.

No, you don't get to "keep your innocence" and still hang around with your baby-eating cousins.

Are adults responsible for their actions or not? If you grew up in a home where it's acceptable to shoot heroin and rob people, do you get a pass if you do that stuff once you reach adulthood?

Is it because babies are cute and grown ups are not so cute?

It's because adults can make meaningful choices and babies cannot.

Read up the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Hofling Hospital Experiment sometime. This is behavior pretty much indistinguishable from some of the worst results of that vile ideology

No, they are not. Full stop. They are entirely distinguishable. Equating them is absurd.
Take the Milgram experiment. It is troubling? Certainly. But pushing a button and having to ignore screams, while being assured that you are doing nothing wrong, is incredibly different from blowing someone's brains out...or raping an adolescent girl...or chopping someone's hands off with a machete. There is literally no comparison to a controlled expiriment which is designed to make it easy for people to convince themselves they're doing nothing wrong and actually going out there and doing evil things. Things which are and were done by bad people in war zones.

It's comforting to think that Nazis or whatever are uniformly complete monsters that have something 'wrong' with them where you can make life-or-death decisions without knowing anything other than their affiliation--because they're monsters and can't do that better. But it doesn't work that way and has never worked that way. With some very few exceptions most of the people you're gleefully killing, even the ones for some reason or another are shoving prisoners into trains to Dachau, are normal-ass people.

It may be comforting for you to think "everyone's the same", but the fact is no, people are not all the same. Some people are capable of performing horrendous acts, and some people are not. Some people are put into certain situations and take one course, and others are put into the same situation and do something else.
At the end of the day, people make choices and take the consequences.

This reasoning does not apply to D&D heroes. A lot of people have pointed out that it might be too much to expect people fighting in a heroic fantasy pastiche to faire much better than Lancelot and Conan (where even if they wanted not to kill everyone in a swordfight they couldn't, because they're vanilla action heroes) but I find it a really flimsy excuse that you can control your sword manuevers enough that you can cut holes in space time but you can't avoid killing faceless goon #9.

And we're done. This is your whole high-level bullshit wankfest all over again, and I'm done with it.

I play Conan and Lancelot and Han Solo and guys like that. It doesn't matter if they're all 5th level or whatever you say. Everything I'm saying applies to guys like them. Guys who do not have awesome godlike powers and can therefore have their cake and eat it too.

Morality is morality. If it's okay for Luke and Han to blow up a million guys, it's okay for my D&D character to blow up the Dark Lord's fortress of orcs. I am assuming parity in capabilities (i.e. you are unable to single-handedly deal with everybody in the fortress simultaneously), because that is 100% of the D&D I play, and I'm not unique in that respect. Your reality-warping Dragonball Z shitheads can go fly a kite.

I mean, crap, why are they even encountering nazi guards or orc hunting parties? They can teleport past all that shit. I was under the assumption we were talking about normal people.

[kzt]

So if I have a bunch of Nazi prisoners I got the drop on, it's okay for me to torture and kill them instead of bringing them to a PoW facility because they're Nazis?

If any of those guys have guns and can shoot you, then yes, you kill them without qualm. If they surrender, and you don't have good reason to believe they'll break parole (or have a way of dealing with prisoners), you don't kill them (if you want to be a hero).

My dad knew a guy who was in a US Army Ranger unit in WW2. They were on foot about 30 miles in front of the "real army", the infantry, tanks, etc. They would take a bunch of prisoners, question them and then the same guy would ask the NCO if he should "take them back to headquarters". The NCO would say yes, and he would march them off.

He'd be back in 10 minutes.

[sabs]

Ask how many German Soldiers who surrendered after the Battle of the Bulge survived. The US army had several instances of killing prisoners. But,we have a Geneva convention I don't think D&D does.

[DSMatticus]

I think there's a few issues in this thread that we're failing to correctly separate.

1) Is one side of a conflict inherently more evil than the other?

2) If so, are the soldiers on that side of the conflict inherently evil people?

3) Does the fact that it's war excuse killing good (or morally neutral) people?

The answer to 3 seems to be 'yes.' It's war. You can't always take prisoners. It's logistically impossible. Bullets are not usually nonlethal. If good people are picking up guns to fight, you're going to have to shoot good people. And you can't even let people go. That's just stupid, they'll just end up back in the war. So let's just take it at face value - when you're fighting the grunts of the dark lord, even if they're just regular Joes, when it's a matter of life and death you kill them because they'll kill you. So just accept that it's okay for the PC's to kill the dark lords gullible pawns, but it's sad. "Him or me." Good or evil don't factor into that fight.

The answer to 2 is up for some debate, but I'm going to have to say 'no.' There are tons of persuasive leaders who have convinced normal people to do crazy, horrible things. It's not just something that happens in controlled laboratory environments. They even convince these people it's the right thing to be doing. Being that gullible is bad, but it's not morally reprehensible.

The answer to 1 is pretty obviously 'only sometimes.' There are plenty of justifications for war. And sometimes, both sides have a reasonable justification. No one side has a monopoly on all that is righteous and holy. Maybe one side is slightly more in the right than the other, but do you really expect the two sides to sit around at a (non-magical) tea party, parse out the relative ethics of their claims, and decide who's in the clear, and then pack up and go home? That's completely not what human nature is.

So, yes. Those are the three questions we're trying to answer and jumbling up the answers to. Good people die in war, on both sides, and it's not the fault of the guy who shoots them - they die because there's no nonlethal/diplomatic option. And maybe you have crazy, evil leaders with charisma out the wazoo that convince good, sane people to do crazy, evil things, but that doesn't make people evil. Good people inadvertantly do bad things all the time. And sometimes there is no clear right thing in the first place.

Tl;dr: good D&D characters can kill non-evil soldiers and still be good, as long as they think their cause necessitates the killing. Killing is even preferred to the alternative of leaving them alive if when they recover they're likely to continue opposing the PC's. But just because good PC's are killing them justly doesn't make them evil.

[PoliteNewb]

I also wanted to try to answer this:

What is under consideration is:

1) How appropriate it is to have entire races of critters whose overriding concern is making the world less safe and happy and the ramifications of this.

I wasn't discussing this before, really...my argument was never "orcs are killable because they're orcs".

My argument (while similar to above) is a bit different: there is nothing wrong with presenting all the orcs your PCs are likely to encounter as villains, with justifiable evidence of villainy.

Are all orcs genetically encoded villains? No, of course not. But if every orc the PCs encounter through the course of the campaign is a scalp-taking, blood-drinking, child-raping SOB, your PCs should be fine with killing most/all of the orcs they come across. If you want the PCs to encounter the good orcs, they should be noticeably and recognizably less villainous.

2) For critters that don't default to evil but are part of an overwhelmingly evil philosophy, how much individual responsibility any particular actor bears and thus whether it's appropriate to kill them.

I will attempt to summarize my views on this:

All mature adult sapients are individual moral actors, and as such, bear the entire responsibility for actions they perform. People who perform acts worthy of death (such as murder, rape, torture, and threatening an armed man with violence) can be killed without significant moral qualm.

Further, you can make educated guesses about the acceptability of killing any particular sapient you come across, based upon your knowledge of his past actions, your ability to infer those past actions, your ability to predict his actions in the immediate future, and his association with others whose villainy is known/obvious.

If you know that orcs of the Bloody Hands tribe do not give quarter and eat their enemies alive, you can safely assume that orcs flying that standard are not likely to parley.

If you see a group of orcs whose tribe is unknown, but who have human skulls hanging from their belts, you can make a reasonable guess about their treatment of humans and act accordingly.

If you know that a band of orcs just slaughtered a halfling village to the last chubby baby, and you have come across them sleeping peacefully, you can make a good guess about what will happen if you let them go.

And if you know that these orcs are working with Lord Grimdark the Reaper, who devours the souls of his enemies, you can be reasonably sure they aren't just poor misguided joes trying to feed their families. And even if they are, you can still kill them during your assault on Lord Grimdark's fortress...something similar to the Felony Murder rule should apply.

Does doing this make you a nice guy? Not necessarily. But it does not make you an amoral bastard who will cross any line and is just as villainous as what he's fighting.

And really, that's all I've ever argued. That there is a middle ground between "heroes who don't kill" and "evil bastards who do kill".