The Politics of Tabletop RPGs
- Thread starter mesonoxian
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
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- Earth
Last Yu-Gi-Oh anime proper finished airing in March. New series of shorts started on YouTube in April. Time will tell if they'll go back to traditional broadcast or not, but there's still content being made.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Wow, they actually sent Yu-Gi-Oh to the shadow realm.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, this is centered on the way Paizo's (freelance, but with central oversight) authors used alignment in the PF1e days, but reading an old part of this thread actually led me to understand some of their choices better.
See, in several points in various APs, one runs into bandits. Unsurprisingly. But what a friend and I always thought odd was that these people were regularly listed as Chaotic Neutral; even if they were fairly nasty, described as attacking / stopping groups even if they looked poor or whatnot. To me, it seemed much more fitting for folks who regularly went out to do or threaten violence to others in order to seize their (potentially vital-to-survival) goods to be, well, Evil.
But seeing the way things split between a vision of bandits as murderous killing machines (who also did some torture on the side) and bandits as people in a position bad enough that they have to resort to violence to survive, that made me realize the point. A CN bandit is the "my harvest failed and I need food for myself and my family" or the "the local aristocrat seized my fields and now I'm trying to not starve" bandit, marked as not being actively maliciously cruel by their Neutral alignment. A CE bandit, on the other hand, is the one who cackles when the PCs don't chase them down, saying "alright, let's go back to the Cave of Screams, torture our previous captives some more, than go out for another bit of cruelty".
Which doesn't exactly fit with how alignment is described in the combined D&D 3.5/PF 1e legacy, but does show the kind of use case where alignment basically fulfils its role: basically being the marker used to differentiate between "this is a complicated situation where maximum use of violent force is not necessarily the best move" and "nah, if you let them run they will just, I dunno, skin a child or something, kill them in the robust mechanical framework of this tactical combat".
Of course, at the same time, you also see how this naturally results in the kind of reshuffling / jank of a lot of alignment systems. If the only people who are marked as Evil in the system are people who really should just be killed as soon as possible, then you get a lot of weirdness in the Neutral area, as plenty of terrible people stay there because they're not "I torture people because I want to"-tier terrible.
See, in several points in various APs, one runs into bandits. Unsurprisingly. But what a friend and I always thought odd was that these people were regularly listed as Chaotic Neutral; even if they were fairly nasty, described as attacking / stopping groups even if they looked poor or whatnot. To me, it seemed much more fitting for folks who regularly went out to do or threaten violence to others in order to seize their (potentially vital-to-survival) goods to be, well, Evil.
But seeing the way things split between a vision of bandits as murderous killing machines (who also did some torture on the side) and bandits as people in a position bad enough that they have to resort to violence to survive, that made me realize the point. A CN bandit is the "my harvest failed and I need food for myself and my family" or the "the local aristocrat seized my fields and now I'm trying to not starve" bandit, marked as not being actively maliciously cruel by their Neutral alignment. A CE bandit, on the other hand, is the one who cackles when the PCs don't chase them down, saying "alright, let's go back to the Cave of Screams, torture our previous captives some more, than go out for another bit of cruelty".
Which doesn't exactly fit with how alignment is described in the combined D&D 3.5/PF 1e legacy, but does show the kind of use case where alignment basically fulfils its role: basically being the marker used to differentiate between "this is a complicated situation where maximum use of violent force is not necessarily the best move" and "nah, if you let them run they will just, I dunno, skin a child or something, kill them in the robust mechanical framework of this tactical combat".
Of course, at the same time, you also see how this naturally results in the kind of reshuffling / jank of a lot of alignment systems. If the only people who are marked as Evil in the system are people who really should just be killed as soon as possible, then you get a lot of weirdness in the Neutral area, as plenty of terrible people stay there because they're not "I torture people because I want to"-tier terrible.
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I seem to recall that Neutral Good was the "base" alignment that one is born with as a human (elves gravitating more towards Chaos and Dwarves towards Law), so even Neutral as your Moral alignment is explicitly a step below the "average" human.
And I recall that one of the important things about D&D Humans being that they don't have a predefined alignment preference like that?
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Found what I was thinking of. The MM Alignment for Farmers under the "Human" entry. Many "professions" seem to have had alignments back then.
Which is odd to me. I've always treated neutral as the sapient baseline. I.E you are mainly self interested but generally pro social and mostly inclined to cruelty or kindness by personal circumstance and individual relation with the target of said things. Actually being good requires a genuine principled mental stance that I can't seriously picture the majority of people having.
Something worth noting is that a lot of later D&D and pathfinder world building on the neutral alignment centered on the idea of it involving more then the pursuit of abstract balance and harmony or the unwillingness to pick a side you describe. I view it as a rejection of some early D&D work that defaulted to having Neutral as a non-actor that didn't do anything or monsters motivated by inhuman logic. This seemed motivated by a desire to create greater role play options for neutral characters. Classic example come from the PF1e books "Champions of the Balance" and Faiths of Balance".
They provided options for the neutral characters and organizations to be proactive and dedicated to shaping or maintaining the world so that it fit a desired state. It allowed Neutral characters to have intense or even fanatical principles without being so divorced from conventional human logic as to be insane.
PS:
I think that Pathinder largely abandoned this in favor of more de facto distinction between good / evil faiths and gods for 2e. This is most obvious in Abadar no longer being so willing to tolerate practices like slavery in the name of spreading and defending civilization. I believe they have similarly walked back things like Druids committing eco-terrorism or followers of Nethys not caring about the consequences of their extreme magic use..
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Speaking of druids!
I think it's interesting how so many settings grab this idea of druids that feels - to me at least - based more on modern hippie and environmentalist ideas than, well. The kind of thing you might get in a world where it's not civilization needing to carefully avoid treading on the last few preserved groves, but more a small corner of the world being carved out from the endless wilderness.
This may also just be my personal liking of the idea of a druid who displays a very flippant attitude towards "nature", because they're a creature of the wild, if the wild wanted their reverence, it'd try less hard to kill them constantly, damnit.
I think it's interesting how so many settings grab this idea of druids that feels - to me at least - based more on modern hippie and environmentalist ideas than, well. The kind of thing you might get in a world where it's not civilization needing to carefully avoid treading on the last few preserved groves, but more a small corner of the world being carved out from the endless wilderness.
This may also just be my personal liking of the idea of a druid who displays a very flippant attitude towards "nature", because they're a creature of the wild, if the wild wanted their reverence, it'd try less hard to kill them constantly, damnit.
I don't know, I think neutral being able to just be the average rando alignment has value in and of itself, but if thats what they're going for, thats what they're going for.
Also I have reallllly never been keen on treating good and evil as something which needs to be 'balanced' as like an intrinsic setting thing. I think that was taken from Moorcocks Law/Chaos divide(which is actually a bit sound) and applied to the good evil axis kind of thoughtlessly.
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Only D&D setting I know of that treats good and evil as needing to be balanced is Dragonlance, and that's due to unique metaphysics of the setting.
What Pathfinder 1e did is focus more on how faiths and gods centered on promoting concepts like cities, nature, or the cycle of life and death are going to have both good and evil elements. They are neutral in the sense that they are willing to pursue good or evil paths depending on the circumstances rather then existing in an imagined perfect balance between them.
I think it allowed for some interesting scenarios where character archetypes that we had become used to thinking of as straightforward heroes or villains could break from traditional tropes while still following a coherent ideology and code of conduct.
I believe that factions believing in the need for a balance between good and evil were also introduced in the Planescape series and that this had something of a lasting influence on other D&D products.
In the Pathfinder universe this would be the Aeons and the Monad. Aeon - PathfinderWiki
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Oh, factions believing it is one thing. Dragonlance just has the setting agree with them
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- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Doesn't Dragonlance also have the silliness of it being possible to do a genocide and it make you More Gooder?
I am not particularly fond of the idea of a balance between good and evil but one concept of balance (I believe also first introduced in Planescape) was the Blood War between the Lawful Evil of Hell and the Chaotic Evil of the Abyss. This idea of an all-consuming conflict between two competing paradigms of evil and the larger worldbuilding on how it was shaping their interactions with the rest of the universe was quite appealing.
That is straightforward canon for any rpg setting that has an always evil race with a morality that can't be changed.
That is straightforward canon for any rpg setting that has an always evil race with a morality that can't be changed.
Specifically, I think one of the major events in the setting's backstory is "an autocrat outlaws the worship of all Evil deities and begins genociding all races which traditionally follow them, this somehow risks making the world too Good so the gods destroy the autocrat's capital city and most of his nation with a giant meteor."
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- Lake Wobegon
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- He/Him/His
. . . The start and end points are fine (do genocides, get smote by your victims' patrons, seems simple enough), it just loses the plot in the middle.
Wasn't there a larger plot of the autocrat being a false prophet who had turned the religion into the worship of him and was trying to become a God with some kind of crazy ritual to drive all Evil from the world? I viewed as more like the Gods using an extreme punishment to stop a world-destroying ritual perpetrated by a fanatic.
Dragonlance had a weird take on the Gods as a lot of what is presented makes absolutely no sense in the context of the previous worldbuilding. The aforementioned extreme destruction of the Cataclysm to stop one mad man or the absence of the Gods somehow being caused by Mortals abandoning them being the main examples.
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The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Neutral was the default alignment of humans across multiple editions because it was "not morally upstanding enough to stick your neck out to do good, not amoral enough to go out ofnyour way to do harm" and that does kind of sound like how most people go through life. And then it used to also be "has no real morality" like animals and constructs begore they created "Unaligned" as an option. I hear people talk about neutral being "good and evil must be in balance" but I don't think I've ever actually seen that in practice.
Sounds very on brand for Gary "nits make lice" Gygax.
Parzival
They shall not pass. We shall overcome.
- Location
- Northern Virginia
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- He/Him
Dragonlance wasn't Gary's setting.
Half Moon
In the end, there is no end.
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- She/Her
Is that as silly in practice as it sounds like here?
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- Somewhere
I mean, it never actually comes up in any of the adventures.
In practice what it means is that when the forces of the good gods become too dominant they become corrupt racists bastards and wreck everything and when the forces of evil become too dominant they rip themselves apart with infighting and wreck everything.