Good & Evil?

[btrc]

I may be missing it, but I'm a bit lost. Is the intention of your game to examine what Good and Evil is, or are you trying to predefine it?

I have my own ideas about what I want it to be in the game (pre-defined), but I'm looking for outside opinions to make sure I haven't overlooked any personal "blind spots" in terms of philosophy. Good and Evil will be absolutes, but most of the time PC's will be dealing with merely good and evil. It is about examining the concepts in the sense that people can do good things for evil reasons, or do evil things to get a good result.

As an example of one of the choices in the game, there exists "sorcery" in the gameworld. Sorcery is Evil with a capital E, a corrupting influence that fills you with the same revulsion that you would get from smashing an infant's skull and feasting on the brains. But it is also an emotional, powerful rush, a seductive power whose use makes you want to use it more. Use it too much, and you even start to enjoy it...

However, sorcery may be the only tool available that can defeat or banish some foes, so PC's may have to use it, and do so knowing the risks to themselves. They are good people using an evil tool out of necessity to fight a greater evil.

Is it better to avoid all possibility of being tainted, and risk a failure that releases a greater Evil? Or is it better to accept the risk of being corrupted into what you are fighting in the hope that you will succeed against the foes both external and internal?

This is the kind of moral framework the game presents, and which the concepts of Good and Evil will be presented.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

Since you are willing to declare, in the game, what you think is Good or Evil, this thread has more utility than I first thought. I will try to be more helpful, this time:
Be careful of the Infinite Retreat (a close cousin of infinite regress).

You are going to broadly define Good and Evil for the players, so that they can gauge Good Acts against Evil Acts, for their characters.

Then you are going to set up Difficult Moral Decisions that require the players to balance their choice of Acts... against what? Pragmatism? Utopianism? Idealism? Rational Empiricism? Solipsism? Basically, even if you provide a nice, succinct dichotomy between Absolute Good and Absolute Evil (and in the process solve humanity's need for religion), you still must frame that within a "metaethics" that speaks to how one must interpret those absolutes in normative, limited decision making. Those metaethics are what keeps human sociologist and philosophers at work, to this day: our body of knowledge is small; our apprehension of cause and effect in a given instant even smaller; yet we must act "ethically" and "morally" to serve whatever ultimate metaethics we have adopted.

Only if the PCs will always have all of the facts of any situation, can they act Absolutely Good or Evil... and in such a case, if they are "righteous" or "Good" then they become automatons with no "decision" to make. Their implied/assigned Goodness, coupled with complete knowledge of chances and consequence, leads to no "moral" behavior... just automatic behavior.

In short, NO definition of Capital-G Good or Capital-E Evil has room for "difficult" moral decisions. You have to decide on more than just The Big Two: you need to develop game systems/situations that give the players ways to hook into the "difficult" part of the decision, not the "moral" part.

Your example is quite telling: Sorcery is *E*vil--yet, not really, as one can come up with pragmatic situations in which its *E*vil is acceptable to *G*ood characters. In fact, sorcery is NOT really *E*vil. It just TENDS to be *E*vil, but sometimes it can be wrestled into a net gain of *G*ood for the whole. In your very example, you express a form of Pragmatism coupled with Moral Relativism, not the Absolutism you hope to establish with Capital Letters.

You certainly haven't chosen a trivial subject, for your game theme or for this thread. Good luck;
David

[Adam Dray]

Consent / non-consent are interesting poles for good and evil (and a bit controversial, to boot).

[btrc]

You are going to broadly define Good and Evil for the players, so that they can gauge Good Acts against Evil Acts, for their characters.

Not so much. The game backdrop is that big-E Evil has been imprisoned for all eternity, and big-G Good has vanished to parts unknown. Both of these happened a loooong time ago. But, it seems that Evil is starting to leak back into this frame of existence, and humanity is the only thing in way. Humans are too 'small' to be truly Good or Evil, with few exceptions, so we are little-g good fighting the efforts of big-E Evil, desperately using every tool at our disposal. Including sorcery, which is Evil like water is wet. You can use water to put out a house fire (which is a good act, we presume), but the water is no less wet because of the way you used it, and you are wet in the same way if it splashes on you, whether you are putting out a fire at an orphanage or fire-hosing its playground full of toddlers. Same with sorcery. The 'wet' sticks to you.

This gameworld has Good and Evil as properties inherent to reality, not value judgements made by sentient beings. We're just incapable of understanding the absolutes of either, much like it is difficult for us on this thread to imagine how Good and Evil could exist in the absence of thought. Those are part of the 'great unknowables' of the game. PC's have to deal with the big grey area in the middle, where you -can- do good things for bad reasons and vice versa. PC's are not so much trying to be Good as they are trying to -not- become Evil.

The world backdrop is that only a minority of people have the Sight, and can understand what is going on. The rest of the world is Blind and does not want to believe in Evil, and will rationalize away anything they encounter outside their desired worldview. A PC cutting loose with a sorcery might be percieved as a person with a gun. A monster might be a pack of rabid dogs, and so on. The existence of a major Evil on this plane for a few minutes would be percieved as an unprecedented natural disaster (in the gameworld, the major tsunami of a few years back was such an occurence). Mostly, PC's will be dealing with lesser Evils, who are busy trying to get the bigger Evils loose, plus other humans who have succumbed to Evil's siren call and are actively trying to thwart the PC's.

PC's are fighting a battle that the rest of the world literally cannot, will not and does not want to understand. Both Good and Evil are meant to be so lofty (or depraved) that PC's cannot actually understand them, much less reach them, but for game purposes, defining the space in between these extremes in understandable terms is the best I can hope for. And the comments on this thread are helping out.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

Thanks for setting me straight Greg.

I might see Evil and Good a bit atypically. Using force to achieve your ends is what I consider wrong, and tolerance would be what I see as good. However there are times where you have to use the first like in self defence of yourself and others.This might be an interesting way to look at Evil and Good, or maybe not. In our world a lot of bad comes from the force that is used by the government typically to try to be fair, or support what some people percieve as the good. I don't want to turn your thread into political debate, so I'll drop that part. However it could be interesting if the players have the sight and know that force is evil, but that guy over there is going to be the next Hitler, or Baby Doc, is force justified? Apocalypse Girl touches on this and might be useful if you think it's an interesting take on where good and evil lie.

[NN]

David: great post.

Greg: Food for thought: the "Euthyphro dilemma" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_Dilemma


and, how do you intend to make usage of sorcery corrupt the characters?

[TroyLovesRPG]

The only time I saw Good & Evil is when one group wanted what the other group had. The most horrible atrocities, oppressive governments and demoralizing philosophies were created in the name of Good. So, the historical view of Good and Evil is inappropriate. I like Yoda's commentaries on good, evil and power. It's simple and very zen like. With RPGs, I absolutely love the struggles between good and evil. More so, I like the struggles to determine what's good and what's evil. That depends entirely on the opinions of the beings in question.

Its your game and your definitions of Good and Evil apply. Its important to let your players know exactly what the distinctions are, especially if you have consequences for performing Evil (or Good) actions.

I have a game where Order and Chaos have a huge effect on what happens, both in story and game mechanics. I found that order and chaos can be measured mathematically and its easier to see consequences of actions. Order and chaos take on persona-like qualities and it becomes a driving factor in the game and how players play the game. Its possible for your players to do anything they want, but there are forces in the background that can sit-up and take notice.

Maybe that's where you can focus the good/evil struggle--how will the players interact in the game? A character is good or evil. So, how do the game mechanics affect what happens to the characters? Hellraiser movies and comics wallow in good and evil, but somehow point out that there is no good. Everything is evil to some extreme and the characters have no way of avoiding it.

That you know about evil and can become a path towards evil. I read a comic where champions of good fought evil. On returning from their battles, the champions were purged of the knowledge of evil from their body, mind and soul. Coming into contact with minions of evil was enough to corrupt them. In that society, true good was the ignorance of evil. True evil was the knowledge of everything. Kind of reminds me of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge.

Regardless of the approach, you will be confronted with the religion factor. One possibility is too develop religions based on the pure ideals of good and evil. Most likely, you'll find they operate the same way. Check out In Nomine by Steve Jackson Games. The essays on good and evil are very interesting.

Good luck! Evil luck?!?!?

Troy

[Danny_K]

Have you read Paladin?  It's freely available on the web and it touches on some similar themes -- there's a very rigid black-and-white moral Code that all the PC's are supposed to adhere to, and the GM serves challenging situations that are variously 1) "gray" -- i.e., straddle the divide of Good & Evil, and 2) tempting -- the bigger the challenge, the more tempted the players should be to use the "dark side" of their power to get things done. 

The kicker is that the gaming group creates the Code together.

Another game your post puts me in mind of is Nobilis, where there are multiple different factions, including Heaven and Hell -- the trick here is that Heaven and Hell are inhuman in the perfection and rigidity of their beliefs.  The individual PC's have to find some way of reconciling the impossibly strict dictates of their code with the everyday moral dilemmas of life as a demigod. 

The first of these games has rather specific mechanics for determining how faithful a PC has been to their code, while the second uses the codes as part of the setting and offers rewards for serving their code, but doesn't go any further.  Where does your game fall on this spectrum?  That's where the rubber meets the road, it seems to me.

[btrc]

NN:
I don't think the Euthyphro Dilemma applies in my case, since Good and Evil (and what they represent) are external forces. If you ask "a)does an evildoer do evil because it is an evildoer, or b) is it an evildoer because it does evil?", the answer is a). In this gameworld, it is the nature of an evildoer to do evil, but one can do evil without being a dedicated evildoer, just like one can play basketball without being a pro player. A Bond villain quote comes to mind: "Torture is more of a hobby for me..."

Sorcery, or any other Evil influence corrupts PC's by giving them increased levels in personality traits. Minor personality flaws grow until they are obsessions or psychoses, and once a certain level is reached, they succumb to the 'dark side' and the GM gets permanent control of the character. The final stage is irreversible, but the process is not. PC's can overcome their inner demons and reduce any effects they have suffered, but it is not easy.

Danny_K:
Within the game, PC's are fighting the good fight because that's the choice they have made. You can See the Evil in the world and choose to simply try to avoid it. PC's have chosen to act. Within that framework, they have an internal code for the group they are a part of, with varying degrees of rigidity (don't harm the innocent (rigid), follow the law...at least when dealing with humans(less rigid), and so on). Enforcement of that is done by higher-ups within the organization the PC's are part of, so there is both "doing the right thing because it is right" and "doing the right thing because if you go rogue your own people will bust a cap on you".

The higher-ups in the PC's organization actually fear Good as much as they do Evil. They know that if Good ever returned from wherever it went, humanity would be shoved into the same hole Evil is in. We don't meet the standards of Good anymore than we can really be Evil.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[Castlin]

Not so much. The game backdrop is that big-E Evil has been imprisoned for all eternity, and big-G Good has vanished to parts unknown. Both of these happened a loooong time ago. But, it seems that Evil is starting to leak back into this frame of existence, and humanity is the only thing in way. Humans are too 'small' to be truly Good or Evil, with few exceptions, so we are little-g good fighting the efforts of big-E Evil, desperately using every tool at our disposal.

This reminded me of the Titus Crow books by Brian Lumley, although there it's more like Neutrality versus Chaos, with good being an invention of humanity. Anyway, you might want to look at those at the library if you can as they provide some neat ideas of what tools humanity might have in this fight, and how they came by them. Don't read them if you're a Lovecraft hater or purist, though.

As a lot of people here have said, humanity has been struggling for its entire existence to find absolute definitions for Good and Evil. So far, it hasn't panned out. What you might want to consider is that Good and Evil, as they exist as tangible, cosmic forces, are incomprehensible or harmful to humans. It certainly seems to have been the case for the whole of our history. A conflict between cosmic absolutes, therefore, is going to end up disastrous for humans no matter which side comes out victorious. We are not creatures of absolutes, at least not without changing our fundamental nature, which is conceptually similar to death. So once again, there's a situation where the characters can't win, which I agree makes for a good horror setting.

You've mentioned that Evil is "sticky". Is Good, too?

It seems to me, the PCs in this setting just think they want Good to win. What they really want is for Evil to not win, which is not the same thing. It's not even the same thing as Evil losing, because if Evil loses, the Good wins, and that's not good. Basically they're trying to keep a balance between the two in which they can survive. Good is just inactive in this setting, so there's no struggle against it.

Well hopefully there's some food for thought.

[David "Czar Fnord" Artman]

This gameworld has Good and Evil as properties inherent to reality, not value judgements made by sentient beings. We're just incapable of understanding the absolutes of either, much like it is difficult for us on this thread to imagine how Good and Evil could exist in the absence of thought. Those are part of the 'great unknowables' of the game. PC's have to deal with the big grey area in the middle, where you -can- do good things for bad reasons and vice versa. PC's are not so much trying to be Good as they are trying to -not- become Evil.

All that is well and good, but it still leaves you regressing. If Good and Evil are "unknowable" then how can I make a "difficult" moral decision for my character? I will have to frame the choice as something "knowable" and, as such, that becomes The Real Good and The Real Evil (i.e. normative applications of abstract metaethics). That framework, then, become the actual systemic hooks for your game: take The Blue Pill (Good) and get a +2 to Cool, but a -2 to Scary; take The Red Pill (Evil) and get a -2 to Cool, but a +2 to Scary. You will ultimately find that you have to hang character options, the "cost" of choices, and the result of each choice onto some element of character efficacy (or, maybe, player credability... for a weird "my guy acted most moral, so I get to narrate" type of game).

Are you sure you even need to toy with words like Evil and Good? After all, Good is not (apparently) a "proactive" element of the universe: it's gone. And Evil is not some point-space entity or a set of clear (i.e. comprehensible) ethical rules. So why even go into that semantic quagmire?

Why not use the term "Perversion" or "Taint" or "Devolution" or "Degeneracy"? It seems that you want the game to cause players to make "ethical" choices of expedience within a framework that cause each expedient choice to undermine (and eventually destroy?) the character. That just sounds to me like two resources in opposition: time and "taint"/reduced effectiveness/weakness. Your examples of "grey morality" with Sorcery really become almost gamist calculations of expedience:
Option A: Never use Sorcery, never enjoy its expedience, never suffer its taint.
Option B: Use Sorcery at will, maximize its expedience, go out in a blaze of glory--err, infamy.
Option C: Factor time to complete against potential gains of expedience versus the deferred cost of those gains.

Where is the morality in that? I go for A every time, unless the game system has some kind of "ticking time bomb" like character age or "The Domination of Darkness's Taint" or some other reason to rush me. And if that rush gets to be too fast, too soon then I go to B: use it or lose it--after all, if The Great Bugbear wins, I surely won't have a useful (effective) character anymore, right? (That was implied the presumption that the characters would, of course, oppose Pure Evil.)

Only if the rush versus the expedience of taint is PERFECTLY balanced, will you get me to take C... and then it's all a factor of efficacy now versus time later--you better be a reliable GM, or I will "game" it and assume I will never enjoy the fruits of avoiding taint, in later sessions, and it'll be back to B.

I hope this sort of thought is helping you. I realize this sounds like "concept bashing," but I genuinely believe you want a game to "get at" morality. I am trying to show you that "getting at" morality can be tricky, because so much of apparently "moral" choices are really choices of expedience versus costs. (As was suggested by Guy, with his re-characterizations/explanations of altruism as deferred or indirect selfishness.)

Still with you--even though it sounds like I am beating you about the face and neck. :-)
David

[Emmett]

Good is in essence "Following Rules". Evil is "Break Rules". The question is, what are those rules? Take any example of good or evil and you can follow this formula. For instance the "eating babies" example would break "don't hurt others" and "protect the weak".

There you get into some pretty thorny issues as far as players preconception of what the rules should be. You could end up with a game that a lot of people object to because you didn't get the rules right. However all does not need to be lost. You could be functionally vague. In otherwords, just establish the rules that will matter in game, such as "don't use sorcery", "don't hurt self", "don't hurt others" and "protect the weak" (this is not an exclusive list, just examples). A little playtesting would give you more as the players try and get around the rules and still say they're good.

Incidentally the "don't hurt others" rule is thorny, but rich in conflict. If you're familiar with the anime series Trigun, the main character tries not to hurt anyone and never kills, he has to be extraordinary to do this and live. The same thing with a character, can you harm evil and still be good? The answer to that would be yes, unless there is a specific rule otherwise and if the rules say the player is allowed to enforce rules. That is do the rules include penalties?

[btrc]

All that is well and good, but it still leaves you regressing. If Good and Evil are "unknowable" then how can I make a "difficult" moral decision for my character?

One does not have to have experienced the view from the top of Mount Everest to know which direction is uphill. Similarly, you may not ever be able to "know" Good/Evil, but you know the direction they are in.

Humanity, for reasons explained in a lot more detail in the game background, find it easier to be evil than good. But, both aspects actually work for adventurers. As long as Evil stays locked up, humanity is the top of the heap, so our selfish little evil tendencies want to maintain the status quo. And, having in our most ancient past the taint of having fought on the side of Evil against Good, we see our current status as a chance at redemption.

our examples of "grey morality" with Sorcery really become almost gamist calculations of expedience:
Option A: Never use Sorcery, never enjoy its expedience, never suffer its taint.
Option B: Use Sorcery at will, maximize its expedience, go out in a blaze of glory--err, infamy.
Option C: Factor time to complete against potential gains of expedience versus the deferred cost of those gains.

There is certainly an aspect of this. There are only minor benefits game-wise of doing good for good's sake (or evil). In the game, Sorcery is a skill that must be learned, it is not inherent. So, players will decide consciously whether to take that path for their characters. It is powerful, it is an 'edge', it is a temptation, but one can with sufficient restraint, use it and avoid serious problems. Gamewise, the level of power you use reflects the effect on you. If you use only a fraction of your potential, you may be 'wasting points', but your deliberate self-restraint reflects your ability to overcome the corrupting influence. But when "thing X" is getting ready to tear your partner limb from limb, how much risk to yourself are you going to take to save them?

You've mentioned that Evil is "sticky". Is Good, too?

Nope. ;) We're more naturally drawn to Evil. We have to work at being Good.

It seems to me, the PCs in this setting just think they want Good to win. What they really want is for Evil to not win, which is not the same thing. It's not even the same thing as Evil losing, because if Evil loses, the Good wins, and that's not good. Basically they're trying to keep a balance between the two in which they can survive. Good is just inactive in this setting, so there's no struggle against it.

That might be, but that would also be a personal view. The PC's, once they understand the nature of things, will see that a balance has to be maintained, but since Good is not taking an active part, the PC's and humanity (who have both good and evil in them) must take the part of Good in the struggle.

At this point in the discussion, I'll say that in the gameworld, humanity is/was merely the "least of all Evils". When Good vanished after imprisoning Evil, the universe was left with neither Good nor Evil in it. To restore this, the prison in which Evil was bottled up cracked just a little, and humanity escaped. We weren't very Evil, and we also had a little Good in us, so the universe was satisfied that the balance was restored. In a non-sentient way, of course. Think of it as an energy imbalance being corrected. Other, more powerful Evils seek to exploit these cracks in the prison to force their way back into the universe at large, with unknown results, and frankly, humanity doesn't want to find out what would happen in this case.

The organization that the PC's will belong to (The Brotherhood of Gilgamesh) has been keeping Evil bottled up for all of recorded history and then some. The gameworld just happens to be set in the present.

Greg Porter
BTRC