So last year, in this StoryGames thread http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/comment/356403#Comment_356403 , Sage LaTorra wrote: “we don’t have any interest in preserving anything problematic… If there’s stuff that you guys feel is problematic or awkward I’d love to hear about it, here or privately. We’ve tried to steer clear of some of the really horrendous parts of D&D…”
Is that something you’re still interested in exploring – ethical/political issues in DW’s text & implied world – and if so, is this a good place for it?
http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/comment/356403#Comment_356403
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I’d be interested in hearing about it, sure.
OK. Background: I’m on my first readthrough of DW, very excited about the system so far. I’ve been loving AW, and wanted to introduce some of these spiffy new-style RPG techniques to my 9yr old son, but the milieu of AW is a bit racy. He’s into old school D&D so DW is a perfect fit. One of the things I’ve been talking about with him, as we play OSRIC D&D, is the messed up values involved — all orcs are evil, etc. So I’m quite pleased with DW having taken steps in the direction of overhauling that, but am also therefore looking at the text with a critical eye, i.e. is this the story I want to tell my kid about the nature of good and evil?
So, here’s the sentence that jumped out at me — from the GM chapter on Dangers, in the Hordes list:
“Humanoid Vermin (impulse: to breed, to multiply and consume)”
This strikes me as being off in a way that barbarian hordes (impluse: to grow strong, to drive their enemies before them), say, or underground dwellers (to defend the complex from outsiders), or undead horrors and evil sorcerers are not.
Is it clear why? I can elaborate…
Yeah, I can see that. Dropping “humanoid” would probably be a good idea. The idea here is to cover things along the lines of, say, an intelligent horde of locusts.
Humanoid definitely makes it sound like you’re referring to orcs and goblins.
Insects is a bit better? But there’s a sense in which it doesn’t get at the heart of the problem.
So, a couple things.
Thing #1: part of the problem with the whole “orcs are evil” trope is what it says about the nature of intelligence and the way it makes evil be about essence rather than action. I mean, the fact that orcs are intelligent means there are orc stories and songs, there are orc villages with orc craftspeople making things and orc mothers nursing orc babies. It’s a pretty short step from saying “but orcs are evil” — whether it means “orcs are evil in their inherent essence, even the babies” or just “the statistical tendency of orcs to evil is so great that it is not worth considering the exceptional cases where those babies might grow up to be not-evil” — to saying “the only good orc is a dead orc” — and then you have your self-righteous paladins mopping up villages of orcs, babies included, and counting it as a net win for Good. That’s not a problem if it’s only the paladin’s opinion — indeed it’s a good history sim — but it’s a problem insofar as the game itself endorses that opinion, if a Detect Alignment spell shows that he’s right.
Insects is a bit better, I guess? But if they’re intelligent insects — if they too have songs, stories, ambitions — if they too raise their children, and if they are capable of ethical decision-making — then in a sense you’ve only obscured the problem (it’s less likely to occur to us to judge them on their own terms).
Thing #2: Now you might ask, so if I’m so generous in giving orcs and intelligent insects the benefit of the doubt, why do I not mind the stuff about barbarians, underground dwellers and the undead?
So first off, the undead, demons, etc, seems like a special category, because it’s not like they’re a natural society of intelligent beings. That seems different to me. If something is a horror directly created by evil magic, if it’s a kind of sentient weapon, I have less trouble believing that it has no moral agency, that it’s just a tool of the evil sorcerer, than if it is just an ugly-looking critter with its own village and kids.
With barbarians and underground dwellers, the thing is that what makes them a threat is their actions. With the underground dwellers, the impulse is in fact basically a frank acknowledgement that the adventurers are the intruders. The dwellers aren’t being demonized. They’re in conflict with the adventurers, but it’s a conflict over resources, it’s not necessarily Good vs Evil. You’d do the same if you were them.
With the barbarians, they’re making war. It’s not their essence that’s the problem. They are doing evil and must be opposed; they could also stop. One could make peace with them. What they’re DOING is the issue, not the fact of them BEING.
The really chilling thing about the “Humanoid Vermin” is not the name; it’s the impulse. They breed, multiply, and consume. Of those three verbs, two of them mean “have kids”. The thing we don’t want them to do is not to invade, etc. It’s to exist. The fact that they are there, breeding, is unacceptable. They are, as it were, a “demographic time bomb”.
“Vermin” supports this. The nature of vermin is that you kill ’em. In a way it’s odd to call a large, intelligent, dangerous animal “vermin” — i.e., literally, a worm. But the thing is, if instead of comparing them to small mindless pests, we compared them to, say, bears, the problem with the impluse “to breed and multiply” would be immediately apparent. Of course bears breed and multiply. Bears are dangerous, ad if bears attack, you fight back, but there isn’t an intrinsic wrongness to making more bears. There’s no notion that the world would be better off if there were NO bears. But that’s the force that the word “vermin” carries. To call something vermin — and to blame it for multiplying — is to vote for its utter elimination. And when the something is actually a someone, “vermin” is an implicit vote for genocide.
Thing #3 is history. “Humanoid Vermin, impluse: to breed” is actually really cool-sounding. It’s in tone and voice with the tradition you’re working in, it’s resonant, it’s evocative. It sounds chilling and awesome: oh my god, the unclean hordes are rising up, multiplying, swarming like insects, corrupting our way of life, consuming us! Hey, I’d play that!
But there’s kind of an unpleasant historical reason why that’s true. The tradition in question is the pulps. Calling human beings “vermin” is in tone for the Robert E Howard era U.S. pulps because the 1920s were a moment of extreme racial anxiety in the USA, when a whole heck of a lot of people really did feel precisely that way about the unprecedented waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and East Asia. “Humanoid vermin, breeding and consuming” is precisely the language that people like H. P. Lovecraft would use BOTH politically, about their new neighbors who did unclean and eldritch things like cooking with garilc, AND in their fantasy fiction. There’s a paper thin wall between them.
Okay, that was a lot of words for one single line of your text! Sorry for my prolixity.
As for a fix — if you’re really going for something like insects and you really do want to imply that the problem is their NUMBER, I would make it more explicitly like a plague of locusts, upping the ante with the impulse so it’s clear it’s about explosive growth and destruction, not just population growth — maybe “Inhuman Swarm (impulse: to blot out the sun, to devour everything in their paths)”
If you want something more like the orcish hordes and you want to capture the anxiety of the humans and demihumans about them, that’s great, but have the game’s description of the impulse be honest about what’s going on rather than telling it from one partisan side’s POV, i.e.
: “Humanoid Multitudes(impulse: to compete for resources, to expand their territory)”
Again, really sorry that I used so many words to say that. 🙂
How much of this hinges on the difference between science/reality and fantasy?
By which I mean, I am not at all certain that just because intelligent orcs exist that they have anything like a human society. They may be the result of horrible magical or divine workings on other sentients or a zombie-style plague driven to spread the infestation (or even just Dark Fey doing that Changeling thing). Even if they do live and breed like humans, there’s no guarantee that they are very much like humans in other ways. The existence of (quasi)divine entities that could pervade a race of beings and corrupt or influence them at a very fundamental behavioral allows the possibility of an actual effectively evil race (or at least one that is essentially opposed to happiness as humans know it.)
I tend to think of these things as more campaign issues rather than fundamental game issues. In some of my games, orcs are just oddly colored distemperate humans, in others they are irredeemably corrupt beings. I would still call them “humanoid” in either case.
I agree that this could be presented better, but you’re making a lot of assumptions about fronts being “evil” here. A front can be totally well-intentioned. If you look at the impulse, humanoid vermin are specifically about their numbers: multiplying and consuming. I think that as-is the problem is their number. They’re not a military force, they’re overpopulation. Choosing to “fix” that with slaughter is horrible.
FWIW, when I write classic orc fronts they’re wandering barbarians.
Oh, it’s clear to me that a front can be well-intentioned: you do an admirable job of conveying that in the language you use about cavern dwellers. They are defending their own; quite admirable.
“Humanoid vermin are multiplying”, on the other hand, does not sound quite as sympathetic. “Communities with overpopulation problems” calls for an advisory commitee; “vermin multiplying” calls for an exterminator. You may say that it’s horrible to respond to it with slaughter. But in point of fact, in real history, when people have called other people vermin, it was generally as a prelude to slaughtering them. Like “oriental” in the 2012 thread I linked to, it’s a word with historical baggage.
John, that’s what I was saying about demons and the undead; I can conceive of beings “infected by evil” to the extent that they dont’ count as moral agents. Tolkein’s orcs are corrupted elves. But, 1) humanoids means something specific, and they’re not handled that way in the text — a few pages later, the “peace talks with the orcs break down”. Creatures capable of peace talks are not “implacably evil by their nature”. And 2) the idea of not just a being corrupted by evil, but a race of beings racially corrupted by evil, is fundamentally squicky. Tolkein fucked it up; his corrupted elves ended up hella racist. I’m not saying it would be impossible to pull off? But it would take some real doing. You’d have to really confront what it means for babies to be evil, right? And what that means when you’re standing there with a sword in front of the babies.
Yeah, I agree, reading it in this light makes me pretty uncomfortable.
My work here is done! 🙂
I’ll let you know if I find anything else.
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Warning: This post has the “awkward” tag.
Sorry, apologies. I’ll say it this once and then forever hold my peace.
Dude, I think maybe you should not be playing a game that hinges on killing things and taking their stuff. 🙂
(Intelligence is a prerequisite for evil. A man eating shark is not evil, because it is not a moral agent. And some of the greatest minds in human history believed evil is of essence, and that action flows from essence… There is good evidence that the whole of the human race is evil of essence.
So why should I not decide that in my fictional world all orcs are evil? If that is the way Orcs are in my universe, why not? Why should “political correctness” and “cultural sensitivity” be extended to a fictional race? If I create in my story a fictional society of humans that kill their babies for population control and convenience and worship gods like Cthulhu as social norms, why should their whole society not be portrayed as evil? If you don’t like my story, read another book.)
Political correctness is all good and fine, but Dungeon World? Seriously?
My vote is: Keep political crusades off game forums.
(PS: And I found the “white racial fail” remark on the other thread extremely hurtful, bigoted and racist. Funny that the political correct are often so blind to their own bigotry)
Hi Wynand!
I have to confess that I never quite understand what is meant by “political correctness.” It sounds like it has something to do with shutting up to please other people, or something? Yeah, don’t do that.
I think a game based on the idea that human beings are evil of essence — say, one that took the Doctrine of Original Sin, or some variant thereof, seriously and incorporated it into the game world? — would actually be pretty cool.
I also think the questions you raise are interesting — why shouldn’t you decide that all Orcs are evil? What if evil is a matter of essence? How do we deal with the problem of evil in games, like a society built on infanticide or slavery or whatever?
I think those are really cool questions and I’d love to talk about them. I think they’re worth discussing because storytelling matters, and because roleplaying games are an awesome art form with potentially great impact. But then you voted for not discussing such questions on a gaming forum. I don’t really get that.
It’s pretty clear to me that the Powered by the Apocalypse games come originally out of just this kind of engaged artistic/moral inquiry, taking apart earlier RPGs and interrogating their lazy assumptions — mechanical, artistic, moral, the whole enchilada. That’s why AW is so focussed on addressing the power dynamic between the MC and the players. That’s why gender in AW looks like it does. And so on. That’s how we got here.
The point is to make the game more awesome. The point is not to appease someone else; it’s to say what you really mean, to avoid lazy cliches, to think fresh.
You want to argue for evil races? Awesome. Bring it. Look at what philosophical foundations your thinking rests on, what that ends up doing. Take it to I want to play a paladin in your game, slaughtering orc babies for God. I’m not being facetious. Let’s see what happens.
I’m only bored if all you’ve got is “lighten up, I don’t know why it works like that, it’s only a game, man.”
Benjamin Rosenbaum
1) I guess I just don’t conceive of Dungeon World as providing such specific information that I must consider any of its references to orcs somehow “canonical” and/or definitive for orcs in any particular game.
2) In the context of fantasy, I’m not sure I understand the idea of an inherently evil race being “squicky”. It certainly may be less interesting vis-a-vis the moral conflicts that it fails to engender, but….squicky? So…one being corrupted is okay, but a race isn’t?…where do you draw the line? 3, 100, 5k?
2.5) Additionally, in the fantasy context, there’s nothing at all that requires evil babies for an evil race. Members of that race could be; immortal, the result of ongoing corruption efforts, drawn from the mud fully formed, the result of ritual summoning/creation, and any combination of the above you care to consider. (maybe even some things I didn’t think of OTTOMH.) You can’t examine such a race anthropologically, nor can we assume that anything we think we know in that regard applies.
3) As far as I can tell, there’s nothing forbidding inherently evil beings from suing for peace or engaging in full diplomacy with their neighbors. There may be perfectly reasonable practical considerations that lead to that sort of thing. Just because they are inherently evil doesn’t imply that they are furniture-chewing maniacs.
4) I don’t hold Tolkien to any particular account in this regard. Yes, his take on this sort of thing is rather…simple. However, I think he is somewhat trapped in writing what is essentially an extremely long fairy tale. Fairy tales, by their nature, don’t happen in a living, real world. By attempting to wrap his huge fairy tale into one, we end up subjecting that world to scrutiny that it doesn’t deserve and cannot hope to survive.
1) No, me neither.
2) It’s not about the number. It’s about what you’re saying about what evil is.
Being corrupted because you were seduced by evil: non-squicky.
Being magically summoned from some hellish plane: non-squicky.
etc., etc.
Being evil because your parents were evil and it runs in the family: squicky.
I use the term “squicky” advisedly, as opposed to “impossible” or “logically incoherent” or something. It’s certainly possible to come up with a coherent narrative in which evil is a heritable trait. It would be very easy to do lazily and badly; perhaps it could be done well. But what you couldn’t get away from is the fact that you’re telling that narrative in a real world in which people really do believe that kind of thing, with horrifying results. It’s disingenuous to believe none of that ickiness will stick to your narrative.
You can deside that you have black-skinned, bestial, subintelligent, violent, sexually rapacious men in grass skirts carrying spears in your narrative too. There’s no reason you can’t. You can make anything up that you want. You may even be able to come up with some kind of cool, internally consistent reason why they make total sense in your milieu. But we’re only going to be able to enjoy that aspect of your narrative by a kind of willful blindness to the real world (or by straining to cast it as some kind of ironic commentary). The minute we ease up on that, we’re grossed out.
2.5) Yeah, those are all cool ideas. I could be sold on them.
What are you responding to specifically, though? We were talking originally about “impulse: breed”, right?
3) This is true. My pointing to peace treaties was not meant to illustrate that the beings involved couldn’t be evil. Evil folks in the real world sign peace treaties all the time! But those evil folks in the real world are persons capable of moral reasoning, who are evil by virtue of their behavior. Not “inherently evil.”
You don’t sign peace treaties with zombies or shoggoths. It’s easier for me to accept a zombie or a shoggoth — something incapable of moral reasoning, a force of (un)nature, etc — as “inherently evil”, as opposed to “evil by virtue of its actions”. When you call something “inherently evil”, you mean that regardless of what it does, the world would be better off if it were destroyed, right? It is the sort of thing which by its nature should be killed.
In the real world, no one is inherently evil by virtue of their blood, their ancestry, regardless of what they do. If you introduce, into a fantasy setting, creatures that are inherently evil by virtue of their ancestry, you need to ask yourself: why?
Boring answers include “because it’s fantasy, and that’s how fantasy works” (i.e. I will unthinkingly copy the results of earlier artists’ work, without reproducing their engagement ) or “I dunno, lighten up”.
Non-boring answers include things like “because I want to take seriously the doctrine of Original Sin in this game” or “because I am exploring the ancient-world idea of a curse borne unto the seventh generation” or whatever. Sure, okay. But then bring it. What does it mean? What are the logical, moral conclusions you come to?
4) I think you do Tolkein a disservice — he considered himself to be creating a “secondary world” and took massively painstaking care in its continuity, logic, and history — not at all how fairy tales work. He would be the last person who would want to be excused from the task of communicating a moral order through his fiction.
Vincent Baker is the guy who wrote AW, which DW is descended from: his take on orcs is, in this context, instructive: http://storygames.pbworks.com/f/otherkind.pdf
Benjamin Rosenbaum
“2) It’s not about the number. It’s about what you’re saying about what evil is.”
Well, when you figure out an effective definition for evil, let me know. 🙂 For my purposes, I can only work with the idea that “evil” means “opposed to health and welfare of the protagonistic races.” Which can take many forms on many different levels.
“But what you couldn’t get away from is the fact that you’re telling that narrative in a real world in which people really do believe that kind of thing, with horrifying results. It’s disingenuous to believe none of that ickiness will stick to your narrative.”
I think, in this case, there’s more too it. Literally. In reality, we have no god(s)…or at least not one so evident that people can’t argue about it. In fantasy, however, there is/are gods. A typical/traditional fantasy world is divided into (at least) two camps because of this. Evil and good, in such a scenario are tangible things with real impact (even if that impact isn’t much more sophisticated than which divine “team” you are on).
I’m certainly not advocating that as any sort of fantastic or sophisticated idea. However, I think that’s part of the appeal to those who enjoy it.
“What are you responding to specifically, though? We were talking originally about “impulse: breed”, right?”
About the idea that evil orcs implies evil babies (and presumably females and elderly.) Even that impulse doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in a fantasy setting. Which sounds more “weasely” than I intend. The important implication is that you can’t necessarily postulate a human-like society, behavior, moral faculties, etc. from the existence of a race in a fantasy world.
“When you call something “inherently evil”, you mean that regardless of what it does, the world would be better off if it were destroyed, right? It is the sort of thing which by its nature should be killed.”
None of which means that it cannot be negotiated with for purely practical motivations. Critically, I don’t think you need to be “zombie-level” insane to be inherently evil. While orc and demon may both be inherently evil, they don’t have to be equal in the purity(?), depth(?), or even character of their individual evils. So, while the zombie and shoggoth may be implacably evil, perhaps orcs are “placably” evil. Even in Tolkien, orcs seem to degrade to the level of a lesser general menace when they do not have inspiration from Sauron or Morgoth.
“Non-boring answers include things like “because I want to take seriously the doctrine of Original Sin in this game” or “because I am exploring the ancient-world idea of a curse borne unto the seventh generation” or whatever. Sure, okay. But then bring it. What does it mean? What are the logical, moral conclusions you come to?”
I don’t think that makes sense as a goal for all gamers/games. If you are approaching the game from a more tactical point of view, then all you need to know is that there are “evil” beings, where “evil” is indistinguishable from “target”. If you are approaching the game from a more philosophical perspective, then I think exploring those issues and their possible answers is a goal of play, not a prerequisite of the rules. I think that’s especially true since these are (presumably) speculative ethical issues since, as you say, real-world people are not inherently evil.
“I think you do Tolkein a disservice — he considered himself to be creating a “secondary world” and took massively painstaking care in its continuity, logic, and history — not at all how fairy tales work. He would be the last person who would want to be excused from the task of communicating a moral order through his fiction.”
That’s why I said that he was trying (with limited success, IMO) to wrap his fairy tale in a living world. I’m not really interested getting bogged down in literary criticism of Tolkien specific. However, if he was trying to communicate a moral order through his fiction….my analysis would not be pretty.
To address Wynand’ s point (and a minor counterpoint to negativity) I was extremely pleased that, in general, there is no requirement to kill things and take their stuff. A character’s progression doesn’t depend on that happening, unlike other games.
Secondly, it doesn’t label monsters as evil (which is slightly odd in a thread about just the opposite, but I hadn’t noticed the horde thing). I’m fed up of games where things are unthinking labelled evil, which then becomes a tag for slaughtering them without moral consequences.
Having said that, DW is unsatisfying as means to explore it. I placed a horde of kobolds, people in authority who labelled them vermin, others who clearly traded with them as people behind the backs of the authority, and tasked the players with removing them. Unthinking mass slaughter ensued, stuff was taken from the victims. Yet, I’m a fan of the characters, so, so, I dunno. If that’s what they want to do, that’s what you give them?
One thing that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen someone touch on is the general presumption that intelligent beings must necessarily follow the human path: basically helpless infants that are incapable of making moral judgments or deliberately acting evil (that is, innocents); (usually) caring mothers that may be hampered by the need/desire to protect their young; elderly that are substantially weakened by age and unable to defend themselves. None of that needs to be true, for example with orcs. And yet, even if orcs are inherently irredeemably evil and never innocent or naturally helpless, that does not necessarily mean they may be slaughtered with impunity; after all, if killing intelligent life is wrong, and orcs are intelligent, then slaughtering the lot of them is still wrong. Perhaps that is even where new orcs come from: humans (or elves or whatnot) who choose to kill indiscriminately and without remorse eventually become the very evil orcs they thought to oppose.
I love Philip’s idea for orcs, and in general breaking down the biological model can totally transform the moral equation. Sure, if everyone became an orc via their ACTIONs, then orcs being evil totally rocks!
When I worked on the online fantasy game Sanctum in the 90s, we intentionally replaced Races with Nations — some, like Elves and Dwarves and Humans, were mostly biological, but someone could become a Shadow by succumbing to Despair, or a Misfit by being infected by Chaos, etc.
Adrian, don’t forget that the GM is one of the players; the game should be exploring what all the people playing the game are interested in exploring. In the AW rules it says something like, don’t deprive them of victory, but make their victory have consequences — part of making the world real. What happens when you unthinkingly go along with orders to exterminate “vermin”? If I were you, I’d have the people in authority very pleased with the adventurers give them stuff, heap praise upon them, and then — assuming none of the advs are dwarves but one of them has a close dwarven friend or ally — start talking about how the dwarves are too numerous and too rich and full of themselves and need to be taught a lesson. When you lie down with the devil…
(“First they came for the kobolds, but I was not a kobold, so…” 🙂 )
John, you TOTALLY get to choose what is in your game. It’s utterly in your hands. Isn’t that exciting and awesome? It also means the choices you make are CHOICES. They matter. They’re what you decided. No one made you do it. If “the idea that “evil” means “opposed to health and welfare of the protagonistic races.” is enforced by the game, that’s a choice (not, by the way, a choice DW makes — Sage is on record, as quoted above, as wanting to rid DW of that legacy).
You also don’t get to hermetically seal your choices off from the real world with a wall of “it’s just a game”. And why would you want to? It’s not a trivial thing, a game — it matters — it’s deep and real and awesome. So if you decide PCs get XP for rape, you TOTALLY can. And it makes sense! Rape is often, and effectively, used in war as a terror tactic. Internal consistency and historical accuracy! However, a lot of players are going to be like “XP for rape? FUCK YOU.” That doesn’t mean they are party-poopers. That means they’re taking the game seriously. You get to tell your truth of the world as you see it, and they get to tell theirs. If they’ve been raped, that conditions how they experience “XP for rape”. And it SHOULD. They should bring their whole selves to the game.
So most of my grandparents’ cousins were killed by people who thought, very very literally, that they were humanoid vermin “opposed to health and welfare of the protagonistic races.” That’s not a stretch or a metaphor — the pulp writers who came up with the language used in D&D were steeped in the same milieu. It’s the exact same vocabulary.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to play in your campaign. But I’m going to try, as a player, to push that definition as hard as I can. Because doing so will make the game alive and real and fun for me, as opposed to a stale rehashing of fantasy cliches.
Benjamin Rosenbaum Wow that is a subtle implication in the book. But you’re right, very important. And I totally get it, not because it is wrong to create a game that pits good vs. evil, but because the text should not stand in the way of players/GMs who want to pull that concept apart and explore it.
I’m really glad you brought this up. This is something I’ve always felt weird about in my games (my players usually find themselves facing zombies, magical guardians, demons, and other clearly evil or non-living creatures) and it really helped to have someone analyze it in such detail.
Related question. When the Paladin asks “What here is evil”, what do we say? The game’s only definitively evil thing is another player character.
Thanks, Dave.
That is a really good question, Adrian! D&D’s (and thus DW’s) default setting seems to rely on a magically perceptible moral absolute; good and evil are universally detectable. The rules state “a character might not say ‘I’m an evil person’, but may instead say, ‘I put myself first.’ That’s all well and good for a character, but the world knows otherwise. Buried deep down inside is the ideal self a person wants to become — it is this mystic core that certain spells and abilities tap into when detecting someone’s alignment. Every sentient creature in Dungeon World bears an alignment… Evil creatures put themselves first at the expense of others… A Neutral creature looks out for itself so long as that doesn’t jeopardize someone else’s well-being….Most creatures are Neutral. They take no particular pleasure in harming others, but will do it if it is justified by the situation. Those that put an ideal — be it Law, Chaos, Good or Evil — above themselves are harder to find.”
On the face of it, this is pretty muddled, perhaps fruitfully so (leaving plenty of room for diverse visions). But the possible definitions of evil you can pull from this are:
1) Aspiring to model yourself after epic and rapacious evil; you may seem an unassuming shopkeeper on the outside, but you yearn to be Sauron;
2) Putting yourself first at the expense of others; that is, to be evil is simply to be selfish
3) By implication (to distinguish it from Neutral), taking pleasure in harming others — i.e. moral sadism
4) Putting the ideal of Evil above yourself — that is, harming others or furthering destruction even when it harms you or risks your own personal selfish goals — note that this is in direct contradiction to #2.
All of these are different models of evil, and since DW has stripped away the lazy and problematic (not to say, evil 🙂 ) convenience of simply being able to look up a creature’s alignment in the Monster Manual (“you detect evil, it’s One of Those…”) might yield different answers when put to a Detect Alignment test. If, in your world, most people are selfish — they may hope not to harm others, they may indeed quote lofty ideals and make speeches about the Good, but when push comes to shove they are going to look out for themselves first even if it harms their neighbors, particularly people they’ve never met — then by definition #2 (the most explicitly stated) most people (to everyone’s surprise) are going to Detect as Evil. (Certainly this would be true in a campaign based on the doctrine of original sin, as discussed above!) On the other hand, if moral sadism is a requirement, then a gangster who offs his enemies to extend his territory with a mild regret at the loss of them as conversation partners, and taking no pleasure in the matter, but simply as a cold-eyed calculation of his best interest, is Neutral rather than evil. And by gangster, I mean baron, obviously.
And option 4 is really fascinating, because it requires deciding what is evil as a cause or ideal. For instance, say you’re a convinced Nazi in the 40s. You are self-sacrificing and noble, valiant in caring for your comrades and family, kind to animals and small children, and feel great sadness that it is necessary to eliminate the lesser races in order to make room for the protagonistic Aryans. Not a drop of sadism or selfishness in your character — we can only call you Evil by making the determination that the thing you care about as an ideal, the thing you are willing to put before your own selfish interests and lay down your life for, is Evil. Okay, but pace Godwin’s Law, I chose the Nazi example because it’s the easy one. Replace WWII with, say, the Cold War, and it gets trickier. Do you want to place “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability” on the same plane as “Lebensraum for the Aryan people”? How about the American civil war? Are we willing to say a Detect Alignment cast on Robert E. Lee is going to read “evil”, despite his undeniably noble character, because the cause he supports — slavery — is undeniably evil?
I think that this is a really awesome problem to have, and that Detect Alignment is really a wonderful feature of the game.
My only advice is, that as GM, you play to find out what happens — play to find out what Good and Evil mean. The GM doesn’t have to know in advance how Detect Alignment works. In the moment of its casting, guided by the fiction, the agenda, and the principles, the GM can report what it detects, and out of that — since we’re playing to make the world seem real and honoring on-table facts as fixed — will emerge what Evil means in the world.
If it were me, I would hope to often have the answers surprise the party, push on their (and my) preconceived notions, disrupt what’s stable, and push them into moral quandries. What good is a Detect Alignment spell, ultimately, that doesn’t make the established powers of the world deeply uneasy?
My advice is not to distance yourself from it, by being all “well, it just so happens that in this campaign, evil means this silly thing about which I am totally ironic”, but rather to “say what honesty demands” and have Evil in the game be really, as honestly as you can come up with, be what it turns out that you think Evil is. Which means you are using Dungeon World as a tool to discover, interactively, what you as a group think about good and evil.
Therefore my answer to John’s question above — “well, when you figure out an effective definition for evil, let me know” — is, rather than giving you a fish, I am giving you a fishing pole, and the fishing pole’s name is Dungeon World!
Benjamin Rosenbaum
Sorry for taking so long to respond, real life etc.
“John, you TOTALLY get to choose what is in your game. It’s utterly in your hands. Isn’t that exciting and awesome? It also means the choices you make are CHOICES. They matter. They’re what you decided. No one made you do it. If the idea that ‘evil’ means ‘opposed to health and welfare of the protagonistic races.’ is enforced by the game, that’s a choice (not, by the way, a choice DW makes — Sage is on record, as quoted above, as wanting to rid DW of that legacy).”
IF you are playing your game with the intention of exploring these types of issues, THEN it matters. There are people who don’t play with that intention, preferring to view it as some kind of flavorful tactical exercise. DW may not be, to our estimation, the best choice for those people, but…who can say? Play what thou wilt, y’know.
“You also don’t get to hermetically seal your choices off from the real world with a wall of “it’s just a game”. And why would you want to? It’s not a trivial thing, a game — it matters — it’s deep and real and awesome.”
I think I have to fundamentally disagree here. Part of the very point of playing these games at a deep ethical level is to have an environment where these things can be explored that IS sealed off from the real world. I can totally see a case where a group would be willing to explore some kind of IRL human villainy by modifying rules to do so. Additionally, part of the very point of playing these games at a very shallow ethical level is to IGNORE the complexities of the real world for escapist purposes.
In this case (inherently evil groups) I find that the idea of inherently evil races is fairly tied up with the in-fiction reality or at least degree of influence of the fictional divinities and the distinct lack of scientific origins of species, etc. If each race/group has its own deity(ies) who are in conflict and tightly bound to their respective groups and vice-versa…well, that universe IS basically divided up into teams. Although, such a world is not without its own ethical conundra.) IMO, the reason that doesn’t work IRL is that if any of those divinities actually exist, they hide it well.
Now, having said all that, these types of games ARE social activities. Putting things like XP for rape, inherently evil (N)PCs, or even (non)existent gods CAN put you in violation of Wheaton’s Law. Which, IMO, is a far worse sin than cutting a few corners for philoshopical consistency. AFAICT, that is the sum total of your ethical responsibilities in playing or running a TTRPG (designing one may be different).
I mean, to me, the whole point is hang out with some other geeky friends and have some fun. For my part, I stopped viewing playing RPGs as some kind of high art form a long time ago (although it might be a “low” art form….if there is such a thing). Nonetheless, the definition of “fun” can vary wildly from group to group, and I have certainly played with and enjoyed groups for whom a deep exploration of ethics and morality in a world closer to mythology and fairy tales would qualify as fun. (Its my preferred style, actually. My current group is not such a one.)
“So most of my grandparents’ cousins were killed by people who thought, very very literally, that they were humanoid vermin ‘opposed to health and welfare of the protagonistic races.’ That’s not a stretch or a metaphor — the pulp writers who came up with the language used in D&D were steeped in the same milieu. It’s the exact same vocabulary.”
I do not doubt it or disagree at all. However, that’s what I’m referring to by “in a fantasy context.” If you are exploring a world where deities are real, some of the deities are evil, and there are groups/races who are inherently or tightly tied to those deities…well, you get inherently evil groups/races, be they demons, orcs, whatever. I agree that that’s a shallow world from our perspective, at least at first glance, but that’s the world you’re signing onto for traditional fantasy. More modern fantasy, especially “grim” or “dark” fantasy, seems to shoot for a deeper acknowledgement of moral complexity. In those worlds, IME, the deities are often aloof or fraudulent. I’m thinking in particular or the Black Company, and possibly Game of Thrones (although I haven’t finished that series, so no spoilers, please. 🙂 )
As a PS, let me just say that I think this is a very interesting discussion, and thanks for bringing it up.
I finally got around to writing an expanded version of my thoughts on the problem; it’s basically an expansion of what I’ve already said here, but if you’re curious you can read more here: http://attacksofopportunity.tumblr.com/post/66178244256/orcs-humanoid-vermin-and-the-problem-of-evil