Referring to video games and bad people being the main characters:
There was a video game decades ago where the player's party were a bunch of holier-than-thou virtuous NPCs. One thing they all agreed upon: No stealing. What did many players end up doing? Made all the party members stay out of sight of them and, then, stole to their hearts' content.
I've seen many streams where a someone plays a side-scroller and tries to go in a different direction than the obvious one, looking for hidden gems or to see if game designers covered all their bases to prevent players from breaking the game.
A lot of the gameplay I see in streams have players trying to find loopholes around what they think are the DM's schemes, and I feel this is most often (but not always) a videogame influence. That adds a complication and an opportunity for the DM to move the story in a particular direction if the DM can sleight-of-hand their true intentions. Again, this takes familiarity with the characters on the board.
Players are one thing, but the characters are a combination of the players and the players' creations. A different character by the same player could present new challenges for motivation. By focusing on the character, you'll include the player in the considerations, too. Focusing on the player, you might get sideswiped by their creation.
Regarding "altruism gone wrong" or "the benevolent dictator fallacy" or "the Handsome Jack Parable", that's only one kind of bad person. There are also the "YOLO gone wrong" or "get what you can before you die" or "what does it matter anyway" motivations that are decidedly egoist bad people - no consideration for anyone else. The latter is more simple but, in the right hands, can be just as exciting which makes it less simple in the end.
So for two (of likely many) options, you get the Gul Dukat scenario with a complicated villain and allow a straight-forward campaign around it or you get world-eating Galacticus with a complicated campaign to find a solution.
Again, that's just two possibilities out of likely many. (I just woke up. So, my brain's not running on all cylinders right now.)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
It does surprise me as a DM how quickly most PCs gravitate towards the chaotic evil. Chaotic, because it's difficult to predict what they'll do and they give no thought to traditional or acceptable behaviour. And evil, because they rarely think about anyone but themselves. I sprang a random encounter on my players recently where two factions were fighting each other. Some of the party took one side, some took the other, but they still killed everyone and took all their stuff. Job done.
It is easier not to think about others and it is a fictional environment and not everyone has the imagination to really step into a fictional world and think of it as real for their characters.
Plus most newer players are almost certainly coming from computer games where everything is by necessity so scripted that it seldom feels real.
Even in the 80s there was a not insignificant portion of new players to the game, and casually players who persistently opted for chaotic evil. I think Kotath is right in that the "new" or casual (de facto perpetually new) player may not have the ability or inclination to adopt or immerse their role in the moral universe of the game world. I think there may also be a sort of opening of the sandbox of the psyche in this (admittedly often disruptive) style of play too.
About twenty years ago where philosophies and psychologies of media were sort of my "teaching specialty" I would often teach undergraduates with some initial assignments reflecting on what their play past times say about themselves and their world (classic freshman writing stuff). One of the essays I'd often assign was "Complete Freedom of Movement" by Henry Jenkins, a humanities scholar who chaired a media studies department at MIT. He was making a case for digital spaces (not perfectly, but importantly) providing a realm of freedom and exploration and no obligations that "kids today" (or "kids then") just didn't have in the more regulated childhoods he believes more and more children were being raised in (his childhood point of view was sort of the childhood represented in "Stand by Me", an era when my father as a thirteen year old could walk into the pharmacy, buy the chemical components for gunpowder from the chemist, nearly blow him and his friends up with a pip bomb in an undeveloped wooded area and the worst he got for that was the town cop pulling up to him while he was drinking a soda two days later and say "No more bombs!" These days he'd probably still be in a Supermax on a terror conviction). Those days of the real world as unsupervised playground just don't exist by and large for increasing numbers of children in the U.S. at least.
I agree that digital playspaces, as mentioned above have scripts and parameters blocking freedom as its most intuitively felt in play (though the best sandboxes do make efforts to be less didactic, No Man's Sky letting its community just do what it did is an example). I'd say then and now D&D also plays a role in that imaginative free space Jenkins was trying to award the digital.
CE allows the novice player the classic child development and adult organization psychology concept of "testing" or "boundary pushing." I'm not saying it's conscious in the player, but adopting a CE persona does make the game be more about "how far can I go?" "what can I get away with?" limit testing that's a literal "game people play" in real life, but in TTRPG space can be performed more nakedly.
Now while I can appreciate this play style or see it for what it is, I do admit the play style puts the DM in a parental space and unless the DM is fine doing that (say DMing a group of kids and the DM is literally the adult in the room) it's something that DM and players more committed to supporting the world should work to correct.
What I've put above also speaks to a general play reward that can be summed as "high on rebellion." There was another "essay" (it was a little experimental, avant gardy as late 20th century academic writing tended to be in the literary cultural space) that spoke to this tendency with some players in 90s MMORGs (text bass more or less open world RPG environments arguably precedents for games like WoW etc) type space, the essay was titled "**** Art, Let's Kill." It described an online world that was striving for some sort of democratic arts-centered utopia and one small "cell" of players decided to be terrorists and would run around the game engaged in acts of vandalism and disruption. (In the 90s the Terrorist as Freedom Fighter was romanticized a lot in experimental fiction and art circles, a mode that pretty much shut down after 9/11 and didn't really gain cachet again until recently). Basically there's a pleasure in dismantling, but again it's something most groups would need to correct than accommodate.
Lastly, there's the notion "the bad guys just get better lines." This goes back to at least Milton's Paradise Lost, where Satan's language is just more compelling than Gods. Harry Lime in the Third Man (who is probably Chaotic Neutral/Evil) devastates the "good guys" stance of civilization with the cuckoo clock speech. People are drawn to Hannible Lecter's words because in entertaining them and understanding the fiction, they too can take amount outside themselves and believe they're some "alpha" above the sheep. And these are fine things to play within, if you're game has the capacity to go there.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Referring to video games and bad people being the main characters:
There was a video game decades ago where the player's party were a bunch of holier-than-thou virtuous NPCs. One thing they all agreed upon: No stealing. What did many players end up doing? Made all the party members stay out of sight of them and, then, stole to their hearts' content.
I've seen many streams where a someone plays a side-scroller and tries to go in a different direction than the obvious one, looking for hidden gems or to see if game designers covered all their bases to prevent players from breaking the game.
A lot of the gameplay I see in streams have players trying to find loopholes around what they think are the DM's schemes, and I feel this is most often (but not always) a videogame influence. That adds a complication and an opportunity for the DM to move the story in a particular direction if the DM can sleight-of-hand their true intentions. Again, this takes familiarity with the characters on the board.
Players are one thing, but the characters are a combination of the players and the players' creations. A different character by the same player could present new challenges for motivation. By focusing on the character, you'll include the player in the considerations, too. Focusing on the player, you might get sideswiped by their creation.
Regarding "altruism gone wrong" or "the benevolent dictator fallacy" or "the Handsome Jack Parable", that's only one kind of bad person. There are also the "YOLO gone wrong" or "get what you can before you die" or "what does it matter anyway" motivations that are decidedly egoist bad people - no consideration for anyone else. The latter is more simple but, in the right hands, can be just as exciting which makes it less simple in the end.
So for two (of likely many) options, you get the Gul Dukat scenario with a complicated villain and allow a straight-forward campaign around it or you get world-eating Galacticus with a complicated campaign to find a solution.
Again, that's just two possibilities out of likely many. (I just woke up. So, my brain's not running on all cylinders right now.)
[edit: link added to an example]
Right on with Gul Dukat and Galactus ... I'd say not as well written but Anakin Skywalker (ultimately seeking power over the death of love is what led to his fall, Yoda should have dismissed him with "Insecure too much, this one is" when Qui Gon brought him to the Council) and Thanos (ultimately a sort of eco-terrorist) can be fit in there too.
I still think though most people who adopt a career of evil early in their D&D playing are playing a game breaking game (like the video gamers you described). More mature experienced players could take on a Gul Dukat type role, and with the help of a DM willing to play along, maybe even use that evil to question the "goodness" of the world the players are championing (sort of what Trek is arguably doing with the darker cynical shows coming out like Picard and aspects of Discovery).
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And as for 'enslaving' horses, horses are herd animals who have leaders in nature, too. Any good horseman in real life treats their horse much more as a partner than as a slave and every movie in which understanding communications with horses are possible, the horse is typically asked rather than forced, unless the forcing is part of indicating that a bad guy is bad.
The view that good and evil are merely subjective simply does not hold up particularly well.
But who is to say that pigs are less sentient than horses? And most humanoids in D&D would think nothing of breeding and slaughtering pigs. Also, it's not like most humanoids would care to ask horses whether or not they want to be sold before selling them (or their children for that matter). Thus, a slavery element is still there.
My view isn't that evil and good are merely subjective, but that the PoV has a large influence on what gets defined as evil by a particular observer (or social group of observers).
There is a lot we don't know about Illithid culture. Yes, official lore tends to imply that they merely want to use humanoids as labor and to propagate their species. Now, what if feeding their elder brains was somehow important on an intergalactic scale? What if, for instance, a large number of elder brains are necessary to maintain a containment field on some kind of Void force threatening to annihilate the observable (from a common human Pov) universe entirely? So Illithids regard their "work" of capturing sentient creatures for food and labor as being "For the Greater Good." And there would probably be some researcher of otherworldy arcana who would agree with them.
And as for 'enslaving' horses, horses are herd animals who have leaders in nature, too. Any good horseman in real life treats their horse much more as a partner than as a slave and every movie in which understanding communications with horses are possible, the horse is typically asked rather than forced, unless the forcing is part of indicating that a bad guy is bad.
The view that good and evil are merely subjective simply does not hold up particularly well.
But who is to say that pigs are less sentient than horses? And most humanoids in D&D would think nothing of breeding and slaughtering pigs. Also, it's not like most humanoids would care to ask horses whether or not they want to be sold before selling them (or their children for that matter). Thus, a slavery element is still there.
My view isn't that evil and good are merely subjective, but that the PoV has a large influence on what gets defined as evil by a particular observer (or social group of observers).
There is a lot we don't know about Illithid culture. Yes, official lore tends to imply that they merely want to use humanoids as labor and to propagate their species. Now, what if feeding their elder brains was somehow important on an intergalactic scale? What if, for instance, a large number of elder brains are necessary to maintain a containment field on some kind of Void force threatening to annihilate the observable (from a common human Pov) universe entirely? So Illithids regard their "work" of capturing sentient creatures for food and labor as being "For the Greater Good." And there would probably be some researcher of otherworldy arcana who would agree with them.
PoV having a defining role in moral evaluation means subjective. I think the contention is whether subjectivity is "mere" or or integral to good/evil evaluation.
The proposal that the evil Illithids do are actually bulwarks against something far more horrific is a good twist. I think the whole Whitley Strieber grey alien mythology was a slightly more minor key on a similar note. The horrific experiences alien abductees report, which had an invasiveness similar to the manipulations of Mind Flayers, per Strieber's mythos, were actually being performed for some greater good of the cosmos.
What I've put above also speaks to a general play reward that can be summed as "high on rebellion." There was another "essay" (it was a little experimental, avant gardy as late 20th century academic writing tended to be in the literary cultural space) that spoke to this tendency with some players in 90s MMORGs (text bass more or less open world RPG environments arguably precedents for games like WoW etc) type space, the essay was titled "**** Art, Let's Kill." It described an online world that was striving for some sort of democratic arts-centered utopia and one small "cell" of players decided to be terrorists and would run around the game engaged in acts of vandalism and disruption. (In the 90s the Terrorist as Freedom Fighter was romanticized a lot in experimental fiction and art circles, a mode that pretty much shut down after 9/11 and didn't really gain cachet again until recently). Basically there's a pleasure in dismantling, but again it's something most groups would need to correct than accommodate.
Lastly, there's the notion "the bad guys just get better lines." This goes back to at least Milton's Paradise Lost, where Satan's language is just more compelling than Gods. Harry Lime in the Third Man (who is probably Chaotic Neutral/Evil) devastates the "good guys" stance of civilization with the cuckoo clock speech. People are drawn to Hannible Lecter's words because in entertaining them and understanding the fiction, they too can take amount outside themselves and believe they're some "alpha" above the sheep. And these are fine things to play within, if you're game has the capacity to go there.
I am so glad you brought these up. I remember reading a while back an essay about a theologically problematic tendency of modern storytelling: that because the status quo of the majority is generally defined as "Good" (explicitly or not), it is far easier to write interesting (and therefore likable) villains than it is to write interesting (s)heroes. Why? Because the villains are allowed greater agency. Their exercise of that agency - IOW, utilizing their freedom - disrupts the status quo, which is generally what drives the plot at the outset. The initiator of Action is the villain. Darth Vader, Maleficent, David Xanatos, the Sea Witch, Magneto, Killmonger, Cao Cao, Doctor Doom, Poison Ivy, etc. All of these villains have their own devoted fandoms. Some of them get redemption arcs that make them even more popular. Not to mention the fact that many female villains get to wear "sexier" costumes than what is customarily acceptable. Because "Good" has been defined as normal, it also is generally what is boring, what is already allowed, and what reminds younger viewers of the parental and restrictive. The man with the spiked leather jacket riding a souped up motorcycle is attractive in comparison because he symbolizes the unknown horizon, movement, and (a certain form of) freedom. So part of why so many players would rather role-play Chaotic Evil/Neutral is a desire for expansiveness, to associate themselves with what non-fantasy pop culture also associates with social status, and to psychologically distance themselves from their societally controlled spaces and ways of being.
Quote from MidnightPlat>> But who is to say that pigs are less sentient than horses? And most humanoids in D&D would think nothing of breeding and slaughtering pigs. Also, it's not like most humanoids would care to ask horses whether or not they want to be sold before selling them (or their children for that matter). Thus, a slavery element is still there.
My view isn't that evil and good are merely subjective, but that the PoV has a large influence on what gets defined as evil by a particular observer (or social group of observers).
There is a lot we don't know about Illithid culture. Yes, official lore tends to imply that they merely want to use humanoids as labor and to propagate their species. Now, what if feeding their elder brains was somehow important on an intergalactic scale? What if, for instance, a large number of elder brains are necessary to maintain a containment field on some kind of Void force threatening to annihilate the observable (from a common human Pov) universe entirely? So Illithids regard their "work" of capturing sentient creatures for food and labor as being "For the Greater Good." And there would probably be some researcher of otherworldy arcana who would agree with them.
PoV having a defining role in moral evaluation means subjective. I think the contention is whether subjectivity is "mere" or or integral to good/evil evaluation.
The proposal that the evil Illithids do are actually bulwarks against something far more horrific is a good twist. I think the whole Whitley Strieber grey alien mythology was a slightly more minor key on a similar note. The horrific experiences alien abductees report, which had an invasiveness similar to the manipulations of Mind Flayers, per Strieber's mythos, were actually being performed for some greater good of the cosmos.
I would say that subjectivity is integral, but by no means the entirety of morality.
I am so glad you brought these up. I remember reading a while back an essay about a theologically problematic tendency of modern storytelling: that because the status quo of the majority is generally defined as "Good" (explicitly or not), it is far easier to write interesting (and therefore likable) villains than it is to write interesting (s)heroes. Why? Because the villains are allowed greater agency. Their exercise of that agency - IOW, utilizing their freedom - disrupts the status quo, which is generally what drives the plot at the outset. The initiator of Action is the villain. Darth Vader, Maleficent, David Xanatos, the Sea Witch, Magneto, Killmonger, Cao Cao, Doctor Doom, Poison Ivy, etc. All of these villains have their own devoted fandoms. Some of them get redemption arcs that make them even more popular. Not to mention the fact that many female villains get to wear "sexier" costumes than what is customarily acceptable. Because "Good" has been defined as normal, it also is generally what is boring, what is already allowed, and what reminds younger viewers of the parental and restrictive. The man with the spiked leather jacket riding a souped up motorcycle is attractive in comparison because he symbolizes the unknown horizon, movement, and (a certain form of) freedom. So part of why so many players would rather role-play Chaotic Evil/Neutral is a desire for expansiveness, to associate themselves with what non-fantasy pop culture also associates with social status, and to psychologically distance themselves from their societally controlled spaces and ways of being.
It is always more work acknowledging that others exist. I counter that tossing that limitation out is far more 'boring easy mode' than actually caring or trying to find the actual best solution. Say for the moment that the mind flayers really do need to eat people to keep the universe stable. The evil party is far more likely to simply slaughter the Illithids without ever learning that than a truly good party, who might actually listen to their explanation and look for a solution that keeps the universe stable and, ideally, finds the Illithids a much less questionable alternative food source too. That is almost certainly a much greater challenge than simply 'kill them all' and also does not result in the destruction of the universe.
No DM is actually needed for 'kill them all.' One can do that simply in one's own head or in any computer game.
That's true. We agree on something! Again!
My point isn't so much that murder, conspiracy and wanton destruction are de facto desirable. I am moreso demonstrating the attractiveness of that play style for a large number of D&D gamers. And I also wanted to illustrate that it is possible for a campaign world to have Mind Flayers continuing to eat and enslave people without them necessarily being defined as Evil from a meta-narrative perspective , at least in comparison to, say, Humans, Dwarves, Dragonborn, etc. Real life is full of shades of grey. You don't have to be Good to not be Evil. If we extend that principle of real life to fantasy campaign worlds, that at least makes the game world a more interesting one for people who care to read articles about philosophy and etiology.
Is it possible to create a fictional universe where eating humans is necessary to keep the universe from being destroyed in some manner? Of course. You can also design a universe where PC's are all helpless prisoners being slowly tortured and expect your players to sit through that. Or conversely one where everything is completely perfect and there is nothing meaningful to do since the PC's are all perpetually automatically happy, healthy and relaxed. However really not sure why you would consider any such universe as entertaining design....
And yet Call of Cthulhu (where maybe you can add a layer of pulp heroism but the bigger picture is pretty bleak) and more poignantly Delta Green (where it's very clear the PCs side is going to lose) are very popular games. Not 5e popular, but I think I've remembered times when they held a top five if not 2nd place market share after D&D and PF. Heck, I want to say Chill went the Delta Green route in its second edition, claiming SAVE had been doing it wrong all along and had actually made things worse before it imploded.
Agreeing that players with the CE impulse should and can be rehabilitated, I think games where confrontations with cosmologically nihilist propositions are a major theme are a great outlet for that demographic. I think good, compelling gameplay can be made within a Morituri te Salutant ethic where PCs go down swinging behind their conviction even if or - even better - despite the fact that the universe doesn't care. We mentioned Se7en in this thread already with its tagline "Ernest Hemingway once wrote the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part" addresses a contention the film makes which could be great campaign themes.
To further riff on Song_of_Blues Illithid evil being a necessary evil to prevent a cosmic extinction or what have you, the tropes and mythology within cosmic horror speak to that. Other variants are what if the "good people" the humanoids actually have the Illithids to credit for their sapience? This was the reveal in Quatermass and the Pit, also think of the Engineers in Ridley Scotts efforts to do more with the Alien franchise. And actually a having a god like entity that could create both humanity and the alien, and the former being created with nothing near the priority human self hubris would expect, yet having a concept like "good" arise within one of the byproducts of that world ... it's an abyss to think through.
Started this thread thinking of Blue Oyster Cult's "Career of Evil" for the CE impulse, ending these thoughts with Santana's "Put Your Lights On."
Is it possible to create a fictional universe where eating humans is necessary to keep the universe from being destroyed in some manner? Of course. You can also design a universe where PC's are all helpless prisoners being slowly tortured and expect your players to sit through that. Or conversely one where everything is completely perfect and there is nothing meaningful to do since the PC's are all perpetually automatically happy, healthy and relaxed. However really not sure why you would consider any such universe as entertaining design....
And yet Call of Cthulhu (where maybe you can add a layer of pulp heroism but the bigger picture is pretty bleak) and more poignantly Delta Green (where it's very clear the PCs side is going to lose) are very popular games. Not 5e popular, but I think I've remembered times when they held a top five if not 2nd place market share after D&D and PF. Heck, I want to say Chill went the Delta Green route in its second edition, claiming SAVE had been doing it wrong all along and had actually made things worse before it imploded.
Agreeing that players with the CE impulse should and can be rehabilitated, I think games where confrontations with cosmologically nihilist propositions are a major theme are a great outlet for that demographic. I think good, compelling gameplay can be made within a Morituri te Salutant ethic where PCs go down swinging behind their conviction even if or - even better - despite the fact that the universe doesn't care. We mentioned Se7en in this thread already with its tagline "Ernest Hemingway once wrote the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part" addresses a contention the film makes which could be great campaign themes.
To further riff on Song_of_Blues Illithid evil being a necessary evil to prevent a cosmic extinction or what have you, the tropes and mythology within cosmic horror speak to that. Other variants are what if the "good people" the humanoids actually have the Illithids to credit for their sapience? This was the reveal in Quatermass and the Pit, also think of the Engineers in Ridley Scotts efforts to do more with the Alien franchise. And actually a having a god like entity that could create both humanity and the alien, and the former being created with nothing near the priority human self hubris would expect, yet having a concept like "good" arise within one of the byproducts of that world ... it's an abyss to think through.
Started this thread thinking of Blue Oyster Cult's "Career of Evil" for the CE impulse, ending these thoughts with Santana's "Put Your Lights On."
Call of Cthulhu has sanity penalties for delving into Old One lore, though and is a setting in which there are no real heroes or even necessarily real villains, merely victims. It does not particularly promote playing evil characters.
As far as Quartermass, Marvel, too went a similar route. Humans (as well as Eternals and Deviants) were all created via Celestial experimentation on Earth. However there is no attempt made to justify the Celestials having done so. They had a hand in the creation of other sentient races too but IIRC, sentient life developed elsewhere in the Marvel Universe without such intervention. Moreover, when the Celestials returned millennia later in modern times, to declare their experiment finished and essentially clean up (i.e. wipe out their creations), they certainly were treated as an opposing force, not presented as 'good.'
Creation does not justify abuse. The argument 'I brought you into this world therefore you are mine to do with as I please' has not stood up as a defence of abuse for rather a while now.
Well, I invoked Call of Cthulhu and adjacent games to specifically address your quip expressing skepticism that one would "consider such any such universe an entertaining design." Clearly, it is for a sector of the TTRPG market.
Marvel is largely tied to popular consensus of good and evil (and since right and wrong are actually in popular contention, they often find themselves in a bind of wanting to do the right thing but also not disrupt the market), so making the Celestials "villainous" isn't all that surprising. Quatermass and definitely the Alien expansions speak to a universes where anthropocentric morality is a curious product of a system that does not care. And honestly, if an Alien engineer or Illithid architect or drive-by divinity who made sapience on the oops did care for some reason, I'm sure at the top of the list of questions to speak to the exhibition of morality would be "what good was this anthropocentric "good" given the Anthropocene? Given all the other impacts this special morally capable mind has wrought, why would I think it's any more than a curious epiphenomena to the literal mess I made by ... whatever it is I did with you people." Yes the cold creator will "you people" humanity.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
An example of relationship and causality : Imagine a scenario where the Illithids developed on a planet with another sentient but much less technologically savvy species. Let's call them species Z. They manage to come to a sort of peace agreement and the Illithids focus on traveling the stars while the other species largely decides to stay planet-bound. In their travels, the Illithids discover a black hole that is growing in size. Through experimentation on both the Astral and Prime Material Planes, they discover they can limit the black hole's ability to grow through the concerted psychic influence of their elder brains. The problem is that this requires a great deal of fuel - fuel that only comes about through "processing" of other reasonably intelligent life forms. Some of these experiments are done using Illithids and some using species Z. The non-Illithids on the original homeworld hear about this and become agitated. Unsurprisingly, they believe that they are being singled out for sacrifice. Through a mix of propaganda and desire to supplant the Illithids for their own political gain, certain leaders of species Z decide to wage war. The Illithids naturally respond by waging war back and gradually win, but at great cost to their own species. They use the prisoners of war to feed to the Elder brains. Following the war, their calculations reveal that they would need to find other sentient species to feed the Elder brain in order to maintain the containment field around expanding the black hole. Because it is very time consuming to actually find planets with life let alone sentient life, it is far safer for the cosmos (and more economical) to "seed" a number of hospitable planets with the basic building blocks of life and to guide their development such that they eventually become sentient. Having gone through costly war with species Z, the Illithids are also short of labor. They discover that turning sentient creatures into thralls is the most efficient means of making up for the lack of Illithid #s. This labor replacement via mental domination slavery becomes a custom, reinforced by their fear that asking species to sacrifice themselves would lead to yet another costly war, costly both in terms of Illithid lives and in terms of lost time and the potential destruction of the Elder brains preventing cosmic annihilation. Not to mention that managing war is already a mentally taxing endeavor on the Elder brains that would be better spent finding more life-friendly planets with which to seed sentient life onto. Thus, through a combination of history, necessity, and social norms, the Illithids became the brain eating other-worldly slavers that are known to humanoids on Earth as force of Evil.
I think that is really fun to tell a story about bad people who think they are the good guys. Especially when the reveal at the end is all the destruction that they had wrought. It allows for the players to potentially see what they are doing and change. Or not. Either way is a fun time.
I agree that such stories can be interesting but I think there's a more fundamental issue here: D&D is not a story game. It might be that playing the game creates interesting stories and characters. It also might not. And that's fine too. The objective of D&D is to have fun playing make believe in an interesting and believable world. Any stories that come out of that are a side-effect rather than a goal.
To answer the original question, why are the PCs the heroes of the story? It's not up to the DM whether the PCs are the heroes. It's up to them. As DM you give them a situation in which they can be the heroes if they choose. But don't be surprised if they don't make that choice. Just remember the wages of sin, and ensure they get paid in full for their interactions with the inhabitants of your world.
A great character to read that helps answer this exact question is Raistlin from Dragonlance. He is at various times a good, evil, and neutral aligned character and his motivation for adventuring is much different than the rest of his party, sorta. Hes not just out to save the world but has other motives that push him in that direction.
What's the opinion on this protagonist from a series?
The protagonist just wants to sleep on the job and not get fired. Circumstances keep putting the protagonist in the middle of world-shattering plots, requiring the protagonist to try to survive and, in the course of that, end the BBEG threat though that result is never the primary objective. The BBEG's plans are usually thwarted by the protagonist's ironic ability to make a mess of things. The protagonist is fine to be left alone, and if someone doesn't bother the protagonist, the protagonist won't bother. The protagonist has dreams of glory but no real drive or expectation to achieve them.
That protagonist saved a planet twice and the galaxy several times without any intention to do so and without any due recognition for doing so.
Good person? Bad person? Hero? Villain?
What would you do to motivate such a protagonist?
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
An example of relationship and causality : Imagine a scenario where the Illithids developed on a planet with another sentient but much less technologically savvy species. Let's call them species Z. They manage to come to a sort of peace agreement and the Illithids focus on traveling the stars while the other species largely decides to stay planet-bound. In their travels, the Illithids discover a black hole that is growing in size. Through experimentation on both the Astral and Prime Material Planes, they discover they can limit the black hole's ability to grow through the concerted psychic influence of their elder brains. The problem is that this requires a great deal of fuel - fuel that only comes about through "processing" of other reasonably intelligent life forms. Some of these experiments are done using Illithids and some using species Z. The non-Illithids on the original homeworld hear about this and become agitated. Unsurprisingly, they believe that they are being singled out for sacrifice. Through a mix of propaganda and desire to supplant the Illithids for their own political gain, certain leaders of species Z decide to wage war. The Illithids naturally respond by waging war back and gradually win, but at great cost to their own species. They use the prisoners of war to feed to the Elder brains. Following the war, their calculations reveal that they would need to find other sentient species to feed the Elder brain in order to maintain the containment field around expanding the black hole. Because it is very time consuming to actually find planets with life let alone sentient life, it is far safer for the cosmos (and more economical) to "seed" a number of hospitable planets with the basic building blocks of life and to guide their development such that they eventually become sentient. Having gone through costly war with species Z, the Illithids are also short of labor. They discover that turning sentient creatures into thralls is the most efficient means of making up for the lack of Illithid #s. This labor replacement via mental domination slavery becomes a custom, reinforced by their fear that asking species to sacrifice themselves would lead to yet another costly war, costly both in terms of Illithid lives and in terms of lost time and the potential destruction of the Elder brains preventing cosmic annihilation. Not to mention that managing war is already a mentally taxing endeavor on the Elder brains that would be better spent finding more life-friendly planets with which to seed sentient life onto. Thus, through a combination of history, necessity, and social norms, the Illithids became the brain eating other-worldly slavers that are known to humanoids on Earth as force of Evil.
And this functions better than breeding another sentient race to provide additional mental capacity? More importantly though there is zero evidence of any such threat in anything published and there are Gods in this continuum including Gods of Knowledge who presumably would not want the universe to simply cease to exist since that would mean no more knowledge. In fact there are only a small handful of nihilistic deities who might try to conceal the situation. Most would have strong interests in informing their followers in the hopes of something productive being done.
I never said that this was canon lore. Why would you assume that I thought it was. I'm presenting a world-building scenario that would make Illithids more interesting antagonists since their motives in this way would be slightly more comprehensible to the standard humanoid. To bring this full circle, if in a campaign, the PCs get the chance to wipe out several Illithid colonies at once and they somehow found out about this Void-containing ability of the Elder Brains and decided to destroy them anyway and thus destabilizing the Void and wiping out the cosmos, doesn't that make PCs the Evil ones? This is a thought exercise, as any discussion of morality concerning a fictional universe (and sometimes the non-fictional universe) often involves.
Tyranny was a game I enjoyed for that whole "bad character" story arc. I felt like you weren't a bad guy for the sake of being a bad guy but rather indoctrinated in to believing that what you were doing is the right thing. Suppressing rebels, putting down traitors and spreading your overlord's presence while making 'friends' along the way.
Unfortunately, I've not met any examples at a tabletop game yet where I've seen someone be an evil character without doing something AWFUL to someone else for the sake of it being a horrible thing to do.
An example of relationship and causality : Imagine a scenario where the Illithids developed on a planet with another sentient but much less technologically savvy species. Let's call them species Z. They manage to come to a sort of peace agreement and the Illithids focus on traveling the stars while the other species largely decides to stay planet-bound. In their travels, the Illithids discover a black hole that is growing in size. Through experimentation on both the Astral and Prime Material Planes, they discover they can limit the black hole's ability to grow through the concerted psychic influence of their elder brains. The problem is that this requires a great deal of fuel - fuel that only comes about through "processing" of other reasonably intelligent life forms. Some of these experiments are done using Illithids and some using species Z. The non-Illithids on the original homeworld hear about this and become agitated. Unsurprisingly, they believe that they are being singled out for sacrifice. Through a mix of propaganda and desire to supplant the Illithids for their own political gain, certain leaders of species Z decide to wage war. The Illithids naturally respond by waging war back and gradually win, but at great cost to their own species. They use the prisoners of war to feed to the Elder brains. Following the war, their calculations reveal that they would need to find other sentient species to feed the Elder brain in order to maintain the containment field around expanding the black hole. Because it is very time consuming to actually find planets with life let alone sentient life, it is far safer for the cosmos (and more economical) to "seed" a number of hospitable planets with the basic building blocks of life and to guide their development such that they eventually become sentient. Having gone through costly war with species Z, the Illithids are also short of labor. They discover that turning sentient creatures into thralls is the most efficient means of making up for the lack of Illithid #s. This labor replacement via mental domination slavery becomes a custom, reinforced by their fear that asking species to sacrifice themselves would lead to yet another costly war, costly both in terms of Illithid lives and in terms of lost time and the potential destruction of the Elder brains preventing cosmic annihilation. Not to mention that managing war is already a mentally taxing endeavor on the Elder brains that would be better spent finding more life-friendly planets with which to seed sentient life onto. Thus, through a combination of history, necessity, and social norms, the Illithids became the brain eating other-worldly slavers that are known to humanoids on Earth as force of Evil.
And this functions better than breeding another sentient race to provide additional mental capacity? More importantly though there is zero evidence of any such threat in anything published and there are Gods in this continuum including Gods of Knowledge who presumably would not want the universe to simply cease to exist since that would mean no more knowledge. In fact there are only a small handful of nihilistic deities who might try to conceal the situation. Most would have strong interests in informing their followers in the hopes of something productive being done.
I never said that this was canon lore. Why would you assume that I thought it was. I'm presenting a world-building scenario that would make Illithids more interesting antagonists since their motives in this way would be slightly more comprehensible to the standard humanoid. To bring this full circle, if in a campaign, the PCs get the chance to wipe out several Illithid colonies at once and they somehow found out about this Void-containing ability of the Elder Brains and decided to destroy them anyway and thus destabilizing the Void and wiping out the cosmos, doesn't that make PCs the Evil ones? This is a thought exercise, as any discussion of morality concerning a fictional universe (and sometimes the non-fictional universe) often involves.
My sense is that Kotath holds in their games the notion that good and evil are immutable and integral parts of the world. Good is an ideal, it may not be perfectly understood, but it is something to strive for. And that's fine.
However, my contention is that good and evil are well and good and all as yes literally integral parts to the structure of the D&D cosmology, which undergirds the morality of the material plane. But the game also goes beyond that. The Far Realm, whatever it is, is outside that structure. When the material plane, or really any plane, has contact with the Far Realm, it is in contact with entities that literally live outside the morality of good/evil law/chaos. There is something to "is-ness" that's literally beyond the moral underpinnings of D&D. Some lore suggests the Illithids were originally of the D&D understood cosmology, and left it. What happens to evil or good when it leaves and enters a cosmos where good and evil aren't concepts? That's what amorality actually is, to be cute it says that there's "a morality" which outside the D&D usual planar calculus has the Dude saying, "Well, that's just your opinion, man." (see what I did there, I'm bringing the Cohen Brothers and Jeff Bridges into an echo of Stephen Crane).
Good and evil may be ascribed to the actions of interlopers from the Far Realm, but that's literally failing to come to terms. You may more rightly say such aberrations (the monster class) are "wrong" or "incorrect" in that they are not "right" with most D&D understood reality. But despite that, they "are".
You don't even need to go to Lovecraft (easily dismissed/discarded for a number of reasons in "serious" discussions of the intersections of morality/metaphysics/epistemology). You can go to the Book of Job. When the whirlwind and the Leviathan are given voice in "response" to Job's moral objection to the (G_d's) universe, the response is "you literally can't judge me, I am beyond you." For me, that's the Far Realm, and calls into question everything within the moral construct of D&D, so my conclusion is the good and evil distinction is fragile, because it's human. It can be right when it's in its place, but it can be very very wrong when it goes far afield.
Song_of_Blues, you should check out the John Dies at the End books to support/push/pressure your thinking on how monstrosities can figure in a "beyond moral universe." Also, there's some sympathy for your anti-protagonist in the main characters. And, astoundingly, there's a lot of heart in them.
Are we still looking for ways to understand and motivate "bad people" characters to participate in D&D campaigns?
So far, I've been referring to individuals. When we get a group of them, things get very complicated.
The way I see it, a group of people who seem to be thinking the same thing are actually thinking something different from each other and interpreting/assuming it as the same. We appeal to one person, and it doesn't work on the others who will attempt to reassert the assumed group mentality, and peer pressure is a deafening force against logic.
What kinds of "bad people" groups of characters are out there? How do we motivate a group of "bad people" players and their characters to participate in a campaign against other "bad people"?
("Bad people" is subjective. Just try to go with whatever you think fits.)
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
You don't even need to go to Lovecraft (easily dismissed/discarded for a number of reasons in "serious" discussions of the intersections of morality/metaphysics/epistemology). You can go to the Book of Job. When the whirlwind and the Leviathan are given voice in "response" to Job's moral objection to the (G_d's) universe, the response is "you literally can't judge me, I am beyond you." For me, that's the Far Realm, and calls into question everything within the moral construct of D&D, so my conclusion is the good and evil distinction is fragile, because it's human. It can be right when it's in its place, but it can be very very wrong when it goes far afield.
Song_of_Blues, you should check out the John Dies at the End books to support/push/pressure your thinking on how monstrosities can figure in a "beyond moral universe." Also, there's some sympathy for your anti-protagonist in the main characters. And, astoundingly, there's a lot of heart in them.
It is definitely best that we avoid discussions of real world religions. However I would still answer that comment by holding to my point that subjective is still subjective and any given deity, real or fictional simply declaring themselves good or declaring themselves above all does not make them so objectively.
And any given priest or religion making claims does not automatically equate to them truly understanding their deity either, nor is it a given that when their deity does speak directly, that what is said will be passed down accurately. (And we can stick with fictional religions regarding that. I have personally seen examples of this in D&D campaigns where such things happen. Cleric player mishears or misunderstands something the deity says and... instant unintentional schism).
Sure I can take out work of writing, a work I've only mainly studied as a work of literature, and is regarded as a foundational text in discussions of moral philosophy and the problem of evil (note my lean is to metaphysics and epistemology and morality, not RW theology). I'm not sure why you're invoking clerics and priesthoods in the discussion, since throughout we've been discussing these as fairly abstract forces that are either governed and/or the wellspring of fictional deity or Demi-deity entities, who, sure, use mortal agents including faith holders as a way to advance those forces on the prime material plane.
Again, good and evil are essential, I'd say fundamental, values to your game. And that's fine for your game. However, what I've been trying to do is advocate that such moral centering is actually vulnerable via the planar structure to the point where the capital T "truth" of it or significance of it can be called into question. You do realize there's a structure to D&D moral factors (good, evil, law, chaos) that's mapped onto the planar structure, right? It's there on page 303 of the PHB, not every edition maintains this structure but it definitely speaks to cosmology I remember from AD&D and 2e (and is sort of necessary for Planescape). The Far Realm is literally not on the same page as the D&D planar diagram. That begs the question of what good (and by that I mean utility) is good/evil and other moral dichotomies contained and maintained within that structure if it interesects with the Far Realm (again, Flatland level epistemological ramifications). You don't appreciate or value that opportunity, and that's fine for you. But in this discussion it's reading more like a blindspot, adhering to moral didacticism transparently derived from RL moral positioning in this thread, rather than an election to reject a possibility in the game. All I'm offering is the possibility implicit in the game's cosmological design that entertains the amoral, I think many DMs and players are capable of doing that too.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Are we still looking for ways to understand and motivate "bad people" characters to participate in D&D campaigns?
So far, I've been referring to individuals. When we get a group of them, things get very complicated.
The way I see it, a group of people who seem to be thinking the same thing are actually thinking something different from each other and interpreting/assuming it as the same. We appeal to one person, and it doesn't work on the others who will attempt to reassert the assumed group mentality, and peer pressure is a deafening force against logic.
What kinds of "bad people" groups of characters are out there? How do we motivate a group of "bad people" players and their characters to participate in a campaign against other "bad people"?
("Bad people" is subjective. Just try to go with whatever you think fits.)
Need more clarity. Are you asking why a group of "bad guys" or evil people may band with "good guys" and work to de facto "good ends" (as is the case with at least most published D&D adventures? Or are you stuck on why "bad guys" would 1.) work together and then 2.) work toward an ostensibly "good" end?
I'd say one broad stroke guideline you could have is "noble" personalities take risks or perform acts out of a sense of vulnerability, whereas "evil" characters are prompted by "insecurity", at least following a serious oversimplification of contemporary pop psychology.
Another vector probably more easily understood: Professional responsibility or work ethos or sense of duty (which can be detached from morality when we're talking simply about job performance) could be another. A solider may not agree with the political "good ends" of a mission, but they're still a solider and in some outfits valuations of "good guy" or bad guy" are lesser accolades than the peer acknowledgement "you do the job." If it's purely an elective opportunity to adventure on a quest that will lead to good ends, that's tougher, I might lean on the "it's my job" vector with an appeal to an opportunity to practice their expertise at a level far outside their more mundane opportunities outside of adventuring.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you're trying to provoke the PCs into doing some greater good and they are playing evil aligned characters, all you need to do is have the evil aligned NPCs damage them personally. Either steal something from them, or set them up for some crime. They'll be falling over themselves to reclaim their goods or get their revenge in my experience.
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Referring to video games and bad people being the main characters:
There was a video game decades ago where the player's party were a bunch of holier-than-thou virtuous NPCs. One thing they all agreed upon: No stealing. What did many players end up doing? Made all the party members stay out of sight of them and, then, stole to their hearts' content.
I've seen many streams where a someone plays a side-scroller and tries to go in a different direction than the obvious one, looking for hidden gems or to see if game designers covered all their bases to prevent players from breaking the game.
A lot of the gameplay I see in streams have players trying to find loopholes around what they think are the DM's schemes, and I feel this is most often (but not always) a videogame influence. That adds a complication and an opportunity for the DM to move the story in a particular direction if the DM can sleight-of-hand their true intentions. Again, this takes familiarity with the characters on the board.
Players are one thing, but the characters are a combination of the players and the players' creations. A different character by the same player could present new challenges for motivation. By focusing on the character, you'll include the player in the considerations, too. Focusing on the player, you might get sideswiped by their creation.
Regarding "altruism gone wrong" or "the benevolent dictator fallacy" or "the Handsome Jack Parable", that's only one kind of bad person. There are also the "YOLO gone wrong" or "get what you can before you die" or "what does it matter anyway" motivations that are decidedly egoist bad people - no consideration for anyone else. The latter is more simple but, in the right hands, can be just as exciting which makes it less simple in the end.
So for two (of likely many) options, you get the Gul Dukat scenario with a complicated villain and allow a straight-forward campaign around it or you get world-eating Galacticus with a complicated campaign to find a solution.
Again, that's just two possibilities out of likely many. (I just woke up. So, my brain's not running on all cylinders right now.)
[edit: link added to an example]
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Even in the 80s there was a not insignificant portion of new players to the game, and casually players who persistently opted for chaotic evil. I think Kotath is right in that the "new" or casual (de facto perpetually new) player may not have the ability or inclination to adopt or immerse their role in the moral universe of the game world. I think there may also be a sort of opening of the sandbox of the psyche in this (admittedly often disruptive) style of play too.
About twenty years ago where philosophies and psychologies of media were sort of my "teaching specialty" I would often teach undergraduates with some initial assignments reflecting on what their play past times say about themselves and their world (classic freshman writing stuff). One of the essays I'd often assign was "Complete Freedom of Movement" by Henry Jenkins, a humanities scholar who chaired a media studies department at MIT. He was making a case for digital spaces (not perfectly, but importantly) providing a realm of freedom and exploration and no obligations that "kids today" (or "kids then") just didn't have in the more regulated childhoods he believes more and more children were being raised in (his childhood point of view was sort of the childhood represented in "Stand by Me", an era when my father as a thirteen year old could walk into the pharmacy, buy the chemical components for gunpowder from the chemist, nearly blow him and his friends up with a pip bomb in an undeveloped wooded area and the worst he got for that was the town cop pulling up to him while he was drinking a soda two days later and say "No more bombs!" These days he'd probably still be in a Supermax on a terror conviction). Those days of the real world as unsupervised playground just don't exist by and large for increasing numbers of children in the U.S. at least.
I agree that digital playspaces, as mentioned above have scripts and parameters blocking freedom as its most intuitively felt in play (though the best sandboxes do make efforts to be less didactic, No Man's Sky letting its community just do what it did is an example). I'd say then and now D&D also plays a role in that imaginative free space Jenkins was trying to award the digital.
CE allows the novice player the classic child development and adult organization psychology concept of "testing" or "boundary pushing." I'm not saying it's conscious in the player, but adopting a CE persona does make the game be more about "how far can I go?" "what can I get away with?" limit testing that's a literal "game people play" in real life, but in TTRPG space can be performed more nakedly.
Now while I can appreciate this play style or see it for what it is, I do admit the play style puts the DM in a parental space and unless the DM is fine doing that (say DMing a group of kids and the DM is literally the adult in the room) it's something that DM and players more committed to supporting the world should work to correct.
What I've put above also speaks to a general play reward that can be summed as "high on rebellion." There was another "essay" (it was a little experimental, avant gardy as late 20th century academic writing tended to be in the literary cultural space) that spoke to this tendency with some players in 90s MMORGs (text bass more or less open world RPG environments arguably precedents for games like WoW etc) type space, the essay was titled "**** Art, Let's Kill." It described an online world that was striving for some sort of democratic arts-centered utopia and one small "cell" of players decided to be terrorists and would run around the game engaged in acts of vandalism and disruption. (In the 90s the Terrorist as Freedom Fighter was romanticized a lot in experimental fiction and art circles, a mode that pretty much shut down after 9/11 and didn't really gain cachet again until recently). Basically there's a pleasure in dismantling, but again it's something most groups would need to correct than accommodate.
Lastly, there's the notion "the bad guys just get better lines." This goes back to at least Milton's Paradise Lost, where Satan's language is just more compelling than Gods. Harry Lime in the Third Man (who is probably Chaotic Neutral/Evil) devastates the "good guys" stance of civilization with the cuckoo clock speech. People are drawn to Hannible Lecter's words because in entertaining them and understanding the fiction, they too can take amount outside themselves and believe they're some "alpha" above the sheep. And these are fine things to play within, if you're game has the capacity to go there.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Right on with Gul Dukat and Galactus ... I'd say not as well written but Anakin Skywalker (ultimately seeking power over the death of love is what led to his fall, Yoda should have dismissed him with "Insecure too much, this one is" when Qui Gon brought him to the Council) and Thanos (ultimately a sort of eco-terrorist) can be fit in there too.
I still think though most people who adopt a career of evil early in their D&D playing are playing a game breaking game (like the video gamers you described). More mature experienced players could take on a Gul Dukat type role, and with the help of a DM willing to play along, maybe even use that evil to question the "goodness" of the world the players are championing (sort of what Trek is arguably doing with the darker cynical shows coming out like Picard and aspects of Discovery).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
But who is to say that pigs are less sentient than horses? And most humanoids in D&D would think nothing of breeding and slaughtering pigs. Also, it's not like most humanoids would care to ask horses whether or not they want to be sold before selling them (or their children for that matter). Thus, a slavery element is still there.
My view isn't that evil and good are merely subjective, but that the PoV has a large influence on what gets defined as evil by a particular observer (or social group of observers).
There is a lot we don't know about Illithid culture. Yes, official lore tends to imply that they merely want to use humanoids as labor and to propagate their species. Now, what if feeding their elder brains was somehow important on an intergalactic scale? What if, for instance, a large number of elder brains are necessary to maintain a containment field on some kind of Void force threatening to annihilate the observable (from a common human Pov) universe entirely? So Illithids regard their "work" of capturing sentient creatures for food and labor as being "For the Greater Good." And there would probably be some researcher of otherworldy arcana who would agree with them.
PoV having a defining role in moral evaluation means subjective. I think the contention is whether subjectivity is "mere" or or integral to good/evil evaluation.
The proposal that the evil Illithids do are actually bulwarks against something far more horrific is a good twist. I think the whole Whitley Strieber grey alien mythology was a slightly more minor key on a similar note. The horrific experiences alien abductees report, which had an invasiveness similar to the manipulations of Mind Flayers, per Strieber's mythos, were actually being performed for some greater good of the cosmos.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I am so glad you brought these up. I remember reading a while back an essay about a theologically problematic tendency of modern storytelling: that because the status quo of the majority is generally defined as "Good" (explicitly or not), it is far easier to write interesting (and therefore likable) villains than it is to write interesting (s)heroes. Why? Because the villains are allowed greater agency. Their exercise of that agency - IOW, utilizing their freedom - disrupts the status quo, which is generally what drives the plot at the outset. The initiator of Action is the villain. Darth Vader, Maleficent, David Xanatos, the Sea Witch, Magneto, Killmonger, Cao Cao, Doctor Doom, Poison Ivy, etc. All of these villains have their own devoted fandoms. Some of them get redemption arcs that make them even more popular. Not to mention the fact that many female villains get to wear "sexier" costumes than what is customarily acceptable. Because "Good" has been defined as normal, it also is generally what is boring, what is already allowed, and what reminds younger viewers of the parental and restrictive. The man with the spiked leather jacket riding a souped up motorcycle is attractive in comparison because he symbolizes the unknown horizon, movement, and (a certain form of) freedom. So part of why so many players would rather role-play Chaotic Evil/Neutral is a desire for expansiveness, to associate themselves with what non-fantasy pop culture also associates with social status, and to psychologically distance themselves from their societally controlled spaces and ways of being.
I would say that subjectivity is integral, but by no means the entirety of morality.
That's true. We agree on something! Again!
My point isn't so much that murder, conspiracy and wanton destruction are de facto desirable. I am moreso demonstrating the attractiveness of that play style for a large number of D&D gamers. And I also wanted to illustrate that it is possible for a campaign world to have Mind Flayers continuing to eat and enslave people without them necessarily being defined as Evil from a meta-narrative perspective , at least in comparison to, say, Humans, Dwarves, Dragonborn, etc. Real life is full of shades of grey. You don't have to be Good to not be Evil. If we extend that principle of real life to fantasy campaign worlds, that at least makes the game world a more interesting one for people who care to read articles about philosophy and etiology.
And yet Call of Cthulhu (where maybe you can add a layer of pulp heroism but the bigger picture is pretty bleak) and more poignantly Delta Green (where it's very clear the PCs side is going to lose) are very popular games. Not 5e popular, but I think I've remembered times when they held a top five if not 2nd place market share after D&D and PF. Heck, I want to say Chill went the Delta Green route in its second edition, claiming SAVE had been doing it wrong all along and had actually made things worse before it imploded.
Agreeing that players with the CE impulse should and can be rehabilitated, I think games where confrontations with cosmologically nihilist propositions are a major theme are a great outlet for that demographic. I think good, compelling gameplay can be made within a Morituri te Salutant ethic where PCs go down swinging behind their conviction even if or - even better - despite the fact that the universe doesn't care. We mentioned Se7en in this thread already with its tagline "Ernest Hemingway once wrote the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part" addresses a contention the film makes which could be great campaign themes.
To further riff on Song_of_Blues Illithid evil being a necessary evil to prevent a cosmic extinction or what have you, the tropes and mythology within cosmic horror speak to that. Other variants are what if the "good people" the humanoids actually have the Illithids to credit for their sapience? This was the reveal in Quatermass and the Pit, also think of the Engineers in Ridley Scotts efforts to do more with the Alien franchise. And actually a having a god like entity that could create both humanity and the alien, and the former being created with nothing near the priority human self hubris would expect, yet having a concept like "good" arise within one of the byproducts of that world ... it's an abyss to think through.
Started this thread thinking of Blue Oyster Cult's "Career of Evil" for the CE impulse, ending these thoughts with Santana's "Put Your Lights On."
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Well, I invoked Call of Cthulhu and adjacent games to specifically address your quip expressing skepticism that one would "consider such any such universe an entertaining design." Clearly, it is for a sector of the TTRPG market.
Marvel is largely tied to popular consensus of good and evil (and since right and wrong are actually in popular contention, they often find themselves in a bind of wanting to do the right thing but also not disrupt the market), so making the Celestials "villainous" isn't all that surprising. Quatermass and definitely the Alien expansions speak to a universes where anthropocentric morality is a curious product of a system that does not care. And honestly, if an Alien engineer or Illithid architect or drive-by divinity who made sapience on the oops did care for some reason, I'm sure at the top of the list of questions to speak to the exhibition of morality would be "what good was this anthropocentric "good" given the Anthropocene? Given all the other impacts this special morally capable mind has wrought, why would I think it's any more than a curious epiphenomena to the literal mess I made by ... whatever it is I did with you people." Yes the cold creator will "you people" humanity.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
An example of relationship and causality : Imagine a scenario where the Illithids developed on a planet with another sentient but much less technologically savvy species. Let's call them species Z. They manage to come to a sort of peace agreement and the Illithids focus on traveling the stars while the other species largely decides to stay planet-bound. In their travels, the Illithids discover a black hole that is growing in size. Through experimentation on both the Astral and Prime Material Planes, they discover they can limit the black hole's ability to grow through the concerted psychic influence of their elder brains. The problem is that this requires a great deal of fuel - fuel that only comes about through "processing" of other reasonably intelligent life forms. Some of these experiments are done using Illithids and some using species Z. The non-Illithids on the original homeworld hear about this and become agitated. Unsurprisingly, they believe that they are being singled out for sacrifice. Through a mix of propaganda and desire to supplant the Illithids for their own political gain, certain leaders of species Z decide to wage war. The Illithids naturally respond by waging war back and gradually win, but at great cost to their own species. They use the prisoners of war to feed to the Elder brains. Following the war, their calculations reveal that they would need to find other sentient species to feed the Elder brain in order to maintain the containment field around expanding the black hole. Because it is very time consuming to actually find planets with life let alone sentient life, it is far safer for the cosmos (and more economical) to "seed" a number of hospitable planets with the basic building blocks of life and to guide their development such that they eventually become sentient. Having gone through costly war with species Z, the Illithids are also short of labor. They discover that turning sentient creatures into thralls is the most efficient means of making up for the lack of Illithid #s. This labor replacement via mental domination slavery becomes a custom, reinforced by their fear that asking species to sacrifice themselves would lead to yet another costly war, costly both in terms of Illithid lives and in terms of lost time and the potential destruction of the Elder brains preventing cosmic annihilation. Not to mention that managing war is already a mentally taxing endeavor on the Elder brains that would be better spent finding more life-friendly planets with which to seed sentient life onto. Thus, through a combination of history, necessity, and social norms, the Illithids became the brain eating other-worldly slavers that are known to humanoids on Earth as force of Evil.
I agree that such stories can be interesting but I think there's a more fundamental issue here: D&D is not a story game. It might be that playing the game creates interesting stories and characters. It also might not. And that's fine too. The objective of D&D is to have fun playing make believe in an interesting and believable world. Any stories that come out of that are a side-effect rather than a goal.
To answer the original question, why are the PCs the heroes of the story? It's not up to the DM whether the PCs are the heroes. It's up to them. As DM you give them a situation in which they can be the heroes if they choose. But don't be surprised if they don't make that choice. Just remember the wages of sin, and ensure they get paid in full for their interactions with the inhabitants of your world.
A great character to read that helps answer this exact question is Raistlin from Dragonlance. He is at various times a good, evil, and neutral aligned character and his motivation for adventuring is much different than the rest of his party, sorta. Hes not just out to save the world but has other motives that push him in that direction.
What's the opinion on this protagonist from a series?
The protagonist just wants to sleep on the job and not get fired. Circumstances keep putting the protagonist in the middle of world-shattering plots, requiring the protagonist to try to survive and, in the course of that, end the BBEG threat though that result is never the primary objective. The BBEG's plans are usually thwarted by the protagonist's ironic ability to make a mess of things. The protagonist is fine to be left alone, and if someone doesn't bother the protagonist, the protagonist won't bother. The protagonist has dreams of glory but no real drive or expectation to achieve them.
That protagonist saved a planet twice and the galaxy several times without any intention to do so and without any due recognition for doing so.
Good person? Bad person? Hero? Villain?
What would you do to motivate such a protagonist?
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I never said that this was canon lore. Why would you assume that I thought it was. I'm presenting a world-building scenario that would make Illithids more interesting antagonists since their motives in this way would be slightly more comprehensible to the standard humanoid. To bring this full circle, if in a campaign, the PCs get the chance to wipe out several Illithid colonies at once and they somehow found out about this Void-containing ability of the Elder Brains and decided to destroy them anyway and thus destabilizing the Void and wiping out the cosmos, doesn't that make PCs the Evil ones? This is a thought exercise, as any discussion of morality concerning a fictional universe (and sometimes the non-fictional universe) often involves.
Tyranny was a game I enjoyed for that whole "bad character" story arc. I felt like you weren't a bad guy for the sake of being a bad guy but rather indoctrinated in to believing that what you were doing is the right thing. Suppressing rebels, putting down traitors and spreading your overlord's presence while making 'friends' along the way.
Unfortunately, I've not met any examples at a tabletop game yet where I've seen someone be an evil character without doing something AWFUL to someone else for the sake of it being a horrible thing to do.
My sense is that Kotath holds in their games the notion that good and evil are immutable and integral parts of the world. Good is an ideal, it may not be perfectly understood, but it is something to strive for. And that's fine.
However, my contention is that good and evil are well and good and all as yes literally integral parts to the structure of the D&D cosmology, which undergirds the morality of the material plane. But the game also goes beyond that. The Far Realm, whatever it is, is outside that structure. When the material plane, or really any plane, has contact with the Far Realm, it is in contact with entities that literally live outside the morality of good/evil law/chaos. There is something to "is-ness" that's literally beyond the moral underpinnings of D&D. Some lore suggests the Illithids were originally of the D&D understood cosmology, and left it. What happens to evil or good when it leaves and enters a cosmos where good and evil aren't concepts? That's what amorality actually is, to be cute it says that there's "a morality" which outside the D&D usual planar calculus has the Dude saying, "Well, that's just your opinion, man." (see what I did there, I'm bringing the Cohen Brothers and Jeff Bridges into an echo of Stephen Crane).
Good and evil may be ascribed to the actions of interlopers from the Far Realm, but that's literally failing to come to terms. You may more rightly say such aberrations (the monster class) are "wrong" or "incorrect" in that they are not "right" with most D&D understood reality. But despite that, they "are".
You don't even need to go to Lovecraft (easily dismissed/discarded for a number of reasons in "serious" discussions of the intersections of morality/metaphysics/epistemology). You can go to the Book of Job. When the whirlwind and the Leviathan are given voice in "response" to Job's moral objection to the (G_d's) universe, the response is "you literally can't judge me, I am beyond you." For me, that's the Far Realm, and calls into question everything within the moral construct of D&D, so my conclusion is the good and evil distinction is fragile, because it's human. It can be right when it's in its place, but it can be very very wrong when it goes far afield.
Song_of_Blues, you should check out the John Dies at the End books to support/push/pressure your thinking on how monstrosities can figure in a "beyond moral universe." Also, there's some sympathy for your anti-protagonist in the main characters. And, astoundingly, there's a lot of heart in them.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Are we still looking for ways to understand and motivate "bad people" characters to participate in D&D campaigns?
So far, I've been referring to individuals. When we get a group of them, things get very complicated.
The way I see it, a group of people who seem to be thinking the same thing are actually thinking something different from each other and interpreting/assuming it as the same. We appeal to one person, and it doesn't work on the others who will attempt to reassert the assumed group mentality, and peer pressure is a deafening force against logic.
What kinds of "bad people" groups of characters are out there? How do we motivate a group of "bad people" players and their characters to participate in a campaign against other "bad people"?
("Bad people" is subjective. Just try to go with whatever you think fits.)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Sure I can take out work of writing, a work I've only mainly studied as a work of literature, and is regarded as a foundational text in discussions of moral philosophy and the problem of evil (note my lean is to metaphysics and epistemology and morality, not RW theology). I'm not sure why you're invoking clerics and priesthoods in the discussion, since throughout we've been discussing these as fairly abstract forces that are either governed and/or the wellspring of fictional deity or Demi-deity entities, who, sure, use mortal agents including faith holders as a way to advance those forces on the prime material plane.
Again, good and evil are essential, I'd say fundamental, values to your game. And that's fine for your game. However, what I've been trying to do is advocate that such moral centering is actually vulnerable via the planar structure to the point where the capital T "truth" of it or significance of it can be called into question. You do realize there's a structure to D&D moral factors (good, evil, law, chaos) that's mapped onto the planar structure, right? It's there on page 303 of the PHB, not every edition maintains this structure but it definitely speaks to cosmology I remember from AD&D and 2e (and is sort of necessary for Planescape). The Far Realm is literally not on the same page as the D&D planar diagram. That begs the question of what good (and by that I mean utility) is good/evil and other moral dichotomies contained and maintained within that structure if it interesects with the Far Realm (again, Flatland level epistemological ramifications). You don't appreciate or value that opportunity, and that's fine for you. But in this discussion it's reading more like a blindspot, adhering to moral didacticism transparently derived from RL moral positioning in this thread, rather than an election to reject a possibility in the game. All I'm offering is the possibility implicit in the game's cosmological design that entertains the amoral, I think many DMs and players are capable of doing that too.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Need more clarity. Are you asking why a group of "bad guys" or evil people may band with "good guys" and work to de facto "good ends" (as is the case with at least most published D&D adventures? Or are you stuck on why "bad guys" would 1.) work together and then 2.) work toward an ostensibly "good" end?
I'd say one broad stroke guideline you could have is "noble" personalities take risks or perform acts out of a sense of vulnerability, whereas "evil" characters are prompted by "insecurity", at least following a serious oversimplification of contemporary pop psychology.
Another vector probably more easily understood: Professional responsibility or work ethos or sense of duty (which can be detached from morality when we're talking simply about job performance) could be another. A solider may not agree with the political "good ends" of a mission, but they're still a solider and in some outfits valuations of "good guy" or bad guy" are lesser accolades than the peer acknowledgement "you do the job." If it's purely an elective opportunity to adventure on a quest that will lead to good ends, that's tougher, I might lean on the "it's my job" vector with an appeal to an opportunity to practice their expertise at a level far outside their more mundane opportunities outside of adventuring.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you're trying to provoke the PCs into doing some greater good and they are playing evil aligned characters, all you need to do is have the evil aligned NPCs damage them personally. Either steal something from them, or set them up for some crime. They'll be falling over themselves to reclaim their goods or get their revenge in my experience.