Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
For an interesting example of a non-evil vampire, consider the main character of the game Vampyr, Dr. Jonathan Reid, a doctor-turned-vampire who operated in London during the Spanish Flu. In a good playthrough, Reid is able to resist his blood thirst.
Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
I have a Cambion who is not evil as well. To describe him, you might use adjectives like, "corporate". However, he is loyal and decidedly not evil despite being the offspring of Dispater. So, as I said previously. Evil, unless you do not want them to be.
Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
That claim shows a severe lack of imagination regarding a topic in a game that is reliant on imagination.
A couple of months ago, I created a backstory of one who isn't evil and is enjoying unlife just fine in three sentences. So, toss out the claim that "anything else is goth fantasies". It doesn't take a lot of imagination to show that claim is false. It does take someone using imagination, though.
Never mind. I just saw a 3-sentence backstory of that person. It says a lot about the replies here.
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.
Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
I have a Cambion who is not evil as well. To describe him, you might use adjectives like, "corporate". However, he is loyal and decidedly not evil despite being the offspring of Dispater. So, as I said previously. Evil, unless you do not want them to be.
But that also disproves what you said earlier. Vampires can be good or neutral even when they're not in goth fantasies.
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Having 'good' vampires is a relatively new literary phenomenon, but as long as you assume alignment is determined by actions (i.e. a creature is evil if it does evil things), the only way a creature is necessarily evil is if it either lacks free will, evil is necessary to its existence (for example, a 5e lich is required to sacrifice souls to its phylactery, which makes avoiding evil while continuing to exist hard to impossible), or evil is part of its definition (for example, if a fiend becomes non-evil, is it still a fiend or is it something else?). In the case of vampires, AD&D vampires weren't really able to feed without killing people (2 levels energy drain kills most people and isn't sustainable even on targets who can survive it once or twice), but killing doesn't seem required in more recent editions so being non-evil is probably just difficult, not impossible
Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
I have a Cambion who is not evil as well. To describe him, you might use adjectives like, "corporate". However, he is loyal and decidedly not evil despite being the offspring of Dispater. So, as I said previously. Evil, unless you do not want them to be.
But that also disproves what you said earlier. Vampires can be good or neutral even when they're not in goth fantasies.
There are always exceptions. I let people play neutral and good orks, goblins, and one gnoll long before there was a book saying go ahead and do it.
Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
I have a Cambion who is not evil as well. To describe him, you might use adjectives like, "corporate". However, he is loyal and decidedly not evil despite being the offspring of Dispater. So, as I said previously. Evil, unless you do not want them to be.
But that also disproves what you said earlier. Vampires can be good or neutral even when they're not in goth fantasies.
There are always exceptions. I let people play neutral and good orks, goblins, and one gnoll long before there was a book saying go ahead and do it.
Yes, but by nature, the fact that there are exceptions means it's not an "always."
If the player can provide a compelling circumstance for a typically evil creature to be good, I see no reason why not.
Anti-heroes are a beautiful thing!
It's not really up to the player, though. The DM is the one writing the larger world. Imo, encouraging players to push for their particular interpretation/narrative of how things should be is not really a productive point to bring to tables. Honestly, I sometimes feel like people push too hard for moral relativism/free agency/etc. for everything in D&D. This is fantasy, concepts like good and evil are supposed to have some clearly formed and defined agents, particularly when it comes to beings who exist outside of the mortal experience.
Finally, as a personal take, anti-heroes are overrated and the term is often used as a fig leaf to explain why it's acceptable for this character to brutally torture and kill people they don't like, but not for those people over there to. An evil character's goals can still align with the party's if you want them to cooperate for a bit, you don't have to twist conventional morality into a pretzel to justify the interaction.
Validity at a table is up to the table. What's being proposed by many responses it that it may be possible as an extension of any typically evil character (PC/NPC) being a reasonable exception of the evil morality. This doesn't mean it'll be accepted by the table. It is a group thing. Sometimes, the table's setting gets too complicated or too ambiguous with this stuff. Stories become a little more difficult to manage on-the-fly.
Anti-heroes are difficult to define. The common trope is one who isn't good aligned and decidedly obviously so in thought and action. That's a discussion aside of the posed questions as this thread is about a creature (in the generic D&D sense) that is typically evil, not about typically evil creatures being evil while also being a hero.
The hitch will usually be the reason why a creature that needs to do commonly unacceptable deeds to survive can somehow be good. It's tricky but possible... and no goth fantasy is required to do it if you're creative about it.
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'm not saying there should be no table discussion, but I feel that for this kind of big "how the setting functions" thing, it ultimately comes down to what the DM thinks will fit the setting and campaign they're running.
I agree there can be more to anti-heroes than just a simplistic take, but at the same time there's a reason the 90's anti-hero is its own trope. Hearing the term in relation to a character isn't a red flag for me, but it does make me sit up and take notice.
Regarding the "commonly unacceptable deeds" part, in my experience there's generally two ways to cover it. Either the story says it's no longer "unacceptable" if the victim is someone who "deserves it", like a vampire vigilante lethally feeding on criminals, which then gets into the weeds of what "acceptable" means and risks coming across as "this character gets a morality hall pass because they're a protagonist", or the requirement of their condition is lowered to the point that it's sustainable without crossing lines, at which point either they're getting special treatment if they're the exception to the rule, or the horror of the condition is massively diminished because coping with it is something anyone can do.
Their intentions might be good, but per the given description for vampires those intentions would not remain good after the transformation. Becoming a vampire fundamentally alters an individual's personality and outlook.
I don't know about Exandria, I don't care for the setting especially its premise, but in Masquerade, they can definitely be good. Keeping your Humanity high is baked into the mechanics of the game and in the setting of World of Darkness. Committing acts that lower a vampire's Humanity is like shifting alignment toward Evil and the lower it is the more likely they are to Frenzy - when "the Beast" takes over, when you've been enraged by something or blood-starved. That's what makes the life of a good vampire or a Carpathian tragic.
Otherwise, usually in most fantasy settings, it's like asking if a zombie can be good. The rule is "no" and the exception is a tragedy and possibly even a double crime against nature. This is because their soul is gone, or their body's connection to it is weakened, and the soul is mechanically synonymous with a person's morality and consciousness, and in this way their base desires go unfiltered. For zombies it's the basic, but primal urge to eat. Personally, I think it's like their bodies are seeking out another soul to replace the one that they've lost, and the only way their rotted brains can think to do that is to eat their way to the soul directly. For vampires, blood becomes the center of every whim and long plan. To inherit wealth, status, divinity? It's all in service to take the one thing that they desired from the beginning, blood. And without a conscience to act as a filter, they will take it in whatever way they see fit or practical. That is why Dhampirs can have a Good alignment, and why vampires can't. How can you play a creature that doesn't have a soul?
Towards the end of last year I ran a party in a Baldur's Gate campaign through my take on Mandorcai's Mansion (the literal house from hell), and I decided to pop in a "good" (or at least, non-hostile) vampire at the start.
Named her Cendria after the city of Cendriane (ancient elven city that bridged the material plane and feywild, destroyed by drow and taken over by vampires – that last part is probably just a coincidence though…). I made her pretty creepy, just sitting in a reading chair near the entrance hall, then when a clock chimed she was gone (and the hall was suddenly decrepit) with the door to the dining room creaking open ominously…
But she was just happy to have visitors, with unseen servants serving up whatever they wanted, she chatted with them, made no secret of what she was, and when the party mentioned getting caught in bad weather on the road she joked about experiencing the same (an unexpected bout of clear and sunny weather). She gave some hints about how the mansion operates, and what nuisances they might encounter further into the non-euclidean maze of corridors and was content to send them on their way.
She made no effort to drink anyone's blood, because she's clearly meeting that need somehow, and let slip that she's living in the mansion as a place to hide (because of how weird I made its nature, it's an almost ideal place to hide since it's impossible to scry into and very well protected). She also mentioned that someone helped modify one of the mansion's insidious invitations to name her (so that she could enter it in the first place), meaning she has at least one outside ally somewhere in the city (and it might be someone the players have also encountered…).
It's a fun character to dance around in the campaign because she's dangerous yet non-threatening, and must be getting blood from somewhere. She was also encountered later and paid one of the players in old coins from Cendriane, and in trying to sell these the players have learned there was someone else asking around about artefacts from that city at Sorcerous Sundries. If they dig into her past they may find she was a lot less pleasant after she was turned, and it was only through concerted effort over centuries that she learned true control of a sort, able to take only what she needs rather than drinking people dry etc. She may have started learning control as a defensive mechanism, to avoid leaving a trail others could follow, but as that control over her thirst grew she came to accept she has no soul, but no longer sees that as an excuse to behave like a monster.
I really enjoy playing around with characters that "should" be evil but aren't, or are yet aren't outwardly so – I often toy with complex "evil" characters who aren't just cackling maniacs, because the most interesting villains (and anti-heroes) are the ones who you either can't see until it's too late, or who actually have motivations you can understand or even sympathise with (even if you don't fully agree). Also it's just fun to think about why a creature might be typically evil, and what it would take for them not to be, and whether they could change.
It seems that undead are typically evil because they have some need that is fundamental to their undead being and would do anything to fulfil, and that usually means harming others – I tend to question whether that's truly evil, but in the case of vampires who are otherwise sentient and intelligent you have to assume they are aware of it and doing it anyway, so evil is appropriate for a default, especially if a vampire isn't even trying to control their thirst.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
“Evil” in D&D is a relatively broad spectrum, not a single set of behaviors. It naturally covers free-willed beings that choose to be harmful and/or destructive for their own personal gratification or advancement, but it also covers entities who, while acting more on fundamental nature rather than deliberate choice, act to kill or harm outside of the necessities of survival. In the case of vampires, this comes from the general twisting of the soul physical undeath almost always produces in D&D. You can try to shade away the negatives, but personally I prefer to use vampires as a case of “seems relatable, but really aren’t”; the fact that they look humanoid can make the contrast of a fundamentally inhuman nature stronger.
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Yes. Always. Anything is else is goth fantasies. But then again, you do you.
Read through this thread, please. Your statement is provably wrong.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Thirds right, as other people have said earlier on this thread, there is literally a vampire in an official 5e book who is NOT evil. (Jander Sunstar from VGtR.)
In addition, just because one monster has one typical alignment doesn't mean that every monster in that group has that alignment.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.For an interesting example of a non-evil vampire, consider the main character of the game Vampyr, Dr. Jonathan Reid, a doctor-turned-vampire who operated in London during the Spanish Flu. In a good playthrough, Reid is able to resist his blood thirst.
I have a Cambion who is not evil as well. To describe him, you might use adjectives like, "corporate". However, he is loyal and decidedly not evil despite being the offspring of Dispater. So, as I said previously. Evil, unless you do not want them to be.
That claim shows a severe lack of imagination regarding a topic in a game that is reliant on imagination.
A couple of months ago, I created a backstory of one who isn't evil and is enjoying unlife just fine in three sentences. So, toss out the claim that "anything else is goth fantasies". It doesn't take a lot of imagination to show that claim is false. It does take someone using imagination, though.
Never mind. I just saw a 3-sentence backstory of that person. It says a lot about the replies here.
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.
But that also disproves what you said earlier. Vampires can be good or neutral even when they're not in goth fantasies.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.Having 'good' vampires is a relatively new literary phenomenon, but as long as you assume alignment is determined by actions (i.e. a creature is evil if it does evil things), the only way a creature is necessarily evil is if it either lacks free will, evil is necessary to its existence (for example, a 5e lich is required to sacrifice souls to its phylactery, which makes avoiding evil while continuing to exist hard to impossible), or evil is part of its definition (for example, if a fiend becomes non-evil, is it still a fiend or is it something else?). In the case of vampires, AD&D vampires weren't really able to feed without killing people (2 levels energy drain kills most people and isn't sustainable even on targets who can survive it once or twice), but killing doesn't seem required in more recent editions so being non-evil is probably just difficult, not impossible
There are always exceptions. I let people play neutral and good orks, goblins, and one gnoll long before there was a book saying go ahead and do it.
Yes, but by nature, the fact that there are exceptions means it's not an "always."
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.If the player can provide a compelling circumstance for a typically evil creature to be good, I see no reason why not.
Anti-heroes are a beautiful thing!
It's not really up to the player, though. The DM is the one writing the larger world. Imo, encouraging players to push for their particular interpretation/narrative of how things should be is not really a productive point to bring to tables. Honestly, I sometimes feel like people push too hard for moral relativism/free agency/etc. for everything in D&D. This is fantasy, concepts like good and evil are supposed to have some clearly formed and defined agents, particularly when it comes to beings who exist outside of the mortal experience.
Finally, as a personal take, anti-heroes are overrated and the term is often used as a fig leaf to explain why it's acceptable for this character to brutally torture and kill people they don't like, but not for those people over there to. An evil character's goals can still align with the party's if you want them to cooperate for a bit, you don't have to twist conventional morality into a pretzel to justify the interaction.
Validity at a table is up to the table. What's being proposed by many responses it that it may be possible as an extension of any typically evil character (PC/NPC) being a reasonable exception of the evil morality. This doesn't mean it'll be accepted by the table. It is a group thing. Sometimes, the table's setting gets too complicated or too ambiguous with this stuff. Stories become a little more difficult to manage on-the-fly.
Anti-heroes are difficult to define. The common trope is one who isn't good aligned and decidedly obviously so in thought and action. That's a discussion aside of the posed questions as this thread is about a creature (in the generic D&D sense) that is typically evil, not about typically evil creatures being evil while also being a hero.
The hitch will usually be the reason why a creature that needs to do commonly unacceptable deeds to survive can somehow be good. It's tricky but possible... and no goth fantasy is required to do it if you're creative about it.
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'm not saying there should be no table discussion, but I feel that for this kind of big "how the setting functions" thing, it ultimately comes down to what the DM thinks will fit the setting and campaign they're running.
I agree there can be more to anti-heroes than just a simplistic take, but at the same time there's a reason the 90's anti-hero is its own trope. Hearing the term in relation to a character isn't a red flag for me, but it does make me sit up and take notice.
Regarding the "commonly unacceptable deeds" part, in my experience there's generally two ways to cover it. Either the story says it's no longer "unacceptable" if the victim is someone who "deserves it", like a vampire vigilante lethally feeding on criminals, which then gets into the weeds of what "acceptable" means and risks coming across as "this character gets a morality hall pass because they're a protagonist", or the requirement of their condition is lowered to the point that it's sustainable without crossing lines, at which point either they're getting special treatment if they're the exception to the rule, or the horror of the condition is massively diminished because coping with it is something anyone can do.
Would someone become a vampire, for the express purpose of acquiring the powers and skills to kill other vampires, and protecting the people?
Could you say that such a person was good, even though their alignment says otherwise?
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
Their intentions might be good, but per the given description for vampires those intentions would not remain good after the transformation. Becoming a vampire fundamentally alters an individual's personality and outlook.
I don't know about Exandria, I don't care for the setting especially its premise, but in Masquerade, they can definitely be good. Keeping your Humanity high is baked into the mechanics of the game and in the setting of World of Darkness. Committing acts that lower a vampire's Humanity is like shifting alignment toward Evil and the lower it is the more likely they are to Frenzy - when "the Beast" takes over, when you've been enraged by something or blood-starved. That's what makes the life of a good vampire or a Carpathian tragic.
Otherwise, usually in most fantasy settings, it's like asking if a zombie can be good. The rule is "no" and the exception is a tragedy and possibly even a double crime against nature. This is because their soul is gone, or their body's connection to it is weakened, and the soul is mechanically synonymous with a person's morality and consciousness, and in this way their base desires go unfiltered. For zombies it's the basic, but primal urge to eat. Personally, I think it's like their bodies are seeking out another soul to replace the one that they've lost, and the only way their rotted brains can think to do that is to eat their way to the soul directly. For vampires, blood becomes the center of every whim and long plan. To inherit wealth, status, divinity? It's all in service to take the one thing that they desired from the beginning, blood. And without a conscience to act as a filter, they will take it in whatever way they see fit or practical. That is why Dhampirs can have a Good alignment, and why vampires can't. How can you play a creature that doesn't have a soul?
Vampire the Masquerade is a radically different game from D&D.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Towards the end of last year I ran a party in a Baldur's Gate campaign through my take on Mandorcai's Mansion (the literal house from hell), and I decided to pop in a "good" (or at least, non-hostile) vampire at the start.
Named her Cendria after the city of Cendriane (ancient elven city that bridged the material plane and feywild, destroyed by drow and taken over by vampires – that last part is probably just a coincidence though…). I made her pretty creepy, just sitting in a reading chair near the entrance hall, then when a clock chimed she was gone (and the hall was suddenly decrepit) with the door to the dining room creaking open ominously…
But she was just happy to have visitors, with unseen servants serving up whatever they wanted, she chatted with them, made no secret of what she was, and when the party mentioned getting caught in bad weather on the road she joked about experiencing the same (an unexpected bout of clear and sunny weather). She gave some hints about how the mansion operates, and what nuisances they might encounter further into the non-euclidean maze of corridors and was content to send them on their way.
She made no effort to drink anyone's blood, because she's clearly meeting that need somehow, and let slip that she's living in the mansion as a place to hide (because of how weird I made its nature, it's an almost ideal place to hide since it's impossible to scry into and very well protected). She also mentioned that someone helped modify one of the mansion's insidious invitations to name her (so that she could enter it in the first place), meaning she has at least one outside ally somewhere in the city (and it might be someone the players have also encountered…).
It's a fun character to dance around in the campaign because she's dangerous yet non-threatening, and must be getting blood from somewhere. She was also encountered later and paid one of the players in old coins from Cendriane, and in trying to sell these the players have learned there was someone else asking around about artefacts from that city at Sorcerous Sundries. If they dig into her past they may find she was a lot less pleasant after she was turned, and it was only through concerted effort over centuries that she learned true control of a sort, able to take only what she needs rather than drinking people dry etc. She may have started learning control as a defensive mechanism, to avoid leaving a trail others could follow, but as that control over her thirst grew she came to accept she has no soul, but no longer sees that as an excuse to behave like a monster.
I really enjoy playing around with characters that "should" be evil but aren't, or are yet aren't outwardly so – I often toy with complex "evil" characters who aren't just cackling maniacs, because the most interesting villains (and anti-heroes) are the ones who you either can't see until it's too late, or who actually have motivations you can understand or even sympathise with (even if you don't fully agree). Also it's just fun to think about why a creature might be typically evil, and what it would take for them not to be, and whether they could change.
It seems that undead are typically evil because they have some need that is fundamental to their undead being and would do anything to fulfil, and that usually means harming others – I tend to question whether that's truly evil, but in the case of vampires who are otherwise sentient and intelligent you have to assume they are aware of it and doing it anyway, so evil is appropriate for a default, especially if a vampire isn't even trying to control their thirst.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
“Evil” in D&D is a relatively broad spectrum, not a single set of behaviors. It naturally covers free-willed beings that choose to be harmful and/or destructive for their own personal gratification or advancement, but it also covers entities who, while acting more on fundamental nature rather than deliberate choice, act to kill or harm outside of the necessities of survival. In the case of vampires, this comes from the general twisting of the soul physical undeath almost always produces in D&D. You can try to shade away the negatives, but personally I prefer to use vampires as a case of “seems relatable, but really aren’t”; the fact that they look humanoid can make the contrast of a fundamentally inhuman nature stronger.