Honey, I Summoned a Demon

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Plane

I guess one of the problems is that GURPS doesn't necessarily have an objective definition of 'good', much less 'pure' good, or 'lily white' purity. Statistically I'm not sure there's any way to represent it...

GURPS Powers has "Evil" and "Good" categories of powers which might help navigate that but I don't have a grasp of it.

Questions like "can someone be lily white pure good and a non-vegan" for example... I wouldn't know how to answer that in GURPS terms. Philosophically it's hard for me to even define if objective good can exist apart from inherent impulse to get dopamine response from hard-wired charitableness, or subconscious desire for reputation/karma.

This is a feature, not a bug. Gurps doesn't really assume any moral framework or lack thereof for any given game. It does give advice on what genre conventions say "Good" and "Evil" powers or magic look like, but in the end its just advice.

The morality of your setting (including games set in the real world) is between you and your players. There are settings and stories where Good and Evil are objective things that can be measured and give their wielders power. There are stories where whether or not those objective powers actually line up with good and evil is explored. There are settings where morality-based powers don't exist.

One interesting feature of good and evil in fiction is that its much easier to present pure evil than pure good. I've got a hate-filled monster that wants to kill or torture everyone he sees. That's easy to portray, as we don't need this creature to wrestle with moral quandaries. He could be more intelligent or target something other than physical suffering, but that doesn't get many people worked up. On the other hand, we ask a "being of pure benevolence" to not only wrestle with the quandaries but solve them out of hand.

So the most common way to depict the forces of good and evil is to present outright forces of evil, and then show a very restrained and subtle power of good that only really targets the forces of good and acts through mortal agents, who are allowed to make mistakes and have flaws. That way we can avoid actually working out perfect ethical systems anytime we want to write fiction.