[DF] Why not have some pure "bad guy" races in DF?

[trooper6]

When playing D&D, I've tended to find that a lot of players I have been around are very interested in the alignment system as their roleplaying touchstone. And they take the alignment system very seriously. I've run into groups that all want to be Good aligned and take being good very seriously...and therefore need to feel that killing other beings who are living in a dungeon is a good act. Making those being inherently evil, so you don't have to talk to them, accomplishes that. And then I've run into groups that all want to be Evil...and then do Evil, evil things These are often the same groups.

In groups that play systems with either other morality meters, or no morality meters, I've found that behavior and ideology behind the characters also changes.

I really do think that system matters.

D&D with absolute morality. Vampire with a the goal of not losing your humanity. Unknown Armies with Madness Meters. GURPS with Mental Disads that have little to no moral value judgement attached to them. They all result in different flavors.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by trooper6

5. PCs go on a thrilling journey of adventure trying to find the four pieces of MacGuffin before the evil race, in the meantime they kill lots and lots of the evil race in thrilling battles.

Not really relevant to the discussion, but it's another rather dumb cliche that bothers me.

If they need the Four Shards of the Shattered MacGuffin to perform the ritual, and your goal is only to prevent the ritual from being performed, you only need ONE piece to win.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by trooper6

If you want to feel like a noble, morally clean good guy while you are killing and looting...you need those antagonists to be pure evil with no shades of gray.

Originally Posted by sieurin

Never met any roleplayer who wanted to be.

Hi. I'm Ryan. Now you have. :)

In my time, I've played, among many others (using D&D alignment even though not all were D&D characters):
a) a Templar who was secretly neutral good among a band of Templars who considered themselves lawful good but who he saw as neutral evil (and was afraid he'd be executed if he spoke up)
b) a true neutral cleric who left the group (in and out of character) because he could not stomach the actions of the rest of the group (who were in the Thieves' Guild but acted like they were in the Murder Everyone They See Guild)
c) a lawful good, but fun-loving, paladin of the Gold Dragon. Think honest cop, rather than crusader

[sieurin]

Oh, I have met people who wanted to play "good guys". I have just never met anyone who needed it written in stone that his opponents were "evil" so he could go on butchering them. Instead, people we played in dungeon crawls were the kind of people who had rather low thresholds for killing, while people played in other campaigns had higher thresholds, but where usually in situations where this was not an issue.


Erik

[Wraithe]

Having gone back and re-reading b-dogs posts, I think I'm leaning toward troopers6's view - bdog, yer not coming out and saying what the problem is.

I mean, you want a race to be "big E" evil. Ok, no problem, is there a reason you can't pick one out of the races in DF and say "Poof - these guys are Eeeevil™"?

[Stone Dog]

I'm pretty sure the poster doesn't want feedback, he wants confirmation. the pattern is usually something like "This is my idea" followed by discussion followed by "But this is my idea" again until somebody feeds him his idea back.

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Wraithe

I mean, you want a race to be "big E" evil. Ok, no problem, is there a reason you can't pick one out of the races in DF and say "Poof - these guys are Eeeevil™"?

Humans, for instance.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by sieurin

Never met any roleplayer who wanted to be. I have sometimes longed for someone who actually wanted to play a paladin unironically, for instance.

I had had great fun playing my Radiant Servant of Palor (a Healing Cleric), I had no problems with role playing not willing to do more than 'containment' of the (usually) Evil Races like Orc and Goblins (IE would not raid their lands killing all he see, but warrior bans out side their lands where far to stop via kill if necessary to prevent them form harming others) and would even heal them if they were not being a threat to others. But had no qualms in smiting the (always) Evil Undead and Outsiders with his mighty clue bat where ever found.

And would be very upset if the DM had pulled 'but the Vampire is really a nice guy' on me. Everything he knew about vampires was the curse that made them resulted in a twisted evil parody of the soal of the victim of the curse that coluld on be saved by destroying the vampire.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

As for the ultimate answer to why no "pure" evil monsters? I think it's because society is moving away from that kind of perspective as a whole. To be honest, the idea of a race being "innately" evil, and their children being "innately" evil (would you kill a Hobgoblin kid? If so, you're already touching on what makes the concept disturbing), is rather reminiscent of the ideas of a race being "superior" to another, or another race being "inferior", thanks to genetics.

Just an aside: I don't think that's true. The problem is that we're human and react to human things in a human fashion.

Let me offer a different perspective. If you were to go toe-to-toe with an Alien's brood, would you really hesitate to burn a nest filled with face-hugger eggs? Face-huggers are "baby" aliens, but I don't think many of us would hesitate to slaughter them all. It's not really a question of morality: these things will kill us if we do not kill us. There is no talking to them, making deals with them, or loving their children and turning them good. They are rapacious monsters that eat everything, obviously, and there is no redeeming them.

Which isn't to say that there isn't plenty of sci-fi drama to be gained from realizing that an inhuman race isn't without compassion or merit, and coming to an understanding. However, once the "baby" stops being a cute kid with little fingers and toes and huge eyes, and instead becomes a fanged monstrosity that's merely smaller than an adult, we lose alot of sympathy for it.

"Would you kill a baby hobgoblin?" looks like a morality test, but to me, it's really a test of how sympathetic the hobgoblin is. I don't think many people would hesitate to kill a "baby monster" if that baby monster was a parasitic larva or a screaming, fanged creature with scrawny legs, clutching claws and over-sized head.

[Landwalker]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The problem is that we're human and react to human things in a human fashion.
...
I don't think many people would hesitate to kill a "baby monster" if that baby monster was a parasitic larva or a screaming, fanged creature with scrawny legs, clutching claws and over-sized head.

I imagine this is a big part of the perception of "moral quandary"—What the "evil race" looks like.

Consider all of the stereotypically evil races that people impose this quandary on: Hobgoblins, orcs, goblins, drow elves, etc. What do they all have in common? They all look more or less humanoid. Is anyone going to think twice about wiping out a nursery of beholders? Probably not. A red dragon hatchling? Doubtful. Even in settings where dragons are not only sentient but among the most intelligent beings in the world, if you stumble across a red dragon wyrmling, you kill it. Or you run away, depending on who you are.

But as soon as you start making that dragon look more like a human—upright posture, arms with gripping hands, somewhere between four and eight feet tall, for example—what do you have? First, you have the stereotypical "lizardman" or "dragonborn" or whatever. Second, you have people who wouldn't have batted an eye at sticking a blade through that red dragon wyrmling suddenly thinking about whether or not it's moral to do the same thing with the same level of indiscrimination to a "humany-looking" version of it.

So perhaps one good route to take if you want irrevocably evil races in your game without having players trying to examine moral dilemmas that you don't want to be part of your game is to make those evil races distinctly inhuman. Not just "oh it's an orc and it has tusk-things and is angry all the time", but something with four legs and three eyes that communicates through a chirp-based language.

In short, dehumanize the enemy. Hell, even if the enemy is human, they can be dehumanized. The most well-known example of this would be Imperial grunt-level soldiers in Star Wars (both Storm Troopers and Tai Fighter pilots). On the outside, they all look the same (and sure, they might all look the same on the inside, too, but it wouldn't matter even if they didn't). You never see their faces. Their voices sound strange because of the distortion of their helmets and such. By comparison, the "good guys" wear helmets that let you see their faces. (Edit: Obviously, it's harder to take this route in some situations than others, because for some species (e.g. Humans) it makes little sense to have infants wearing the same dehumanizing gear as the adults.) Simple things like this go a long way towards taking what would otherwise be a morally gray situation and turning it into guilt-free massacre.