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[Discussion][HF] What significant (if any) differences would there be in a D&D-style world without objective morality, as opposed to standard fantasy fare?
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Author: u/Carduus_Benedictus *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7fhjv0/discussionhf_what_significant_if_any_differences/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2017-11-25T19:56:59
Post:
There are still objective gods that give spells and magicians that create magic, there are still a wide variety of alien 'monsters', and there are still issues and strife. We can still say that something is good or evil, we just don't have empirical proof. What issues would come about without the ability to use 'good' and 'evil' as objective justifiers for one's actions?
Comments:
u/N0_B1g_De4l [+21] (8 hours later)
"Objective morality" in fantasy doesn't (usually) mean "objective", really. It means that morality is observable, but that's not necessarily the same as objective. You can cast detect evil and detect that a skeleton is, in some sense, "evil". But does the fact that the spell's judgement and your moral judgement use the same term make them interchangeable? Would your moral judgment change if the spell was instead called detect flarg?
The Second Apocalypse goes into this question a good deal more deeply.
u/SoylentRox [+15] (31 minutes later)
Technically, "detect evil" is probably just the opinion of the cleric's patron god and not actually an absolute measurement. We know the various gods in D&D are not omnipotent or omniscient, they have stats and can be killed by epic enough characters.
So I'd say the only difference in such a setting would be that it was common knowledge that someone showing up as "good" or "evil" when you cast that spell is just a matter of opinion, and that different clerics with different patrons gods could sometimes get conflicting answers if they cast on a particularly controversial target.
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (11 hours later)
False. You can kill an avatar of said god. The stats blocks are always only for the physical manifestation of said deity.
u/traverseda [+11] With dread but cautious optimism (19 hours later)
That's a very strong way to put that. It's also an internet meme. Where D&D is written by a lot of different people, has a lot of different campaign settings, etc, you can't really say "false" about anything. It's all probabilistic, D&D being so loosely defined. You might be better served by saying something like "That's not how I remember it in 3.5" or "The RAW in 5.0 provide no mechanism to do that".
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+10] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
Where has this meme been all my life?
u/SoylentRox [+5] (11 hours later)
I had the impression that it wasn't impossible to actually kill a god permanently, albeit you might need to replace them or have some crazy epic item, etc.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+3] (a day later)
If you're willing to go back to 3.5 Forgotten Realms, they had a whole plotline on god-death via loss of portfolio.
u/SoylentRox [+3] (a day later)
Eh. I guess. I mean more in "spirit of the setting" sense. If you try to rule lawyer D&D down to the most minute details, you'll never get anywhere : at the lowest level, without a GM to house rule away ridiculous exploits, D&D is and has always been broken.
Anyways, if I were the DM, I'd rule that gods can't be killed in the same way you cannot ban electric fields from a universe. Gods control primal forces that will always be present. But you should be able to destroy a god's mind and replace it with a substitute, elevating some other being to be god.
u/ehrbar [+6] (8 days later)
False declaration of "False". Several versions of D&D fully allow you to kill gods.
For example, the original; the supplement Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes is explicit that Odin only has 300 hit points, rather than giving him an "avatar" or "manifestation" with 300 hit points.
Then AD&D first edition, as of Deities & Demigods, is very clear that its stats are for the gods, and that the gods, if slain on their home plane, are "absolutely and irrevocably dead". Rather than say players can't do this, it then goes on to say that if characters try to challenge a deity on its home plane, the god should bring to bear "all the powers that the being has." Which is very much not the same thing as declaring it impossible for the characters to kill the god; after all, if it was impossible, why would the god need to bring all its powers to bear? Now, six years later, in the Manual of the Planes we first get rules that make a god unkillable; Greater Powers, if reduced to 0 hp, are transformed into a vapor that re-forms into the god in 1d10 days. But Lesser Powers and Demi-Powers still can be slain permanently on their home plane (though now Demi-Powers can be raised from the dead by more powerful deities, rather than their deaths being irrevocable).
Now, in AD&D second edition, sure, gods are invincible against mortals and the beings with stats are their avatars.
But then this changes back in D&D 3.x. Deities & Demigods for 3rd does raise the option of making gods unkillable, but the default is that they can be "slain in physical or magical combat", and they have stats like hit points. And these stats are not just for avatars; entries for the gods have stat blocks both for the deity and weaker stat blocks for their avatars.
4th edition eventually had explicit rules for killing gods, and designer posts on the Internet making it explicitly clear that yes, characters actually killing gods, not just manifestations, was intentionally allowed.
5th edition does not have any actual rules on the subject, and has no published deity stat blocks, either.
So, for what we might call the six "main" versions of D&D -- original, AD&D, AD&D 2nd, D&D 3.x, D&D 4th, and D&D 5th -- on whether characters can kill gods, the votes are "Yes", "Yes", "No", "Yes", "Yes", and "Abstain". By a vote of 4-1-1, gods in D&D "can be killed by epic enough characters."
u/throwawayIWGWPC [+1] (13 days later)
So spoketh the Greater Power ehrbar.
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (15 days later)
thanks for the exhaustive answer.
u/TheAtomicOption [+11] (a day later)
Bringing up alignment is the 2nd best way to start a fight with D&D people. There isn't "objective morality" in D&D so much as there is "concrete morality" in which karma and taking moral stances have much more concrete effects than IRL thanks to the existence of gods.
u/CopperZirconium [+7] (23 minutes later)
Detect evil spell wouldn't work, or it would just trigger for certain creatures and magic and not inform moral judgements. I don't think much would change because we clearly don't need objective morality to condemn other groups as evil.
It might allow experimentation with necromancy without getting corrupted. (Although I think "White Necromancers" are already a thing with the alignment grid.)
u/ShiranaiWakaranai [+8] (9 hours later)
If objective morality doesn't exist, then objective good and evil doesn't exist. At which point, munchkinery might ensue.
There are plenty of powerful spells/magic effects that only work on targets that are "good" or "evil". Since there is no objective good or evil, gods/mages could munchkin by defining "good" and "evil" for their spells however they wish.
Define money as the root of all evil, and now your clerics can find treasures in dungeons better than any rogue using their detect evil spells.
Define everyone who doesn't follow your god as an evil heretic, and now your priests can wage a holy war with killer healing spells.
Define metal impurities as the taint of demons, and now your priests can be expert blacksmiths, refining metals with ease using "purify evil" spells.
u/Kinoite [+4] (a day later)
Magic leaves traces. So, "detect evil" becomes a family of spells like "detect necromantic energy."
Those spells reveal undead AND anyone who channels a lot of necromantic magic AND anyone whose class has necromantic themed powers.
"Blessed" weapons work mostly the same. Instead of disrupting Evil, they're disrupting the power sources that people use to increase their speed and durability.
The upside of this is that enough de buffs could partially solve the "quadratic wizard / linear fighter" thing.
Non magic classes have an advantage because they don't need to maneuver around localized de buffs.
u/Kinoite [+3] (a day later)
The real change is non-mechanical.
D&D is combat heavy. A standard plot is, "go kill that clan of intelligent creatures." A lot of the payout is having the freedom to be a world-shaping badass.
'Evil' facilitates this. Grognar the Barbarian can cut his way through the Evil Cultists and their Evil Minions safe in the knowledge that they're Evil.
Things change if you make the world into shades of grey.
One option is to give the characters pre-modern worldviews. They'd think like Odysseus, instead of equality-loving moderns. I've never seen this pulled off, but would love to see a group do it well.
The other option is to plot the game around shades of grey. Easy mode is to have a conflict where several, equally sympathetic human factions are fighting.
A potentially more interesting option is to really run with the idea that characters have modern morals in a world where everyone else runs on Good vs Evil.
So, you kill all the Kobold warriors because the Kobolds are attacking human settlements.
But then, you've got a population of 40 young and infant Kobolds who haven't done anything wrong and will starve if you don't provide for them and rebuild their town.
You'd have a game where the PCs are carving out their own kingdom, in the middle of hostile and confused neighbors. They'd have to protect New Koboldopolis from rampaging paladins.
u/Roxolan [+5] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (a day later)
Alignment is a negligible part of why D&D gets away with lots of murder. Almost none of the D&D designated targets are guaranteed, inheritably, bone-deep Evil. Human cultists definitely aren't. You're on the hook for kobold babies and Draco Malfoys regardless of where the folks you killed fell on the alignment spectrum.
(Not that you bothered casting Detect Evil on any of them before killing them anyway.)
The actual reason why adventurers don't worry about it, yet somehow aren't haunted by starving kobold children, is an unspoken social contract between players and DMs that This Isn't What We're Here For.
And different groups will place different boundaries on the Thing. I have no doubt that there are people out there running the equivalent of a Koboldopolis campaign without rejecting the alignment system at all.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+2] (a day later)
Think like Odysseus...how do you see that? Just a clever, occasionally savage MacGyver who loves random women but always comes home to his wife?
u/hoja_nasredin [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (11 hours later)
I preferred DND when good and evil, were objective. You wanted to be a necromancer? You had to be evil. Now everyone can be everything with no constraints and it looses it's coolness factor.
u/Carduus_Benedictus [+2] (16 hours later)
Well, there's two sides to that. Preventing munchkinry absolutely needs rules there. But not having to deal with moral dilemmas by casting a spell and then just killing those that fail....that is a munchkinry of a different sort.
u/vakusdrake [+2] (14 hours later)
On a somewhat related note I tried to make a consistent alignment system for use in D&D style games: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193mUyuiNWJxGYWQw9GS4yX-gGMJle5WFe_1iXxWx6AY/edit?usp=sharing
However the approach I used could be considered to be in some ways worse, because while alignments are well defined many people aren't going to fall into one of the alignment categories, which means it not an all encompassing system.
Still I think if you used the system for purposes of detect alignment it might be pretty useful. Though you might also want to use it in conjunction with other things like having the spell detect their alignment by the standard of a particular god, the caster or some other comparative metric.
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
A practical guide to evil seems to be evolving in that direction. The gods above and below exist and act on the world, but their relationship with human ideas of good and evil is, if not entirely orthogonal, at least quite diagonal.