Detecting Evil: Holy Smite & Holy Word

[Sylaire]

The Girdle of Sex Change (or possibly "Femininity/Masculinity") is actually in my opinion slightly LESS artificial and clumsy sounding than the Helm of Opposite alignment. Sex is, at least, tangible and visible. (And if you're like me and you live next door to a noisy couple, it's clearly audible too. The swine.) Alignment? Ehhh... not so much, as Jon Stewart might say.

(Thanks for remembering the name ) Oh, the Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity is quantifiable, all right. It's just silly.

I'd argue that CE is a very hard alignment to consistently follow, in the same way (and for much the same reasons) as LG is a hard alignment to consistently follow. In fact, I'd argue it is at a basic level contrary to social intercourse itself, and so the concept of a CE society is something of a contradiction in terms.

Not just something of a contradiction. I'd say that it's actually impossible. Drow society, for example, basically follows a LE model of social norms; it's just made up of people who ignore these alleged norms for their own benefit.

(I'd also argue that most drow, on a practical basis, must be NE in alignment despite what the game stats claim. Simply put, a society made up of CE individuals would tear itself apart, while NEs would be capable of cooperating for their own greater good even while attempting to get ahead in life.)

CE is the default alignment for horrible, evil monsters that, as you put it, cause destruction for its own sake (NE tends to imply sociopaths, while CE actively takes pleasure in causing pain). I think that's why traditional AD&D undead and other General Adversaries To Heroes are listed as being CE. The problem is, as soon as you slap a personality on a creature, especially one as complex as a Gothic villain, it's hard to have them continue to be actively CE.

(It's ironic that the designers seemed to understand this from the beginning with regard to liches, but have dug in their heels on "vampires are Chaotic Evil"...sooner or later. Weird.)

You can see even Ravenloft's designers had trouble with this. In his earlier incarnations, Strahd was Chaotic Evil - but that doesn't make for a very sympathetic villain at all. This is especially true for Ravenloft, where each major villain needs something about them that the PCs can look at and identify with.

And of course once the "noble general" backstory came into being, CE didn't work at all.

Yes, the "I, Strahd" version was definitely LE (you could even argue "LN with E tendencies")--a brutal and harsh order, but one that was fundamentally just. He clearly gave in to his evil side over the whole Sergei/Tatyana thing...

I would argue that the vampire Strahd could qualify as Chaotic Evil, though...in this case, it's not so much a matter of Strahd's ideology (which appears to have slid into NE, with an insistence on getting his way and a definite slackening of his personal honor) but of his behavior, which tends to get away from him (cursed lycanthropes are the ultimate example of this--the werecreature, when transformed, is basically a killing machine, a mass of unnatural desires--"kill, maim, eat"--which the intelligence is powerless to control).

[Archedius]

Yeah I have to refine what I wrote earlier if it matters: I don't like alignment along the law-chaos axis and I dislike neutral. More fitting for the setting IMHO is the good and evil alignment. We know these concepts exist in Gothicism and we know that there are those who judge ( the DP's) based on these two concepts. Neutrality doesn't make sense to me really as a person always leans to one side or the other of the good an evil axis. Law and chaos make little sense to me as people often vary wildy based on moment and context. It's late at night so if this didn't make sense that's why:)

[Dion of the Fraternity]

In most Ravenloft games I now play I've done away with rigid alignment rules: instead I use Heroes of Horror's behavioral alignment rules, wherein alignment is fluid on a case-by-case basis.

Beyond that, I do away with alignment altogether and just use a homemade system that adapts White Wolf's Virtue/Vice system. It's easier on many levels.

[The Nightmare Man]

In most Ravenloft games I now play I've done away with rigid alignment rules: instead I use Heroes of Horror's behavioral alignment rules, wherein alignment is fluid on a case-by-case basis.

How well has that system been working for your games?

I've actually been considering using it myself for my RL campaigns...

[Bluebomber4evr]

One of the biggest mistakes people make regarding alignment in D&D is thinking that it's prescriptive, i.e. "my character is LG so he must act this way." That is not how alignment works in D&D, and it never has been that way. Alignment is descriptive--"my character is acting this way, so now his alignment is LG." It is not rigid, but fluid, depending on how your character behaves. Alignment does not define your character, your character defines his alignment.

The biggest mistake people make regarding alignment in Ravenloft is assuming the world has "shades of gray." It doesn't. Gothic literature is a world of absolute morality. In works such as Matthew Lewis' The Monk, for example, there are zero shades of gray. Predominantly Christian works, God judges all characters by their actions on a black & white definition of good and evil--no moral ambiguity is allowed. In Ravenloft, the Dark Powers fill this role of judging people on an absolute black and white scale of morality.

There is, however, the power of free will. People who become evil in gothic literature did so by their own choices. Likewise, those who are evil often trick and fool others into doing their bidding, like the monk in Matthew Lewis' tale.

In D&D of course, one can just whip up a spell or magic item to read one's alignment, thus completely hosing the gothic concept altogether. After all, how can you be fooled into doing something wrong if your detect alignment spell clearly tells you he's evil? Likewise, such magic would make it easy to follow the black and white definitions of morality that the Dark Powers judge people by.

That is why such spells don't work in Ravenloft. In order to preserve gothic mystique, the lines of alignment must appear blurred to the PCs, forcing them to make their own choices--but the lines are very rigidly defined by the DPs. Those who assume that morality holds no importance in Ravenloft are the ones who find themselves in the greatest trouble; they're the ones who incur the most powers checks.

[HuManBing]

You make some bold assertions.

One of the biggest mistakes people make regarding alignment in D&D is thinking that it's prescriptive, i.e. "my character is LG so he must act this way." That is not how alignment works in D&D, and it never has been that way.

I disagree. Certainly, the 3.5 PHB is very forgiving about alignments, and it even says that people are not consistent from day to day in their alignment. But your assertion that "it never has been that way" is plain flat-out wrong, in my opinion. In 2nd ed., merely behaving in a way inconsistent with your alignment is grounds for sacrificing half your XP for this level. Behaving in an inconsistent way twice is grounds for losing all your XP for this level, if I recall correctly.

Not that I support this method at all, but I'm hoping to bring this up as a matter of explaining why some may get a straitjacket view of alignment, rather than just retconning previous editions to pretend that a) it never was this way, and therefore b) people have no justification for thinking it was this way.

The biggest mistake people make regarding alignment in Ravenloft is assuming the world has "shades of gray." It doesn't. Gothic literature is a world of absolute morality. In works such as Matthew Lewis' The Monk, for example, there are zero shades of gray.

Then again, The Monk is a very morally explicit piece of work. The Devil himself makes an appearance at the very end to lift the monk up into the air and throw him off a mountaintop. If you tie what Gothic literature is to The Monk solely, then a diabolos ex machina ending should fit right in no matter what.

Needless to say, it doesn't.

Even the monk himself has flashes of penitence and fear. True, it's generally not a feeling that he's done anything wrong so much as fear that he'll get caught for it... but consider when he rapes the female victim at the very end and finds out she's his blood relative. That causes him agony, like it would any reasonable person. For a true "no shades of grey" argument, wouldn't he not care whether his rape victim was his own flesh and blood?

Matthew Lewis is an interesting choice, too. He's always been a bit too florid and fantastical for my liking.

True Gothic fiction, in my opinion, is to be found with Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole and (later on) Edgar Allan Poe. Take a look at The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho. In each, emotions take over and make the familiar into frighteningly unfamiliar things. Rationality gutters and sputters in the wilderness, where the all-consuming desire to survive can push people to do irrational things. Shades of grey are definitely visible in Gothic literature, though admittedly not to the point of latterday urban gothic stories such as The Crow - you don't get actual antiheroes, because the focus is usually not exclusively on ambiguity, in traditional Gothic literature the way it is in latterday fiction.

At the end of it all, there is a reasonable (if not completely rational) explanation for things, and each person seems to have understandable motivations, even if you don't agree with them. This would qualify as shades of grey in my book.

[Sylaire]

I'd actually have to agree with Bluebomber regarding the existence of black-and-white morality in Gothic literature. The lack of a firmly defined good and evil is a definite product of modern culture. Religion, traditionally the cultural arbiter of good-evil standards, is simultaneously presented to us in multicultural fashion and exposed for its worst sides by a news media eager for scandal. Simultaneously, national politics is not only polarized by divisions between sides but (in America, post-Watergate) there's a fundamental distrust that everyone involved regardless of affiliation is a crook out only for their own money and power-hunger. There's a deep cultural subcurrent--not, by any means, an exclusive one, but one I'd say is strong enough to be defined as cultural rather than countercultural--that anyone who accepts an externally-provided definition of good and evil is being manipulated and deluded.

It's this that makes games like Vampire possible, or films like The Crow, as you cite as a modern example. It's this that occasionally leave me scratching my head as I read certain Ravenloft rules (like reading the Powers Check table in Forbidden Lore...then realizing that it contradicts the Black Box's own example...then realizing just what kind of heinous acts are supposed to be equivalent to casting the diabolic and evil feign death spell...or reading in VRGtV about how inevitably vampires slide into being the absolute icons of Chaotic Evil while realizing that not twenty feet away from where I bought VRGtV is the romance section of the same bookstore, where dozens of titles present vampires to their readers as the ultimate figures of romantic fantasy).

Regardless of the lines the characters may cross, traditional Gothic literature presumes, indeed arises out of societies which believe at their heart, that there is such a thing as an objective, divinely applied standard of good and evil (not at all to say that there weren't philosophies and social movements which believe otherwise, just what the average buyer of a Minerva Press gothic novel sees in life). Mr. Hyde isn't just a sociopath who is free to indulge in Jekyll's temptations without crises of conscience, but is genuinely evil. Victor Frankenstein isn't just an obsessed scientist who commits criminal acts to perform his work, then abandons that work to try to make its own way in the world, but transgresses moral law in the mere act of creating the monster. Dracula does not shy from the cross because of some vestige of his own beliefs in life or because of the faith of the one holding it, but because the very symbol itself is imnical to the unholy power that reanimates his corpse for evil.

For the most part, in a Ravenloft game this does not present a problem. Player characters from Ravenloft are likewise members of societies that believe in this kind of ethos. That is, even if the players might argue the point, their characters would not. Indeed, what is probably most surprising socioculturally about Ravenloft is that so many domains are ruled politically and driven culturally by horrible villains and yet the populations still do show that underlying belief--which suggests to me that, like proper Gothic villains, the darklords of Ravenloft do understand on some level that their actions are or were wrong, though they may justify them to themselves on some pretext.

The real difficulty, to my mind, comes in the "Weekend in Hell" games, where characters from an external setting are dumped into Ravenloft, and suddenly are presented with the fact that not only do evil actions have consequences, but that the very definitions of good and evil are not those which existed or applied in the characters' game world. Then all of a sudden you have the potential for neither the characters nor the players believing in the standards of behavior which the Dark Powers are subjecting them to.

(By the way, have any of you as DMs ever run a "Weekend in Hell" game where one of the PCs was a good-aligned necromancer or similarly aspected character class--something that's just another field of magic wherever the PCs come from, but is suddenly redefined as diabolic monstrousness aligned with the forces of darkness where the mere using of their powers regardless of the consequences thereof is an act as vile and indeed sometimes more vile than rape, murder, or torture? If so, how did you deal with the resulting tension between the RL rules and the character concept as defined by its original game world?)

[HuManBing]

Thinking on this, I think the examples I'm searching for come with the late 1800s. Certainly by the time of Poe, there is enough decay and decadence going round that it's no longer clear which side of the fence he's on.

One story deals with hypnotism as a means of cheating death. The practitioners are not "evil" per se - but he still has the mental viewpoint to appreciate the macabre nature of what he's doing. Another story - Ligaeia - deals with the miserable end of a noble scion in debauchery and ossification... with a healthy hint of incest as well.

All of these are a significant step towards the amoral (or moral-yet-helpless-to-prevent-the-decline) phase of Gothic literature.

Admittedly, this is considerably after Matthew Lewis and Radcliffe in the scheme of literature. I can well accept that the original novels (including the excellent Castle of Otranto) all did have the typical Romantic ideals of goodness counterbalancing evil - and that only later came the blurring of the two.

[Archedius]

I think HumanBeing hit what I was trying to say on the head.

From what I feel from the setting: the Dark Powers seem to enforce societal or perhaps racial views on good and evil, goblins do not seem to face powers checks for torture or cruelty as it is part of their culture to do so, the illithid do not face checks for torture and consumption of intellegent beings as it is their culture and nature to do so. If a human were to do those things they would be judged. I don't know if I'm going in the right direction but I feel as though the DP's judge not only on good and evil but on the background of the one to be judged. Don't know if I'm articulating my thoughts well on this

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Or maybe mind flayers, goblins, and so on are regarded as already so irredeemably damned that punishing them for their misdeeds doesn't serve any purpose. Really, is an illithid going to turn vegetarian because the DPs will spank it if it doesn't?

[HuManBing]

The DPs wouldn't punish a rabid dog for destructive behavior. Thus, they wouldn't punish drow or mindflayers necessarily unless there was something atypical about them that made them regret or show some degree of turning "to the light" so to speak.

This makes the God-Brain of Bluetspur somewhat problematic, but I believe there's a FOS netbook out there dealing with this one...

Once something becomes completely irredeemable and loses any interest in fighting the DPs, they let it go, e.g. Soth. I used to think Drakov fits into this category too, because as portrayed he's basically too ignorant to ever repent or even start on the road to redemption (and he doesn't seem to have any real curse either). But later posts in this messageboard have given me a few ideas to make him more "human" in his suffering.

[Bluebomber4evr]

You make some bold assertions.

One of the biggest mistakes people make regarding alignment in D&D is thinking that it's prescriptive, i.e. "my character is LG so he must act this way." That is not how alignment works in D&D, and it never has been that way.

I disagree. Certainly, the 3.5 PHB is very forgiving about alignments, and it even says that people are not consistent from day to day in their alignment. But your assertion that "it never has been that way" is plain flat-out wrong, in my opinion. In 2nd ed., merely behaving in a way inconsistent with your alignment is grounds for sacrificing half your XP for this level. Behaving in an inconsistent way twice is grounds for losing all your XP for this level, if I recall correctly.

Not that I support this method at all, but I'm hoping to bring this up as a matter of explaining why some may get a straitjacket view of alignment, rather than just retconning previous editions to pretend that a) it never was this way, and therefore b) people have no justification for thinking it was this way.

Just because they docked xp for behaving differently (and I don't believe that was a hard rule but an optional one), doesn't mean that alignment was prescriptive. I believe even as far back as 1st edition alignments were supposed to reflect behavior, not the other way around. I'll have to go back to the old rulebooks to check, but I don't recall that rule, and I never got the impression that characters were forced to play the alignment on their character sheet--even as far back as 1st edition.

True Gothic fiction, in my opinion, is to be found with Anne Radcliffe and Horace Walpole and (later on) Edgar Allan Poe. Take a look at The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho. In each, emotions take over and make the familiar into frighteningly unfamiliar things. Rationality gutters and sputters in the wilderness, where the all-consuming desire to survive can push people to do irrational things. Shades of grey are definitely visible in Gothic literature, though admittedly not to the point of latterday urban gothic stories such as The Crow - you don't get actual antiheroes, because the focus is usually not exclusively on ambiguity, in traditional Gothic literature the way it is in latterday fiction.

At the end of it all, there is a reasonable (if not completely rational) explanation for things, and each person seems to have understandable motivations, even if you don't agree with them. This would qualify as shades of grey in my book.

As a side note, I don't think Poe would be considered "true" Gothic literature, though he certainly made heavy use of gothic imagery in his tales.

I think you're missing an important point I'm making. Do characters with moral ambiguity exist in gothic literature? Yes. Do they end up paying for said amiguity? Again, the answer is yes. In both Radcliffe's Udolpho and Lewis' Monk, the basic message is that no matter how much wickedness you get away with in this life, you will be judged by a wrathful God in the end. People have free will and can choose their own moral path, but the rules are rigidly defined by God and those who stray ultimately end up paying for it if they don't change their ways. In Ravenloft, this definition of morality is held by the Dark Powers--they judge those who fall short of their definitions, but it is still up to the PCs to make that choice on their own--a choice they could easily avoid if spells like detect alignment worked properly.

[HuManBing]

We may be disagreeing over a very fine turn of phrase as far as the D&D alignment system goes. I believe the distinction may be between viewpoint A: "AD&D 2nd ed. forces you to play your character's alignment and there's no way you can get out of doing it", and viewpoint B: "AD&D 2nd ed. strongly encourages you to play your character's alignment and you can choose not to but pay a heavy XP price for so doing".

For the record, I reject your assertion that D&D never prescribed alignment based behavior. It may not have straitjacketed players into playing their alignment. (Although in places it came pretty close, especially with paladins.) But it still put down very compelling reasons for playing to an alignment and gave punishments for those who didn't.

These are absent in 3rd edition, and good riddance.

I have no issue with your assertion that D&D currently is non-prescriptive. I agree with that fully, and I think it should be player's choice.

Also for the record, I agree that original Gothic fiction did have clearly defined polarities of good and evil. In my response to your post, I had gotten myself entangled in what Ravenloft is, and what Gothic fiction is. I hereby reverse from my first opinion, and remand for a finding not inconsistent with this post.

However, to address another contention in your first post, I believe Ravenloft has evolved away from this early Gothic literature, as it moves away from its "weekend in hell" roots and evolves into a full fledged campaign setting. True, good is rewarded and evil is punished, but not consistently. Also, the line between what is good and what is evil has blurred.

This was not so clear in the first round of 2nd ed. adventures, which mostly had a villain (even if masked) and a virtuous victim. But beginning with the later 2nd ed adventures, especially the ones after the Red Box release, did indeed feature enough moral ambiguity so that the PCs had to scratch their heads and wonder which side really is right after all.

This has nothing to do with merely fooling the PCs as to who had what motivation, as was done in Feast of Goblyns and what not. Even assuming the PCs are in full knowledge of their actions, their circumstances, and the repercussions of their actions, it is no easy task to know what is clear-cut good and what is clear-cut evil.

This sort of choice is apparent in Circle of Darkness, where the PCs have to choose between a clearly evil human zealot, and a fiendish outsider bent on destruction. In The Evil Eye, a similar balance hangs, where a human darklord must struggle with allies and enemies, including her newly-born son. (And it features the ultimate of high drama where the PCs face a tough choice as to whether they step in to save her from a brutal life-threatening stabbing... from a killer with plenty of justification for the attack!)

No easy answer for any of these. There's a choice between people who are clearly evil, and clearly good at the same time - and the exact balancing test is left up to the PCs. I'd say that's a pretty decent definition for "shades of grey" right there.

Had "Death Undaunted" ever seen print, this would have served as an excellent example of the exact shades-of-grey argument that you reject. (The adventure is currently in the Library - J. Mangrum was very gracious enough to give us a .pdf of his notes.) The PCs are forced to choose between two (or three) evils, and the choices they make lead to very real consequences. Ultimately the greatest reward is if they help Azalin, the greatest penalty is if they allow Death to triumph.

Is any of them a "good" leader in the traditional sense of the word? No. But some are worse than others, clearly. Does that mean a Paladin should lose his paladinhood just for even being in this adventure? No.

So, to summarize, there are plenty of adventures in Ravenloft that do assume a simplistic moral behavior on the part of the main protagonists and antagonists. Sachmet lying in her tomb is bad. Sekhmet plotting against Ankhtepot is bad, and Ankhtepot himself is bad too. Azalin manipulating the PCs and lying and torturing and threatening the widespread destruction of the Prime Material multiverses is also bad.

But in latterday releases there's definitely enough going on in the Gazetteers and domains to get the shades-of-grey question going. Consider Falkovnia.

Gondegal, we are told, is himself good. From this we presume he doesn't torture people and he is generally a positive influence on those around him. As an opponent of the Drakov regime, however, an obvious choice would to ally with the kobolds that ravage Falkovnia and also oppose Drakov.

Is this evil? The kobolds clearly lie, cheat, steal, and kill without regard. But they're chaotic evil... how does that play out? Chances of these chaotic creatures ever performing the sheer immense scale* of Drakov's atrocities are very unlikely. So helping them overthrow Drakov or at least curtail his atrocities is likely to the benefit of Falkovnians, in the balance.

*(if you'll pardon the pun)

Of course, this moral arithmetic isn't going to make much difference to the mourning relatives of the Falkovnian army grunts who are killed in the kobold attacks. They would suffer the death of a family member, as would all those who relied on the Falkovnians, and this would go regardless of whether the next village down the road profited great benefits with the death of the Talon overlord or not.

Play it how you want. Write adventures for this how you want. But imposing something as sweeping and prohibitive as "Ravenloft doesn't have shades of grey" is doing the campaign setting a great disservice, I feel.

[Bluebomber4evr]

I'll hold off for now on debating the rules in prior editions until I get home and can consult the books.

As for my "Ravenloft doesn't have shades of gray" comment, I'll admit that I phrased it wrong. Ravenloft PCs should be placed in those sorts of situations in order to force the sort of choices that may or may not incur powers checks. But I stand by my point that the DPs have a black-and-white view of morality and judge characters accordingly.

[The Nightmare Man]

Or maybe mind flayers, goblins, and so on are regarded as already so irredeemably damned that punishing them for their misdeeds doesn't serve any purpose. Really, is an illithid going to turn vegetarian because the DPs will spank it if it doesn't?

I've considered this before, mostly for the mind flayers...

I'd like to think that the Dark Powers have found their own unique ways to deal with the illithids when dealing out punishment (when the illithids themselves have attempted something so perverse [even for them] that a Powers Check is warranted)-- ways that don't automatically subscribe to the same laws of reality (and the same standards of the DP) that non-illithids must adhere to.

The 3e RLPHB seems to suggest that evil is evil... regardless of the way it is packaged. As such, I would think this means that the DPs should include every intelligent species in that perspective -- regardless of how different they may be from the humanoid/demihumanoid norm.