Quote from: Pat;1130500Let's look at your examples. Six out of seven are ripped-from-the-front-page type of evil. Abused dogs combined with wet markets. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. A con artist preying on the elderly. Corporate malfeasance. Corporate pollution, and terrible working conditions in a sweatshop. Sexual exploitation and drug abuse. They're seedy, sleazy, and hit uncomfortably close to home. And far too many (3/7) are about the sexual abuse of women, which is a Magic Realm usually worth avoiding.

Many people play fantasy for escapism, not lurid Law & Order-type horrors. If you focus more on exploitation and suffering than on over-the-top stunts, delve too deep into the petty and mundane instead grandiose plans, or make them too topical, then you break that escapism. It's the difference between the Nazis in Indiana Jones, and Schindler's List. And while that's appropriate for certain genres, even a small dose can have a powerful impact in a game that's focused on grand heroics.

Greetings!

Law and Order-type horrors!:D Nice description, Pat! I confess, I did watch Law and Order for quite some time! *Laughing* In my own campaigns, I prefer the more fantasy heroic stuff. Sometimes I add Law and Order horror, but in small doses, probably for precisely the reasons you mention. On occasion, like when thinking about "Grim and Gritty" campaigns, or "Dark Fantasy" or whatever such styles are called, I mused about how in a world of such dark powers, evil cults, demonic creatures--and the allure of embracing and exploiting magic power and abilities--the evil psychotics, sadists, and petty tyrants would be going bananas, you know? It made me think, well, that kind of--as you phrased it--Law and Order-type horrors would be everywhere! I thought, geesus, no wonder the local police and military need help against dragons, giants, and orcs! *Laughing* They have their hands full dealing with all of the Law and Order-type horrors.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1130439Using magic during trials is problematic at best. In the same way that technology can be hacked, magic can be manipulated.

That's a good point, and if applied in a reasonably sophisticated culture, those vulnerabilities would be well known and accounted for. That is all within the context of how magic works in the campaign being run, the relevance and direct input of the gods, the relationship of gods to their portfolios and alignment and the like.

In a campaign such as the Thule setting, you can easily get mixed alignment clerics as clerics just have an alternative version of magic.

But it isn't obvious at all if clerics of rival organizations will detect each other as evil.  That is a campaign level decision of the DM.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1130439Using magic during trials is problematic at best.

In the same way that technology can be hacked, magic can be manipulated.

As a cleric, how do you know whether the spirit from whom you are receiving your spells is good or evil? The answer is you don't. If a cleric violates the tenets of his religion and loses access to spells, there is nothing preventing a demon from slipping in and granting the cleric spells.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1130439Players having faith in the validity of detect lie/evil and know alignment is potentially very dangerous. Good characters could be duped into committing evil acts, such as the mass murder of innocent people.

If players don't have absolute faith in the validity magic, as they never should, then at best it is a starting point for an investigation, such as with lie detectors in the modern legal system.

Ideally, trials should be based purely on logic and nothing else. More often, magical thinking, adherence to superstition by the masses, and demonic manipulation will rule the day.

With arbitrary magic, then logically anything is possible, so there is no way to tell anything. It's not just that you shouldn't trust the answers from magic spells. You also shouldn't trust eyewitness accounts, because they could just be mind controlled or fooled by illusions. And you can't trust physical evidence, because it could just have been conjured out of thin air. Players having faith in the validity of their own eyes can be duped into committing evil acts, because what they think are orcs coming to attack them are actually an illusion over children running to them for help.

You have to believe something at some point. In a world with magic, the results of magic can be more or less reliable just like anything else. Just like in the real world, we still believe technology and allow it in our trials -- using our judgement to assess how reliable each piece of technology is. In practice, we do use videotape and fingerprints and DNA tests and other technology -- and sometimes they are more reliable than eyewitness accounts or non-technological physical evidence.

With respect to the game, if I don't want players to rely on detect lie spells, then I would just disallow them -- or modify the mechanics so that the spells are no more reliable than modern-day lie detectors.

Quote from: jhkimWith arbitrary magic, then logically anything is possible, so there is no way to tell anything. It's not just that you shouldn't trust the answers from magic spells. You also shouldn't trust eyewitness accounts, because they could just be mind controlled or fooled by illusions. And you can't trust physical evidence, because it could just have been conjured out of thin air. Players having faith in the validity of their own eyes can be duped into committing evil acts, because what they think are orcs coming to attack them are actually an illusion over children running to them for help....

Which is why ideally a trial should be based foremost on logic. No particular piece of evidence is sacrosanct, including magic. Each element is a piece in structuring a circumstantial case. The players should be encouraged to think, rather than being allowed to use magic as a crutch. Intelligent enemies will weave sophisticated plots to snare their victims in a web of lies, and evil gods will be the most dangerous in this regard. It must be assumed that they know how each spell functions, and this knowledge will be used by them to their own advantage, and if players assume that magic, or anything, is inviolable, then this too will be exploited.

Quote from: jhkimWith arbitrary magic, then logically anything is possible, so there is no way to tell anything. It's not just that you shouldn't trust the answers from magic spells. You also shouldn't trust eyewitness accounts, because they could just be mind controlled or fooled by illusions. And you can't trust physical evidence, because it could just have been conjured out of thin air. Players having faith in the validity of their own eyes can be duped into committing evil acts, because what they think are orcs coming to attack them are actually an illusion over children running to them for help....

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1130872Which is why ideally a trial should be based foremost on logic. No particular piece of evidence is sacrosanct, including magic. Each element is a piece in structuring a circumstantial case. The players should be encouraged to think, rather than being allowed to use magic as a crutch. Intelligent enemies will weave sophisticated plots to snare their victims in a web of lies, and evil gods will be the most dangerous in this regard. It must be assumed that they know how each spell functions, and this knowledge will be used by them to their own advantage, and if players assume that magic, or anything, is inviolable, then this too will be exploited.

If evil gods are using their god-powers to deceive and manipulate the PCs, then neither logic nor anything else will be of any use. There is no winning strategy against the powers of an evil god. If they treat the magic as inviolate, then the evil god can manipulate the magic results and exploit that. If they *don't* treat the magic as inviolate, then the evil god can exploit their lack of trust in magic and manipulate only the *non-magical* evidence.

Going back to the OP here -- SHARK talked about how facing with mundane, selfish evil lead to "feelings of grimness, despair, and feeling dirty". In my experience, this is often because this evil isn't balanced by good people. In RPGs, there's a tendency to not have good allies -- for the game functional reason that you don't want the PCs to just call the police on the bad guys. But a side effect of this can be that the world looks terribly ugly, with everyone being unhelpful, greedy, and/or useless. I think it's worth considering ways to get the PCs deputized or other ways for them to get in on the action, without them being the only good people willing to help with the problem.

I think this goes double for evil gods. If evil gods are messing with the PCs, then they can just feel screwed. Unless existential despair is intended to be the point of the game, there should be good gods whose help balances out the evil gods.

This is one of those things I have to wrestle less with because I use a system that doesn't really define concepts like good or evil. I only class something as evil if it's a flat universal evil by its very nature, your bonus against evil creatures will always work on demons and devils but will not be used against a man no matter how much evil he commits, for he is not of essence evil, he merely chooses to do evil, and trapped by physical limitations such as hunger evil deeds may be necessary to survive, unless his creator and the creator of the world are thusly evil for creating this situation he cannot be himself classed as evil. If in order to survive he must murder and eat young mister coffin, which most would say is evil, I would not class him as evil for having to make this choice. Yet, if he chose instead to die of hunger himself and let young master coffin eat his remains instead, I would classify that self sacrifice as good. Detect evil will never serve to locate the nearest pimp or axe murderer in a game I run. Unless said pimp or axe murderer is evil by their very essence or nature, such as being undead or a disguised extraplanar creature. Likewise, I will brook no brooding evil by nature creatures as heroes/anti-heroes who are defacto good, a devil that laments his fall from grace, the lack of gods light, and who does only objectively good deeds like saving orphan puppies will still eat acid when hit with holy water, your bonus vs evill will still effect her, and she will still be consigned to hell regardless. Forgiveness is for mortal men alone.

In my Lion & Dragon campaigns, "evil" as a definite and pure sense is not really the realm of the human, though some humans can be corrupted by evil to the point that they are beyond salvation. On the other hand, all humans in the setting are varying degrees of imperfect, so that in my Albion campaign the PCs were serving nobles who were at times doing very bad things for what they thought were good reasons, or sometimes good things for bad reasons.

In terms of alignment, I use Law/Neutral/Chaos, to reflect how much a person believes or disbelieves in order and structure and civilization, while goodness and evil are left to roleplaying the religious elements of the medieval-authentic world. Religious "good" in the medieval sense would often be seen as evil (or at least wrong) by the standards of the modern paradigm.

I also make it very clear to the players that the vast majority of NPCs in the world are likely to be Neutral in alignment. People who are Lawful or Chaotic in alignment are outliers.

Fuck.

Shark wrote a book. On evil.

Different kinds, to me, would be Kaiser Soze: evil that convinces evil to do evil. The usual evil of stealing and killing, then the exceptional evil of extortion and coercion. If, I'm a true villain known for genocide, I might hire a group to cover my crime. To be me and take the blame, even.

Edit: It's funny when the players realize they were duped.

Quote from: SHARK;1129930In an upcoming game I am looking forward to this weekend, I was thinking about various plots, dynamics, and tone. I got to thinking about these kinds of distinctions, if that makes any sense. What do you think about different "kinds" of evil, different dynamics and plots, and villainous characters? Do you prefer one style over another? Do you like mixing such different styles or approaches?

Stephen King described this as the difference between "inside evil" and "outside evil", i.e. the difference between evil that comes from human beings making human choices for humanly comprehensible reasons (stipulating that clinical sociopathy is comprehensible as a real-world phenomenon, if not a moral experience) and evil that comes from forces or entities outside the human realm; both, he said, had their value in terms of the horror story, the former because of its innately convincing reality and the latter because of its capacity to evoke a sense of grandeur, scope and awe that no merely human villain, however vile, can do.

I freely admit that for myself I always prefer "outside evil" as the greatest-scope antagonist, not only because of this capacity for spectacle but because, as has been previously noted, "outside evil" antagonists generally offer opportunities for a dramatic and convincing cathartic resolution that "inside evil" villains simply don't -- "inside evil" villains have a distressing tendency, if done properly, to remind us that certain kinds of evil will always be with us, which is a very good way to foster exhaustion and despair.  It was either Chesterton or Gaiman (or both) who said, "We tell children fairy tales not to remind them that dragons exist -- they already know this -- but to remind them that dragons can be beaten."

That said, I almost always ensure the "outside evil" is backed up, connected with, or mutually reinforces a faction of "inside evil" as well, because if the two become too separate it becomes very easy to see them as mutually irrelevant; also, because while outside evil is grand, spectacular and awesomely frightening, it's impossible to make it personal.  To use Game of Thrones as an example, our protagonists were terrified of the Night King, but they hated Cersei Lannister, which is part of why the final season of the show was deliberately constructed the way it was.  Evil, in the end, is evil, whether outside or inside, and the fact that it all feeds back into itself wherever it occurs should never be forgotten.