Wolf Link 🐺Cultural differences in fantasy races instead of the plain "good vs. evil"
ZigguratThere is a lot of critic against the whole Good/Evil Lawful/Chaotic alignment and most RPG either don’t have any morality system, or different compass… A simplified D&D style alignment is great for board-gaming where you want to quickly says who is good and who is evil, but isn’t representative of real-life and doesn’t work for RPG, at least at the moment you want to write conflict a bit more complicated than Good versus Evil.
More important than culture, there is the point of view of various factions. Orcs are seen as dangerous barbarians who attack humans, but may-be orcs see human flesh very nourishing, need to give human flesh to kids if we want them to grow big and strong. Elves are at war against human, but may-be human are cutting the trees that elves need to live in. You example regarding property is pretty interesting. We’re on lemmy so let’s get political, in real-life many left-winger would agree that property is robberry Who is evil ? the person deciding that a piece of land and the cattle growing there is their’s or the person who cross that land and hunt that cattle to feed their family ? Isn’t the farmer asking gold to people wanting to feed their family the bad guy of the story ? Look at real-life, there is no such thing as good or evil only people with different opinion and objectives.
So when writing conflict, you need to take into account everybody opinion. Everybody needs the water from the river to water their crop, but the upstream clan decide to build a few canal to water more crop leading to drought in the downstream territories. There is plenty of real-life conflict based on that and it’s a very good pitch to start a war with things more complicated than evil orcs like to eat humans
The bigger problem occurs when players cast stuff like detect good and evil. If they cast it on the orcs, what do you tell them as a DM? Do you tell them what you think is their morality? Do you make the spell give an ambiguous result? Do you make the spell fail? All these options have benefits and drawbacks, but none of them are perfect.
cast stuff like detect good and evil.
This is actually my more fundamental critic against D&D. As a GM (and a player) I like more investigation-type scenario than dungeon crawling or big battle. Spell like detect good/evil or detect lie are basically killing any investigation scenario very quickly. like you have kids disappearing in the village, the king hires adventurer to investigate. The adventurer run one spell, Oh the Queen is Evil and the rest is a fight against the queen. While in an RPG without that type of spell (or even a whole alignment system) you’ll have a whole scenario on finding out that the Queen kidnaps kids and bathe in their blood to stay young and pretty, now you spent most of the evening about finding what happen, get enough proof to confront the queen, and finally fight her (or ask the guards to so because it’s already 23:00 and you work tomorrow). So an alignment mechanic and a way to detect it can have a huge influence on how the game goes.