Orcs, Violence, and Evil

Another rambling blogpost about my thoughts.

I was reading a discussion about Keep on the Borderlands, and in it people were complaining about how the orc (and goblin and so on) tribes in the caves have children and noncombatants that, after all the orc warriors have been slaughtered, the PCs will have to decide what to do with.

I like that. It drives home that the orcs are people (dangerous, fucked up people, but still...) and that the world is one where you can't just solve everything with violence.

Apparently, being presented with orc children, and deciding whether to slaughter them, leave them to die, drag them back to civilization... coupled with the realization that the PCs have invaded these creature's homes and killed everybody. It left a bad taste in people's mouths, apparently.

So. Why does this happen? Because the game presents orcs as having two qualities:

• They are people, with language, culture (however crude), families (however disfunctional), homes, babies...
• They are all evil, and must be removed, probably through violence.

Combined, these qualities produce results that can seem troubling. Tolkein struggled with making orcs Always Evil, and never arrived at a solution he was happy with. Gygax made many smart game design choices, but went a little mental here when he basically declared that, yes, in D&D you morally ought to exterminate the orc babies (helpfully clarifying that, after all, 'nits make lice').

D&D handles morality in what is the most stupid way I've encountered in any setting: good and evil are objective forces in the world (like fire and entropy) and alignment means serving one of these. And, for all the PHB talks about good PCs doing mercy and selfishness, in actual play mostly alignment is used to designate which monsters you're meant to kill. Now your PCs are genocidally righteous crusaders for an abstract cosmic principle. It's fucking daft.

(I'm VtM player. I like paths and roads. I like moral greyness and subjectivity in my characters).

This post, then, is about how I handle these things in D&D style games.

Firstly, alignment. 

Fuck alignment, it was always a stupid idea.The 3x3 grid of good vs evil and law vs chaos is a rubbish way to classify PC personalities, and repeatedly results in shitty play experiences as the GM and the player argue about whether the player is roleplaying their character right, which inevitably devolves into two people disagreeing about the fundamental principles morality is built on. The D&D books are fucking useless at resolving this since, fundamentally, alignment is either there to tell you that you should kill those orcs or else just a vestigal leftover from previous editions.

Perhaps you want alignment in your games, though? Who am I to judge, people watch the Marvel films so there's no accounting for taste. For starters, ditch the addition of good vs evil. It was a later addition anyway, and it messes things up. Make alignment about law vs chaos, with both being cosmic principles rather than moral judgements. Even better, go full LotFP and have law mean 'the divine plan', neutral be 'the shitty imperfect material world' and chaos be 'unnatural influences'. Have extremes of law and chaos be alien and incomprehensible. Have sensible humans all be neutral.

I actually, now I think about it, like how LotFP does alignment. It works with the setting LotFP wants to depict, and avoids stupid arguments about utilitarianism or whatever.

So there you go. Alignment should not about morality; if you want to roleplay 'a good person' then you can totally do that, without having to wrangle game mechanics to do so.

Second point: Who are the PCs?
PCs should not be heroic. PCs should not be noble and good and all of that. Or at least, they shouldn't default to that (a noble or altruistic PC would be an interesting quirk, not the expected standard).  PCs are amoral (or morally dubious) treasure hunters. They're tomb-robbers and mercenaries and weirdos. 

I tend to think of adventurers as being roughly the fantasy equivalent to members of street-level drug gangs in the real world. When you've come from a shitty background with few prospects, and want to get rich or famous or badass, and normal society gives you few options for that... you become a gangster/adventurer. Its really fucking dangerous, and kind of frowned on, and there's no formal recognition. Its you and your buddies trying to make a big score. You probably die young, law enforcement probably has it in for you. You are the desperate fringe elements willing to risk it all dong grubby unpleasant dangerous stuff in the hopes of getting rich.
(how do clerics fit into this? I tend to run clerics as being cultists, mystics, prophets... religious nutters tapped into alien cosmic forces. Dregs. Not members of an established catholic-style church, as those priests have theology to debate and flocks to minister to and are far too busy with that to go tomb-robbing).

Why have this as the default PC, rather than a more heroic archetype?
Firstly, by making PCs amoral you increase their agency in the world. You no longer have the 'no, you're good, you ought to take this plot hook or you're RPing badly' issue. An amoral character can act altruistically if they want to,  if the whim takes them. A heroic party is expected to act heroic.

And being heroic inevitably leads to quests to save the world with only one outcome (the world is saved and goodness prevails... or I guess the campaign ends?) where you just follow the quest to its end result. Those stories in those genres bore me. Further down the page I will start frothing at the mouth and ranting about why.

Secondly, it totally fucks up the synergy between game mechanics and character motivation. You're PC wants to get rich quick; so they go into a dungeon to get treasure. You want to get XP so you can level your PC up, XP is rewarded for treasure, so you go into a dungeon to get treasure. They line up. If a heroic PC wants to do heroic things, but the player wants treasure to level up... you get a disconnect and the game is worse for it as you struggle to justify doing what the system incentivizes. (you could remove xp-for-treasure but that probably leads to either XP-for-killing shit, and so games that are nothing but constant slaughter, or XP-for-merely-showing-up, which is unbelievably shitty and pointless).

So, then. The problem of evil.
I, as a person in the real world, think that murdering people is wrong. Sometimes it's arguably necessary for a greater good, but killing a person is still a bad thing. I am, for most definitions, a fairly enthusiastic pacifist in the real world.
I find the idea of whole races of people (orcs, goblins, dark elves etc) being presented as 'evil and so you should kill them' bothers me. It's easy to make this about racism, but to me it's less that and more about the normalization of killing.

Violence in games (and wider media) is a topic I have strong complex feelings about. I don't think that it makes you kill people IRL or anything. But, I look at a video-game protagonist gunning down hordes of enemies, and I find it hard to support that character; they're committing mass slaughter. I don't like it.

Making broad catagories of goons that it's OK to kill doesn't really help that. Orcs, stormtroopers (guess whether I mean the german ones or the ones from starwars), and so on are still people, even if the media in question tries to dehumanize them so that killing them feels less murdery.
It's not even the violence itself (I like playing villains: my PCs at the moment include a tzimisce koldun who commits casual attrocities to keep people too frightened of her to cause problems, and a weird death-cultist necromancer who firmly believes that most problems can be solved by killing people until the reincarnate into a more compliant personality. Note that both of these people are, by their own moralities, behaving morally, they're just a bit fucked up. And, you know, see my comments above about D&D PCs being amoral thugs). But when a work expects me to treat constant unrelenting murder as laudable, I just lose my ability to treat the protagonist as the good guy. 

This seeps into how I run my games. I don't like presenting scenarios where the correct course of action is to run around killing people. (you'll notice how in Wolfpacks & Winter Snow, I set it up so you get XP for hunting and killing animals, but never for killing humans/people). So, monsters tend to manifest themselves in a few forms. Mindless zombies, dangerously territorial or predatory animals, and so on... fighting them isn't an issue. They're not people. (if you want to be an angry vegan at me about this... fuck off. You're welcome to lump wolves in with orcs and treat them like I treat orcs down below).

Orcs and so on are treated as 'just people'. They're dangerous, sure. They're your enemies, sure. Their culture might be cruel or fanatical or aggressive, sure. But they are, fundamentally, people. They bleed and scream when you stab them. They have families and friends. They want to avoid dying.
In my games, you can totally negotiate with orcs. It's hard, sure. Orcs are dickheads. But you can do it. Hell, it's probably smart to negotiate with them rather than fighting; they tend to be just as smart as you are, and fighting smart enemies means that I the GM will fuck you up with every dirty tactic they might be capable of. Traps, hostages, ambushes, formation-fighting, psychological warfare... And then they'll flee or surrender if obviously beaten. They'll hold grudges. Their buddies will want to avenge them.
Violence against people gets messy, because they're people.

However, they aren't intrinsically evil, any more than the Romans invading Gaul were intrinsically evil to the gauls. They're just your enemies. They're just dickheads.

Those orc babies in KotB? They're great. They drive this point home.
LotFP's referee book, now I remember, explicitely says that you might as well just use humans instead of humanoid monsters. I like that, too. 

The other catagory is supernatural, alien stuff. Demons? Well, they're just too weird and fucked up. You can't reason with a demon, it wants you to suffer in the same way you want to keep breathing. They're just evil. They're wrong. They shouldn't exist. Kill them, burn them, purge them with fire.
But they're also not people, not properly. A demon can't reason like a person; it wants to cause suffering and that's all it ever will - indeed ever can - want. It's a fragment of a personality, single-minded and almost robotic (though potentially very intelligent). It exists to cause suffering.
This doesn't only apply to demons. A fire elemental only wants to burn things. That includes you, or your house, or your family. It can't really be reasoned with, it's a force of nature, not a person. Or, in Ynn, the Idea of Thorns. It's a virus that just wants to infect more and more minds. It's not a real person. Alien, dangerous. Not really sentient.
Fighting these things is like fighting a forest fire or a plague.

Interlude while I talk about Absolute Evil.

I hate - fucking hate with a deep-seated loathing - fiction which is about a battle to defeat an absolute evil. And it's so rooted in pop culture these days. Indeed, in culture in general these days. The sith are just evil and you need to defeat them. So are the combine in halo, Chaos in 40k, so are whatever the avengers are fighting today. Ultimate evil means you can do - must do - whatever it takes to defeat it. If you need to compromise your principles (batman hacking everybody's phones to find the joker or whoever), do it. If there's colateral damage where you Fight The Evil, well... you had to to fight the evil. If you need to sacrifice some buildings or some principles or some civilian lives to win, that's justified and it will always be justified because absolute evil provides absolute justification.
Here's what a city looks like after the avengers save it (new york, I think?):

Here's what winning ww2 looked like. (Hiroshima, iirc)

Ruined buildings, dead civilians. Horrific damage. But it was justified, right? They had to do it to stop the axis powers. That makes it OK, right? They were Evil. Right?

But that's where we are as a culture, still. Our enemies aren't merely our enemies, who want things we don't. They're the Evil Other.
Us vs them, good vs evil. Don't negotiate with terrorists. Punch nazis. SJWs and/or the alt-right are ruining pop-culture so we dox the shit out of them. If you don't like what's on TV its Fake News, but it's OK to distort things as much as you need in order to win the propaganda wars. It's justified because they're the baddies and we have to win.
Fuck it.
Fuck everything about it.
Pop-culture reflects and influences how we see the world as a society. Right now, we seem to love apocalyptic struggles of good vs evil. And, right now, if you're online, like... ever... you will see the Internet Culture Wars raging. Brexit and trump and all of that. Our politics seem to have no room for compromise or cooperation, just a constant struggle to pull control to your side, and if you must sacrifice ethics to do it, you sacrifice ethics. I'm pretty left wing, but the state of left-wing discourse online is so virulently hostile, poisonous and thought-policey that I'm sick of it. And then the other side is... baffling to me in how openly horrible they are.


Ahem. Games about orcs and treasure. Let's make this relevant to tabletop gaming.
(can you tell I've not slept in 18 hours?)


I love vampire the masquerade because it makes it clear that there is no good side. The camarilla are hypocrites and ruthlessly authoritarian, the sabbat claim to be saving the world but spend a hell of a lot of time doing masacres and not much tracking down antediluvians, the indie clans are mostly serving ancient blood-gods who have no good intentions, and the anarchs are short sighted idiots who will ruin everything for everybody. Nobody is in the right, everything is messy. Talk and maneuver because you can't afford to go in guns blazing.

A big strength of oldschool games, to me, is their amorality and the freedom that grants for characterization and decision making. Trying to add mechanical, world-imposed morality to the game weakens that. Trying to present enemies as intrinsically evil weakens that.
Enemies that are just there to fight and be die and give XP are boring, and they're thematically shallow. 'It's a monster, I guess we fight it' will never be as engaging an experience as 'OK, what's up with these guys? should we fight them?'.
In an OSR game I'm able to just explore cool dungeons and get treasure. Why fuck that up?

And, most importantly, fuck the fucking marvel films.