Ew

Hey man, they pay me to go kill the wizard saving the world from magic plague, I tell them to fuck off so I won't die. They pay me to go kill a dozen children, yeah, okay, I'll do it. They want me to kill the good mayor of bumfuckville who is bringing the economy back and making it great again, I'll gut him. Who cares about morals. Leave that for the philosophers. You should just worry about not getting burned alive by some shitty fucking mage somewhere.

>compromising your morals at any point

Grey morality is a dumb esoteric concept.
You either have morals and rationalize past them for a greater good, or you don't and you merely act in self interest.

My chivilrous brother of african descent.

Settling for "the best of a bunch of bad choices" is just taking the easy way out. Sure, a good solution to the problem at hand might not be evident, but that's the thing about good. Good takes effort. It's easy to give up on some to save more. It's easy to turn your back to crime if it helps your family out. It's easy to look at injustice and say "I can turn this to my advantage".

Compromising your morals is always easy. But it's never right.

I don't feel strongly about them. However, if I've gone through a massive ordeal to accomplish a goal, and get any of the phrases above from someone, they're getting killed.

genocide is evil, genocide of kender is good and just.

That's not genocide. It's pest control.

>"I did what was needed to be done!"
>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"
>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"

These are fine if used properly. They can be a great setup for a villain who the heroes can empathize with, but as a moral for the heroes it's limited to darker works. It's really easy to use poorly though, so a lot of times when it shows up it seems bad. Can be used to good effect though.

>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"

This is actually the worst thing ever and I hope it dies in a fire never to be remembered.

>moral relativism
>"it's evil but not under x, y, z conditios, or if b... or c... or what if d?..."
Yes that's the gist of it, what's your point?

>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
Can't remember the last time I committed X, m8.

>"I did what was needed to be done!"
>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"
Don't worry, I intend on doing the same thing.

>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"
Will yours do?

> "If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
I always hated this. Played a campaign where the BBEG said that when we cornered him and I didn't hesitate to skewer him. Might as well just kill them to keep them from doing anything worse than they've already done.
Grey morality is fine but that argument always irked me.

So, you're not an adventurer, you're a mercenary, or an assassin. And are bound to get a paladin on your evil ass.

>implying he wouldn't gut the paladin, too
>implying he hasn't also killed a fuckton of evil

Guy's just trying to get paid. He doesn't care.

Sounds pretty neutral evil to me.

>alignment changes dynamically with actions
>he's legit TN because he does just as much good as evil

And self-defense against a good-aligned creature isn't evil. Anyone who says otherwise is a dumdum.

Being neutral doesn't work like that. If you murder a princess because you got paid, and then go save a princess because you got paid, you're still evil. Even assuming those are equal acts, it's clear that he's only in it for the money, and doesn't care about the actual actions he's doing.

Being a greedy sociopath is specifically Evil territory. True neutral won't murder somebody else for solely their own benefit.

That only works if his motivations alter from being altruistic to selfish.

This guy is being a selfish dick no matter what his actual actions are.

He isn't greedy. It's his job. That's like saying the guy working in retail is greedy because he needs the money. Big shock, you need money to buy things you can't produce yourself.

No, his character acts purely in self interest, no matter what. Neutral evil is looking out for number one. He seems pretty neutral evil to me.

Being paid to murder is evil. Alignments aren't as complicated as people try to make them out to be.

Aside from the first one, they all make sense as villainous motives in the context of the character in question. Remember that every villain is the hero of their own story.

>People who view morality as a strict universal binary instead of a series of competing value-systems
>People who know so little about metaethics they aren't even aware they have a value-set, and just take their cultural norms as universal truths
>People who think that acknowledging the above makes you a baby-fucking mass murdering rapist monster.

>A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. She has no love of order and holds no illusion that following laws, traditions, or codes would make her any better or more noble. On the other hand, she doesn’t have the restless nature or love of conflict that a chaotic evil villain has.
Sounds neutral evil to me.
Sounds like you like moral ambiguity.

>Trump meme

Back to /pol/ you fucking crossboard retard.

>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
Fucking moronic, kill this person at once and then fail to become just like him just to prove him wrong, and that his point is senseless. Unless you need to commit some horrible atrocity to kill him forever, like killing an entire country full of people whom he'd implanted fragments of his soul into to obtain immortality, and you are literally only killing him out of revenge, when he's no longer any threat to anyone, then he has no fucking leg to stand on, kill him immediately.

>"I did what was needed to be done!"
Can be justified, if they're honest, and can give proper justification for everything they've done, then you can let them go. Unfortunately most things that do this little line here make all the characters conveniently forget one genuinely horrible thing that this person did out of sheer plot convenience. Remember when Illidan burned down that night elf village at the beginning of Frozen Throne, killing all of its denizens, and then later said "EVERYTHING I HAVE DONE I HAVE DONE FOR LOVE! I NEVER WANTED TO HURT GOOD GUYS", yeah bullshit you killed innocent people chasing demonic power you fucking moron. How about when Kill La Kill tried to white wash Satsuki Kiruin in spite of the fact that she had one of her generals cold bloodedly murder a teenaged student, and then strung up his lifeless corpse outside the school as a warning. Pretty hard to whitewash that, so it was just conveniently forgotten. Again, good if done right, usually shit.

>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"
Is the person insane? Did what they did actually make the world a better place in a way you can now agree was actually ethical? If not, kill the bastard. We could technically advance medicine hundreds or thousands of years if we started performing mengele style experiments. Would this make the world better? Yes. Does that mean we should do it? No, it's unethical. Kill the bastard.

And the guy working in retail doesn't murder people for it. If your job involves killing children and you see nothing wrong with that, you're evil.

If he isn't greedy, then why does he feel the need to accept every job? I'm guessing assassinations tend to pay a lot. Would he really waste time killing children if people weren't paying him a lot of money for it?

If he doesn't care as much about the money and is charging a pittance for assassinations, why not just get a normal job? If he was true neutral, it'd be far easier to get a job as a courier or a spy. Even simple thievery would involve less killing of innocents and allow him to make money, and has the added bonus of not drawing as much ire from paladins.

He is Evil. He isn't just trying to get by. He has a need for a lot of money, or he's simply a sociopath that enjoys killing. Either way, having no qualms about hurting innocents puts him squarely as Evil. Burning down an orphanage and then killing a necromancer doesn't balance that out, even if you only did it for the money.

(Cont)
>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"
Was there actually an impending crisis that could only be averted through misdeeds? Did he actually act to the best of his ability to minimize harm through what he did? Or did he see something bad happening and without telling fucking anyone about it immediately decide to take fate into his own hands and decided all by himself who deserved to die so that the rest could survive? If it's the second one, fucking kill the bastard. We appreciate you saving the world, but maybe do it in a way that isn't fucking retarded.

When the results of the "good" way are worse than the "bad" way, you should consider if the bad way is really all that bad compared to the alternative.

what about a villain that fully believes he does good and can't understand why the PCs are trying to stop him

Dark Heresy campaign has gotten to a point where we've decided that anyone who says "You DONT UNDERSTAND!" probably needs a bolt/sword in the skull to cure their insanity.

The first of these is always the worst. Killing someone very rarely makes you become like them. While it can affect someone psychologically, it's always a dumb thing that's usually only done by the villain as a last-ditch move to get the hero to spare him.

As for the rest, they can work fine in domr settings. People genuinely do have different ideas on what would make the world better. The trouble is that people seem to mistake black morals for grey ones.

Take, for example, a scientist orchestrating events to cause a series of wars and cull the population because wars bring scientific advancement and overpopulation is a problem.

Then, for comparison's sake, have a charismatic leader who has gathered many people from all over the land to form a new kingdom, with very strict laws and rules compared to most of the outside. He's working to expand his territory because the population is growing, but he isn't really oppressing people and the kindom is functioning.

The first is the sort of thing that's rather clearly wrong, though the attempt is made to paint it as grey if the villain continues to make excuses and insist what they're doing is right as they nuke the planet.

The second is something less overtly sinister, the sort of thing where morality is actually grey. It brings into question freedom vs. security, and can actually have sides to the issue without either being right or wrong.

That's sort of the issue I have with 'grey morals'. When people take more black and white issues and try and pretend they're all grey, it just gets annoying. Obviously, every situation is different, and discussing objective morality is a crapshoot at the best of times, but if you want to have grey morals, you should at least try and make both sides seem like they're reasonably trying to do the right thing.

There's not a damn thing wrong with it.

On the rare occasion I actually play D&D, paladins are a banned class and good is a restricted alignment. Alignment is stupid, and people do nothing but use it as an excuse to be the fun police.

>There's something loose in the lower decks of the ship, sir. It's- It's killing us! Jettson the lower decks, or it'll kill everyone! CUT US LOOSE!
>A quarter of the ship are working in engineering. Do you sever the links to the lower decks and consign everyone there under your command to death, or try and see what's going on with armed security forces?

>There's a nuclear device in the city, Sir. And there's enough of them guarding it with their lives that we won't get to them before the safeteys disengage and they can trigger it. They're going to blow up the entire district if we don't strike now. There's still a dozen civilian hostages in the building, but we can level the building and destroy the bomb with an airstrike. There may be some collateral damage.
>Blow up the building and kill some civilians, or try to go in protecting the hostages and risk the whole district?

>He laughs at you, dropping his gun into the rain-soaked street. You can't hear him over the thunder, but you know he's taunting you at managing to kill the witness you were sworn to protect. It can't be traced back to him, and you know he'll get away with it, and start killing again. He'll never get imprisoned. Their blood will be on your hands if you don't do it. You've leveled your own police-standard issue piece to his head. How easy would it be to say he was killed while fighting back?

Grey morals only work if the GM accepts that there's no right (or wrong) answer.

I like grey morality, but I also tend to let my PCs choose whatever they want without coming down on them like a ton of bricks; as long as they can explain their reasoning, it's good.

Sure, bad things can still happen, and if they fuck shit up it has consequences. But no punishing them like they made the 'wrong choice' or some shit. The point of grey-grey is that there isn't one.

>Alignment is stupid
>good is a restricted alignment

So you admit the alignment system is fucked up, and yet you seem to be using it anyway and just banning good? That seems a bit silly.

If anything, I would just say to toss out alignment altogether. If you're playing 4e or 5e, you don't even have to get rid of Paladins, as they're not alignment restricted in those editions.

Dependant upon the tone of the game.
You don't murder your enemies in Saturday Morning Superheroes.
You do so with great gusto and enthusiasm in the 40K RPGs.

>being either a moral relativist or a realist
Shiggy, I sure hope Veeky Forums grows up at some point.

I have a player who keeps trying to derail stuff like this. My campaign was about the PCs being on the evil side of a conflict, but my plan was that they would eventually flip sides once they realized the rebels were in the right.

That didn't happen, because of one asshole.

First, he refused to talk to the prisoners. He gagged them and got people to set guards. Whenever they took someone alive, he would kill them after an interrogation and refuse to let them get a word in the edgeways. He DELIBERATELY ignored scenes like a peasant woman with a starving child and got the party to just go and buy more shit instead.

Like, I get that he didn't want to do that. But he basically spoilt half the campaign for everyone. It was obvious he was FUCKING DOING IT ON PURPOSE, because when the rebels outright sent the PCs evidence, HE BURNED THE EVIDENCE.

Some level of moral ambiguity has to be there, man. Otherwise, like this campaign, it just becomes a series of increasingly violent and depressing hack-and-slash encounters. By the end, when they laid siege to the last free city, the PCs just rode in and killed everyone alongside demon-possessed knights and flew the not-Nazi flag from the palace.

Like, this wasn't the campaign I wanted to run but I had to run it anyway.

Alignment is unforunately tied to game mechanics, so I can't get rid of it without changing the rules. But advertising the fact that retarded smitefags and their lackeys are not allowed dissuades a really toxic crowd from applying for my games.

a villain who has an alien mindset or is massively delusional can work. Some sort of outsider who calmly explained why your world is horrific and needs to be destroyed for example could make for an interesting villain.

Utilitarian morals are good, but often end up being about making other people be the ones who actually make the sacrifices for the greater good.

Avoiding that double standard is the line that one crosses between villain and hero in my books.

>Alignment is unforunately tied to game mechanics, so I can't get rid of it without changing the rules.

A handful of spells isn't really a good case for that. Alignment really doesn't factor into much even in older editions. Banning good is probably the most roundabout solution ever, and it really makes me question your understanding of the whole issue

>not anything personal. Your world is on collision course with ours. Either you all die, or you AND all of us die. What would you do to save your own people?

I save everyone.

How?

>Seal all the bulkheads, teleport everyone out

>Detonate an EMP overhead to disable the electronics, then rescue the hostages

>Cast Zone of Truth and Raise Dead

>inb4 but you don't have access to those things! Your solutions fail because I'm changing the scenario so you can't succeed!

Not enough of the scenario has been fleshed out, so it hasn't been established you can do those things.

So it's irrelevant whether or not you can or can't in this situation. It boils down to this. In a situation were the only feasible option is sacrifice some to save many, and there are no other options, would you do it?

I save everyone

We find a way!

This isn't vidja.

Now you're modifying the stated situation. The stated situation is that you can't. For whatever reason, you can't. What do you do?

Satan to the rescue!

Sacrifice myself. Save everyone.

i'm not guy you're talking to, but depending on the campaign you either save as many as you can and then make peace with the cost of your actions, or call the GM a goatfucker for going out of his way to construct a no win scenario.

Not an option.

You have five seconds to press the big red button, or do nothing. Those are your two options. Nothing else exists.

What do you do?

No win scenarios exist in real life though. Pbviously not often in this dichotomous way, but plenty of situations in my own life have led me to realize the choice is between a lesser of multiple evils. If there is even a choice at all. Negative situations surprise you, and then you're left with figuring out how to make the best of it.

Exactly. This isn't real life. This is a game. I'm sorry for any losses you've had in your life user, but that's part of what makes fantasy so great. It gives you a place where at the end of the day, you can be the hero who finds that third solution so nobody has to die.

That's why I save everyone.

simply put murder the fucktard, grey morals are for those on the black scale trying to be a complete dick about it.

Obviously, but something bad has to happen for the stakes to be raised in the first place. It's why so many fantasy stories start with your quaint little village being destroyed. There has to be some amount of loss involved for it to mean anything.

Also, just so you don't think I'm so kind of scarred autist, I was more talking about shit like when you get a pop quiz and you have the choice of skipping class or trying not to flunk the test too hard.

Winners write history, so everyone I've killed was irredeemably evil.

all morals are grey

Wrong, scholars write history. They decide who was the bad guy and who was the good guy. So be nice to them, or they'll make you look like an illiterate Chad with bad breath for the rest of time.

>Sociopath meme
>Moral relativism meme
Sure is not understanding what either of those things are in here.

In what situation exactly does a DM say "you can't, under any circumstances, save everyone"?

Either come up with circumstances for it, or don't bother treating it like a scenario that exists. Give me access to enough caster levels, and I can save everyone in this world.

Ah le epic try to save everyone but more people die as a result belief

If you're inclined to do good, it's the opposite of what you said.

It's far harder to compromise your morals

like I said, depends on the setting. If it's something like dark heresy you do what you can and possibly role play dealing with the guilt, but if it's something like a lighthearted mutants and masterminds game than you call him a goatfucker for thrwoing a convoluted no win scenario at you out of left field.

also regardless of tone if you do come up with a clever 3rd option and he blantly changes things up so you faill you call him a goatfucker regardles.

Oh and if he makes the paladin fall i'm fairly certain it's justifiable homicide.

>There has to be some amount of loss involved for it to mean anything.

There's a lot more than lives that can be lost user. The happy starting village being cursed with a drought is just as valid as razing everything with a dragon, if not more so.

With the latter, your hero is out for revenge. They have no home to go back to, no family to encourage them. If that drive and anger fades, there's no real consequence left for them. Everyone they cared about is already gone.

With the former, the village is still alive, but dying. The hero can go back at any time, to see the faces of their family and remind them why they're fighting. The drive is always there, because if they fail the quest then the consequences are clear. Everyone they care about is depending on them.

While this gets skewed a bit once you bring the kingdom at large into things, the point is that you don't have to kill people to ensure things have weight.

Why not trying to save others from the same fate? I'm obviously not arguing that every campaign/story regardless of tone should have shit like this. Just that it's perfectly within reason for some to be like that, and it can actually be interesting and engaging for the players to make those choices.

It can be interesting to be faced with those circumstances certainly, however, the key is for it to not be contrived.

The situations where you have 5 seconds to choose whether or not to press a button or two different values of people die aren't very interesting or engaging.

I know, and I would never present that situation in a game. It's just a simplified version of a potential no win scenario because it's awkward to have to explain all the setting and context of the actual situation that might surround it in a game. Just boiling it down to the purely moral/ethical/emotional response and ramifications for the sake of an argument about those things.

Everyone dies on the liferafts.
EMP tech only exists from nuke format. City dies.
It's a modern setting. Speak with dead is inadmissible as evidence and your pet zombie is also not allowed. Bad guy kills and rapes your family then vanishes overseas.

>The heavens and hells are false constructs of false gods.
>I will empty the heavens and scour the hells, and all the dead together will pass to the true afterlife, as the Creator intended.

Is this lawful neutral? Is this right? Wrong?
Assuming that they're correct.

How about instead of "If you kill me, you'll be just like me!", it's "If you kill me, your treasure will be destroyed!"?

>Your solutions fail because I'm changing the scenario so you can't succeed!

Glad we got that out of the way

Yeah, all of those situations are direct results of despair. Chasing after good without possessing the capabilities to achieve it.

Okay this is becoming a tad ridiculous
>I have a forcefield!
>too bad. I brought my dinosaur WHO EATS FORCEFIELD DOGS!

That's the way to get the video game babies to play along, sure, but the former statement is something I think needs to be asked of murderhobos once and a while.

Two people are murdering people who disagree with them. Both sides think they are right and have to do it see their perfect vision of the world come out on top. What, if anything, is actually giving you a moral high ground? If nothing, how do you come to terms with that?

At key points of the campaign dilemnas can be pretty interesting, especially if couched right.

One good one is handing a bad guy over to an indisputably evil ally for "questioning" instead of going to the proper authorities about it, who aren't well equipped to handle the villain. Or if dead, extracting things from his body.

>>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"
It's still killing - you aren't actually saving anyone.

Still, well constructed grey morals are better than pure black or white morals.

If a grey moral character was an antagonist, i'd still kill him though.

>"it's evil but not under x, y, z conditios, or if b... or c... or what if d?..."
Yes, pretty much.
Except you consider euthanasia as completely equal as murder for money.

>>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
0/10
>>"I did what was needed to be done!"
ok
>>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"
ok
"You're doing it wrong, and that's why..."
>>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"
ok

>killing in order to protect your wife and child is evil
This is how stupid you sound.

>you hate the evil overlord because he killed your father
>he was actually an adventurer at the time, your father was an evil overlord
>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
>you see his child in the back room

Might makes right, user.

>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"

I say "suits me fine", then kill you. No, wait, I kill you, then say "suits me fine".

>"I did what was needed to be done!"

I dispense the punishment, then say "So did I"

>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"

You wouldn't mind me punishing you, if that's the case.

>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"

That's right. Prepare to be sacrificed.

>"If you kill me then you will be just like me!"
Virtually never true, and some executions need to happen. The vast majority of them should be done by law. MAYBE you arrest rather than kill him when he surrenders the first time- but if he tries to pull a fast one, blow his head off.
>"I did what was needed to be done!"
Ambiguous situation. Is he actually right?
>"I just wanted to make the world a better place!"
There are legal ways of doing that, though they are admittedly Really Damn Hard.
Also an ambiguous situation.
>"You need to sacrifice some to save the whole!"
This is a hardball case. If he is actually true and it comes down to pick forty people out of fifty to live or risk them all dying 50% of the time, I won't begrudge him for putting me in the ten- though I hope he has the decency to pick himself, too.

Moral ambiguity exists, in the sense that it's hard, extremely hard, to see the long-term effects of your decisions and pick a least-bad-case scenario. That doesn't mean everyone's entitled to be Hitler.

This is chaotic from perspective of false gods and lawful from perspective of the True Creator, same with "Right" and "Wrong".

>Do I have any idea of what might be in the lower decks? Can enough of the engineering crew be rescued without risking the threat spreading to the rest of the ship?

>Do I know any shortcuts in the building the terrorists don't know about? Will the terrorists necessarily activate the bomb as soon as it's armed, or will they try to make demands first?

>What's stopping me from arresting him on suspicion of murder? If this crime can't be traced to him, what crimes can?

Honestly, not really. Why would someone who knows you have a teleporter tell you to sacrifice everyone? Answer: in the actual scenario an ancient evil is on board turning everyone into biocircutry and the whole ship would have died if the commanding officer didn't jettison the engineering bay.
vimeo.com/1019416

Nukes are traditionally shielded from EMP.

When has someone in a noir story had access to raise dead?

Well, I actually rolled a 1d100 for each, but you just failed to hit the target DC each time. If you roll the dice to go for a better option and fail, that's your own fault, isn't it?

>shoot him
>shoot his son
Nope.png

>Do I have any idea of what might be in the lower decks? Can enough of the engineering crew be rescued without risking the threat spreading to the rest of the ship?

Listen to the transcript, and make your own decision.
vimeo.com/1019416

(Fleet Command): Research module? This is the bridge. We’ve got power
fluctuations in your area and the hangar bay. Are you running any tests?

(Research Team): Not that I know of, bridge. Let me che-

(Fleet Command): What was that? What’s going on down there?

(Research Team): Uhh don’t know … give me a second. We were examining surface
material from the alien probe and …

(Fleet Command): What is going on? Now we’ve got biohazard warnings going
off across the lower decks!!! What have you done?

(Research Team): Something’s loose! It’s killing us!! You’ve got to save the
rest of the ship. Jettison the lower decks!

(Fleet Command): Kharak forgive us! Bridge to all stations: Emergency
jettison protocols engaged!

(Research Team): CUT US LOOSE!!!

>Not shooting him and raising his son
It's like you don't want someone to put you back in line when you become an Evil Overlord.
Or, better yet, not becoming an Evil Overlord at all because you're raising your son, unlike your deadbeat mother.