>Evil creatures are far more prevalent than Good; the forces of Good are only able to build kingdoms and carve out lands of peace and safety because Good creatures are able to unite and work together against common foes effectively, while evil creatures refuse to follow one another and backstab each other at the first opportunity
>Good and Evil are balanced forces in the world, each searching for some edge that will give it a way to break the eternal stalemate which the roughly equal populations and power dictates
>Good is the dominant force in the world, and most creatures are naturally inclined to it; Evil must operate largely in the shadows or in disguise, but this plays to Evil's strengths, for it is at its most powerful when it is insidious, using guile and deceit to manipulate Good creatures into destroying themselves and one another
What's your preferred flavor for an alignment-based fantasy world, Veeky Forums?
The first. Gives the player characters a reason to exist.
Parker Lee
All of those combined.
First case describes the relation between barbarism and wild Evil, like orcs, aberrations, beasts and etc.
Second case is more about Chaos and Order, and not necessarily about Good and Evil, and is directly related to the first one.
Last one is about political greed, insidious machinations and evil blasphemous corruption that seeps into Good societies and slowly take them over from the inside.
Lincoln Reed
I have always liked the idea that the forces of evil are far more numerous, but cannot rise to the same heights as the forces of good
Jonathan White
I like the last one because I prefer comfy games, though the first two have their places as well
Oliver Garcia
If I had to pick one, it would probably be the first.
More fun when you are the underdog.
Samuel Thompson
The first. Good can redeem the evil but it is much more difficult than corruption. The problem is, Evil will never triumph because it always defeats itself. The path of evil is futile.
The third. But only for evil campaigns to give the players a reason to not just rape and pillage and actually resolve some problems in ways that aren't just punching them until they stop being a problem.
Christopher Garcia
>What's your preferred flavor for an alignment-based fantasy world, Veeky Forums?
>The 'soft' driving force of a fantasy world is Good vs Evil: personal beliefs between peoples and creatures of varying moralities, dispositions, values, etc.. coming into conflict over such varying opinions and practices- typically made only worse by their lack of context and mutual understanding. Men fighting men, the mechanizations and folly of mortal beings and nothing more- they are their own ruin and reign.
>The 'hard' driving force of a fantasy world is Chaos vs Order: subtle, cryptic, truly ancient and fundamental forces that permeate every facet of their world, reality, from the divine to the mundane. Forces of Chaos and Order, both capable of horrifying acts of unthinkable evil and brilliant acts of staggering good. They tear into one another without remorse, two snakes trying to consume the other whole, and in the sidelines the rippling tides created by these two forces shape the various worlds through the scars and wounds that are left behind.
>The 'third' capitalizing party of a fantasy world is Nature: easily ignored, constantly underestimated, seen as a bystander, but dwelling in the sidelines they secretly monetize and subsume every force in the narrative to their own advantage and survival. Comparatively young, weak, they are ultimately a corrupting, unbiased, force that will consume and consume: Good, Evil, Chaos, Order, all of these are simply tools to be used for their unthinking, slow, smothering, crusade of persistence.
Something like that is my general preference.
Sebastian Hill
>Good and Evil are balanced forces in the world
this
>each searching for some edge that will give it a way to break the eternal stalemate which the roughly equal populations and power dictates
Without this
Adam Murphy
This is a quality post. I like this post. I have nothing more to add.
Adam Baker
I prefer when neutrality is the balance tipper. In a grim and dark world wolves will be a settlement-destroying power apparently working for the forces of evil. But the wolves are not evil, they're starving because of what evil's been up to and squishy farmers are less dangerous to hunt than liches and their skeleton armies.
It also adds a sense of responsability. The village wouldn't be besieged by starving animals if the authorities have paid more attention to the creeping darkness. Evil thrives when good does nothing.
Alexander Lewis
It bothers me when chaos is considered a synonim for evil and order synonimous with good. It smells like fascist propaganda
Luis Perry
What if there is no real chaos? Just society and nature. It's in our nature to be social, but society can destroy nature (too much "order") and nature can destroy society (too much "chaos"). So we must find a balance that lets our instincts and our creativity build upon each other.
Lucas Wright
1 and 3. 1 is that classic old school traditional fantasy story. Good for high fantasy campaigns. 3 is closest to how good and evil were seen historically. Good for historical or low fantasy campaigns. Also, it must be said that Three Hearts and Three Lions is just plain awesome. I hate 2, because the the answer is always the "Balance". It results in stupidity such as if the world were too good, then to restore the balance we would have to commit more murder or something stupid like that. This is just plain stupid wether it's Dragonlance or later Star Wars.
I like these too. Law and Chaos makes far more sense for 2. That's the only time it makes sense to have a "Balance".
Zachary Ross
associating nature with chaos and society with order is another shitty thing to do. We wrship order because we love control. We are weaker and slower than almost all other animals, our strenght is our ability to construct mental models and make predictions. So we definitely look for order, for structure, control. "Chaos" is just what we call when it's impossible or harder to create structures to make predictions and to take control. But nture isn't pure chaos, nature is in a constant state of balance, constantly shifting, but it doesn't lack structure. It's just that it's structures and mechanisms that go againstt our interests. Pur chaos, without structure would lead to nothing, just a constant bubbling of energy, without anything forming from it. It's where we're led due to enthropy. At the same time pure order, is immobility, structure without energy. Any microscopic subatomic vibration would introduce chaos to order. In effect pure order would equal to nothingness. Or to everything cristallized in a single instant, with time no longer existing.
Parker Ross
Isn't this what Alex Jones always preaches?
Carson Gutierrez
Selfishness is the natural order of things IRL, which in humans lends itself towards Evil behaviour
I think fantasy shouldn't always reflect reality, but the best fantasies are ones that have some sort of reflection of what your audience is most familiar with, whether that's concepts understood intuitively in reality or concepts that are simple to grasp but applied with sophistication or polish
Parker Adams
It depends. In general, if it's something I've done for players to interact with and it's small and light on the backstory, probably number 1. For my overall world, it depends by location. I had a whole convuluted paragraph to sort describe it but captures it rather well.
Blake Clark
>Selfishness is the natural order of things IRL no it's not.
Ryan Bennett
>It bothers me when chaos is considered a synonim for evil Actually, lately it tends to be more and more the other way around. Post-modernism a fear of totalitarian regimes has driven us towards systematic cultural mistrust of order in general.
>associating nature with chaos and society with order is another shitty thing to do. Nah, it's pretty fucking logical. Nature/chaos is the default state of being, order/culture is something we, humans, must actually actively CREATE. Sure nature isn't inherently purely chaotic, but it is the original state of being - infinitely complex and complicated - while culture is an attempt to give orderliness to this natural, original state of being.
Factually and objectively wrong.
I prefer worlds where Good and Evil are concepts that people introduce in an attempt to make sense of the world and figure out strategies that they believe could be beneficial to their survival. The moment you make Good and Evil part of the actual cosmology of the universe, you are already robbing the inhabitants of your world - or your players for that matter, of the arguably single most important and valuable agency they should have: moral agency. And that is not only arrogant and usually really stupid, but worse: it's also boring.
Liam Clark
>Nature/chaos is the default state of being no it's not. >but it is the original state of being yes, from which structure arises, and that includes nature.
But from particle spins to planets orbits, from atomic structure to migration patterns, nature is full of structure and order, order that we need in order to live. But it's often an order that we can't control, thus we call it chaos. order= forces that we have reated and that are in our control chaos=forces that are outside our control
Brody Mitchell
>no it's not. It objectively is, actually.
>yes, from which structure arises, and that includes nature. Structure needs cultured cognition. It's something created by the observer, by narrowing down infinite number of potential patterns to few relevant ones. Chaos is not what we can't control. Chaos is that which we can't predict, that which we can't find a pattern to. BIG fucking difference.
