Quote Originally Posted by Keltest View Post
Then I think you failed the exercise when you created those scenarios when asked to generate an obviously and visibly evil antagonist.
Er. Except that there are conflicting exercises. I responded to Satinavian who insisted that "moustache twirling evil is dumb and I wont include it in my game", while at the same time insisting that "any harm done in self interest is evil", by talking about the difficulty this creates, since all enemies who are not "stereotypically evil" enemies will likely be fought for reasons of self interest, so in such a game setting it would be very difficult to have any conflict at all and not have to label most of the participants as "evil".

To which, Icefractal interjected by saying the equivalent of "That's not true, because you could just stock the dungeons with <stereotypical evil monsters> and fight them!", and to which Errorname followed up with something like "it's easy to just come up with <insert list of obviously evil foes to fight>". See? Problem solved!

So yeah... I then looped it back around to the starting point by asking "well, what if they *aren't* all stereotpical evil foes"? You know, the original case I was examining in the first place and which Satinavian proposed.

That's not me failing at any exercise at all. That's me just bringing the whole thing full circle back to where we started. I have repeatedly stated that the only way to make the whole "harm for self interest is evil" is if you actually do fill your game world with "stereotypical evil to fight". But... and this is key, I also pointed out that if you actualy do have that kind of evil in your game world, then there's value in distinquishing it from "folks who do cause harm, for personal gain, but aren't the moustache twirling steroetypical evil types".

My point, in long lumbering and typical fashion, is that whichever way you choose to go, there's still a need for a "gap" in the alignment range that we might call "neutral". Either you game does, in fact, have "evil creatures and people who do evil things for the sake of doing evil because they are just so darnned evil!", in which case "neutral" sits in the gap between "does evil for the sake of doing evil" and "does good for the sake of doing good" *or* your game does not have that form of evil at all, in which case almost all forms of conflct are going to derive around some variation of self interest, and thus self interest can't really be used as a sole determinant of an action being "evil" either.

Either scenario supports my position (that just because someone causes harm in the pursuit of self interest that does not automatically make them evil), it's just the details that change with each one.