The evil of Lawful Good

[Drache64]

Just curious if anyone else has witnessed the evil of Lawful Good characters attempting to smite evil...

What I commonly see (as player and DM) is Lawful Good characters act out against players who don't meet their alignment in an evil way.

Example:
Party of Lawful Good characters and a true neutral character are traveling with an NPC, the NPC steps on a trap and dies. The neutral player shrugs "sucks to be him" and loots the pockets of the dead man.

The Lawful Good player plants an axe in the back of the neutral players skull. People without empathy are evil they reason...

Example 2:
A dragon born lawful good paladin introduces himself to a chaotic evil Bard. The Bard explains he doesn't believe in religion. The paladin uses detect alignment and detects the evil in the Bard.. so he runs him through with his sword...


What's your opinion, are they doing it wrong? (I think so)

Do you have any funny stories?

[Lord Raziere]

Thats not Lawful Good, that alignment is Stupid Paladin. and while there are stories of them, they ain't funny.

[Drache64]

Thats not Lawful Good, that alignment is Stupid Paladin. and while there are stories of them, they ain't funny.

I understand that, I was the neutral player in the first example and the DM in the second.

This mentality unfortunately seems very common amongst players.

[King of Nowhere]

This mentality unfortunately seems very common amongst players.

I've never seen it, and it's not brought up often in the forum. it's not that common. you must have found a statistical anomaly

[Drache64]

I've never seen it, and it's not brought up often in the forum. it's not that common. you must have found a statistical anomaly

Yeah I've played with 5 different groups and people in Arizona, maybe it's a local thing?

[Mr Beer]

First example is a player being a jerkface to another player, it's not so much an alignment issue as out of game issue. Also it's grossly over the top and not lawful good at all. Lawful good doesn't mean randomly murdering people for jaywalking.

Second one is more dickery if the Bard is another player but if not might be OK depending on exact circumstances.

I think a lawful good person can approach problems with brutal violence (D&D is high on violence anyway) but it should be tempered with mercy. Assassinating random people is not lawful good.

[Studoku]

Thats not Lawful Good, that alignment is Stupid Paladin. and while there are stories of them, they ain't funny.

Also known as Lawful Stupid.

This is less an issue with lawful good and more an issue of stupid players. Bad players are just as responsible for the lolrandom behaviour of Chaotic Stupid.

[Psyren]

This mentality unfortunately seems very common amongst players.

It's not - you're just unlucky. I'd also wonder what age group you typically play with, because resorting instantly to PvP over looting a corpse doesn't seem particularly mature.

[Drache64]

It's not - you're just unlucky. I'd also wonder what age group you typically play with, because resorting instantly to PvP over looting a corpse doesn't seem particularly mature.

I was 20 when I was attacked by the 50ish woman lawful good player.

The paladin was 17 when I was DMing at age 26

What made me want to post this was a story on YouTube of a whole party of Lawful Good players acting quite evil to an evil player.

https://youtu.be/EpoYU8udILs

Seeing as it's easy to find stories of this and I have my own example, perhaps people who come to this community are just more reasonable than what I've been seeing.

Personally I play lawful good as one who simply is bound to do good based on his alignment.

[Inchhighguy]

This is not the 'evil' of Lawful Good, just the extreme.

The world of D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world. It is NOT Earth in the 21st century.

Example one: Killing a corpse looter. This is a perfectly fine thing for a Lawful Good person to do. It sure is moraly wrong to loot the dead. And as D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world...the punishment is death.

More so, in a world where you can detect and know, with 100% certainty that a person IS Evil or Good, it is perfectly fine to kill a person of an opposing alignment. Again, D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world.

Simply put, in the D&D world Good and Evil don't mix.....they kill each other.

[Drache64]

This is not the 'evil' of Lawful Good, just the extreme.

The world of D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world. It is NOT Earth in the 21st century.

Example one: Killing a corpse looter. This is a perfectly fine thing for a Lawful Good person to do. It sure is moraly wrong to loot the dead. And as D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world...the punishment is death.

More so, in a world where you can detect and know, with 100% certainty that a person IS Evil or Good, it is perfectly fine to kill a person of an opposing alignment. Again, D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world.

Simply put, in the D&D world Good and Evil don't mix.....they kill each other.

Lol see, I'm not the only one running into people with this mindset.

[Anymage]

#1: Since you're here, it's safe to assume that the name Miko means something to you. She wouldn't exist if the trope of the paladin with the holy avenger stuck up her backside wasn't a thing. We do know the stories.

#2: Oftentimes, problematic players will jump on any bit of story/setting fluff to justify why being disruptive is just "good roleplaying". We've all seen it with LG, and truthfully we've all seen it a lot more with CN.

#3: Paladin specifically has a problem where some players have been primed to think that their characters will fall if they aren't extremists.

[denthor]

In 2nd edition there was a little known rule Palsdins could not strike the first blow. They must be attacked first hit or miss. They both should have fallen then and there


For the corpse looter. Digging up a corse would be a let me give you the flat of my sword till you stop. To outright kill no to strike first no

You need to ask the second one if a bartender is an evil man would he kill that one?

[False God]

Lawful: Does the act in question violate the law?
Good: Is the act in question evil?

It's possible a corpse-looter is both in violation of the law, and there's probably a strong chance the act is considered evil, or at least non-good if it is against the law.

The question really becomes: what is the paladin entitled (under the same law) to do about it?

The problem with most games and paladins is that they answer the first question, but not the second. Is robbing a store punishable under the relevant law by death? And if it is, who's the arbiter of the punishment? Is the paladin a duly-deputized enforcer of the relevant law? And if he is, what authority does he have under the law?

I agree that the pseudo-medieval times D&D operates under tends to favor a more Hobbsian outlook where life is "cruel, brutish and short".

BUT, the inclusion of strong laws means we need to assess where the paladin's position on the authoritarial ladder is. A paladin may only have the authority to arrest the law-breaker and turn them in to the nearest outpost. A paladin may have the authority to do nothing at all. A paladin may have the authority to kill on sight, for even the slightest legal or moral violation.

Without answers to those questions, we're really only left to wonder.

[Drache64]

Lawful: Does the act in question violate the law?
Good: Is the act in question evil?

It's possible a corpse-looter is both in violation of the law, and there's probably a strong chance the act is considered evil, or at least non-good if it is against the law.

The question really becomes: what is the paladin entitled (under the same law) to do about it?

The problem with most games and paladins is that they answer the first question, but not the second. Is robbing a store punishable under the relevant law by death? And if it is, who's the arbiter of the punishment? Is the paladin a duly-deputized enforcer of the relevant law? And if he is, what authority does he have under the law?

I agree that the pseudo-medieval times D&D operates under tends to favor a more Hobbsian outlook where life is "cruel, brutish and short".

BUT, the inclusion of strong laws means we need to assess where the paladin's position on the authoritarial ladder is. A paladin may only have the authority to arrest the law-breaker and turn them in to the nearest outpost. A paladin may have the authority to do nothing at all. A paladin may have the authority to kill on sight, for even the slightest legal or moral violation.

Without answers to those questions, we're really only left to wonder.

THIS.

love it.

And to answer the corpse looting more specific, her stated reason for killing my character had nothing to do with corpse looting, it was very specifically the lack of empathy

[JNAProductions]

Yeah, that's not Lawful Good. In either case.

In the first case, to me, the most Good and Lawful thing to do is this:

Spoiler: LG Behavior

Show

In character, tell the other player "You'll be returning those belongings to their next of kin as soon as we're out of this dungeon."

In the second case, while someone pinging Evil on your Evilometer is certainly someone you should watch out for and be aware of what they're doing... Well, if you want a GOOD example of Lawful Good, read Dresden Files. Specifically, look for a chap named Michael Carpenter.

[False God]

THIS.

love it.

And to answer the corpse looting more specific, her stated reason for killing my character had nothing to do with corpse looting, it was very specifically the lack of empathy

The in-character reasoning for it doesn't really matter. If they're a duly-deputized enforcer of the law, and you broke the law, their reason need not be "you broke the law". If their authority extends to "death" it doesn't necessarily mean they're mandated to kill you. They might be authorized to require repayment of the loss, it might mean the law is functionally at their whim to enforce. Maybe they like you, and decide not to enforce it at all. It's not uncommon in modern society for people to get a pass on certain laws because they are clever, pretty, funny, or the enforcer in question likes them.

In a time when the laws are even more subject to the whims of the enforcer, if the law quite literally says "you can choose to enforce it, or not, and to what degree" then the paladin is at least on the legal spectrum, within their rights to do any of those things or none. Judge, jury, executioner. Or maybe just probation officer and social worker.

Which is again why it's important to note what the paladins legal authority is, which most games never do, which is why we often have reports of "lawful stupid" or "lawful jerkface". What the laws are matter far less than what the paladin is authorized to do about them.

[Koo Rehtorb]

People conflate "lawful" with "agents of the law" way too often. Lawful as an alignment doesn't mean "always follows the law", it means that you believe in a world structured by order. That often means working within the law is preferable, but you're under no particular obligation to consider yourself beholden to it if the law of the land, or lack of law, is getting in the way of enacting a more orderly world.

[Drache64]

The in-character reasoning for it doesn't really matter. If they're a duly-deputized enforcer of the law, and you broke the law, their reason need not be "you broke the law". If their authority extends to "death" it doesn't necessarily mean they're mandated to kill you. They might be authorized to require repayment of the loss, it might mean the law is functionally at their whim to enforce. Maybe they like you, and decide not to enforce it at all. It's not uncommon in modern society for people to get a pass on certain laws because they are clever, pretty, funny, or the enforcer in question likes them.

In a time when the laws are even more subject to the whims of the enforcer, if the law quite literally says "you can choose to enforce it, or not, and to what degree" then the paladin is at least on the legal spectrum, within their rights to do any of those things or none. Judge, jury, executioner. Or maybe just probation officer and social worker.

Which is again why it's important to note what the paladins legal authority is, which most games never do, which is why we often have reports of "lawful stupid" or "lawful jerkface". What the laws are matter far less than what the paladin is authorized to do about them.

This person was a wizard from her own land where her level 20 sorcerer was Queen

[Pleh]

I always felt that any LG character with no sense of mercy does not understand their alignment. Some creatures may be definitively, physically comprised of evil and mercy just has no context, but a fellow mortal adventurer is not that case.

The Paladin should be first offering a warning unless they have a real reason to think that anything short of killing this person now will likely result in the Paladin's death. Maybe if they were facing a bandit who expressed intentions of robbing them or a troll intent on eating them, this would be reasonable. A person committing nonviolent crimes or having an evil alignment is not an active threat by itself. That's reason for the Paladin to not associate with the character, not to outright kill them. Someone should leave the party.

Not to mention an axe to the back of the head against an unsuspecting ally is distinctly dishonorable (some paladins might care more than others, but few wouldn't care at all). Even if you intend on killing them, no ambushes. Announce your challenge and let them either renounce their crimes (drop the stolen loot) or face imminent justice.

If in fighting them, they surrender (and you are given reason to believe their surrender is genuine), you also more than likely must stop. They have pleaded for mercy and demonstrated compliance. Denying mercy in this instance is non-good (not necessarily evil, but trending that way).

If you fight them down to low health, you should probably switch to nonlethal damage if it is at all reasonable. Mercy also dictates the avoidance of excessive force, so if the foe is already beaten, why take their life as well? Simply subdue them and set right their wrongdoing.

But at the very least, player to player etiquette dictates that you should warn a fellow player before the action is taken that the other character would have zero tolerance for the behavior. It's just bad form to ambush your fellow gamers that way, since they likely would choose to act differently if they were aware that the other character feels that way. Kind of the same idea as asking the DM question, "are you sure?"

[Max_Killjoy]

Classic "morality is a tag" actions.

"We're the Good Guys, so what we do is Good." is a powerful enabler of evil.

[LibraryOgre]

Classic "morality is a tag" actions.

"We're the Good Guys, so what we do is Good." is a powerful enabler of evil.

Essentially, it's "morality as a team", rather than an actual description of behavior. If your "good" doesn't actually act "good", only oppose "evil", then you're playing Team Morality, not morality-as-written.

The solution is to make clear to your players how you're playing good, evil, law, and chaos. What do those mean, and how do you view them acting.

[KineticDiplomat]

We could no doubt expound at length about the perils of Utopian thought and types who embrace it, but since I’m sure you’ve heard it already, let’s touch another point:

This is yet another one of D&Ds limiting factors that generally constrain it to a very narrow set of story types. The alignment system was meant to, largely, let Aragon kill orcs without having to worry about it. It does not handle Solomon Kane or Jaime Lannister very well at all. You CAN get Fall-From-Grace, but only if the rest of table and the GM are willing to deconstruct the alignment system to begin with.

Which tends to either pigeonhole players - “you must act in alignment” or give them free chicken for excuses “I’m just acting in my alignment.”

I strongly recommend either:

1) Deconstructing the Alignment Sustem with your table.

2) If you can’t do that, define table limits.

3) Play a game that isn’t D&D. Find a system with better RP. Which is basically all of them.

[RazorChain]

Just curious if anyone else has witnessed the evil of Lawful Good characters attempting to smite evil...

What I commonly see (as player and DM) is Lawful Good characters act out against players who don't meet their alignment in an evil way.

Example:
Party of Lawful Good characters and a true neutral character are traveling with an NPC, the NPC steps on a trap and dies. The neutral player shrugs "sucks to be him" and loots the pockets of the dead man.

The Lawful Good player plants an axe in the back of the neutral players skull. People without empathy are evil they reason...

Example 2:
A dragon born lawful good paladin introduces himself to a chaotic evil Bard. The Bard explains he doesn't believe in religion. The paladin uses detect alignment and detects the evil in the Bard.. so he runs him through with his sword...


What's your opinion, are they doing it wrong? (I think so)

Do you have any funny stories?

Murder is against the law and considered evil in most places as well. But in D&D land this is often considered differently. I got penalised by my DM once because I didn't kill an evil NPC even though I didn't have any proof of she had broken the law or done some evil, just because her race was Evil.

[Mechalich]

This is yet another one of D&Ds limiting factors that generally constrain it to a very narrow set of story types. The alignment system was meant to, largely, let Aragon kill orcs without having to worry about it. It does not handle Solomon Kane or Jaime Lannister very well at all. You CAN get Fall-From-Grace, but only if the rest of table and the GM are willing to deconstruct the alignment system to begin with.

In fairness to D&D there are an awful lot of things in the Monster Manual that truly are unmitigated horrors you can kill without worrying about, mostly notably evil outsiders and the overwhelming majority of undead. It's true that the various 'goblinoid' races have been rather significantly humanized over time, but even those, in the same way as perfectly human bandits, can be presented as things that will generally attack first and can be fought with suitably lethal force without any difficulty until they run away.

The big problem D&D has is in dealing with intermediate force or no force scenarios of evil - the latter including both mundane crimes like fraud and various supernatural ills such as mind control. This is both an issue of greater nuance being a challenge in gameplay, and a system problem that in D&D its hard to find appropriate punishments other than death - corporal punishment for one is fairly useless given the hit point system. Traditional dungeon crawls don't really offer any way to hand someone over to the authorities or to even safely restrain them at all (in D&D video games, enemies that you rarely spare from death tend to mysteriously vanish offscreen). Likewise, at high-levels you have the standard superhero problem of individual entities too powerful for society to reasonably contain without cheats like inhibitor collars.

Generally, I feel that most GMs should avoid presenting their tables with alignment-based conundrums unless they've previously made it very clear what alignments mean in their game and how they're going to hand them. Also, I feel that all D&D players should be cautioned against extreme stances. PCs are meant to be fairly ordinary people, they aren't alignment-exemplar outsiders. The average lawful good paladin finds even a Hound Archon frightfully intense, while the relentless cold-blooded scheming of a Osyluth would shock and horrify your average tyrannical warlord.

[Berenger]

[...] Again, D&D is a violent, brutal, bloody world.

Simply put, in the D&D world Good and Evil don't mix.....they kill each other.

There is so much so much wrong with this statement. "The D&D world" does not even exist. D&D is a system. You mean a setting. There are multiple settings and they differ greatly from each other.

[Worgwood]

Killing someone over the perceived infraction of a moral code is certainly "Lawful", but it isn't "Good", IMO. And committing an act of unprovoked murder is neither Lawful nor Good, regardless of what your Detect Evil tells you. In fact once you start dealing in moral extremes, regardless of your intentions, you cease to be Good.

Of course, morality is subjective, and everybody has their own idea of what Good and Evil are. D&D is a world of black and white - but it's also one also drenched in shades of grey, so it can be a little hard to find your niche there as a Good character, let alone a Paladin. Plus, it's very tempting as a GM to punish characters for making moral choices (that bandit you spared has killed again!), and because a lot of players (in my personal experience) like to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions, they tend to only do Good when they're sure their bases are covered.

Like many people, I think there are a lot of problems with the alignment system overall, but one of the big ones is that people forget that your alignment is not set in stone. Yours can change, and with work, you could influence others to change. With that said, combat is one of the centerpieces of D&D, and very few players I know would like to invest time into watching the Paladin try to rehabilitate a thief, bandit, goblin, orc, or even a demon or devil. There are other RPGs out there if you're looking to ask or answer questions of morality.

Plus, as others have said, it's pretty hard to punish evildoers in a world where everything short of killing them is a slap on the wrist.

[shawnhcorey]

Alignment is just the colour of your team's shirts. They all employ the same actions with the same results. Alignment is nothing but a way to screw over the players.

[King of Nowhere]

the corspe-looting is especially egregious, since the party (and by extension the paladin) kill foes and loot their corpses on a regular base

The solution is to make clear to your players how you're playing good, evil, law, and chaos. What do those mean, and how do you view them acting.

I don't know. If they are sane individuals, there should be no need.
And against problem players, nothing works.

[MoiMagnus]

Just curious if anyone else has witnessed the evil of Lawful Good characters attempting to smite evil...

What I commonly see (as player and DM) is Lawful Good characters act out against players who don't meet their alignment in an evil way.

Example:
Party of Lawful Good characters and a true neutral character are traveling with an NPC, the NPC steps on a trap and dies. The neutral player shrugs "sucks to be him" and loots the pockets of the dead man.

The Lawful Good player plants an axe in the back of the neutral players skull. People without empathy are evil they reason...

Example 2:
A dragon born lawful good paladin introduces himself to a chaotic evil Bard. The Bard explains he doesn't believe in religion. The paladin uses detect alignment and detects the evil in the Bard.. so he runs him through with his sword...


What's your opinion, are they doing it wrong? (I think so)

Do you have any funny stories?

Standard D&D does not consider those behaviour as good.

Some RPG tables prefer morality systems that are more consequentialist (as long as the end result is an improvement, you can torture and kill as you want) or subjective (as long as you're convinced you're acting for the good, you are good). But unless you want to end up in morality debates like "was [insert well-known dictator] actually lawful good?", I would not advise for them.

But on top of "this is not lawful good", this would not be an adequate behaviour if the character was lawful evil.

The alignment of your character (and whatever is written anywhere) does not allow you to be a jerk with the other players. You always have full control on this non-existing concept called "your character". Whatever your character do, you always had the choice to decide that "your character won't do that in that situation", and find a justification latter on why (friendship? promise?).

There is no "This is how my character act. Sorry for that." Your character can be a jerk, but this does not allow you to behave as a jerk as a player and breaking the game by going to the extreme.