I am really enjoying being a player in tabletop games, both with my group and by myself in solo where I play side stories of my same character, but I have a problem trying to roleplay and adapt to a non modern morality in the fantasy world.
like adventurers tend to go into tombs and pillaged stuff for gold, and often have a justification for getting stronger, but it seems very morally gray. I feel like actually good people would just leave that stuff like magic alone. How do I make myself play a villainous character, or more neutral and self-centered one?
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On the contrary, good people would claim the treasures or artefacts within for a noble purpose, or even to deny them to the forces of darkness infesting the locale in which they lie. If you're looking for a less heroic excuse for dungeon diving, it's simple - you're a sellsword looking for a quick buck with minimal legal difficulties, ergo you raid an old ruin long abandoned to the elements and whatever foul creatures have since moved in, kill shit, and have your financial future set for however long the haul lasts.
Simple. There is always justification either personal or as a group for most actions.
If people are being threatened by monstrous hordes, it could be argued its is immoral to leave some enchanted blade in a tomb when it could be used to defend the living.
Pragmatism is almost always valued over what we would call the moral.
If orcs existed in real life, they would have been genocided. Modern day, we would call this wrong. We could say that they could have been taught to be better.. But to the people who lived under their attacks, and had their families butchered. They would want to prevent it from ever happening again.
This is nonsense.
>The Socialomicon
>“Can I kill the baby kobolds?”
When people are asked to name a historical point that D&D most closely represents, they’ll usually say something like “The Middle Ages”, or perhaps a date between 1000 AD and 1500 in Europe. Truth be told, to find a historical period which has a social setup anything like D&D, you’re going to have to go back. Way back. D&D represents a period in history that is most closely identifiable with the Iron Age: the landscape is dotted with tribes and aspiring empires, the wilderness is largely unexplored, and powerful individuals and small groups can take over an area without having a big geopolitical hubbub about it. The source material for the social setting of D&D is not Hans Christian Andersen, it’s Homer’s The Iliad and Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. In the backdrop of early historical empire building, crimes that modern humans shake their heads at the barbarity of are common place – even among the heroes. D&D at its core is about breaking into other peoples’ homes, possibly killing the residents, and taking their stuff home with you in a sack. And in the context of the period, that is acceptable behavior for a hero.
>Living With Yourself After a Raid
The goblins have gone and conducted a raid on your village in full force. They rode in, took a bunch of the sheep, killed some of the people, set fire to some of the cottages, and rode away again with Santa Sacks filled with this year’s crop. And they laughed because they thought it was funny. And now that your elder brother has been slain you want to dedicate yourself to the eradication of the Goblin Menace and begin the training necessary to become a Ranger so that you can empty the goblin village from the other side of the valley once and for all.
Par for the course D&D, right? Wrong! Killing all the goblins isn’t just an Evil act, it’s unthinkable to most D&D inhabitants. This is the Classical Era, and actually sowing the fields of Carthage with salt is an atrocity of such magnitude that people will speak of it for thousands of years. In the D&D world, goblins raid human settlements with raiding parties, humans raid goblin settlements with “adventuring parties”, and like the cattle raiding culture of Scotland, it’s simply accepted by all participants as a fact of life. When your city is raided by other groups of humanoids, it’s a bad thing for your city. Orcs may kidnap some of your relatives and use them as slaves (or food), and many of your fellow villagers may lose their lives defending lives and property important to them. But that’s part of life in the age, and people just sort of expect that sort of thing.
What the actual frick are you on about?
If you have a known group of raider goblins, then any decent lord would go clear them the frick out.
People did not tolerate raiders as "just a part of life"
>decent lord
>referencing Middle Ages when the OP is specifically using Iron Ages norms
>Vikings looted up and down the coast with virtual impunity for centuries
>told his 'local lord' to suck it
In the Iron Age that absolutely was the case. And genocide was a horrific thing even for the day and age.
>Razing Hell: When Genocide is the Answer
Sometimes in history there would come a great villain who just didn’t get with the program. The Classical example is the Assyrians. Those bastards went around from city to city stacking heads in piles and levying 100% taxation and such to conquered foes. They became. . . unpopular, and eventually were destroyed as a people. That’s the law of the jungle as far back as there are any records: if a group pushes things too far the rules of mercy and raiding simply stop applying. Goblins, orcs, sahuagin. . . these guys generally aren’t going to cross that line. But if they do, it’s OK for the gloves to come off. In fact, if some group of orcs decides to kill everyone in your village while you’re out hunting so that you come home to find that you are the last survivor, other humanoids (even other Evil humanoids like gnolls) will sign up to exterminate the tribe that has crossed the line.
Cultural relativism goes pretty far in D&D. Acceptable cultural practices include some pretty over-the-top practices such as slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. But genocide is still right out. That being said, some creatures simply haven’t gotten with the program, and they are kill-on-sight anywhere in the civilized world or in the tribes of savage humanoids. Mindflayers, Kuo-Toans, and [Monster] simply do not play the same game that everyone else is playing, mostly because their culture simply does not understand other races as having value. And that means that even other Evil races want to exterminate those peoples as a public service. Like the Assyrians, they’ve simply pushed their luck too far, and the local hobgoblin king will let you marry his daughter if you help wipe them out of an area.
Solitary intelligent monsters often get into the same boat as the Kuo-Toans. Since the Roper really has no society (and possibly the most obscure language in Core D&D), it’s very difficult for it to understand the possible ramifications of offending pan-humanoid society. So now they’ve done it, and they really haven’t noticed the fallout they are receiving from that decision. Ropers pretty much attack anything they see, and now everyone that sees a roper attacks them. In the D&D worlds, ropers are on the brink of extinction and it probably never even occurs to them that their heavy tendrilled dealings with the other races have pushed them to this state.
>Temporal Authority in D&D
“Kill the dragon, marry the princess, rule the kingdom.”
D&D is set in an essentially Iron Age setting. If your group (or even you personally) are known to be hardcore enough, you actually do rule the lands extending as far as you can reach. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need a bureaucracy, because there’s still relatively little that you can do on your own. That administrative staff is necessary, it’s there to tell people what you want them to do, and to tell you when they aren’t doing it. In fairy tales, as well as D&D, the guy (or girl) who saves the kingdom by slaying the big monster marries the child of the local king. This is usually because the current king is himself a powerful dude with a PC class himself. His children may be aristocrats, and by marrying them off to a powerful adventurer who may well be able to take his kingdom by force, he’s preserved his own position and kept his family from being set on fire. Nominally in this situation the crown is still in the previous king’s family and moving to the next generation normally. You may even get a title like “Prince Consort” or something – but everyone knows that you are running the show because you can slay dragons. No one is going to say it, but the princess’ only real job in this scenario is to. . . keep you happy. And she’s not even the only one that has that job. Surprisingly, the previous king is actually fine with that, because if his daughter has Aristocrat levels, that really is the best he can expect for her.
>In fact, if some group of orcs decides to kill everyone in your village while you’re out hunting so that you come home to find that you are the last survivor, other humanoids (even other Evil humanoids like gnolls) will sign up to exterminate the tribe that has crossed the line.
Wow. No. It would be rare to find a savage tribe of feral (demi/meta) humans or "monsters" who would suddenly ennoble themselves and set aside their entire agenda in order to selflessly take part in a coordinated group effort by all other extant tribes to, uh, completely exterminate one tribe that completely exterminated another.
No. If they talked about it at all, they would just remark about how the deleted tribe deserved extinction because they were weak, and how these new developments affect their tribe (like if the ousted tribe's land is now available to encroachment for hunting, or if the ousted tribe inflicted enough casualties on their enemies to be threatened or destroyed in turn by another tribe).
A lot of your other stuff is pretty good, but this makes you seem like some sort of mindbroken leftist digging a well and then poisoning it.
Hopefully that is not the case.
Oh I'm talking about real morality, not /misc/-tard morality. I should have mentioned that.
Which one are you? The wall of text guy or the beaver guy? OP?
>If orcs existed in real life, they would have been genocided.
They do, but they weren't; instead, the, uh, goblins ended up doing something very clever...
You see, orcs are warlike savages, with different tribes fighting each other often. Raids are common. Orcs would raid another orc tribe, and any enemy orcs they didn't kill would be captured as prisoners by the victorious orcs.
The victorious orcs would then sell their orc prisoners to goblin merchants in exchange for gold, weapons and whatever else they felt would prove helpful in capturing more orc prisoners to sell into slavery for further profits.
The goblins would then resell their orc slaves to other goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, et cetera, who would then set them to work as slaves, extracting luxury resources from the cultivation of certain plants -- sugar, tobacco, cotton -- for processing & sale at great profits (thanks in part to the margins on labor).
In time, however, the other peoples of the realms declared slavery illegal, and the goblins kvetched. No longer able to profit from their freed slaves, they instead orchestrated a multigenerational campaign of revenge.
By fooling everyone into thinking that the offspring of formerly enslaved orcs would not simply revert to violent savagery in the absence of the lash, the goblins set the stage for what eventually became an enormous war without fronts, as the enormous orc population -- burgeoning thanks to the misplaced charity & compassion of the non-orcs, much to the goblins' glee -- violently fought its hosts in the streets, demanding not equal rights, but racial superiority over their very liberators.
Orcs, man...
>I feel like actually good people would just leave that stuff like magic alone
Why?
>How do I make myself play a villainous character, or more neutral and self-centered one
Go into dungeons and acquire treasure and magic for self centered or neutral reasons. why the confusion?
>picrel to balance out that vomit you made me look at OP.
>I feel like actually good people would just leave that stuff like magic alone.
huh? why
>like adventurers tend to go into tombs and pillaged stuff for gold, and often have a justification for getting stronger, but it seems very morally gray. I feel like actually good people would just leave that stuff like magic alone.
Depends on the context, if you present this as simply tomb robbing, then yeah, but maybe they're removing magic items so other, presumably less responsible parties, don't gain them. Or maybe they are removing magic items or killing monsters that are causing problems for the surrounding area.
The standard fantasy adventure setting is borderline post-apocalyptic. Whether it's the fall of Netheril or Atlantis or a thousand other permutations, there USED to be a powerful and advanced cosmopolitan empire covering much of the land.....that no longer exists. Civilization is in decline, much of the world is unmapped or untamed wilderness, and just riding around the countryside you can come across fallen keeps and strongholds and ruins of a better time. It's not seen as evil or immoral to go into these fallen ruins in search of useful tools/weapons/etc for the same reason it's not considered immoral for survivors of a plane crash to loot the cabin and turn the broken wings into shelter against the rain.
Not actually reading your thread OP but that Gnoll lady is hot and has cute footpaws
We need less sperging about muh dnd and warhammertards bawling their eyes out, and more gnoll/hyena ladies on this board
I don't normally say this, but this one REALLY looks like ahe kidnaps human male fighters
>like adventurers tend to go into tombs and pillaged stuff for gold, and often have a justification for getting stronger, but it seems very morally gray
This is an old thing though, stealing from graves has been looked down on since effectively forever from what I can tell. Graverobbing is bad, although breaking into an enemy's underground fortress (dungeon) is less questionable. We are at that point talking about something more like a war, in which looting an enemy's fortress is hardly morally questionable. He would do the same to you, if you were to lose.
War is bad, the nature of looting dungeons in a way displays that.
>good people would just leave that stuff like magic alone
This depends entirely on how magic works in a given setting. If magic functions as real world magic does, where you are constantly risking your life and sanity by petitioning strange spirits with blood sacrifices; Yes, good people would stay away from magic. If magic functions more like "science" where you attempt to manipulate the natural world around you, it becomes more morally gray but not inherently evil. Sooooo Idk, most likely yes if we're thinking about it.
>How do I make myself play a villainous character or more neutral and self-centered one?
You seem moral and conciencous, not a fricking homosexual like so many OPs, so my advice is: Don't. Play brave heroes in your campaigns like those in old myths and chivaleric cycles.
Either that, or try and put yourself in the shoes of a more pragmatic, lower class soldier who has no choice but to steal to eat sometimes. He isn't evil, doesn't even need to be particularly egotistical, just desperate.