Where'd the good guys go?

[GodBeastX]

I'm not going to disable crap because you can't use your brain for RP.

This whole thread is like a giant red button being pushed that upsets me about people.

I didn't reply with my full thoughts because I was trying to keep my thoughts cool, but I can't be quiet.

Why do we have a thread "Not enough Good IMO" and a bunch more where people are saying the opposite? "Where's the Evil? I don't see any!"

I've just been taking stock of the various factions that I know about in Sundren and noticed a very severe deficiency in Good Guys that actually do anything.

Wrong, Militia, Temples, Random players doing their own good acts, etc. They outnumber the evil NPC/PC count.

Sundren Government - Sells slaves to the Thayans, commisions Thayans to write policy for them (eg on the Drow) something no other government on Faerun would do, Arrests the people (yea ok drow) who have proven themselves friends to Sundren by ridding Sundren of a major menace (Hadavi) and have submitted themselves willingly to the Temple of the Triumvirate to be judged.

- Do not recall slave selling to Thayans.

- They commissioned the red Wizards for information on Drow and practices on how to handle them. PURELY INFORMATION SOURCE. CONSULTATION! Heaven forbid the government actually ask a wizard how to deal with problems! OH NO! Maybe the Government doesn't detect alignment like players do, you know, where everything is black and white?

- Arrest Drow who killed Hadavi? DUH! Did you ever consider that MAYBE THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT SHE DID?! Sure, players are running around talking to each other. I have yet to see players make reports about all of this. So why should the government know? It's not like the Drow walks into Town hall. They saw a Drow, they were hunting it, players came in "YOU GOT THE WRONG DROW" K, so they take it into custody. Police often take people into custody in RL to deal with them and see if they're criminals. Are they BAD GUYS for it? OH NOES!

Thayans - Do I really need to say this. OK Sells drugs, engages in slavery blah blah blah - Bad guys

- Offer magic items and services to governments which helps them deal with menaces like Bloodmaim orcs and Mossclaw and offer trade in the area boosting economy so families can eat. GOOD GUYS! Wait, are we entering a gray area? Something PCs can't enter? Thayans also give a % of their earnings to the government!

- Rememeber, there's only 2 PC Red Wizards.

Banites - Not even gonna go there - Bad guys

Wonderful. And we have only a few PCs that are banites. Because the good guys, who you don't think exist, have killed all the others!

Vampires - Basically Banites with bigger teeth - Bad guys

Heaven forbid we actually have encounter based organizations for PC's to deal with. You know, we should just remove all the kill on sight creatures so that people can just sit around camp fires until a DM decides to spawn something.

Cyricists - Torture, murder,... - Bad guys

I guess it's a good thing this isn't a faction in Sundren. Maybe a DM used them for an event, holy crap! We used a bad guy group for good guys to have fun killing! I bet the DM wouldn't have done it if he knew this thread would show up.

Exigo Merchants - Trading partners with the Thayans (despite the fact that Mulhorandh is at war with Thay ). Willing to sell anything including Lich dust, to anyone, including Cyricists. - Bad guys

Cuz I guess Exigo is aligned politically with Mulhorandi, or that all of it's members are from the province at war with Thay. And I guess there's no way they could have Sundren people in their ranks, along with many other flaws in your statement.

Helmites - Yes good guys but apparently unwilling to actually do anything about any of the above except the vampires.

Maybe because all of the above aren't doing harm to people that people aren't inviting on themselves? Should Helm (L/N) be killing Thayans because some guy decided he wanted to be a Drug Addict? Did you also not think that maybe PCs need to gather proof of misdeeds? "OMG BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING!!" "So we should just take your word for it?" How about the bad guys just start saying every good guy is a slave trader and a drug dealing murderer? OH, BUT THAT WOULD BE UNFAIR! Because YOU know you're not! Maybe you should read up on Torm's Deity description, where it says Tormites have trouble fighting Bane because Bane doesn't just jump out and start problems and give them reason to just kill them. It would also help if maybe some people JOINED the Helm church instead of making grind squads and calling them "Do gooder groups."

Triumvirate - See Helmites.

See above.

So in conclusion we have a SERIOUS lack of any effective good factions. We can't even class the players as factions as they are not able to organise themselves into formal factions there by providing some sort of resistance to the upsurge of evil.

Where are the Good guys and what in the nine hundred and ninety nine hells are they actually doing out there?? Where are the Harpers? Sundren is placed right at the top of the Sword Coast. If any evil faction managed to get an upper hand in Sundren it would be extremely bad for Neverwinter, Waterdeep, heck most of the Sword Coast and thats not even looking at places like Evermeet or the Moonshae Isles.

I realise that it is policy not to allow player controlled factions but could we at least have some good factions given some attention because right now it seems to be that the evil factions are on course for an over all victory and as players we cannot do anything about it because the evil factions are the ones getting DM support thus can do basically anything they like, and have all the powerful NPC's that we don't stand a chance against.

Playing good guys is becoming very depressing because you can't win.

What we have is a serious lack of effective good PCs. Good PCs on Sundren spend more time attacking other good PCs than the evil they're trying to stop! And heaven forbid the Good Guys have to come up with an effective plan to try to thwart evil that doesn't involve swinging a sword. I see evil PCs coming together in quiet and plotting, scheming, doing their thing. I see good pcs coming together and complaining about the weather, and asking if anyone wants to grind cuz they have nothing to do.

Should the DMs just play with each other? I mean, I can make good guys that will figure out all of the bad guy's plots for you and totally take actions themselves if you want. I mean, I can make all the vampires die too and all the mossclaw meet their end. You know, we can make it easy to be a good guy so you have nothing to do all day and you can "Win" sundren. Or you can struggle and actually have to put effort into your shit.

You can't win if you don't try to win. And you won't win the moment you wake up and say "I should win right now."


I've said this once and I'll say it again:

* If you can't accept that evil is hard to remove from it's nest, Sundren is not for you.

* If you can't accept your sword isn't enough to save the world, Sundren is not for you.

* If you like to sit on your ass and complain about evil instead of getting IC and gathering people together to fight it, Sundren is not for you.

* If you can't accept that you may have to take months to finally win, SUNDREN IS NOT FOR YOU!

[Janus]

I just wanted to reply to Rhifox and say how much I apreciated the response. As strange as it may sound I actually like being argued with and have my views challenged. It's the way I form my opinions and I feel they are stronger for it.

I am going to respond to a couple of points here if thats OK.

As an organization, it is neutral at worst. A few of the people in it are disreputable, but on the basis of the organization itself it is not bad. Selling drugs is definitely not bad (sorry, but I believe drugs should be legal, there is nothing morally wrong here at all), and slavery is A) not exactly practiced much in the Enclaves anyway, and B) slavery itself, while morally wrong, isn't necessarily evil, it depends on how the master treats the slave, and can go from well-off house servant to the tortured experiment, and more often than not, it's the former, not the latter.

OK a few points I don't disagree with. I don't disagree that certain drugs should be legal. Cannabis for example. Things like Heroin and Crack I'm afraid I'd strongly disagree with. It is the difference betwen the drugs the Thayan's sell andthe ones the Exigo sell. Thayans seem to sell the hard drugs Exigo the soft drugs.

On the subject of Slavery, it's evil. There is no good form of slavery. There is no light and fluffy side to it. Slavery is destroying another human being for personal gain. There is nothing not evil about that. Regardless of how a master treats a slave that slave has still had to be broken to begin with in order to get them to accept their lot as a slave. That slave does not have one of their fundamental human rights. The right to freedom. It is why slavery is illegal the world over, even with criminals.

We have Cyricists in Sundren? I've only seen one, and it was just an alt.

Yup and my character has the torture marks to prove it.

Everyone is trading partners with the Thayans, because the Thayans are a merchant organization just as Exigo is. Apparently that's a bad thing... evil by association, it seems. By your logic, 100% of the PCs on Sundren are bad because they trade with either/both the Thayans and Exigo.

Good point well made.

They attempted to raid the Enclave and got themselves killed for it. They tried to be heroes, and found out the hard way that being a hero is not easy, it's more often than not a path to martyrism.

I was under the impression that this was a PC led attempt not something organised by the Harpers as an organisation. Yes one of the Players was a Harper, but acting alone.

Don't play a good character then. It's not supposed to be easy. You're not supposed to win.

<snip>

Besides, if you think evil is easy then you don't know what you're talking about. Again, the Banites have suffered majorly over the past week, several characters and prominent NPCs being perma-killed. Us Red Wizard PCs (not that we're evil, but if you feel like lopping us in here then so be it) regularly face discrimination from the supposedly 'good' PCs, being spit on, attacked, at best only given a cold shoulder. Giving any kind of information at all about anything possibly bad that you might do instantly turns all the 'good' PCs against you.

I suppose what I was aiming at here was saying that I think that the fight between good and evilshould be a state of barely maintained balance. I see winning as stopping evil from winning rather than wiping them out all together which as you and Saulus rightly say would not be good for the game as it would get very boring very quickly.

I was certainly not aware of the losses suffered by the evil factions and I'd like to say thanks for pointing them out.

[GodBeastX]

What do people bloody expect? End credits after you kill the evil in the world?

RP is about getting situations shoved on you and you live the life it creates. Whether you become enslaved, or simply can't pay your taxes. Whether a dragon is mad you stole part of his treasure, or Bane is warring against your city.

[Dranius]

Everyone (Especially GBX) who posted here so far pretty much everything I had in my mind to say, but I'll just throw a small opinion here.

To me, RPing always meant something at least partially close to realism/reality (Of course excluding the fact that the world we RP in is medieval with liches and dragons, magic, and what-the-heck-not), and with that said; here are a few newsflashes (mostly from reality):

Good doesn't always win, heck it loses more than it wins.

Almost nothing is easy, and nothing is ever handed to you with cookies n' milk on a silver platter. No matter what you try to do, be that grabbing a two-handed gigantic axe and mindlessly swinging your way through a monster-infested cavern, or smooth-talking/manipulating/backstabbing your way to the top in the local politics, you are supposed to shed sweat to make it happen, why should the fight against evil, or the fight against good, be any different at all?

And for all I know, and for all I've seen posted many times before (Of course, anyone's free to correct me if I'm wrong, just be gentle), this world is supposed to be "grey" not Black & White, there's a game and a sequel with that name if it is so important to do things that way.

Note: These points are all of personal opinion and are open for correction.

'Nyways, just my two cents on the matter, not that much to say but I just had to at least speak a small part of my shattered mind on the matter. Over n' out *Static...*

[Rhifox]

OK a few points I don't disagree with. I don't disagree that certain drugs should be legal. Cannabis for example. Things like Heroin and Crack I'm afraid I'd strongly disagree with. It is the difference betwen the drugs the Thayan's sell andthe ones the Exigo sell. Thayans seem to sell the hard drugs Exigo the soft drugs.

Still, selling it isn't evil, it's neutral business.

On the subject of Slavery, it's evil. There is no good form of slavery. There is no light and fluffy side to it. Slavery is destroying another human being for personal gain. There is nothing not evil about that. Regardless of how a master treats a slave that slave has still had to be broken to begin with in order to get them to accept their lot as a slave. That slave does not have one of their fundamental human rights. The right to freedom. It is why slavery is illegal the world over, even with criminals.

I consider slavery under the same light that I see monarchy, or guns and weapons. It is a case by case basis that is only evil on the premise that most humans are evil and take advantage of others when given the opportunity. However, this is not something limited to slavery on its own. Some slaves may be well-treated and given a lot of freedom while some free serfs are treated horribly and given little freedom, for instance. The reason slavery is considered evil is because it gives complete control to the owner, who, more often than not, abuses that power. This is a case of the person being the one to blame, and not the act itself.

Now, you can fight against the act itself, yes. But what you are fighting for is removing the opportunity for people to abuse their power, and that's what should be recognized. In other words, practicing slavery does not make a nation evil. It provides already evil people an easy outlet to demonstrate their cruelty. The nation isn't to blame, it is the actions of the evil people. The problem is, people get this wrong often, and they attack anyone who is recognizable as a member of the nation, thinking that all from that nation is evil, rather than A) fighting the act itself (freeing slaves, for instance, as well as publishing essays, public demonstrations, political maneuvering, etc), or B) fighting the specific evil individuals who are abusing their power over the act (only targeting specific Red Wizards known to be cruel to their slaves, for example).


This is getting a bit off-topic, so any more debates can be taken to my character ICly, as she'd have the same arguments I would.

[Machiavelli]

And heaven forbid the Good Guys have to come up with an effective plan to try to thwart evil that doesn't involve swinging a sword. I see evil PCs coming together in quiet and plotting, scheming, doing their thing.

Eeek, this thread has turned a bit sour... To be fair, good PCs do actually come together and plot a fair bit, but perhaps with failure to sufficiently engage with staff on what they're planning and so forth (I know I've been guilty of that). In the end I think what Janus is really commenting on isn't actually good/evil (as it's been rightly pointed out that some of the relevant organisations are neutral or occupy grey areas), its about organisations involved with the power structure of Sundren as opposed to those outside it. This is always bound to be a sticky question, as there are no real power structures outside the main factions except for informal (and very fluid) associations. Having played an quite activist character, I'll admit that it's hard to form lasting alliances and work together toward a meaningful goal... the presence of some sort of symbol such as a group which people belong to and hold in common can make all the difference (and can compensate for arriving/leaving players). Oh... am I rambling again XD, well hopefully none of that was too idiotic or offensive *waits to get flamed*

[Saulus]

All right this isn't much of a discussion anymore. Closed.