Last night I asked my wife what she thought the mechanics would be if a Detect Evil spell from various rpgs worked in real life. We talked for about an hour and worked out the following general rules. 1. Evil is the willingness to knowingly make another pay a known cost for a benefit you desire. If you dont know the cost, or the cost isnt very high, or you dont desire the outcome, then the level of evil is mitigated. a. participation in institutional evil is still evil, and some weight of that will still accrue to the balance of an otherwise good person. b. There is no corresponding Detect Good spell, and good acts do not register with this spell. Probably all normal people have some degree of evil, its just a question of how much. For example, most people are careless in certain circumstances while driving. An accident under those circumstances would still generate a slight evil rating even though the perpetrator was entirely unwilling for it to happen. 2. Roselle made reference to the Most Evil scale as useful for quantification. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Evil#Scale_and_criminals) But since that scale starts with a person who kills in self-defense at 1, we would need a measure of fractional evil 0.1 to 0.9 as well. .1 careless .2 reckless .3 selfish, etc. 3. Evil does not reside in people but in actions. A person who continually thinks evil thoughts but never acts on them does not register as evil. A person who thinks of themselves as very good, but who willingly makes others pay a high cost for their benefit would be marked by those evil acts. Evil actions explode like a dye-pack across the psychic landscape, staining the psychic body (visible to the spell) of the perpetrator. When you cast the spell you see a literal stain on their body, which is deep and solid if done intentionally, and wider the more people it affects or the more powerful effect it has had. (Note: It would be possible to bury the needle if encountering a person who had murdered, or caused to be murdered, many thousands or millions of people. It would likely not be possible to determine, via this spell, whether Stalin or Hitler, for example, were more evil. They would both be deeply and totally stained.) 4. Evil mitigates over time via voluntary processes of atonement and forgiveness, but is never erased. The immediate what have I done? guilt-response of a murderer does not mitigate the evil-rating of the act, however. We didnt get very far into how forgiveness actually works before we decided wed wasted enough time on this. :)
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 18:37:02 +0000
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