Goodies versus Baddies: Good or Bad?

D&D PCs kill lots of ostensibly sentient beings, and often other humans, and don't usually think twice about it.

Is this good or bad? In some ways, the OSR can be understood as a backlash against a predominant squishiness on this point that had emerged and gained traction during late-TSR/early-WotC era. Whereas Gygaxian D&D had been 'intensely relaxed' about the idea that orcs and the like were simply there for the killing, that approach had gone out of fashion during the course of the 90s, to be replaced by two somewhat paradoxical impulses. On the one hand, there was a growing desire to 'humanise' (for want of a better word) the traditional evil humanoid races and treat them essentially as misunderstood 'others' whose very 'othering' was problematic. And on the other it had become de rigeur for the PCs to be conceived as morally complicated, edgy anti-heroes - the pinnacle of this trend being the creation of the Tieflings as everybody's favourite PC race - and as a consequence it had become hard to commit to good versus evil as a legitimate metaphysical struggle; what we were into were shades of grey. 

These two trends, which never quite sat well alongside one another, nonetheless somehow combined into the notion that there isn't really any metaphysical difference between humans and (say) orcs, that there was something a little embarrassing about 'black and white' moral thinking, and that it was terribly grown up to feel a certain amount of angst about traditional D&D's purportedly simplistic goodies-and-baddies style morality. 

The OSR was in many ways a rejection of this dominant paradigm. This did not come in a return to goodies-and-baddies style morality, however; if anything, it took the form of an even more wholehearted embrace of moral relativism. Indeed, we saw during this period the expression of a strong antagonism towards qualms. D&D PCs, the proponents of the OSR used to say, are murder-hobos. They are rogues. They do not have alignments; they are not heroes; they loot and kill for a living. Therefore, the reasoning went, there is no point in being moralistic about what goes on in a game, and no point in being squeamish. So the PCs encounter a load of orc babies. What difference does it make if they kill them or not? This does not mean anything - it is just part of the slightly arch, detached tone of the game.

Until recently I too broadly would have broadly gone along with this view of things. But at a certain point in the career of concepts, what was once counter-cultural becomes the mainstream, and what was once mainstream becomes counter-cultural. And so it is with 'goodies versus baddies' style morality. It is now very far outside of our cultural comfort zone to accept stories in which there are good characters who are just intrinsically good and bad ones who are just intrinsically bad (have you noticed how almost every villain in the movies for the last 25 years has needed to have been given a reason for turning out the way he has?). And it is even further outside of our cultural comfort zone to accept stories in which an unquestionably 'good' person attacks and kills vast swathes of enemies on the basis simply that he is a goodie and those enemies are straightforwardly evil and recognised to be such. (Top Gun: Maverick was execrable but a possible counter-example.) We tend to think of that kind of story - Rio Bravo, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Robin Hood, etc. - as at best corny and at worst childish.

This, though, makes the timing ripe for a rediscovery or reinvention of the notion that the PCs in a D&D campaign could actually be heroes in the old-fashioned sense and the creatures they encounter unreconstructed villains. In a tired, jaded, cynical world, would there not be something refreshing about embracing the goodies-versus-baddies motif, and doing something fresh and interesting with it?