Kittens, Devas and Immortality

[RPG Post]

Kittens, Devas and Immortality

This article is only vaguely related to the deaths of cute widdle kitty cats. And it has less to do with Dungeons and Dragons than it does with angels and madmen. Er …minus the madmen part. Unless you RTA, as it mentions eternal madness.

Wizards of the Coast has an interesting article on Devas called How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Immortality, a character race introduced in Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook 2. It is more generally about immortality and memory and the rebirth cycle Devas go through. The article mentions Highlander, not just the catchy theme song (which may not be as catchy as Flash, ah ahhh) but the idea that immortality is not all it is cut out to be. You lose everyone you know and love, and for Devas, who have a lack of personal continuity/memory, it is a life of infinite loss, losing almost everything of themselves but having other people and ...um ...things remember them and their deeds, good and bad.

Which is what I want to discuss. “Good.” Paladins, Devas, other characters, are based on the idea of 'good.” How do you role play it?

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A simplified word about good: when you are driving, you make choices. Sometimes people will let someone on a side street or leaving a parking lot pull out in front of them. They consider the act to be “good” though it may be better called “Kind.” They may have ten, 20, even more cars behind them when that happens. Who is it kind to? The one person trying to enter traffic. Who did it inconvenience? Everyone behind the “kind” driver. Sometimes being “good” causes harm/discomfort to others. Suppose you don't let the one person out, then you have still made a choice to inconvenience someone.

Inconvenience is not evil, of course. Unless inflicted knowingly with intent to cause harm. But how do you do the most good in any situation?

You could go with Spock's “the need of the many ...” or a more nerdly (is it possible to be more nerdly than someone who quotes Star Trek? :-) ) Aristotle's “The securing of one individual's good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine." But those postulates still result in, potentially, an individual or small group suffering.

Good is not necessarily relative but being purely good is a difficult path; you cannot even succeed by being passive. It may seem like if you don't do anything, you can't harm anyone. But then what of yourself? If you don't live to your full potential you harm yourself and may offend your deity and/or creator. You could also let someone come to harm by not acting, thereby violating one of Asimov's three laws of robotics (Perhaps I have graduated to more nerdly.) It is a loop, with seemingly no definitive answer.

A long time ago, in Dragon Magazine #38, an article ran entitled “Good Isn't Stupid.” I have no idea if the article is easily available in a new collection (Best of Dragon 2 is a 1981 copyright) so I will quote a passage: “If good is carefully considered, compared to and contrasted with evil, then common sense will enable most, if not all, questions regarding the behavior of paladins and rangers [feel free to add “devas”] to be settled on the spot. ...What matters is that a definition of “good” is established upon intelligent and reasonable grounds. Viewpoints do differ, so absolutes (especially in a game) are both undesirable and impossible.”

A deva cannot turn a blind eye to injustice or iniquity but may have to make complex choices that extend into the far future, a future which he or she will eventually experience. I hesitate to equate Jack Bauer with a deva, but he is someone who makes morally questionable choices, in theory for the “greater good.” There is also a character in Serenity, The Operative, who serves the state by performing short term questionable acts that are meant to pay off in the long run.

The point of all of this is, your character lives in a “real” world, with real consequences and of various and sundry opinions on morality. No matter what game system you play, if you role play, you will run into gray areas where “good” is not necessarily so obvious. Devas make choices that create enemies Even when the choices are not “evil” they can have lasting repercussions that create conflict for future role playing.

But what does this have to do with kittens, and immortality? I was going to give a standard philosophy trope where you sacrifice the kitten to save ten lives, but damn, kittens are cute. So instead I will go with nine lives versus infinite lives. In it's nine lives (metaphor, I know) a cat cannot experience everything. It is still a finite span of time. Whereas a Deva has or will experience(d) everything. And will have a vague sense of having known more, or different things. Devas then are somewhat like Charlie in Flowers For Algernon and not at all like kittens, who, presumably, being related to Rakshasas, remember everything of their past. Forget the kittens entirely. Evil, but cute, creatures.

As a partial aside, imagine combining Modern Warfare or some multi-player FPS with the Deva and coming up with an adventure where you experience dim memories of an evil being “camping” wherever you are reborn, always killing you within an hour. Your adventure, whether you accept it or not, is to live past that first hour. This is why respawning as a stag with a “bummer of a birthmark, Hal,” is to be avoided.

All of which is to say that the article on Wizards Web site was thought provoking.