Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:'Detect evil' requires a whole bunch of active definitions and decisions of what right and wrong, good and evil are that any player with a shred of imagination would baulk at being spoonfed, even if it was likely to turn out to be anything other than mawkishly preachy- and which to it's credit D&D never did, although perhaps they were too lazy.
You could reasonably define an 'evil' sufficiently extreme that yes, assorted supernaturally-empowered individuals
would find that being anywhere near it made their palms itch. It wouldn't be that difficult.
The merchant who short-changes his customers, beats his wife, or is only averse to stealing when it inconveniences him not to be, doesn't qualify- or shouldn't. But given a moment's thought about what a vampire
really is, or the pyramids of skulls Tamerlane piled up in places he didn't care for... if you can't get a sense of fundamental wrongness out of that, something's missing in your head.
Which leads to some dark ironies, of course, the equivalent of a Catholic will-be-saint-someday getting those waves of supernatural evil off the dungeons of his own church's inquisition... but in and of itself, I don't think the idea's invalid. What skews the whole thing so badly is the moral rigidity that pigeonholes everything and implicitly bars the Designated Good Guys from ever doing anything horrid, not the idea that you can actually have something so horrible that it can be picked up on the supernatural radar of any decent empowered person in a ten mile radius.
Besides which, I've never met a D&D pantheon- except for the very early bits where they tried to rip off real and established-mythical religions, you know, the lawyered-out text with Chthulhu in the monster manual...
I have a version of that- well, strictly speaking my father does, but he never uses it and didn't notice when I nicked it for a two-year period.
Though I think they must have removed Cthulhu and friends from the list of pantheons- they're not there. Possibly a
slightly later printing of
Deities and Demigods?
that didn't seem that it was made up solely for the purpose of being part of a roleplaying game. No confusion, no overlap, no undergrowth, no real moral complexity- not even inspired silliness for most of them. 4th ed reaches rock bottom by having a god whose sole purpose is to empower paladins.
Also, we're looking at a real, genuine and deep total inability to understand the world they're supposed to be parroting. Rigid rules of the kind the system has did not exist in the minds of the people it's supposed to be modelling- principles (inconvenient things like thou shalt not kill, etc) often at odds with the necessities of life, intermittent enforcement, much interpretation needed- own judgement always required, and the court of public opinion always in session. Show me an incorruptible hero in pre- Tolkien myth and legend; there probably are some, but I bet none leaps off the top of the head- the overwhelming majority were devious, murderous, dodgy, chancing bastards. Certainly not Charlemagne's twelve paladins, the originals, which if they actually existed were certainly of the class which power corrupts.
Galahad? Just a thought... off the top of my head.
But aye, therein lies the rub. D&D as we know it today, and arguably even in its early iterations,
isn't a parroting or modeling of pre-industrial societies as they really existed, or even of those societies as they fantasized themselves- not Arthurian Britain and
certainly not Dark Age Britain. It is, in essence, a sort of generalized mad-libs process for creating high fantasy adventures
in the style of 20th century fiction. There's a reason Gygax cited Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as inspirations, and as I recall cited them more often than he did the knights of the Round Table, really.
Again, the style of 20th century fiction. And that style has evolved away from the chancing-bastard model so common in mid-century (Conan, the aforesaid swordsmen of Lankhmar, et cetera) towards the artificially vivid moral clarity pioneered by Tolkein, and emulated so many times in other major influences on the genre.
