Niceanity

Niceanity

Hat tip to author Jon Del Arroz for passing along the following exhortation to Christians from 4Chan to reject the Cult of Nice.

Nice

To defeat the Death Cult, the Church is gonna have to roll up her sleeves, get her hands dirty, and make some messes.

Gamer and fellow systematic theologian Rick Stump addresses the misperception among D&D players that good is weak and dumb.

Many years ago I had been only DMing for months when a guy I knew invited me to sit in on a game he played. He said it had a ranger, a cleric, a magic-user and two thieves. I sat with him and rolled up a paladin on my first try. I was very eager to play and described how my character rode up to the small country home they used as a base and dismounted, and introduced myself as So and So the paladin.

  At that point the entire party attacked my character and killed him in a single round.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Paladin,” said one of the players, “We hate paladins. Can’t stand that lawful good bull.”

  “But I thought you were a ranger?” I said.

  “I am! But we’re all chaotic neutral – the DM let’s rangers be neutral.” he replied.

  The DM felt that killing a good person for no reason was at worst a chaotic act, which surprised me even more until, sitting in (I had a spare character because that is the way I roll) I watched this party ofchaotic neutral players loot and pillage a hamlet because one of them only needed 80 experience points to level up. When they were done they even burned the farms and barns. When I asked what they thought would happen to the 60-80 innocent men, women, and children whom they had just left foodless, penniless, homeless, and without any livestock, tools, or weapons since Winter was less than a month away they replied ‘who cares? Just NPCs, man’. When I asked them why they never played or liked good characters they were near universal in saying, ‘Good is stupid and weak’.



  I was once sitting in with a party, just observing, as the DM ran an NPC paladin who was guiding them. The party was neutral but on a mission from the Bishop and the paladin was the only guy that knew the way. The DM rolled an encounter and boom! red dragon attacks the party. After the first round I quietly asked the DM,

  “Did you forget the paladin? He’s just sitting there.”

  “What? He would never help neutral people!”

  The paladin sat there on his horse, sword in its sheath and lance rested doing nothing until the dragon breathed fire, killing half the party as well as the paladin and his warhorse. The party, with no guide and too weak from the encounter anyway, turned back. When I asked the DM why he did things that way he said (as close to a direct quote as I can get after the years),

  “Have you read the books? No paladin would ever help a neutral person, ever!”

  “But his inaction let an evil creature triumph! That wasn’t about helping neutral people, that was about destroying evil!”

  “The lawful part means he has to do that even if it is stupid.”

Note that the evil-masquerading-as-neutral players and DMs had their concept of good formed by post-1980 fantasy books.

As for Rick…

  I had been running my Seaward campaign for 6 years before I read The Hobbit and for 8 before I read The Lord of the Rings. I had spent my early years reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Andre Norton, Le Morte D’Arthur, and (especially) the stories of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers. Heck, I read Vance’s Lyonesse before I read The Fellowship of the Ring.

  The great thing about the books that I read first and most, from the Twelve Peers to the Return of the King, was that they all give a very clear idea of what is meant by good and evil, especially within the milieu of fantasy, be it literature or tabletop role playing.

  The Twelve Peers, John Carter, Allan Quatermaine all shared a few traits – they were brave, they were honest, the protected the weak, and they were decisive. They also laughed, had close friends, drank, and fought. But they also were champions of the weak, loyal friends, fierce enemies, and able to judge others by their words and deeds rather than being bigoted (John Carter not only has friends of all of the races of Mars he forges close ties between them for the first time in millenia; Allan Quatermaine admires and supports Umbopa/Ignosi long before he learns he is a king; if a man is a good fighter and a Catholic his past is his past to the paladins.

Once again, we see the stark difference–not just in quality, but underlying morality–between post-1980 fiction and the pulps/classics.

As for good being stupid and weak, ask the golden calf worshipers about Moses. Ask the priests of Baal about Elijah. Ask the heresiarch Arius about St. Nicholas and the traitorous French nobles about St. Joan of Arc.

Not only is goodness the truth, it is being. Evil is nothing more than a lacking in the good with no positive existence of its own.

Sickness is the absence of health. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Sin is a lack of charity.

This parasitic relationship means that evil is not only weaker than the good, evil is wholly dependent on it.

Similarly, defeat is the lack of victory. Evil can only win if good men cooperate with it through act or omission. Let’s act accordingly.

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34 Comments

  1. Heian-kyo Dreams

    Couldn't figure out how to zoom in on the image to read, so went to Twitter. Didn't find the image, but discovered that leftist wahmen are on a sex strike. Also that leftist men think women hate sex.

    Current Year is weird.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Twitter link added.

      Also, opening the image in a new tab makes it zoomable, at least in Brave.

    • JonM

      Leftist men think women hate sex because women hate sex with leftist men. The unspoken bit about the sex-strike is that it won't affect leftist men. The wahmen are withholding sex from the only men worth having sex with – men who oppose abortion.

      *cue 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' theme here*

    • Heian-kyo Dreams

      @Brian thanks, opening the pic in another works on Chrome.

      @JonM so basically the crazy leftist women will keep settling for soy while pining for real men. Only this time, it's protesting!!!

    • Brian Niemeier

      You're welcome.

      The SWPL bugwomen will keep importing High T, low IQ 3rd world men so they won't have to settle–or so they think.

  2. Alex

    These guys Rick describes sound like utter moral and spiritual retards. I'm not a D&D player; are attitudes like this really endemic among players?

    • Man of the Atom

      Depends on your party. When I started playing DnD, our entire party was Lawful Good, with the exception of the Neutral Good thief. We played the White Hat sheriffs hunting down the chthonic aberrations that wanted to eat the nice humans in their settlements.

      Good times, both ethical and moral.

    • Brian Niemeier

      When I got started with D&D, the DM and most of the payers went to the same Catholic high school I did. We already knew the basic moral categories and Evil as a Privation of the Good theory.

      Most of the guys referred to Lawful Good characters as portrayed in the novels as Lawful Stupid. Players were discouraged from running their LG characters as LS.

      That group gave me a lot of useful tips for avoiding the latter alignment interpretation, such as leading by example, taking everything in moderation, making mercy the perfection of justice, etc.

    • Heian-kyo Dreams

      @Alex

      That is one of the many socially retarded flavors of gamer you get in open games. Open games run at a game store and mostly allow anyone to come and go. They are generally made up of cruft tier players since all the normal, functional folks break off and create their own (private) group.

  3. JD Cowan

    "The lawful part means he has to do that even if it is stupid."

    These are the same types that believe Batman's dilemma over killing the Joker is anything but ridiculous.

    Their view of good and heroism is limited to selfish appetites and mindless unthinking obedience to the man with the bigger gun.

    Poul Anderson is spinning in his grave.

    • Man of the Atom

      For most modern D&D players, "LG" stands for "Lawful Stupid".

      Projection.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Also note their adherence to Liberal legal positivism.

      Pointing out that law must be a handmaid to virtue, and a law that contradicts the good is no law at all shuts them right down.

  4. Man of the Atom

    Rick had other comments associated with that article, likely on G+, that detailed how to deal with that CN party.

    It was essentially the town's survivors appeal to the Church. A party of clerics and fighters, led by one or more paladins, hunt them down and offer them a chance for repentance.

    Repent or Die.

    RPGs can be Moral as well as Fun.

    • Brian Niemeier

      The commenters are right, and their solution will work, provided the DM isn't complicit and enabling the CN party's behavior.

      If I'd been in Rick's shoes–and I have been more than once–I'd have left that group as soon as they killed my character, and shaken their dust from my shoes.

    • Emmett Fitz-Hume

      "If I'd been in Rick's shoes–and I have been more than once–I'd have left that group as soon as they killed my character, and shaken their dust from my shoes."

      Same here. There's a special breed of douche bag that one only finds at the gaming table. They usually belong to that category Vox Day calls Gammas. They're like a TTRPG subspecies of Gamma.

      They tend to have a lot of 'in jokes' that they use to single out the new guy. Because its the closest they get to being on the other end of hazing.

      And they usually flourish where a DM is complicit and enjoys the entertainment or the DM is they only guy willing to put in the effort to run a game but is also bullied by his own players.

      I have encountered two such groups in my day and didn't last more than one session with either group.

  5. Misha Burnett

    And I think this is also why so many non-Christians (and semi-Christians) see Christianity as a feel-good religion. When Atheists tell me that my faith is some kind of wishful thinking or crutch for the weak, it's this "Nice Jesus" that they think I worship.

    I'm not that kind of believer. I am, in very literally truth, a God-fearing Christian. God terrifies me because he is Good–in the sense of absolutely righteous–and I'm not.

    You can bargain with evil. You can bribe the unrighteous by appealing to their greed for wealth or power.

    In the face of true Goodness, you can only submit or be destroyed.

    • Brian Niemeier

      "In the face of true Goodness, you can only submit or be destroyed."

      Well said and amen.

  6. Anabasis

    This is outstanding, thanks for sharing.

    Put another way, no Christian or even pagan philosophers viewed "niceness" as a virtue.

    So in addition to being contra Christ, niceness is a modern novelty for those strip-mining the God-fearing Christian civilization built by their ancestors.

    • Brian Niemeier

      "Put another way, no Christian or even pagan philosophers viewed "niceness" as a virtue."

      Indeed not.

      "Nice" originally meant "stupid".

  7. Durandel

    4chan might become the Covadonga of the Zoomer generation.

  8. Paul

    'Niceness' is another term for 'virtue signalling'.

    "evil is not only weaker than the good, evil is wholly dependent on it."

    Similar to how socialism depends on the productivity of capitalism?

    • Brian Niemeier

      Not sure if the analogy holds. I'd have to ask an economist.

    • Jeremy Beckett

      According to Paul Johnson in his 'Modern Times', in the 70s the Soviet Union allowed 2% of its population to practice free-market capitalism. That 2% provided 40% of the USSR's foreign exports. The analogy holds well, I think.

    • Jeremy Beckett

      Sorry, I nerded out and answered the wrong point, I think. What I meant to say is that socialist societies select for inefficiency by their very nature. What is the point of overthrowing a society (it's never voluntary) if your new society is inferior? So they must believe (those who aren't just sociopaths in it for the loot) that their new society IS better. After all, they've gamed the sucess many times in their planning sessions and the success is ALWAYS successful, so obviously …

      THEN they realize that Political Studies, or Literature, or street crime, is inadequate preparation for the actual difficulties of actually producing things, but they're already committed, and they have to force people at gunpoint to submit to their practically-illiterate fantasies or they'll be killed by their victims.

      So they murder a million scapegoats, as well as Party rivals, and hope that the survivors will be too frightened to rebel.

      They have a nation of slaves, and won't understand that you can't command seed the way you can a coerce a man, and just ruin the farms, and production plummets across the board, and they kill and kill and kill, and yet people keep failing them, and the sociopaths stop more-reasonable ones from modifying the society into more reasonable lines (or what was the point of the revolution?) …

      …and they all lived happily ever after. Now eat your cockroach gruel and thank your daughter so she'll mention your gratitude in her secret report to the Prefect of Social Correction. Remember that you have to forget your father until/if he returns from Re-Education. Crying is Counter-Revolutionary.

  9. CrusaderSaracen

    Notice how “niceness” is cited as a virtue by the left only insofar as they use it to try and club us over the head with. They can shove it

    • Brian Niemeier

      The Left always operates by turning the Right's virtues into vices.

    • Durandel

      It’s right out of the Alinsky playbook

    • Brian Niemeier

      And they have no defense when their playbook is turned against them.

  10. Korodzik

    Just a note, but this isn't from 4chan. It's likely from 8ch.net, a different board with a different culture.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Corrections welcome. Thank you.

  11. Todd Everhart

    Mark 3:27
    "But no one is able to enter a strong man’s house and steal his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can thoroughly plunder his house."

    • Brian Niemeier

      Good exhortation to strength.

      Related: The Prince of the Apostles uses Holy Word: Kill (Acts 5: 9-10)

      Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”

      At that moment she fell down at his feet and died.

    • Todd Everhart

      Not just a reason to be strong, but also an expectation from everyone that he will use his strength. "No one is able" means that the strong man naturally will prevent it. Only bound can he be taken advantage of. Nice is the opposite of strong.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Well said.

Comments are closed