I’ve been recently learning about logical fallacies, and as I was pondering some of the more recent ones that I’ve been learning, I’ve realized that they could be very useful in D&D! They can add more realism to the world.
I feel like it can be hard in D&D to make bad decisions or beliefs sound realistic. We obviously know why it’s wrong to for someone to steal gold from someone else. Someone who does that must just be a bad person.
One way to make these faulty decisions and beliefs that I’ve been pondering is to intentionally introduce logical fallacies. Logical fallacies occur every day in real life, and they can add more depth and nuance to a person’s reasoning. It moves the reasoning past I’m a bad person or I’m unintelligent to I have good reasons for my choices, even if the reasoning is faulty.
For example, consider the false dilemma. Take a town where the main industry is music. Say an elusive bard with a magical lute is causing trouble in the town. The governor may feel like the only two options are to ban musical instruments or to let the bard wander free, causing havoc throughout the town. So he makes the choice to ban musical instruments from the town, sacrificing his town’s main industry to keep the town safe.
This creates a convincing story for why musical instruments might be banned from the town. It also provides an opportunity for the players to try and find a better solution if they’d like. For example, they may suggest that only lutes are banned, or that all instruments must be registered and tagged.
Logical fallacies can also be used to create problems that players might be able to solve, even if they aren’t directly related to a single person’s reasoning. For example, if we think of circular reasoning, we can create a problem like the following:
- taxes go up
- more people become poor
- people need to resort to crime to make ends meet
- the city guard needs to be bigger to handle higher amounts of crime
- taxes need to go up to support a bigger city guard
- more people become poor
- etc.
This problem seems like something that could actually happen in real life, not some contrived “greedy ruler wants to increase taxes”. Everyone in this situation appears to be doing their best to handle the situation, but it’s causing the situation to get worse. This is also a problem that can be solved by breaking the cycle, which is something that players can do.
So, based on these ponderings, I think that making use of logical fallacies can improve the realism of the game. They can be used either to directly support a character’s reasoning, or they can be used as a launching point for creating other elements of the game, such as problems that need to be solved.