Give me scenarios and ideas, where a "necessary evil"

>>50621095
Any limited resource that is required. Limitations on its availability generate conflict when it dwindles.
The spice must flow.
Only so many X can be alive at a given time and a new one is needed every so often.

>>50621095
Jail?

The world is always full of those seeking to change it. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. So many folks moving down the road of best intentions, on their way to ruin. We need a force to balance these game changers out. A force with one driving goal that churns everything else in it's wake. A force of ruin itself that all can agree must be stopped. Gives the thinkers and doer's something to focus on, without tipping the world into chaos with other conquests.

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>>50621095

illidan.

Death. Especially if its a physical manifestation.

Sure, death brings misery and loneliness.
But without the concept of death, you're not gonna experience the concept of life either. You're gonna take life for granted and not live it to your fullest.

Oh, and you also end up with zombies and skellies trying to turn you into one of them - nobody wants that.

>>50621095
A powerful, evil being once defeated and sealed a less powerful but far more evil being.

If we get rid of this evil asshole, we'll free some evil psychopath.

>>50621201
>If we get rid of this evil asshole, we'll free some evil psychopath.
Are you talking about Trump and Pence?

>>50621174
Shitty WoW lore is always going to be evil and unnecessary.

>>50621095

God does not deliver free will.

To God, everything is just a playing piece.

make the minis revolt against the players

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>>50621095

>>50621095
Hell.
Where else would you bottle up every evil in the world?

>>50621210
No, keep /pol/ shit out of this.

I'm trying to think of good reasons for letting evil exist. In this case it's a "better the devil you know" scenario.

>>50621095
Go watch Shinsekai Yori

Or, in brief, population has to be super heavily controlled/culled because people with psychic abilities have a chance of snapping and becoming walking WMDs.

>>50621222
I still really can't get over how great this book was.

>>50621133
From a libertarian point of view, one could extend this to law itself. Sacrificing relatively minor freedoms (like murdering people for personal gains) for greater benefits (not being murdered for others peoples personal gain).

In regards to OP's actual question, the evil empire may be evil and it may be their own fault that they're the only source of law and order in the world, but if they're the only source of law and order in the world than anyone who likes those to things has a good reason to support the evil empire regardless of additional context to that state of affairs.

>>50621095
I think the Zoroastrians started it with Azi Dahaka (or Az Dahak or whatever), the three-headed demon sorcerer king who ruled the world for a millennium, but whose long but temporary evil rule stopped the ultimate evil from ruling the world for eternity. The Egyptians similarly have Set, who, while evil, helps fights Apep, the god of Chaos who threatens the Sun god Ra, the bringer of life.

A planet-wide empire holds back an apocalyptic class evil being from blowing up the world by sacrificing 25,000 years of experience (so 1,000 25 year olds, 500 50 year olds, or any mix of ages so long as it is at least 25,000 years lived) every day in bloody sacrifices.

>>50621095
Fallout 3's "The Pitt" DLC.

Guy enslaves loads of dudes, forcing them to work in horrible conditions that eventually turn them into monsters, but he's doing so to build a great city with factories that can produce steel in a broken world that has little hope of being rebuilt without it. He is actively working on a cure to fix the turning into a monster problem.

>>50621095
If by "the world" you mean "human civilization", you could always point to money and commerce as a real-world example.

>>50621451
The Pitt was great actually. For a game that had an outright karma system and which had generally stuck so far inside easy moral "dilemma" zones, I was fully expecting a straightforward slaves = good, rulers = bad kinda thing.

Honestly all of fallout 3 could have been improved with more grey areas (I'm sure there's a joke about the games aesthetic in here). For example, the main conflict of the plot is actually extremely two-sided. There is a LOT of sense to be made and good to be done in carrying out the Enclave's plan, which the game punishes good/neutral karma characters for doing by just plummeting your karma to evil.

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The plot of this movie.

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>>50621095
The classic example of this is the kingdom where a virgin sacrifice is made to the dragon every so often. The hero in the saga represents someone who goes against not just the dragon, but the way of thinking that allows this necessary evil. It's an archetype, -- and thus a powerful storytelling tool.

Another example from recent fiction would be the Night's Watch from ASOIAF. The Night Watch is a long standing tradition of men doomed to spend the rest of their lives on frozen guard duty, protecting against some unnamed and unspeakable evil. It's an institution that is seen as necessary and unquestioned, even to the point of Lords of the Land executing men who desert from it. Samwell Tarly is a favorite character of mine, because he questions it and seeks to master the secrets behind it.

I believe GRRM was influenced by Anne Mccaffrey and her Dragonriders of Pern series; the institution of the dragonweyrs represented an old custom that had fallen into disrepair and disrepute, and was questioned by the populace why they were even needed, only to find out they were essential in the survival of all life on Pern when shit started falling from the sky.

>>50621133
similarly, Games Workshop LLC

>>50621095
SCP-231

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>>50621095
Similar to the virgin sacrifice, would be the archetype of the scapegoat: it's from the Bible (and therefore Jewish custom) that a goat gets all the people's sins laid upon it, and then it's led into the wilderness to die. In a fantasy RPG setting, we may put this forth as someone who is cast out of their village (willingly or unwillingly) in order to restore some sense of peace and harmony -- maybe a good archetype for a starting character -- like Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke.

There is also the deeply entrenched evil, a kind of "gordian knot" -- an entrenched problem that is only overcome by thinking outside the box, or through brute force. I was playing in a PF Society game, where we were introduced to someone important in a city where slaves were kept. I had the option of freeing the slaves, at the cost of turning myself into an outlaw. This society was engaging in the evil of slavery, but it was such an endemic part of their culture, that freeing them would be the work of an entire campaign (but it didn't go down that way). It's the kind of evil where a paladin has to simply nod and pray to his deity, and maybe try and ease immediate suffering, and then go on about his mission, there's nothing he can do for the larger problem.

>>50623392
>The Night's Watch

I can see the "necessary", but where's the evil? It's essentially a voluntary monastic order that doubles as refugee camp and penal colony (also largely voluntary, considering that joining the order is often given as an alternative to whatever the standard sentence is), and--regardless of your thoughts on incarceration by the state--I don't think either of those qualify as evil, or even particularly bad.

Like, it's hardcore and fantasy based and their vows are super serious and made on pain of death, but none of that sprucing up really changes its core functions. It wasn't terrifically uncommon for prominent figures in-universe to volunteer to join the Watch (Benjen comes to mind, and daddy Mormont, who joined as soon as his son was of ruling age).

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>>50623979
I knew someone was going to ask this...

The "evil", if I may, comes from the terrible condition the men find themselves in -- the lives they have to lead in order to maintain the institution, and what it does to them psychologically and socially -- similar to the crews on board a warship (like in Das Boot) or in some other maddening situation that doesn't end -- like in a terrible prison. Humanity adapts, but we're often twisted into our worst selves in order to survive. The Night's Watch is (at its best) a monastic order of devoted men, and (too frequently) an order of The Doomed standing guard until they die.

>>50621095

Kender. The thieving abominations are the bane of honest and decent men everywhere, but they're so annoying, and their souls are so cancerous and toxic, Eldritch reality warping monstrosities avoid the world at all costs.

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>>50624085
I'll take the eldritch abominations, thanks.

>>50621095
A virgin needs to be sacrificed every morning or else the sun won't rise.

>>50621095
In some settings, good and evil are real and tangible forces. It is not so much that evil must exist, it is that it literally cannot not exist. Everytime evil is removed, a new one pops up to balance things out. It works the other way too, so if good is about to be snuffed out, a new hope appears.

>>50621095
What about a negative inevitability? Different thing, same effect on people. Entropy.