Pell's Alignment Philosophy Questions/Discussion Thread [Archive]

willpell

2013-01-11, 07:37 AM

Shouldn't really be answering this thread yet since I'm in kind of a hurry, will have more time later today, but we've got a couple interesting ones right off the bat so I can't resist. (Once again this is all my opinion, it may not be supported by any canon publications, may even contradict them, but this is how I believe things ought to be unless there's significant reason to the contrary, which there may have been in the canon sources but just as likely there wasn't. Better stop myself there lest this become a rant.)

Actually, if anything, I think WotC should have offered up more information on holy warriors of all nine alignments. Other than a single issue of dragon, though, I know of none.

Agreed, and I may make a project of that eventually if I get time. Though of course it won't be truly representative; a "paladin of neutrality" would make sense for someone with a Rilmani-esque philosophy, but you can't really have a "paladin of not caring", so some ethical systems (or lacks thereof) just won't work. Still, at least one "subset" of each alignment could work for some sort of holy warrior; the best we can manage for the moment is clerics, but they have way more mechanical baggage than is ideal (some should not really turn undead or the like, for instance).

On the morality of undead creation:

Is it moral to use a person's remains to create mindless undead without their prior consent?

Almost certainly not. If the existence of ghosts and outer planes, or any proven connection between the condition of the remains and the persistence of the soul, is known as fact, then definitely not. If no such knowledge exists, you might make an argument for the idea that it doesn't matter what someone wanted after they've ceased to exist, and claim that there's ethical justification for using zombie laborers the way we in reality might use robots, or some similar benefit. But it's extremely dicey at best, and almost certainly doesn't fit "moral" at all.

What about with their prior consent?

That depends on whether the GM goes along with the subtext in the setting that suggests undead are dangerous to the universe simply by their very existence, that they're walking holes in the natural order who put everyone in danger of the whole plane being invaded by Nightwalkers or something because there was too much neg-energy around. If you explicitly rule out such effects, then I'd say it's probably acceptible to do anything to a body that its former owners are willing to sign off on, though there are some issues with ensuring that it's fully informed consent, dealing with the chance they'll change their mind (centuries of contemplation in Celestia might shift your opinions on a lot of issues), and similar such issues. There are a lot of wrinkles that would need to be addressed by the authorities, much the way our society has to deal with questions of whether it's moral for someone to do something like selling their internal organs, and the possible negative implications of either allowing or disallowing it. Not questions that have easy answers, even in a world of magic!

What is the maximum acceptable ratio of damage to the soul/benefit to the living?

To say that this is a difficult answer to calculate is to understate immensely. :smallwink:

On intelligent undead:
Is it immoral to create a type of intelligent undead whith the transformee's consent?

Probably not, unless it's something inherently dangerous like a vampire or wight, or the aforementioned setting subtext is invoked.

What if the resultant undead needs to feed on sentient creatures?

If the feeding is fatal then creating such creatures is almost certainly an evil act (unless the ethics of inflicting death have become *very* strange indeed, which is conceivable if the influence of magic and the planes gets dialed very high, but makes for an increasingly alien and difficult-to-SOD setting). If the creatures can feed responsibly without inflicting permanent harm on their victims, and perhaps even benefit them in some way (such as the ecstatic pleasure inflicted by a vampire's bite in the White Wolf universe), it is more possible that the arrangement can be ethically and morally acceptible, though again there are a lot of dangerous complications you'd have to work around.

What about a nonvoluntary transformation to prevent a loved one from passing on?

The existence of Good-aligned outer planes strongly argues against turning someone into a wight or lich or something being preferable to letting them die. It's saying you care more about your own desire for their company than about the fate of their immortal soul. If it's something like preserving Einstein's brain, you might call it justifiable, but it's virtually never going to be "Right" with a capital R.

What about a voluntary transformation into a form that does not require feeding on the living (such as a lich?) (also, assuming lichification doesn't require murder or the like.)

You have to ignore the (irritatingly vague) "unspeakable evil" nature of the lichifying ritual mentioned in the MM, but if you do that, going lich begins to look reasonable, especially if you change the qualities imbued by the template. Good liches are already a thing in Forgotten Realms (Eberron too, I think), as the elves like to keep their elders around indefinitely to advise them. It can be highly amusing to explore the potential problems with doing this; just because something is capital-G Good doesn't mean its presence is all sunshine and roses, and you can create a lot of uncomfortable-but-not-quite-Evil situations with the idea that your society is now ruled by people who redefine the concept of "conservative elders".

How do you think a person can justify their actions while playing a Paladin of Freedom? A Paladin of Freedom must follow a strict code of taking no evil actions and must not work to help anyone who will use their help towards lawful or evil ends.

If a Paladin of Freedom so strictly follows such a code in a deontological fashion (as suggested), is not he himself Lawful?

Gonna have to look up "deontological" as well as look at UA again, but offhand I'd say the word you're getting stuck on is "strict". The PoF's code is almost certainly more like "loose". He keeps coming back to the same moral anchors, but he floats around in the area of them a lot. More on this later, I really have to go.

kardar233

2013-01-11, 01:52 PM

Almost certainly not. If the existence of ghosts and outer planes, or any proven connection between the condition of the remains and the persistence of the soul, is known as fact, then definitely not. If no such knowledge exists, you might make an argument for the idea that it doesn't matter what someone wanted after they've ceased to exist, and claim that there's ethical justification for using zombie laborers the way we in reality might use robots, or some similar benefit. But it's extremely dicey at best, and almost certainly doesn't fit "moral" at all.

I would disagree here. There's no evidence that I've seen in any of my rulebooks that draws any parallel between the condition of a body and the soul. To me, the body of someone who has died has no more significance than a house they've been evicted from. Like many things about undead, without a contrived "negative energy is unnatural and bad" excuse, the exercise ends up without any moral character in any direction.

Raven777

2013-01-11, 02:40 PM

(also, assuming lichification doesn't require murder or the like.)

What if it does but you raise back the sacrificed afterwards?

Darth Stabber

2013-01-11, 02:40 PM

I would disagree here. There's no evidence that I've seen in any of my rulebooks that draws any parallel between the condition of a body and the soul. To me, the body of someone who has died has no more significance than a house they've been evicted from. Like many things about undead, without a contrived "negative energy is unnatural and bad" excuse, the exercise ends up without any moral character in any direction.

Given how many undead creation spells have the evil descriptor we can safely assume that something about the creation of undead is bad. Negative energy planar connections offers a reasonable explanation, if you don't like it, feel free to come up with another. The bottom line is that rules as written it's evil, anything else is house rules.

Story

2013-01-11, 02:57 PM

What about something like Necropolitan? All the fun of being undead with none of the ethical baggage of Liches.

Short of a contrived "negative energy = bad" ruling, I don't see any reason why Necropolitans are a bad thing.

Raven777

2013-01-11, 03:01 PM

I think past some point, it's all about the DM's fluff. If he says that undead are inherently a Bad Thing™ in his game, you are flat out of luck, no matter how reasonable an argument you make.

I would know. I hold the theory that binding the souls of Evil foes to fuel rituals is at worst Neutral, because it removes Evil souls from the cycle that would otherwise be drawn to Hell or the Abyss to fuel the creation of new Devils or Demons. The way devil and demon fluff is stated, if you die Evil, you are irredeemable. Better capture and destroy their souls, then.

But then the DM says nope, that's still Evil... because the Gods say so. Then you remind him that Gods are not arbiters of good and evil. Then he reminds you that in his game, yes, yes they are.

Elderand

2013-01-11, 03:08 PM

I don't think there is much connection between body and soul asside from it being easier to stuff your soul back in your body due to familiarity. And even then, given that it's easier to stuff your soul back into a brand new random body (reincarnate 4th level) than into your own body (raise dead 5th) I'd say it's pretty clear that no such connection between body/soul exist after death.

The Viscount

2013-01-11, 03:35 PM

Nettlekid

2013-01-11, 03:36 PM

One thing about alignments that has always been a bit tricky to work around is the empirical evidence of what is Good and what is Evil. Unlike our world, the forces of Good and Evil are distinct, and while certain actions are neutral or can be good and evil depending on context, some actions by definition can only be Good, and some can only be Evil. The actual morality of a character is sometimes overruled by the ethics of the actions they take. Case in point, the regular Paladin. A Paladin can truly believe they're doing good, and be the purest person ever, but if they ever mistakenly do something Evil while thinking it's good, they lose their powers. That's pretty empirical. Likewise, if you cast too many spells with the Evil descriptor, you go to Hell. (If you don't atone, I think it's like 9. The Fiendish Codex II says stuff about this.) Experiments with Plane Shift or Speak with Dead could confirm this. So it stands to reason that forces of Good and Evil are objective. As such, for the whole undead thing, I think the reasoning is as follows. There are Evil gods. The bidding of those gods and their actions are Evil. Clerics of those gods gain the power to channel negative energy, so by extension negative energy is also Evil. And so anything powered by negative energy must be Evil as well. The reverse argument holds true for Good gods, positive energy, and Deathless creatures, which is quite silly because they are effectively the same as undead, just less ugly usually.

Something that rather bothers me when alignment concerns arise is that while there's an obvious stance between Good and Evil, the position between Law and Chaos is a lot more undecided. In a typical adventuring campaign, you want to help the forces of Good and defeat the forces of Evil. Not all of your members need to be good, but it's implicitly accepted that Good is right and Evil is wrong. If the world ends up Neutral, people are okay with it, but Good is the best answer. A neutral creature can live in a Good world, and depending on the Good world even an evil creature might be able to struggle by. In an Evil world, good cannot survive, and neutral would have a hard time at best. But when you look at Law and Chaos, you never really want one over the other. Most campaigns would have you strive for Neutral on that front, because too much Law and you get a dictatorship or something similar, while too much Chaos gives rise to anarchy and destruction. I don't think it's fair that, as far as I see it in game worlds, you can never have too much Good, any Evil is too much evil, and you don't want too much Law or Chaos. How have people dealt with that?

Another thing about playing characters with these alignments is that again, the Good and Evil side dictates too much of it. A party of good characters are not likely to allow an evil character in, but I can't think of any case where a party of lawful characters exists and refuses entry to a chaotic character (mainly because I can't picture Lawful Good and Lawful Evil working together in the first place). But it's not unreasonable for a party of lawful good, neutral good, and chaotic good to work together, while a party of lawful good, lawful neutral, and lawful evil is kind of weird. So in all, the Law-Chaos axis just plays into things less than the Good-Evil axis. My favorite alignment is chaotic neutral, because it's the freest. Because you're most devoted to Chaos, you can do both Good and Evil things and not have to lock yourself into either of those positions. Heck, you can even do Lawful things, because it would be too non-Chaotic to follow the hard-and-fast rule that you'll never do Lawful things because you're Chaotic. But once you have that mentality, then alignments barely mean anything at all.

Chilingsworth

2013-01-11, 09:05 PM

One note in reference to Chillingsworth's mention of turning a loved one to an undead to prevent them from dying. Remember that when a person is made into an undead, their soul is gone. The person is no longer there. Also, in what sort of situation would one have access to the type of magic to make one undead, but not to resurrect a person?

Off the top of my head? Two situations:

1. You're a wizard.

2. You yourself are an undead capable of turning others.

Also, I thought that sentient undead, at the very least, usually retained the original's soul?

TuggyNE

2013-01-11, 10:52 PM

Also, I thought that sentient undead, at the very least, usually retained the original's soul?

What's more, all undead have some sort of connection to the creature they were formed from, since it's impossible to raise/resurrect a creature if an undead spawned from it is still walking around. Exactly what that connection is has never been precisely defined.

Yuukale

2013-01-12, 01:15 AM

Chilingsworth

2013-01-12, 01:25 AM

If an elf is ok with killing non-elves just as much some humans are ok with killing animals to some end (progress, eating, fashion, w/e)
AND
this same elf regards each and every elven life sacred the same way good clerics do.

would that make me...

a) lawful evil (disrespecting life in an organized fashion)

b) chaotic good (I do good things to 'my race' even if I have to break eggs (humans)

c) lawful neutral (defined morals yet killing humans and preserving elves cancel them out)

d) none of the above

e) you are ...... because of .....

Depends: Do you go out of your way to kill humans, or only kill them when nessecary, but feel no remorse about it when you do?

Either way, sounds like you're a good candidate for the Eldreth Veluuthra (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Eldreth_Veluuthra)

Raven777

2013-01-12, 01:26 AM

Yuukale

2013-01-12, 02:10 AM

Depends: Do you go out of your way to kill humans, or only kill them when nessecary, but feel no remorse about it when you do?
Either way, sounds like you're a good candidate for the Eldreth Veluuthra (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Eldreth_Veluuthra)

I don't kill them for sport, only if they stand in the middle of some elven design. If a Coronal declared that Illefarn were to be reborn and the cities in its actual space didn't want to relocate, then war wouldn't cause me to shed a tear on their behalf.

I strongly like the Eldreth Veluuthra, but there's a thing that the Seldarien disapprove and will forsake whoever joins them, if it's not in the book then I read it in candlekeep on a thread.

Chilingsworth

2013-01-12, 02:15 AM

I don't kill them for sport, only if they stand in the middle of some elven design. If a Coronal declared that Illefarn were to be reborn and the cities in its actual space didn't want to relocate, then war wouldn't cause me to shed a tear on their behalf.

I strongly like the Eldreth Veluuthra, but there's a thing that the Seldarien disapprove and will forsake whoever joins them, if it's not in the book then I read it in candlekeep on a thread.

Their godforsaken status is mentioned in Champions of Ruin, yes. Actually, I wasn't even sure if you were playing in the Realms.

EDIT: and from your description, I'd guess Lawful Evil: your duty drives you to commit evil acts.

Nettlekid

2013-01-12, 02:22 AM

Killing a good Awakened Bear is Evil even if the Bear's still an animal. Basically, as soon as the thing's sentient, it gets protected statue.

With this out of the way... Racism (specieism?) motivated killings are Evil, but whether they are lawful or chaotic depends on how the greater Elven society sees them. If your character's society condones it, then Lawful. If not, then Chaotic.

Is that always the case? Githyanki and Githzerai are both pretty neutral, Githyanki a little more evil than Githzerai. But these mortal enemies will actually take up arms together against illithids, their evil enemies. So, this species-based killing is Evil? But it's against an evil creature. But the creatures doing the killing are also probably evil.
What about the case where adventurers kill creatures like Orcs and Goblins and especially fiends pretty indiscriminately because of their species?
Or, perhaps most controversially, Paladins who'll kill ANY evil creature just for being evil. Or even probably nonevil creatures of a usually evil species. That's all called Good, despite being basically genocide.

In the case of this human-killing elf, I'd say probably lawful neutral. As far as I'm aware, the killing of a human is not an objectively Evil act, the way killing an angel is Evil and killing a devil is Good. So morally, those actions are neutral. It might go evil if this guy hunts humans with zeal, and it might go good if he seeks to spare human life if at all possible (as opposed to seeing them as disposable.) He's lawful because he's following the rules of his culture concretely, and it would go more neutral if he tried to save humans, and outright chaotic if he spared humans at the cost of elven life (like for good humans and evil elves, for example).

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-12, 03:02 AM

Is that always the case? Githyanki and Githzerai are both pretty neutral, Githyanki a little more evil than Githzerai. But these mortal enemies will actually take up arms together against illithids, their evil enemies. So, this species-based killing is Evil? But it's against an evil creature. But the creatures doing the killing are also probably evil.
What about the case where adventurers kill creatures like Orcs and Goblins and especially fiends pretty indiscriminately because of their species?
Or, perhaps most controversially, Paladins who'll kill ANY evil creature just for being evil. Or even probably nonevil creatures of a usually evil species. That's all called Good, despite being basically genocide.
No it's not. Except for the fiends, none of those are recognized by the rules as definitely always good acts. Even the paladin that stabs anything his evil-dar pings is a paladin that's going to fall in short order, by RAW.

In the case of this human-killing elf, I'd say probably lawful neutral. As far as I'm aware, the killing of a human is not an objectively Evil act, the way killing an angel is Evil and killing a devil is Good. So morally, those actions are neutral. It might go evil if this guy hunts humans with zeal, and it might go good if he seeks to spare human life if at all possible (as opposed to seeing them as disposable.) He's lawful because he's following the rules of his culture concretely, and it would go more neutral if he tried to save humans, and outright chaotic if he spared humans at the cost of elven life (like for good humans and evil elves, for example).

This is accurate though. I'm not sure I'd even call the character lawful at this point. The given info is simply too sparse to make any kind of judgement about that character.

Raven777

2013-01-12, 03:11 AM

Is that always the case? Githyanki and Githzerai are both pretty neutral, Githyanki a little more evil than Githzerai. But these mortal enemies will actually take up arms together against illithids, their evil enemies. So, this species-based killing is Evil? But it's against an evil creature. But the creatures doing the killing are also probably evil.
What about the case where adventurers kill creatures like Orcs and Goblins and especially fiends pretty indiscriminately because of their species?
Or, perhaps most controversially, Paladins who'll kill ANY evil creature just for being evil. Or even probably nonevil creatures of a usually evil species. That's all called Good, despite being basically genocide.

Well, it depends if you subscribe to the books' depiction of Good or to your own table's more personal morals.

Illithids, Orcs and Drows are not hunted by Good heroes because of what they are, but because of what they do. Mass slavery, mass slaughter of innocents, wearing tight black leather... Bringing them to the justice of the blade for these actions is Good.

But as long as they do not actually commit them, heroes have no Good vindication to assault them based on race alone. One who does would be a bigot. Being a bigot doesn't automatically makes him pure Evil, but continuing this behavior means he shouldn't ping Good for long either.

willpell

2013-01-12, 03:19 AM

What if it does but you raise back the sacrificed afterwards?

Being killed was probably still rather traumatic to them (and the raise likewise, since it usually costs them a level). So even if it's no longer muder, it's at least assault and possibly akin to rape. While not completely impossible to compensate the victim enough that they will forgive the transgression, it is still a transgressive act. Exactly how much so will depend on a lot of moving parts, but in general our own reality is the starting point, and you figure out from there how much easier/harder the lives of D&D people are (eg elves live for hundreds of years, so they've probably suffered so many minor traumas as to no longer be bothered by them, but a major trauma scars their lives for centuries instead of decades, so the range of crimes and punishments in elven society is probably wider than humans would think necessary...this "take a few lumps but never forgive an actual bruise" attitude also kinda ties into why elves are Chaotic as a rule).

The bottom line is that rules as written it's evil, anything else is house rules.

This is exactly why I do not think RAW should be upheld as some holy grail; it is a common reference point, no more. The reasons for a spell like Deathwatch to be evil are spurious at best; there is absolutely nothing wrong with changing them, you just have to make sure to inform people you've done so.

Short of a contrived "negative energy = bad" ruling, I don't see any reason why Necropolitans are a bad thing.

There was something about the nails used in the Crucimigration being evil relics, but that's pretty obviously BS, so I agree here. Necropolitans are a lot like Warforged IMO; they probably have a bit of a problem with empathy, but overall there's no reason to assume they tend strongly toward Evil or are incapable of being Good if they make any real effort toward it.

This reminds me of something I wanted to touch on before and forgot to. One possible argument for why undead = badness is the relative abundance of direct mental control effects for undead, versus those that work on creatures in general (and generally not on undead). Dominate Monster is a high-level spell, so most people will go through their lives without getting within five counties of someone capable of casting it, but if you're a 1-HD Necropolitan, a level 6 cleric can force you to do anything he wants without you having any ability to stop him, and he's only 3 levels ahead of your "lifetime experience earned" total. So converting a person to an undead is sort of like inflicting permanent Wisdom drain on them; it means they're less likely to be able to protect their own freedoms or take responsibility for actions that occur because they were physically present at a location.

As a result of this, while creating undead is not necessarily Evil, it is almost certainly something that a Chaotic Good individual should frown heavily upon; just the possibility that the necropolitans can be used against their will, and legitimately claim innocence of the actions they were forced to perform, is going to be enough to incline a PoF toward the belief that Necropolitans should never have existed and should not be allowed to create more of themselves. A normal Paladin is more likely to listen to the arguments in favor of a zombie labor force or the Necropolizing of sages and great leaders and such; to him it's a fairly straightforward cost/benefit analysis, while the more emotional PoF is skeeved by the very idea and probably would rather not take chances. (Though of course it can go the other way for different reasons; where the PoF gets the crawlies for personal or empathic reasons, the Paladin fixates on the message being sent or the underlying philosophical principle, and the PoF is more willing to be convinced to try something over his own objections, hoping that he can manage to come out ahead - though he also has less hope that if things do go wrong this time, it will stop others from repeating the mistake, so again he's more likely to try and prevent it from happening in the first place.)

But then the DM says nope, that's still Evil... because the Gods say so. Then you remind him that Gods are not arbiters of good and evil. Then he reminds you that in his game, yes, yes they are.

Oof. I get where he's coming from, but it does sound like he's a bit less than consistent. So yes, all the more reason why you should try and talk these issues through with a GM before the game, as well as over the course of a campaign (preferably not in the middle of a play session, if it can be avoided).

One thing about alignments that has always been a bit tricky to work around is the empirical evidence of what is Good and what is Evil. Unlike our world, the forces of Good and Evil are distinct, and while certain actions are neutral or can be good and evil depending on context, some actions by definition can only be Good, and some can only be Evil. The actual morality of a character is sometimes overruled by the ethics of the actions they take.

As it should be, IMO. Although the book's standards for defining actions as Evil are not always reasonable...Poison, for instance. The use of non-damaging poisons to render opponents unconscious so they can be imprisoned and tried fairly should definitely not be either inherently Evil or "illegal in all societies". Dishonorable, perhaps; I'd be comfortable with dinging a Paladin or Knight for using such tactics, but otherwise, if you can get Carrion Crawler Brain Juice some way other than breeding Carrion Crawlers (they're dangerous enough that cultivating them is at best irresponsible), using it as a contact weapon to knock out criminals without bloodshed or pain shouldn't bother an Acolyte of Peace in the slightest. Likewise, actual Drow Poison is probably not something you should be using if you're Good, since it's made by Drow who probably weren't, but the exact same substance (assuming it has no terribly nasty ingredients) manufactured by a Good alchemist should be usable on a NG Corellonite cleric's arrows without risk of him becoming True Neutral and losing his clerical powers.

Case in point, the regular Paladin. A Paladin can truly believe they're doing good, and be the purest person ever, but if they ever mistakenly do something Evil while thinking it's good, they lose their powers. That's pretty empirical.

It's hard to say without examples, but this is probably justifiable in most cases. If you insist on killing a Succubus because Succubi are always evil, and you assume that the person who's telling you that this Succubus is really a polymorphed innocent must be lying and kill her anyway, it's only appropriate for you to lose your paladin powers and need to atone. It doesn't matter how certain you were, you still should have been less trigger-happy and taken the time to make absolutely sure the action was Right. It's possible that in a more convoluted situation, the chances are better that a legitimate mistake would be made - but as Hinjo said, that's exactly why we have an Atonement spell. If the gods are reasonable, they will know you're not omniscient and will judge you based on your best efforts, not punish you for factors beyond your control.

Likewise, if you cast too many spells with the Evil descriptor, you go to Hell. (If you don't atone, I think it's like 9. The Fiendish Codex II says stuff about this.)

*facepalm* Okay, well that's just dumb. Once again, we shouldn't always follow the RAW; sometimes it was written by an editor who hadn't had his coffee that morning.

The reverse argument holds true for Good gods, positive energy, and Deathless creatures, which is quite silly because they are effectively the same as undead, just less ugly usually.

One thing worth acknowledging here is that if you go to the Positive Energy plane (or any other Strongly Positive-dominant plane), you'll be healed so much that you explode. Doesn't entirely make sense, given that this can't happen on the Material plane with the same amount of healing, but it does cast a certain amount of doubt on the idea that Positive energy is necessarily always Good, or that Negative should always be Evil.

Something that rather bothers me when alignment concerns arise is that while there's an obvious stance between Good and Evil, the position between Law and Chaos is a lot more undecided.

This is fairly appropriate, because ethics are a lot more involved, situational, and open to interpretation than morals. I don't agree with those who say there's literally no difference between Chaos and Law, but it is true that often times the difference is less about what you do than about how or why you do it (as my example with the Paladins earlier demonstrates). For this reason, even if a character is playing a Law Incarnate or a Neutral Cleric of Erythnul or something, the DM should not be in a big hurry to ding them for betraying their ethical alignment. One or two somewhat Chaotic acts do not usually mean you stop being Lawful; by definition Law is about consistency, so while a perfectly Lawful person should be totally consistent, you have to be fairly consistently non-Lawful in order to have stopped being Lawful, if you get what I'm saying. There are exceptions; a guy who sets an entire market square on fire just to watch it burn, even if it's deserted at the time, has probably behaved Chaotically enough that he can't pick up a Monk level until he's put in some serious effort to get back to a disciplined mindset (inflicting mass property damage for the sake of "ooh, pretty colors" is about as undisciplined as you can get).

(This leads into an odd side-question which I'll throw out: according to the RAW, when you hit a high enough XP total for your next level, you immediately level up. So if you are a Monk and you happen to not be Lawful at the time you gain a level, you can't legally gain a Monk level, but you aren't intentionally gaining a non-Monk level, so should you be able to take your current level in Paragon or something, and then go back to Monk levels after you've become Lawful again? I'm strongly inclined to say "yes", but feel free to discuss it.)

A neutral creature can live in a Good world, and depending on the Good world even an evil creature might be able to struggle by. In an Evil world, good cannot survive, and neutral would have a hard time at best.

Well put.

I don't think it's fair that, as far as I see it in game worlds, you can never have too much Good, any Evil is too much evil, and you don't want too much Law or Chaos. How have people dealt with that?

I created a campaign world specifically to turn that on its head, but I won't get too much into discussing it here, since it's too far from RAW for general discussion. But it does make for an interesting question that you should put to a Rilmani or some such individual. (One of the more minor changes I made in my setting was to rule that Xan Yae was Neutral Good, because I perceived this same disconnect; the description of her didn't make it seem that she was at all "evil tolerant", and it's very difficult to argue that balancing X amount of Good against Y amount of Evil can work out to Neutral. It can be done, but the mentality it required didn't seem consistent with the description of Xan Yae.)

A party of good characters are not likely to allow an evil character in, but I can't think of any case where a party of lawful characters exists and refuses entry to a chaotic character (mainly because I can't picture Lawful Good and Lawful Evil working together in the first place).

I very easily can. Members of a government, a monolithic church, or any number of similar organizations are expected to set aside their individual differences, follow orders and obey the rules and laws of the group, filing protests or the like only through due process and at the proper time. And not wanting a Chaotic character in the group would be as simple as not wanting your party Rogue filching your gold, or the clueless twit of a bard starting to whistle because he's bored while you're supposed to be doing a stakeout.

My favorite alignment is chaotic neutral, because it's the freest. Because you're most devoted to Chaos, you can do both Good and Evil things and not have to lock yourself into either of those positions. Heck, you can even do Lawful things, because it would be too non-Chaotic to follow the hard-and-fast rule that you'll never do Lawful things because you're Chaotic. But once you have that mentality, then alignments barely mean anything at all.

This is definitely not how I would rule it in my games. My personal feeling is that Chaos is a distinct code of its own, and that it's going to stand for its own principles, so it definitely is possible in my game to get dinged for not being Chaotic enough. For instance if you're a Chaos Incarnate and you find a shack in the woods where a religious fundamentalist has been brainwashing his children to believe that elves are evil, you're going to feel a responsibility to get in there and tell the kids that their father is lying to them and that elves aren't really like what he's been descibing. But at the same time, if the government tried to take the children into protective custody, you might stand up for the father's rights to raise his children however he wants without The Man getting involved. As a Chaotic individual, you don't see a contradction in taking both sides of this issue, because you believe it's perfectly possible to make sense of even such a convoluted situation. You want the father to have his children, and the children to have their freedom to believe differently from their father, and you will blame Law if the father refuses to accept his children's change of heart, because Law is what keeps his mind in this rigid obsessive state, blinds him to his own feelings and those of his children, and keeps him from growing and evolving as a person.

If an elf is ok with killing non-elves just as much some humans are ok with killing animals to some end (progress, eating, fashion, w/e)
AND
this same elf regards each and every elven life sacred the same way good clerics do.

This is a very thorny case. Speciesism tends to be Lawful Evil, but if the elf is skinning humans to make a fancy coat, that's probably atrocious enough behavior to be regarded as Chaotic Evil. His compassion for his fellow elves is almost certainly not enough to make him Good, even if he only kills humans for food; he might manage to avoid an Evil tag in that case. Given the long elven lifespan (and, if they're Sun or Gray elves, heightened Intelligence; Wisdom would also work if there was a +WIS Elf race, though it'd also make this sort of behavior less likely IMO), he could make a justifiable claim of superiority ("sure humans are sentient, but not very sentient; how much thinking and feeling can they do in a mere 70 years, after all?"), and if he shows some regard for the condition of his farm humans, he more nearly approaches Good, but he'd have to keep this behavior very low-key and very well-balanced in order to have any hope of actually being Good, even if the game avoids anthropocentric bias altogether (which is basically impossible anyway; ultimately it's pretty hard to stop acknowledging our own humanity completely, or really properly put ourselves in the mindset of something legitimately better than us).

All told, I'd most likely peg this character as somewhere between True Neutral and some variety of Evil depending on the exact particulars. Lawful Neutral and Neutral Good are both an extreme stretch; the other three alignments are almost unquestionably out.

I don't kill them for sport, only if they stand in the middle of some elven design. If a Coronal declared that Illefarn were to be reborn and the cities in its actual space didn't want to relocate, then war wouldn't cause me to shed a tear on their behalf.

Don't know what Coronal and Illefarn are, but I'd have a very hard time accepting that the elves couldn't possibly build their city somewhere else in order to avoid having to murder the humans that live there.

Is that always the case? Githyanki and Githzerai are both pretty neutral, Githyanki a little more evil than Githzerai.

Githyanki are often/usually Evil, partly because they have a lich ruling their society, and mostly just because they're driven by hate and determined to conquer. I figure them for the classic "abused turns abuser", personally; they're so determined to punish the Illithids for their ancestors's slavery that they don't care if they become just as bad as the Illithids in the process; they can't even realistically picture a day when their war will end in victory, so they're not trying very hard to figure out what will happen thereafter. They're radical extremists, more likely to execute than to torture or enslave, and almost never having any fun doing any of these, but they consider their end so important as to justify any means whatsoever, so they're more than "a little" evil as a general rule.

But these mortal enemies will actually take up arms together against illithids, their evil enemies. So, this species-based killing is Evil? But it's against an evil creature. But the creatures doing the killing are also probably evil.

For the most part, killing Illithids is not speciesist. It's not just that they're an "always evil" race; it's that they do evil things non-stop. If you murdered Thoqqalm from the BOXD just because of her species, that wouldn't be a Paladin-quality act, but attacking her on the assumption that she's probably evil because she's a mind flayer is not entirely unjustified, and illithids are dangerous enough that you could hardly be blamed for trying to put her down fast and not listening to any excuses about her being Good from what you would assume is a thrall of hers.

So in this case, it's not necessarily Evil to want to kill Illithids. But it's also perfecty compatible with an Evil alignment. It's not like all the villains happily work together, after all.

What about the case where adventurers kill creatures like Orcs and Goblins and especially fiends pretty indiscriminately because of their species?

Fiends are literally made of evil, so with very few exceptions killing them on sight is a Good act. But Orcs and Goblins are free-willed creatures who were simply raised in a society that taught them Evil principles, so kill-on-sight with them is very definitely not Good behavior. It is for much this sort of reason that the "murderhobo" label for adventurers tends to fit. The GM has the responsibility to fight the standard paradigm of assuming that you get XP for killing things that are okay to kill; this is an oversimplification of what D&D is really supposed to be about. If you wipe out an entire orc warband, you've defeated them and you earn XP; you don't earn more XP by butchering their defenseless children, and you're certainly not Good after you do so. (Assuming that they'll grow up to become another human-hating warband, and dispatching them now to be safe from that potential threat, is probably Lawful Neutral mentality.)

As far as I'm aware, the killing of a human is not an objectively Evil act, the way killing an angel is Evil and killing a devil is Good.

Correct, and again this is because Outsiders are part and parcel of the plane they come from, which is overwhelmingly dominated by the force of the alignment. Devils who become Good somehow will find that Baator becomes an extremely unpleasant place to their new sensibilities, and will probably leave; it will be their responsibility to find way of making their non-Evil status clear to the natives of wherever they move to. If enough Devils were to become Good fast enough, Baator itself might stop being an Evil plane, and eventually people with Knowledge: the Planes would learn that this had happened, and spread the word that it was time to stop smite-on-sighting Devils. It would be a painful adjustment period and mistakes would be made, but that's how the Planes work; their reality is based on belief which is based on reality which is based on belief, and so whatever you assume to be true tends to become true and to shape further such assumptions. (That does NOT mean the mechanics of the process are simple enough that you can easily track them with game rules such as "9 Evil spells = Damned".)

wearing tight black leather...

:biggrin: :biggrin: :biggrin:

Darth Stabber

2013-01-12, 03:41 AM

This is exactly why I do not think RAW should be upheld as some holy grail; it is a common reference point, no more. The reasons for a spell like Deathwatch to be evil are spurious at best; there is absolutely nothing wrong with changing them, you just have to make sure to inform people you've done so.

I am not RAW's biggest supporter, but I do try to have a good reason to vary. Also since everyone is playing under their own set of house rules, most conversations on the board will default to RAW. The question is whether or not the rule makes sense. I have made sense of it in a way consistant with raw, therefore I don't deviate on that point. If it doesn't jibe for you, do what you want.

Story

2013-01-12, 03:52 AM

This reminds me of something I wanted to touch on before and forgot to. One possible argument for why undead = badness is the relative abundance of direct mental control effects for undead, versus those that work on creatures in general (and generally not on undead). Dominate Monster is a high-level spell, so most people will go through their lives without getting within five counties of someone capable of casting it, but if you're a 1-HD Necropolitan, a level 6 cleric can force you to do anything he wants without you having any ability to stop him, and he's only 3 levels ahead of your "lifetime experience earned" total. So converting a person to an undead is sort of like inflicting permanent Wisdom drain on them; it means they're less likely to be able to protect their own freedoms or take responsibility for actions that occur because they were physically present at a location.

A single feat gives +4 Turn Resistance. If a level 1 character is facing a level 14 Cleric, they were going to get dominated anyway. If you rule that Corpsecrafter can be applied to the ritual, then that's more turn resistance right there. Sure it's possible to boost turning to absurd levels, but that usually requires a dedicated build, and boosting rebuke is harder than turning.

(This leads into an odd side-question which I'll throw out: according to the RAW, when you hit a high enough XP total for your next level, you immediately level up. So if you are a Monk and you happen to not be Lawful at the time you gain a level, you can't legally gain a Monk level, but you aren't intentionally gaining a non-Monk level, so should you be able to take your current level in Paragon or something, and then go back to Monk levels after you've become Lawful again? I'm strongly inclined to say "yes", but feel free to discuss it.)

Actually, the item crafting rules say that you can delay leveling up.

willpell

2013-01-12, 05:25 AM

Actually, the item crafting rules say that you can delay leveling up.

Only if you have an Item Creation Feat, which non-casters never do.

Raven777

2013-01-12, 03:34 PM

Isn't one of the doomsday critters in Elder Evils (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Evils) powered by positive energy? I think it's Ragnorra. If I remember correctly, she bathes the world in so much positive energy that everything starts growing weird tumors or melting into gooey monsters.

I also remember a homebrew Elder Evil that's basically the Rapture. Lawful Good positive energy fueled Shadows start killing people and spawning more and more of their own until the universe is populated only by happy, Lawful, Good Shadows. Sure, nobody has free will anymore and they'll do little more than exist and wander until the collapse of reality, but they'll be happy.

willpell

2013-01-18, 02:45 AM

Ragnorra....the Rapture.

Both sound like they'd make good baddies for a party of Neutral heroes such as druids, where Good is more like "Nicer Evil" or "Principled Jerk" and the true "good" ideal is Balance (the Rilmani would probably feature as allies in such a game).

Randomly I am now imagining doing a D&D version of Arkham Horror (the modern FFG version), with the Elder Evils standing in for the Ancient Ones of that game. D&D's rules are way too complicated in a lot of ways, but a stripped-down rulesset and the same setting/characters/monsters/etc. could make a great board game.

Kane0

2013-01-18, 03:17 AM

willpell

2013-01-18, 05:00 AM

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-18, 05:27 AM

I have a question, but it may or may not be entirely relevant, so no need to answer it.

I have players that like to choose Chaotic Neutral because they use it as an excuse to do almost anything without being CE and hence labeled Chaotic Stupid. Is there an obvious solution to this, or at least a way to mitigate them from linking their character's identity to their alignment so closely?

Evil is still evil. If you kill an NPC without being able to justify it, that's evil. If you torture someone, that's evil. If you knowingly endanger others for your personal gain, that's evil. Betraying those who trust you is usually evil too (depends on whether you went into the relationship considering them an enemy and intending to betray them).

Being chaotic doesn't change any of that.

Honestly though. If noone in your group is interested in using the alignment system, as their attempts to avoid it by always being CN suggest, maybe you should just drop it. The alignment system is not required for the game to function and if its hurting your game instead of enriching it you'll be better off without it.

Gildedragon

2013-01-18, 05:40 AM

How do you think a person can justify their actions while playing a Paladin of Freedom? A Paladin of Freedom must follow a strict code of taking no evil actions and must not work to help anyone who will use their help towards lawful or evil ends.

If a Paladin of Freedom so strictly follows such a code in a deontological fashion (as suggested), is not he himself Lawful?

The Paladin's code is a metagame concept, same as HP, BAB, Class & Skill Ranks.
The way I see it; a paladin follows the code not because they are compelled signed up to follow the code in exchange for their class abilities, but because their virtue means their personal motivations and actions are aligned with the concepts embodied in the code. Thus a break in the code is the paladin's motivations/actions being out of line with the virtue that is at the core of their class abilities.
Does this make sense? A paladin's actions follow a certain pattern, even if the paladin has no notion of this pattern.

To your question, it makes sense to me that all the, well, extreme alignments should have their mortal exemplars (not in the planar sense.) Actually, if anything, I think WotC should have offered up more information on holy warriors of all nine alignments. Other than a single issue of dragon, though, I know of none.

My question: (not that this is the format of the thread, unless it ends up being...:smalltongue:):

On the morality of undead creation:

Is it moral to use a person's remains to create mindless undead without their prior consent? What about with their prior consent? What if you use the skeleton or zombie to improve the lives of the living? What if it causes no harm to the immortal soul? What if it causes some damage? What is the maximum acceptable ratio of damage to the soul/benefit to the living?

On intelligent undead:
Is it immoral to create a type of intelligent undead whith the transformee's consent? What if the resultant undead needs to feed on sentient creatures? What about a nonvoluntary transformation to prevent a loved one from passing on? What about a voluntary transformation into a form that does not require feeding on the living (such as a lich?) (also, assuming lichification doesn't require murder or the like.)

It is a bit disapointing there aren't a NG LN CN NE versions of the paladin, and that the versions that exist have so little support. Alas here is where one has to turn to homebrew.

On undead, in order and with rationalization. These exegeses assume that undead & neg. energy are not necessarily inherently evil.

Generally morally neutral with evil tendencies, but certainly chaotic & rude. It can be seen as desecration or theft, or as merely going through someone's garbage and taking stuff from it for your own use.

I'd say squarely neutral. This is not so much rummaging through the trash as getting weird inheritance and doing with it as you like.

I'd say shift the alignment in question 1 step north

That is one of the assumptions I make to answer these questions.

If it caused harm to the immortal soul, it'd be an evil act; no matter the ratio. The evil may be mitigated if the dead party knew beforehand and was willing to take the damage for someone else's sake.

Neutral, though may vary depending on the undead.

Yes, decidedly Evil.

Evil and Chaotic.

Neutral, unless it requires murder, in which case: evil.

What's more, all undead have some sort of connection to the creature they were formed from, since it's impossible to raise/resurrect a creature if an undead spawned from it is still walking around. Exactly what that connection is has never been precisely defined.

I'd always thought that was because the creature was now a new different creature (the creature touched is not a dead creature anymore, thus not a valid target). Alternatively, it could be because the negative energy has scrubbed or superseded the whatever that allowed the previous inhabitant's soul to return (so that when you're raising the ex-zombified body of the fighter, it tries to raise the zombie, which is not a valid target, thus making the spell fail).

I have a question, but it may or may not be entirely relevant, so no need to answer it.

I have players that like to choose Chaotic Neutral because they use it as an excuse to do almost anything without being CE and hence labeled Chaotic Stupid. Is there an obvious solution to this, or at least a way to mitigate them from linking their character's identity to their alignment so closely?

Straight up: you could drop them to CE; particularly if they do anything that would entail the [vile] descriptor. I would be hesitant about this, but it is an option.

A less knee-jerk reaction would be to ask them what makes them neutral in regards to good and evil, rather that evil or good, and not accept anything that is not satisfactory.

ArcturusV

2013-01-18, 05:44 AM

Or, just let them be Chaotic Evil. If they are doing it to try and skirt the Evil alignment, remind them that the book does state that if they consistently behave in a way that is contrary to their stated alignment you can inform them to go change that "Alignment: _______" section to say Chaotic Evil.

But if it's just wanting the freedom to occasionally be Evil without having to worry about Paladin Smiting or the like. No problem with Neutral. Neutral guys go both ways from time to time.

The question is always "Consistently". And the rules are geared so that if you Consistently behave in such a way, your alignment changes to reflect that. You should never force someone to play a certain way or say "Your alignment prohibits that" unless you're talking about Paladins/Monks/Clerics/Druids/Other Alignment Dependents, and want to warn them about potential Fall actions or give them a chance to justify it.

TuggyNE

2013-01-18, 05:52 AM

I'd always thought that was because the creature was now a new different creature (the creature touched is not a dead creature anymore, thus not a valid target). Alternatively, it could be because the negative energy has scrubbed or superseded the whatever that allowed the previous inhabitant's soul to return (so that when you're raising the ex-zombified body of the fighter, it tries to raise the zombie, which is not a valid target, thus making the spell fail).

That explanation works for raise dead, but since (true) resurrection is capable of resurrecting the original creature once the undead formed from it is destroyed, it's not sufficient.

Gildedragon

2013-01-18, 06:00 AM

That explanation works for raise dead, but since (true) resurrection is capable of resurrecting the original creature once the undead formed from it is destroyed, it's not sufficient.

True Resurection is much more powerful with it not even needing a body. One could just say that the ex-undead body is a means of unambiguous identification and it uses the old body as raw materials.

edit: Ignore this, I misread resurection's wording as can't rather than can.
...though a similar reasoning may say that the fact that it doesn't need a whole body... but -shrug-

I fig I might as well toss a Q in:
What's so evil of the deathwatch spell?

ArcturusV

2013-01-18, 06:04 AM

Gildedragon

2013-01-18, 06:12 AM

Note on the body thing: Reincarnation, which makes a new body, but is similarly blocked by the Undead clause. If I hacked off a finger, but later a zombie was raised (sans finger), but I used the finger to Reincarnate the dead man into a new body (Thus having nothing to do with the zombie self)... why does the fact the zombie exist block it? I mean Raise Dead makes sense in so far as you need the intact body (As I read the spell) thus the finger solution doesn't work and it's hard to get a soul into a body that is already inhabited by dark magics, etc.

Touche. Now, what happens if person dies, gets reincarnated and THEN you make a zombie? What happens if the effects are simultaneous for example: someone makes a contingent spell that raises their body as a zombie if they get reincarnated (or viceversa), or by releasing two touch-charges via spell-flower?

sleepyphoenixx

2013-01-18, 06:16 AM

Note on the body thing: Reincarnation, which makes a new body, but is similarly blocked by the Undead clause. If I hacked off a finger, but later a zombie was raised (sans finger), but I used the finger to Reincarnate the dead man into a new body (Thus having nothing to do with the zombie self)... why does the fact the zombie exist block it? I mean Raise Dead makes sense in so far as you need the intact body (As I read the spell) thus the finger solution doesn't work and it's hard to get a soul into a body that is already inhabited by dark magics, etc.

A possible explanation that would also justify the undead = evil rule is that the
characters soul is bound/imprisoned in the creation or operation of the undead body.
Otherwise creating undead would be little different from creating golems (only a lot creepier).

ArcturusV

2013-01-18, 06:17 AM

My Rules Fu is far, far too weak to know.

"All I know is that I know almost nothing."

But it makes an interesting question about what the nature of Evil (as undead are about 99-100% pure evil. I don't discount some sourcebook I might not have read with Good Undead, or Neutral Undead, just haven't seen it yet), and how it can trump the power to create a new body for a soul.

Does Animate Dead and similar spells use the soul of the body's previous inhabitant to power the necromancy? And Resurrection is just more powerful than most Necromantic bindings so it removes that effect?

Does this mean if I cast Resurrection to bring back someone who is Undead currently, that said Undead crumbles to dust/"dies" instantly as the bindings on the soul powering the undead are cut?

I honestly don't know.

Gildedragon

2013-01-18, 06:28 AM

I'm pretty sure I've read about good liches and mummies.
I think a lich halfling bard working as a kitchen-maid or something as an NPC in a splatbook, as well as some good-lich shtick in some monster manual

What do you understand as Neutral, on either axis, to be?
Personally I see neutrality in the good-evil axis to be a desire to be one alignment but constant failure and innaction towards that ideal as a result of opposed traits. For example: a desire to be selfless, and altruistic and honorable, and even acting towards it, but constantly comitting small pecadilloes with the justification "nobody will notice" or "everyone does it", as well as, when push comes to shove, being unwilling or incapable of acting in a truly selfless manner.

ArcturusV

2013-01-18, 06:38 AM

Well, lets say I'm glad they dropped the definition of True Neutral from earlier Editions where it defined every Neutral as some grand cosmic philosopher who couldn't do anything without first carefully considering how it would impact the balance of the alignments across the multiverse.

Think I'm kidding? No, that was the definition of True Neutral in 2nd Edition. :smallyuk:

I see Neutral, or rather True Neutral as the SELFISH alignment. You're not really motivated by any strong moral curves or psychosis, etc. You're just out to take care of yourself, and those things you care about. You don't really think about the grand scheme of Good, or look to solve your problems via Arson and Murder. In the end, you just want to get to the end of the day with your skin intact, a full belly, and a warm body to sleep next to, how you got there isn't really your concern.

Larkas

2013-01-18, 08:33 AM

I think that all the controversy around undead arose because of an unwillingness from the part of the designers to define what actually means to rise undead creatures. It seems they intended undead to be created by binding the original creature's soul. But it could just as easily be created by binding a "negative elemental" to the corpse, like when you bind an earth elemental to make a golem. If a DM wants to go with the second interpretation, it makes no sense to stop true resurrection or reincarnation from happening just because there is a zombie occupying your previous shell.

Well, lets say I'm glad they dropped the definition of True Neutral from earlier Editions where it defined every Neutral as some grand cosmic philosopher who couldn't do anything without first carefully considering how it would impact the balance of the alignments across the multiverse.

Think I'm kidding? No, that was the definition of True Neutral in 2nd Edition. :smallyuk:

I see Neutral, or rather True Neutral as the SELFISH alignment. You're not really motivated by any strong moral curves or psychosis, etc. You're just out to take care of yourself, and those things you care about. You don't really think about the grand scheme of Good, or look to solve your problems via Arson and Murder. In the end, you just want to get to the end of the day with your skin intact, a full belly, and a warm body to sleep next to, how you got there isn't really your concern.

It can go both ways, actually. True Neutral can both represent a commitment to Balance or what can only be labeled as unalignment, which is what you described.

ArcturusV

2013-01-18, 09:25 AM

Yeah, it could be a commitment to balance. But it's something that I don't think players would typically do. I mean I can't imagine a session going something like:

Fighter: I charge at the Goblin Warchief now that he's exposed!

Wizard: I fireball their last group!

True Neutral Cleric: I can't let them wipe out an entire tribe of Goblins and disturb the great balance in that way. I ready an action to bash the wizard in the face with my mace when he tries to fireball them.

Which tends to be how they defined True Neutral in the "maintain the balance" sort of way back in the day.

willpell

2013-01-18, 12:28 PM

Glad to know this thread still has legs. I doubt I'll ever catch up to Afro's 25 pages of awesome, but I will do what little I can.

I have a question, but it may or may not be entirely relevant, so no need to answer it.

Hey, anything that gives me an excuse to spout off is more than "relevant" enough for me. :smallbiggrin:

I have players that like to choose Chaotic Neutral because they use it as an excuse to do almost anything without being CE and hence labeled Chaotic Stupid. Is there an obvious solution to this, or at least a way to mitigate them from linking their character's identity to their alignment so closely?

Well, "linking your character's identity to their alignment" is always going to be a problem if someone takes too simplistic an approach. Dividing people into a smallish (such as 9) number of categories is never going to be how you write a psychology textbook. There should easily be dozens if not hundreds of broad behavioral archetypes which are consistent with any given alignment. So if the players think Chaotic Neutral is just one thing, prove to them otherwise. Building characters which must be CN for rules reasons (Chaos Incarnates, Clerics of Kord with an Any Nongood PrC, multiclass Druid/Savage Bards, etc.), and show those characters having complex motivations. Sure, some are just going to want the freedom to be selfish and contrary (but not actively sadistic), but others are tightly-wound, deadly serious warriors who simply cultivate unpredictable thought patterns to ensure that opponents can't figure them out well enough to defeat them, and still others are snarky jokesters who think that an unfolding disaster brought about by others' hubris is quality entertainment, and still another is a space-cadet spiritualist who steals unappreciated valuables and throws them away because he believes people are better off learning to live without material attachments...there are a lot of ways to play this or any other set of ethical principles.

Without knowing more about your players, I can't tell you much about how to manage their behavior, other than a general suggestion to talk things over with them and find out what they want out of the game. If they're only interested in killing orcs and taking their loot, no reason to force them to protect spoiled princesses or rescue dirt farmers. But make sure they know that they can write "Chaotic" on their character sheet and not be compelled to disrupt your plans for the game. If a ruckus is what they want, don't bother constructing anything more for them, but definitely find out for sure.

I'll be back to answer this page's questions later on.

Strawberries

2013-01-19, 02:44 AM

I'm pretty sure I've read about good liches and mummies.

Given that I remember at least one neutral-aligned succubus, that's really not surprising. Usually my rule of thumb is free will = can be of any alignment they want to be. It may be difficult due to society/circumstances/strong compulsions/physiology, but the possibility is there. I played a neutral-aligned banshee once, for instance. It was lots of fun. :smallsmile:

willpell

2013-01-20, 06:27 AM

Honestly though. If noone in your group is interested in using the alignment system, as their attempts to avoid it by always being CN suggest, maybe you should just drop it. The alignment system is not required for the game to function and if its hurting your game instead of enriching it you'll be better off without it.

I would assess this as false. There is a significant amount of interwoven alignment presence in the game, from the rules on which spells clerics can cast to the damage reduction of planar exemplars. Removing alignment is possible, but NOT effortless, and I would say it's "required" for the game to function, unless you modify the game (at which point it is technically a different, though very similar, game).

The Paladin's code is a metagame concept, same as HP, BAB, Class & Skill Ranks.

False. It is a (poor) attempt at translating the class's flavor into such a (not meta) game concept. But while no DM who maintains anything resembling a Fourth Wall is ever going to let you say "I don't have the maximum skill ranks allowed by my Hit Dice" in-character, a paladin can very definitely talk about his Code, the actions which he feels in his very soul would sever his connection to the Force of Law and Good Itself. So it is definitely not strictly an aspect of mechanics.

It is a bit disapointing there aren't a NG LN CN NE versions of the paladin

Incarnates can roughly fill the same conceptual role, if you're willing to put up with incarnum; restrict their soulmeld selection in exchange for full BAB, give them a special mount instead of Incarnum Radiance, and keep tinkering until you like what you've got. Also, really, it won't break anything if you allow NG or even LN paladins; you might have to revise their spell selection, and you'd potentially let them enter PrCs that an LG paladin can't (eg an NG paladin could take bard levels and maybe end up as a Sublime Chord or something, I'm just guessing since I don't know that PrC), which could be houserules around. It takes some work but it can be done. It's even easier if you use the UA Prestige Paladin instead of the PHB paladin; he's just a Fighter/Cleric theurge, so making him an NG cleric of Kord or something isn't too weird. I'm reluctant to encourage LN paladins because they end up as exactly the stereotypical "death to jaywalkers" templar, but if you're willing to apply a sensitive touch you can make sense of it.

What's so evil of the deathwatch spell?

Nothing really. It's fluffed as being "drawing on the powers of death", which certainly is logical if you're a necromancer using it to find soon-to-be fresh corpses. But a minor variant on it could reasonably be a "triage" spell for Neutral or even Good healers to use figuring out who needs help the worst. You might want to change the output slightly to make the distinction more clear, but ultimately just dropping the Evil descriptor isn't likely to hurt much.

But it makes an interesting question about what the nature of Evil (as undead are about 99-100% pure evil. I don't discount some sourcebook I might not have read with Good Undead, or Neutral Undead, just haven't seen it yet), and how it can trump the power to create a new body for a soul.

Evil is often portrayed as a corruptive, eclipsing force, so that fits. One rotten apple, and all that.

I'm pretty sure I've read about good liches and mummies.

Good liches are definitely a thing in Forgotten Realms, and possibly Eberron as well; in both cases they're Elves who like to keep their revered elders around for even longer than the thousand years an elf lives in the first place. They're a bit yicky-looking, but powered by positive energy; technically this should mean they're Deathless (Book of Exalted Deeds) rather than Undead, which would make them vulnerable to Energy Drain. In any event, even if liches can't be Good, they can certainly be Neutral if you ignore the mandated fluff; people have been trying to escape death any way they can forever, and if you ignore the "radioactive" aspect of negative energy as I've suggested doing, it becomes very reasonable to support non-Evil Undead. It is however appropriate to say that these tend to be Lawful, as they are inherently static creatures and thus could tend to become stuck in their ways, not able to evolve with the times because they don't feel the pulse of life to give immediacy to their surroundings. (I apply similar logic to vampires in my campaign; coming from a White Wolf RPG background, I don't like the way D&D's vampires are portrayed as Buffyesque monsters which spawn ad infinitum but have all the traditional weaknesses, and prefer to run them as ancient schemers who can occasionally be morally neutral or even Good, but only in a very rigid and nitpicky way, so they are permitted to have any Lawful or Evil alignment; the more they let themselves get lazy and follow their base instincts, the more inevitably Evil they become.)

What do you understand as Neutral, on either axis, to be?
Personally I see neutrality in the good-evil axis to be a desire to be one alignment but constant failure and innaction towards that ideal as a result of opposed traits. For example: a desire to be selfless, and altruistic and honorable, and even acting towards it, but constantly comitting small pecadilloes with the justification "nobody will notice" or "everyone does it", as well as, when push comes to shove, being unwilling or incapable of acting in a truly selfless manner.

All of this is indeed one good interpretation of Neutrality. It can also be an assumption that you should mind your own business and judge not lest ye be judged, or a desire to avoid tying yourself down to one set of prejudices and losing the ability to adapt to changing circumstances (one of the reasons why Druids are required to be Neutral; Nature isn't easily abstracted). For a more 'arch' take on Neutrality, I've recently become fond of the Rilmani, a Planescape faction which champions balance as an ideal and tries to defuse conflict between the extremes. I'm definitely up for talking more about this later on.

Well, lets say I'm glad they dropped the definition of True Neutral from earlier Editions where it defined every Neutral as some grand cosmic philosopher who couldn't do anything without first carefully considering how it would impact the balance of the alignments across the multiverse.

Certainly "every" is nearly always an exagerration.

I see Neutral, or rather True Neutral as the SELFISH alignment.

No, Selfishness is almost always a strong pull in the direction of Evil and/or Chaos; a character can be selfish and stay True Neutral by not going too far (indeed, that's pretty much what most people do), but being TN is definitely not synonymous with selfishness, nor vice versa. Keep in mind also that a fairly reasonable degree of selfishness in reality, where we don't have a lot of answers to big questions about how other people feel or what the purpose of everything is, makes a lot less sense in D&D world where you can cast Detect Thoughts or Plane Shift to the Celestial Realms. If you're only looking out for #1, the chances are extremely good you're going to step on some toes as a result of your obliviousness to the cares of others; these are probably Evil acts, just ones not significant enough to affect your alignment unless they become a very strong pattern.

I think that all the controversy around undead arose because of an unwillingness from the part of the designers to define what actually means to rise undead creatures.

Indeed, and that was probably the right call on their part; making it vague means making it easier to change to suit your campaign. They could only print so many books, after all. I agree it might be nice if some things were better nailed down, but that's why I'm always fussing with my homebrew versions (that and my allergy to really stupid-sounding monster names).

Which tends to be how they defined True Neutral in the "maintain the balance" sort of way back in the day.

The problem with this being simply how the heck the Balance Cleric is supposed to know enough about the world to be sure whether Evil needs to be protected from Good or vice versa. Without omniscience, you can't really claim to be qualified to make such determinations.

Given that I remember at least one neutral-aligned succubus

Neutral? Hell, (pardon the pun), there's a Lawful Good succubus published as canon on the Wotco site. I would have vetoed that one myself. She still has the ability to inflict negative levels (which turn people they kill into wights), so it only makes sense to assume that she's fundamentally incapable of walking the righteous path without succumbing to her evil nature, let alone being capable of gaining paladin powers. At the very least I'd probably say that an Exemplar who changes alignment turns into a different Exemplar, which for her would mean instead of a succubus she's now an Archon of some sort, still beautiful and possibly still shapeshifty (this is dicey, as it can be used to deceive and victimize by presenting yourself as something you're not, but it's not necessarily off-limits), but no longer inflicting negative levels.

In some cases it might not make sense to change the entire creature, but perhaps to homebrew it into a revised variant - a Hezrou who became Chaotic Neutral could be a Slaad, but if it became Good there isn't really an Eladrin that bears any semblance to it, so you might have to tack an "eladrin template" onto it and file off its more demonic characteristics. All this is based on my feeling that Exemplars are not simply creatures who live on a plane with certain characteristics, but living symbols of those very natures - eg a Kyton isn't just a guy made out of chains who happens to be LE and to live on a plane that's inherently hostile to Chaos and Good, he's a guy made out of chains because he's LE and because chains are symbolic of Evil Lawfulness, so if he turned into a Guardinal he couldn't be made of chains anymore.

thethird

2013-01-20, 07:08 AM

Otherwise creating undead would be little different from creating golems (only a lot creepier).

The animating force for a golem is a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The process of creating the golem binds the unwilling spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem’s creator.

Golem (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/golem.htm) entry in the SRD. It is already little different, except that for the Golem you explicitly bind some spirit that doesn't have anything to do with the Golem. A spirit that might be chilling in the Elemental Park of the Elemental Plane playing fetch with its Elemental Puppy while his Elemental Family eats Elemental Sandwiches.

Note though, that depriving a living creature that hasn't done anything to you, at all, of its free will and binding it to a golem is not at all [Evil].

My question would be why is that not [Evil] while animating a corpse is [Evil] (regardless of the circumstances, it is already dead, and maybe it desired to be animated, or it is going to serve a good purpose)?

I'm pretty sure I've read about good liches and mummies.

There are explicitly good liches in monsters of Faerun. Note though that they aren't [Good] nor do they propose any different creation method. Eberron's lesser focus on the alignment will probably host good liches.

On the Necropolitan thingie that come up, they are from Ghostwalk a campaign setting and there undead isn't necessarily [Evil] thus the lack of [Evil] of the Necropolitan.

My biggest issue (and question) with the alignment system and morality in D&D is that there are several gods. And there are [Good], Good, good, neutral, evil, Evil, [Evil] gods, and the same in the law-chaos axis. And each of them rewards or punishes people based on their own set of moral values. If you are good you might go to "paradise" if you follow a good God, but if you are following a [Good] God? Meh, you might be lucky if you are allowed in some sort of purgatory. And if you are [Evil] and follow an [Evil] God? You get a better deal than that guy.

There is almost a God for each philosophy or point of view, and each one of those is going to reward you for doing their thing. As they view the world as long as you do what they say you are Lawful and Good.

How could there exist a base alignment system in vacuum, not tied to the point of view of any society or group or religion?

willpell

2013-01-20, 08:06 AM

Golem (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/golem.htm) entry in the SRD. It is already little different, except that for the Golem you explicitly bind some spirit that doesn't have anything to do with the Golem. A spirit that might be chilling in the Elemental Park of the Elemental Plane playing fetch with its Elemental Puppy while his Elemental Family eats Elemental Sandwiches.

It's probably a mistake to anthropomorphize the elementals that much; they are inchoate spirits from an unfathomable way of life. That said, it is indeed ethically dicey to enslave them with magic; I imagine the issues are similar to the various uses humans put animals to. Building two golems to fight each other for your own amusement would be pretty much equivalent to dogfighting, being clearly an Evil or at best strongly non-Good act. Building a golem for labor might be more akin to training a draft horse...the horse would probably rather frolic free in the wild, but as "superior" intelligent beings, we're comfortable with deciding that the horse's indolent lifestyle isn't as important as our need to get a field plowed or something. In either case, the unwilling impressment of a sentient being into an unwanted situation is why a lot of (not all?) golems have a Berserk button. It might be possible to lovingly craft a golem which serves as a particularly comfortable and satisfying vessel for an elemental, and the result would be loosely equivalent to keeping a pet - there still might be some PETA-esque groups claiming that this is unacceptible, but the golem itself might seem to be almost happy, and most witnesses would be satisfied with the evidence.

Note though, that depriving a living creature that hasn't done anything to you, at all, of its free will and binding it to a golem is not at all [Evil].

Elementals don't have souls, or at least not distinct ones, so there's some justification for this. Interestingly the same is true of outsiders...perhaps Enslaving a Formian or the like is likewise non-Evil. (Enslaving an angel or devil obviously has implications beyond the simple act of enslavement.)

My question would be why is that not [Evil] while animating a corpse is [Evil] (regardless of the circumstances, it is already dead, and maybe it desired to be animated, or it is going to serve a good purpose)?

Aside from the above, the RAW implication is what I've been calling the "radioactivity" model - undead by their very nature serve to weaken the forces of life worldwide just by existing. If this is true, it explains why good has such a mad-on for undead, but the DM needs to decide whether it actually is true, or is just perceived as being true by powerful members of Good factions who enforce their own logic on the magic that's dispensed to Clerics, Druids and Paladins.

There are explicitly good liches in monsters of Faerun. Note though that they aren't [Good] nor do they propose any different creation method.

Which is funny as heck, given the text in the MM where it says "the process of becoming a lich is unspeakably evil". I'm told that the exact details of why were described in earlier editions and cut from 3E due to space (and preference for fluff flexibility).

On the Necropolitan thingie that come up, they are from Ghostwalk a campaign setting and there undead isn't necessarily [Evil] thus the lack of [Evil] of the Necropolitan.

Correction - Necropolitans are not from or in Ghostwalk. They are detailed in Libris Mortis. Ghostwalk is a mini-campaign setting, which revolves around treating Ghosts as Ethereal Plane outsiders rather than as Undead. Necropolitans are standard undead, and while they are not required to be Evil themselves, their creation involves the use of "magic evil nails", and thus counts as an Evil act because it uses Evil artifacts. Kinda dumb, that, and I ignore it in my campaign, but it is consistent with the "radioactivity" theory.

My biggest issue (and question) with the alignment system and morality in D&D is that there are several gods. And there are [Good], Good, good, neutral, evil, Evil, [Evil] gods, and the same in the law-chaos axis. And each of them rewards or punishes people based on their own set of moral values. If you are good you might go to "paradise" if you follow a good God, but if you are following a [Good] God? Meh, you might be lucky if you are allowed in some sort of purgatory. And if you are [Evil] and follow an [Evil] God? You get a better deal than that guy.

There is almost a God for each philosophy or point of view, and each one of those is going to reward you for doing their thing. As they view the world as long as you do what they say you are Lawful and Good.

It is certainly possible to operate on this basis. I prefer not to, myself, in large part to avoid the thorniness of these issues. But to kind of get at why this sort of thing might be required - some people are of the opinion that "earning" a thing is better than being given it, or that it is spiritually more rewarding to engage in charity than to accumulate material wealth, or the like - basically, different people have different standards for Good. So there also need to be different Gods for them to worship.

Ideally, all the perspectives are represented and everyone can find the god they prefer; if you legitimately feel that giving a child too much candy will spoil it and make it insufferable, and you think everyone should have to work hard for their living, a tough-as-nails god like St. Cuthbert or Moradin is probably more to your preference than a goody-two-shoes like Yondalla or Ehlonna (ignoring that Yondalla and Moradin are racial gods, so members of those races tend to be indoctrinated into worshipping a member of that pantheon, rather than a more personally appealing non-racial god). As it stands, it looks like sometimes you can get screwed by circumstances; if the church of Heironeious has all the money and power in your area and you simply can't get to any other churches, your only hope is to pray to your god of preference (assuming you ever even hear of them) and hope to be miraculously whisked away to one of his powerbases.

How could there exist a base alignment system in vacuum, not tied to the point of view of any society or group or religion?

As it stands, that's exactly what is true. Good Itself is a measurable force which empowers Paladins and Incarnates; it also empowers archons, guardinals, angels, eladrins, and a variety of Gods, who in turn found churches and cults preaching their understanding. And the Paladin or Incarnate is expressing the goals of Good Itself through his limited mortal perspective, but Good does exist as a force absolute, with the single most correct answer being deterministic. Apparently even Pelor and Zaphkiel and Morwen and Talisid are limited in their ability to comprehend that absolute answer, and pass on slightly warped versions of the doctrine, which are further modified by everyone who plays Telephone with the preaching on down the line. A Paladin or Incarnate is getting their (wordless) instructions closer to the source, but they also are less wise than those divine beings, so while they might have fewer prejudices they also have less ability to judge. The result is, well, something of a mess - but our game more or less needs Drama to function, so that's probably as it should be.

thethird

2013-01-20, 08:31 AM

Elementals don't have souls, or at least not distinct ones, so there's some justification for this. Interestingly the same is true of outsiders...perhaps Enslaving a Formian or the like is likewise non-Evil. (Enslaving an angel or devil obviously has implications beyond the simple act of enslavement.)

Elementals do have souls, even if they aren't distinct from their body

Correction - Necropolitans are not from or in Ghostwalk.

True, that's what happens when you don't check the sources before posting :smalltongue:

Apparently even Pelor and Zaphkiel and Morwen and Talisid are limited in their ability to comprehend that absolute answer, and pass on slightly warped versions of the doctrine, which are further modified by everyone who plays Telephone with the preaching on down the line. A Paladin or Incarnate is getting their (wordless) instructions closer to the source, but they also are less wise than those divine beings, so while they might have fewer prejudices they also have less ability to judge. The result is, well, something of a mess - but our game more or less needs Drama to function, so that's probably as it should be.

Pelor... I hope that example was on purpose because Pelor might not be the goodest of the [Good] Gods.

He is pretty evil, imho.

Jozan casts Symbol of Pain which is clearly [Evil] (player handbook, pg. 291)

How can he do that?

other examples of Pelor's goodness

Classes
Pelor has the Shadowstriker, and worse, the Shadowspies (complete champion) which aren't exactly [Good]
Pelor also has Malconvokers (complete scoundrel) which summon [Evil] fiends, summoning fiends is clearly evil, per the book of vile darkness.

Items
He also has the Hammer of Witches (weapons of legacy) appropriately named for its main use, killing arcane spellcasters, without planing nor meditation nor consideration of their alignment.
Shard of the sun (complete divine) deals damage regardless of the evilness of the target. Dawnstar (complete divine) is... a doomsday device when sundered, specially to the one carrying it. Also the Dawnstar was created because a paladin of pelor ended in Hell (why was he there in the first place?)
Inquisitor bracers (MiC) beat stuff up, hopefully they are undead and they receive additional damage, or if they aren't they might be somewhat healed... What form of detecting undead is that? :smallannoyed:

willpell

2013-01-20, 09:18 AM

Pelor... I hope that example was on purpose because Pelor might not be the goodest of the [Good] Gods.

I'm aware of the Burning Hate gag, but it is just that, a gag. I mentioned Pelor because he is THE default Good god, the one cited as being worshipped by the majority of everyone who doesn't have their own racial god in the generic campaign setting. (Humans did get a racial god in one of the supplements, and he makes a pretty good stand-in for anything negative about Pelor you wanted to spin, since he's a blonde and bronzed sun-worshipping athlete type, who happens to be LE because he's basically a D&D Nazi.)

Jozan casts Symbol of Pain which is clearly [Evil] (player handbook, pg. 291)

Symbol of Pain probably had the Evil descriptor added to it by the rules wonks well after the picture had been commissioned by the flavor wonks.

Pelor has the Shadowstriker, and worse, the Shadowspies (complete champion) which aren't exactly [Good]

Perhaps not [Good], but still Good. Nobody gets picked as a Shadowspy if their potential superior has any doubts whatsoever as to their ability to walk the moral line, even if their ethics must get a bit wickety. The leaders are almost certainly clerics, which means that if they cease to be Good, they will Fall. More to the point, they can't be receiving [Good] spells from an Evil got. At worst, Pelor might be secretly Neutral, and if anything that would make him experimenting with questionable agents like Shadowspies more of a risk to him than if he's staunchly Good. Should he become Evil, his clerics would be severed from him as long as they remain Good, and certainly some of them would, even if many had been inching steadily south under his guidance. He couldn't ever push it too far or he'd be screwed.

Pelor also has Malconvokers (complete scoundrel) which summon [Evil] fiends, summoning fiends is clearly evil, per the book of vile darkness.

Malconvokers are an unusal case.

Items
He also has the Hammer of Witches (weapons of legacy) appropriately named for its main use, killing arcane spellcasters, without planing nor meditation nor consideration of their alignment.

*facepalm* Okay that one I'll give you. I don't have that book, but there are at least two "witch hunter" PrCs, so I'm just going to write this off as them catering to a certain market that consists exclusively of really swell guys who like to beat up nasty bad icky-faces because they're very intelligent and reasonable. We will not dwell any further on that.

Shard of the sun (complete divine) deals damage regardless of the evilness of the target.

So does a rock or a stick, what's your point?

Dawnstar (complete divine) is... a doomsday device when sundered, specially to the one carrying it.

I don't think the writers were very good about remembering that sunder exists. They may not have put very much thought into this one.

Also the Dawnstar was created because a paladin of pelor ended in Hell (why was he there in the first place?)

Presumably to beat up devils, or because he Fell. I haven't read it.

Inquisitor bracers (MiC) beat stuff up, hopefully they are undead and they receive additional damage, or if they aren't they might be somewhat healed... What form of detecting undead is that? :smallannoyed:

Heh. Well if you use them that way, you're probably heading south. Then again, people aren't perfect, and again this is why we have an Atonement spell.

Story

2013-01-20, 03:05 PM

Heh. Well if you use them that way, you're probably heading south. Then again, people aren't perfect, and again this is why we have an Atonement spell.

According to the fluff, that's explicitly what they're designed for, meaning that at least some parts of the church of Pelor condone that behavior.

TuggyNE

2013-01-20, 06:46 PM

It's probably a mistake to anthropomorphize the elementals that much; they are inchoate spirits from an unfathomable way of life. That said, it is indeed ethically dicey to enslave them with magic; I imagine the issues are similar to the various uses humans put animals to. Building two golems to fight each other for your own amusement would be pretty much equivalent to dogfighting, being clearly an Evil or at best strongly non-Good act. Building a golem for labor might be more akin to training a draft horse...the horse would probably rather frolic free in the wild, but as "superior" intelligent beings, we're comfortable with deciding that the horse's indolent lifestyle isn't as important as our need to get a field plowed or something. In either case, the unwilling impressment of a sentient being into an unwanted situation is why a lot of (not all?) golems have a Berserk button. It might be possible to lovingly craft a golem which serves as a particularly comfortable and satisfying vessel for an elemental, and the result would be loosely equivalent to keeping a pet - there still might be some PETA-esque groups claiming that this is unacceptible, but the golem itself might seem to be almost happy, and most witnesses would be satisfied with the evidence.

This is a pretty solid explanation, and the best one I've heard so far (although given that the elder elementals get Int 10 or better, it's not quite perfect). Now I want to stat up an organization called PETES. :smalltongue:

(Also, stone, iron, adamantine, and mithral golems are apparently nice enough to live in that the elemental won't go berserk. So there's that.)

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-20, 07:10 PM

The alignment system is -not- required for the game to function. Not even close.

It imposes a minor limitation on which spells a cleric can cast. The vast majority of cleric spells have no alignment descriptor. The handful that do can either be scrapped or the 4 versions (there's always 1 for each alignment) can be rolled into a single spell and keyed off of whether those affected are allies of the faith, enemies of the faith, or those that are neither.

Outsiders damage reduction needn't even be altered. Holy, unholy, anarchic, and axiomatic weapons are simply narrowed in effect to bypassing the DR's of these creatures while being relieved of the negative level clause for anything that doesn't have an alignment subtype.

All that's left at that point is the incarnate and soulborn classes from MoI. Simply tying them to the forces of the outer-planes makes them function normally with no change at all.

That's it. Alignment system scrapped. Those four words are now just descriptors for a relatively small number of creatures and magic items.

Raven777

2013-01-20, 07:42 PM

I have players that like to choose Chaotic Neutral because they use it as an excuse to do almost anything without being CE and hence labeled Chaotic Stupid. Is there an obvious solution to this, or at least a way to mitigate them from linking their character's identity to their alignment so closely?

I am nearly always guilty of this, but my reason makes sense : I'm more into D&D for playing the system (building characters, overcoming encounters, making use of skills in cool ways) than for playing a role that could constrain my actions. Therefore, I pick the alignment that's synonymous with the least amount of moral quandaries, and that's Chaotic Neutral (or sometimes Chaotic Good). I don't want to be dragged back by the DM or fellow players telling me "but that's not good" or "but that's now lawful". I want to feel free to do whatever I feel like whenever I feel like as each situation calls. Maybe your players feel the same way?

On the other hand, if they use Chaotic Neutral as an excuse to get away with arson, murder and jaywalking, maybe it's time they get introduced to the Lawful side of the equation :

If their reputation as dodgy and unreliable people starts preceding them, haggling for goods, collecting information, getting quests might all become harder. If they manage to annoy somebody enough, nothing says actual Good mercenaries and adventurers can't be hired to exact justice.

When nobody in civilized lands wants to talk to your players anymore and cadres of Paladins and Rangers are hounding them across the countryside, they might get the message :P

Kane0

2013-01-20, 08:50 PM

Maybe your players feel the same way?

It's a little hard to pin down. One of them comes for the social event and is not a real issue, but the other is a bit more disruptive.

He is the kind of chaotic neutral that will demand healing from an ally, then if he does not get healed attempt a nonlethal dose of Crusaders Strike on an ally to heal himself without any forewarning, then not understand why the cleric will not heal him, despite his good diplomacy roll. He doesn't go out of his way to disrupt the game, but he has a habit of finding rules to abuse and making stupid decisions.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-20, 08:58 PM

It's a little hard to pin down. One of them comes for the social event and is not a real issue, but the other is a bit more disruptive.

He is the kind of chaotic neutral that will demand healing from an ally, then if he does not get healed attempt a nonlethal dose of Crusaders Strike on an ally to heal himself without any forewarning, then not understand why the cleric will not heal him, despite his good diplomacy roll. He doesn't go out of his way to disrupt the game, but he has a habit of finding rules to abuse and making stupid decisions.

Doesn't crusader's strike demand that it be used against an enemy? And if it doesn't, I know there's no rule preventing you from attacking yourself. Let him hit himself back to full health.

Kane0

2013-01-20, 09:26 PM

I houseruled it to only work for lethal damage and cannot heal more HP than damage you deal.

willpell

2013-01-21, 12:25 AM

It imposes a minor limitation on which spells a cleric can cast. The vast majority of cleric spells have no alignment descriptor.

True, but several significant ones do. In particular, Summon Monster. A Good cleric can't summon Fiendish creatures, no matter how useful they might be (at levels 1 and 2 when your summoning options are extremely limited; a Lawful Good cleric can get dogs, dolphins, ants and bees, and that's about it...granted the duration is also 1-2 rounds so the spell is basically useless anyway, but still). There are also several spells that are sneaky with their Alignment descriptors, listing them under the actual spell but not on reference shortlists. Contagion, for instance. Spreading disease is an Evil act, and for good reason; the spell won't function for you if you're Good, and it's a fairly potent spell which can be used to devastate a small community of NPCs.

The handful that do can either be scrapped or the 4 versions (there's always 1 for each alignment) can be rolled into a single spell and keyed off of whether those affected are allies of the faith, enemies of the faith, or those that are neither.

"Ally/enemy of the faith" is a subjective distinction. "Good/Evil" is not.

Outsiders damage reduction needn't even be altered. Holy, unholy, anarchic, and axiomatic weapons are simply narrowed in effect to bypassing the DR's of these creatures while being relieved of the negative level clause for anything that doesn't have an alignment subtype.

The inevitable result of which is that serial killers can now use Holy weapons to butcher barmaids, in case they need to defend themselves against fiends summoned by Good paladins.

kardar233

2013-01-21, 01:04 AM

The inevitable result of which is that serial killers can now use Holy weapons to butcher barmaids, in case they need to defend themselves against fiends summoned by Good paladins.

I think you're overstating the effect of the change. Characters will still generally summon creatures from an Outer Plane that they identify with, because of doctrine or beliefs or the simple fact that such creatures are more amenable to acting with their goals, e.g. Paladins will likely summon angels because they are less likely to go on murderous rampages than fiends are. Similarly, weapons aren't defined as Holy anymore, they are defined as "attuned to Celestia" or "crafted to destroy fiends".

HalfGrammarGeek

2013-01-21, 01:07 AM

Gildedragon

2013-01-21, 01:34 AM

Walking toasters for me. The people who made them may be suspect, particularly when creating undead, but since I can imagine so many good uses for undead, and have used them when I DM, having them be neutral is more concordant with me.

TuggyNE

2013-01-21, 03:09 AM

Similarly, weapons aren't defined as Holy anymore, they are defined as "attuned to Celestia" or "crafted to destroy fiends".

There's already a way to make "crafted to destroy fiends" weapons, and it's Bane. But I'm not sure what "attuned to X plane" would be, or its effects....

willpell

2013-01-21, 03:30 AM

My own question is a follow-up to the golem/undead discussion: How do other gamers prefer golems and mindless undead? As soulless walking toasters (i.e., not inherently Evil in creation or existence), or as enslaved souls just waiting for the chance to slip their creator's control to wreak bloody havoc (i.e., Evil in creation and existence)?

I'm definitely inclined to think that golems should mostly not require the spirit-binding thing; for any golem that doesn't have a Berserk ability, I'll assume that the creator weaves together a bunch of magic into a much-more powerful equivalent of an Unseen Servant, and that the result is no more sentient than the computer code which governs a Roomba's behavior. (Whether robots will eventually qualify as sentient, I think we can all agree that they don't now; perhaps in the future AIs will regard owning a Roomba as the equivalent of animal cruelty, but IMO it's more likely that they would lack our sentimental tendency to empathize with their less sophisticated relatives.) It's fitting that the cheaper and easier-to-make Flesh and Clay golems* should have issues; presumably summoning and binding an elemental to animate your statue is a "shortcut" which lower-level mages might be tempted to use, rather than wait until their spellcraft is up to doing the more genteel form of animation. I would be comfortable with ruling this an Evil act, but am equally content to leave it as-is under the "elemental spirits aren't people" assumption, depending on what fits the game.

*I'm also a fan of White Wolf's Promethean: the Created (you can see a picture of the rulebook in this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0601.html) strip), whose characters are more or less sentient golems with a Pinnochio complex, to describe the premise with extreme flippantness. They come in five "lineages", two of which are based on Frankenstein and the original Golem of Prague, who was made out of clay, so the Flesh and Clay golems are obvious matches. Of the remaining three, the Osirians are more quasi-undead and the Ulgan are a weird shamanic-rebirth thing, so modeling those in D&D would be more likely to involve templating a humanoid than creating a Construct. The Galatea are based on the Pygmalion story, and their nearest D&D equivalent would be the "Pleasure Golem" in the Book of Erotic Fantasy, though as-written that one is more than a little squicky. Suffice to say that without major revision, this golem is definitely deserving of a Berserk button - it doesn't have one as-written, but that can be regarded as the writers of this book not wanting to dilute their message.)

WotC could have saved a lot of ink and trees by killing the paladin=LG thing from the start, with similar text as the cleric and a little table showing which alignments paladins of which alignment can smite.

Indeed. There are quite a few rules like that, which get disclaimed every single time some supplement breaks them, even though the core is the only place they aren't broken. This is exactly why I think there need to be new "3.8" corebooks...Pathfinder already rebuilt the system more or less from the ground up once, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful to do it again, especially if you could disregard the parts of the OGL which prohibited Pathfinder from using certain parts of 3E rules (such as the experience point table or the Product Identity monsters).

Agreed; I'll always find it utterly bizarre how everyone accepts that clerics can serve any god under (or hidden from) the sun and be whatever alignment is appropriate, but the instant someone suggests that the 'diehard cleric with less magic' class should have similar flexibility, some portion of the D&D population goes into a frothing nerd rage.

Well the paladin is a little more than a "holy warrior"; he's the archetypal Shining Knight, and thus nobody wants to see him tarnished by association with other equally-valid archetypes which argue that Lawful Goodness isn't such an absolute ideal. Myself, I think the Crusader neatly fits the archetype you're looking for, without having to impinge on paladins (even an LG Crusader doesn't quite overlap the paladin's shtick, since he doesn't get things like Lay on Hands or a special mount). But since I had a bias against Tome of Battle until quite recently myself, I can understand people not quite wanting to accept that.

Even the true neutral holy warrior has a shtick; "Extremism is dangerous, and needs to be smitten" card. (Smite the four extreme alignments, rather than law/chaos/good/evil.) It sounds strange at first, but it's no stranger than "I'm erratic and angry and like to kill people...so I'm extra good at killing people with morals!"

I don't see much strangeness with either of those:

* The "antipaladin" is not just erratic and angry and homicidal; he honestly believes that his sociopathy is the natural and ideal state of human beings, and considers Law and Good to be treacherous lies which lull the strong into submission to their inferiors, and unite the weak into a pestilential swarm. He spreads death and chaos and fear because he genuinely thinks that a Mad Max-esque hellscape is a fun place to live, that there's something pure and right about the inner animal of all human beings, and that life is wasted on those who don't live on the razor's edge. This doesn't make him stupid; he probably won't kill his girlfriend (unless "the b**** was asking for it"), and he won't approve of someone else who does, but in general he thinks most people who do kill their girl(/boy/thing)friend probably wouldn't have done so unless they had a good reason, and is less likely to punish them than he is to punish the girlfriend if she survives the attempt and flees. After all, it was her responsibility to placate her would-be assassin somehow, rather than turning on him and running to whine for help from some sanctimonious meddler.

* The "un-paladin" of True Neutral, perhaps backed by the Rilmani or a druidic circle, understands that life is too complicated for labels like "good" and "evil" to mean very much, and he objects to people who kill in the name of such ideologies. When someone is committed to only one such absolute, there's probably still hope to talk some sense into them, but if they cleave to a philosophy which unquestioningly accepts two principles while utterly condemning their opposites, they have in essence divided the entire world into two categories, and that kind of absolutism is certainly dangerous and unnatural. On behalf of everyone who is somewhere in the middle and doesn't want to be forced to pick a side, he will teach these self-appointed exemplars a lesson in the dangers of aligning yourself too closely with alien forces which cut you off from the adaptability which is Nature's hallmark. This one works a bit less well than the CE, as it suggests that a person whose morality evolves over time will "blink" in and out of smiteability, rather than spending long consistent stretches on the "right" or "wrong" side. Personally I wouldn't approve paladin-type smiting for a Neutral exemplar just because of this weirdness.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-21, 08:19 AM

True, but several significant ones do. In particular, Summon Monster. A Good cleric can't summon Fiendish creatures, no matter how useful they might be (at levels 1 and 2 when your summoning options are extremely limited; a Lawful Good cleric can get dogs, dolphins, ants and bees, and that's about it...granted the duration is also 1-2 rounds so the spell is basically useless anyway, but still). There are also several spells that are sneaky with their Alignment descriptors, listing them under the actual spell but not on reference shortlists. Contagion, for instance. Spreading disease is an Evil act, and for good reason; the spell won't function for you if you're Good, and it's a fairly potent spell which can be used to devastate a small community of NPCs.

"Ally/enemy of the faith" is a subjective distinction. "Good/Evil" is not.

The inevitable result of which is that serial killers can now use Holy weapons to butcher barmaids, in case they need to defend themselves against fiends summoned by Good paladins.

And? If you're scrapping the alignment system, the cleric is released from the restrictions on which spells he can cast, period. Summon monster lets him get anything on the list. Contagion is now a question of, "is the potential colateral worth it?" etc.

Ally or enemy of the faith is -supposed- to be subjective in a no-alignment setup. It's simply a question of, "is the creature affected affiliated with my faith or with an organization that opposes my faith?" If yes to the former, he's an ally. If yes to the latter, he's an enemy. If no to both, he's "neutral."

Since holy is just a descriptor for a sword that's particularly effective against fiends in this setup, applying it to a bar-maid simply does normal weapon damage unless the bar-maid is a demon in disguise or the like.

The idea here is to rely more on the group's logical processes for how these tools and spells should be used. If you've got paladins of honor (PHB default) summoning fiends to fight wild beasts, it's not illegal; just stupid. If he's setting them on cultists of nerull or the like, it's poetic justice. (though it's not really an issue in either case since summon monster isn't on the paladin list.)

You don't need RAW to enforce morals and ethics if your group has fairly similar beliefs on what's good and evil or lawful and chaotic.

And of course, none of it matters a whit if noone's playing a paladin and the DM doesn't actually use outsiders.

HalfGrammarGeek

2013-01-21, 11:05 AM

Well the paladin is a little more than a "holy warrior"; he's the archetypal Shining Knight, and thus nobody wants to see him tarnished by association with other equally-valid archetypes which argue that Lawful Goodness isn't such an absolute ideal. Myself, I think the Crusader neatly fits the archetype you're looking for, without having to impinge on paladins (even an LG Crusader doesn't quite overlap the paladin's shtick, since he doesn't get things like Lay on Hands or a special mount). But since I had a bias against Tome of Battle until quite recently myself, I can understand people not quite wanting to accept that.
I don't have a problem with ToB, I just think it's exasperating how many people get hung up on a class title. I can't count the number of core-only DMs I've had, where anyone wanting to play a paladin was stuck with either LG or refluffing another class. (Not that refluffing a cleric is a terrible choice optimization-wise, but some players don't want the complication of a full caster.)

willpell

2013-01-21, 11:14 AM

Since holy is just a descriptor for a sword that's particularly effective against fiends in this setup, applying it to a bar-maid simply does normal weapon damage unless the bar-maid is a demon in disguise or the like.

That's not the point. The point is, it's supposed to be a Holy sword, and he's using it for a pretty thoroughly unholy purpose. There should be consequences to such an act.

I don't have a problem with ToB, I just think it's exasperating how many people get hung up on a class title.

"Titles are important!..."
--His Magnificence, Reverend Master of Excellence

ArcturusV

2013-01-21, 11:17 AM

It was one of those things that I actually liked about 4th Edition finally, was dropping the morality lockdown on the Paladin and allowing him to be an exemplar and champion for any cause faith.

It's a long way from back in the old Paladin's Handbook of 2nd edition, where they say "There is no Anti-Paladin" due to the reasoning behind Good vs Evil. Good believing in a single, solitary, noble champion. Whereas Evil favored the nameless hordes, not an equal and opposite approach. And that is certainly an interesting aspect to say. Though it always struck me as odd.

I say odd because Evil has always had a survival of the fittest flavoring to it in D&D. It is, at it's core, very Darwinian in it's believe that the strong should flourish and the weak should suffer and die at the whims of the mighty, etc. You'd think a belief system based on that would have several champions. But that wasn't really a way they decided to go.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-21, 11:31 AM

That's not the point. The point is, it's supposed to be a Holy sword, and he's using it for a pretty thoroughly not-holy purpose. There should be consequences to such an act.Because you never hear about supposedly righteous people misusing the tools at their disposal. Fixed that for you, btw. Your example was a serial killer, for whom the holy sword's holiness is utterly meaningless. If not for the glow he wouldn't even know it was magic unless he stumbled upon a demon.

You're failing to divorce mechanics from the connotations of the name. Holy in this context is essentially just a secondary form of <fiend> bane that stacks with the normal bane quality. That it's called "holy" doesn't mean squat to mortals that don't fight fiends.

"Titles are important!..."
--His Magnificence, Reverend Master of Excellence

Titles are important, labels are not. A fighter or knight can earn the title of paladin by being pious, following the code, and being given the blessing of their god by some religious figure. A mechanical paladin could easily get himself knighted in a LG kingdom. The name of the class doesn't have to have any RP influence at all.

ScionoftheVoid

2013-01-21, 02:01 PM

Raven777

2013-01-21, 08:23 PM

Personally, I see most Undead as a body and a mind animated by Negative Energy. Negative Energy is the primeval energy of stasis and oblivion. It consumes, it recycles, it snuffs out : it drags down entropy towards the heat death of the universe. But it is not sentient on its own. It has no agency, no grand scheme to carry on. It has, however, the property of behaving like a Soul in that it animates the vessels it invests. This is also why undeath prevents Resurrection. It clogs the Soul's spot.

The body is still there, the memories and brain wiring are intact, but the Soul has moved on. The Undead might behave like your husband because it perceives and understands the world through the lenses of your husband's brain and the experiences stored within, but it is not your husband. And since Negative Energy is a force of decay, it will want to consume something. Brains, blood, life force... Undead always end up innately destructive because oblivion is the essence of the force that drives them. It calls. It hungers. None escape it.

There are, like with most systems, exceptions. Those would be your Vampires and your Liches, among others, who retain their Souls. Still, they nonetheless inherit the destructive urges brought forth by what fuels their unlife.

Which is why my Undead are innately Evil while skipping the Soul enslavement business entirely. Because they are destructive by nature. Sentient enough ones can fight it, for a time, but the urges are still there. In time, they will warp their mind. None escape it.

willpell

2013-01-22, 10:08 AM

It's a long way from back in the old Paladin's Handbook of 2nd edition, where they say "There is no Anti-Paladin" due to the reasoning behind Good vs Evil. Good believing in a single, solitary, noble champion. Whereas Evil favored the nameless hordes, not an equal and opposite approach. And that is certainly an interesting aspect to say. Though it always struck me as odd.

It sort of makes sense, but you can just as easily argue for the opposite, Good relying on team power while Evil has loners that devour everything around them for their own strength. And Law vs. Chaos likewise can be flavored either way. Given the distinction in mechanics between "one CR 20 creature" and "twenty CR 1 creatures", it's probably just as well this idea faded away.

I say odd because Evil has always had a survival of the fittest flavoring to it in D&D. It is, at it's core, very Darwinian in it's believe that the strong should flourish and the weak should suffer and die at the whims of the mighty, etc. You'd think a belief system based on that would have several champions. But that wasn't really a way they decided to go.

I support this interpretation 100%; IMC I totally run with the Darwinian definition of Evil for at least a third of my villains (another third are generally various forms of psychopathology, or at least aggressive emo-angst, and the remainder includes those who buy into the Team Evil propaganda on one level or another, with clerics of Nerull and stereotypical liches and mind flayers and so forth all falling in here; there are also categorical hybrids, such as the Githyanki who are part-Darwin and part emo, or a typical ogre or vampire being part Darwinian and part cackling black hat).

Because you never hear about supposedly righteous people misusing the tools at their disposal.

But you can't do that with a holy sword because it will punish you for trying to wield it if you aren't pure of heart. That's the whole point of it being holy.

Your example was a serial killer, for whom the holy sword's holiness is utterly meaningless.

It should be clear by now that I disagree.

You're failing to divorce mechanics from the connotations of the name.

As should we all. If the connotations change, so should the name.

Holy in this context is essentially just a secondary form of <fiend> bane that stacks with the normal bane quality.

Which I would characterize as powergaming, and disallow. If you don't want the subtext of holiness, you don't get to game the system in a way that is only IMO-acceptible within the context of said subtext. Ideology has power; if you want to ditch the ideology you can live without the power too.

The name of the class doesn't have to have any RP influence at all.

Again, you won't ever convince me of that. If they can be separated, my response is to want them knitted together more closely, to make them truly inextricable next time.

That they will stand around without doing anything at all if not given orders suggests they don't have the capacity to have an alignment.

Treants have an alignment, yet it seems to me that if the forest isn't in any danger, the treants will be content to float in a state of nonbeing until needed, not even thinking unless it perceives an unusual event in its surroundings. I can believe that for a Construct, inactivity could be accepted as its default condition. Of course that only applies if the Construct has Intelligence, which they generally don't (apart from Living Constructs).

Things about mindless undead attacking the living on sight even if uncommanded seem to me just as forced as Deathwatch drawing on the powers of death. There's no real reason for it, it's just being poorly justified.

What do you have against the classic zombie apocalypse? The idea that the dead should hate and resent the living "instinctively", even if not fully aware, need not be automatic, but it's certainly not ever out of place. Wherever zombies go, zombie malevolence is naturally free to follow.

(I've heard it suggested that Undead were made Evil to make them vulnerable to Paladin smites, which could have been managed by adding the type to what a Paladin is allowed to smite in the first place or just giving them an arbitrary Evil subtype instead of having mindless creatures with an alignment).

Point; it would make more sense for them to be [Evil] rather than "Evil".

Negative Energy is the primeval energy of stasis and oblivion.

Oblivion sure, but "stasis" is more dubious. Negative energy tends to kill things, whereas if it's an energy of stasis it ought to preserve them in a lifeless condition but prevent them from rotting - essentially petrification or time-stopping. Conversely, animating zombies (or anything else) counterindicates being a static force. Given the existence of the elder evil Ragnorra, I think it makes sense to say that "static" and "dynamic" needn't be correlated with "life" and "death"; IMC I made this explicit, with clerics able to channel Lawful or Chaotic energies which flip-flop the components of turning and rebuking (Lawful heals and rebukes because it wants everything to stay as it is/was, and Chaotic disintegrates the living and the dead with equal impunity).

Undead always end up innately destructive because oblivion is the essence of the force that drives them. It calls. It hungers. None escape it.

Sucks to be a Necropolitan, I guess...

There are, like with most systems, exceptions. Those would be your Vampires and your Liches, among others, who retain their Souls.

They do? (rereads Undead Meldshaper feat....)

Sentient enough ones can fight it, for a time, but the urges are still there. In time, they will warp their mind. None escape it.

So they're exactly like the living then. :smallwink:

tadkins

2013-01-22, 04:33 PM

I had an idea for a character and I'm debating on her alignment, perhaps you guys would be willing to chime in?

She's a whisper gnome cloistered cleric with a necromantic bent (a non-deity one, as none of the undead-related ones really seem to fit her philosophy). Her main goals involve the study of magic, geology, lost artifacts and lore. To that end she runs mining and archaeological operations using groups of raised skeletal diggers to do the work of many people.

She's not cruel or malicious by any means, and she doesn't loose her undead cadres on poor unsuspecting villages or anything. I'm thinking that this would put her alignment on the neutral side, but the whole fact that she would be involved with necromancy and raising the undead makes me wonder if that this wouldn't put her into the evil alignments by default. If it's the latter case, would this mean someone can have an evil alignment and not be your typical madcap cackling villain?

What do you guys think?

Gildedragon

2013-01-22, 04:44 PM

hamishspence

2013-01-22, 04:47 PM

Heroes of Horror, in the Dread Necromancer section, explained that while there's an element of intrinsic evil to the things the character does, balancing it with good intentions can place the character in Neutral alignment.

It also discussed "anti-heroes" in similar terms- saying they are probably neither Good or Evil but a flexible Neutral.

So a case can be made that it is possible to play a nonevil undead-raiser, even when undead-raising is treated as evil in itself.

Conversely, an evil-aligned character does not have to be cacklingly evil- books like Champions of Ruin go into some detail on the subject.

tadkins

2013-01-22, 04:57 PM

I would say not necessarily evil but not enough info to tell. To what end is she conducting the digs, who will benefit from her finds (local community, her, a city?), has she asked for consent of the next of kin of whose bodies she is using, are they getting remuneration, has she asked the communities descended from her research-subjects for permission, why undead instead of avocational/apprentice archaeologists/historians?

Her ends involve sating her thirst for knowledge and to some extent, her vanity (she has a thing for gems and keeps the best ones for herself). She's a bit of a loner, having been outcasted from society for her beliefs, so she doesn't keep contacts with any historical groups or anything. She does however keep a library and knowledge depository of her own, open to anyone who can find it and present themselves as non-hostile.

She uses various informational leads to bring her from place to place in search of promising artifacts or lucrative mining spots, raising and dismissing workers as necessary. She doesn't particularly care whose bodies are raised, and she doesn't ask permission; skeletons are skeletons, after all (this is why I don't consider Wee Jas to be a potential deity choice). Her distrust of society prevents her from considering the option of hiring living people.

I like to think of her as a reasonable character that could work as a non-hostile NPC, or even a PC in some parties, even if her reclusive nature and carefree attitude toward necromancy might default her toward an evil alignment.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-22, 05:01 PM

@Willpell's response to my previous post:

In a system without the alignment system there are no good or evil acts. Good and evil are solely the province of the supernatural forces that comprise certain outsiders. A fiend isn't evil because of its behavior, it's evil because it's made of evil. Its behavior is entirely the province of its instincts and upbringing, these just happen to typically coincide with what is traditionally thought of as evil.

A holy sword isn't holy because it's a weapon of justice and virtue, it's holy because it's been imbued with energies that are the reverse of those energies that comprise the makeup of fiends. It's a weapon, not a judge of character.

For the powergaming argument, aligned outsiders almost universally have damage reduction that the bane quality doesn't bypass and noteably more power than most creatures of their CR. Being able to stack Holy and Evil outsider bane means being able to more quickly slay a creature that's typically quite difficult to assail and spending gobs of cash on what is only a +1 weapon against any other creature. It's not even powergaming in the standard system. Also, if you insist that it is powergaming (it's really not) why not eliminate outsider (<alignment>) from the list of bane options?

Gildedragon

2013-01-22, 05:13 PM

Her ends involve sating her thirst for knowledge and to some extent, her vanity (she has a thing for gems and keeps the best ones for herself). She's a bit of a loner, having been outcasted from society for her beliefs, so she doesn't keep contacts with any historical groups or anything. She does however keep a library and knowledge depository of her own, open to anyone who can find it and present themselves as non-hostile.

She uses various informational leads to bring her from place to place in search of promising artifacts or lucrative mining spots, raising and dismissing workers as necessary. She doesn't particularly care whose bodies are raised, and she doesn't ask permission; skeletons are skeletons, after all (this is why I don't consider Wee Jas to be a potential deity choice). Her distrust of society prevents her from considering the option of hiring living people.

I like to think of her as a reasonable character that could work as a non-hostile NPC, or even a PC in some parties, even if her reclusive nature and carefree attitude toward necromancy might default her toward an evil alignment.

From this -I- would recommend a CN alignment, with the caveat that other aspects of her personality may move her one step in any direction. Her lack of care for consent by the dead or their relatives is callous and lawless, though not necessarily evil. additional factors, such as how she disposes of the undead and greed also color her alignment: CN with NE tendencies I'd say.

If she then made an effort to put some of her gains back in the communities that provide her the materials, sought to obtain mining legal rights, used her wealth for good, and otherwise tried to be a moral person, she could be even be NG

thethird

2013-01-22, 05:17 PM

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-22, 05:20 PM

You make me think of Nightblood from Warbreaker. A "holy" sword created to slay evil. Of course, the creator didn't take into account that the sword wasn't really able to discern evil. And well, whenever the sword is drawn it tries to kill everything, and it is constantly whispering to its wielder that it should kill people, with comments on the lines of "those dudes look pretty evil to me."

I get the impression this is directed at my previous post?

In that case it's important to note that a sword that's holy or unholy can't do that unless it's also intelligent (and a little insane).

thethird

2013-01-22, 05:28 PM

ArcturusV

2013-01-22, 05:32 PM

Far as the Gnome Necromancer: I'd put the character at neutral. What flavor of neutral depends on views that aren't really mentioned so far. The way your gnome is described as practicing Necromancy though, I don't see as inherently evil. Particularly if your setting doesn't use details like raising Skeletons as trapping and binding souls, etc. How you describe it, it is really more like just having Bone Golems except the method of manufacture is slightly different.

And of course, not all Evil acts instantly mean Evil Alignment. Neutral has wiggle room for a reason. Nor is vanity or greed, for gems or knowledge, necessarily evil. It becomes evil when it crosses the line from "really likes" to "Willing to do evil things to get".

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-22, 05:39 PM

Yes, it was directed at your post.
Nightblood isn't insane, it just doesn't really know what "evil" mean. In its owns words it is figuring it out. On the other hand, it does know what "slaying" mean and well, it does that quite well.

As a side note, Nightblood do not kill Good people, those who haven't done anything wrong or evil aren't attacked by it. Problem is, that Nightblood falls completely at gradation, it doesn't discern between some petty thief and a an assassin, to it both are evil.

I'm not really familiar with the character or its source, but I'd hazard a guess that it's probably holy in the "the church says so" fashion rather than the "imbued with the fundamental force that makes up angels" fashion.

If that's the case it would be defined in D&D terms as a particularly intelligent item with a special purpose, but without the tools to properly address that special purpose. It might also register as evil on the alignment scale because of the indiscriminate nature of how it chooses targets. In fact, even if it is a holy weapon (having the weapon property), it might still be evil because of that lack of discrimination. It's clearly not operating under a clear understanding of what constitutes good and evil, since it pings thievery as evil when theivery is a default chaotic act that only becomes evil under certain circumstances.

HalfGrammarGeek

2013-01-22, 05:57 PM

I'd rather have the former, though I'd probably note that the default fluff for golem creation doesn't apply in any game where I wasn't ruling their creation as Evil (regardless of whether the creature itself is or isn't). That they will stand around without doing anything at all if not given orders suggests they don't have the capacity to have an alignment. Things about mindless undead attacking the living on sight even if uncommanded seem to me just as forced as Deathwatch drawing on the powers of death. There's no real reason for it, it's just being poorly justified. (I've heard it suggested that Undead were made Evil to make them vulnerable to Paladin smites, which could have been managed by adding the type to what a Paladin is allowed to smite in the first place or just giving them an arbitrary Evil subtype instead of having mindless creatures with an alignment).
To play devil's advocate, why are paladins given the ability to smite undead if they're not inherently evil in some way? I mean sure, you can scrap the Evil tag and mention undead in the text of Smite Evil, but how does that make any more sense? It's Smite Evil, not Smite Might be Used for Evil. If it was, paladins would be able to smite everything from edged objects to spell books to lawyers.

Just food for thought.

To handle the question of why a soul cannot be raised if an undead creature is using their body, it could be imagined that their body acts as a beacon back to the Material Plane in a way that is disrupted by undead inhabitance. Resurrection and it's True cousin can do without this beacon, and can override it if the body is uninhabited, but if the body is occupied by some form of undead the beacon still functions but is warped in a way that stops the attempt to bring them back (without actually harming the soul). It would also allow for the possibility of Reincarnating someone's finger and raising the rest as a zombie with minimal confusion about how it works. And if the Reincarnated body dies, it's still theirs, so they could be raised despite the zombie shuffling around in another body that is also theirs. Or a DM could have it not count as theirs, if they'd prefer to stick closer to RAW. That seems like an acceptable way of explaining the, otherwise unknown, reason for undead preventing resurrection without necessarily making the use of undead Evil to me. Any significant flaws to it?
Sounds good to me, though I honestly don't give the res angle a lot of thought.

HalfGrammarGeek

2013-01-22, 06:00 PM

Which is why my Undead are innately Evil while skipping the Soul enslavement business entirely. Because they are destructive by nature. Sentient enough ones can fight it, for a time, but the urges are still there. In time, they will warp their mind. None escape it.
This is all pretty close to how I see undead. The only part that's hard to wrap my head around is a person's soul being separate from his personality/memory/mind. I've always thought of them as one and the same.

tadkins

2013-01-22, 06:42 PM

Awesome. Thanks for the responses, everyone.

I do think of the character as occasionally helping the good guys out, provided they're not of the "rawr undead smash it" Paladin of Pelor types that would immediately attack. To her, undead are just a cheap, efficient source of labor and protection. They don't need to eat or sleep, and will follow a skilled necromancer's orders to the letter without question.

I like playing off the idea that Necromancy in itself isn't entirely evil as well, and not just about raising the dead. It's about the search for knowledge in places that others might fear to tread. Speaking with the dead and studying the barriers of life and death are also a big part of it.

Raven777

2013-01-22, 06:44 PM

This is all pretty close to how I see undead. The only part that's hard to wrap my head around is a person's soul being separate from his personality/memory/mind. I've always thought of them as one and the same.

I makes sense if you consider one's mind - the ensemble of memories and personality traits - to be a function of the data accrued within one's brain. You'd be a totally different person if your life experiences were not the same. The Soul keeps and imprint of it, sure, and whatever force possesses a corpse might come with its own data imprint as well, but the original data is still in the hard disk too. I mean in the brain.

Sucks to be a Necropolitan, I guess...

You shouldn't expect one to account for every Race, Template and Spell published in the history of D&D when setting one's hypothetical personal fluff.

willpell

2013-01-23, 11:21 AM

I had an idea for a character and I'm debating on her alignment, perhaps you guys would be willing to chime in?

The character you described sounds to be firmly Neutral to me, but IMO you can definitely "have an evil alignment and not be your typical madcap cackling villain". It varies depending on exactly how Evil is definied, which is something you have to work out with the DM, but even by a fairly strict definition, contract killers are (generally Lawful) Evil, even if all they do is follow orders and collect a paycheck. They can spend the money building orphanages; it doesn't make them not Evil, because they're still murderers. But they certainly don't have to be motivated by evil, nor do they need to revel in it (and cackling is generally more a sign of insanity, or at least boredom, than Evilness anyway). If Undead are "radioactive" in the campaign, then you might default to Evil because you're the magical equivalent of a Corrupt Corporate Executive building a pollution-spewing factory. But even if you're actively harming the world, you might not be harming people, at least not in the short term, so you could certainly find common cause with a group of heroes.

There's a computer game called Diablo 2 that I've long been addicted to, and one of the characters you can play in it is a Necromancer, but more or less Good-aligned despite it. His shtick is that he reanimates slain monsters and traps their souls as a way of working off their karmic debt; he throws curses on monsters to teach them respect for life by sapping its vitality away from them, and also makes golems and uses poison but those don't really have any philosophy subtext. If you can track down the manual to the game, the backstory of the Necromancer faction (jungle temples of Rama-something, I think) is very interesting reading; there's links to Hinduism, Buddhism, Egyptian myths and Voodoo (none of which we can talk about on this forum, but you can go to a library or something and find all sorts of info) which are hinted at in this character and can be very useful for flavoring non-evil Necromancy. Death is inevitable, after all; understanding and controlling its power aren't necessarily bad things, as long as you don't go around inflicting it willy-nilly for the lulz.

In a system without the alignment system there are no good or evil acts. Good and evil are solely the province of the supernatural forces that comprise certain outsiders. A fiend isn't evil because of its behavior, it's evil because it's made of evil. Its behavior is entirely the province of its instincts and upbringing, these just happen to typically coincide with what is traditionally thought of as evil.

Bah, I don't buy it.

A holy sword isn't holy because it's a weapon of justice and virtue, it's holy because it's been imbued with energies that are the reverse of those energies that comprise the makeup of fiends. It's a weapon, not a judge of character.

Then don't call it a holy sword. Call it "angelic energy charged" or whatever. If words like "holy" no longer carry inherent weight and meaning that elevates them above mere mechanics...well, I have no choice but to be miffed at such despoilage of ideology.

Also, if you insist that it is powergaming (it's really not) why not eliminate outsider (<alignment>) from the list of bane options?

Being able to do extra damage (even if ultimately insignificant) to extraplanar interlopers (by particular sort) is an important concept worthy of reflection. (Also there are native outsiders.)

To play devil's advocate, why are paladins given the ability to smite undead if they're not inherently evil in some way?

Paladins aren't given the ability to smite undead. They smite Evil, so if undead are no longer evil they can't be smote. Paladins, as quasi-clerics, can turn undead, but that's nothing to do with alignment, it's because they channel positive energy. If undead aren't "radioactive", then negative energy isn't evil anymore, and positive energy isn't good (indeed, the Elder Evil Ragnorra, monsters such as the Ravid, and the general fact that hanging out on the PEP makes you explode pretty much support that positive energy isn't Good in the first place). Paladins are warriors for Good and they wield positive energy - those facts are thematically parallel and frequently paired, but not necessarily inevitably connected, and certainly not synonymous.

This is all pretty close to how I see undead. The only part that's hard to wrap my head around is a person's soul being separate from his personality/memory/mind. I've always thought of them as one and the same.

I have put a lot of effort into analyzing my own pet theories about the mind, spirit and soul, and I have a pretty decent concept of where the distinction lies. If you copied every thought from your brain into a clone body and then watched it get up and walk around, it would have your exact mind (at the moment of creation; you'd rapidly diverge), but your "spirit" (more scientifically, your "ego-identity complex" wouldn't have gone anywhere, it'd still be looking out your own eyes, at a distinct pair of identical eyes belonging to your clone. Conversely, amnesia can cause you to forget your own identity, but your perspective continues; you're still looking out the same pair of eyes, even if you don't recognize the face you see in the mirror. All of that is "spirit", whereas "soul" is less of a meaningful concept during life; I figure that your soul isn't really "you", but rather a sort of umbilical tether connecting your current "you" to some sort of Akashic overbeing which has experienced numerous lives in various identities (sort of like a person playing multiple RPG characters!). It thus represents an inmost essence which is part and parcel of who you are, but not really integral to your particular self.

I would like to point out that all of this is too heavily influenced by entirely-made-up RPG stuff to qualify as a discussion of religion.

You shouldn't expect one to account for every Race, Template and Spell published in the history of D&D when setting one's hypothetical personal fluff.

Personally I would say that anything you didn't account for in your worldbuilding ought to explicitly not exist in your campaign...though admittedly I break that rule constantly, and thus am frequently contradicting my previous writeups.

kardar233

2013-01-23, 03:20 PM

Then don't call it a holy sword. Call it "angelic energy charged" or whatever. If words like "holy" no longer carry inherent weight and meaning that elevates them above mere mechanics...well, I have no choice but to be miffed at such despoilage of ideology.

That's why I proposed "aligned to Elysium/Bytopia/other Higher Plane" as an alternative to Holy, as it makes Good/Evil (in the sense of game mechanics) based on how you align yourself with the Outer Planes.

the general fact that hanging out on the PEP makes you explode pretty much support that positive energy isn't Good in the first place).

It's possible to have too much of a [Good] thing. :smallbiggrin:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-23, 03:42 PM

HalfGrammarGeek

2013-01-23, 05:31 PM

Paladins aren't given the ability to smite undead.
I know; I was responding to scionofthevoid's suggestion that making walking toasters (aka mindless undead) Neutral and then naming undead as a smitable type in the Smite Evil text would reconcile the 'why are mindless undead Evil?' issue. (So that paladins can smite them, silly rabbit!)

Doesn't make much sense either way, as I see it.

I makes sense if you consider one's mind - the ensemble of memories and personality traits - to be a function of the data accrued within one's brain. You'd be a totally different person if your life experiences were not the same. The Soul keeps and imprint of it, sure, and whatever force possesses a corpse might come with its own data imprint as well, but the original data is still in the hard disk too. I mean in the brain.

I have put a lot of effort into analyzing my own pet theories about the mind, spirit and soul, and I have a pretty decent concept of where the distinction lies. If you copied every thought from your brain into a clone body and then watched it get up and walk around, it would have your exact mind (at the moment of creation; you'd rapidly diverge), but your "spirit" (more scientifically, your "ego-identity complex" wouldn't have gone anywhere, it'd still be looking out your own eyes, at a distinct pair of identical eyes belonging to your clone. Conversely, amnesia can cause you to forget your own identity, but your perspective continues; you're still looking out the same pair of eyes, even if you don't recognize the face you see in the mirror. All of that is "spirit", whereas "soul" is less of a meaningful concept during life; I figure that your soul isn't really "you", but rather a sort of umbilical tether connecting your current "you" to some sort of Akashic overbeing which has experienced numerous lives in various identities (sort of like a person playing multiple RPG characters!). It thus represents an inmost essence which is part and parcel of who you are, but not really integral to your particular self.

So let me get this straight; all of my characters' souls are connected to me, where their programming is imprinted on my mainframe. And if one of them dies, some uppity caster can install a pirated copy of its program into its corpse. But the copy doesn't count as a soul, because federal regulations don't recognize such contraband?

(Yes, I just horribly conflated your two soulful explanations. My sincerest apologies!)

kardar233

2013-01-23, 05:44 PM

I would actually like to see an alignment system that conflates Positive and Negative Energy with Law and Chaos, and then has Paladins Smite according to their alignment. LG Paladins of Honor smite Evil and Undead, CE Paladins of Slaughter smite Good and Living, in the same sense as Clerics channel positive and negative energy.

Gildedragon

2013-01-23, 06:20 PM

Problem with conflating positive/negative energy with Law/Chaos is that it can be easily argued both ways within the D&D uses of it.

Death (produced by negative energy) is part of the natural order of things, it needn't be seen as chaotic, but the result of an inextricable, emotionless, uncaring Law. (thus avoiding death calls down Inevitables)

Whereas Life (produced by positive energy) is wild, transgressive, arbitrary and upsets states of equilibrium. As such it could well be seen as chaotic

Conversely,

Undeath (negative energy) goes against the cycles of birth-death that allow for the smooth functioning of the world. It violates natural orders and stands outside of them, not making way for the next iteration of life. This is a chaotic action.

Whereas Deathlessness (positive energy undead) are the product of a desire to protect and maintain traditions, knowledge and cultures. This is a lawful action

On the G-E axis there are problems too:
The problem with concatenation of Positive Energy and Healing with Good is that both of these can be used in VERY nasty ways.

At a basic level it allows you to inflict harsher, more prolonged, and more brutal "interrogation techniques" without risking your prisoner dying. With greater ingenuity one can get... well, more creative.

willpell

2013-01-23, 07:46 PM

If you don't buy the idea that no acts are inherently good, evil, lawful, or chaotic then you're essentially saying that the game simply cannot exist without some form of alignment system. Given the number of RPG's that do just that, it seems a rather fallacious stance to take.

The alignments might exist, but magic which interacts with them doesn't - essentially the exact opposite of what you propose.

Less importantly, but still noteable, outsider (<alignment>) bane won't affect most native outsiders as very nearly none of them have an alignment subtype.

I thought "Bane (outsider, evil)" affects all evil outsiders, not just [Evil] ones.

As for the connotations of the term holy; IRL, what's holy to one religion is utter blasphemy to another. The word loses the connotation on its own unless there's only one religion in your game-world.

True, but that doesn't apply to D&D world religions. Heironeous and Kord are deeply irreconcileable in their stances on Good, but both of them still are Good. Thusly, a weapon which is holy to one is still holy to the other. Only evil clerics can claim to hold sacred an Unholy weapon (IRL "holy" and "sacred" are synonymous, but in D&D they have a clear distinction).

Also, you really see a difference in connotation between a holy sword and a celestial sword?

Easily. Celestial just connotes "of the stars"; it could mean "alien and tied to the uncaring whims of fate" just as easily. "Holy" though very much suggests "of unblemishable purity and moral rigor", so having a sword remain holy after a baptism in barmaid blood just doesn't work for me. (Though I have to squint a little not to think the same of "sacred", which seems to have the same general theme, just not quite as strong...somehow that long "o" makes the difference, sounds like a reverent chant or something.)

So let me get this straight; all of my characters' souls are connected to me, where their programming is imprinted on my mainframe. And if one of them dies, some uppity caster can install a pirated copy of its program into its corpse. But the copy doesn't count as a soul, because federal regulations don't recognize such contraband?

Er...I think one of us has outsmarted me, myself and/or I.... :smallredface:

I would actually like to see an alignment system that conflates Positive and Negative Energy with Law and Chaos, and then has Paladins Smite according to their alignment. LG Paladins of Honor smite Evil and Undead, CE Paladins of Slaughter smite Good and Living, in the same sense as Clerics channel positive and negative energy.

Smiting Living would be about 800 times as powerful as Smite Undead, just FYI. Anyway I don't know why you think either should be vulnerable to smiting. Turn/Rebuke is more than enough to make them feel discriminated against. :smalleek:

Raven777

2013-01-23, 07:57 PM

So let me get this straight; all of my characters' souls are connected to me, where their programming is imprinted on my mainframe. And if one of them dies, some uppity caster can install a pirated copy of its program into its corpse. But the copy doesn't count as a soul, because federal regulations don't recognize such contraband?

(Yes, I just horribly conflated your two soulful explanations. My sincerest apologies!)

Ergo, piracy is evil.

Larkas

2013-01-23, 07:59 PM

The alignments might exist, but magic which interacts with them doesn't - essentially the exact opposite of what you propose.

I actually quite like this idea. Alignment exists, but you can't target them. Or even better, you can't even detect them. Now, that makes Evil's life much easier, since Good might hesitate, but can make for some very paranoid game. I think that's why I like OA's taint-based stuff so much: you can pretty much only deal with Chaos. ... Does this sound to Ravenloft-ish for your tastes? :smalleek:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-23, 08:36 PM

I actually quite like this idea. Alignment exists, but you can't target them. Or even better, you can't even detect them. Now, that makes Evil's life much easier, since Good might hesitate, but can make for some very paranoid game. I think that's why I like OA's taint-based stuff so much: you can pretty much only deal with Chaos. ... Does this sound to Ravenloft-ish for your tastes? :smalleek:

If they can't be interacted with and they can't be detected (which is redundant since detection is a form of interaction) then they serve no mechanical purpose and there's no reason for them to exist. It also makes it completely impossible to bypass the DR of most outsiders without getting an enhancement or special material that universally bypasses damage reduction. This means either having to modify those creatures' DR to something that actually exists, or increase their CR because the only way past their DR just became much rarer and a little more expensive.

@Willpell:

The when you select outsider and an alignment for the bane quality, you're selecting a type and subtype. An evil slaad doesn't give a crap that you have an Evil Outsider Bane long-sword, since it doesn't do any more damage to him than any other +1 longsword. If you want to get bane to effect a tiefling then it needs to be keyed to Outsider (native), because he lacks the subtype for Outsider (evil) to affect him.

Larkas

2013-01-23, 10:28 PM

See, you're thinking "game rules repercussions" only. A Paladin might still need to be good, but good is no longer an easy to follow guideline. He might still need to smite evil creatures, but evil is no longer clearly cut any more. What if that Orc he has just smitten wasn't, in fact, evil? What if it was just trying to lead his people to a better life? The Paladin wouldn't know it: he doesn't have an x-ray vision for detecting baddies. He might act out of prejudice, which is bad, or might choose inaction due to a lack of certainty on his part, which might be worse. So, how should he act? There isn't an easy answer to that, and THAT is why this might be interesting. Sure, it's not a game for every group, but some groups might find a game of intrigue and deception more entertaining than a "knight in shining armor saves the day" kind of game. And of course, detection and interaction (they can be the same thing, but I'm taking interaction to mean "attack targeting x", ok?) might just be unreliable, or very limited: you know that that Orc isn't good. But what does that tell you about him? Is it ok to kill a non-good person just because his people is generally mostly composed of savages? There is a path to follow now, but it is still hazy.

Furthermore, there might exist ways to interact with [Good] and [Evil] even in a world where you can't interact with good and evil. Exemplars are just that: examples of that alignment, so even in a place where you can't divine people's general intentions merely by scanning their alignments, you could still generalize how creatures that come from the Abyss tend to think. After all, they are not evil, they are MADE of evil. You still might be wrong about it, but this would be an excusable error. Or would it? :smallamused:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-23, 10:49 PM

Larkas

2013-01-23, 10:56 PM

You're saying plus and minus at the same time here.

If the smite evil ability doesn't interact with a creature's alignment then either it smites everything or it smites nothing except creatures with the evil subtype. The orc is either smited regardless, or he's not smited even if he deserves it.

For the thing on exemplars, that's exactly what I was saying before.

Again, you're failing to divorce game mechanics from the actual game. I said "smite evil creatures", not "use Smite Evil", I.e.: the act of kicking some (evil) guy in the teeth. Regardless, even if that was THE way of finding if someone is evil or not, would you go swinging your sword around to see who got hurt the most?

Either way, poor choice of words from my part, my bad.

Raven777

2013-01-23, 11:44 PM

What if Smite Evil behaved like the Sword of Truth?

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-24, 03:17 AM

Again, you're failing to divorce game mechanics from the actual game. I said "smite evil creatures", not "use Smite Evil", I.e.: the act of kicking some (evil) guy in the teeth. Regardless, even if that was THE way of finding if someone is evil or not, would you go swinging your sword around to see who got hurt the most?

Either way, poor choice of words from my part, my bad.

You also said that a paladin still had to be good, but if good has nothing to do with the game rules, then how do you decide if the paladin is good enough? That's basically saying that you're throwing out the alignment system and that the paladin has to live up to your completely arbitrary standard. Since evil is equally undefined, you can simply say glaring at that guy for being an ass is an evil act and you fall.

The system can work without the alignment system being a part of it, but if you remove the alignment system you have to remove the whole thing, not just bits and pieces. (again, examplars being an exception because of how incredibly clear-cut their rules interactions would be.) Keeping the requirement that a paladin be good is saying that you're subbing in your own alignment setup instead of using the default. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's still different from removing alignment altogether.

Larkas

2013-01-24, 06:57 AM

What if Smite Evil behaved like the Sword of Truth?

Uuuuh, you kinda lost me there. Is that a spell?

You also said that a paladin still had to be good, but if good has nothing to do with the game rules, then how do you decide if the paladin is good enough? That's basically saying that you're throwing out the alignment system and that the paladin has to live up to your completely arbitrary standard. Since evil is equally undefined, you can simply say glaring at that guy for being an ass is an evil act and you fall.

The system can work without the alignment system being a part of it, but if you remove the alignment system you have to remove the whole thing, not just bits and pieces. (again, examplars being an exception because of how incredibly clear-cut their rules interactions would be.) Keeping the requirement that a paladin be good is saying that you're subbing in your own alignment setup instead of using the default. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's still different from removing alignment altogether.

But I never said that, in that scenario, alignment should be removed from the game. I just said that it might be a nice change of pace to not be able to interact directly with said alignments. Good exists, and is just as pure as Good in a world without those rules. Evil, likewise. You just can't interact with them by popping up an x-ray vision. But just because you can't interact with them, doesn't mean alignments couldn't exist and have real impact upon the world. Yeah, a Paladin might fall if he ceases being good. Yeah, a villain can be redeemed and be made to see the folly of his ways. No, it doesn't have to be obvious what is good and what is evil.

Now, I've derailed Pell's topic enough, and won't insist on the subject. I just find it strange that you could imagine a game without alignments but not a game simply without alignment-bashing.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-24, 07:06 AM

tadkins

2013-01-24, 07:07 AM

There's a computer game called Diablo 2 that I've long been addicted to, and one of the characters you can play in it is a Necromancer, but more or less Good-aligned despite it. His shtick is that he reanimates slain monsters and traps their souls as a way of working off their karmic debt; he throws curses on monsters to teach them respect for life by sapping its vitality away from them, and also makes golems and uses poison but those don't really have any philosophy subtext. If you can track down the manual to the game, the backstory of the Necromancer faction (jungle temples of Rama-something, I think) is very interesting reading; there's links to Hinduism, Buddhism, Egyptian myths and Voodoo (none of which we can talk about on this forum, but you can go to a library or something and find all sorts of info) which are hinted at in this character and can be very useful for flavoring non-evil Necromancy. Death is inevitable, after all; understanding and controlling its power aren't necessarily bad things, as long as you don't go around inflicting it willy-nilly for the lulz.

Yep, I remember that game fondly, and the Necromancer was my favorite class. Anti-heroes are appealing characters to play.

I suppose the best way to think about it is how alignment in D&D is a pretty hard coded thing, in that you're not really an evil character if you're not actively out killing, torturing, or all the other nasty stuff described in the BoVD.

ArcturusV

2013-01-24, 07:11 AM

Raven777: Then you'd have to deal with red leather clad women with ageles after you every time you make a Paladin.

Really though with Smiting in an Alignmentless system, I'd think a Smite would more or less be "I can use it whenever I want". Except if you piss off the powers that be who give you your smiting, you lose it. So it's really Smite Anything... except if I misuse it a bunch I'll probably lose it.

Even Mechanically, if it was Smite Anything with the potential for overuse and abuse of the power, it wouldn't really break a Paladin.

Larkas

2013-01-24, 07:37 AM

Yeah, we ran into a miscommunication error there. We were talking about completely different things.

Btw, even under the default rules a detect spell giving you a character's alignment doesn't give you carte-blanche to smite-on-sight. Never did, at least not for good characters.

Ah, indeed. But there are always Miko-like players who love to ignore that simple fact... Thing is, I really like the alignment system. It has serious potential for role play. But people tend to abuse (or rather, over simplify) it: either by smiting something just because it reads "evil" or by making a Paladin fall simply because he took a pretty neutral stance. Alignments should be seen as loose guidelines: no LG individual should be exactly the same as the next one, even if they share ideologies, for example. Even if they are guidelines with real impact on the game, 9 alignments is not the same as 9 ways to think and act. I'm sure everyone can picture some NE character who, at the end of the day, is more beneficial to the world than a LG zealot, for example.

TL;DR: I like the alignment system. I don't like how some people don't know how to use it.

ArcturusV

2013-01-24, 08:03 AM

I'm sure everyone can picture some NE character who, at the end of the day, is more beneficial to the world than a LG zealot, for example.

Yes, the last full campaign I finished. Where my Lawful Evil Warrior-Priest type basically became the savior of the world and united several blood feuding factions into a peaceful empire (Willingly, not subjugated). And the Lawful Good character basically Demon Apocalypse'd another section of the world in his mad bid to "Set things right" and regain his throne as a disposed Nobleman.

So it's less "picture" and more practical example I have.

willpell

2013-01-24, 11:55 AM

I have no time to do the thread justice today, hopefully I don't forget to read further back and respond where appropriate when I get a chance this weekend. If I fail to address a question you're welcome to repost it.

Yes, the last full campaign I finished. Where my Lawful Evil Warrior-Priest type basically became the savior of the world and united several blood feuding factions into a peaceful empire (Willingly, not subjugated). And the Lawful Good character basically Demon Apocalypse'd another section of the world in his mad bid to "Set things right" and regain his throne as a disposed Nobleman.

While it's perfectly possible for an Evil character to do Good works without anyone punishing him for it, the same should not be true in reverse. If the LG character released demons into the world, he should Fall (if a paladin) and/or be damned (partially at the least) for his actions. He may be trying to pull a Greater Good, but he should not have to wait long to find out whether he's failed, and if the forces of Good are not completely oblivious twits, they should notice what he's up to and stop him before he can pull off such a massive foul-up in their name.

Any harm that's done by a Good character should always be either accidental or tragic (ie the result of fate conspiring against them); if they take an action that is flat-out wrong, they don't get to keep their halo.

ScionoftheVoid

2013-01-24, 12:40 PM

Treants have an alignment, yet it seems to me that if the forest isn't in any danger, the treants will be content to float in a state of nonbeing until needed, not even thinking unless it perceives an unusual event in its surroundings. I can believe that for a Construct, inactivity could be accepted as its default condition. Of course that only applies if the Construct has Intelligence, which they generally don't (apart from Living Constructs).

The difference is that treants and intelligent constructs can act on their own initiative even if they generally don't see a reason to. A mindless undead literally cannot do things unless they're ordered to.

What do you have against the classic zombie apocalypse? The idea that the dead should hate and resent the living "instinctively", even if not fully aware, need not be automatic, but it's certainly not ever out of place. Wherever zombies go, zombie malevolence is naturally free to follow.

In D&D in particular, it just seems totally arbitrary to me in the same way that Deathwatch's [Evil] tag does. That a being is mindless and cannot act on its own initiative... except to harm living creatures just feels ridiculous and absurd to me. Especially when they're also the only exceptions to the rule that things with animal or lower Intelligence don't have alignments of their own (though they may have alignment subtypes, for whatever reason).

In general, I'm not fond of it being so for the sake of it being so. I'd rather there were some kind of reason why the zombies hate the living. Whether they're created to do so, act on an instinct or program to be aggressive toward anything that moves (rather than just anything that lives, unless they can somehow perceive life itself) or have some other kind of justification, I'd like there to be one beyond "because they're zombies/evil (despite having less mental capacity to be evil than animals)/icky dead things."

I don't see why they would "hate" the living when being able to hate requires some kind of mental presence. A mindless zombie should be no more capable of hatred for life than a flame is of hating water, or than an air conditioning system is of hating heat. At least to my mind.

On the subject of adding Undead to Smite Evil - I didn't quite think that through, clearly, but it's no more odd than the Paladin normally getting Turn Undead for no clear reason.

ArcturusV

2013-01-24, 12:40 PM

Not that I ever considered the character Good. Just he did and it was what he had filed out on his Alignment Section, and the DM never got around to telling him otherwise. Too much behavior to be considered "good" in my book. Though he justified his actions by pointing out the whole "Demon Apocalypse" thing was unintentional... though it was on thin grounds. Basically that those that overthrew his Rightful Rule unleashed Demons of their own as Shock Troops/Elites. So he was going to wake up an Ancient Dragon to help him kill them off. Then when said Dragon who was evil decided not to play nice, realized he couldn't handle said Dragon and ended up calling forth the Demon Prince of Indiscriminate Slaughter and Carnage to try and counter the Dragon. Did not go well.

Though that character does remind me. What is the stance on magic like Charm, Suggestion, Dominate? I always felt that they were (EVIL) in nature. Because somehow robbing creatures of their own free will and self determination never really struck me as a Good, or even Neutral, ideal. One of the reasons I thought that above character was "EVIL" in truth also involved his use of Charm Person, Dominate, Suggestion, and similar effects to basically get whatever he wanted out of NPCs, basically only because he wanted it, and forcing them to comply with his wishes if they were against the target's nature by stronger magic/high Diplomacy or Bluff rolls on Charmed Targets, etc.

I mean I can see on one hand why said magic might be (EVIL). The idea of stripping someone's will and so forth is typical villain category. Why it's not seems a flimsier ground to stand on. Only thing that can come to me off the top of my head is the Non-Violent/Respect for Life/Mercy ideals of Good. e.g: Rather than killing a villain force him to reform, or at least stop his rampage by less violent means.

willpell

2013-01-25, 02:32 AM

So he was going to wake up an Ancient Dragon to help him kill them off. Then when said Dragon who was evil decided not to play nice, realized he couldn't handle said Dragon and ended up calling forth the Demon Prince of Indiscriminate Slaughter and Carnage to try and counter the Dragon. Did not go well.

Did it never occur to him to summon Raziel, the Archon of Horribly Murdering Evil Things (And Not Other Things) instead? :smallconfused:

What is the stance on magic like Charm, Suggestion, Dominate? I always felt that they were (EVIL) in nature. Because somehow robbing creatures of their own free will and self determination never really struck me as a Good, or even Neutral, ideal.

These effects are definitely highly questionable from an ethical perspective, but I think at least some forces of Good approve of them conditionally. I have a slightly disturbed CG Enchantress who thinks of Charming people as just a way to make the whole world a friendier place, "lubricating" social encounters by getting past the awkward distrustful phase. Conversely I can see use of Dominate magic to enforce obedience on the reflexively rebellious, with the logic that you're Good so you won't force the person to do anything that they shouldn't have chosen to do of their own free will, if they were less principled than you. Law and Chaos can also support strong opposition to the idea, so this is a great way to drive conflict between two Good factions. Neutral Good is potentially willing to consider either application and less likely to object to them, though of course that will vary individually.

It would be interesting to speculate on what the celestial races think of it. They probably have a vast enough perspective to know exactly what the limit of our free will is in the first place (ie how strongly someone's instinctual compulsions restrict their ability to make choices). Whether they care or not is another story.

Only thing that can come to me off the top of my head is the Non-Violent/Respect for Life/Mercy ideals of Good. e.g: Rather than killing a villain force him to reform, or at least stop his rampage by less violent means.

Exactly. While Good will never sign off on using such methods to achieve an Evil goal, ultimately they may be willing to support their use to Good goals, for the same reason that they support violence against the Evil. Violence or enslavement may be bad things in an abstract sense, but one or another Good force may decide their use is justifiable under the right circumstances. Other groups may disagree, potentially leading to a lot of conflict that needn't be based in Good vs. Evil, or even conflicts where you might agree with Evil's point. "Sure I kill everyone who looks at me funny, but at least I don't rape their minds and force them to follow me around singing my praises! I think you're the real villain here, buddy." You don't have to agree with the villain (nor does the universe), but you can at least get where he's coming from.

I don't see why they would "hate" the living when being able to hate requires some kind of mental presence. A mindless zombie should be no more capable of hatred for life than a flame is of hating water, or than an air conditioning system is of hating heat. At least to my mind.

"Hate" is perhaps a misnomer here, but water doesn't need to hate a fire in order to put it out, just by coming into proximity with it. If undeath is genuinely an overridingly inimical anti-life force, then snuffing out every form of life which comes within its detection range might be as inevitable as water flowing downhill, at least unless the undead in question is intelligent enough to resist the instinctive urge to do so. (I once wrote a story about humans making contact with Serpent People who've survived underground since the age of the dinosaurs, and I made a point of mentioning how the two races intelligently decide they're in too much danger of mutually-assured destruction to go to war, even though each race has a strong instinctive itch in the back of the brain that makes them really want to kill each other. The same could apply to Necropolitans and Liches versus the living.)

On the subject of adding Undead to Smite Evil - I didn't quite think that through, clearly, but it's no more odd than the Paladin normally getting Turn Undead for no clear reason.

I would imagine they get TU for the same reason they get a list of spells that are almost exclusively from the cleric list. They're essentially a fighter/cleric hybrid with a few special "baked-in" powers that no longer count as spells. UA makes this explicit with its Prestige Paladin variant.

(Digression: I'm told that the original 1E Paladin and Bard were essentially prestige classes; was this also true of the Ranger? Did the original Ranger have something like Favored Enemy? I've always thought the Ranger seems a bit odd as a Fighter/Druid mix, and could stand to be "unmagicked" a little more skillfully than the Complete Warrior variant, as his shtick to me just seems like being a hunter, and spellcasting seems kinda superfluous. Anybody who knows the history of the Ranger class, feel free to expound at length.)

Ah, indeed. But there are always Miko-like players who love to ignore that simple fact... Thing is, I really like the alignment system. It has serious potential for role play. But people tend to abuse (or rather, over simplify) it: either by smiting something just because it reads "evil" or by making a Paladin fall simply because he took a pretty neutral stance. Alignments should be seen as loose guidelines: no LG individual should be exactly the same as the next one, even if they share ideologies, for example. Even if they are guidelines with real impact on the game, 9 alignments is not the same as 9 ways to think and act. I'm sure everyone can picture some NE character who, at the end of the day, is more beneficial to the world than a LG zealot, for example.

TL;DR: I like the alignment system. I don't like how some people don't know how to use it.

I pretty much agree with every word of this post, most especially the bold.

If they can't be interacted with and they can't be detected (which is redundant since detection is a form of interaction)

Very good point, that.

The when you select outsider and an alignment for the bane quality, you're selecting a type and subtype. An evil slaad doesn't give a crap that you have an Evil Outsider Bane long-sword, since it doesn't do any more damage to him than any other +1 longsword. If you want to get bane to effect a tiefling then it needs to be keyed to Outsider (native), because he lacks the subtype for Outsider (evil) to affect him.

Well that rather thoroughly sucks. Is the same true of Ranger Favored Enemies? If you pick "evil outsiders" there, does the Death Slaad laugh at you?

Kelb_Panthera

2013-01-25, 02:49 AM

Yes, the ranger's favored enemy is a choice of type and, in the case of outsiders and humanoids, subtype. The Slaad that laughed at your Evil Outsider bane long-sword will laugh just as hard at your favored enemy: outsider (evil). You'd need a chaotic outsider bane weapon and favored enemey: outsider (chaotic). This is abundantly clear in the favored enemy entry and the bane quality uses the same list.

Chilingsworth

2013-01-25, 02:54 AM

To play devil's advocate, why are paladins given the ability to smite undead if they're not inherently evil in some way? I mean sure, you can scrap the Evil tag and mention undead in the text of Smite Evil, but how does that make any more sense? It's Smite Evil, not Smite Might be Used for Evil. If it was, paladins would be able to smite everything from edged objects to spell books to lawyers.

Umm... you mean they can't? :smalltongue:

Yep, I remember that game fondly, and the Necromancer was my favorite class. Anti-heroes are appealing characters to play.

I suppose the best way to think about it is how alignment in D&D is a pretty hard coded thing, in that you're not really an evil character if you're not actively out killing, torturing, or all the other nasty stuff described in the BoVD.

Wait, Diablo 2 is old enough now to be "remembered fondly?!"
...
Now, I feel old. :smalltongue:

Gnorman

2013-01-25, 02:57 AM

It's Smite Evil, not Smite Law. Granted, there's some overlap.

Seharvepernfan

2013-02-01, 02:35 PM

I'm just going to butt in here with a question that has always bothered me. Say you are a paladin or otherwise have smite evil. You come across someone who pings as evil.

1. They are evil. This means they have done something to earn that alignment-label, correct? This means they have done something evil, they are guilty of something, at some point in the past, and haven't done anything to rectify it or otherwise shown any remorse.

2. They are evil. They will (probably) go on to do evil things in the future.

My gut reaction is that it's okay to smite the bastards, because at some point in time, they deserved it, and they will probably go on to do other evil things in the future, and you have the chance right now to prevent that.

Now, I know that evil characters can have a change of heart, or can be persuaded to good by others. So, if you kill them, you are preventing them from having that chance. That does seem wrong.

(I also know that evil people are something of a resource - that evil 9th level rogue has nine levels of skills and experience that can be put to good use; it would be kinda wasteful to just kill him, yeah?)

But, if your success at turning them isn't assured (like, if you try to capture them and fail, and they escape, when you could have just killed them), then aren't you being irresponsible by taking that risk? The same goes for trying to imprison them - or otherwise contain them while inhibiting their ability to harm others.

IRL, you can't just go kill someone for being "evil", you have to prove that they have committed a crime, and blah blah blah legal system and they're imprisoned, and possibly executed depending on a lot of things. In D&D, a paladin has that proof right in his/her head, so why is it objectively wrong to go and kill them?

Secular powers might not like it, but secular powers are not the cosmic power of good. If it's right, it's right, despite what anybody thinks.

My last comment: I don't know exactly how D&D defines it, but the point of good is to either maximize the total amount of joy and happiness in the world, or to attempt to increase the total amount of joy and happiness in the world without committing any evil acts. I'm not sure which, because it is okay to kill an evil person when you don't absolutely have to (in D&D rules), but apparently it's wrong to just smite a bastard when you come across one.

So, how and why am I wrong about all this?

Story

2013-02-01, 03:44 PM

So, how and why am I wrong about all this?

Well the alignment system is somewhat subjective and open to interpretation. However, under the most common rules, you can't just smite someone for being evil. Being evil doesn't necessarily mean they spend their weekends burning down puppy orphanages. It could just be the merchant who refuses to give a discount to starving peasants.

Also, being good doesn't mean maximizing happiness, because the forces of objective Good often don't.

Seharvepernfan

2013-02-01, 04:06 PM

It could just be the merchant who refuses to give a discount to starving peasants.

I don't think that actually qualifies as evil. This sounds like "...but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.", which is neutral according to the PHB.

Also, being good doesn't mean maximizing happiness, because the forces of objective Good often don't.

"Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings." It's not exactly the same as "maximizing happiness", but it's close, I'd say, especially that "concern for the dignity" part.

What if I had said "minimizing suffering" instead?

willpell

2013-02-01, 04:24 PM

Ah, I was hoping that my SPOON thread might revive interest in this one, as it really should probably have been posted to here since it's entirely about alignment. But conversely I really like saying SPOON so it's all good.

1. They are evil. This means they have done something to earn that alignment-label, correct? This means they have done something evil, they are guilty of something, at some point in the past, and haven't done anything to rectify it or otherwise shown any remorse.

This is sort of like giving someone life in jail because they fail to pay one traffic ticket. Given the binary nature of evil status it makes a lot of sense, all of it non, that there's no distinction as to how severe the evil needs to be for smiting to be appropriate. Especially silly given that we have a mechanic, built right into Detect Evil, for measuring the strength of someone's evilness. It's just that unless you're a cleric or undead or something, your potential score is extremely limited. Still it seems to me as though Smite Evil should do damage based on the Aura of Evil strength of the target, rather than just your own level. That's a bit too ham-fisted for me to institute off the bat, but I should definitely look at something along these lines.

2. They are evil. They will (probably) go on to do evil things in the future.

That presupposes that the future is knowable, and ignores the hope of redemption. Wickety at best.

(I also know that evil people are something of a resource - that evil 9th level rogue has nine levels of skills and experience that can be put to good use; it would be kinda wasteful to just kill him, yeah?)

But, if your success at turning them isn't assured (like, if you try to capture them and fail, and they escape, when you could have just killed them), then aren't you being irresponsible by taking that risk?

An interesting counterpoint. Do you have a right to exploit a person as no more than a tool, just because they're Evil and you're Good (nevermind exactly what makes you and them so)? Is it your fault what others do just because you don't kill those others when you suspected they might do something? I'm strongly inclined to respond with an emphatic and unequivocal "NO" in both cases, but what really catches my eye is the way they seem to lean in different directions. The first is very imperialistic, entitling yourself to undervalue others by comparison to you, and selfishness is classically Evil (even if not as much so as, say, torture). But the second is saying you have the right to either prohibit others from ever doing anything you dislike, or kill them just in case they might, and that basically is equivalent to saying that you consider them capable of anything other than controlling themselves, that they're ticking time bombs you're obligated to put out, and that they have the right and power to govern your behavior and vice versa - it essentially overvalues them.

IRL, you can't just go kill someone for being "evil", you have to prove that they have committed a crime, and blah blah blah legal system and they're imprisoned, and possibly executed depending on a lot of things. In D&D, a paladin has that proof right in his/her head, so why is it objectively wrong to go and kill them?

Aside from the previous, a few other problems crop up...

* Nobody but the paladin and like a deity or something knows his Detect Evil is real; he could simply lie and say someone's evil and kill them just because he wants to.

* Assuming his DE is real, false positives are not impossible; magic can make someone evil temporarily (Morality Undone in the BOVD, and reprinted I think in Lords of Madness), and creatures of fiendish heritage may ping Evil due to their subtype regardless of anything they do. (There's a canonical succubus paladin on the Wizards website - myself I'd never have allowed it, but someone thought it made sense - who has the unfortunate distinction, between her class and her subtype, of pinging on all four alignment detects.)

* And finally, even if the diagnosis is geniuine and accurate, the target qualifying as Evil does not guarantee that they are any particular type of Evil, or tell you what their nefarious plan is; they may be only pawns in a game or even smokescreens, they may have a stain of sin on their soul which is more icky than atrocious, but never have actually harmed anyone in any real way, or they may be a lesser evil who "may yet have a part to play" in dealing with a greater one. You don't get a prophecy of all the future evil they might cause, so you're acting on a severe paucity of information.

Secular powers might not like it, but secular powers are not the cosmic power of good. If it's right, it's right, despite what anybody thinks.

Very, very dangerous territory. What if the cosmic power of Good gets hacked? If you've always heard a voice in your head, and for ten years it's done nothing but kind and wonderful stuff, and suddenly it tells you to stab someone, do you give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it has a good reason for this demand, or do you wonder whether something has gone pear-shaped without you noticing? A possessing demon might have the ability to simulate your Detect Evil ability going off when pointed at innocents, either to trick you into killing them or lull you into *not* killing them even when the guilt is real. There are just tons of ways that this level of absolutism is dangerous. Trusting anything is always a risk; you can decide you're going to believe your powersource will never steer you wrong, but that belief would be very useful to it, if it decided to do exactly that.

My last comment: I don't know exactly how D&D defines it, but the point of good is to either maximize the total amount of joy and happiness in the world

Dubious. Both Greyhawk and Toril have a god of martyrdom who suggests that Good is about being willing to suffer yourself when it's right and beneficial somehow (Phieran in the first case, I think Malaster or something in the second). If everyone followed this deity's dogma, the result would be a world in which every person was LG (or thereabouts), but they would all be grim humorless self-sacrificers willing to get tortured to death rather than surrender the nuclear codes (insert appropriate phlebotinum substitute). Other deities in this corner have similar commitments to duty, community, peace and moral uprightness; they always claim that it's for the best, but happiness is only one of the benefits they can be working toward. Security, legacy, decorum, reliability, progress - there are a lot of things that Good can be demanding which provide ennui or worse, as you toil toward their achievement and recognize that the beneifts you're working to earn won't become available within your lifetime (think of the Operative from Serenity).

or to attempt to increase the total amount of joy and happiness in the world without committing any evil acts. I'm not sure which, because it is okay to kill an evil person when you don't absolutely have to (in D&D rules), but apparently it's wrong to just smite a bastard when you come across one.

So, how and why am I wrong about all this?

If the illegitimus in question is not Evil, but just kind of a jerk, murdering him because he annoys you would be kind of wrong, yeah. The gods don't police people's thought's so your free to wish (as long as you don't Wish) that he'd get a painful and final lesson in appropriate behavior; you won't stop being Good because you imagined killing him, or even found yourself wishing he'd give you an excuse for killing him. But if you're too quick to assume you've gotten that excuse, without making real danged sure, you might just be all twitchy with the desire to kill someone because you're, oh what's the word, psychotic. A principled sociopathi is not an impossibility (see "Dexter"), & it's probably not unheard-of for a guy who enjoys killing but willingly behaves himself to end up with paladin powers. Still, he had better be darn carefully that he never does the "right" thing for a really wrong reason. Intent matters; accidentally knocking someone out a window is very different from deliberately pushing them, and even if you're punished for reckless negligence involving horseplay in front of an open window, the punishment is probably less severe because you weren't actively trying to kill someone. If you want to kill, anyone that you do kill will be assumed to be your pleasure, unless the circumstances are very unambiguous that your deed was strictly business.

Larkas

2013-02-01, 04:41 PM

Dubious. Both Greyhawk and Toril have a god of martyrdom who suggests that Good is about being willing to suffer yourself when it's right and beneficial somehow (Phieran in the first case, I think Malaster or something in the second). If everyone followed this deity's dogma, the result would be a world in which every person was LG (or thereabouts), but they would all be grim humorless self-sacrificers willing to get tortured to death rather than surrender the nuclear codes (insert appropriate phlebotinum substitute). Other deities in this corner have similar commitments to duty, community, peace and moral uprightness; they always claim that it's for the best, but happiness is only one of the benefits they can be working toward. Security, legacy, decorum, reliability, progress - there are a lot of things that Good can be demanding which provide ennui or worse, as you toil toward their achievement and recognize that the beneifts you're working to earn won't become available within your lifetime (think of the Operative from Serenity).

Ever heard of the Material worlds the Harmonium dominated, where even Beholders, Illithid and chromatic Dragons are LG? :smallbiggrin:

ArcturusV

2013-02-01, 06:34 PM

Well, you'd think about the whole Ping thing and Paladins, that a Paladin is expected to act to a higher standard than Evil is. And even other Good Non-Paladins (Or exalted as in Exalted Deeds territory) characters. It's perfectly reasonable to have a character go, "Screw you Shiny Pants!" and Smite God on a Paladin without provocation. That's in their territory.

But a Good character should strive for higher ideals. What separates a Lawful Good Cleric from a Lawful Evil Cleric is not the spell list, or the presence of Evil Smiting, etc. It's a Code and a calling to a higher purpose. Lawful Evil can have its honor, and it's codes. But it's eventually going to do whatever is easiest for it's goals. Lawful Stupid earns that moniker not just for the bullheaded, blind "JUSTICE" rage and such that they go on, but also by the higher ideals they stand to. A Lawful Good character should show mercy, and compassion. Should consider finalizing acts like killing and so forth not the last resort, but definitely not the first.

Example:

You're a paladin in a village. You detect evil. You see Joe the Dirt Farmer pings Evil, but you know by just asking a local "Hey... what's his story?" or having been around there for a while that Joe the Dirt Farmer isn't slaughtering people in the middle of the night. No one is reporting mysterious acts of Baby-cide or something.

So he's evil. But not overtly so. Maybe he just has evil, self serving thoughts. Instead of going "SMITE EVIL!" and then tell everyone "What?! He was evil!", the Paladin can just go up to Joe the Dirt Farmer and say, "... I know you have a darkness in your heart. Straighten up, I'll be watching..."

Maybe that sort of warning from a Paladin will get him to change an evil bend he wasn't fully aware of? Maybe it'll scare him into changing for fear of getting caught offering prayers to some pit fiend? Maybe he IS irredeemably evil. In which case he knows the Paladin is "onto him"... which will force his hand to do something overt and obvious, maybe even try to kill the paladin later instead if he is irredeemable.

Less messy "Is this wrong" questions in that case.

Chilingsworth

2013-02-01, 07:07 PM

Ever heard of the Material worlds the Harmonium dominated, where even Beholders, Illithid and chromatic Dragons are LG? :smallbiggrin:

What's this Harmonium? When I googled it, all I found were links to a type of musical instrument. :smallconfused:

Seharvepernfan

2013-02-01, 07:36 PM

Maybe he just has evil, self serving thoughts.

Thoughts don't make you evil, though. Actions do.

If you never actually do anything good or evil, then you are neutral.

ArcturusV

2013-02-01, 07:49 PM

Seharvepernfan

2013-02-01, 07:59 PM

That seems... squiffy. Because a lot of what defines an Alignment is based on Thought rather than Deed in particular.

Lying to someone for example, isn't good, evil, or neutral, in and of itself. Thoughts, and intentions, are what makes it good (Santa is real and will reward you if you are good all year), neutral (No, you don't look fat in that), or evil (That route goes to the Land of Free Sex and Bacon, nope, not to the Land of Unbearable Suffering).

Actually, the PHB says that lying is unlawful.

"Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word,..."

Whereas chaotic characters "...do what they promise if they feel like it."

(and personally, IRL, I think lying when you don't need to is evil, even about santa to your kids)

Larkas

2013-02-01, 09:11 PM

What's this Harmonium? When I googled it, all I found were links to a type of musical instrument. :smallconfused:

The Harmonium (http://mimir.net/psmush/hardheads.shtml) is a faction in the planes! If you want more information, ask around in Afroakuma's thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265884). :smallsmile:

Lord_Gareth

2013-02-01, 09:33 PM

The Harmonium (http://mimir.net/psmush/hardheads.shtml) is a faction in the planes! If you want more information, ask around in Afroakuma's thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265884). :smallsmile:

A note: Afroakuma deals in strict canon and labels speculation and personal explanations as such explicitly.

willpell

2013-02-02, 04:26 AM

Ever heard of the Material worlds the Harmonium dominated, where even Beholders, Illithid and chromatic Dragons are LG? :smallbiggrin:

Okay, there's a LG illithid in the BOXD, I can deal with that - but all mind flayers on a world being LG? How the dickens does that work? They still have to eat sentient beings don't they?

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-02, 04:55 AM

Okay, there's a LG illithid in the BOXD, I can deal with that - but all mind flayers on a world being LG? How the dickens does that work? They still have to eat sentient beings don't they?

That particular issue isn't really what makes illithids evil to begin with. That's addressing a basic biological need and they don't get evil-pinged for that. It's the ruthless subjugation of "lesser" races and the constant meddling in surface world politics to the effect of wars both open and secret that make them evil.

Lord_Gareth

2013-02-02, 08:21 AM

That particular issue isn't really what makes illithids evil to begin with. That's addressing a basic biological need and they don't get evil-pinged for that. It's the ruthless subjugation of "lesser" races and the constant meddling in surface world politics to the effect of wars both open and secret that make them evil.

This answer is not correct; their eating habits do make them evil and I'm very sad that Willpell didn't link the post explaining this. In point of fact I PM'd it to him and that thread contains a WONDERFUL example of what an LG mind flayer society could look like.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-02, 08:51 AM

This answer is not correct; their eating habits do make them evil and I'm very sad that Willpell didn't link the post explaining this. In point of fact I PM'd it to him and that thread contains a WONDERFUL example of what an LG mind flayer society could look like.

Oh? Which part is incorrect?

Lords of Madness page 62 makes it very clear that illithids -must- consume living brains to survive in the last paragraph of the internal anatomy section and page 74 expands on this to explain that they must have no less than 1 per month or suffer malnourishment.

If you claim that brain eating is evil, under these specialized circumstances, then illithids can only be considered inherently evil.

You couldn't be disputing the other portion of my comment?

Larkas

2013-02-02, 08:54 AM

Oh? Which part is incorrect?

Lords of Madness page 62 makes it very clear that illithids -must- consume living brains to survive in the last paragraph of the internal anatomy section and page 74 expands on this to explain that they must have no less than 1 per month or suffer malnourishment.

If you claim that brain eating is evil, under these specialized circumstances, then illithids can only be considered inherently evil.

You couldn't be disputing the other portion of my comment?

Wait, does it have to be living brains of intelligent creatures?

hamishspence

2013-02-02, 09:16 AM

Lords of Madness implies that some nonthrall brains are necessary:

p74
"Besides the logistic issues, the brains of lifelong thralls are less satisfying to mind flayers than the brains of free individuals. A thrall has few true experiences to remember and even fewer emotions, which are the "meat and potatoes" of a nourishing, fulfilling mind."

p62
"For reasons explained below, an illithid's brain is anathema to its body. The process of ceremorphosis creates something closer to parasite than brain. That parasite becomes an indispensible part of the body. Its great weakness is that it does not produce the critical enzymes, hormones or psychic energy that the body needs to survive and function. Those critical components must come from consumed brains."

(though it goes on to say that a lot of the enzymes and hormones can come from food, but only brains can contribute the psychic energy).

Larkas

2013-02-02, 09:47 AM

Hmmmm... Terrible analogy, I know, but vegans can live quite well, even though they are missing some critical components on their diet. This happens because they can supplement it in other ways (http://www.theveganrd.com/2010/11/recommended-supplements-for-vegans.html). How you'll do that for illithids beats me, however. I guess it could work if you used a setup not unlike the "Ambrosia Farm (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=7274.0)".

TimeWizard

2013-02-02, 10:03 AM

To your question, it makes sense to me that all the, well, extreme alignments should have their mortal exemplars (not in the planar sense.) Actually, if anything, I think WotC should have offered up more information on holy warriors of all nine alignments. Other than a single issue of dragon, though, I know of none.

My question: (not that this is the format of the thread, unless it ends up being...:smalltongue:):

On the morality of undead creation:

Is it moral to use a person's remains to create mindless undead without their prior consent? What about with their prior consent? What if you use the skeleton or zombie to improve the lives of the living? What if it causes no harm to the immortal soul? What if it causes some damage? What is the maximum acceptable ratio of damage to the soul/benefit to the living?

On intelligent undead:
Is it immoral to create a type of intelligent undead whith the transformee's consent? What if the resultant undead needs to feed on sentient creatures? What about a nonvoluntary transformation to prevent a loved one from passing on? What about a voluntary transformation into a form that does not require feeding on the living (such as a lich?) (also, assuming lichification doesn't require murder or the like.)

I made a character specifically about this. He was a monk (i.e. he lived in a monastery, his class was wizard) who found what amounts to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and raised skeletons of the past monks to defend his temple against the fantasy version of the Mongol Horde. After saving his temple, the Elders excommunicated him on ethical grounds. He then set off to travel the world, finding the other great Books of the Dead and used his mindless undead horde to save the weak and do tasks that would be too dangerous or logistically unfeasible (skeletons don't eat). He built safety huts on mountains, cleared out lost underwater aqueducts, etc.. while being firmly LG. The DM had some of the same qualms about morality, but in the Necromancer's mind, it was akin to using a dropped shield in battle. It was an interesting character to play. After saving a village from bandits and what not, I would often forgo a share of treasure in exchange for taking remains from graveyards, if the townspeople agreed.

I don't agree with the idea that Necromancy automatically equals evil, especially since Fireballing a guy is "good" while building an orphanage with undead is "evil". It adds a weird dynamic to things. I can see if you had a very old school Sauron versus Humans thing going in your game, where in this is a perversion of order etc... but even then, WotC has come out with something like 5 kinds of "good" undead (iirc they're called "Deathless"). It could also be cultural, what with the judeo-christian undead=bad where in say, Japan, the idea of a warrior serving his master beyond life is a pretty heroic concept- the Book of 5 Rings rpg had a skeleton in armor who defended the Emperor's bedroom, because he never slept, got bored, blinked, or could be bought.

So with a modern morality, I can't see why we have to assume undead are always bad, unless you take on some kind of plague or uncontrollablity.

willpell

2013-02-02, 01:22 PM

This answer is not correct; their eating habits do make them evil and I'm very sad that Willpell didn't link the post explaining this. In point of fact I PM'd it to him and that thread contains a WONDERFUL example of what an LG mind flayer society could look like.

If you mean just now, I didn't get the PM because my inbox was full. I've been desperately trying to muck it out while trading PMs with someone recently, so there's been no space to spare without my throwing away the newest messages.

ArcturusV

2013-02-02, 05:33 PM

The only real argument for undead being EVIL, in all caps like that, that I can see TimeWizard is basically the concept behind say, Maho in Legend of the 5 Rings. That while Maho isn't necessarily used for evil (It's peasant magic that commoners can learn to do things that the nobles may or may not do for them, etc), it's sheer existence and use taints the soul and eventually corrupts everyone exposed to it, turning them into some will-less (but not mindless necessarily) thrall to the evil god.

I personally as a DM wouldn't have had a problem with your LG Necromancer Monk, it's perfectly within alignment and flavor/backstory. The only time I'd really have had a problem with that is the problem I have with some people in general. They hit the point where you have an army of skilled (leveled) people working for you, the game is no longer an "Adventure" but more a Delegation. Which is usually one of the times I decide to retire the party and start off with fresh blood.

Maybe have them do one shot cameo adventures or appearances where something so great is going on the old guard has to dust off their equipment and ride out onto the field while their armies of undead/servants/warriors/mages/etc are busy keeping the homestead from being overrun.

Lord_Gareth

2013-02-02, 08:13 PM

If you mean just now, I didn't get the PM because my inbox was full. I've been desperately trying to muck it out while trading PMs with someone recently, so there's been no space to spare without my throwing away the newest messages.

No, the one I sent you which caused you to put the Illithid Pizza line in your sig.

willpell

2013-02-03, 12:48 PM

No, the one I sent you which caused you to put the Illithid Pizza line in your sig.

Oh, right. Got a link to that? It was long enough ago that all I remember was something about Rings of Sustenance.

Larkas

2013-02-03, 02:25 PM

Oh, right. Got a link to that? It was long enough ago that all I remember was something about Rings of Sustenance.

Now I'm curious too. :smallconfused:

Yuukale

2013-02-03, 05:26 PM

incurring in the sin of not reading the whole thread, I dare ask:

wouldn't it be a tad more scientific posting what Exalted Deeds and Vile Darkness list as being "good" and "evil" ?

I believe that these aren't objective notions and thus, a debate on what's what would never reach an end or logical conclusion. But, we may at least stablish some boundaries.

Lord_Gareth

2013-02-03, 08:33 PM

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-03, 08:52 PM

Here you go (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9594407#post9594407).

That thread also contains a great imagining of what an LG mind flayer society would look like.

Spoiler: It's still creepy.

That argument is full of holes. First it posits that brain-eating is unecessary, which is explicitly untrue, then it says that they could eat any of several creatures to gain the psionic energy they get from brains from creatures that -are- sapient.

Just about the only thing he got right was that the process of ceromorphosis might be considered evil. Being a form of parisitism and utterly necessary for the creation of illithids, however, it might not. If they discontinue any and all ceremorphosis then illithids will go extinct in short order. Their society will cease to be altogether. In time even neothelids will stop being created as they are the result of illithid tadpoles canibalizing each other in the elder-brain pool.

afroakuma

2013-02-03, 09:32 PM

That argument is full of holes. First it posits that brain-eating is unecessary, which is explicitly untrue, then it says that they could eat any of several creatures to gain the psionic energy they get from brains from creatures that -are- sapient.

I really did not want to participate in this thread, but it appears that I'm going to have to come in to defend my work.

First of all, I didn't just dive in to be inventive; I did my homework, using Lords of Madness and The Illithiad as well as specific citations on some of the other creatures mentioned in that piece. Ustilagors, oortlings and thralls are explicitly indicated as components of the illithid diet, with oortlings in particular treated as cattle and more than suitable to be the main course at an illithid dinner.

Per Lords of Madness, page 62, illithids eat a great many kinds of food, and most for enzymes and hormones they require. Now, the question turns to brains as the only external source of psionic energy; I'd dispute that as a general case (specific trumps general) but regardless, it indicates brains. Not "sentient" brains, not "free-range" brains. Just brains. As hamishpence helpfully pointed out, "desirability" is a factor in choosing sentient, free, wild brains. There's nourishment and then there's satisfaction, and thralls cover the first but not the second. An illithid can get more cerebral psionic energy by cracking open a brain mole than your average human; it's not quite a snack of the same caliber, though.

Note that this source isn't exactly suitable on the question of diet; a paragraph prior it asserts that brains are the only source for enzymes, hormones and psychic energy, while a few sentences later it posits that there are other useful sources of the first two. Other sources of psionic sustenance are noted to exist in other sources, and that's before you step into the realm of components of the game rules that would let them deal with that.

In short, don't be so dismissive of my piece. I'm arguing from canon sources.

Sorry for the interruption, folks. Enjoy your thread.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-03, 10:35 PM

The illithiad is a 2e source. It's irrelevant to 3e. Even if that weren't true, the only non-sapient creature you've named is the brain-mole.

Then there's the fact that LoM says "psychic energy" not psionic energy. If all they needed was psionic enegy then they could simply use psionic devices to imbue their food with it or find some non-organic source to harvest. Since the underdark is known for its magical emenations and there's no difference between psionics and magic it should be a trivial matter to find a rock that gives off the right energy if psionics was all that was meant.

Follow this with the fact that there're a myriad of things that humans can't eat that other animals can and the assumption that a brain-mole is somehow the same as a humanoid from a dietary stand-point is even more suspect.

afroakuma

2013-02-03, 11:20 PM

The illithiad is a 2e source. It's irrelevant to 3e.

I disagree with that perspective; 3.X as a general rule worked to continue from 2E and 1E fluff where possible. Nonetheless, it's a matter of choice; if your protest is based on wanting to dwell exclusively on material presented in Lords of Madness, then you could have articulated that rather than claim that my position was "full of holes" and that I had almost nothing correct. Had you done that I wouldn't be involved here at all.

Then there's the fact that LoM says "psychic energy" not psionic energy.

My apologies for paraphrasing; "psychic" is used liberally as a term under the psionic umbrella, and in casual conversation I don't have an issue alternating the two.

Follow this with the fact that there're a myriad of things that humans can't eat that other animals can and the assumption that a brain-mole is somehow the same as a humanoid from a dietary stand-point is even more suspect.

It's a brain. Brains provide the needed psychic energy. Cows. Rabbits. Deer. Humanoids are satisfying, not mandatory.

Anyway. I'm done laying out my case. If you want to continue calling down my position, have at it. I've said my piece and, given your tone towards my work, I'm not really interested in discussing it with you any further.

willpell

2013-02-03, 11:23 PM

wouldn't it be a tad more scientific posting what Exalted Deeds and Vile Darkness list as being "good" and "evil" ?

BOXD and BOVD are rightly regarded as questionable sources, having been written from thoroughly less than unbiased perspectives that do a poor job of reflecting real moral complexity.

That thread also contains a great imagining of what an LG mind flayer society would look like.

Spoiler: It's still creepy.

I unfortunately was not able to find it with a brief search of the thread for "Lawful Good" or "LG". ("Search the thread" as in "click the thread pages one at a time then use Ctrl-F", since the forum search function remains an unthing.)

Also, while I was reading this, I had a thought about cere
morphosis. Like okay, we know that mind flayers naturally shouldn't exist, because tadpoles in the elder brain pool could eventually turn into neothelids if left alone. But...who says the elder brain pool is natural in the first place? Where did the first one come from? Was there ever a natural situation in which tadpoles were swimming around eating each other, and then somehow one of them wound up in a person's ear and turned him into the first mind flayer, who then started harvesting skulls to create the first elder brain? Or did the elder brain come first, perhaps originally as a necromantic brain in a jar or something? We don't know; the subject is left intentionally unclarified for the benefit of bombastic GMs who want a cheap source of Ultimate Drama for their plot which doesn't contradict any canon. (OMG YOU GAIZ IMC WEZA GONNA FIGHT THE FUST MINDFLAYZORZ EVAH SO EPIC RITELOL).

Lord_Gareth

2013-02-04, 12:01 AM

Here you go again (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9595056#post9595056)

Theoretical Good mind flayers - they steal corpses and use them to reproduce.

willpell

2013-02-04, 12:04 AM

Here you go again (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9595056#post9595056)

Theoretical Good mind flayers - they steal corpses and use them to reproduce.

Oh my god - it's an exact parallel to my favorite movie of all time. I am so using this.

"We use your dead as vessels..."

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-04, 01:52 AM

That probably wouldn't work given the time-frames for ceremorphosis and putrefaction.

willpell

2013-02-04, 02:06 AM

That probably wouldn't work given the time-frames for ceremorphosis and putrefaction.

As in Afro's idea wouldn't work, or just the result wouldn't resemble the Strangers? (Obviously they can't look like Mind Flayers and the Strangers at the same time, but there are various ways of fudging that.)

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-04, 02:16 AM

As in Afro's idea wouldn't work, or just the result wouldn't resemble the Strangers? (Obviously they can't look like Mind Flayers and the Strangers at the same time, but there are various ways of fudging that.)

As in the amount of putrefaction that takes place in a human body within a single week would make that body entirely toxic to itself if it somehow sprang back to life.

willpell

2013-02-04, 02:42 AM

For all we know, ceremorphosis could change that (IOW, A Wizard Did It).

zlefin

2013-02-04, 03:02 AM

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-04, 03:08 AM

For all we know, ceremorphosis could change that (IOW, A Wizard Did It).

The lower brainstem, the part of the brain responsible for vital functions, isn't replaced in ceremorphosis. LoM page 63, middle of the first paragraph; "The tadpole is neurologically melded onto what remains of the lower brain stem and assumes complete control of the body's nervous system."

Given this, I'm changing my previous statement to "that just plain won't work." Taking over a dead system that's been dead for over a week won't bring it back to life.

ArcturusV

2013-02-04, 03:09 AM

The problems I've had with alternates on it, is even when I try to stress it, people still think in terms of Law/Chaos or Good/Evil on it. I tried a stint with Aggressive/Defensive for Law and Chaos substitutes before. But people kept trying to define (in their minds and actions) Aggressive as Evil and Defensive as Good, even though they weren't slated to be related to it at all. Instead it was supposed to be something where a Defensive Good person might be inclined to be a medic, curing ills after they happen. Where an Aggressive Good person is more like the researcher who tries to find a vaccine for the disease.

Instead everyone just played it as Aggressive was Butcher, and Defensive was Savior. :smallannoyed:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-04, 03:11 AM

willpell

2013-02-04, 05:02 AM

Larkas

2013-02-04, 05:25 AM

As in the amount of putrefaction that takes place in a human body within a single week would make that body entirely toxic to itself if it somehow sprang back to life.

Gentle repose with a CL of 7.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-04, 06:41 AM

Gentle repose with a CL of 7.

Gentle repose prevents parasites from feeding on the corpse. If this were not so it couldn't stop the eventual decay of the body since one of the major factors of the body's decay is the flaura in the digestive tract feeding off of the surrounding tissue.

Even if you reject that, you're saying that mindflayer society cannot exist in a non-evil manner without the aid of spellcasters. Given that a bog-standard illithid is a 15th level character they can't even hope to produce enough casters from their own kind to sustain more than a handful in a "settlement." This in-turn means that they would be completely dependent on either a humanoid race or a race with natural casting ability to support them; rather a tremendous blow to their dignity as a people (something good is supposed to respect); since they can't enthall other beings for their own gain and still be good.

And all this is assuming they can find a people willing to let them use their dead like that. Grave-robbing is generally frowned upon and bodies are usually treated in some way before laying in state for a few days before being buried. Unless of course they're creamated.

hamishspence

2013-02-04, 07:20 AM

I don't know about alternate, but my rule of thumb for some time has been "Lawful people believe that a situation always remains the same unless forced to change. Chaotic people believe that a situation will inevitably change unless forcibly kept the same."

This isn't necessarily much of a guide though- what they think about this belief might be more informative.

A person who believes things will change unless they're kept the same- and that this is a Bad Thing- and goes to great effort to keep what they want in the same state- a person who locks their society into virtual stasis- seems to me more like D&D Lawful.

Conversely, a person who thinks that it requires active effort to change things- and that change is a Good Thing- and works to great effort to shake up a society they perceive as moribund- seems very like D&D Chaotic.

Larkas

2013-02-04, 07:50 AM

You preserve the remains of a dead creature so that they do not decay. Doing so effectively extends the time limit on raising that creature from the dead (see raise dead). Days spent under the influence of this spell don't count against the time limit. Additionally, this spell makes transporting a fallen comrade more pleasant.

The spell also works on severed body parts and the like.

Nowhere does it say that the target corpse's flesh is rendered inedible. It just says that it doesn't decay. How exactly it works is effectively irrelevant, and I'm not about to theorize on it. Think of all the cat girls! "It's magic" is a perfectly reasonable response in this case.

Furthermore, considering that the MM presents to us a 9th-level sorcerer, which is more than enough to cast 3rd level spells, I don't see how they would need help from any other race. And you're thinking in no-LA, no-RHD humanoid settlements terms. Your bog standard Mind Flayer would, in his society, be considered as a level 1 Warrior would be in human society - at least demographic-wise.

Lastly, no one said that being LG is EASY. It would take a set of extraordinary individuals to effect that change in a small settlement, let alone a whole culture based on such weird physiological parameters. They must strive and adapt, and as Afro rightfully said, even ther "lawful goodness" would come out as alien to us. However, considering their reproduction needs, it is undeniable that grave robbing is better than cold blood killing. Besides, acting like one knows better than everyone else is a classic "symptom" of being LG. Knowing of their limitations and of what the alternative would entail, I reckon that LG mind flayers would not be above controlling the minds of a few humanoid grave diggers.

On a side note, a LG mind flayer sorcerer could specialize in fetching the corpses and guaranteeing the cooperation of humanoid settlements. That could even be a job in a capitalist society like the one described by Afro (heck, they could even work in the humanoid society undercover: Alter self into elan, Gentle repose as a way to preserve the corpse presumably for burial, not unlike those caretakers that clean and care for the body so the family can mourn it), or even a ceremonial position in a more religiously-inclined one. Anyways, I digress.

willpell

2013-02-04, 08:10 AM

This isn't necessarily much of a guide though- what they think about this belief might be more informative.

A person who believes things will change unless they're kept the same- and that this is a Bad Thing- and goes to great effort to keep what they want in the same state- a person who locks their society into virtual stasis- seems to me more like D&D Lawful.

Conversely, a person who thinks that it requires active effort to change things- and that change is a Good Thing- and works to great effort to shake up a society they perceive as moribund- seems very like D&D Chaotic.

A Chaotic person knows better than to try to keep things the same. Change is not a Good or Bad thing in and of itself, and so it makes no sense for there to be a policy of trying to ensure or prevent it without specific goals in mind. The difference is simply that the Lawful person, having worked to make a chance (eg: building a city), assumes that the work will not spontaneously undo itself without some cause, and thus focuses on trying to thwart possible such causes. A Chaotic person, on the other hand, if he builds a city, knows it will eventually fall no matter what he does, and tries to make sure it accomplishes its intended aims in the short term, knowing that those aims will only stay accomplished for so long.

Basically, think of Jurrasic Park's Ian Malcolm as Chaotic and John Hammond as his Lawful antagonist (or vice versa). Hammond goes to great effort designing a park which he thinks is state of the art and perfect in every way, he refuses to listen to the naysaying of his subordinates about how his goals can't be met in the timeframe and budget available, and inevitably things go wrong, exactly as Malcom was certain they would and Hammond was certain they wouldn't. (Most other characters were somewhere in between and thus are Neutral, not assuming that disaster is either impossible or inevitable but judging based on the cirumstances.)

TuggyNE

2013-02-04, 08:12 PM

A Chaotic person knows better than to try to keep things the same. Change is not a Good or Bad thing in and of itself, and so it makes no sense for there to be a policy of trying to ensure or prevent it without specific goals in mind. The difference is simply that the Lawful person, having worked to make a chance (eg: building a city), assumes that the work will not spontaneously undo itself without some cause, and thus focuses on trying to thwart possible such causes. A Chaotic person, on the other hand, if he builds a city, knows it will eventually fall no matter what he does, and tries to make sure it accomplishes its intended aims in the short term, knowing that those aims will only stay accomplished for so long.

Basically, think of Jurrasic Park's Ian Malcolm as Chaotic and John Hammond as his Lawful antagonist (or vice versa). Hammond goes to great effort designing a park which he thinks is state of the art and perfect in every way, he refuses to listen to the naysaying of his subordinates about how his goals can't be met in the timeframe and budget available, and inevitably things go wrong, exactly as Malcom was certain they would and Hammond was certain they wouldn't. (Most other characters were somewhere in between and thus are Neutral, not assuming that disaster is either impossible or inevitable but judging based on the cirumstances.)

So, Tarquin is Chaotic, because he doesn't care about his empire lasting after his death?
An idealistic abolitionist is Lawful, because she figures former slaves will be fine once they're free of their harsh masters and educated and relocated?

That's pretty counter-intuitive to me, and is much more of a personality trait than an alignment (Optimistic vs Pessimistic, perhaps).

To be fair, I can see what you're saying in a way, but equating Lawful with "believes natural laws and cause and effect are a thing" and Chaotic with "believes entropy overtakes everything rapidly and unpredictably in the short term" seems inaccurate, at best.

willpell

2013-02-04, 11:24 PM

Clearly I need to revise my language a little because I don't see any of that being implied by what I said. :smallconfused: :smallannoyed: :smallsigh:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-05, 12:47 AM

Nowhere does it say that the target corpse's flesh is rendered inedible. It just says that it doesn't decay. How exactly it works is effectively irrelevant, and I'm not about to theorize on it. Think of all the cat girls! "It's magic" is a perfectly reasonable response in this case.This doesn't change the fact that dead is dead. It also completely ignores the fact that mindflayers need humanoid host bodies; they're completely dependent on one or more humanoid races no matter how it's sliced. Also, not that it matters, unless there's caster on hand to cast gentle repose the corpse will still decay somewhat in the time it takes for the body to be found and preserved, though dead is still dead and consequently useless anyway.

Furthermore, considering that the MM presents to us a 9th-level sorcerer, which is more than enough to cast 3rd level spells, I don't see how they would need help from any other race. And you're thinking in no-LA, no-RHD humanoid settlements terms. Your bog standard Mind Flayer would, in his society, be considered as a level 1 Warrior would be in human society - at least demographic-wise. The 9th level sorcerer is presented as an exceptional member of the race; same as the hound archon hero or the greater abysall basilisk or the celestial charger unicorn. I'm thinking in terms of experience required to gain -any- class levels. A mindflayer must gain 15 times as much experience as a 1st level human to gain a level and take on -any- class. Living in any kind of settlement instead of living the adventurer's life severely stunts the rate of growth for any race and since illithids grow in experience so much slower than most races this is even more true of their society. Any individual with -any- class levels would be an extreme rarity. One with three levels in a casting class, when they don't have thralls to do their fighting for them and must train warriors too, will be little more than a curiosity; not something to try and stand the entire culture on.

Lastly, no one said that being LG is EASY. It would take a set of extraordinary individuals to effect that change in a small settlement, let alone a whole culture based on such weird physiological parameters. They must strive and adapt, and as Afro rightfully said, even ther "lawful goodness" would come out as alien to us. However, considering their reproduction needs, it is undeniable that grave robbing is better than cold blood killing. Besides, acting like one knows better than everyone else is a classic "symptom" of being LG. Knowing of their limitations and of what the alternative would entail, I reckon that LG mind flayers would not be above controlling the minds of a few humanoid grave diggers. There's a hell of a lot of difference between difficult and, for all practical purpose, impossible.

Grave-robbing simply can't work. People don't just bury their dead whole unless they're under extenuating circumstances that make it necessary. They also rarely bury the dead on the same day that they died, barring those same sorts of circumstance. Grave robbing will get a "useable" corpse so rarely as to be essentially never, and this is still ignoring the fact that you're making the ridiculous assumption that the flayer larva can bring a corpse to life.

On a side note, a LG mind flayer sorcerer could specialize in fetching the corpses and guaranteeing the cooperation of humanoid settlements. That could even be a job in a capitalist society like the one described by Afro (heck, they could even work in the humanoid society undercover: Alter self into elan, Gentle repose as a way to preserve the corpse presumably for burial, not unlike those caretakers that clean and care for the body so the family can mourn it), or even a ceremonial position in a more religiously-inclined one. Anyways, I digress.

You digress into fantasy. Basically the entire race would have to have that job to procure enough corpses, which are still unuseable anway; relegating the entire race to societal parasites rather than having any society of their own.

hamishspence

2013-02-05, 02:24 AM

Clearly I need to revise my language a little because I don't see any of that being implied by what I said. :smallconfused: :smallannoyed: :smallsigh:
Your definitions appeared to be

"Assumes things will stay the same and does not worry": Lawful

"Assumes things will change and knows better than to try and halt it": Chaotic

willpell

2013-02-05, 02:42 AM

@ Kelb: This is true if you take the rules on PC advancement as applying to NPCs as well, which is potentially a valid assumption, but not necessarily the only one. PCs are all special and stuff; who says NPCs need to gain Experience to acquire class levels, any more than animals (who are never playable as PCs) need to gain experience to advance in HD? It may just naturally happen over the course of time, for reasons that don't apply to PCs because the DM says so.

Your definitions appeared to be

"Assumes things will stay the same and does not worry": Lawful

"Assumes things will change and knows better than to try and halt it": Chaotic

Okay I definitely screwed up if that's what you got from it.

Lawful: "Assumes things will stay the same, so an injustice which is true now will never correct itself unless Law takes action. So it totally does worry about any situation that is currently not to its satisfaction, but one which is to its satisfaction, it assumes will remain so if sufficiently protected from outside assault."

Chaotic: "Assumes things will change unless the change is halted, so tries to halt undesireable changes as best it can manage, though it knows it may not be able to do more than stem the time for a while. Meanwhile, knows that it requires constant effort to keep a situation as desired, not exactly so but progressively through constant improvement, else it inevitably must decay."

Not quite as succinct as my previous version, but hopefully sufficiently unpackaged to be both comprehensible and recognizeable as the same concept.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-05, 02:51 AM

Given the utter lack of any other advancement mechanic except templating and the fact that experience is awarded for overcoming challenges which need never inolve direct physical danger (example: making a series of difficult diplomacy checks to moderate a negotiation between nations on the verge of war) and I can't see any reason why the xp system wouldn't be used for NPC's. It just all happens in the background where the players never see it.

TuggyNE

2013-02-05, 04:38 AM

Okay I definitely screwed up if that's what you got from it.

Lawful: "Assumes things will stay the same, so an injustice which is true now will never correct itself unless Law takes action. So it totally does worry about any situation that is currently not to its satisfaction, but one which is to its satisfaction, it assumes will remain so if sufficiently protected from outside assault."

Chaotic: "Assumes things will change unless the change is halted, so tries to halt undesireable changes as best it can manage, though it knows it may not be able to do more than stem the time for a while. Meanwhile, knows that it requires constant effort to keep a situation as desired, not exactly so but progressively through constant improvement, else it inevitably must decay."

Not quite as succinct as my previous version, but hopefully sufficiently unpackaged to be both comprehensible and recognizeable as the same concept.

Yes, that is substantially what I believed you to be saying previously. If anything, my descriptions seem to apply even better; Tarquin puts a fair bit of effort into managing his shell game, under the assumption that the endlessly shifting politics of the region make it essential.

I.e., your definition of Lawful being analogous to Newton's first law of motion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newton.27s_first_law), while your definition of Chaos being more correlated to chaos theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory). Names aside, I don't think that's really workable, for the reasons I gave earlier.

hamishspence

2013-02-05, 04:45 AM

I could easily see a Lawful character spending constant effort to keep society functioning- not just from "outside assault" but from "inner decay".

Larkas

2013-02-05, 05:47 AM

@Kelb: I won't keep arguing; I've said my piece and conjectured the best I could on why such a society might work under basic assumptions of the D&D system. Since you clearly won't have any of it, I won't waste my breath. Just one thing:

You digress into fantasy. Basically the entire race would have to have that job to procure enough corpses, which are still unuseable anway; relegating the entire race to societal parasites rather than having any society of their own.

Of course I digress into fantasy. Actually, I've been talking ALL fantasy. Last time I checked, this is a board for role playing games, which are themselves works of pure fantasy. :smallconfused:

Anyways, sorry for the derailing, Pell.

willpell

2013-02-05, 07:07 AM

Anyways, sorry for the derailing, Pell.

You mean sorry again, but I still don't mind. :smallcool: :smallamused: :smallbiggrin:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-05, 09:14 AM

@Kelb: I won't keep arguing; I've said my piece and conjectured the best I could on why such a society might work under basic assumptions of the D&D system. Since you clearly won't have any of it, I won't waste my breath. Just one thing:

Of course I digress into fantasy. Actually, I've been talking ALL fantasy. Last time I checked, this is a board for role playing games, which are themselves works of pure fantasy. :smallconfused:

Anyways, sorry for the derailing, Pell.

I'll elaborate then. You digressed into a fantasy that required ignoring far more of the applicable logical points that are based in reality and the mathematics of the gaming system than makes sense.

When the game itself gives such a detailed description of how mind-flayer reproduction works; by the parasite taking over the functions of a live host; ignoring biology altogether doesn't make sense.

When the system gives you the numbers to do the math on how and how often creatures become stronger, ignoring it makes no sense.

When someone counters your arguments with logical counterarguments, ignoring it makes no sense.

@Willpell: was this really that much of a derail? How can we decide the morality of a hypothetical mindflayer society; which presumably would be on-topic in a general alignment/philosophy thread; if we can't establish how such a society could or couldn't function?

Killing other creatures to survive isn't evil. It's a necessary part of nature. That illithids have to consume the brains of living humanoids to at least reproduce is inescapable fact. By saying that this is evil, you're* saying that the very existence of mindflayers and their continued existence into the future is inherently evil and that they and their society have no right to exist under the tenents of Good; with the capital G.

*That's a generic "you're" not a direct address to willpell.

Raven777

2013-02-05, 10:10 AM

... the very existence of mindflayers and their continued existence into the future is inherently evil and that they and their society have no right to exist under the tenents of Good; with the capital G.

This might be the objective truth as far as fundamental Good is concerned. Maybe the existence of their entire species genuinely is an... aberration. :smallcool:

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-05, 10:13 AM

This might be the objective truth as far as fundamental Good is concerned. Maybe the existence of their entire species genuinely is an... aberration. :smallcool:

In which case a LG mindflayer society would be impossible. Such a society would live for one generation then go extinct.

Raven777

2013-02-05, 10:20 AM

In which case a LG mindflayer society would be impossible. Such a society would live for one generation then go extinct.

This has precedent in fiction. Balthazar from Throne of Bhaal was a Lawful Good Monk Bhaalspawn and nominal leader of the game's five primary antagonists, his master plan being to eliminate all the other Bhaalspawns (including his "allies") before ritually killing himself to end the God of Murder forever.

Lawful Good Illithids might very well decide their species should end then and there in the same fashion he saw things.

After all, Good does not automatically translate into "good at making the best life decisions".

joca4christ

2013-02-05, 10:24 AM

:

I see Neutral, or rather True Neutral as the SELFISH alignment. You're not really motivated by any strong moral curves or psychosis, etc. You're just out to take care of yourself, and those things you care about. You don't really think about the grand scheme of Good, or look to solve your problems via Arson and Murder. In the end, you just want to get to the end of the day with your skin intact, a full belly, and a warm body to sleep next to, how you got there isn't really your concern.

Yes, I can definitely see this as being the case. In some instances, you do have the PC who does seek balance (i.e. the Druid) in life, but not nearly as hand-tied as in past editions.

willpell

2013-02-05, 10:34 AM

@Willpell: was this really that much of a derail?

Larkas seemed to think it was; who am I to contradict him?

Killing other creatures to survive isn't evil. It's a necessary part of nature.

For some creatures. MFs may not be among them. Heck, do we know that they EVER die of old age? Maybe they don't need to reproduce at all.

By saying that this is evil, you're* saying that the very existence of mindflayers and their continued existence into the future is inherently evil and that they and their society have no right to exist under the tenents of Good; with the capital G.

*That's a generic "you're" not a direct address to willpell.

As Raven pointed out that may be true, but it's wickety at best if so, so I'll assume it is not. They may belong to an alien ecosystem in which their behavior is a naturally balanced action, a check on some other predator who would be just as destructive by itself, but the two were not dangerous as long as each was negating the other. Thusly, the fault of all MF evil might ultimately lie with whoever upset that balance, just as it will be humanity's fault if the Argentine Ant conquers the world (more than they already have) because we're the only reason they ever got out of Argentina, where even deadlier ants kept them suppressed - and forced them to evolve into the monstrosities we now see them to be.

MFs may genuinely be incapable of experiencing positive emotion, or that may just be a consequence of Ilsensene messing with them. Maybe they're supposed to be incapable of *any* emotion; they might originally have been engineered by Good magewrights or deities as a force of order, which would transfigure the minds of nonsentient apes or orcwort "fruits" or completely artificial humanoid-created hosts (organic golems, vat-grown Clones, etc), or any number of other things. Perhaps the first ceremorphosis of a human was accidental, and the boiling kettle of negative emotions in humanity's id was more than the little tadpole's protobrain could handle.

Then again, perhaps brain-eating fulfills some function under Good's plan, and the original Mind Flayers were meant to exist exactly as they were, but Good intended to keep them under control and ensure that they never victimized anyone who was not fully deserving of having its brain excised alive, perhaps even needing to undergo that horrific experience in order to be "scared straight" (this could be especially true of multi-brained entities such as ettins; maybe ettins are naturally schizophrenic and MFs were designed to study them, determine which brain deserved to survive, and pluck out the other one). Again, presumably, something went wrong with this plan; perhaps the gods of Good were naive, arrogant, or just plain stupid (I demand that Good be perfectly virtuous to the best of its ability; if a Good individual is a complete and utter moron and nobody else manages to prevent him from screwing up, he may screw up on an epic scale and not Fall until after he finishes doing it), or perhaps again it was humanoids bumbling in where they didn't belong and messing up some magnificent sublime calculation.

There are lots of possibilities, though admittedly all of them are a stretch. Ultimately, MFs are designed to be horrific and monstrous and make great kill-on-sight (assuming you can) unquestionable villains. They perform far better if allowed to function in that role, so significant work is required to transform them to belong anywhere else.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-05, 01:35 PM

Mindflayers live to about 135, this is on-par with half-elves who only live a little longer.

Their emotional capabilities are also covered in LoM. Unfortunately the feelings that generally motivate good characters are pretty much off the table. Pride and satisfaction in the outcomes of research and plots is as good as it gets. (forgive the pun.)

Given the stringent requirements for the humaniod host for ceremorphosis, that I noticed on looking these details up, I'm even less inclined to think that just any brain is acceptable as a food source.

Xervous

2013-02-05, 02:06 PM

So to go about saying what is morally good or not...

-Is good judged by the degree to which a being fulfills their purpose in life, i.e. its pathos?
-Is good based in the general procurement of happiness and avoidance of pain?
-Is good based upon acting in accordance with simple universal synthetic a priori maxims?

These are horribly butchered paraphrases of some popular historical views on morality, I've avoided Hobbes because his general idea is glaringly Lawful and his sentiments on humanity are far from flattering. And I've probably missed a few so feel free to toss em up.

~The first assumption, Sophocles', if taken to be the lens through which good and bad is viewed, throws the whole argument to Baator and back. Joe the farmer succeeds at farming in his life, therefore he was good, is a generalization of this, an example that fits the equation but does not prove said equation to be universally applicable.
~However, we quickly run into a problem. Everything existing has a purpose, otherwise it would not exist, and since they have a purpose, they may be judged good because they succeed at fulfilling their purpose; therefore a devil who succeeds at being a devil would be judged a good devil. So, g'bye Sophocles.

~The second school of thought, Mill's utilitarianism, is all about seeking pleasure (very broad meaning) in one's actions and avoiding or reducing instances of pain in one's existence. There's hearty helpings of "love thy neighbor" and "treat others as you would wish to be treated..." so that there is a general net increase of happiness // net reduction of pain.
~Mill's conception of morality fits surprisingly well to the DnD world (as I see, don't forget to check my sig), those who go about being "good", promoting pleasure in themselves and others // reducing pain in themselves and others are usually the people who end up as petitioners in the Good places like Celestia and co. where they find more of what they dealt with in life. Those who do the opposite end up in the lower spectrum, in places that give back to them what they dealt with in life.
~Of course, Mill's system has a big problem with the procurement of pleasure through the causing of pain. Harvesting a man's organs to save five patients (who in this hypothetical would go on to live healthy normal lives) is one of the examples often argued; whether the net gain in pleasure justifies the pain, or the intentional causing of the pain invalidates the pleasure...
Of course, this may very well be the same holy double standards batman
of sorts that comes up with lots of stuff in DnD...

Bleh, too typed out to elaborate on Kant for now

Shining Wrath

2013-02-05, 02:24 PM

What if it does but you raise back the sacrificed afterwards?

I would consider killing someone as an evil sacrifice, and then raising them, a particularly exquisite form of torture. As in VERY evil. That person will never ever be the same.

Talderas

2013-02-05, 02:47 PM

What's the best alternate definition of chaos/law people have found? I'd like something that's a lot clearer to work with; i've gto some ideas, but i'd like to hear from people who've played more about what alternate definitions or words work best in practice.

I define things along the Law/Chaos scale using the three Cs. Concepts, Codes, and Causes.

A concept is an ideal that is not inherent lawful or chaotic. The methods to achieve a concept may be lawful or chaotic but the concept is above it. Justice is a concept. Equality is a concept. Balance is a concept. In fact, a concept should, in theory, be above the good/evil axis as well. Good, Evil, Lawful, or Chaotic means can be used to achieve a concept.

Codes are the lawful scale of the law/chaos slider. A code is an authoritative compendium or rules or behavior. It is ordered by a collective or even an individual but the key point is that it is authoritative. It is also a "reasoned" course of action. I say the course of action is reasoned in that the reaction to an event would already be defined by the code. That means that multiple people subscribe to it and hold it to be true. The laws on the book are a code to be followed. Samurai's bushido is a code that all samurai acknowledge and follow. A personal code of conduct is not a code for the determination of law and chaos because it is personal to you. It is not authoritative for anyone else. Codes are used to achieve the concept. So for the principle of justice, lawful characters will follow the codes that they live by. This may be the laws of a nation to sentence a murderer or it could be similar to the Asari Justicar code that dictates action.

Causes are the opposite of codes. Causes are chaotic. Causes are meant to be fulfilled. Causes are emotional. A chaotic individual serves the cause and the entire point is to bring about the concept as a cause which is emotionally fulfilling. An example would be the vigilante who pursues a murderer to exact justice. He doesn't care if he breaks laws. He just wants to see the murderer pay for killing the person. He may execute the murderer (neutral). He may take them to other authorities (good [mercy]). He may kill the prisoner with the exact same method the murderer used to kill his victim (potentially evil). All that matters is that the character's sense of justice is fulfilled (emotional fulfillment).

I don't mind answering questions about my method.

Raven777

2013-02-05, 03:18 PM

... snip...

Personally, I believe Kant's make the most sense. To measure if a deed is Good or Evil, universalize it : verify if it is sustainable when everyone is given an opportunity to do it. Farming? Good as long as the resources are there. Slavery? By definition, those enslaved are denied their opportunity, so, evil. Neighbor's brain is your exclusive source of food? Dead neighbor probably won't get to taste yours, so, evil.

Talderas

2013-02-05, 03:31 PM

Personally, I believe Kant's make the most sense. To measure if a deed is Good or Evil, universalize it : verify if it is sustainable when everyone is given an opportunity to do it. Farming? Good as long as the resources are there. Slavery? By definition, those enslaved are denied their opportunity, so, evil. Neighbor's brain is your exclusive source of food? Dead neighbor probably won't get to taste yours, so, evil.

That definition falls apart when you start looking at killing. There's plenty of sources within D&D that do not call killing an evil act. If you kill another creature that other creature cannot kill you. That would fall under evil using that definition.

Xervous

2013-02-05, 03:35 PM

Thank you for that Raven, my head is obviously too pureed from all this ethics cramming that its seeping out...

On a random note, chilled monkey brains anyone?

-> and back again, what of summoning creatures, especially intelligent ones, to do things for you? In the case of combat, they're getting whisked away on the whim of some wizard to be forced to fight and perhaps live through a pseudo-death experience, and then there's gating Solars and whatnot. Are there any general Do's and Don't's for how to treat your summoned creatures?

Raven777

2013-02-05, 04:35 PM

hamishspence

2013-02-06, 03:07 AM

That definition falls apart when you start looking at killing. There's plenty of sources within D&D that do not call killing an evil act. If you kill another creature that other creature cannot kill you. That would fall under evil using that definition.

I think Kant went with "Killing in self-defence"

If every human only killed in self-defence- there would be no killing of human by human at all- hence "Not Evil" in his metric.

Xzar

2013-02-06, 07:49 AM

Talderas

2013-02-06, 08:07 AM

However whilst looting the cave they find the babies of the monsters. What do they do with them and where does this act fall under the following variations.

a) Members of this race are believed to always be evil. There is no evidence of a good or neutral member of this race. However, they are just babies. Unarmed, innocent of any crime etc.

b) Members of this race are almost always evil. Contrary examples are very, very race.

c) Members of this race are generally evil, but their babies mature very quickly and will soon become as dangerous as their parents.

To make it more complicated there is a Paladin in the party.

To clarify, are we talking evil race like Demons/Devils or are we talking an evil race like Orks/Goblins/Drow?

When it comes to outsiders, finding a member of their race that is not the alignment is practically impossible. Usually when the alignment shift happens the creature itself changes (see Eriynes being fallen angels but considered a devil). For a race from a non-aligned plane the alignment is far more mutable and the young can be raised into a different alignment if raised in a different environment.

The answer, to me, seems rather clear. Infants are innocent if the race isn't bound to alignment by the planar wheel. They are ignorant of alignment and haven't had any time to formulate anything regarding it. Killing them would be an evil act. They are not a threat as they are helpless and you're attempting to condemn them for actions that they have not yet committed but you believe they may commit. Abandoning the infants would likely be an evil or neutral act because you're probably leaving them to starve. Taking them with you and finding a church that would shelter them and raise them to believe in all that is good would probably be a good action and also quite merciful.

hamishspence

2013-02-06, 08:54 AM

Usually when the alignment shift happens the creature itself changes (see Eriynes being fallen angels but considered a devil).

Usually- but not always- the famous Succubus Paladin on the WoTC site springs to mind, and I believe the Planescape Campaign Setting had other examples.

Erinyes are one of the few devils that reproduces "the old-fashioned way" (when a male erinyes and a female erinyes like each other very very much...) rather than being transformed mortal souls- which means you can have baby erinyes.

willpell

2013-02-06, 09:57 AM

Here is one for you, apoligies if this has been done already.

It has been done ad infinitum in the D&D community and probably on D&D, but I don't think it was done in this thread and even if so I don't mind answering it anew. I love questions like this because sometimes you change your mind enough to get new answers when asked multiple times; I like to consider an issue from more than one angle (though I can't claim to consider all angles; some are just flat-out wrong no matter how hard I squint, at least to me).

However whilst looting the cave they find the babies of the monsters. What do they do with them and where does this act fall under the following variations.

a) Members of this race are believed to always be evil. There is no evidence of a good or neutral member of this race. However, they are just babies. Unarmed, innocent of any crime etc.

b) Members of this race are almost always evil. Contrary examples are very, very rare.

c) Members of this race are generally evil, but their babies mature very quickly and will soon become as dangerous as their parents.

Scenario A is probably true of things like orcs, gnolls, drow, fire giants and so forth; ultimately they have something resembling a human brain, therefore they should have something resembling human minds. They may differ slightly in terms of what's true of their brain - generations of genetic weeding may have atrophied the drow's capacity to feel empathy to nothing, gnolls may be natural sadists, fire giants could have almost-literally-explosive tempers that no amount of training can cure - but even so, I'd say that characters who want to stay Good should consider themselves obligated to see to it that the babies get placed with some being potentially capable of raising them to be Good (or at least non-Evil). To kill blameless infants of a sentient race would be an unjustifiably Evil act, and leaving them to starve after slaughtering all potential caregivers would be no better (plus being dangerously irresponsible, since if an infant does manage to survive it will be utterly feral and possibly more dangerous than its evil parents could have made it).

Scenario B is probably true of something like a mind flayer, and of evil Outsiders if you treat them as having a modicum of free will. The laterally are literally made of evil, and the former are alien horrors who are canonically incapable of feeling positive emotion (though there is at least one canonical example of a good one - there are no references to her *feeling* anything, only *deciding* to pursue Good as a cause). So in this case, while I'm not going to say you *should* kill them, I don't think you can be criticized terribly harshly if you *do*; hoping for them to turn out well is probably enough of a pipe dream, that even the most idealistic preacher would have a hard time claiming with a straight face that you should have tried it.

Scenario C sounds more than anything else like it describes chromatic dragons (and might also apply to undead if they were ever babies). The sheer amount of danger involved in keeping a baby dragon around, even if it's not dyed-in-the-wool Evil, probably justifies making this decision on a pragmatic basis more than a moral one. It'll depend on the resources involved; if you can find a wizard to freeze them in a time bubble or something, or just track down a metallic dragon willing to adpot, then these are better options than killing. But while dragons are at least as intelligent as people and quite possibly more so, their minds are alien, and chromatics are at least reputably rumored to be hardwired for cruelty on a very deep level. Given how many lives you'd be putting in danger if you brought even one dragon hatchling back to a village, where it would grow at a spectacular rate and be well capable of razing the entire place within a couple years, I think I'd say you can't claim to be responsible doing that. And leaving it to its fate is again somewhat likely to turn this into a Dead Travelers Zone, so I think executing the beasts might be deemed acceptible for a Good character (at least one that's not too "arch") if he doesn't have the kind of resources necessary to have a better option. The act should bother him a lot, and he certainly doesn't get much XP for it (a little roleplaying award if he seems appropriately guilt-wracked and so forth, otherwise nothing; it's not a challenge except possibly in the ethics department), but he can fairly justifiably claim to have made it for the right reasons. To do otherwise under these circumstances is to risk suggesting that Good is Dumb and that Neutral is ultimately wiser, for not gambling innocent lives on pointless sentimentality. Not wanting to send that message, I'd probably allow a character to "write off" a sin like this without dinging his alignment, as long as he's clearly not all gung-ho for the butchery or anything.

To make it more complicated there is a Paladin in the party.

I'm firmly on the record as saying Paladins should never be run as Lawful Stupid templars who kill everything that acts suspicious. The Code of Conduct, while inflexible in-character, should be taken as being much more complicated IC than the summary in the books we're reading. So my answers above don't change much, if at all, because the character is a Paladin rather than anyone else with a Good alignment. The Paladin should hold himself to the highest standard, but it's not really a different standard (than fellow LGs at least, unless they're from radically divergent sects; a CG of course uses a slightly different version of righteousness), he's just more rigorous about it. But I never believe the paladin should face a choice where any action available to him results in a Fall; there should always be one that's better than the others, and close enough. (Theoretical dilemmas such as "millions will die if you don't murder this innocent in cold blood" should just not arise in the first place, and even if they do, they should have a solution that avoids the Fall without requiring the Paladin to commit an atrocity, no matter how "necessary". There's no easy rule about how exactly, but you should figure one out or just avoid the question, rather than accept that the wrong answer is the only one.)

Talderas

2013-02-06, 10:11 AM

Scenario C sounds more than anything else like it describes chromatic dragons (and might also apply to undead if they were ever babies). The sheer amount of danger involved in keeping a baby dragon around, even if it's not dyed-in-the-wool Evil, probably justifies making this decision on a pragmatic basis more than a moral one. It'll depend on the resources involved; if you can find a wizard to freeze them in a time bubble or something, or just track down a metallic dragon willing to adpot, then these are better options than killing. But while dragons are at least as intelligent as people and quite possibly more so, their minds are alien, and chromatics are at least reputably rumored to be hardwired for cruelty on a very deep level.

Dragons have genetic memory. They inherit knowledge from their parents. As soon as they hatch they are already thinking, breathing, and dangerous. Changing one from its alignment would be exceedingly difficult without the use of magic/compulsion. Even having an adopting metallic dragon from the moment it hatches would not yield a good chance of the chromatic hatchling turning out non-evil.

willpell

2013-02-06, 10:13 AM

Dragons have genetic memory.

Source for this?

Talderas

2013-02-06, 10:21 AM

Source for this?

Draconomicon, pg12. Section regarding Wyrmlings.

A newly hatched dragon emerges from its egg cramped and sodden. After about an hour, it is ready to fly, fight, and reason. It inherits a considerable body of practical knowledge from its parents, though such inherent knowledge often lies buried in the wyrmling's memory, unnoticed and unused until it is needed.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-06, 11:13 AM

Here is one for you, apoligies if this has been done already.

A party of good adventurers kills the evil monsters, it was fully justified in doing so. The creatures were evil, doing evil acts and if it entertains you the party also gave them the chance to surrender. In D&D terms they did good.

However whilst looting the cave they find the babies of the monsters. What do they do with them and where does this act fall under the following variations.This again. Really? :smallsigh:

Before answering a few things you left out have to be established. First and foremost, you can't be talking about a humanoid race. If you were then there'd still be women and children around unless you went in for the wholesale slaughter of the tribe, which means you can safely ignore the situation altogether or you've slaughtered the parents of an isolationist family, which makes me question why they needed to be killed to begin with. In that case there should still be more of their kind not too distant.

a) Members of this race are believed to always be evil. There is no evidence of a good or neutral member of this race. However, they are just babies. Unarmed, innocent of any crime etc.Belief doesn't matter. What matters is whether they really are an always evil race or not. If they are, then they should detect on evil-dar regardless of age and you've got yourself a smite-target. In any other case (usually or often evil) you're now responsible for their lives. Find an orphanage. True dragons don't count because they're perfectly capable of fighting back and probably will. If not you can talk it out with them.

b) Members of this race are almost always evil. Contrary examples are very, very rare.See previous response.

c) Members of this race are generally evil, but their babies mature very quickly and will soon become as dangerous as their parents. The only examples I can think of for this are true dragons. Since I already covered them I'll ask if you or anyone else knows of any other such creatures?

To make it more complicated there is a Paladin in the party.

A paladin actually simplifies things. He can do the evil scan to see if they're inherently evil creatures and consequently safe to dispose of immediately. There are extraordinarily few creatures that are inherently evil that aren't outsiders with the evil subtype that would actually qualify as auto-kill targets.

willpell

2013-02-06, 11:44 AM

Draconomicon, pg12. Section regarding Wyrmlings.

Hm...I'd have said that's not quite the same as genetic memory (which I think of as involving actual memories, not just "practical knowledge"), but perhaps I'm splitting hairs scales.

The only examples I can think of for this are true dragons. Since I already covered them I'll ask if you or anyone else knows of any other such creatures?

Off the top of my head, sentient magical beasts such as the Displacer Beast might work for this category. Possibly certain aberrations as well, though those are more likely to be B, depending on the species (some are "just weird", others firmly alien and inimical to normal life).

A paladin actually simplifies things. He can do the evil scan to see if they're inherently evil creatures and consequently safe to dispose of immediately. There are extraordinarily few creatures that are inherently evil that aren't outsiders with the evil subtype that would actually qualify as auto-kill targets.

The second sentence appears to be you already knowing this, but the first does not, so I'll spell it out just to be clear to everyone reading: Detect Evil is not foolproof, it can generate false positives or the target might be temporarily Evil-ized by a spell or cursed item or something. So while DE can confirm that you're not about to waste your daily Smite, this should mostly be applied only to creatures you were certain were okay to kill anyway; it needs to be attacking you or presently threatening innocents or something, else a pre-emptive strike is overzealous at best.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-06, 11:55 AM

Hm...I'd have said that's not quite the same as genetic memory (which I think of as involving actual memories, not just "practical knowledge"), but perhaps I'm splitting hairs scales.

Off the top of my head, sentient magical beasts such as the Displacer Beast might work for this category. Possibly certain aberrations as well, though those are more likely to be B, depending on the species (some are "just weird", others firmly alien and inimical to normal life).

The second sentence appears to be you already knowing this, but the first does not, so I'll spell it out just to be clear to everyone reading: Detect Evil is not foolproof, it can generate false positives or the target might be temporarily Evil-ized by a spell or cursed item or something. So while DE can confirm that you're not about to waste your daily Smite, this should mostly be applied only to creatures you were certain were okay to kill anyway; it needs to be attacking you or presently threatening innocents or something, else a pre-emptive strike is overzealous at best.

I'm well aware of the myriad ways that exist for foiling divination, but -all- of them require a spellcaster intervene or the exceedingly rare corner cases of adult creatures of an inherent alignment rejecting their own nature.

In the case of a handful of infant creatures the possibillity that one of these foils is in place is infinitesimally small to the point of not being worth consideration.

It's as unlikely as it would be that you could succesfully convert a demon to the side of righteousness and virtue. Sure, it could happen but you're probably better off to just kill the thing and be done with it and BoED says that ignoring possibilities that slim is acceptable.

Talderas

2013-02-06, 12:08 PM

Off the top of my head, sentient magical beasts such as the Displacer Beast might work for this category. Possibly certain aberrations as well, though those are more likely to be B, depending on the species (some are "just weird", others firmly alien and inimical to normal life).

Magical beasts tend to be Always True Neutral or usually <alignment>. Displacers are usually lawful evil. Pegasus are usually chaotic good. Aboleth is an aberration that is usually lawful evil.

hamishspence

2013-02-06, 12:12 PM

In the case of a handful of infant creatures the possibillity that one of these foils is in place is infinitesimally small to the point of not being worth consideration.

Cambions (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits). 10% of Cambions are born Not Evil. Thanks to their Evil subtype, they will all detect as Evil.

A Cambion is (technically) a demon- born of a cross between a planetouched (usually a tiefling) and a fiend.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-06, 12:39 PM

Cambions (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits). 10% of Cambions are born Not Evil. Thanks to their Evil subtype, they will all detect as Evil.

A Cambion is (technically) a demon- born of a cross between a planetouched (usually a tiefling) and a fiend.

Those material plane natives?

They sound like they're right on the borderline for being considered fiends. Killing fiends is always a good act.

Are they social creatures or relatively rare? They may well be covered by my comment on the village/tribe's non-combatants still being around to care for them and, thus, safe to ignore entirely.

willpell

2013-02-07, 02:52 AM

In unrelated news, it seems a German psychologist thinks he's detected a "dark patch" on the brain of psychopaths which could be used as a diagnostic criterion for the future "evil" of any patient who has it. Life gets stranger by the day, no?

or the exceedingly rare corner cases of adult creatures of an inherent alignment rejecting their own nature.

It remains unclear exactly how rare that is.

It's as unlikely as it would be that you could succesfully convert a demon to the side of righteousness and virtue. Sure, it could happen but you're probably better off to just kill the thing and be done with it and BoED says that ignoring possibilities that slim is acceptable.

BOED is far from the best source in terms of reasonable definitions of ethics. If it and BOVD are the only support a position has, I don't consider that position stable at all. (Also I have no doubt that converting a demon to the side of Good is possible; the only thing I'm uncertain about is whether they remain a demon after the conversion. I'm of the opinion they should not, but Eucleia the Succubus Paladin apparently was made by someone who believes "succubus" is just a species and doesn't depend on alignment, leading to the extremely squicky idea of a Good character who can kiss people to death, which then rise as wights.)

ArcturusV

2013-02-07, 03:15 AM

So, random quick question brought up in another topic:

Hostage Taking? Does it have an Alignment Nature to it?

The original comment postulated that taking a hostage (Of someone who was adversarial if not an active enemy. Hindering your quest but not actually acting against you overtly), is a Chaotic Act.

Opinion was mentioned Hostage Taking has no Alignment unless a personal code the character follows says otherwise.

Opinion that it was Lawful, though since the Hostage was an Adversary but not an Enemy, it was Neutral to Evil.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-07, 03:39 AM

In unrelated news, it seems a German psychologist thinks he's detected a "dark patch" on the brain of psychopaths which could be used as a diagnostic criterion for the future "evil" of any patient who has it. Life gets stranger by the day, no?Nah, we're just continually noticing strangeness that's always been there and simply hasn't been noted before.

It remains unclear exactly how rare that is.As you're so fond of pointing out, words have meaning. Always, in the colloquial sense; the sense that it was used in regards to alignment entries, means so often as to preclude any assumption to the contrary. This is sufficient to match up with BoED's text for when its okay to forgoe the attempt to convert and attack on sight.

BOED is far from the best source in terms of reasonable definitions of ethics. If it and BOVD are the only support a position has, I don't consider that position stable at all. (Also I have no doubt that converting a demon to the side of Good is possible; the only thing I'm uncertain about is whether they remain a demon after the conversion. I'm of the opinion they should not, but Eucleia the Succubus Paladin apparently was made by someone who believes "succubus" is just a species and doesn't depend on alignment, leading to the extremely squicky idea of a Good character who can kiss people to death, which then rise as wights.)

It's a good thing they're not sources on ethics then isn't it. They're sources on objective alignment. Ethics and morality are social constructs built around various societies and, consequently, have no universal truths to them. Since ethics and morality almost invariably call to religion as a source or confirmation, I generally ignore them in these discussions.

This distinction does cause some cognitive dissonance but so does a guy hitting his enemy so hard that his ally 30ft away purges all the poison from his body and instantly recovers from its lingering effects (the crusader's strike of righteous vitality maneuver.) Sometimes you have to adjust your thinking a little to grasp RAW. Feel free to disagree with RAW (I disagree with my own example; I think that maneuver should be su, but it's ex)* but don't pretend it's not there.

*If you agree or disagree, take it to the ToB thread on the front page. We're already discussing it there.

hamishspence

2013-02-07, 07:04 AM

Those material plane natives?

They sound like they're right on the borderline for being considered fiends.

Extraplanar- native to the Abyss. Description begins with "Demon, Cambion."

So yes, they're fiends.

Talderas

2013-02-07, 07:36 AM

BOED is far from the best source in terms of reasonable definitions of ethics. If it and BOVD are the only support a position has, I don't consider that position stable at all. (Also I have no doubt that converting a demon to the side of Good is possible; the only thing I'm uncertain about is whether they remain a demon after the conversion. I'm of the opinion they should not, but Eucleia the Succubus Paladin apparently was made by someone who believes "succubus" is just a species and doesn't depend on alignment, leading to the extremely squicky idea of a Good character who can kiss people to death, which then rise as wights.)

The mechanics are quite clear. The succubus is still typed as Outsider [Evil] and Outsider [Chaotic] but has a lawful good alignment. Mechanically, that character is susceptible to all spell affects that are alignment dependent that do not require a neutral alignment. Detect Good/Lawful/Chaotic/Evil will all ping positive on here. Holy word, blasphemy, and the lawful/chaotic versions will all drop the effects on her or none of them will affect her.

The Monster Manual does define each of the lines in a stat block.

Alignment
This line gives the alignment that the creature is most likely to have. Every entry includes a qualifier that indicates how broadly that alignment applies to the species as a whole

In the glossary of the MM it goes on to explain the qualifiers which I will summarize.

Always: Individuals are born with that alignment. Hereditary predisposition or born on a plane that predetermines it. It is possible to shift alignment but such individuals are rare or unique.
Usually: Majority (50+%) have the alignment. Strong cultural influence or sourced from creation.
Often: Nature or nurture trends toward this alignment. Plurality (40-50%) have it.

Any creature that has the Lawful, Chaotic, Good, or Evil subtype should probably not deviate from that alignment. An Outsider with both the Chaotic and Evil subtypes probably shouldn't deviate to neutral on either axis, let alone good and lawful, while a creature that just has the evil subtype shouldn't move to neutral or good on the good/evil axis but could hold any law-chaos alignment without issue. However, most of those creatures have Alignment: Always <alignment> in their stat block to indicate it.

--

Extraplanar- native to the Abyss. Description begins with "Demon, Cambion."

So yes, they're fiends.

They're outsider. Only when encountered away from the abyss are they extraplanar.

hamishspence

2013-02-07, 07:50 AM

Talderas

2013-02-07, 08:11 AM

Inclusion of the Extraplanar subtype in a monster template tells you it's not susceptible to certain effects when on the Material plane (or off it's home plane.

Not every Outsider has the Extraplanar subtype though. Some don't have it, and don't have the Native subtype either- like the astral stalker in MM3.

Arguably, an Uvuudam, despite being an Outsider with the Evil subtype, is not a Fiend since it's native to the Far Realm

Extraplanar & Native to a Lower plane & Outsider & Evil Subtype is what I would consider the minimum to be called "Fiend".

Although- I suppose it could be argued that all creatures native to a non-Material plane should have Extraplanar in their stats based on the assumption that they're being encountered on the Material.

Extraplanar is a subtype that a creature gains and loses as it moves about the planes. When it is on a transitive plane (Shadow/Etheral/Astral) or its home plane it does not have the subtype but if it's on any plane but those four defined it gains the type. Since it is a mutable subtype rather than a permanent subtype it means that a fiend is no longer a fiend when you encounter it on a lower plane. You can't use extraplanar in your definition.

willpell

2013-02-07, 09:24 AM

Came up with another manifestation of my definition of LvC, consistent with but hopefully useful in addition to my previous postulates.

"Law is preoccupied with, what was, what will be, and what is, in that order. Chaos is preoccupied with what is, what might be, and what might have once been, in that order. Neutrality cares roughly equally for what was, what is, and what might be, with minimal certainty that it will, and minimal uncertainty about what was."

Hostage Taking? Does it have an Alignment Nature to it?

I would say that, like killing, it can't be assigned an alignment in the abstract; it would depend on a lot of details regarding who and why, how it was enforced and for how long, to what goal and with what subsequent action in the case of each outcome. Between the number of permutations and the fact that it's something that happens IRL with fairly great frequency, I don't think I'm up to getting into it anytime soon. Maybe when this thread is up to 30 pages you can ask again.

Nah, we're just continually noticing strangeness that's always been there and simply hasn't been noted before.

I would say that's debatable for Quantum Mechanics and/or Zen Philosophy reasons, but it's probably not worth arguing over anyway, making little practical difference in any event as it does.

As you're so fond of pointing out, words have meaning.

Though I also believe that meaning is not set in stone and evolves at variable rates under different circumstances.

It's a good thing they're not sources on ethics then isn't it. They're sources on objective alignment.

They're not very well respected even for that purpose.

Ethics and morality are social constructs built around various societies and, consequently, have no universal truths to them. Since ethics and morality almost invariably call to religion as a source or confirmation, I generally ignore them in these discussions.

I'm fairly certain that this is "almost invariably" in the Monster Manual sense of "often/usually/always", as I've seen no shortage of sources in which athiests have postulated various moral and ethical systems without mentioning religion once. We could each "citation needed" the other on this one, but there are probably more productive uses for our time and energy.

Sometimes you have to adjust your thinking a little to grasp RAW. Feel free to disagree with RAW (I disagree with my own example; I think that maneuver should be su, but it's ex)* but don't pretend it's not there.

I don't consider it not there; I consider it so incomplete that it cannot and should not be regarded as a binding final arbiter, only a common reference point from which to *begin* comprehending what the rules obviously are. If your calculator spits out a 2+2=5, you shouldn't assume that there is a flaw in the laws of mathematics; if the RAW spits out a nonsensical result like drown-healing, it's equally appropriate to assume there's a glitch, and either fix it, or ignore it and move on, hoping it was a relatively isolated incident and that the "calculator" still works often enough to be worth using.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-07, 10:00 PM

Extraplanar- native to the Abyss. Description begins with "Demon, Cambion."

So yes, they're fiends.

Then non-evil isn't good enough. Unless they're good killing them is a good act. Even if they are good killing them is still a good act, there's just a better than even chance that it's also an evil act.

Not that it matters much, the only way the scenario above is even probable is if the players are travelling through the Abyss. If they encounter this scenario with cambion babies on the material, allowing them to continue to exist on the material can cause the effects of a lingering evil per BoVD making their destruction necessary because of the guaranteed harm they will cause simply by being.

willpell

2013-02-07, 11:18 PM

Even if they are good killing them is still a good act, there's just a better than even chance that it's also an evil act.

Uh, no. An act can't possibly be both good and evil at the same time. It might be neither, if the two cancel each other out, but evil is by its nature corruptive; in general, X amount of evil likely negates 2X or even 3X amounts of good, so anything resembling equal quantities of each ends up Evil. It's the old "rotten apple" chestnut.

ArcturusV

2013-02-07, 11:21 PM

Unless you consider the True Neutral "Cosmic Balance" type. As it's been defined before mixing Good and Evil Acts at the same time sounds like something they'd do.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 01:26 AM

Uh, no. An act can't possibly be both good and evil at the same time. It might be neither, if the two cancel each other out, but evil is by its nature corruptive; in general, X amount of evil likely negates 2X or even 3X amounts of good, so anything resembling equal quantities of each ends up Evil. It's the old "rotten apple" chestnut.

Source?

I've got a lovely counter example: +1 holy unholy longsword; a weapon that is imbued with equal amounts of the cosmic forces of good and evil, yet still exists. If the cosmic forces can be channeled into the same item, then why can't they be invoked by the same act?

ArcturusV

2013-02-08, 02:33 AM

So for full effectiveness it'd have to be used against something like a Half Deva-Half Slaad or something?

...

Which is almost so crazy I kinda want to see a Half Deva-Half Slaad now.

willpell

2013-02-08, 02:50 AM

Unless you consider the True Neutral "Cosmic Balance" type. As it's been defined before mixing Good and Evil Acts at the same time sounds like something they'd do.

Perhaps if they're Neutral Stupid...I generally try to discourage alignments on the wrong end of the Stupid/Awesome axis.

Source?

Everything. Common sense, mythic resonance, folklore, reason in general. The stuff RAW-arguers so often overlook when attempting to justify why they can get away with things that obviously shouldn't work.

I've got a lovely counter example: +1 holy unholy longsword; a weapon that is imbued with equal amounts of the cosmic forces of good and evil, yet still exists. If the cosmic forces can be channeled into the same item, then why can't they be invoked by the same act?

The rules may not prohibit such an item from existing explicitly, but have you ever seen a published example of one? The writers may not have bothered to rule it out, figuring it wouldn't occur to anyone to make such a thing. Wouldn't it confer a negative level on ANYONE who holds it, and two if they're neutral? Seems like it disincentivizes itself efficiently enough.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 04:06 AM

Everything. Common sense, mythic resonance, folklore, reason in general. The stuff RAW-arguers so often overlook when attempting to justify why they can get away with things that obviously shouldn't work.Ignoring common sense is usually pretty safe. It's far less common than the name would suggest. It also frequently disagrees with itself.

Mythic resonance doesn't have a problem with it. Various modern mythos are veritably filled with anti-heroes and sympathetic villians. If good and evil can, indeed -do-, exist in every human alive then what possible reason could there be for an action taken by such a being to be relegated to only one or the other, never both?

Reason doesn't have a problem with it either; see my example of murdering a murderer. There may be a net-value for its morality, but that's a result of being different portions of good and evil and having some left-over, not a result of it only being a little of one.

The rules may not prohibit such an item from existing explicitly, but have you ever seen a published example of one? The writers may not have bothered to rule it out, figuring it wouldn't occur to anyone to make such a thing. Wouldn't it confer a negative level on ANYONE who holds it, and two if they're neutral? Seems like it disincentivizes itself efficiently enough.

Read the description of those abilities again. Such a weapon would only impose 1 negative level on a -non-neutral- wielder. To get 2 you'd need to be one of those rare outsiders that's good and has the evil subtype or vice versa. Add anarchic and axiomatic and you've got a lovely weapon for a character that believes outsiders need to stay outside and leave the material plane to mortals' governance.

willpell

2013-02-08, 04:57 AM

It also frequently disagrees with itself.

This doesn't prove it to be wrong. It proves that life is complex and that simple answers seldom cut the mustard. Which is exactly why you should trust your gut in most matters.

Mythic resonance doesn't have a problem with it. Various modern mythos are veritably filled with anti-heroes and sympathetic villians.

And I have no problem with that - but they're usually one with shades of the other, and it doesn't suggest that they should have equal power over both. More likely the opposite; because they stand on both sides of the fence, it never shelters them from either set of enemies.

If good and evil can, indeed -do-, exist in every human alive then what possible reason could there be for an action taken by such a being to be relegated to only one or the other, never both?

Magnetic polarity. An ion cannot be both positive and negative; it becomes neutral (and thus not an ion, if I understand the term right) instead.

Read the description of those abilities again. Such a weapon would only impose 1 negative level on a -non-neutral- wielder.

Alright, I wasn't sure on that part and I stand corrected. So I guess if you're a "warrior of balance", it sort of makes sense. That still doesn't prove that the two energies can really coexist though. I would figure they're on different edges of the blade, or they blink back and forth, or something. And anyway, the energies are different from the morals which generate them, which are mostly what I'm talking about.

Add anarchic and axiomatic and you've got a lovely weapon for a character that believes outsiders need to stay outside and leave the material plane to mortals' governance.

Heh, okay I could get behind that. Although it's a +1 sword that costs like a
+5 sword and is IIRC +3 against all such outsiders, so not that great.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 05:02 AM

Concordant Killers (MM IV) wield swords that count as holy, unholy, anarchic and axiomatic, for them- no-one else can use them.

Then non-evil isn't good enough. Unless they're good killing them is a good act. Even if they are good killing them is still a good act, there's just a better than even chance that it's also an evil act.

Not that it matters much, the only way the scenario above is even probable is if the players are travelling through the Abyss.

Given that the planetouched is always the mother- cambions will rarely be encountered on the Abyss (despite being native to it) unless their fiendish fathers have claimed them, and taken them there, or they have made their own way there as adults.

A case can be made that "just cause" overrides any amount of "necessary due to them involuntarily spreading evil energy" - you need them to be actually doing something (or have done something) very wrong to have the justification to go after them.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 05:16 AM

This doesn't prove it to be wrong. It proves that life is complex and that simple answers seldom cut the mustard. Which is exactly why you should trust your gut in most matters. If it disagrees with itself then on or the other of its positions have to be wrong. If they're both right then the thing they disagree on exists in opposing states simultaneously. Either way works toward my point.

And I have no problem with that - but they're usually one with shades of the other, and it doesn't suggest that they should have equal power over both. More likely the opposite; because they stand on both sides of the fence, it never shelters them from either set of enemies.That leads to a nasty slippery slope of "once you've chosen a side, that's the side you're on; no take-backs," and a situation in which good can do no evil and evil can do no good. Exactly the kind of thing that gets the alignment system constantly trashed by detractors that have been forced into that corner. I'll have to respectfully disagree since that is neither a desireable end or the intent of the designers as they have explicitly said in all sources on the matter.

Magnetic polarity. An ion cannot be both positive and negative; it becomes neutral (and thus not an ion, if I understand the term right) instead. And yet an ion does have both positively and negatively charged components. It's the imbalance between them that makes the atom itself imbalanced one way or the other. This creates an attraction to other, oppositely charged ions and creates an ionic bond to form molecules. I don't think that an attraction between good and evil is the goal you were aiming for in this comparison, so perhaps you'd like to try and pick another?

Alright, I wasn't sure on that part and I stand corrected. So I guess if you're a "warrior of balance", it sort of makes sense. That still doesn't prove that the two energies can really coexist though. I would figure they're on different edges of the blade, or they blink back and forth, or something. And anyway, the energies are different from the morals which generate them, which are mostly what I'm talking about.First, you create a mechanical issue with those assumptions. The blade would get its full effect against the creatures I mentioned; not one or the other at your choice, or one or the other on random chance, but both.

Second; you've made the erroneous assumption that alignment does not exist independent of morals when this is in direct contradiction with the lore and the subjective nature of morals. The cannon lore has the cosmic forces of aligment existing before any sentient or sapient mind to contemplate morality and doesn't give a fig about the morals of any one culture. The only way for the crunch and the fluff to meet without conflict is for the cosmic forces of alignment to be drawn to or released by certain actions but to exist independently of those actions in some kind of potential state or an elsewhere waiting to be called upon.

Heh, okay I could get behind that. Although it's a +1 sword that costs like a
+5 sword and is IIRC +3 against all such outsiders, so not that great.

I never said it was an optimal weapon, but at least half of it would be useable against most of its intended foes. +1 enhancement and 4d6 extra damage is something and being able to bypass all alignment based DR doesn't hurt either.

The higher enhancement you're thinking of is the bane quality and might increase the enhancement to 5 in addition to the 4d6 extra damage against the outsiders with the appropriate subtypes.

Just double checked. That would be a terrible weapon. +5 would be the bane qualities again. The alignment qualities are +2 each making it a +9 total weapon.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 06:12 AM

And yet an ion does have both positively and negatively charged components. It's the imbalance between them that makes the atom itself imbalanced one way or the other.

Excepting hydrogen- ionised atomic (as opposed to molecular) hydrogen gas has each "atom" be a proton with no negative charge at all.

Still, the point is valid in general.

Unless they're good killing them is a good act. Even if they are good killing them is still a good act, there's just a better than even chance that it's also an evil act.
Concerning the cambion- here's a possibly cliched scenario:

An ordinary tiefling citizen (call her Rosemary :smallamused:) has been living a relatively blameless life.

A demon, disguised as her husband, conceives a child with her, on behalf of its master, and slips away.

When she has the child, she notices it's a bit different- more fiendish-looking than she is- and figures it out.

Nevertheless, she resolves to bring it up, and keep the child out of reach of his fiendish father. Possibly moving around to prevent the "long term presence of a fiend" tainting of the surrounding area.

Some clerics or paladins, sensing the child's evil aura, decide they're obligated to kill the child.

Would this qualify as an evil act as well as a "Good by BoVD standards" one?

I'd say it would.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 07:05 AM

Excepting hydrogen- ionised atomic (as opposed to molecular) hydrogen gas has each "atom" be a proton with no negative charge at all.

Still, the point is valid in general.

Concerning the cambion- here's a possibly cliched scenario:

An ordinary tiefling citizen (call her Rosemary :smallamused:) has been living a relatively blameless life.

A demon, disguised as her husband, conceives a child with her, on behalf of its master, and slips away.

When she has the child, she notices it's a bit different- more fiendish-looking than she is- and figures it out.

Nevertheless, she resolves to bring it up, and keep the child out of reach of his fiendish father. Possibly moving around to prevent the "long term presence of a fiend" tainting of the surrounding area.

Some clerics or paladins, sensing the child's evil aura, decide they're obligated to kill the child.

Would this qualify as an evil act as well as a "Good by BoVD standards" one?

I'd say it would.

I'd be comfortable labeling that a simultaneously good and evil act. Though it's arguable that a banisment or dismissal would remove the child to the abyss where it would either be adopted or eaten by some fiend or other both satisfying the good necessity of removing it from the material while avoiding the evil of slaying an innocent child. It's -almost- certain death but not quite. Enough to absolve the caster IMO.

Of course, that begs the question of whether being born there is sufficient to call a creature native to that plane or not. If two erinyes have a baby on the material does that baby have the extraplanar subtype on the material, baator, both or neither?

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 07:14 AM

It's -almost- certain death but not quite. Enough to absolve the caster IMO.

Not IMO. :smallwink: If nothing else, it adds an extra arrow to the quiver of the Forces of Evil- they produce cambions because they have a bit more self-control than your average demon, and make good lieutenants.

Note that any planetouched female- tiefling, aasimar, genasi, chaond, etc can produce a cambion when crossed with a fiend.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 07:20 AM

Not IMO. :smallwink: If nothing else, it adds an extra arrow to the quiver of the Forces of Evil- they produce cambions because they have a bit more self-control than your average demon, and make good lieutenants.

Note that any planetouched female- tiefling, aasimar, genasi, chaond, etc can produce a cambion when crossed with a fiend.

If it weren't for these sorts of corner cases the alignment system would work almost flawlessly.

Just as well though. If it worked too much better we couldn't have these rousing debates.

Does the text for these creatures really say -any- planetouched? It strikes me as odd that a cambion could result from the union of a fiend and an aasimar.

willpell

2013-02-08, 07:39 AM

If it disagrees with itself then on or the other of its positions have to be wrong.

Nope, they're just separate positions for situations that may look similar on the surface. There is no actual disagreement, just a perception of one.

If they're both right then the thing they disagree on exists in opposing states simultaneously.

Like your sword? :smalltongue:

That leads to a nasty slippery slope of "once you've chosen a side, that's the side you're on; no take-backs," and a situation in which good can do no evil and evil can do no good.

Sort of, but not as you're implying here. It's not "nothing Good does can ever count as Evil"; it's "those who are Good *must not* ever do Evil", which is as it should be. Doesn't entirely work in reverse due to the aforementioned rotten apple effect; even if an Evil being does seemingly good deeds, they may be tainted by association with him.

And yet an ion does have both positively and negatively charged components. It's the imbalance between them that makes the atom itself imbalanced one way or the other.

The net result of which is a single polarity. You might have three holy swords and four unholy swords in your unholy arsenal.

I don't think that an attraction between good and evil is the goal you were aiming for in this comparison

Well not here no, but I do tend to find it poetically fitting on a regular basis. The best-known example is Garth Ennis's "Preacher"; I've done this sort of thing in my campaign more than once.

First, you create a mechanical issue with those assumptions. The blade would get its full effect against the creatures I mentioned; not one or the other at your choice, or one or the other on random chance, but both.

Like a chainsaw perhaps; the pulsating energies rip the schizophrenic being apart as the sword cuts through it.

Second; you've made the erroneous assumption that alignment does not exist independent of morals when this is in direct contradiction with the lore and the subjective nature of morals.

Yes I'm aware that the canon says that you should pretend Good vs. Evil is about as noble and meaningful as Red vs. Blue; I don't care. The subjective nature of morals means that the objective alignments generated from those morals must have a little wiggle room (more in the direction of Evil than Good because Evil has fewer principles and absolutes). I feel quite justified in saying that those who allow Angels to murder babies as long as they're Evil babies are, by and large, Doing It Wrong (some highly extenuating circumstances might apply, though even that it icky to even think about). This goes no matter whether the person in question is just one gamer, or an official Wotco staff member who's penning a book about how using poison is automatically an evil act but executing infants isn't necessarily.

The only way for the crunch and the fluff to meet without conflict is for the cosmic forces of alignment to be drawn to or released by certain actions but to exist independently of those actions in some kind of potential state or an elsewhere waiting to be called upon.

...maybe? I don't quite follow. The way I figure it, there might have been Good and Evil energies floating around in the void before creation, but they didn't really mean anything or have any distinctions between them until there were beings for them to act upon. When two monkeys or whatever had one banana, Good flowed down from the void into the minds of the monkeys and said "split the banana so you can each be somewhat happy", Evil flowed down from the void and told each monkey "bash in the other monkey's head so he doesn't keep you from your banana", and maybe Neutral flowed down from the void and said "take the banana and run faster than the other monkey and hope he gets bored chasing you". Regardless, the monkeys then chose whether or not to follow the forces' whisperings, and if they chose the path of Good, they empowered Good, while if one chose the path of Evil and killed the other, Evil was empowered. The empowered force then went out looking for more monkeys, as did the non-empowered force with a little more desperation, and this process has continued ever since.

Acts which are Good always produce more Good, and beings who perform Evil acts quickly become Evil aligned. Their objective nature does NOT enable you to declare allegiance to Good and receive a Platinum Express card, which gives you a 50-Kilonazi credit account to charge future Evil deeds against and then pay them back with Good deeds so you remain Good as long as your balance stays under the limit.

Nevertheless, she resolves to bring it up, and keep the child out of reach of his fiendish father. Possibly moving around to prevent the "long term presence of a fiend" tainting of the surrounding area.

Some clerics or paladins, sensing the child's evil aura, decide they're obligated to kill the child.

Would this qualify as an evil act as well as a "Good by BoVD standards" one?

I'd say it would.

At best a Neutral act, never a Good one, and the clerics' deity would be unamused in the extreme if he's Good that they couldn't have waited and checked with him. A Paladin would pretty much insta-Fall for this IMC, unless there were very reliable divinations absolutely proving that the child *would* do evil in the future, and this could not be prevented any way other than by killing the child, and the character couldn't come up with a way of letting the child live while keeping it under constant surveillance to kill it just before it attempts any atrocities, rather than now when it's nowhere near having done anything even remotely evil yet.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 08:01 AM

At best a Neutral act, never a Good one, and the clerics' deity would be unamused in the extreme if he's Good that they couldn't have waited and checked with him.

The problem is the BoVD statement that "Killing a fiend is always a good act. Allowing one to exist is clearly evil"

I tend to place mercy, respect for life, etc above this on the priority order- yes, technically allowing a fiend to exist is evil- but it's a level of evil on the order of telling a very minor lie for one's own benefit.

Does the text for these creatures really say -any- planetouched? It strikes me as odd that a cambion could result from the union of a fiend and an aasimar.

It says "a plane touched, usually a tiefling"

Usually, not always- and with no bar as to which planetouched.

Yes, it's odd- but I figure that "native outsiders" of most kinds are more easily changed by the touch of "Evil energy" than other creatures- thus their producing demon offspring, when crossed with demons.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 08:35 AM

Nope, they're just separate positions for situations that may look similar on the surface. There is no actual disagreement, just a perception of one. You're moving the goalpost on me. When common sense tells two people the opposite thing about the same topic (it has and will continue to happen) one of them must be wrong unless the topic is somehow meeting both their expectations in spite of those expectations being opposed.

Like your sword? :smalltongue: Precisely.

Sort of, but not as you're implying here. It's not "nothing Good does can ever count as Evil"; it's "those who are Good *must not* ever do Evil", which is as it should be. Doesn't entirely work in reverse due to the aforementioned rotten apple effect; even if an Evil being does seemingly good deeds, they may be tainted by association with him. Thats still the same argument. The only distinction between must not and can not is that the straps on the straigh-jacket aren't buckled as tight. This is the argument that leads to people saying "your character wouldn't do that because it's against his alignment" at the gaming table. These people should be tarred, feathered, strapped into a chair and struck repeatedly with mining equipment. (forgive the hyperbole but one person telling another how to play his character pisses me off to no end.)

The net result of which is a single polarity. You might have three holy swords and four unholy swords in your unholy arsenal.This isn't an argument that actually opposes what I said. Clearly the arsenal is evil overall, but that doesn't mean its not also partly good.

Well not here no, but I do tend to find it poetically fitting on a regular basis. The best-known example is Garth Ennis's "Preacher"; I've done this sort of thing in my campaign more than once.Not familiar with "preacher" so no comment.

Like a chainsaw perhaps; the pulsating energies rip the schizophrenic being apart as the sword cuts through it. That's certainly an entertaining visual image. It doesn't change the fact that the whole weapon is simultaneously charged with both good and evil energy with no extra strain on the material or the magic (no decrease in the effectiveness of either effect, no change to the cost to enhance)

Yes I'm aware that the canon says that you should pretend Good vs. Evil is about as noble and meaningful as Red vs. Blue; I don't care. The subjective nature of morals means that the objective alignments generated from those morals must have a little wiggle room (more in the direction of Evil than Good because Evil has fewer principles and absolutes). I feel quite justified in saying that those who allow Angels to murder babies as long as they're Evil babies are, by and large, Doing It Wrong (some highly extenuating circumstances might apply, though even that it icky to even think about). This goes no matter whether the person in question is just one gamer, or an official Wotco staff member who's penning a book about how using poison is automatically an evil act but executing infants isn't necessarily.If a baby is literally made of evil, an erinyes for example, and you slay it you're reducing evil in the multiverse and almost certainly preventing it from becoming a force for evil when it grows up regardless of how its raised. If you insist that this can only be a good or an evil act then in the ultimate cosmic balance it must be good. It removes not only the evil of the creature in the present but also the potential and highly probable evil of the creature in the future. The alternative is to wait until it does something(s) evil enough to warrant killing when it's both older and harder to kill utlimately netting less evil removed from the multiverse than if you'd simply killed it when you first had the chance.

Btw, do you realize you're painting a picture where evil is noteably stronger than good and will ultimately win?

...maybe? I don't quite follow. The way I figure it, there might have been Good and Evil energies floating around in the void before creation, but they didn't really mean anything or have any distinctions between them until there were beings for them to act upon. When two monkeys or whatever had one banana, Good flowed down from the void into the minds of the monkeys and said "split the banana so you can each be somewhat happy", Evil flowed down from the void and told each monkey "bash in the other monkey's head so he doesn't keep you from your banana", and maybe Neutral flowed down from the void and said "take the banana and run faster than the other monkey and hope he gets bored chasing you". Regardless, the monkeys then chose whether or not to follow the forces' whisperings, and if they chose the path of Good, they empowered Good, while if one chose the path of Evil and killed the other, Evil was empowered. The empowered force then went out looking for more monkeys, as did the non-empowered force with a little more desperation, and this process has continued ever since. If they had no meaning, why did they say those specific things? Moreover, if they were the same thing before that instant, why are they now so different as to be unable to exist in the same place simultaneously? Lesser importance: did you realize that monkeys, being of animal intelligence, are incapable of doing or being good or evil.

Acts which are Good always produce more Good, and beings who perform Evil acts quickly become Evil aligned. Their objective nature does NOT enable you to declare allegiance to Good and receive a Platinum Express card, which gives you a 50-Kilonazi credit account to charge future Evil deeds against and then pay them back with Good deeds so you remain Good as long as your balance stays under the limit. That's the thing though. The vast majority of creatures -don't- decide what their aligment will be. They behave according to their instincts and/or how they were raised and their alignment is a result of the cosmic forces of good, evil, law and chaos being drawn to or released by certain of those behaviors. If a given act fits the criteria for more than one, why shouldn't it draw or release the energies of both alignments even if they're opposed?

At best a Neutral act, never a Good one, and the clerics' deity would be unamused in the extreme if he's Good that they couldn't have waited and checked with him. A Paladin would pretty much insta-Fall for this IMC, unless there were very reliable divinations absolutely proving that the child *would* do evil in the future, and this could not be prevented any way other than by killing the child, and the character couldn't come up with a way of letting the child live while keeping it under constant surveillance to kill it just before it attempts any atrocities, rather than now when it's nowhere near having done anything even remotely evil yet.
Divinations don't reach that far. The furthest reaching divination is contact other plane when in contact with a greater deity of the appropriate portfolio at no further than 20 weeks into the future. Unless the evil baby in question grows faster than a puppy in both mind and body, tha's simply not far enough to be useable. Hamish got the rest of this one.

The problem is the BoVD statement that "Killing a fiend is always a good act. Allowing one to exist is clearly evil"

I tend to place mercy, respect for life, etc above this on the priority order- yes, technically allowing a fiend to exist is evil- but it's a level of evil on the order of telling a very minor lie for one's own benefit.

It says "a plane touched, usually a tiefling"

Usually, not always- and with no bar as to which planetouched.

Yes, it's odd- but I figure that "native outsiders" of most kinds are more easily changed by the touch of "Evil energy" than other creatures- thus their producing demon offspring, when crossed with demons.

I might make an exception for aasimar if I get that book, but okay then.

I'm suprised at you, Hamish. I'd thought you knew better than to think that lying is inherently evil by RAW. BoVD page 7, man. "Lying is not necessarily an evil act, though it is a tool that can be easily used for evil ends."

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 08:39 AM

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 08:55 AM

It's based on BoED's

"Is it acceptable to tell a lie to avert a world-shattering catastrophe? ... The answer is no, an evil act is an evil act."

I figured it might be fairer to invoke BoVD's "not necessarily evil" and restrict "evil lies" to ones with only selfish ends.

I go by the primary source rule. BoVD is the primary source for all things evil and it says that lying isn't evil in and of itself.

I only call a lie evil if it causes harm; e.g. telling the king his wife has been faithful even though your CN bard has been banging her for a week straight. Either the lie leaves her with guilt or she tells him the truth and your lie causes him wrath. In either case her betrayal was an evil act (the breach of trust, the sex is incidental and sex is not, itself, morally weighted by RAW) otherwise lying is only a chaotic act by default. Actually, this is probably a better example of a chaotic lie than an evil one.

Better example: you knife a guy in an alley and the guards arrive at the same time as some poor schlub from the bar on one side of the alley. The guards take you both in and they're going to hang the killer no matter what the circumstances were. If you tell them the schlub did it, that's an evil act.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 09:53 AM

Regardless- the basic point was that one may end up caught between doing nothing and committing an evil act.

And "doing nothing" might include "allowing a fiend to live"

Result- one is caught between two evils.

I would generally be very generous when a person chooses correctly between minor evil of omission and major evil of commission.

"So, you allowed a fiend to live- but you avoided committing murder, you showed the virtues of mercy and respect for life- say one Hail Cuthbert and go in peace, your sins are forgiven."

willpell

2013-02-08, 10:01 AM

The problem is the BoVD statement that "Killing a fiend is always a good act. Allowing one to exist is clearly evil"

Well...that's just dumb. By that logic, all Demogorgon or Asmodeus would have to do is figure out a way to transform every being in the universe into a fiend for one second (a tall order certainly, but not that far beyond the pale for massive magic, since there are spells that change one being into a fiend so you'd just have to have a mass version and infinite range); they would all commit the evil act of failing to kill each other, so for one second all beings in the universe would both be evil and have done evil, and Good would probably be finished forever. So the lesson here is pretty much just "BOVD doesn't have a very good definition of evil", which I for one knew anyway.

When common sense tells two people the opposite thing about the same topic (it has and will continue to happen) one of them must be wrong unless the topic is somehow meeting both their expectations in spite of those expectations being opposed.

By definition it isn't "common sense" unless it's "in common" among all people who are being sensible. If there's something to argue about (for a reason beyond the arguer being obstinate or something), then the answer may not be as common-sensical as it appears, or one party may have a better grasp on the situation than the other, and the other would come to agree with the first if possessing the same knowledge and ability to analyze it. In my world there are no wrong answers, only misleading conclusions based on insufficient data; with enough comprehension, a single truth always becomes clear. Though that may require quite a lot of comprehension indeed, possibly mroe than can be acquired under the circumstances.

The only distinction between must not and can not is that the straps on the straigh-jacket aren't buckled as tight.

No, "can not" is saying that any action a Good person takes is Nonevil by definition. My "must not" is intended to convey that any Evil action taken makes a person Nongood (though that's a significant exagerration). It's not that the Evil act is impossible, it's that it disqualifies you from claiming accurately to be Good, because if you were really Good you would never have chosen to do the Evil (again, exagerrating; minor sins and extenuating circumstances can provide a little wiggle room).

This is the argument that leads to people saying "your character wouldn't do that because it's against his alignment" at the gaming table. These people should be tarred, feathered, strapped into a chair and struck repeatedly with mining equipment. (forgive the hyperbole but one person telling another how to play his character pisses me off to no end.)

Welp, guess you'd better break out the ol' pickaxe and shovel, cause I'm perfectly willing to use that phrase if the circumstances fit. Granted it's suboptimal; a better way to express the same general idea is "That action is incompatible with your alignment, so if you do it I'll have to change your alignment", allowing the player to have the choice but imposing the consequence. However in some situations, I'd consider "that's not allowed" to be an acceptible shortcut. You can prohibit a character from flying because he doesn't have wings, or from picking a lock because he has nothing to use as a lockpick. Tools and capabilities can be mental or even spiritual as well as physical, so if someone's a paladin, they might be psychologically incapable of an action which would cause them to Fall or require atonement (as a veeeery loose guide, I might tie this to the character's Wisdom; the more Wise you are, the less able you are to accept an un-Wise course of action as being an option for yourself).

Not familiar with "preacher" so no comment.

The title character is empowered by his possession of a spirit created when an angel and a demoness mated. (It's funny how Good always seems to wear the pants in this situation; I forget where else I've seen such pairings but I don't remember any of them involving a female angel seduced by a handsome devil, the reasons for which I consider fairly obvious given our culture's attitudes, but I'd better refrain from going into that.)

That's certainly an entertaining visual image. It doesn't change the fact that the whole weapon is simultaneously charged with both good and evil energy with no extra strain on the material or the magic (no decrease in the effectiveness of either effect, no change to the cost to enhance)

Note to self: if I do allow the creation of such an item, I should reduce the enhancement cost for reasons of redundancy.

If a baby is literally made of evil, an erinyes for example, and you slay it you're reducing evil in the multiverse

Nope, however much evil it contains as a baby, you yourself assume at least an equivalent measure of evilness by killing it, and so there is no net profit to the world, you've simply stained your own soul instead of leaving the baby to be responsible for its own future decisions. You've become the villain it might have grown up to be.

and almost certainly preventing it from becoming a force for evil when it grows up regardless of how its raised.

How would it have become a force for evil if it grew up to perform only Good deeds? If you can be evil while doing only good works, then good and evil don't mean anything, and I won't accept that. Therefore, while the [Evil] subtype might let Smite Evil hit you, it doesn't actually mean you ARE Evil, nor does it doom every act you perform to be tainted by your [Evil]ness. If the books say it does then the books are wrong; this may be only my opinion but I state it as truth.

The alternative is to wait until it does something(s) evil enough to warrant killing when it's both older and harder to kill utlimately netting less evil removed from the multiverse than if you'd simply killed it when you first had the chance.

If you kill it upon its attempting its first evil act (having failed to stop it any other way, or not being capable of trying under the circumstances), then you have done Good, and *that* reduces the universal Evil balance.

Btw, do you realize you're painting a picture where evil is noteably stronger than good and will ultimately win?

I've often felt that the RAW and most of the settings I'm familiar with support this assumption, but I fail to see how it's suggested by what I'm saying. If anything I'd say Good is always winning unless it cheats, whereupon it forfeits its ability to win and grants Evil the victory by default. Thusly Evil's victory condition is to trick Good into thinking it will lose. Good never actually "wins", it merely stands fast against Evil forever, ensuring that life can continue, while Evil's ultimate objective is to snuff it out (a universe of pure Evil would be unquestionably unviable; the Lower Planes only work because they have higher ones to invade and recruit from).

If they had no meaning, why did they say those specific things?

Because that was their nature. If Good didn't say "Do the right thing", it wouldn't be Good. Circular logic perhaps, but that's the best kind for a situation like this.

Moreover, if they were the same thing before that instant, why are they now so different as to be unable to exist in the same place simultaneously?

They've polarized themselves as absolute opposites. Light and dark are the same if no being exists which can see or fail to see; the moment a choice between Good and Evil was possible, they were distinct. Before that, while they may have technically existed as different things, there was no way to distinguish one from the other, for there was nothing to do the distinguishing.

Lesser importance: did you realize that monkeys, being of animal intelligence, are incapable of doing or being good or evil.

I'm speaking of the moment when they were first sentient and able to choose. If you must nitpick, replace "monkeys" with "protohominids".

That's the thing though. The vast majority of creatures -don't- decide what their aligment will be. They behave according to their instincts and/or how they were raised and their alignment is a result of the cosmic forces of good, evil, law and chaos being drawn to or released by certain of those behaviors.

I'm...not actually sure whether we disagree on this part or not. If a person chooses to be, for example, charitable, then he is behaving in a Good way according to his Good alignment. If he then murders a baby, whether it's an Evil baby or not, he is instead channeling Evil through his actions and thereby becoming Evil (at least fractionally). No amount of Good that he can possibly saturate himself with will inure him against the ethical consequences of an action incompatible with his ethics. If he does Evil, he will ding himself with Evilness. (I might then rule that his future actions are tainted in small ways as a result of that choice, but this is probably more work than I want to go to, and would also depend on roleplaying and whether the player is up for this sort of thing.)

Divinations don't reach that far.

Not reliably, perhaps. The DM can always introduce special methods of divination that are not available to be cast out of just any spell slot, but can produce far more impressive result than any (non-epic at least) ordinary spell.

I go by the primary source rule. BoVD is the primary source for all things evil and it says that lying isn't evil in and of itself.

While I don't agree with your reasoning for aforementioned reasons, I am in agreement here; deception is just a tool like any other, its alignment will depend on the circumstances. Though it's possible the writer here defined "lying" more stringently than just any old falsehood, as I've seen evidence of such a distinction being used in some places. If you define a "lie" as "a malicious statement of untruth", then it would pretty much always be evil. Perhaps "little white lies" don't count as "lies" under the BOVD definition.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 10:12 AM

So the lesson here is pretty much just "BOVD doesn't have a very good definition of evil", which I for one knew anyway.

It also makes life really hard for Paladins of Tyranny and Paladins of Slaughter who want to participate in the Blood War, since they Fall every time they kill a fiend.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 11:20 AM

Well...that's just dumb. By that logic, all Demogorgon or Asmodeus would have to do is figure out a way to transform every being in the universe into a fiend for one second (a tall order certainly, but not that far beyond the pale for massive magic, since there are spells that change one being into a fiend so you'd just have to have a mass version and infinite range); they would all commit the evil act of failing to kill each other, so for one second all beings in the universe would both be evil and have done evil, and Good would probably be finished forever. So the lesson here is pretty much just "BOVD doesn't have a very good definition of evil", which I for one knew anyway.That's simply not possible. As extreme as they are, even epic magicks limits do exist. More importantly, no entity in the multiverse lacks for enough enemies to have any real chance of success with such an endeavor if it were remotely feazible.

By definition it isn't "common sense" unless it's "in common" among all people who are being sensible. If there's something to argue about (for a reason beyond the arguer being obstinate or something), then the answer may not be as common-sensical as it appears, or one party may have a better grasp on the situation than the other, and the other would come to agree with the first if possessing the same knowledge and ability to analyze it. In my world there are no wrong answers, only misleading conclusions based on insufficient data; with enough comprehension, a single truth always becomes clear. Though that may require quite a lot of comprehension indeed, possibly mroe than can be acquired under the circumstances.By that definition common sense is a myth. I'm comfortable with that.

No, "can not" is saying that any action a Good person takes is Nonevil by definition. My "must not" is intended to convey that any Evil action taken makes a person Nongood (though that's a significant exagerration). It's not that the Evil act is impossible, it's that it disqualifies you from claiming accurately to be Good, because if you were really Good you would never have chosen to do the Evil (again, exagerrating; minor sins and extenuating circumstances can provide a little wiggle room).This is what's painting your picture of evil eventually winning. Evil is simply more encroaching and inexpellable by your guidlines. Sooner or later, given the infinite nature of time, everything will be corrupted by evil unless it's simply incapable of being corrupted. You've already conceded that creatures literally made of good, celestials, are not immune to this taint. What is?

Incidentally. Look into heroes of horror's taint mechanics. It strikes much closer to what you're describing evil to be.

Welp, guess you'd better break out the ol' pickaxe and shovel, cause I'm perfectly willing to use that phrase if the circumstances fit. Granted it's suboptimal; a better way to express the same general idea is "That action is incompatible with your alignment, so if you do it I'll have to change your alignment", allowing the player to have the choice but imposing the consequence. However in some situations, I'd consider "that's not allowed" to be an acceptible shortcut. You can prohibit a character from flying because he doesn't have wings, or from picking a lock because he has nothing to use as a lockpick. Tools and capabilities can be mental or even spiritual as well as physical, so if someone's a paladin, they might be psychologically incapable of an action which would cause them to Fall or require atonement (as a veeeery loose guide, I might tie this to the character's Wisdom; the more Wise you are, the less able you are to accept an un-Wise course of action as being an option for yourself).I'll be honest. Discussing these things with you has some entertainment value, but I have exactly zero interest in ever sitting at a table where you're the DM. This isn't the straw that broke the camel's back but it's definitely another nail in the coffin.

The title character is empowered by his possession of a spirit created when an angel and a demoness mated. (It's funny how Good always seems to wear the pants in this situation; I forget where else I've seen such pairings but I don't remember any of them involving a female angel seduced by a handsome devil, the reasons for which I consider fairly obvious given our culture's attitudes, but I'd better refrain from going into that.) The only one I can think of is little nicky from the movie of the same name.

Note to self: if I do allow the creation of such an item, I should reduce the enhancement cost for reasons of redundancy.Redundancy with each other or redundancy with outsider bane? In the former you're creating a dissonance between your fluff and your crunch. It should be more difficult to entrap two opposing forces in the same item if they're anathema to each other but a cost reduction suggest that it would be easier than normal.

Nope, however much evil it contains as a baby, you yourself assume at least an equivalent measure of evilness by killing it, and so there is no net profit to the world, you've simply stained your own soul instead of leaving the baby to be responsible for its own future decisions. You've become the villain it might have grown up to be.So upon death, the creature breaks down completely and flows into the slayer? It's an interesting visual but it's also completely unsupported by the rules of the game or any fluff I've seen anywhere. Does killing an adult fiend have a similar effect?
If so, I really recomend looking at taint as an alternate to the moral axis of alignment. It really does fit your concept so very much better.

How would it have become a force for evil if it grew up to perform only Good deeds? If you can be evil while doing only good works, then good and evil don't mean anything, and I won't accept that. Therefore, while the [Evil] subtype might let Smite Evil hit you, it doesn't actually mean you ARE Evil, nor does it doom every act you perform to be tainted by your [Evil]ness. If the books say it does then the books are wrong; this may be only my opinion but I state it as truth. It is only your opinion and is, in fact, in direct opposition to the rules.
A creature with the evil subtype is literally made of the cosmic force of evil. Evil comprises its very nature and instincts. Murder, torture, betrayal, and corruption are as much a part of its instincts as the urge to reproduce is part of ours. IRL a number of cultures say that the reproductive act is categorically always wrong, yet those peoples continue to reproduce. That's a teaching with no direct opposite. Trying to raise a fiend to do good is like trying to raise a human to un-screw people. It's more than just denying instinct, it's actively doing things that everything in their heart screams is wrong. It's even worse when you consider that a human only has to avoid temptation until the biological systems break down and they can't anymore. Fiends are forever unless they're destroyed. They must contend with both denying temptation and doing everything their instincts rail against forever; something all but a handful are more than intelligent and wise enough to realize quite quickly.

If you kill it upon its attempting its first evil act (having failed to stop it any other way, or not being capable of trying under the circumstances), then you have done Good, and *that* reduces the universal Evil balance.And if you fail? Nevermind the taint of evil from its mere presence if you've remained in one locale.

I've often felt that the RAW and most of the settings I'm familiar with support this assumption, but I fail to see how it's suggested by what I'm saying. If anything I'd say Good is always winning unless it cheats, whereupon it forfeits its ability to win and grants Evil the victory by default. Thusly Evil's victory condition is to trick Good into thinking it will lose. Good never actually "wins", it merely stands fast against Evil forever, ensuring that life can continue, while Evil's ultimate objective is to snuff it out (a universe of pure Evil would be unquestionably unviable; the Lower Planes only work because they have higher ones to invade and recruit from).This simply does't work. Evil's not tricking good in your setup. It really will win eventually because once something's tainted it's tainted forever and it spreads that taint in all it does. It may not have been your intent, but you've set your world up for a fall with this setup unless X amount of good is worth ∞X amount of evil.

Because that was their nature. If Good didn't say "Do the right thing", it wouldn't be Good. Circular logic perhaps, but that's the best kind for a situation like this. Circular logic isn't the best logic for anything. It's a failure of logic. It's essentially the same as saying "I'm right because I said so and if you don't believe me you can ask me again if you'd like."

They've polarized themselves as absolute opposites. Light and dark are the same if no being exists which can see or fail to see; the moment a choice between Good and Evil was possible, they were distinct. Before that, while they may have technically existed as different things, there was no way to distinguish one from the other, for there was nothing to do the distinguishing. Here's more of that circular logic and a couple comparitive failures as well. Where dark and light meet you get shadows or grays (depends on which sense of light and dark you're talking about.) If the difference was there before it could be observed then it predates the observers. This is exactly what I was saying. Good and evil -must- be independent of morals because they existed before there were societies to create morals. Morals which don't always jive correctly with alignment.

I'm speaking of the moment when they were first sentient and able to choose. If you must nitpick, replace "monkeys" with "protohominids".As I said it's a minor, mostly irrelevant point. Going by the canon lore the first sapient minds where those of the demons and all humanoid races were created as they currently are by their racial deities. Exactly when and how humans were created is a bit murky but I'm inclined to think, and this is a combination of speculation and a deviance from the RAW cosmology, that humans were created by the blood of lord moon striking the earth when Akodo split open his belly to rescue the other children of the sun and moon, much like how kobolds were born of the blood tiamat and bahamut's first battle.

I'm...not actually sure whether we disagree on this part or not. If a person chooses to be, for example, charitable, then he is behaving in a Good way according to his Good alignment. If he then murders a baby, whether it's an Evil baby or not, he is instead channeling Evil through his actions and thereby becoming Evil (at least fractionally). No amount of Good that he can possibly saturate himself with will inure him against the ethical consequences of an action incompatible with his ethics. If he does Evil, he will ding himself with Evilness. (I might then rule that his future actions are tainted in small ways as a result of that choice, but this is probably more work than I want to go to, and would also depend on roleplaying and whether the player is up for this sort of thing.)See my previous points about how evil wins because of this.

Not reliably, perhaps. The DM can always introduce special methods of divination that are not available to be cast out of just any spell slot, but can produce far more impressive result than any (non-epic at least) ordinary spell.The spell I named calls on the only creatures able to see into the distant future to look as far as they can for an answer. There is no non-epic spell that can go further. It's questionable if it's even within the power of epic magic to do this. The only way that looking that far into the future is possible is if free will is a bad cosmic joke and the future is actually predetermined. Logic can barely stand up to the strain of a greater deity's ability to see the future without predestination.

While I don't agree with your reasoning for aforementioned reasons, I am in agreement here; deception is just a tool like any other, its alignment will depend on the circumstances. Though it's possible the writer here defined "lying" more stringently than just any old falsehood, as I've seen evidence of such a distinction being used in some places. If you define a "lie" as "a malicious statement of untruth", then it would pretty much always be evil. Perhaps "little white lies" don't count as "lies" under the BOVD definition.
I tend to favor that interpretation as well, but "little white lies" are still lies. They just fall under the umbrella of chaos rather than evil. Depending on the exact circumstances individual lies can fall on any alignment.

It also makes life really hard for Paladins of Tyranny and Paladins of Slaughter who want to participate in the Blood War, since they Fall every time they kill a fiend.

This isn't hard to reconcile. Blackgaurds and paladins of tyranny or slaughter aren't meant to take part in the blood-war. They can do that once they're dead and have been converted into fiends.

They're job is to further their respective causes on the material and ensure a fresh supply of new fiends for the blood-war. Most paladins of tyranny wouldn't be interested in the blood-war anyway being mortal emulations of the baatezu, most of whom are only interested in furthering their own ambition through whatever means necessary.

willpell

2013-02-08, 11:21 AM

It also makes life really hard for Paladins of Tyranny and Paladins of Slaughter who want to participate in the Blood War, since they Fall every time they kill a fiend.

dies laughing...

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 11:27 AM

addendum to my last post: paladins of tryanny are mortal emulations of the baatezu -and- the various gods with similar outlooks.

willpell

2013-02-08, 12:36 PM

Missed this post before.

That's simply not possible.

Never said it was, I was just making a point.

By that definition common sense is a myth. I'm comfortable with that.

And I'm comfortable with assuming that "myth" is a higher truth that few people but me are wise enough to comprehend, something I also believe of many actual myths. :smallcool:

This is what's painting your picture of evil eventually winning. Evil is simply more encroaching and inexpellable by your guidlines. Sooner or later, given the infinite nature of time, everything will be corrupted by evil unless it's simply incapable of being corrupted. You've already conceded that creatures literally made of good, celestials, are not immune to this taint. What is?

The answer's in bold. Evil cannot force anyone to do evil (actions taken under mind control, unless you consented to it at least, do not ding your alignment much if at all). You always have the option to choose Good instead and to continue choosing Good forever, up until the moment when you start choosing Evil. So just don't ever make that choice, or seek forgiveness if you do, lest you surrender your freedoms by becoming unclean and unworthy of saving. Hence my hardline no-baby-murdering stance. So long as the stain of evil is not on your soul, you're fine; once it is there, it never quite washes out, but Evil's victory is inevitable only if people are sloppy and allow themselves to be smeared.

Incidentally. Look into heroes of horror's taint mechanics. It strikes much closer to what you're describing evil to be.

I wasn't impressed by it, though I didn't look too close. I know it causes your body to physically fall apart, which is definitely not my idea of what Evil should be (though not Good either).

I'll be honest. Discussing these things with you has some entertainment value, but I have exactly zero interest in ever sitting at a table where you're the DM.

Likewise, with no offense intended or taken. We have very different attitudes and it's good that we have come to understand this clearly. That said, this thread is my particular soapbox. You are of course welcome to stay here and continue the discussion so long as it amuses you, but if it's my opinion vs. RAW, in this place my opinion wins.

The only one I can think of is little nicky from the movie of the same name.

Ding! Thank you. I guess that's gotta beat Preacher for "best-known" then.

Redundancy with each other or redundancy with outsider bane?

Redundancy with each other. I'd say having two +2 bonuses which can't be stacked together except in an absurdly rare corner case shouldn't count as more than +3 total bonus; you've got the flexibility of slaying Good and Evil alike, so it's worth more than just Holy or Unholy, but charging the full price for both when you have the base price and +1 enchantment as surcharges, that'd just be too mean. You can buy two entire +3 swords for the price of a +4 sword, IIRC, and definitely so for a +5. It's just not fair to charge the full price when the player might get to use the full bonus once or twice in a long campaign.

In the former you're creating a dissonance between your fluff and your crunch. It should be more difficult to entrap two opposing forces in the same item if they're anathema to each other but a cost reduction suggest that it would be easier than normal.

Not easier, just less costly, due to the narrow utility of it. It's like finding stuff in the dollar bin at a store; it doesn't mean it's the best stuff in the store so they want to let you buy a lot of it.

So upon death, the creature breaks down completely and flows into the slayer?

No, just the Evil energy of it, assuming it did in fact possess any by virtue of its nature despite having been blameless. Or it might be more Evil drawn down from the void or up from Hell or whatever, but the point is, by executing an innocent, you declare firmly your allegiance to the force of death and your opposition to justice or mercy. You cannot stay on the side of Good if you're willing to perform such an atrocity, at least not without major mitigation.

It is only your opinion and is, in fact, in direct opposition to the rules.

Meh, the rules have drown-healing in them, there's no point whatsoever in taking them seriously. All rules are subject to DM adjustment, and I don't think it's worth adjusting anything if you're not willing to deal with something as major as making sure Good is really "good".

A creature with the evil subtype is literally made of the cosmic force of evil.

That may or may not mean anything. Ever read Hellboy? He's not even a tiefling or cambion - he is literally the son of the Devil. But growing up in America and learning the importance of protecting innocent life, let alone of not ending the world as he was prophecied to do, was all it took to put him on the side of right, even though he's still bright red and has to keep cutting his horns off. Being made of Evil and actually being "evil" are very different things. When there is literally not another Evil being anywhere in the universe, we can talk about whether those who technically qualify as fiends need to die despite not having done anything. Until then, it's completely unacceptible to kill people who might have chosen to do good work, when the calories you burned swinging your sword could have been saved for a battle against actual villains which you'll now lose because of the wasted effort.

Murder, torture, betrayal, and corruption are as much a part of its instincts as the urge to reproduce is part of ours.

Says who? Even the most heinous and dyed-in-the-wool villain might take a few years at a time of being a model citizen who performs not a single morally heinous act, just because he's no active desire to at the moment. Having Evil in your blood doesn't compel you to commit evil acts any more than owning a knife compels you to stab every person you see. It might be the potential for Evil, but no more than that, and you don't deserve to die just for being what you are, no matter what that is. Not until you actually at least start doing something.

IRL a number of cultures say that the reproductive act is categorically always wrong, yet those peoples continue to reproduce.

??? I'm not aware of any groups who go quite that far; can you explain who you're referring to without breaking a forum rule? Assuming for the sake of argument that you're referring to, say, mimes...if all mimes were forbidden to breed, this wouldn't mean that there could never be any more mimes in the world. It would just mean they'd have to recruit non-mimes whose parents had "sinned" and brought them into the world, and who would now have to swear never to "sin" themselves. As long as some genetically adequate number of non-mimes of both genders exist, this cycle can continue indefinitely.

Trying to raise a fiend to do good is like trying to raise a human to un-screw people.

Er, yeah, no, that's not even close to making sense.

It's more than just denying instinct, it's actively doing things that everything in their heart screams is wrong.

Perhaps so. Still, if they see a huge civilization dominating the globe by doing "wrong", and they're barely staving off starvation by being "right", might they not consider telling the heart to shut up, and listening to their head (or stomach) instead?

Fiends are forever unless they're destroyed. They must contend with both denying temptation and doing everything their instincts rail against forever; something all but a handful are more than intelligent and wise enough to realize quite quickly.

Okay are we still talking about cambions? Because while they may qualify as fiends, I'm pretty sure they're not immortal (except as petitioner souls, which normal humans of evil alignment also become). For actual fiends you may have a point, but even then it's questionable. If a baby erinyes's distant ancestors were angels once, maybe the process is reversible (especially if the GM doesn't agree with my "one unit evil equals three units good" idea).

Nevermind the taint of evil from its mere presence if you've remained in one locale.

Where exactly is this "taint" described? Does it have any effect besides pinging on Detect Evil? If it has no measurable effect save registering to a sense that we already know to be fallible, then I'm strongly distinclined to suspect it might conceivably matter in any way whatsoever.

This simply does't work. Evil's not tricking good in your setup. It really will win eventually because once something's tainted it's tainted forever and it spreads that taint in all it does.

I believe I alluded to a possibility of atonement for at least minor transgressions. If you're not murdering babies it's probably not too late to save yourself.

Circular logic isn't the best logic for anything. It's a failure of logic.

It's the kind of logic which indicates that a world could have ended by retroactively generating its own beginning, which is the only real alternative to speculating that the universe always existed, or that it was created by a previous universe which was created by a previous one etc. etc. ad infinitum. So really it's the only logic that can suffice for this purpose as far as I can see.

Where dark and light meet you get shadows or grays (depends on which sense of light and dark you're talking about.) If the difference was there before it could be observed then it predates the observers.

Not sure what you're getting at.

This is exactly what I was saying. Good and evil -must- be independent of morals because they existed before there were societies to create morals.

But at the time they were created, they were already the same as the morals that would later be created.

Morals which don't always jive correctly with alignment.

They in fact do a pretty good job of jiving, if you do not accept that it can be Good to kill babies. Morals are not really subjective, just incompletely understood.

Going by the canon lore the first sapient minds where those of the demons

I guess that would explain a lot. Suffice it to say this is not what I assume to be true in any of my current campaign worlds.

that humans were created by the blood of lord moon striking the earth when Akodo split open his belly to rescue the other children of the sun and moon

So your cosmology is Asian-based?

The only way that looking that far into the future is possible is if free will is a bad cosmic joke and the future is actually predetermined.

It doesn't have to be completely predetermined; you can be seeing the most probable course of events, based on decisions that people will choose freely to make under future circumstances, having made that choice based on the information they will have had at the time. Though personally I do think free will pretty much is a bad cosmic joke, IRL at least. In D&D it can be Word of God if you so choose, but I don't really see the point of such a declaration, as I find it diminishes versimilitude if nothing ever restricts your choices the way they are often restricted IRL.

hamishspence

2013-02-08, 12:49 PM

That may or may not mean anything. Ever read Hellboy? He's not even a tiefling or cambion - he is literally the son of the Devil. But growing up in America and learning the importance of protecting innocent life, let alone of not ending the world as he was prophecied to do, was all it took to put him on the side of right, even though he's still bright red and has to keep cutting his horns off. Being made of Evil and actually being "evil" are very different things. When there is literally not another Evil being anywhere in the universe, we can talk about whether those who technically qualify as fiends need to die despite not having done anything. Until then, it's completely unacceptible to kill people who might have chosen to do good work, when the calories you burned swinging your sword could have been saved for a battle against actual villains which you'll now lose because of the wasted effort.

So it is acceptable to use violence against actual villains?

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-08, 02:52 PM

And I'm comfortable with assuming that "myth" is a higher truth that few people but me are wise enough to comprehend, something I also believe of many actual myths. :smallcool::smallamused: a high horse is good for melee combat but not the best position for debate, at least not if you want anyone to take you seriously. I don't believe my understanding of alignment's RAW or morality to be perfect or even close to it. I do believe my understanding of alignment's RAW is better than average; a trait I share with Hamishspence, whose opinion on such I feel bears equal weight with my own when discussing the matter.

A key point in rational discussion is willing to not only entertain the thought, but actually accept that you may be wrong on any given point and willing to review and re-review relevant passages as necessary to either confirm or deny that you are.

The answer's in bold. Evil cannot force anyone to do evil (actions taken under mind control, unless you consented to it at least, do not ding your alignment much if at all). You always have the option to choose Good instead and to continue choosing Good forever, up until the moment when you start choosing Evil. So just don't ever make that choice, or seek forgiveness if you do, lest you surrender your freedoms by becoming unclean and unworthy of saving. Hence my hardline no-baby-murdering stance. So long as the stain of evil is not on your soul, you're fine; once it is there, it never quite washes out, but Evil's victory is inevitable only if people are sloppy and allow themselves to be smeared.So any person that does't live a perfectly non-evil life is indellibly tainted. You're placing good at a much more difficult level of requirement than the vast majority of humanity is capable of. This is why evil wins.

I wasn't impressed by it, though I didn't look too close. I know it causes your body to physically fall apart, which is definitely not my idea of what Evil should be (though not Good either). That's only half of it; corruption. The depravity score is its complement and is entirely mental. If you discard corruption and keep depravity, taint is exactly what you want. If the whole "evil eventually drives you mad" angle doesn't appeal you can still keep the depravity score and only use it to interact with supernatural effects that target, cause, or remove it. Note that removing it is nearly impossible and having a scaling number is more in line with what you're describing than a simple one the other or neither setup like the standard model.

Likewise, with no offense intended or taken. We have very different attitudes and it's good that we have come to understand this clearly. That said, this thread is my particular soapbox. You are of course welcome to stay here and continue the discussion so long as it amuses you, but if it's my opinion vs. RAW, in this place my opinion wins.That's not how public forums work. All you can do is accept what others have to say on the topic you've put foward or ask the mods to lock the thread. That said, no offense was intended or taken on my part either. :smallsmile:

Ding! Thank you. I guess that's gotta beat Preacher for "best-known" then.It's even the opposite you mentioned. The dad is the devil and the mom is an angel.

Redundancy with each other. I'd say having two +2 bonuses which can't be stacked together except in an absurdly rare corner case shouldn't count as more than +3 total bonus; you've got the flexibility of slaying Good and Evil alike, so it's worth more than just Holy or Unholy, but charging the full price for both when you have the base price and +1 enchantment as surcharges, that'd just be too mean. You can buy two entire +3 swords for the price of a +4 sword, IIRC, and definitely so for a +5. It's just not fair to charge the full price when the player might get to use the full bonus once or twice in a long campaign.

Not easier, just less costly, due to the narrow utility of it. It's like finding stuff in the dollar bin at a store; it doesn't mean it's the best stuff in the store so they want to let you buy a lot of it. I agree from the pragmatic game balance standpoint but the cost is representative of the magical ingredients that go into making the hunk of metal hold the magic inside it. Reducing the amount of ingredients necessary suggests reducing the power necessary to accomplish the task by a comensurate degree.

No, just the Evil energy of it, assuming it did in fact possess any by virtue of its nature despite having been blameless. Or it might be more Evil drawn down from the void or up from Hell or whatever, but the point is, by executing an innocent, you declare firmly your allegiance to the force of death and your opposition to justice or mercy. You cannot stay on the side of Good if you're willing to perform such an atrocity, at least not without major mitigation.As I said, it's made of evil. For there to not be a net increase in worldwide evil some of the evil must remain with the body or the body must break down immediately or at least in short order. FC2 fluffs it as the latter; fiends completely dissipate from the material shortly after their demise in any of a number of colorful ways. You could, of course, revise your statement so as to say killing the creature -does- result in a net increase in evil in the world, but that puts just a little more detail on your portrait of evils ultimate victory.

Meh, the rules have drown-healing in them, there's no point whatsoever in taking them seriously. All rules are subject to DM adjustment, and I don't think it's worth adjusting anything if you're not willing to deal with something as major as making sure Good is really "good".Good, lowercase G, is relative. It's subjective to your culture. So is evil. For the system to include an objective version that any serious weight can be given to an objective definition or set of guidlines needed to be given. This is how we get BoED and BoVD.

As I recently mentioned in another thread, these texts are not ethics or philosophy texts intended to accurately state the universally correct definitions for good and evil. No such definitions exist. They were intended to create an objective framework for a game so that players that wanted to make alignment a major part of their game had a common point of reference. Drown-healing is an editting error that must be ignored if people are to be in danger of drowning. The RAW of alignment takes a bit of effort and a concious disconnect from thinking of it as a philosophy, but it does work except in very odd corner cases like the ones that are being discussed.

By suggesting that BoED and BoVD have no value you're saying the equivalent of all aquatic elements of the game don't have value because drowning does't work right in the rare case that something puts you in a postion to drown but something else removes you from that position before you do. In virtually any situation where you lose conciousness to lack of air, that situation persists until you're dead.

That may or may not mean anything. Ever read Hellboy? He's not even a tiefling or cambion - he is literally the son of the Devil. But growing up in America and learning the importance of protecting innocent life, let alone of not ending the world as he was prophecied to do, was all it took to put him on the side of right, even though he's still bright red and has to keep cutting his horns off. Being made of Evil and actually being "evil" are very different things. When there is literally not another Evil being anywhere in the universe, we can talk about whether those who technically qualify as fiends need to die despite not having done anything. Until then, it's completely unacceptible to kill people who might have chosen to do good work, when the calories you burned swinging your sword could have been saved for a battle against actual villains which you'll now lose because of the wasted effort.The problem with this example is that he's not a D&D character or part of a D&D campaign. Who the hell knows what he is in D&D terms? This much I can say; he's dramatically more human than a typical D&D fiend ever could be.

Says who? Even the most heinous and dyed-in-the-wool villain might take a few years at a time of being a model citizen who performs not a single morally heinous act, just because he's no active desire to at the moment. Having Evil in your blood doesn't compel you to commit evil acts any more than owning a knife compels you to stab every person you see. It might be the potential for Evil, but no more than that, and you don't deserve to die just for being what you are, no matter what that is. Not until you actually at least start doing something.This is applying humanistic values and value to an inherently inhuman creature. As for who says they have evil instincts, WotC. Even mere tieflings, who are only touched by evil rather than holy comprised of it, have instincts telling them to do evil per their descriptions in every source not related to eberron. Both fiendish codices also alude to these creatures being evil from the moment they're created. If it makes you feel any better, they also point out that sexually reproduced fiends are an extraordinary rarity. Most are converted from the petitioners of motals or spontaneously pop into existence fully formed.

??? I'm not aware of any groups who go quite that far; can you explain who you're referring to without breaking a forum rule? Assuming for the sake of argument that you're referring to, say, mimes...if all mimes were forbidden to breed, this wouldn't mean that there could never be any more mimes in the world. It would just mean they'd have to recruit non-mimes whose parents had "sinned" and brought them into the world, and who would now have to swear never to "sin" themselves. As long as some genetically adequate number of non-mimes of both genders exist, this cycle can continue indefinitely. I can't, but I'm guessing you've accurately divined them by use of the word "sin." Having been a culture that dominated a significant part of the world for several centuries, it's simply not possible that converts provided more than a small fraction of those who comprised this culture. As I said; Instinct usually trumps dogma, and what I know of psychology and probability tells me that the only reason that is "usually" rather than "always" is the limitations of human mortality.

Er, yeah, no, that's not even close to making sense. It's not supposed to. It was partially intended to show how absurd the notion of fiends doing good is. A better, more accurate analogy would be the instinct to eat. Unlike eating, doing evil isn't strictly required for a fiend as nourishment. Its instinct and drive to do evil are very much comparable to the instinct to eat and appetite. Trying to get a fiend to reject evil an do good is like getting a human to reject eating and voluntarily induce vomiting on a regular basis. Sure there are some that do, but it's invariably because of, or results in, a mental disorder.

Perhaps so. Still, if they see a huge civilization dominating the globe by doing "wrong", and they're barely staving off starvation by being "right", might they not consider telling the heart to shut up, and listening to their head (or stomach) instead?The problem with this is that neither good nor evil is clearly the dominant force. In fact they're pretty much dead-even. If your hypothetical starving man saw that the neighboring big kingdom not only agreed with what his heart told him, but was willing to feed him and let him become a citizen easier than the kingdom he's already in, he'd be hopping the border before you could say "soup line."

Okay are we still talking about cambions? Because while they may qualify as fiends, I'm pretty sure they're not immortal (except as petitioner souls, which normal humans of evil alignment also become). For actual fiends you may have a point, but even then it's questionable. If a baby erinyes's distant ancestors were angels once, maybe the process is reversible (especially if the GM doesn't agree with my "one unit evil equals three units good" idea).No I'm talking about fiends in general. Cambions are included but not specific to any of my points about fiends.

Where exactly is this "taint" described? Does it have any effect besides pinging on Detect Evil? If it has no measurable effect save registering to a sense that we already know to be fallible, then I'm strongly distinclined to suspect it might conceivably matter in any way whatsoever.BoVD under the lingering effects of evil. The long-term presence of a fiend can cause some seriously unpleasant things. It's much more than just a lingering aura for a paladin to track.

I believe I alluded to a possibility of atonement for at least minor transgressions. If you're not murdering babies it's probably not too late to save yourself."Alluded to," "probably," these are vague and uncertain where becoming tainted by evil was definitive and irreversable. This continues to bode poorly for the forces of good in your world.

It's the kind of logic which indicates that a world could have ended by retroactively generating its own beginning, which is the only real alternative to speculating that the universe always existed, or that it was created by a previous universe which was created by a previous one etc. etc. ad infinitum. So really it's the only logic that can suffice for this purpose as far as I can see. No it isn't. The logical course is to acknowledge that there was a beggining and we simply do not know what came before or how the circumstances surrounding the beggining came to be.

Not sure what you're getting at.Dark and light are not mutally exclusive. They can intermingle to the effect I stated.

But at the time they were created, they were already the same as the morals that would later be created.Except when the morals of different cultures differed. What's good by the tenets of absolute alignment good doesn't necessarily match what your specific culture says is good. A mercantile culture will tell you that amassing as much wealth as possible is good even if you occasionally have to step on a few people, but absolute good says that greed is evil so your culture's ambivalence toward crushing competitors is wrong.

They in fact do a pretty good job of jiving, if you do not accept that it can be Good to kill babies. Morals are not really subjective, just incompletely understood.This simply isn't true. The only points I can think of that absolutely noone would disagree with are that it's a bad thing when someone in your group dies, regardless of how you define that group, and that being hungry sucks.

I guess that would explain a lot. Suffice it to say this is not what I assume to be true in any of my current campaign worlds.It was the period of existence before the gods of law came to be to oppose them and created time and numbers to measure them and the time it would take to eradicate them.

So your cosmology is Asian-based?No but it does have some details ported in from rokugan. Notably the spirit realm is part of the great wheel. It's coexistent but not coterminous with the material, existing on the far side of the ethereal plane. Sun and Moon, Amaterasu and Onnotangu IIRC, are the progenitors of humanity albeit by accident. They are not traditional gods (no divie rank) and only one nation in the world is home to the offspring of their progeny.

It doesn't have to be completely predetermined; you can be seeing the most probable course of events, based on decisions that people will choose freely to make under future circumstances, having made that choice based on the information they will have had at the time. Though personally I do think free will pretty much is a bad cosmic joke, IRL at least. In D&D it can be Word of God if you so choose, but I don't really see the point of such a declaration, as I find it diminishes versimilitude if nothing ever restricts your choices the way they are often restricted IRL.

The restrictions on choice IRL are illusory. There's always another choice. It's just that a -lot- of choices are bad ones. If I got to the afterlife and my god told me it was all predestined from the big-bang foward, I'd spit in his eye. Try to anyway. He'd probably avoid it since he knew it was coming. I just find the idea appaling.

Illarion

2013-02-08, 02:55 PM

So it is acceptable to use violence against actual villains?

That is depentant of your moral outlook. If you can always justify the killing of someone to reduce suffering in the world then yes you can kill anyone that you can resonably determine that will at some point cause suffering to the innocent.
If your villian has commited such crimes in the past and is showing intent to continue to do so, then your most exalted of heroes, should have no moral qualms with dispatching this villian.

willpell

2013-02-09, 02:05 AM

So it is acceptable to use violence against actual villains?

It's never ideal, but generally yeah, it's accepted that it may be the only way to stop their evil plan. Accepting honorable surrender, striking for nonlethal, providing a fair trial - all are preferable, but you won't Fall for executing someone who has committed or attempted atrocities and gives every indication of continuing to be dangerous. You might be called in by a supervisor to explain your actions, possibly face a reprimand if you acted too hastily or seemed to enjoy it a little more than is considered mentally healthy. But it has to become a pattern of behavior before it's likely to have any negative effects on alignment.

A key point in rational discussion is willing to not only entertain the thought, but actually accept that you may be wrong on any given point and willing to review and re-review relevant passages as necessary to either confirm or deny that you are.

So I'm not a rational debater; sue me.

So any person that does't live a perfectly non-evil life is indellibly tainted. You're placing good at a much more difficult level of requirement than the vast majority of humanity is capable of. This is why evil wins.

That is exactly where I see most of the good/evil tension in my game coming from. It's the whole reason why Evil still finds recruits. I would rather that Good's critics be complaining about how its standards are too high, rather than complaining that it simply has no standards, and kills anyone who pings on Detect Evil without really thinking about it. The latter is not Good by any stretch of the imagination to me.

The depravity score is its complement and is entirely mental. If you discard corruption and keep depravity, taint is exactly what you want.

Hm...I will look into this.

If the whole "evil eventually drives you mad" angle doesn't appeal you can still keep the depravity score and only use it to interact with supernatural effects that target, cause, or remove it. Note that removing it is nearly impossible and having a scaling number is more in line with what you're describing than a simple one the other or neither setup like the standard model.

That does in fact sound pretty right. The way I figure it, once you start going a little mad, all your thoughts are colored by it, so it would in fact be very hard to cure yourself of it, at least without a complete mindwipe. Rather Call of Cthulhu-influenced, this perspective.

It's even the opposite you mentioned. The dad is the devil and the mom is an angel.

Right, I should have remembered that. This fits with the rather shallow (not in the perjorative sense) portrayal of both parents; we don't get much about the courtship or relationship between them, so the prevailing social attitudes are much more about "my mommy is an angel" and a corresponding image of the father as tough but fair (as fits with this portrayal of devils specifically, rather than of demons in the D&D sense or the more general idea of fiends overall). The more attention you pay to the actual idea of an angel being seduced by a fiend, the more it contradicts prevailing social mores about gender for the angel to be female or the devil male. (Of course as long as we're mucking about with cosmic forces, there's no particular reason the coupling needs to be heterosexual, or even sexual in any sense beyond the conceptual.)

I agree from the pragmatic game balance standpoint but the cost is representative of the magical ingredients that go into making the hunk of metal hold the magic inside it. Reducing the amount of ingredients necessary suggests reducing the power necessary to accomplish the task by a comensurate degree.

Figure it's a "buy in bulk" kind of discount. You're already charging the material to hold alignment energy, so you can stretch things a little bit in a way you couldn't with entirely dissimilar enchantments.

Good, lowercase G, is relative. It's subjective to your culture. So is evil. For the system to include an objective version that any serious weight can be given to an objective definition or set of guidlines needed to be given. This is how we get BoED and BoVD.

Cultures can have subjective ideas of good if objective good doesn't show up and tell them they're wrong. Which is exactly what it will do in D&D land. Thusly, cultural mores which do not correspond to objective good and evil will swiftly be eliminated.

The problem with this example is that he's not a D&D character or part of a D&D campaign. Who the hell knows what he is in D&D terms? This much I can say; he's dramatically more human than a typical D&D fiend ever could be.

So if I want to build a character who is literally Hellboy-in-D&D-world, I'm just boned? Screw that. The D&D portrayal of fiends can be adjusted for the benefit of a character that I want to play, as long as the DM is cool with it.

A better, more accurate analogy would be the instinct to eat. Unlike eating, doing evil isn't strictly required for a fiend as nourishment. Its instinct and drive to do evil are very much comparable to the instinct to eat and appetite. Trying to get a fiend to reject evil an do good is like getting a human to reject eating and voluntarily induce vomiting on a regular basis. Sure there are some that do, but it's invariably because of, or results in, a mental disorder.

I have certain attitudes regarding the label of "mental disorder" that I should probably not get into. But the bottom line is that some people choose to eat very little, and to be sensible about what they eat and when and how much, and the same could apply to a fiend who, even if he is compelled to lie cheat and steal and tolerate those who do, can get his RDA of Vitamin Evil in ways that inflict minimal harm on his environment. And if the forces of Good would rahter kill him than the binge-eviling fatcats that are actively harming the world, it reinforces the idea that they are jack-booted thugs, whom sensible people can, should and must oppose every bit as vehemently as they do Evil. The net result of such a portrayal is that Neutral is the real good and Good is just an alternate flavor of evil, and I'm fine with using that to set up a Vorlons-vs.-Shadows dynamic...but I'd really prefer that you stop using the word Good if that's what you're going to do. Say "celestial" instead, and you're fine. (After all, the Vorlons brainwashed humans to see them as angels, and the equivalent for other races.)

BoVD under the lingering effects of evil. The long-term presence of a fiend can cause some seriously unpleasant things. It's much more than just a lingering aura for a paladin to track.

Once again I'm strongly inclined to ignore anything BOVD says. It is after all entirely written by Monte Cook; one guy's opinion being used as the sole reference point for a game written collectively by the entire team is just not a very tenable situation. At the very least, BOVD overstates the point. Lingering effects of evil can happen, if the DM wants it to for the sake of plot. They are not mandated to in every single situation. Evil isn't radioactivity; it doesn't contaminate everything exposed to it at a consistent measurable rate. (And I would also speculate that this usage of "fiend" was really not meant to include technical qualifiers such as fiends or cambions, but Monte just forgot to specify that it should only apply to actual fiends.)

No it isn't. The logical course is to acknowledge that there was a beggining and we simply do not know what came before or how the circumstances surrounding the beggining came to be.

It doesn't matter whether we know it or not; we can logically conjecture what it must have been. And if there was no prior reality, then no force could have acted to create our current reality, because there were no forces to act so, unless they came from the future ot our current reality to generate their own past. Every other model must inevitably portray the previous existence of some other reality, and thus only forestalls the question rather than answering it. Eventually, something has to have instigated the creation of the first reality that ever was, unless realities can have just always existed. Retroactive self-creation is the only consistent model I've been able to conceptualize which acknowledges that there was ever nonexistence.

Except when the morals of different cultures differed.

Then one of them was wrong, or at least less right.

A mercantile culture will tell you that amassing as much wealth as possible is good even if you occasionally have to step on a few people, but absolute good says that greed is evil so your culture's ambivalence toward crushing competitors is wrong.

So mercantile cultures are Evil-influenced and have a corrupted view of what's Good. Makes perfect sense to me.

It was the period of existence before the gods of law came to be to oppose them and created time and numbers to measure them and the time it would take to eradicate them.

Yeah that's something that I pretty much just ignore as being nonsensical.

They are not traditional gods (no divie rank) and only one nation in the world is home to the offspring of their progeny.

Which would of course explain why the Rokugani are such incredible racists....

The restrictions on choice IRL are illusory. There's always another choice. It's just that a -lot- of choices are bad ones. If I got to the afterlife and my god told me it was all predestined from the big-bang foward, I'd spit in his eye. Try to anyway. He'd probably avoid it since he knew it was coming. I just find the idea appaling.

I find the idea of being allowed to make a bad choice, by someone who had the power to understand why that choice was bad, and could have told you exactly why you shouldn't do that and exactly what you should do instead, to be equally abhorrent. If a theoretical creator has truly limitless power, then he can stop time and take a century explaining the situation to you just before you make your fateful decision, and then compress your memory of that entire dialogue down to a single gut instinct which tells you not to do the thing you were about to do. To instead let you do it, and then punish you for doing it when you had no conceivable way of knowledge, is unacceptibly arbitrary and capricious. If a Supreme Being like that existed, there would be no point in even trying to live; your best objective would be to try and find a way of self-obliviating ,so you needn't suffer that being's completely self-indulgent punishment for your disobedience of his draconian edicts.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-09, 03:39 AM

It's never ideal, but generally yeah, it's accepted that it may be the only way to stop their evil plan. Accepting honorable surrender, striking for nonlethal, providing a fair trial - all are preferable, but you won't Fall for executing someone who has committed or attempted atrocities and gives every indication of continuing to be dangerous. You might be called in by a supervisor to explain your actions, possibly face a reprimand if you acted too hastily or seemed to enjoy it a little more than is considered mentally healthy. But it has to become a pattern of behavior before it's likely to have any negative effects on alignment.I find this reluctance toward violence, in a world full of violence enacted by both man and nature, kind of pitiful. I'm okay with wanting to avoid needless bloodshed, but a Good that's afraid to get its hands dirty seems like a weak Good to me.

So I'm not a rational debater; sue me.Rationale and logical problem solving is how tools and societies are built. They're why we live in houses and have internet instead of squatting under trees cold and hungry, hoping a predator isn't getting ready to pounce and eat us. Rationale seems like rather an important and useful tool to simply discard it like that.

That is exactly where I see most of the good/evil tension in my game coming from. It's the whole reason why Evil still finds recruits. I would rather that Good's critics be complaining about how its standards are too high, rather than complaining that it simply has no standards, and kills anyone who pings on Detect Evil without really thinking about it. The latter is not Good by any stretch of the imagination to me. That's a gross exageration of Good's willingness to use necessary force when standing against the enemy. The problem with good having too high a standard is that evil is often insidious. It shows its lower standard in a reasonable light and dark gods -do- reward their followers in this life and the next. How and how much they reward those followers varies by god, but overall a majority will see Good as a raw deal the way you've set it up. You've also created a scenario where actively neutral isn't possible. The way you've got it, neutral is just less evil than smite-worthy but still evil nonetheless.

Hm...I will look into this.

That does in fact sound pretty right. The way I figure it, once you start going a little mad, all your thoughts are colored by it, so it would in fact be very hard to cure yourself of it, at least without a complete mindwipe. Rather Call of Cthulhu-influenced, this perspective.The CoC rules for psychosis are a bit more detailed and an adaption for them to D&D exists in unearthed arcana.

Right, I should have remembered that. This fits with the rather shallow (not in the perjorative sense) portrayal of both parents; we don't get much about the courtship or relationship between them, so the prevailing social attitudes are much more about "my mommy is an angel" and a corresponding image of the father as tough but fair (as fits with this portrayal of devils specifically, rather than of demons in the D&D sense or the more general idea of fiends overall). The more attention you pay to the actual idea of an angel being seduced by a fiend, the more it contradicts prevailing social mores about gender for the angel to be female or the devil male. (Of course as long as we're mucking about with cosmic forces, there's no particular reason the coupling needs to be heterosexual, or even sexual in any sense beyond the conceptual.)Prevailing gender roles and stereotypes are gradually changing here in the US, so it's really only a matter of time before the evil father - good mother dynamic starts to become more prevalent. As for Little Nicky; that was never intended to be anything but a spoof of heavan and hell so it's really not the best comparison to the truly great heights and depths that D&D outsiders go.

Figure it's a "buy in bulk" kind of discount. You're already charging the material to hold alignment energy, so you can stretch things a little bit in a way you couldn't with entirely dissimilar enchantments. Then why is it still full-price for a holy axiomatic sword?

Cultures can have subjective ideas of good if objective good doesn't show up and tell them they're wrong. Which is exactly what it will do in D&D land. Thusly, cultural mores which do not correspond to objective good and evil will swiftly be eliminated.
Perhaps unfortunately, this is not true. Where the forces of good go the forces of evil follow and vice-versa. Each will continually undermine the other and ultimately the people with the most social and political power will push the values of their side as the right ones. Chaos and Law will also be there to help muck things up even further, siding with whichever furthers their angle.

So if I want to build a character who is literally Hellboy-in-D&D-world, I'm just boned? Screw that. The D&D portrayal of fiends can be adjusted for the benefit of a character that I want to play, as long as the DM is cool with it.You can build a character like hellboy and you can call him hellboy if you like. He'll be just as anomolous a character in D&D as he is in his own universe though. Exactly how he differs from normal will be altered by the change in setting. Btw, you realize there are ways to remove the evil subtype? There are rituals in Savage Species that can replace one alignment subtype with another, but they're rituals and require a willing participant. They also have a chance of destroying the creature undergoing the ritual, IIRC.

I have certain attitudes regarding the label of "mental disorder" that I should probably not get into. But the bottom line is that some people choose to eat very little, and to be sensible about what they eat and when and how much, and the same could apply to a fiend who, even if he is compelled to lie cheat and steal and tolerate those who do, can get his RDA of Vitamin Evil in ways that inflict minimal harm on his environment. And if the forces of Good would rahter kill him than the binge-eviling fatcats that are actively harming the world, it reinforces the idea that they are jack-booted thugs, whom sensible people can, should and must oppose every bit as vehemently as they do Evil. The net result of such a portrayal is that Neutral is the real good and Good is just an alternate flavor of evil, and I'm fine with using that to set up a Vorlons-vs.-Shadows dynamic...but I'd really prefer that you stop using the word Good if that's what you're going to do. Say "celestial" instead, and you're fine. (After all, the Vorlons brainwashed humans to see them as angels, and the equivalent for other races.) The problem with your comparison is that evil is the food and there are no evil supplemental vitamins. People that choose to eat very little aren't going as far as a fiend doing good has to go. As I said, the comparison is not only not eating at all, but actively purging the contents of the stomach on a regular basis. There are no physical health concerns for the fiend, but it will -always- be unpleasant for them to do good and pleasant for them to do evil. A human tormenting himself for 80ish years without ever once failing is all but unheard of, but possible. Even the mighty will of an outsider can't hold forever though. Sooner or later he will slip up and when he does it's very likely that it will prove a slippery slope he goes down head-first, provided he doesn't just get sick of living in constant torment and either leap down the slope or kill himself.

Honestly, the more this picture comes into focus, the more it seems to me that trying to force a fiend to live as a good creature amounts to an eternity of torture and good simply being too selfish and prissy to get its hands dirty and just end it before it inevitably becomes necessary.

Once again I'm strongly inclined to ignore anything BOVD says. It is after all entirely written by Monte Cook; one guy's opinion being used as the sole reference point for a game written collectively by the entire team is just not a very tenable situation. At the very least, BOVD overstates the point. Lingering effects of evil can happen, if the DM wants it to for the sake of plot. They are not mandated to in every single situation. Evil isn't radioactivity; it doesn't contaminate everything exposed to it at a consistent measurable rate. (And I would also speculate that this usage of "fiend" was really not meant to include technical qualifiers such as fiends or cambions, but Monte just forgot to specify that it should only apply to actual fiends.) Fiends doesn't mean fiends. Really?

Monte had the lead but there were at least four other people that had input and assuming he went from his gut instead of doing a bit of research and approaching the situation as dispassionately and rationally as possible is absurd. Did some of his personal moores probably creep in? Yes; that's fairly probable. Is the whole thing his treatise on what evil is supposed to be? Almost certainly not. The man was a proffesional game designer doing his job. This isn't SKR we're talking about.

Evil being a contaminating force and fiends corrupting the world around them were hardly his ideas, anyway. Such themes are readily apparent in myth and folklore throughout the world. Your own model of evil paints it as a contaminating force that corrupts all it touches, for pete's sake.

It doesn't matter whether we know it or not; we can logically conjecture what it must have been. And if there was no prior reality, then no force could have acted to create our current reality, because there were no forces to act so, unless they came from the future ot our current reality to generate their own past. Every other model must inevitably portray the previous existence of some other reality, and thus only forestalls the question rather than answering it. Eventually, something has to have instigated the creation of the first reality that ever was, unless realities can have just always existed. Retroactive self-creation is the only consistent model I've been able to conceptualize which acknowledges that there was ever nonexistence.Conjecture is just that. Logic has very little to do with it. You're trying to rationalize something for which there currently is no logical answer and telling yourself the solution you've come up with is based on logic, when it's really just unsupported guesswork.

Then one of them was wrong, or at least less right.

So mercantile cultures are Evil-influenced and have a corrupted view of what's Good. Makes perfect sense to me.Actually, good has no problem with commerce or wealth. It's the crushing the competitors that was problematic. Good churches need cash in the war-chest for when evil comes to batter its doors down and as I mentioned previously no culture will perfectly reflect absolute good and many will have their social moores determined more or less inependently of alignment because of opposing forces cancelling one another out.

Yeah that's something that I pretty much just ignore as being nonsensical. The instant of creation is always nonsensical. This one's as good as any and it's canon. It's the beginning of the outside, mind, not the beginning of the material. That comes later.

Which would of course explain why the Rokugani are such incredible racists....Racism is one of the most common factors for fantasy cultures in any setting. The Rokugani are nothing special in this regard.

I find the idea of being allowed to make a bad choice, by someone who had the power to understand why that choice was bad, and could have told you exactly why you shouldn't do that and exactly what you should do instead, to be equally abhorrent. If a theoretical creator has truly limitless power, then he can stop time and take a century explaining the situation to you just before you make your fateful decision, and then compress your memory of that entire dialogue down to a single gut instinct which tells you not to do the thing you were about to do. To instead let you do it, and then punish you for doing it when you had no conceivable way of knowledge, is unacceptibly arbitrary and capricious. If a Supreme Being like that existed, there would be no point in even trying to live; your best objective would be to try and find a way of self-obliviating ,so you needn't suffer that being's completely self-indulgent punishment for your disobedience of his draconian edicts.

So not only is free will an illusion, but it would be a very bad thing if it weren't? We'll simply have to accept that we don't agree on this point and drop it. It skirts dangerously close to religion, IMO, anyway.

willpell

2013-02-09, 05:44 AM

I find this reluctance toward violence, in a world full of violence enacted by both man and nature, kind of pitiful. I'm okay with wanting to avoid needless bloodshed, but a Good that's afraid to get its hands dirty seems like a weak Good to me.

It seems far more worrisome to me that the forces of Good might have a danged near Nazi-esque ideology about how some varieties of creature are inherently undeserving to exist and must be purged with ruthless efficiency. One of the chief concerns of Good should be ensuring that the innocent are not punished, let alone annihilated, based on their just having seemed guilty due to a misunderstanding or an intentional frame job or something. Any time you're too willing to solve your problems with violence, you're likely to succumb to "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome.

Rationale seems like rather an important and useful tool to simply discard it like that.

I don't deny that it's useful, but it's not for me. In D&D terms, I'm Chaotic Good, a free spirit who wants to be able to do anything that "anybody would ever" want to do. Strictures of rigor are depressing and confining to me; I don't want to waste half my limited lifespan researching my answers to make sure they're exactly correct, I'd rather just operate on the basis of what I feel to be essentially true, and assume that the world has a certain amount of wiggle room in it so that minor errors shouldn't be a big deal. I save my energy for getting worked up over things that I consider a big deal, and not for nitpicking trivialities as the Lawful always seem to. If you wanna be technically correct, be my guest; I'm more concerned with being happy, free, and intensely alive-feeling, in a way that just doesn't work if you're afraid to immerse yourself in the flow of the world for fear of doing something that's marginally suboptimal.

The problem with good having too high a standard is that evil is often insidious.

Exactly. It deceives and manipulates, and thus if Good is too quick to strike when given probable cause, then Evil can do a lot of damage by constructing the llusion of probable cause, in order to frame innocents so that Good destroys them, sowing fear in the hearts of other innocents that they'll succumb to the same fate, undermining people's trust in good and making them desperate to avoid detection for their inevitable mortal failings, and thus driving them to seek protection from more forgiving Evil masters.

It shows its lower standard in a reasonable light and dark gods -do- reward their followers in this life and the next. How and how much they reward those followers varies by god, but overall a majority will see Good as a raw deal the way you've set it up.

Going to Hell to be flayed alive by a God of Torment for having faithfully served him is a pretty raw deal IMO. Sure you've got his personal attention, but are you sure you want it? Good conversely promises rich rewards for those who stand fast, against the temptation of poisoned fruit today instead of waiting for the unpoisoned fruit you've been promised.

You've also created a scenario where actively neutral isn't possible. The way you've got it, neutral is just less evil than smite-worthy but still evil nonetheless.

Pretty much - Neutral people are those who lack the conviction to stand with Good but are not interested in standing against it. A vast oversimplification, but essentially correct.

Prevailing gender roles and stereotypes are gradually changing here in the US, so it's really only a matter of time before the evil father - good mother dynamic starts to become more prevalent.

Sigh...I was worried that discussing this might skirt the COC/TOS, but I guess I'm gonna have to risk it. Where I was going wasn't "evil father" at all. It was about the perception that Good for females is inherently tied to chastity, or at least reluctance to engage sexually with those who haven't jumped through a sufficient number of hoops, a double standard that is historically not applied to males much. If a male angel is seduced by a demon, it's her fault for being female, evil, and sexual. If a male devil seduces a female angel, it's her fault for being female and succumbing to the evil of sexuality. The old chestnut about how a master key opens many locks but a master lock should only ever open for one key. It's a thoroughly stupid bias, but one that's lingered for millenia and is reluctant to die out even in this enlightened age.

Then why is it still full-price for a holy axiomatic sword?

Because Chaotic Evil outsiders are a lot more common than Good Evil ones. You can very easily apply both bonuses. If Holy and Axiomatic were both +3-equivalent bonuses, I'd probably let you have both of them for +5. But at +2 each, together they're still probably worth +4, since you can find no shortage of demons to stab.

Perhaps unfortunately, this is not true. Where the forces of good go the forces of evil follow and vice-versa. Each will continually undermine the other and ultimately the people with the most social and political power will push the values of their side as the right ones.

You have a point, but the availability of detect magic makes this a lot harder to pull off. If a teacher preaches "all elves are inherently evil because they're all just Drow waiting to happen" in an attempt to start a race war, just use magic to see if he's lying and/or evil. Such spells aren't foolproof, but they at least weed out the fools who don't correct for them. The more ruthlessly Evil exploits its greater willingness to fight dirty, the more easily Good can point at it and get people to realize they don't want anything to do with people who will engage in such wickedness, when Good offers them mercy and charity and justice and so forth.

Btw, you realize there are ways to remove the evil subtype? There are rituals in Savage Species that can replace one alignment subtype with another, but they're rituals and require a willing participant. They also have a chance of destroying the creature undergoing the ritual, IIRC.

Hm, sounds like kind of a bum deal. I haven't really read SS because it's a 3.0 book, so I figure I need to have a better grip on how to convert its rules. (BOVD is also a 3.0 book but I read it because it grabbed my interest a little more, being on a topic so near to my heart - I might disagree vehemently but at least I care, whereas SS was more "something cool to check out someday" than "something I have to investigate now").

The problem with your comparison is that evil is the food and there are no evil supplemental vitamins.

Well since evil isn't actually necessary, just desireable, that's not really a problem. Some comparison involving e-cigarrettes or non-alcoholic beer might be more apt.

There are no physical health concerns for the fiend, but it will -always- be unpleasant for them to do good and pleasant for them to do evil.

Perhaps, but it needn't be overwhelmingly so. Particularly if the fiend is Lawful enough to listen to reason, it shouldn't be too hard to point out that logically, all people torturing and killing each other is bad for the health of any individual person within such a system, and so there are measurable benefits to doing things the Good way. This is the sort of logic that the Drow player in my campaign has to work to recognize; the surface world baffles her in its seemingly counterintuitive way of working, but at least it observably is working, so she gives it the benefit of the doubt and suppresses her instincts (mostly). For an actual fiend, the culture shock would be a lot more wrenching, might seem like absolute madness, but the evidence that there's something to it would still be there. (The fact that a Chaotic individual is less likely to be swayed by an appeal to reason does marginally justify D&D's tendency to portray Lawful as the greater Good and the lesser Evil, and Chaotic as the reverse, even though I personally despise that slant, and reversed it hard in my campaign.)

Even the mighty will of an outsider can't hold forever though.

It probably doesn't need to; eventually enough "momentum" will be built up that the creature's inherent Evil can begin converting into Good. With a long enough history of Good works, whatever stain remains on its soul can gradually be eclipsed, though it may never fully disappear. But this is also a point in favor of Good emphasizing self-sacrifice. A fiend that has chosen to do good, but knows it may not be able to stay the course forever, might be the one who chooses to take the lich's phylactery and leap into the Sphere of Annihilation, so that a far greater evil as well as its own future potential evil are both deleted from the cosmos forever. (It would absolutely NOT be Good for someone else to push the same Fiend into the Sphere; the decision must always belong to the potential martyr. And for the fiend to leap into the Sphere just because, without anything to be accomplished by it, is pitiful at best; other scholars of Good would rightly call it something of a cop-out, though maybe acceptible in the scheme of things...certainly not a good example to follow, though.)

Honestly, the more this picture comes into focus, the more it seems to me that trying to force a fiend to live as a good creature amounts to an eternity of torture and good simply being too selfish and prissy to get its hands dirty and just end it before it inevitably becomes necessary.

Nobody said the fiends should be forced to be Good. They just can't stay in Good's house if they're planning on wreaking Evil there (which arguably they might not have a choice about, if those BOVD taint rules are in use). Sending them back to Hell and keeping them there is perfectly acceptible. However, killing them is a little more traumatic than a mere deportation.

The man was a proffesional game designer doing his job. This isn't SKR we're talking about.

I've seen more evidence of SKR being a professional than Monte, although the latter does seem to be the more compelling writer.

Your own model of evil paints it as a contaminating force that corrupts all it touches, for pete's sake.

Not by its mere presence, no. If a fiend is just standing in a room not bothering anybody, and you don't see any magic auras centered on it, it's probably not doing anything other than maybe making people nervous (which is the fault of their own prejudices and cowardice). If the fiend starts talking to you, you'd best take its words with a grain of salt, for they may be intended to undermine your morals. But they probably can't succeed in doing so unless you choose to allow it.

Actually, good has no problem with commerce or wealth. It's the crushing the competitors that was problematic.

Commerce by definition requires some people to have less so that others can have more. Good wants prosperity, which doesn't require a system of exchange. A hippy commune where everyone does their share of necessary work and enjoys the rewards together is a perfect model of the kind of society Good would like to see. Any system of trade is probably inherently Lawful to a marginal degree; it might be compatible with Good, but not central to it nor perfectly in line with its ideals. Like violence, money is something Good resorts to when necessary, but strongly discourages from considering the best solution to anything.

Racism is one of the most common factors for fantasy cultures in any setting.

Which I consider absolutely unacceptible, and fight tooth and nail to discourage in every case. Cultural discrimination can be acceptible; if that Elf is wearing traditional Elvish robes, it's a good bet he may have been raised with certain attitudes characteristic of the elven kingdoms. But to assume he believes those things just because he's an elf, when he gives no signal whatsoever that he was raised in the elvish manner, is racism and it is wrong and Evil, and I don't stand for it in any culture wanting to call itself Good or even Neutral.

So not only is free will an illusion, but it would be a very bad thing if it weren't?

Debatable, but I do tend to feel at though the vast majority of cases offer one most-preferable solution, so the other answers are usually "wrong", or at least "less right", and thus free will is often only the freedom to make bad choices. Perhaps not in all cases, but ultimately I believe were would be best off knowing more and being able to live more wisely, even if it meant only ever doing what our conscience tells us to do, rather than choosing unwisely just to prove we can.

hamishspence

2013-02-09, 06:01 AM

Anyr

2013-02-09, 08:13 AM

I don't deny that it's useful, but it's not for me. In D&D terms, I'm Chaotic Good, a free spirit who wants to be able to do anything that "anybody would ever" want to do. Strictures of rigor are depressing and confining to me; I don't want to waste half my limited lifespan researching my answers to make sure they're exactly correct, I'd rather just operate on the basis of what I feel to be essentially true, and assume that the world has a certain amount of wiggle room in it so that minor errors shouldn't be a big deal. I save my energy for getting worked up over things that I consider a big deal, and not for nitpicking trivialities as the Lawful always seem to. If you wanna be technically correct, be my guest; I'm more concerned with being happy, free, and intensely alive-feeling, in a way that just doesn't work if you're afraid to immerse yourself in the flow of the world for fear of doing something that's marginally suboptimal.

'Logical mindset' does not equal 'soulless beancounter'. Those who value rational thought are just as likely to be 'happy, free, and intensely alive-feeling' as those who don't. Likewise, an absence of rational thought has nothing to do with being a rebel or free spirit. There are plenty of irrational fundamentalists whose gut instincts bind them to rigid dogma; And there are many great rebels (like Galileo), who wield logic like a sword against conformity and narrow-mindedness.

willpell

2013-02-09, 08:24 AM

There are plenty of irrational fundamentalists whose gut instincts bind them to rigid dogma; And there are many great rebels (like Galileo), who wield logic like a sword against conformity and narrow-mindedness.

Well said. I will attempt to consider this.

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-09, 10:23 AM

It seems far more worrisome to me that the forces of Good might have a danged near Nazi-esque ideology about how some varieties of creature are inherently undeserving to exist and must be purged with ruthless efficiency. One of the chief concerns of Good should be ensuring that the innocent are not punished, let alone annihilated, based on their just having seemed guilty due to a misunderstanding or an intentional frame job or something. Any time you're too willing to solve your problems with violence, you're likely to succumb to "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. The problem we're running into is that your take on good says that even if you have a hammer there's no such thing as a nail. Some creatures truly are beyond redemption from the very beginning of their existence. They can change their alignment if they're sapient creatures but they'll -always- go back to their nature unless that nature is changed through powerful magicks. Unless you remove one of the elements that makes a fiend a fiend, there's no happy ending waiting for him. When outsiders die, that's it. The soul and body are one whole unit. They're just gone. (except apparently devils, who reform a century later only to be punished for failure.)

I don't deny that it's useful, but it's not for me. In D&D terms, I'm Chaotic Good, a free spirit who wants to be able to do anything that "anybody would ever" want to do. Strictures of rigor are depressing and confining to me; I don't want to waste half my limited lifespan researching my answers to make sure they're exactly correct, I'd rather just operate on the basis of what I feel to be essentially true, and assume that the world has a certain amount of wiggle room in it so that minor errors shouldn't be a big deal. I save my energy for getting worked up over things that I consider a big deal, and not for nitpicking trivialities as the Lawful always seem to. If you wanna be technically correct, be my guest; I'm more concerned with being happy, free, and intensely alive-feeling, in a way that just doesn't work if you're afraid to immerse yourself in the flow of the world for fear of doing something that's marginally suboptimal.Another poster already anwered this more eloquently than I ever could.

Exactly. It deceives and manipulates, and thus if Good is too quick to strike when given probable cause, then Evil can do a lot of damage by constructing the llusion of probable cause, in order to frame innocents so that Good destroys them, sowing fear in the hearts of other innocents that they'll succumb to the same fate, undermining people's trust in good and making them desperate to avoid detection for their inevitable mortal failings, and thus driving them to seek protection from more forgiving Evil masters.While good says you must be *this* good to be worthwhile and if you're not *this* good you're not good enough, and probably never will be.

Going to Hell to be flayed alive by a God of Torment for having faithfully served him is a pretty raw deal IMO. Sure you've got his personal attention, but are you sure you want it?On the other hand, a god of tyranny might reward your faithful service in life with a command of your own in the afterlife and afford you the opportunity to move up in the ranks of his infernal legion. Acheron, Baator, and Gehenna are replete with deities with agendas that need useful souls to work for them; Hextor, Kurtulmak, Tiamat, etc; and others that could care less about how you spend your afterlife as long as you stay out of their way, including Vecna amongst others.
Good conversely promises rich rewards for those who stand fast, against the temptation of poisoned fruit today instead of waiting for the unpoisoned fruit you've been promised.Except those that offer only more trials of spirit in the next life. Climbing Mt. Celestia may be more pleasant than climbing the infernal ladder in Baator, but it's still more toil and self denial after a life of the same.

Pretty much - Neutral people are those who lack the conviction to stand with Good but are not interested in standing against it. A vast oversimplification, but essentially correct.And those that believe both represent too much structure and interference from the outside, such as a CN cleric dedicated to freedom, or that balancing the good and evil that exist within all creatures will lead to ultimate enlightenment, such as a LN cleric of the idea of balance, are just misguided, right? It's not at all difficult to imagine a character dedicated to balancing good and evil or promoting law or chaos as more important than good or evil, but your setup invalidates both of these concepts and anything similar.

Sigh...I was worried that discussing this might skirt the COC/TOS, but I guess I'm gonna have to risk it. Where I was going wasn't "evil father" at all. It was about the perception that Good for females is inherently tied to chastity, or at least reluctance to engage sexually with those who haven't jumped through a sufficient number of hoops, a double standard that is historically not applied to males much. If a male angel is seduced by a demon, it's her fault for being female, evil, and sexual. If a male devil seduces a female angel, it's her fault for being female and succumbing to the evil of sexuality. The old chestnut about how a master key opens many locks but a master lock should only ever open for one key. It's a thoroughly stupid bias, but one that's lingered for millenia and is reluctant to die out even in this enlightened age.Yet that outlook is gradually decaying. I probably could've made it clearer that this was my point than I actually did. In any case, let's drop this point. It's a relatively minor point and too religiously and politically charged a subject to risk getting the thread locked when it is so incidental to the subject at hand.

Because Chaotic Evil outsiders are a lot more common than Good Evil ones. You can very easily apply both bonuses. If Holy and Axiomatic were both +3-equivalent bonuses, I'd probably let you have both of them for +5. But at +2 each, together they're still probably worth +4, since you can find no shortage of demons to stab.But the discount you mentioned was because it was easier to imbue a weapon with two alignments than an alignment and some other +2 effect. You're creating a fluff-crunch dissonance again. Worse, you're doing it for a very niche item. Utlimately even a character like the one I described wouldn't bother with trying to imbue a weapon like this. Bane is cheaper and has largely the same effect and there's a +1 or +2 enhancement that can bypass any DR after meeting certain conditions.

You have a point, but the availability of detect magic makes this a lot harder to pull off. If a teacher preaches "all elves are inherently evil because they're all just Drow waiting to happen" in an attempt to start a race war, just use magic to see if he's lying and/or evil. Such spells aren't foolproof, but they at least weed out the fools who don't correct for them. The more ruthlessly Evil exploits its greater willingness to fight dirty, the more easily Good can point at it and get people to realize they don't want anything to do with people who will engage in such wickedness, when Good offers them mercy and charity and justice and so forth.As you're fond of pointing out, detect X spells aren't infallible. Worse, they're relatively pretty rare, being spells. Most of that teacher's students will never have any reason to question him until their nation goes to war with an elven people and any individual elf may be hiding his alignment or an oucast from his people for -not- being evil.

Hm, sounds like kind of a bum deal. I haven't really read SS because it's a 3.0 book, so I figure I need to have a better grip on how to convert its rules. (BOVD is also a 3.0 book but I read it because it grabbed my interest a little more, being on a topic so near to my heart - I might disagree vehemently but at least I care, whereas SS was more "something cool to check out someday" than "something I have to investigate now"). It's not a particularly attractive option for an adult, but that's exactly the point for your converted fiends. Going through such a hardship both requires and vividly displays his dedication to good. It just won't work on mindless creatures (I don't think) or those with little to no chance of survival.

Well since evil isn't actually necessary, just desireable, that's not really a problem. Some comparison involving e-cigarrettes or non-alcoholic beer might be more apt.That's addiction not instinct.

Perhaps, but it needn't be overwhelmingly so. Particularly if the fiend is Lawful enough to listen to reason, it shouldn't be too hard to point out that logically, all people torturing and killing each other is bad for the health of any individual person within such a system, and so there are measurable benefits to doing things the Good way.Not for him there's not. A lifetime of being tormented followed by an almost inevitable fall or a suicide that leads to oblivion or a ritual that -may- free him from that torment or -may- kill him and send him into oblivion. Sounds pretty crap-tastic to me.

Also, what about demons? Succubus have sexual reproduction so they sometimes come in infant. There's virtually no chance of successfully converting them even if you get to them early since you'd have to fight against both the evil and the chaos that is their very nature.

This is the sort of logic that the Drow player in my campaign has to work to recognize; the surface world baffles her in its seemingly counterintuitive way of working, but at least it observably is working, so she gives it the benefit of the doubt and suppresses her instincts (mostly). For an actual fiend, the culture shock would be a lot more wrenching, might seem like absolute madness, but the evidence that there's something to it would still be there. (The fact that a Chaotic individual is less likely to be swayed by an appeal to reason does marginally justify D&D's tendency to portray Lawful as the greater Good and the lesser Evil, and Chaotic as the reverse, even though I personally despise that slant, and reversed it hard in my campaign.)Drow aren't inherently evil. That character isn't repressing her instincts she's choosing not to follow the social moores of her native culture; a mutable portion of her psyche. If she hadn't been raised in drow culture she would't have those thoughts to suppress. For a fiend it's not culture shock, it's not some set of ideas that the creature was raised to believe in, it's the same kind of natural feelings that drive the fight or flight response to something fearful, the same kind of natural feelings that attract social creatures to one another for mating and companionship, the same kind of feelings that tell you to eat when you're hungry or sleep when you're tired. It's not a choice they make, it's what they are at the very core of their being.

It probably doesn't need to; eventually enough "momentum" will be built up that the creature's inherent Evil can begin converting into Good. With a long enough history of Good works, whatever stain remains on its soul can gradually be eclipsed, though it may never fully disappear. But this is also a point in favor of Good emphasizing self-sacrifice. A fiend that has chosen to do good, but knows it may not be able to stay the course forever, might be the one who chooses to take the lich's phylactery and leap into the Sphere of Annihilation, so that a far greater evil as well as its own future potential evil are both deleted from the cosmos forever. (It would absolutely NOT be Good for someone else to push the same Fiend into the Sphere; the decision must always belong to the potential martyr. And for the fiend to leap into the Sphere just because, without anything to be accomplished by it, is pitiful at best; other scholars of Good would rightly call it something of a cop-out, though maybe acceptible in the scheme of things...certainly not a good example to follow, though.)Except that, for the reasons I've mentioned previously, it is forever, necessarily. Also, that's a terrible analogy. Unless the artifact can move on its own, whatever good hero was disposing of it should just throw it into the sphere. Evil isn't a stain on a fiends soul like it is for a mortal. It's the very substance of the creature's soul and body; which are the same thing.

Nobody said the fiends should be forced to be Good. They just can't stay in Good's house if they're planning on wreaking Evil there (which arguably they might not have a choice about, if those BOVD taint rules are in use). Sending them back to Hell and keeping them there is perfectly acceptible. However, killing them is a little more traumatic than a mere deportation.That's just it, if you raise a fiend to be good, you -are- trying to force it to stay in good's house. It's not a willing conversion, it's brainwashing.

I don't see that slant. A certain amount of lawful behavior is absolutely necessary to have any society. The undiluted individualism of chaos is just people living near each other with no direction and no recourse for dealing with evil behavior except direct vengeance. IMO, the darkest and most insidious evil in D&D is represented by the Baatezu. There's nothing more chilling than organized, mostly dispassionate evil.

I've seen more evidence of SKR being a professional than Monte, although the latter does seem to be the more compelling writer.I haven't but that's the nature of experience. Everyones' is different.

Not by its mere presence, no. If a fiend is just standing in a room not bothering anybody, and you don't see any magic auras centered on it, it's probably not doing anything other than maybe making people nervous (which is the fault of their own prejudices and cowardice). If the fiend starts talking to you, you'd best take its words with a grain of salt, for they may be intended to undermine your morals. But they probably can't succeed in doing so unless you choose to allow it.If a fiend is staning openly in your midst you're already in a non-good society and the people's nerves are perfectly justified given the nature of what fiends are and what they do as a matter of course. If it was a horrid tiger (ECS horrid template on a dire tiger) instead, you wouldn't bat an eyelash at their nerves.

Commerce by definition requires some people to have less so that others can have more. Good wants prosperity, which doesn't require a system of exchange. A hippy commune where everyone does their share of necessary work and enjoys the rewards together is a perfect model of the kind of society Good would like to see. Any system of trade is probably inherently Lawful to a marginal degree; it might be compatible with Good, but not central to it nor perfectly in line with its ideals. Like violence, money is something Good resorts to when necessary, but strongly discourages from considering the best solution to anything.Money and commerce are inherently lawful. They have no moral weight of their own at all. A commune like that is easily the more lawful model than any capitalistic society, since such a group must work for the good of all and shares equally no matter how much he produces. It's subjugating the individual to the group. In a society of commerce, what an individual gets out is based entirely on what he puts in unless a goverment agency acts to limit one or the other. The elven model, as layed out in RotW, is the best I've seen for striking a balance between the inherent lawfulness of any society with the individuation so important to chaos.

Which I consider absolutely unacceptible, and fight tooth and nail to discourage in every case. Cultural discrimination can be acceptible; if that Elf is wearing traditional Elvish robes, it's a good bet he may have been raised with certain attitudes characteristic of the elven kingdoms. But to assume he believes those things just because he's an elf, when he gives no signal whatsoever that he was raised in the elvish manner, is racism and it is A) wrong and B Evil, and I don't stand for it in any culture wanting to call itself Good or even Neutral.A; yes. B; no. Rather; acts based on racism are often evil, but assumptions based on racial stereotypes; while offensive, frequently inaccurate and wrong; cause no direct harm and can't really be called evil. Though in a fantasy setting where there -are- actual differeces between races and, except humans, races tend to form societies unique to their race, racism is innacurate far less frequently. Saying that orcs, on average, are dumber than humans is racist. It's also factually accurate and, unles you say it within ear-shot of one, does't hurt anyone. How is that evil?

Debatable, but I do tend to feel at though the vast majority of cases offer one most-preferable solution, so the other answers are usually "wrong", or at least "less right", and thus free will is often only the freedom to make bad choices. Perhaps not in all cases, but ultimately I believe were would be best off knowing more and being able to live more wisely, even if it meant only ever doing what our conscience tells us to do, rather than choosing unwisely just to prove we can.

I've said my piece on this matter, and refuse to dicuss it further. We unquestionably can't change each others' minds on this matter and it can only lead to flaming and religion.

willpell

2013-02-09, 11:13 AM

The problem we're running into is that your take on good says that even if you have a hammer there's no such thing as a nail. Some creatures truly are beyond redemption from the very beginning of their existence.

I still regard that as conjecture rather than canon. The existence of one succubus paladin is enough to call into question whether it's ever acceptible to kill anything and deny it the chance to redeem itself and become a force for good in the world. And the worrisome real-world implications of any attempt to treat people as guilty by reason of existing, when they've done nothing whatsoever wrong as yet, are sufficient that I'm very comfortable hardlining in the opposite direction.

They can change their alignment if they're sapient creatures but they'll -always- go back to their nature unless that nature is changed through powerful magicks.

And such magics do exist, so every creature Good kills is one potential convert to its cause which it's destroyed rather than redeeming.

While good says you must be *this* good to be worthwhile and if you're not *this* good you're not good enough, and probably never will be.

Again, Good =/= Intolerance. If you're interested in earning redemption, you almost certainly can; it just requires a lot of effort if you have a lot to make up for. (And, as Miko demonstrates, there isn't always time.)

Climbing Mt. Celestia may be more pleasant than climbing the infernal ladder in Baator, but it's still more toil and self denial after a life of the same.

That part I do agree with, which is part of why the supposed supremacy of Lawful goodness has never worked for me.

It's not at all difficult to imagine a character dedicated to balancing good and evil or promoting law or chaos as more important than good or evil, but your setup invalidates both of these concepts and anything similar.

On the contrary I like both of those concepts. Clearly I haven't explained my "setup" quite right, which is why you shouldn't take things I (or the authors of the rulebooks) say too literally. The truth is almost always too complicated to fit in a soundbite.

Worse, they're relatively pretty rare, being spells.

Whether spells are at all "rare" is debatable and will vary by campaign setting. I get the impression they're rather common, and that's doubly true if you assume they're just better than other class features, as a lot of posters seem to, as the most powerful classes will inevitably come to dominate any campaign setting unless Hand of God stops them.

That's addiction not instinct.

But some people can be born addicted to drugs (because their mother used while they were in utero). So how is that different from instinct? Can we be sure Fiends are anything but a race of addicts, who could be cured of their long-inbred viciousness?

Also, what about demons? Succubus have sexual reproduction so they sometimes come in infant. There's virtually no chance of successfully converting them even if you get to them early since you'd have to fight against both the evil and the chaos that is their very nature.

Chaos isn't inherently worse than Law, it's just a different ethos, frustratingly slippery but not impossible to appeal to. You can't force a demon to walk the difficult path of redemption, but you can try to lure her toward it, by making it seem as if you know something she doesn't, making her want to try out your way and see if it might work better than what she's used to. Being reflexively contrary, she won't respond well to direct interference, so you'd have to be very subtle to nudge her in the right direction, and doing it for long enough (whether "forever" or in hopes of triggering a change in her nature) might be beyond the patience of virtually anyone sharing her Chaotic nature enough not to tick her off. Still, it's not completely impossible, and Chaos is big on pursuing the million-to-one risks in the hopes that an epically improbable win will be more impressive.

(And the concept of an infant succubus is far too disturbing to contemplate.)

It's not a choice they make, it's what they are at the very core of their being.

Perhaps. We don't even know for sure what's at the core of our being, we just have an educated guess. While the GM can make the kind of declarations you're making and have them be absolutely true, he can also make them and have them be only the prevailing assumption of the culture. And as I said before, I consider the idea too nauseating for me to ever sanction.

I don't see that slant. A certain amount of lawful behavior is absolutely necessary to have any society.

Perhaps, but it can be kept very minimal and hands-off in order to leave people the greatest degree of individual freedom. The best example of this is Iain Banks's "The Culture", in which a post-scarcity society grants people virtually unlimited license to do anything they want to (while benevolent machines very subtly convince them not to want to do things like blowing up entire cities just to watch them burn, unless they're in a hyper-realistic simulation designed to let them do exactly that without causing any actual harm).

IMO, the darkest and most insidious evil in D&D is represented by the Baatezu. There's nothing more chilling than organized, mostly dispassionate evil.

Agreed. I always tend to portray Demons more as small-time troublemakers, psychopaths you should try to avoid, but ones somewhat less likely to come looking for you specifically. If they didn't breed like rabbits, it'd be easier to avoid them than to fight them; as it is, they are the most justified kill-on-sight targets you could ask for, but I still insist that they have to at least be doing something currently or potentially harmful before you're justified in attacking them. If they're just sitting around playing Parcheesi or something, instigating violence against them would be like pouring nitroglycerine on a lit cigarette; if you can't stand to let them sit there and stink up the joint, you get a cleric to Banish their butts.

A; yes. B; no. Rather; acts based on racism are often evil, but assumptions based on racial stereotypes; while offensive, frequently inaccurate and wrong; cause no direct harm and can't really be called evil.

Being offensive is causing direct harm, albeit to a slight degree. But more importantly, racism degrades entire classes of beings without caring for them as individuals, and so it directly contradicts the "caring for the dignity of sentient beings" aspect of Good.

Saying that orcs, on average, are dumber than humans is racist. It's also factually accurate and, unles you say it within ear-shot of one, does't hurt anyone. How is that evil?

Well it's more like speciesist (admittedly I goofed on that myself before), but it's still a very hurtful thing to say where anyone might possibly record your words and play them back as a way of hurting a smart orc's feelings by proving that he'll never be smart enough to satisfy some people. Intolerance of any variety is pretty much always evil, albeit the very slight degree of evil that almost nobody can avoid having a little bit of (which is why Good must include some degree of forgiveness for minor slights; the important thing is that it must never become a trend of not caring about them at all).

Kelb_Panthera

2013-02-09, 12:46 PM

I still regard that as conjecture rather than canon. The existence of one succubus paladin is enough to call into question whether it's ever acceptible to kill anything and deny it the chance to redeem itself and become a force for good in the world.Elucidea fell. Same article. More importantly, she converted to good after who knows how many centuries of doing what her kind normally do before being converted for a limited time. She's exemplary of my position; not a counter to it.
And the worrisome real-world implications of any attempt to treat people as guilty by reason of existing, when they've done nothing whatsoever wrong as yet, are sufficient that I'm very comfortable hardlining in the opposite direction. This argument is utterly weightless. There are no real world implications. These are game rules that don't apply to reality at all and even if they did, there are no fiends comprised of pure manifest evil to apply them to so this particular issue wouldn't exist.

To the best of my knowledge there are no mortal creatures in the D&D system that are always inherently evil. There are precious few creatures that both sexually reproduce and have the evil subtype; making this a corner case even amongst outsiders.

And such magics do exist, so every creature Good kills is one potential convert to its cause which it's destroyed rather than redeeming.Good is righteous, not stupid. The chance of converting a fiend to a great enough degree that they'd be willing to chance this ritual is fast-approaching zero. Allowing every one of them to exist until you catch it in the act of doing evil and only killing it even then as a last resort, when only a tiny fraction of them will -ever- avoid reaching that point, is good being a doormat. It's allowing the brambles and weeds of evil to grow rampant on the off chance of finding a single seed of the flower of good in one of its boughs. All you'll accomplish is having the rest of your garden choked into oblivion.

Again, Good =/= Intolerance. If you're interested in earning redemption, you almost certainly can; it just requires a lot of effort if you have a lot to make up for. (And, as Miko demonstrates, there isn't always time.)That may not be your intent, but its certainly the portrait you're painting.

That part I do agree with, which is part of why the supposed supremacy of Lawful goodness has never worked for me.Again, I really don't see that alleged slant. I've read nearly everything 3.5 has to offer for the generic setting and so far as I can tell good and evil don't really favor law or chaos to any notable extent. The only overt leaning item I can think of is the default paladin being the only core class that links two alignments directly. 4e makes a very, overtly clear statement of this notion, but I just don't see it in 3.5.

On the contrary I like both of those concepts. Clearly I haven't explained my "setup" quite right, which is why you shouldn't take things I (or the authors of the rulebooks) say too literally. The truth is almost always too complicated to fit in a soundbite.I mean no offense by this but, given your tendency to toss aside logic when it gets in your way and the fact you've already made a number of self-conradictory statements, I'd hazard a guess that you're portraying your setup accurately and simply like these concepts in spite of the fact it contradicts their very existence.

Whether spells are at all "rare" is debatable and will vary by campaign setting. I get the impression they're rather common, and that's doubly true if you assume they're just better than other class features, as a lot of posters seem to, as the most powerful classes will inevitably come to dominate any campaign setting unless Hand of God stops them.PC classes make up less than 10% of the population and clerics make up less than 10% of that. This is born out by the demographics tables in the DMG and even in sources that give different lay-outs for certain specific races the vast majority of the populace is said to be NPC classes.

The assumption of commonality for spell-casters and spells is a result of the forum focusing entirely on PC's and the quantifiable superiority of casters over non-casters. It creates a false impression that is not in keeping with what the system actually suggests. Individual campaigns -can- deviate from the expected norm, but by default casters and their spells are a rarity on the material plane.

But some people can be born addicted to drugs (because their mother used while they were in utero). So how is that different from instinct? Can we be sure Fiends are anything but a race of addicts, who could be cured of their long-inbred viciousness?That comparison doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. Drugs cause immediate and ultimately fatal health complications. Most babies born addicted to drugs don't survive. A fiend is no more or less healthy than any other outsider for the evil it does and is and in the rare instances of sexually reproduced fiends there's no indication anywhere that their evil nature has any direct effect on infant mortality. It certainly has an indirect effect, what with infants growing up in the abyss, baator, and the like.

Far more importantly though. Drug babies aren't literally made of drugs when they're born but fiends are literally made of evil from the moment they're conceived.

Chaos isn't inherently worse than Law, it's just a different ethos, frustratingly slippery but not impossible to appeal to. You can't force a demon to walk the difficult path of redemption, but you can try to lure her toward it, by making it seem as if you know something she doesn't, making her want to try out your way and see if it might work better than what she's used to. Being reflexively contrary, she won't respond well to direct interference, so you'd have to be very subtle to nudge her in the right direction, and doing it for long enough (whether "forever" or in hopes of triggering a change in her nature) might be beyond the patience of virtually anyone sharing her Chaotic nature enough not to tick her off. Still, it's not completely impossible, and Chaos is big on pursuing the million-to-one risks in the hopes that an epically improbable win will be more impressive.It's a worthless waste of time. Even if you miraculously hold its attention long enough to trick it, and you are tricking it, into doing good, it'll immediately feel how unpleasant doing good is and loose interest in you altogether or attack. Even if you find some ubermasochistic demon that actually likes those unpleasant feelings, its chaotic nature means that it -will- still do reprehensible evil on a whim from time to time "just because."

(And the concept of an infant succubus is far too disturbing to contemplate.)Meh.

Perhaps. We don't even know for sure what's at the core of our being, we just have an educated guess. While the GM can make the kind of declarations you're making and have them be absolutely true, he can also make them and have them be only the prevailing assumption of the culture. And as I said before, I consider the idea too nauseating for me to ever sanction.The DM is free to deviate from the canon lore and the RAW it comes with, but that doesn't make it any less extant. Except for the bit about humanity and the blood of the sun and moon, everything I've said is found in the books. As to how the canon multiverse's alignment works making you nauseous; your weak stomach is dooming good to eventually being completely overcome in your world, so I'll stick with what's presented.

Perhaps, but it can be kept very minimal and hands-off in order to leave people the greatest degree of individual freedom. The best example of this is Iain Banks's "The Culture", in which a post-scarcity society grants people virtually unlimited license to do anything they want to (while benevolent machines very subtly convince them not to want to do things like blowing up entire cities just to watch them burn, unless they're in a hyper-realistic simulation designed to let them do exactly that without causing any actual harm).Huh. Sounds like Riedra during the quori's initial takeover.

Agreed. I always tend to portray Demons more as small-time troublemakers, psychopaths you should try to avoid, but ones somewhat less likely to come looking for you specifically. If they didn't breed like rabbits, it'd be easier to avoid them than to fight them; as it is, they are the most justified kill-on-sight targets you could ask for, but I still insist that they have to at least be doing something currently or potentially harmful before you're justified in attacking them. If they're just sitting around playing Parcheesi or something, instigating violence against them would be like pouring nitroglycerine on a lit cigarette; if you can't stand to let them sit there and stink up the joint, you get a cleric to Banish their butts.That's not something you'd ever see though. Or if it was, it's because they're waiting for something before they can further whatever insidious plot they're working on. Demons are chaotic and evil by their very nature. They can only sit still for a short time and when they move they do very bad things. If you don't have the stomach to kill them when you've got the chance you need to banish them if you can or find someone else with that ability or a stronger stomach ASAP. Just ignoring them is as utterly irresponsible as noticing the tiger cage at the zoo is opened and not telling anyone.

Being offensive is causing direct harm, albeit to a slight degree.Apparently you and I draw the line for direct harm in very differnt places.
But more importantly, racism degrades entire classes of beings without caring for them as individuals, and so it directly contradicts the "caring for the dignity of sentient beings" aspect of Good.You realize that good is now dealing in thought-crimes with this ruling, right? If speaking an unpleasant but true statement is evil then you're limiting the freedom of good creatures and pushing the whole setup toward good being a wishy-washy dictatorship; an odd direction to go, IMO.

Well it's more like speciesist (admittedly I goofed on that myself before), but it's still a very hurtful thing to say where anyone might possibly record your words and play them back as a way of hurting a smart orc's feelings by proving that he'll never be smart enough to satisfy some people.That's on the guy that records it and plays it back, not the speaker. In any case, the orc that's offended by the truth is being overly sensitive. He knows damn well his people are dumber than humans if he's taken any time to make observations on the matter. Smarter doesn't automatically equal better either, especially given that orc culture reveres strength above all else.
Intolerance of any variety is pretty much always evil, albeit the very slight degree of evil that almost nobody can avoid having a little bit of (which is why Good must include some degree of forgiveness for minor slights; the important thing is that it must never become a trend of not caring about them at all).You're now persecuting characters for who they like and dislike. A distaste for the race of people who come pouring down from the hills to raid and plunder every war season is perfectly reasonable and not being prejudiced toward of a race of beings who are literally made of, and on the whole predisposed toward doing, all the bad things that happen to good people is just plain stupid.