Question on house rules

[ilovefire]

I am designing a campaign setting, and it... well, it's not excatly normal. Alignment dosent' exist, positive and negative energy are netiher good nor evil, anything taht deals with life energy is necromantic... I'll just list the 'special rules' under here.

* There is no alignment. Detect (Alignment) spells do not exist. Paladins get a spell like ability Detect Heathen which allows them to detect those of a religion opposing theirs instead of Detect Evil.
* All healing spells are Necromancy [Positive Energy, Healing]
* All spells dealing with positive energy are Necromancy [Positive Energy]
* All spells dealing with negative energy are Necromancy [Negative Energy]
* All alignment descriptors for spells are removed.

Are these rules a bad idea overall as general house rules, is my question, really.

[Golthur]

So long as you cover the bases with abilities like a paladin's smite, and spells that work differently on people of different alignments, you should be fine. I usually eliminate alignment in most of my games as well. I'm not a fan of absolute, detectable good and evil.

As for the healing -> Necromancy change, I'm generally in agreement. I have no idea why they made healing Conjuration magic except to keep the idea that Necromancy is eeeeevil. :smile:

[TheOOB]

Removing changes a suprising amount, but it's not thats too terribly hard to do. Paladins are the most affected by it, just turn detect evil to detect undead, and make smite work on anyone (trust me, the palis will still be weak). Clerics are hit pretty hard, lossing many of their good spells, but I dont think its a bad thing making clerics less powerful.

As for moving the healing subschool to necromancy, that works fine. Healing spells make sense as either evocation (they channel energy), or necromancy(which can do anything with negative/positive energy).

[ilovefire]

actually, it'd probably increase the cleric's power, since it's not the spell that is removed: just the descriptor. So, you can have a cleric of Pelor casting Deathknell all day long, if they wanted to, for example. I was going to change the paladin's Smite Evil to a generic Smite, and I fixed their detect evil allready.

[I_Got_This_Name]

Specific deities can still have objections to certain spells and refuse to grant them; the alignment descriptors on cleric spells are a shorthand rule for which deities object to which spells.

[TheOOB]

Just because animate dead isn't an evil act anymore doesn't mean Generic God #A wants you casting it. It's the same visa-verse, just because raise dead isn't a good spell doesn't mean Nerull likes it.

[ilovefire]

Right. I'll have to check spells on a case-by-case basis... fortunately, the world'll only have three dieties, so it should be easy enough to list what spells they do not allow clerics to cast.