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Dausuul
2007-02-03, 02:36 AM
Recent events in the comic have got me thinking.

Can you go from Good alignment to Evil with a single evil deed?

I'm not just talking about paladins falling here. I'm talking about one single act that catapults a character all the way from the Good side of the spectrum to the Evil side. Naturally, it would have to be a pretty heinous act; you don't go Evil because you said a mean thing to your girlfriend when you were drunk.

What do people think?

(poll forthcoming in a moment...)

Dhavaer
2007-02-03, 02:37 AM
If you sacrifice someone to Nerull while eating kittens and raping puppies, then yeah.
Nothing within the bounds of sanity, though.

Inyssius Tor
2007-02-03, 03:02 AM
For some acts, "yes" would probably be a given; you can't Coup-de-Grace your sleeping child (if your sleeping child isn't, like, a vampire or something) without becoming Evil. However: your question gets more complicated depending on how you define alignment.

For your simple answer: yes. For a more complicated answer... you will never get a unified consensus, because in two pages the posts in this thread will all be full of little angry one-line quote-boxes.

My take: you don't commit Acts from out of nowhere. People don't just suddenly commit deeds, heinous, accidental, or otherwise without thinking about it at all (if they did, I believe that would be psychosis or a mind-affecting spell or possession); if you Coup-de-Grace your son, you've got to have a reason. If that reason is "he must die for the glory of our god!", you probably were evil for a good long while beforehand. If you were doing it because the voices in your head told you to: you probably aren't evil, you just failed your will save vs. Crazy. If you didn't actually make any rolls, you were probably crazy by default, and thus evil.

Dhavaer: Well, that's not really one single act; you need to get the altar all prepped and everything. I would say that requires malice aforethought, which means you were evil before the sacrificing/pedobestiality-rape/kitty-eating.

Dhavaer
2007-02-03, 03:13 AM
Dhavaer: Well, that's not really one single act; you need to get the altar all prepped and everything. I would say that requires malice aforethought, which means you were evil before the sacrificing/pedobestiality-rape/kitty-eating.

What if you found the altar/puppies/sacrifice/kittens?

Zincorium
2007-02-03, 03:13 AM
Depends on how evil it is, what your current alignment is (for instance, if you're already evil the answer is gonna be 'no', if you're neutral you can get away with evil-er acts without a change, but it's a short jump to evil if you do) and a bunch of other stuff.

"Everybody has a place in the spectrum and have to stay there or get moved to a different place" is generically the problem with the alignment system, as opposed to the allegiance system.

And I'm going to expand on something Inyssius Tor said, which is that you had to be evil beforehand. That's pretty much the sole crux on which my judgements rest: were you doing whatever it was for evil reasons? If not, and you aren't a stick-up-the-rear paladin, then no matter what it was, your alignment doesn't change.

My reasoning: alignment is a statement of how you're going to try to act, not a cosmic batch of tally-marks. Doing a bad thing for a good reason doesn't change the fact that you were trying to be good. You just lacked the foreknowledge that the end wouldn't be what you intended. Doing a good thing for selfish reasons wouldn't make you good if you're evil, it makes you deceptively evil.

Armads
2007-02-03, 03:31 AM
it depends on the act of evil committed.
For example, if you run around chopping off innocent people's heads, then that makes you evil. However, if you do something like steal money from someone, then you aren't evil unless you repeatedly do it. Otherwise, all rogues who use sleight-of-hand to steal things are evil

oriong
2007-02-03, 03:33 AM
The simple answer is 'no' but that's also not being very helpful.

Alignment is a matter of attitude and motivation for the most part.

From this perspective you do not behave a certain way because of your alignment, your alingment represents the way you think and act.

Someone with an evil alignment has that alignment because they have a mindset that is evil.

There are acts that, reasonably, require this mindset (or insanity) to be done (assuming of course free will, knowledge, yadda yadda) in order to be undertaken, therefore yes a single act could 'make' you evil .


However, these behaviors happen because your character chooses to act in a certain way, and these choices don't simply burst into being full fledged. A player can be arbitrary and random in their motivation, they can tell their paladin to go into an orphanage and begin slaughtering babies. If he did this there's almost no way you could justify the paladin remaining 'good' but in the same way there's no way you could justify the paladin actually doing that. There isnt' a switch in someone that says 'nice guy' and 'baby slaughterer' but from the player perspective it's that simple. From any sort of realism perspective the paladin would need a reason and a motivation to do this, and in just about every case that motivation would have forced them to stray from the side of 'good' a long time ago, this final act might cement them as 'evil' but they certainly don't leap wildly from one to another.

Green Bean
2007-02-03, 04:38 AM
I don't think that a decently-played character would be able to move two alignment steps with a single action, barring something like a Helm of Opposite Alignment. Yes, characters can commit horrible, kitten-violating things, but the fact is, any character willing to do that probably wasn't Good in the first place. I mean, anyone stumbling across sacrifical kittens and an altar to an evil god, who goes ahead and makes a sacrifice is Chaotic Neutral at best.

Saph
2007-02-03, 05:57 AM
My take: you don't commit Acts from out of nowhere. People don't just suddenly commit deeds, heinous, accidental, or otherwise without thinking about it at all (if they did, I believe that would be psychosis or a mind-affecting spell or possession); if you Coup-de-Grace your son, you've got to have a reason. If that reason is "he must die for the glory of our god!", you probably were evil for a good long while beforehand.

Seconded. You don't go from being a LG paladin to a CE psycho just on a whim. "Hey, you know what? I think I'll abandon all of my core principles that I've lived my life by, just for fun!" It should be a slow, gradual process, building on what was there already.

Of course, if you REALLY want to do it, I'm sure you can come up with something hideously vile enough to drop you to Evil in a single hit. (And please don't take that as a challenge.)

Going from Good to Neutral because of a single action is much more reasonable, though.

- Saph

Kantolin
2007-02-03, 06:03 AM
To be fair, there are examples in literature of someone who was previously very good seeing something so hideous, so horrible, and so earth-shattering that they... well, snapped.

But, those are extreme and should-be rare cases. Generally, it's a slide.

Iron_Mouse
2007-02-03, 06:38 AM
In case of a badly played character from a stupid player who didn't get the alignment system? Yes, maybe.

In all other cases, I would say no. If a deed exists, that is so horribly vile that it is actually abla to change your alignment from good to evil (and I doubt this), no good person would ever willingly commit it. Willingly means, not tricked, dominated, forced, geas etc..

Awetugiw
2007-02-03, 06:53 AM
One could of course try to plead temporary insanity or something, but I really think some good character who comes back home to find his family murdered by orcs has a small but existing chance of just 'snapping' and simply start killing orcs. (Especially orc children, they killed his children too, after all.)

And in most settings that would make him instantly evil.
Now one could of course argue that the character became evil the moment he decided to kill orcs, not the moment he actually killed orcs, but I think the 'evil' moment really is the killing.

The human mind is an amazing, and pretty scary thing in what it can justify to itself.

Saph
2007-02-03, 07:44 AM
One could of course try to plead temporary insanity or something, but I really think some good character who comes back home to find his family murdered by orcs has a small but existing chance of just 'snapping' and simply start killing orcs. (Especially orc children, they killed his children too, after all.)

And in most settings that would make him instantly evil.

I doubt it. Killing the orcs that killed your family definitely wouldn't drop you from Good. Killing every orc in sight without checking to see if they might be innocent/good might, but that would be more like Neutral. I'd say you'd have to continue to kill orcs and continue not to discriminate, even after the initial shock had worn off, to go all the way to Evil.

Coming home to find your family murdered by orcs and killing the orcs? Not even enough to drop you to Neutral, in my book. So to drop yourself all the way from Good to Evil you really have to work at it - it's not something that's just going to happen to you through no fault of your own.

- Saph

Yuki Akuma
2007-02-03, 08:01 AM
Yes.

But only extreme evil, like, say, murdering an orphanage full of orphans 'just for fun'.

And killing orcs just for being orcs would make you evil. Murder for no reason isn't Neutral!

Iron_Mouse
2007-02-03, 08:29 AM
One could of course try to plead temporary insanity or something, but I really think some good character who comes back home to find his family murdered by orcs has a small but existing chance of just 'snapping' and simply start killing orcs. (Especially orc children, they killed his children too, after all.)

And in most settings that would make him instantly evil.
Now one could of course argue that the character became evil the moment he decided to kill orcs, not the moment he actually killed orcs, but I think the 'evil' moment really is the killing.

The human mind is an amazing, and pretty scary thing in what it can justify to itself.
That's a good example. And yes, he might become evil during such an event.

However, it was indeed not because he killed the orcs. His alignment already changed in the moment he found his family. Something like that can change you greatly - after all, your life was destroyed, the ones you love are dead, nothing will be as it was before. That can (doesn't have to, but can) change a lot, your view on the world, your faith, and yes, also your alignment.
Killing the orcs then was just his first evil action. Assuming it actually is evil to kill orcs.

Zincorium
2007-02-03, 08:35 AM
Murder for no reason isn't Neutral!

Agreed, and also irrelevant to that specific example. As long as you have a reason to kill the orcs, such as they're the specific ones that killed your family, they are the tribe which organized the assault in which some of them killed your family, or even possibly as broad as, "I need to kill the orcs, because every one of them I've seen has been a family murdering psycho.", then you aren't acting out of malevolence. Of course, if he was calm enough to make the connection that he's doing as bad a deed as they did, and keeps doing it, then he's solidly evil.

Manslaughter, even voluntary, strikes me as the nuetral position, murder being the evil, and justifiable homicide the 'good' category of killing. My system of thought is based heavily on intent and legitimate justification. By legitimate, I mean you had a good reason when you did it, not cooked up afterwards when facing what you did.

Erk
2007-02-03, 08:42 AM
This sort of question is the reason I, personally, can't stand the alignment system and have house-ruled it out of my games. It's silly to put a tag on a character's personal philosophy and box-in "good" and "evil", two of the most debated terms of philosophy, like that.

Within standard d20 though, I would heavily penalise a player who suddenly and spuriously changed their character's alignment. If a player just decided they were sick of playing lawful good and wanted to go on a killing streak like those chaotic evil folks who are so fun at parties, penalties might fit the fact that the character had clearly gone insane - very low will save, loss of experience (character, being insane, can no longer learn properly because his/her perspective is so skewed), and intentional misdescription of things from me the GM to confuse the player just as his/her character is confused are some good examples.

Alignment change should be very, very slow or have a damned good reason behind it. That's why I don't like having alignment: if they players don't have that crutch to tell them how they should play their character, they generally pay more attention to the motivations behind their actions.

gaymer_seattle
2007-02-03, 09:38 AM
why do you ask this question? is there some evil act you'd like a character to commit, or is this commentary on Miko's final decent into ego-centric psychosis?

take a look at famous anti-heroes. what was their progression into dark paths. Anikin to Darth Vadar was a long road to te evil 'r us and a very sudden shopping spree.

sam neill's character in event horizon pretty much stumbled into the mire of evil while he was looking the other way.

dracula (or at least the 1990 something version) vlad the conquerer sold his soul on evilbay because the catholic church got per-snickety about the details of his wife's death

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-02-03, 09:53 AM
I try to be lenient on the alignment thing, as I think it's more of what best describes your character's intentions, not what encompasses every action they do. That said, if the shift is major enough, I'll change it to better reflect the depth of how different that action was.

And all the same, someone from one alignment can make options of their complete opposite alignment from time to time without really forcing me to change their alignment on them (except in the aforementioned extreme cases). Some people just get all uppity about a rigid system instead of allowing it to be fluid and restriction-less.

Alignment isn't the same as a paladin code.

EDIT: Bleh, that Dracula movie was horrid. Really, nothing like the guy. He was probably Lawful Neutral, as he was intent on fighting what he saw as evil (and was sometimes even right about it), but used extreme measures to do so. Go to Romania and ask around some time. Dracula is still remembered as a hero there.

NullAshton
2007-02-03, 10:19 AM
I don't think it's the evil act changing your alignment. I think it's the alignment changing, which is the reason why you do the evil act. Doing an evil act doesn't change your alignment, because the evil act is the effect of an evil alignment.

Thomas
2007-02-03, 10:36 AM
It's a no. Not because certain acts wouldn't merit an alignment change, but because no one will suddenly commit such acts without already being well on the way toward another alignment. You always see this silliness in D&D alignment discussions - ridiculous constructions and situations that should never happen, where someone suddenly takes some action they should never reasonably undertake. A noble and pure-hearted character isn't suddenly going to sacrifice a baby to a demon lord.

Don't let that confuse you, though - alignment doesn't define actions, it describes trends in behavior and motivation. But if the character you're describing is internally consistent and realistic, the above will hold true.

MrNexx
2007-02-03, 12:17 PM
I can think of several scenarios where "Yes" is the answer.

1) Quite frankly, Miko's current situation. We know her to have been a Paladin up until the gates of the city... she presumably rode Windstrider(striker? can't recall, don't feel like checking) all the way to the city, so she was still LG and still a Paladin until that point, as that's her Paladin mount, and would abandon her if she turned to evil. However, in the course of a single dramatic scene, she's renounced her oath, murdered her liege lord, and struck out at his rightful heir. Even when the gods quite obviously punished her for her acts, she continues to blame everyone else and attempt to murder them... even someone who attempts to arrest her, as he points out the flaws in her theory.
Now, there are two flaws that I see people arguing. One, people will say "that's not a single deed". It does, however, happen within the context of a single scene, and likely no more than five or six minutes at the most, which I think is sufficient.
The second is that people will argue that she's crazy, which I can't deny. But I do dismiss it, because D&D doesn't make such a distinction. It is your actions that matter in the D&D alignment system, and only to a lesser extent their motivations; in fact, I think that evidence points to good actions with evil motivations allowing someone to remain evil, but evil actions with good motivations will not allow someone to remain good.

2) Another situation, which you do not frequently see in D&D because of the requirements of prestige classes, is that of the soul-barter. Any person, in a moment of weakness, can be tempted to evil. What happens if a Paladin, who is a -9 and not stable, is visited by a Demon which promises to save his life in exchange for his service? Many will resist, but will they all? And simply agreeing to such servitude is, in itself, evil enough to warrant a shift to evil... you're swearing yourself to a being of pure evil.

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-02-03, 12:27 PM
I'd like to point out, again, that a paladin doesn't lose his/her powers only due to an alignment change. They more commonly lose them due to acting against their code of conduct- murder is DEFINITELY against that code, no question about it. In refference to the comic, Miko may very well still be LG, though she's on a downward spiral as we speak.

Woot Spitum
2007-02-03, 12:39 PM
In D&D, yes. The game does not have time to document a character's constant inner struggle with temptation. It is only when the character gives in and commits some horriffic, evil act that the alignment changes. I think most DMs would quickly kill off any characters who spend the whole gaming session documenting their character's constant inner struggle just to get them to shut up.

Shazzbaa
2007-02-03, 12:46 PM
Short answer, "No."

I agree with the above posts on how Alignment is a descriptor of a character's motivations, and that no act will change their alignment (but their alignment might have already changed, resulting in the act).

However, I would say that in almost every case, a single action is not enough to display a change straight from good to evil, even a big-deal one. I'd say a clear change in attitude should be present as well. Let's look at Miko -- she's LG, and she just murdered her leader. I hold that this act, in and of itself, won't change her alignment. She could react with: "Oh, 12 Gods, what have I done?!" then I'd accept it as a single (really big) mistake that wouldn't affect her alignment, because she's still got the LG mentality. However, she responded with shifting the blame and justifying her own behaviour... a selfish and almost... Evil reaction. If I were her DM I'd start knocking her alignment down to Neutral (since she may have good intent, but her actions have proven that she clearly holds her own pride above the cause of good in desperate situations), and eventually down to Evil if she keeps it up (and if it becomes clear that her intentions are now completely selfish). The mentality change is important.

OzymandiasVolt
2007-02-03, 01:07 PM
Short answer? "Yes".

Indon
2007-02-03, 01:18 PM
Not neccessarily. Falling as a paladin does not make you evil, or even neutral.

If one act is what signals an alignment shift, then that act is the cumulation of a long series of character development. Even then, it's far from guaranteed.

Miko's been lawful-analretentive for some time, yes, but that doesn't mean she's neccessarily evil, or even neutral yet. She's probably still sliding, though.

Now, some 'single' actions which _can_ make your alignment evil:

-As a divine casting class, accepting power from an evil source (such as voluntarily becoming a blackguard or something).
-Enacting an evil ritual-type thing, like becoming a lich or something. Yes, it's not a single deed neccessarily, but it is a single course of action.

Edit: Mind that these reasons are pretty much supernatural in nature.

Elliot Kane
2007-02-03, 03:58 PM
It would have to be pretty darned extreme, IMO. It's theoretically possible, sure, but unlikely. As others have said, alignment is about a pattern of behaviour. Even a good person who was sliding slowly towards neutral isn't going to suddenly jump straight over into evil without doing something truly terrible.

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-02-03, 04:36 PM
And even then, it's hard to justify the leap in roleplaying. It's more a metagamer aspect, where the player wants to do something entirely unlike how the player's character has been shown to act and think.

Then again, a downward spiral due to a heroic flaw or an upwards spiral due to enlightenment can be played well, so long as the player takes that extra mile to roleplay it right. I haven't seen that yet, but I'd love to.

Thomas
2007-02-03, 04:51 PM
If we're using Miko as an example... paladins fall by committing a single evil action. As has been pointed out, her alignment may or may not be Lawful Good right now. It's irrelevant to her falling.

However, assuming her alignment got changed from LG when she killed Shojo, that's not a single action causing an alignment change. The change was brewing for a long time - her motivations, her theories, her obsession... it was all pushing for that change. In fact, were it not for the fact that she was still a paladin until she struck down Shojo, it'd be perfectly conceivable that her alignment had already changed. (Though requiring an action to "seal the deal" is probably the fairest way a DM could run it, too.)

For D&D alignments, Jedi analogies work best. You have to have the fear, anger, selfishness, and so on to lead you to the Dark Side - you don't just suddenly, without motivation or context or prior build-up, strike down your father and fall to the Dark Side. (And, it can be further argued, you wouldn't just strike down your father unless that fear, anger, etc. were already there.)

Eighth_Seraph
2007-02-03, 05:00 PM
I'm with Shazzbaa on this one. Let's go back to the family-murdered-by-orcs example.

I a Lawful Good character, let's call him Bob, were to open the front door of his home to find his wife and children raped and slaughtered with a piece of paper depicting the symbol of an orc tribe lives nearby, and he knew that a small group from that tribe had been camping out near his village recently, he has a few choices. He could 1) Go the idealistic Christian route of forgiving the orcs and pick up the shattered remains of his life 2) Be indescribably outraged or sorrowful at what happened but decide against retribution 3) Be indescribably outraged or sorrowful at what happened and proceed to enact retribution, bloody or otherwise, upon the orcs.

Should he choose number 1, he then immediately becomes Lawful Good squared. Path number two would retain his alignment, but the subsequent emotional backlash may change that in unpredictable ways. Number three is a big if. If he personally delivers bloody and hateful retribution upon the orcs, his alignment steps immediately down to Neutral from Good. If he then considers his family avenged and goes on with his life, he can start from Lawful Neutral and work whichever way he desires. If instead he is consumed to destroy all orcs for the safety of others so that such a thing could never happen again, he starts teetering on the Neutral-Evil scale. If he then starts enacting the plan to do so, our good friend Bob becomes evil.

So in short, one action may set in motion a movement from Good to Evil, but that act alone will not make a character Evil unless he continues to do acts similar in nature to it.

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-02-03, 05:08 PM
Actually, I'm willing to call that character dumb first. Doesn't that sort of evidence seem... well, out of place? If he was smart, he'd do some detective work first to make sure he's angry at the right group. Whether the character's good, evil, or neutral, that's the best course of action.

Otherwise, I more or less agree.

Elliot Kane
2007-02-03, 05:08 PM
If Bob investigates and finds out that the orcs certainly were responsible for the deaths of his family, then wipes them out in order to prevent them doing it to anyone else's family in the future he also stays LG.

Dervag
2007-02-03, 05:41 PM
I say yes, but only for the most monstrous of acts. To go from a Good alignment to an Evil alignment, you have to go from a good person to an evil person. That's a very big jump to make.
Yes.
But only extreme evil, like, say, murdering an orphanage full of orphans 'just for fun'.
And killing orcs just for being orcs would make you evil. Murder for no reason isn't Neutral!What about killing orcs just for being the tribe of orcs that's been marauding through the countryside for the past month?

What if orc women and children aren't noncombatants?


Should he choose number 1, he then immediately becomes Lawful Good squared.Not necessarily. 'Good' and 'pacifism' are not the same thing at all. It is possible to be a corrupt and evil pacifist, and it is possible to be a militant and aggressive person of good alignment. For example, if these orcs did horrible things to your family, they might well do the same to other families. In that case, they're a threat to the community, too, so both Good and Law call on you to stop them. Realistically, you're going to have to kill at least some of them to make that happen.


Number three is a big if. If he personally delivers bloody and hateful retribution upon the orcs, his alignment steps immediately down to Neutral from Good. If he then considers his family avenged and goes on with his life, he can start from Lawful Neutral and work whichever way he desires. If instead he is consumed to destroy all orcs for the safety of others so that such a thing could never happen again, he starts teetering on the Neutral-Evil scale. If he then starts enacting the plan to do so, our good friend Bob becomes evil.So let me get this straight. If his response is to pick up a bow and start stalking the orc warband until he kills them all off, he becomes Lawful Neutral?

Would someone else lose their good alignment for doing the same thing he is now doing? Would the PCs lose their good alignment by tracking and killing these orcs? I don't think you're applying a fair standard of goodness here.

However, if he was viciously mutilating the bodies of orcs rendered helpless-but-still-conscious and cackling "Die, [insert curse here], DIE!", then yes, that would be an evil act and one that would change his alignment. Likewise if he became so violent against all orcs that he could no longer distinguish between threatening evil orcs and non-threatening non-evil orcs.

The Dirge
2007-02-03, 05:47 PM
Only if you did something incredibly evil/good like saving people from a train wreck/causing a train wreck.

Shazzbaa
2007-02-03, 06:50 PM
If he personally delivers bloody and hateful retribution upon the orcs, his alignment steps immediately down to Neutral from Good. If he then considers his family avenged and goes on with his life, he can start from Lawful Neutral and work whichever way he desires.

Actually, even then I, personally, would leave him at LG unless he had quite clearly changed. I don't think a single fit of anger is enough to change someone's alignment. Now, naturally, for something to drive him to run out and slaughter the orcs brutally, he is probably a very changed man, but he may still step away from this; as in the Miko example, where I said Miko could easily realise with horror what she has done, and how wrong she was, and remain LG. It depends, still, upon the man's mentality. Others have mentioned he may well have the good of others in mind, but I think even if he did act in sudden rage of retribution, he could realise the wrongness of it -- and then he'd just be a LG guy who made a mistake.

If he continues to justify the act to himself, it's quite likely that his outlook is changed now. That's when I would have alignment start to shift.

But I am perhaps overly merciful with these things. :smalltongue:

Stephen_E
2007-02-03, 09:05 PM
I think Thomas summed up the Miko situation best.

It wasn't a single act, it was a pattern of thought/behaviour followed by in short order 3 1/2 Chaotic/Evil acts -
1) Killing Shojo,
2) Trying to kill an unarmed Belkar,
3) Trying to kill Hinjo
1/2) Blaming it all on OotS/Roy.

And even so I'd say she's just on balancing on the border between Neutral and CE.

As for the person coming home to find his family murdered and going on a revenge murder spree. No that doesn't make him Evil from the 1st act. If he continues it will quite possibly end up changing his alignment, but the initial revenge killing won't do it. David Gemmel cover this ground incidentally with his Waylander character/series. The guy was a good soldier who quit to farm with his wife and son. Come home one day to find that a group of bandits had raped and killed his wife and son. Over time he hunts down and kills them all, including those who had turned away and tried to redeem themselves after realising the horror of what they'd done. Along the way he supported himself by doing other bounty hunting. By the time he'd finished he'd become a Assassin. He was still basically Neutral (from his original LG) in that he restricts his contracts to people who deserve death, but is slowly slipping to evil as he becomes more callous. The 1st book (Waylander) starts where he finally murders an unequivacally innocent person (a young King) and recognises that he's actually become evil.

Basically if you do a single out of character act, no matter how Evil/Good it is, it doesn't change your alignment because it is in effect a moment of insanity. If the act isn't completely out of character then we're no longer talking about a single act, but a pattern of behaviour which the act is merely a singular (possibly defining) point within.

Stephen

Avicenex
2007-02-04, 12:26 AM
Here's my take, then I'll see what everyone else had to say...

The process of becoming evil usually takes a long time, and is gradual. However, though the shift to the "dark side" may take some time, a single act done by a person who has been shifting to evil may be a culmination of their journey to evil, and represent their final fall to darkness. Therefore, though the alignment might shift from good to evil in one go, that's only because they have been slowly falling, but that fall hadn't manifested until that one evil deed.

It makes sense to me.

Zincorium
2007-02-04, 01:42 AM
Here's my take, then I'll see what everyone else had to say...

The process of becoming evil usually takes a long time, and is gradual. However, though the shift to the "dark side" may take some time, a single act done by a person who has been shifting to evil may be a culmination of their journey to evil, and represent their final fall to darkness. Therefore, though the alignment might shift from good to evil in one go, that's only because they have been slowly falling, but that fall hadn't manifested until that one evil deed.

It makes sense to me.

AKA the 'point of no return'. I agree, an otherwise gradual alignment progression can easily be cemented in place by a single act. That one act may be when the needle goes from good to neutral or neutral to evil, but it is in no way the only act that factors into the change.

Mewtarthio
2007-02-04, 01:46 AM
1) Quite frankly, Miko's current situation. We know her to have been a Paladin up until the gates of the city... she presumably rode Windstrider(striker? can't recall, don't feel like checking) all the way to the city, so she was still LG and still a Paladin until that point, as that's her Paladin mount, and would abandon her if she turned to evil. However, in the course of a single dramatic scene, she's renounced her oath, murdered her liege lord, and struck out at his rightful heir. Even when the gods quite obviously punished her for her acts, she continues to blame everyone else and attempt to murder them... even someone who attempts to arrest her, as he points out the flaws in her theory.
Now, there are two flaws that I see people arguing. One, people will say "that's not a single deed". It does, however, happen within the context of a single scene, and likely no more than five or six minutes at the most, which I think is sufficient.
The second is that people will argue that she's crazy, which I can't deny. But I do dismiss it, because D&D doesn't make such a distinction. It is your actions that matter in the D&D alignment system, and only to a lesser extent their motivations; in fact, I think that evidence points to good actions with evil motivations allowing someone to remain evil, but evil actions with good motivations will not allow someone to remain good.

She's been teetering at the very edge of LG for some time. I'd say the only reason she's remained a Paladin is that the Twelve Gods hoped she'd see the error of her ways and repent eventually. She's still in desperate panic, so she's Neutral at worst right now. She may eventually turn her back on the Twelve Gods and become evil, though.


2) Another situation, which you do not frequently see in D&D because of the requirements of prestige classes, is that of the soul-barter. Any person, in a moment of weakness, can be tempted to evil. What happens if a Paladin, who is a -9 and not stable, is visited by a Demon which promises to save his life in exchange for his service? Many will resist, but will they all? And simply agreeing to such servitude is, in itself, evil enough to warrant a shift to evil... you're swearing yourself to a being of pure evil.

When the guy returns from the dead, he'll probably regret his choice. He may or may not be bumped down to Neutral: If he reneges on his contract and suffers the penalties, then he's remained Good and proven himself by intentionally suffering a fate worse than death rather than perform an Evil act (this does nothing for the poor guy's afterlife, though). If he wants to start working for the demon (shouldn't it be a devil, though?), he'll shift first to Neutral as he inevitably tries to justify his actions and then inevitably to Evil.

Of course, this is all moot when you factor in magical compulsion (eg "I swear to work for you" "KERRZAP! You're Evil now! Go kill a puppy!"), but that's not really a moral issue.


Here's my take, then I'll see what everyone else had to say...

The process of becoming evil usually takes a long time, and is gradual. However, though the shift to the "dark side" may take some time, a single act done by a person who has been shifting to evil may be a culmination of their journey to evil, and represent their final fall to darkness. Therefore, though the alignment might shift from good to evil in one go, that's only because they have been slowly falling, but that fall hadn't manifested until that one evil deed.

It makes sense to me.

He'll slide to Neutral first. Anakin was Neutral long before he became Darth Vader. Of course, since Lucas has actually stated that there is a Light and Dark side to the Force and the latter really does corrupt people, not to mention the fact that he's clearly raving insane with the power of the Dark Side on Mustafa, there's a bit of pseudo-magical corruption involved (not that it excuses him any: He embraced the corruption willingly).

TheOOB
2007-02-04, 02:46 AM
Generally speaking, while it is virtually impossible for a single act of good to change your alignment from evil to good, the reverse is true. Slaughting a town full of innocent people for money will make even the holiest of paladins an evil person. If a saint went on a killing spree he'd be considered evil, almost no amount of good can atone for the senseless loss of life they would cause. Yet even if a serial killer donated all their money to charity, their still a bad person.

Whamme
2007-02-04, 07:24 AM
Is it possible to move from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil in one moment?

yes. If you've been acting CE with the outward semblance of being LG (killing those you could justify only) and then get put in a situation where 'what I want to do' and 'the right thing' are different...

The gods are still fallible. /The DM/ is fallible.

If you suddenly kill someone utterly undeserving and say that this was, all along, exactly what you'd do, and you have no regrets... change.

If what has been the case is an internal war between conscience and evil, and they' e been cooperating but no longer...

Mewtarthio
2007-02-04, 01:06 PM
Is it possible to move from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil in one moment?

yes. If you've been acting CE with the outward semblance of being LG (killing those you could justify only) and then get put in a situation where 'what I want to do' and 'the right thing' are different...

The gods are still fallible. /The DM/ is fallible.

If you suddenly kill someone utterly undeserving and say that this was, all along, exactly what you'd do, and you have no regrets... change.

If what has been the case is an internal war between conscience and evil, and they' e been cooperating but no longer...

Then you've secretly been Neutral posing as LG. The DM didn't know about that because you lied to him when you told him your alignment (retroactively, anyway: It's either that or you don't really understand that LG guys aren't guys whose best interests happen to coincide with LG ones). By the same token, I could play a holy man who wanders from town to town giving money to the poor and sparing defeated opponents, but when the party recovers the evil artifact, I could take it and kill them all. In this case, a few things are possible:

1) I the player have decided to become arbitrarily evil. That's quite frankly poor roleplaying, and is such an egregious offense that the DM has full right to say "you die of a sudden brain aneurysm, now get out of my group."
2) I have really been plotting this all along, but I wrote "LG" on my sheet so that the Paladin wouldn't register me as "Evil." That's just metagame cheating. See above.
3) I have really been plotting this all along, and I worked out with the DM beforehand that I was really evil, but wrote "LG" on the sheet to throw the other players off the scent. My character has kept himself protect with various nondection items, and had I ever been subjected to a Holy Word spell I really would have suffered the consequences.

Tussy the Druid
2007-02-04, 01:10 PM
It depends. If a good character finds out he doesn't like being good, and goes into a home and slaughters everyone, then he would probably be evil. But I'd say most of it is opinion and the circumstances.

Thomas
2007-02-04, 01:13 PM
It depends. If a good character finds out he doesn't like being good, and goes into a home and slaughters everyone, then he would probably be evil. But I'd say most of it is opinion and the circumstances.

That doesn't sound like a Good character, does it? How often do people go, "Hey, you know, I don't like having a conscience and not acting in a horrible, selfish, antisocial way. I think I'm going to go kill everybody?"

An argument like that could only apply to poorly-played D&D characters (D&D characters because they have alignments in the first place), never to any realistic character.

Stephen_E
2007-02-04, 07:07 PM
Generally speaking, while it is virtually impossible for a single act of good to change your alignment from evil to good, the reverse is true. Slaughting a town full of innocent people for money will make even the holiest of paladins an evil person. If a saint went on a killing spree he'd be considered evil, almost no amount of good can atone for the senseless loss of life they would cause. Yet even if a serial killer donated all their money to charity, their still a bad person.

The problem is that no Saint or Paladin should be waking up and going "let's kill a town full of innocent people today". As Thomas said this is either bad roleplaying or someone theorising a nonsencial hypothetical situation.

About the only exception to this is drugs/brain injury/magic that cause a radical personalty change. If that happens AND the effect is permanent, then yes their alignment has changed, but not through any act of theirs. The alignment change isn't caused by the slaughter of the town full of innocent people, it's caused by the putting on a Helm of Opposite Alignment (or equivalent in Drugs/Brain Injury) and even then it's only a "single act" if it was done unknowingly or unwillingly. If they chose to do it then again we're seeing a series of actions culminating in the final "incident" of change.

Stephen

knightsaline
2007-02-05, 07:14 AM
I say it is a gradual process, but it depends on the actual act. Doing small, evil things like stealing your next door neighbors newspaper isn't really evil, its just annoying. animating the dead of a village that has just been raided by orcs to get revenge on the orcs isn't evil. animating the bodies just for the hell of it is evil.

oh and casting deathwatch should not be evil. you are effectively watching out for your fellow adventurers in doing so.

Thomas
2007-02-05, 07:44 AM
I say it is a gradual process, but it depends on the actual act. Doing small, evil things like stealing your next door neighbors newspaper isn't really evil, its just annoying. animating the dead of a village that has just been raided by orcs to get revenge on the orcs isn't evil. animating the bodies just for the hell of it is evil.

Can you imagine a realistic, internally consistent non-Evil character who would suddenly decide to animate bodies as undead "for the hell of it" ? I can't.

Indon
2007-02-05, 08:47 AM
animating the dead of a village that has just been raided by orcs to get revenge on the orcs isn't evil.

I would say that powerful necromancy like that _is_ innately evil... just not evil enough to change your alignment from a single act.

Good people can do bad things, and vice versa. Unless they're some kind of Paladin, or they're in Ravenloft, a single evil act is unlikely to matter.

Telonius
2007-02-05, 09:21 AM
I would say yes, but only in extreme cases. Most often it's a slow movement from one alignment to another; small evil acts lead to large evil acts. But occasionally, a very good person does a very bad thing; then decides to continue on that path without accepting correction or punishment. Yes, that person might have had something building in them for awhile, but until the action is taken, there's not necessarily an alignment shift. Even paladins feel temptation, but that doesn't mean they're not lawful good. And almost all lawful good characters do things that aren't right occasionally. The lawful good part is that when they do something wrong, and realize it, they accept responsibility and try to correct it.

OOTS plot description ahead...

Rich actually did a very good job of portraying just that with the Miko storyline. She did a very bad thing (killing Shojo), but it was still possible for her to remain lawful good. She could have even regained her paladinhood, if she wanted. Hinjo offered her a chance to correct herself, but she refused. Those two taken together - the evil act, and the refusal to attone - changed her alignment, imo.

Lilivati
2007-02-05, 01:16 PM
Good aligned characters sometimes do evil things. Evil aligned characters sometimes do good things. Alignment describes a pattern of behavior, and thus while an individual act should count in the balance, it shouldn't sway the balance.

Of course, exceptions can be made for willful acts of great evil, done with the character's full intent and knowledge. A decision on the character's part to permanently abandon their previous philosophy, if you will. Also, I think an act of great evil can cause an alignment shift in the sense that the character will be regarded as evil by those who know of the act, and will have to work to regain their former reputation.

longtooth878
2007-02-07, 03:52 PM
Well I would like to think that both are right. In gaming terms we are dealing with stats and statistics and alignment. And alignments are use as bench marks on how a character will act in any given situation. And if you are good and do an evil act (and I mean EVIL) then you are evil. And should get all the penalties/rewards associated with doing such an act. A really good system to track alignments is a chart in DragonLance (first ed.) hand book. If you have characters bouncing back and forth like a game of pong than you should have a talk or start penalizing exp.

LotharBot
2007-02-07, 04:13 PM
It's possible for a single act to result in a total change of perspective. It's even possible for an evil character to do something so evil that they look at themselves and go "WTF am I thinking?" and make a significant shift toward the "good" end of the spectrum. (It may not become outwardly apparent that the shift is permanent for a while, so most people and DMs would wait to change the alignment on the character sheet, but a single act can cause the change.)

Various forms of religious conversion, or even just having an "a-ha!" moment, can also lead to big shifts in alignment. I taught Sunday School with a brother and sister whose parents were druggies, and they eventually ended up in the foster care system. Neither of them grew up with a healthy sense of cause-and-effect, because how good or bad they behaved had no bearing on whether daddy would beat them when he got home. So they'd do all sorts of crazy stuff, not understanding that trying to light the house on fire is a bad things. I remember at one point, though, the sister seemed to suddenly "get it" -- she changed from chaotic to lawful, so to speak. I don't know whether it was something somebody said or something she noticed watching others, but all of a sudden she understood cause and effect and consequences, and she wanted to behave herself. As far as I know, the brother never did make the shift.

Spartan_Samuel
2007-02-08, 09:34 AM
No. The thought itself that alignment can ACTIVELY design and constrict personality and actions is absurd to me. Alignment SHOULD be a byproduct of the personality. Just a side comment. In no way should it ever affect decision making. That should be dealing 100% with personality and the goals in the order of highest priority of that individual in the given situation.

silvermesh
2007-02-08, 11:48 AM
No. The thought itself that alignment can ACTIVELY design and constrict personality and actions is absurd to me. Alignment SHOULD be a byproduct of the personality. Just a side comment. In no way should it ever affect decision making. That should be dealing 100% with personality and the goals in the order of highest priority of that individual in the given situation.

having alignment change based on actions isn't restricting, it's making alignment a direct result of personality.

the problem here is the idea that "a single action changes a characters... ALIGNMENT.

alignment is based in the charcetrs persona. A human being CAN totally change his outlook, which can greatly effect his personality. this is alignment change. it's usually a gradual thing, but it doesn't have to be.

whether or not a single action changes the characfter's alignment is up to the player, because he is the one who decides what the character does NEXT. the single action isn't what defines the characters persona, why he did it, and how it affects him are. The reason we always say that alignment isn't based on one action, it's based on many is to simplify for people who can't quite figure out what alignment they need to be. most "alignment changes" such as this are handed down by the DM because the character is not being played in such a way that fits that alignment at all.

overall character actions helps define alignment onlky because it gives a glimpse at the characters persona. the persona can change in the blink of an eye under the right conditions, and if the player feels that his character has changed drastically, his alignment should be changed then and there. if the player feels that the character was acting irrationally, and may later regret his actions, there is no need for an alignment change, as the persona remains the same.

The question is whether the personality changed, the alignment follows suit. The big problem comes in when a player either can't decide, or when the DM simply doesn't want to trust his player when he says "I just killed that puppy, but I feel bad about it." destructive behavior can easily destroy a well-balanced campaign, and most DMs don't want to risk that that player isn't going to ruin his entire campaign by turning "chaotic stupid".

every experienced DM I know has seen at least one player randomly decide to start killing everything for no apparent reason.

In a campaign where the DM can trust his players to know what they're doing, alignment changes only happen when the player wills them to, because the character has undergone stress, or whatever it may be that made him change how he sees the world.

the part I never understood is why people think they need to cling to the OLD idea that alignment change should always be penalized by the DM, and any DM who thinks the player isn't playing the right alignment is damning the PC to hell by suggesting a different alignment designation. by RAW, there are no penalties for alignment chnage unless your character is a member of a certain class, and if your character doesn't have the right attittude he shouldn't be a member of that class anyhow.

talsine
2007-02-08, 01:00 PM
I'm just suprised that their are so few votes for "alignment is stupid" While i like the discussions it creates, i just do away with alignment completely in my games. Which means altering and removing some spells, but as they rarely come into play in most games i've played its not a huge issue.

As for the conversation at hand, its very rare for one action to mkae you "evil" in game as events on that level tend to be part of the characters backround "my family was slaughtered by orks and i hunt them all because of that" or "my wife was killed bya dragon and i won't rest till i've destroyed them all" blah blah blah are great for giving a character motivation, but is so rare outside of that as to be mostly just a thought experiment kind of thing. I've been playing for years and i've seen it happena handful of times, and most of them were planed because someone wanted to change directions witha character and needed an in game reason to do so.

as an asside, if a spell has the "evil" descriptor, casting it is an evil act, thats RAW, and a great example of why i think alignment is a relic of a time better left behind.

JimmyDPawn
2007-02-08, 01:03 PM
My take: you don't commit Acts from out of nowhere. People don't just suddenly commit deeds, heinous, accidental, or otherwise without thinking about it at all (if they did, I believe that would be psychosis or a mind-affecting spell or possession); if you Coup-de-Grace your son, you've got to have a reason. If that reason is "he must die for the glory of our god!", you probably were evil for a good long while beforehand. If you were doing it because the voices in your head told you to: you probably aren't evil, you just failed your will save vs. Crazy. If you didn't actually make any rolls, you were probably crazy by default, and thus evil.


I have to agree.

The other major thing to consider, is that players don't always consider too carefully what a certain alignment constitutes. I know one guy playing a something neutral halfing, who axed a peasnt in the face for just trying to kick him once. And that was five minutes into the game. Needless to say, the DM bumped him down to chaotic evil.

Logically, it shouldn't jsut happen, except in certain cases, but I certainly agree that if a player takes one alignment to avoid certain spell effects, or to get a prestige class, but generally ACT greatly outside of that, they should definatly get bumped out.