Healer/Dread Necromancer combo. Can you make the alignments work?

[Roga]

Hey Playgrounders, I was dusting off an old character who went Healer/Dread Necro/Mystic theurge, but as I'm pouring over the build with a more experienced eye, I wonder if it's doomed to fail in its conception.
The big concern: Alignments

The Healer requires good, and mentions an oath, but it doesn't have a rules block about said oath other than in its Weapons and Armor proficiency section, where the oath has its restriction of Heavy metal armor, and in the Ex-Healer section it mentions that Healers can loose their spells by "grossly violating her ethos (such as refusing to heal an ally or good aligned creature) would cause them to lose all spells and class features until they Atone.

Dread Necromancers requires non-good, but states that they often balance evil acts with good intentions to remain neutral. There is no Ex-Dread Necro section that would rob them of any features if they became good aligned, but the nature of their work makes good admittedly very difficult.

So the question being, would becoming neutral violate Healer? You couldn't advance via the base class, but I think you could with Mystic Theurge. I have a soft spot for these two classes, and the character in question believed that mindless undead shouldn't be evil. Better to have the dead protect the living. Better to have tireless skeletal beast of burden on farms that require neither food nor rest. All while treating the living as an all too fragile treasure to be protected and nurtured.

I know the arguments for necromancy to not strictly be evil, but I'm wondering if people feel this character can work mechanically or if one side stymies the other.

[ShurikVch]

Take a page from Aleam Valassar (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fc/20060609a)'s book? Paladin and Assassin are morally incompatible too...

Alternately, look at it like this: Paladin can fall, Dread Necromancer can't. Go Dread Necromancer first, than multiclass into paladin?
Or go full Gray Guard, then into the Dread Necromancer?
Or, maybe, use one of the numerous evil variants of Paladin?
Or, maybe, some (prestige-)class, which is not exactly a Paladin, but very close mechanically and flavor-wise?

[GilesTheCleric]

Hellbred (FC2 78) Paladins can leave and enter the class with no penalty. They also don't have their alignment affected by some evil actions.

[Segev]

Starting as a dread necromancer and going to the point you want to stop taking levels of that class before having some sort of moral awakening and becoming Good and taking levels of Healer would be the simplest way to go, though mayhaps not the most optimal. Get a PrC (Mystic Theurge should work) to advance both, later, as advancing DN casting via a PrC won't require you to meet the alignment restriction the way advancing DN itself would.

[Zaq]

Hellbred (FC2 78) Paladins can leave and enter the class with no penalty. They also don't have their alignment affected by some evil actions.

That's not quite how Hellbred work. Hellbred can leave and reenter Paladin, but that doesn't have anything to do with any other class, and the OP had nothing to do with Paladins. Evil Exception doesn't loosen class alignment restrictions, either. It just lets them cast [Evil] spells and use evil-aligned magic items. It even specifies that they can still lose their powers from violating a class's code of conduct.

Overall, I think alignment restrictions are dumb and don't make the game better, so I'm totally in favor of getting your GM to relax them. I think that's going to be your best bet—pitch the character to the GM as a whole, and convince him or her to waive one alignment restriction or the other in order to make the character function.

Spoiler for tangent:
In general, I think that talking to the GM to get the desired results is usually a better idea than trying to dance around some weird RAW argument (in this case, the whole idea with starting as one class and shifting alignments and yada yada). Maybe this is just how the people I game with tend to think, but I've never met a GM who WOULD say "well, I wasn't going to allow you to mix Healer and Dread Necromancer, but you've found a weird and suspect way to advance them by RAW, so I guess go ahead" but who WOULDN'T say "oh, you want to mix Healer and Dread Necro? That's a pretty cool character concept. Sure, let's just ignore the alignment restriction." I fully understand that we discuss things by RAW here, and I'm usually in favor of that, but there comes a point where you have to look at the desired results of a given exercise and wonder if it should really take that kind of mental gymnastics to accomplish that sort of thing, and whether those mental gymnastics are more likely to get the character to the table than five minutes of asking the GM to reconsider one rule.

I feel the same way about people trying to get around the Truenamer's Law of Sequence by using the "effective spell level" trick—I have a hard time imagining a GM who would let you get away with that because it's RAW but who wouldn't work with you to relax the RAW on the Law of Sequence. If the GM wants the Law of Sequence to apply, they'll probably shut down the "effective spell level" trick regardless of what the RAW is, and if the GM doesn't want the Law of Sequence to apply, they'll probably work with you to get around it without resorting to the silliness of the "effective spell level" trick. In this case, if the GM wants to let you mix Healer and DN because that's a cool character concept, they're not going to force you to mess around with alignment shifts and technical arguments about lack of falling text, but if they don't want to let you get away with the concept in the first place, they're probably not going to be persuaded by those same alignment shift arguments.

I'm sure there exist GMs out there who really do try to play things as close to RAW as possible, so I'm sure that SOMEONE out there had to convince a GM that a weird RAW trick based on sketchy language would work before bringing a character to a table. And I understand that answering every topic with "your GM is the one you really need to convince; just talk to them about tweaking this rule or that rule" isn't going to get us a lot of interesting discussion, nor is every topic about a character who exists or wants to exist in a real game with an involved GM. But when I see something like this, it really seems to make a lot more sense to me to remember that not only can you get a GM to tweak or waive a written rule, but the GM is also fully within their rights to shut down something that's based on a sketchy reading of RAW (or anything else they don't like and don't want in the game, for that matter), no matter how RAW it is. At that point, you have to look at the desired results and figure out if the GM is going to want those results to hit the table. If the GM likes the results, the method of getting those results matters less, because the GM will go along with it. If the GM doesn't like the results, the method also matters less, because the GM can still say no even if you stick to strict RAW.

For theoretical discussions, sure, dive into the RAW all you want. That's a lot of fun, and I'm fully in favor of that. I'm not going to pretend I never do that, or that it's a bad thing to do it. But when you're talking about bringing a character to an actual game, and there's an annoying rule in the way of your character concept, all the RAW in the world won't get a character to the table if the GM doesn't like it, and all the RAW in the world won't stand in the way of making something happen that the GM actively wants to happen.

[Roga]

I guess at it's heart is that the Healer's oath is poorly defined, and if you break it you lose your spells until you atone. Do you feel necromancy would violate it? Some argue it's harmless if it's mindless undead used for good purpose, others say it's purely anathema to what a healer is.

[ZamielVanWeber]

I guess at it's heart is that the Healer's oath is poorly defined, and if you break it you lose your spells until you atone. Do you feel necromancy would violate it? Some argue it's harmless if it's mindless undead used for good purpose, others say it's purely anathema to what a healer is.

The healer has no undead specific powers, so no real anti-undead flavor. If you were trying to mix a cleric of Pelor and a dread necromancer then there would be issues. When it comes to undead creation I tend to default to Wee Jas's wisdom: if the body is procured lawfully the act is acceptable, but be careful: actual undead creation is [Evil] and that can make you fall. As for controlling undead it is unaligned so it would depend entirely on what you do with the undead that you are commanding.

[Roga]

Thank you all for the excellent responses. I think I'm over-thinking it. I'm definitely going to take Zaq and ZamielVanWeber's advice. As long as I stick to lawfully acquired corpses, and I'm not doing evil with them, all while offering a hand of healing to all who need it I'll be just fine. I'm looking forward to playing this concept again. :smallsmile: