DM Help When to change my players alignment? [Archive]

Deca4531

2016-10-11, 12:03 PM

So I'm running my players through Rise of the Rune Lords (mild spoilers ahead) and they are just starting chapter 2 with the Skinsaw man. Our lawful good dwarf monk, neutral dwarf fighter and neutral summoner were on their way to question the the NPC in the loony bin. When they got there the doctor refused them entry, saying he was too busy for visitors. They tried to talk their way in but no one used their diplomacy skill ( probably because they all suck at it.) to do it so he remained unfriendly. As soon as they left they decided to break in... like immediately , less than five minutes after they were kicked out. So this group of very non stealthy people of course get caught breaking in the front door of all places. Two of the orderlies approach them and tell them to leave several times before drawing weapons and attacking. I made a point of telling the party they were using billy clubs in a non-lethal way. The Fighter get hit first, takes all of 3 points of damage, and responds by axing a dude in the face. My real issue comes from the monk. He is a lawful alignment as is required for a monk , but he claims that he only needs to be lawful to personal code. He also killed one of the orderlies and had a prepared action to attack one of them if they entered the room , not if they attacked, simply entered the room. He was hiding behind the door and prepared an action to doorcheck whoever walk into the room.

Alignment has always been a very grey area in these kinds of games. Should I change my player's alignment based on their actions? The neutral characters I'm not too concerned about since their alignment does that affect anything , however the monk is another matter. He broke the law by breaking into the hospital, premeditated assault followed by murder of two, to his knowledge, innocent Hospital workers. Earlier in the game there was also another question of morality that I mostly let slide. The party was clearing out a goblin dungeon and came acrossed a Nursery of goblin babies. The two neutral characters debated between murdering them , enslaving them, feeding them their own parents that they had just killed, but eventually settled for leaving them locked cages to starve to death. The lawful good monk was privy to all of this and did nothing. can a lawful good character standby while children are left to die? Are goblin children considered to be evil even if they are just babies? Would a dwarf think twice about killing a goblin baby?

Any comments or opinions on this matter are greatly appreciated. And if anyone knows of an official document that details what players like monks and paladins can or can't do that would be awesome.

Tiri

2016-10-11, 12:07 PM

dascarletm

2016-10-11, 12:16 PM

Lawful has virtually nothing to do with law. I'm not saying the dwarf should or should not slide on that axis, but breaking laws has nothing to do with it.

Khedrac

2016-10-11, 12:45 PM

Important is to warn that players that their characters are heading for alignment changes. Generally one shouldn't change alignments for a single action, but a pattern of behaviour.

That said, I definitely think that aligmnment warnings for "evil" bahviour are appropriate to the good characters in this situation. Note: depending on what they knew the characters may have had justification for the armed break-in, but it's the use of lethal damage in response to non-lethal that really justifies this one, so I am very much with you that that behaviour is not on for "good" characters.

Deca4531

2016-10-11, 01:37 PM

Manyasone

2016-10-11, 01:42 PM

...The two neutral characters debated between murdering them, enslaving them, feeding them their own parents that they had just killed, but eventually settled for leaving them locked cages to starve to death...

This is not neutral behaviour. This is hand down evil behaviour and the feeding part is just plain sick.
My players know me and this would not, under any circumstance, fly at my table.
Even when they are playing evil

Barstro

2016-10-11, 01:46 PM

Lawful has virtually nothing to do with law. I'm not saying the dwarf should or should not slide on that axis, but breaking laws has nothing to do with it.

Can one really be lawful to chaotic actions, though? In the case of guards obviously intending non-lethal damage (to take the DM's word as true), responding by "keeping it real" and killing them is hardly lawful. That strikes me as quite chaotic.

I'm all for "ends justify the means", but I think RAW says differently and actions speak for themselves.

Regardless of the above, a few actions do not really rise to an alignment change.

Geddy2112

2016-10-11, 01:48 PM

Lawful has virtually nothing to do with law. I'm not saying the dwarf should or should not slide on that axis, but breaking laws has nothing to do with it.

Important is to warn that players that their characters are heading for alignment changes. Generally one shouldn't change alignments for a single action, but a pattern of behaviour.

That said, I definitely think that aligmnment warnings for "evil" bahviour are appropriate to the good characters in this situation. Note: depending on what they knew the characters may have had justification for the armed break-in, but it's the use of lethal damage in response to non-lethal that really justifies this one, so I am very much with you that that behaviour is not on for "good" characters.
These two beat me to it. "lawful" is not really about law-it would have been better to name the alignment "order" or "ordered" as it opposes chaos, not about promoting pen and paper law. Lawful characters frequently favor lawful systems, show them respect that is due, and usually don't try to destroy them(instead change them through legal and orderly means). Monks are lawful because 1. most learn a monastic tradition, and traditions are lawful. 2. their lives are managed by discipline and order-their training and teaching grinds that order, perfection, structure(in some form) are important and how you go about a path to being better. A lawful character has no inherent reason they must follow a written law, although most will and if they break one they have a good reason.

Also, a few actions here and there don't change alignment. Alignment is a consistent pattern of action or a worldview. This allows for a few actions out of alignment not to change it, but also covers the base of a character "who swears they are good' but kills everyone and everything without remorse to still be evil. Consistent patters of action show a worldview, and if they are saying otherwise they are lying to themselves and everyone else.

Earlier in the game there was also another question of morality that I mostly let slide. The party was clearing out a goblin dungeon and came acrossed a Nursery of goblin babies. The two neutral characters debated between murdering them , enslaving them, feeding them their own parents that they had just killed, but eventually settled for leaving them locked cages to starve to death. The lawful good monk was privy to all of this and did nothing. can a lawful good character standby while children are left to die? Are goblin children considered to be evil even if they are just babies? Would a dwarf think twice about killing a goblin baby?
This is a classic alignment test and stupid fall bait for every paladin ever. My thoughts on the trope of "what to do with evil orphan creatures" aside, it depends entirely on how goblins are in the setting. if they are more or less akin to monsters(usually are) then it would be nonlawful and evil to let loose evil monsters. It would be an incredibly good move to stay behind and save them all, raising them against their nature and nurture to be lawful good instead of chaotic evil, but they are not forced to act. LG is not duty bound to act-actually they might be bound NOT to release the goblin children, or if death is a thing, it should be swift and merciful. LG is fine with executing, if the punishment fits the crime and it is done as humanely as possible. Also, they may well be duty bound to not act and continue on with the mission, despite not liking the problem of leaving orphans(even evil monster orphans) to die.

It happened in Game of Thrones-Ned Stark, Mr LG, stumbles across the direwolf pups. They are orphaned monsters, as they are vicious wild beasts, and he wants to kill them(swiftly, instead of letting them die in the woods). He only agrees to let the kids have the puppies because they are his house animal and one for each Stark kid. Certainly, John's, Bran's and Rob's dire wolves turn out to be heroes, but Sansa's and Arya's end up casuing trouble. LG knows the danger of trying to domesticate monsters; that saving a few now might lead to greater death, and disorder(as in GoT his daughter's wolves caused political incidents).

hamishspence

2016-10-11, 02:23 PM

Certainly, John's, Bran's and Rob's dire wolves turn out to be heroes, but Sansa's and Arya's end up casuing trouble.

Sansa's caused zero trouble - but because Cercei couldn't get at Arya's, she insisted Sansa's be killed instead.

Tiri

2016-10-11, 02:27 PM

Goblin babies are most definitely not monsters. They, in their current state, are beings too weak in both body and mind to either make a moral desicion or carry it out. They are BABIES. Furthermore, they have the potential to grow into sapient beings who have a chance of not being evil.

Clearly, it is a very evil thing to kill them simply for being goblins. That's just racism.

hamishspence

2016-10-11, 02:34 PM

They, in their current state, are beings too weak in both body and mind to either make a moral desicion or carry it out. They are BABIES. Furthermore, they have the potential to grow into sapient beings who have a chance of not being evil.

Or, as The Giant put it:

Here are the stats you actually need for a hatchling dragon:

Movement: Gets away if you let it.
Saving Throws: Miraculously survives all accidents.
Armor Class: You hit.
Hit Points: Congratulations, Baby-Killer.
Special Qualities: I hope you can live with yourself.

Coincidentally, these are the same exact stats for every other species of baby.

tensai_oni

2016-10-11, 02:36 PM

What happened here is a very clearly Evil act, one that is enough to ding characters even if they usually do not act like that.

It however has nothing to do with Lawful or Chaotic behavior. Your monk has the right idea in that being lawful is about following an individual behavior code. It doesn't have to be clearly defined but it needs to be consistent.

Real talk time - there's no good way of handling chaotic/lawful alignment changes because no two people can agree on what the axis represents exactly. Instead you should just focus on the good/evil axis and ding people when they act like murderhobos.

Not touching the goblin children example. Like it was posted in the thread already, that was a poor situation, a classic "make the paladin fall" trap.

ExLibrisMortis

2016-10-11, 02:41 PM

I believe the actual alignment question has been answered, so to answer the title question: We use 'three strikes and you're out', pretty much. The system breaks down if people are too erratic (e.g. lots of LG and CE actions mixed up - not that we've had this problem yet), but in that case, you round down - a mix of CE and LG is CE (plus some sort of madness), more or less.

AnachroNinja

2016-10-11, 03:17 PM

Deca4531

2016-10-11, 04:15 PM

A better question is, what other options did you provide your players with to help move the story along? This is a pre made module that apparently Edith l expects a level of diplomacy they don't have. They tried to convince him via roleplay rather then a dice roll because they don't have the skill points, got nowhere, si they tried to break in. Did you give them hints that there was another way?

Seconded that law is not a factor here. Also, if you try to hit me with a bat so you can knock me out, and I have a knife, I'm stabbing you. Non lethal damage doesn't mean nerf weapons folks. That's still deliberate harm.

Also, goblin babies are a **** move.

Well the players are level 5, the diplomacy check would have been 25, less if they used another skill to raise his disposition first. They had the option of returning at a latter time, using spells like charm person, bribery. Even breaking in could have been done at night, with a prepared plan. The guards, who were only doing their job, could have been subdued without killing then, they were only lv 1 NPCs.

And the goblin babies are part of the book, not something I threw in just to be a d**k. Best case scenario they could have taken them to an orphanage, at the least opened the cages and let them out in the wild.

Given all the feed back I have gotten here I don't think I'll shift their alignment, but They all have at least 2 strikes against them, one more and I'm going to shift them to evil. They can pay for an atonement spell if they don't like it.

dascarletm

2016-10-11, 04:45 PM

I understand that lawful isn't meant to be literal but at the same time he knew what he was doing was wrong. The party members were there because a murder Witness had been driven insane and they were going to go question him. The doctor could have been persuaded to let them see him but they didn't put much effort into that course of action. They had no reason to think that breaking in was in any way acceptable. For something like a paladin is pretty easy to say "well that's an evil act and I'm taking away your Paladin Powers" but at what point do you say "that's not a lawful way to behave and I'm taking away your ability to level as a monk"?
At the point where it isn't an evil act, and it is a chaotic act.
You said yourself what he was doing was wrong. That's implying good/evil. By all means I say knock him down a peg on the good/evil if you want, but why is it chaotic? A character that doesn't care to sneak, or have any regard for life isn't necessarily a chaotic one.

Can one really be lawful to chaotic actions, though? In the case of guards obviously intending non-lethal damage (to take the DM's word as true), responding by "keeping it real" and killing them is hardly lawful. That strikes me as quite chaotic.

I don't see how that is chaotic at all. I have had many LE characters that would say, "those that get in my way, or impede my goals die."

Darth Ultron

2016-10-11, 06:46 PM

First off, I'd say the problem is the players are playing a ''Combat Adventure Game'' and the DM is playing the ''real world simulator''. This is a huge gap. The players are in an action adventure movie, and the DM is over on Court TV. The players want action and adventure and combat......and the DM wants to simulate reality. With that in mind...

Talking to a npc is boring, even if it's in the published adventure. This is the type of thing that should be very quick and not bog the game down. If it takes more then a couple minutes, it's too long. And worse the Side Trek to just get to talk the NPC is even worse. You don't want to get rid of it totally, just modify it. For example, having an easy door for the PC's to sneak in or having the works just run or give up or even have npc escape and then talk to the Pcs. Anything to avoid the Pcs vs the workers fight.

It's the same with the baby goblins, and worse it's a no win scenario: help the babies and stop the game or do an evil act. The option here is to simply have the babies and a bunch of goblin moms. Then the Pcs can just leave them in peace and do no evil.

Kelb_Panthera

2016-10-11, 08:57 PM

Let me pose a suggestion: dump alignment.

Unless you intend to make alignment a major feature within the campaign you're running, ignore it. It's really not that important. Alignment is only moderately less complex than actual moral philosophy and it's just not worth the effort unless you really want to explore the subject.

Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the few people around here that actually likes the alignment system but it is what it is; complex and of minor importance for most campaigns.

To answer the question posed by the thread title: you change their alignment when they display a pattern of behavior that is more in line with the alignment you're moving them to or toward than the one they're currently on.

All that out of the way,

Your neutral characters are behaving in a manner more in line with evil and while obeying the law of the land isn't always relevant to lawful characters, they do owe their obedience to -some- set of rules beyond a simple personal code; e.g. the dictates of their religion, the orders of those above them in a hierarchy, the rules of their secular order, etc. Doing what you will as long as your personal code of beliefs is okay with it, regardless of what others think is a hallmark of chaos. Your monk is not lawful and probably not good either.

Did I mention that alignment isn't terribly important for most campaigns?

Tiri

2016-10-11, 11:50 PM

It's the same with the baby goblins, and worse it's a no win scenario: help the babies and stop the game or do an evil act. The option here is to simply have the babies and a bunch of goblin moms. Then the Pcs can just leave them in peace and do no evil.

Well, it sounds like the PCs killed all the goblin moms. It's not like stopping to raise a bunch of babies is the only option. They could, depending on their level, summon some help to do it, or just try to complete the rest of the adventure quickly enough to come back and save the babies. At least if you try and fail, you failed to do a good thing.

In fact, it doesn't even sound like there was more dungeon left for them to hack through after the goblins.

Given all the feed back I have gotten here I don't think I'll shift their alignment, but They all have at least 2 strikes against them, one more and I'm going to shift them to evil. They can pay for an atonement spell if they don't like it.

So would they get the same strike for killing a human baby? As in, would it take the murder of three human babies for a character to be considered evil in your game?

Name1

2016-10-11, 11:53 PM

So would they get the same strike for killing a human baby? As in, would it take the murder of three human babies for a character to be considered evil in your game?

Well, OPs kinda right, you normally don't get an alignment hit for single actions. This is about dropping 2 alignments (from Good to Evil), not about loosing Exalted feats or class features (read: It's not like the alignment change actually matters anyway).

Tiri

2016-10-12, 12:18 AM

Well, OPs kinda right, you normally don't get an alignment hit for single actions. This is about dropping 2 alignments (from Good to Evil), not about loosing Exalted feats or class features (read: It's not like the alignment change actually matters anyway).

I know that. I'm just wondering if he's using the same standard for all baby murder, since I know plenty of DMs who would consider the wilful murder of a baby grounds for a straight drop to Evil.

Zanos

2016-10-12, 12:30 AM

I know that. I'm just wondering if he's using the same standard for all baby murder, since I know plenty of DMs who would consider the wilful murder of a baby grounds for a straight drop to Evil.
In my opinion, if a character entertains the thought of feeding an innocent baby's slain parents to it in a serious manner, there's no alignment drop to Evil. That person was Evil before and the player simply filled in the box wrong.

Tiri

2016-10-12, 01:02 AM

In my opinion, if a character entertains the thought of feeding an innocent baby's slain parents to it in a serious manner, there's no alignment drop to Evil. That person was Evil before and the player simply filled in the box wrong.

Well, that's provided there are other things that the baby could conceivably be fed with. I'd rather eat my dead parents than die.

Anyway, you know what I meant by drop to Evil. Obviously anyone who feeds children their parents out of sheer cruelty or leaves them to starve when there are other options is already Evil, but they may not have it on their character sheet and that's what the OP was asking about, if acts like that should change their recorded alignment.

Which they should.

Efrate

2016-10-12, 01:07 AM

I've played the first bit of rise of the runelords multiple times, never got too far, but the babies are described IIRC as monsters whose own mothers keep caged because they are evil little things that will kill and maim anyone from birth. There is a dang good reason their mothers keep them in cages, its because its safer for everyone. Don't equate real world children with DnD monster children. It generally doesn't end well. I would have no issues with as they are described in the module with even a paladin killing them. As a DM I am perfectly ok with that.

They are 100% evil monsters, and yes you could attempt to civilize them, raise them right, but a few things comes to mind. One, no one wants to RP that in your DnD game, playing good parent to evil kiddies isn't an adventure I want to play nor run. I am sure all my players wouldn't want to run that either. Yes is breaks immersion, but a bit of a reality check is in order. The island they are on FWIW is known to be inhabited and avoided by everyone because of the beasties there, no one is going to go out even if the PCs ask, and if they do they will likely kill them (goblins did just kill a bunch of folks in the nearest town). If they PCs heroicly bring them back to town, suffering the bite attacks and everything as they go, good for them. The town now gets vengence upon the murderers of their families and kills them. Let then run wild on the island is an option as well, but there isn't much there, the goblins raid for a reason, and the only thing the babies eat IIRC is raw meat, which they may or may not be able to catch. Letting them lose to fend for themselves might be as good as killing them, possibly more cruel because you either condemn them to slow starvation, or you unleash them if they manage to get to the mainland to hunt people and their livestock. Or they drown trying to swim. Plus pathfinder animals tend to be fairly robust and would likely kill them. The CR 2 boar you face early is very dangerous for a team of PCs, let alone a goblin child.

As for feeding them their mothers, they would be happy with it. Though its rather sick, I dunno if PF goblins cannibalize their fellows as a matter of course while times are tough, but if they do, well, its messed up but its their culture I might call that evil but its very dependent on other factors. For dwarves with their millennia long racial hatred I would allow it without being evil. If they THEN killed the fed goblins, I would count that as evil. But just quickly killing them I would be totally fine with.

Your monk being lawful to his own code is VERY monk, as long as you have an idea of what that code is and it isn't inherently chaotic or just whatever the heck he wants it to be at any given moment. Monks are self focused and I would think adhering to those values is extraordinarily lawful and very fitting with the monk class. Doing lethal damage to people who you are trying to get you to leave and doing non-lethal to you is more of a cause for concern. For the monk especially, he can freely choose lethal or non-lethal. He chose lethal. That is very much not good, if not necessarily evil. Depends on how important said prisoner in, the monks, code, and other things. I would note it, and if it becomes a trend alter his alignment towards evil. It may have been enough for the greater good that they HAD to get to the prisoner (haven't gotten that far yet) no matter what so I would be lenient here.

The dwarves doing lethal is more of a concern, and again something to be watched. They may not have had an easy way to do non-lethal (no one buys saps) short of unarmed and that has issues, but again, as a one time offense its not a big deal. If they continue to do so, they might make the shift.

Talk to the players out of game and let them know where their actions are heading, then let them do what they will.

Tiri

2016-10-12, 01:57 AM

Name1

2016-10-12, 02:14 AM

Goblins are not devils or demons. They are not hardwired from birth to be evil, because no sapient creature apart from evil-subtyped outsiders is.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that a lot of races have a natural tendency towards an alignment from birth. I mean, it's not 100% guaranteed or 100% unchangeable, but then again, WotC did have a Succubus Paladin once and I know... 5 spells from the top of my head which can turn a Evil Outsider Good (Mind Seed, Mindrape, Sanctify the Wicked, Programmed Amnesia, Modify Memory).

Tiri

2016-10-12, 02:22 AM

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure that a lot of races have a natural tendency towards an alignment from birth. I mean, it's not 100% guaranteed or 100% unchangeable, but then again, WotC did have a Succubus Paladin once and I know... 5 spells from the top of my head which can turn a Evil Outsider Good (Mind Seed, Mindrape, Sanctify the Wicked, Programmed Amnesia, Modify Memory).

Not from birth. It's ridiculous to think any spaient creature would have a natural tendency to be evil. Their culture might, but not the creature themselves.

Evil-subtyped outsiders are a different case as they are literally made of evil, but just because they are naturally inclined towards evil doesn't mean they can't be nonevil.

Also, Modify Memory can't change alignments, Mind Seed just destroys the subject's mind and replaces it, Programmed Amnesia is just a Mindrape duplicate and there's been so much argument over Mindrape and Sanctify that I don't want to talk about it at all.

Mordaedil

2016-10-12, 02:35 AM

My two cents is to just talk to your players, explain how you felt the last session proceeded from your perspective and recap the events as you just told us. Then ask them if any of them feel like their characters fit a different alignment better.

Alignment is descriptive, not proscriptive, and if the players feel like they agree they play something they aren't right right now, maybe the alignment was just misaligned before and this is their true nature.

It shouldn't be used as a tool to punish the players, that just makes everyone unhappy.

Zanos

2016-10-12, 02:41 AM

Well, that's provided there are other things that the baby could conceivably be fed with. I'd rather eat my dead parents than die.

Anyway, you know what I meant by drop to Evil. Obviously anyone who feeds children their parents out of sheer cruelty or leaves them to starve when there are other options is already Evil, but they may not have it on their character sheet and that's what the OP was asking about, if acts like that should change their recorded alignment.

Which they should.
It depends. There can be a scenario when a character has acted Good or Neutral for some time, then suddenly decides killing babies, or whatever your obviously Evil stand in act is, is a great idea.

Established characters suddenly swinging alignments is generally a case of bad roleplay, though.

Name1

2016-10-12, 02:47 AM

Not from birth. It's ridiculous to think any spaient creature would have a natural tendency to be evil. Their culture might, but not the creature themselves.

Why would that be different to a natural tendency to be good? And how does that relate to solitary monsters who don't have much of a society to speak of?

Evil-subtyped outsiders are a different case as they are literally made of evil, but just because they are naturally inclined towards evil doesn't mean they can't be nonevil.

Wouldn't that make them more "soft"-wired then?

Also, Modify Memory can't change alignments, Mind Seed just destroys the subject's mind and replaces it, Programmed Amnesia is just a Mindrape duplicate and there's been so much argument over Mindrape and Sanctify that I don't want to talk about it at all.

1. Modify Memories can only affect 5 minutes of memories. While I agree that a single application won't change too much, multiple applications probably can: Just replace it's entire memory with that of a Good-aligned Paladin and it will be Good on it's own. Basically, multiple applications can turn it into a Mind Seed-like effect.

2. Like Modify Memories, if an Evil Outsider has it's entire life and outlook changed, there is a good chance it will turn good. If it still counts as the same creature is questionable, but it doesn't really matter as long as the result is Good.

3. Mindrape states that it can change alignment right in the text, so it's sister spells can likely do the same. The spells aren't clean cut by any means, especially Sanctify the Wicked, but that's one of the few functions they are specifically stated to have.

NichG

2016-10-12, 02:51 AM

Tiri

2016-10-12, 03:20 AM

Why would that be different to a natural tendency to be good? And how does that relate to solitary monsters who don't have much of a society to speak of?

Wouldn't that make them more "soft"-wired then?

I'm not saying any creature has a natural tendency to be good, either. Most solitary monsters probably had interactions with others of their kind at some point that nudged them in a certain direction, or are just neutral.

Well, I think exceptions are uncommon enough to be able to say evil is hardwired into evil outsiders. It doesn't really matter so much what words you use, though.

As for spells that force alignment change, I just don't think they're relevant here.

Efrate

2016-10-12, 05:00 AM

Thanks for the clarification on the goblin babies. Might have just been my Dms description at the time.

I still wouldn't call it evil for a dwarf/anyone with racial hatred to to kill them. My its my more Gygax-like ideas of alignment and the fact that I run games which tend towards very dark, but if you have a racial hatred class trait, I don't ping you for living up to that by killing those you hate. You find helpless sleeping orcs? You a dwarf? Slit their throat in the night call it a good days work. And yes I allow a dwarf/other racial hatred paladin to do it provided it is the best course of action, like one of him vs. 20 orcs. Living to continue your crusade is the best course of action. I would be ok with doing it to children as well, but I kill off/do horrible things to children of all races in front of the players, I don't expect them to not do the same in a similar situation, especially retributively. Nothing like ripping a kids heart out in front of his parents then dominating them into eating it. Or have his parents do the ripping. Even better if you don't magically force them; convince them its a great idea or the only way to save something. Then drop reality on then right as they finish. If they take the high road great, if not, even better. Mostly comes from playing darker games, kids are a very knee jerk reaction provoker.

Racism is very real in DnD and integrated into the culture, I don't punish my players for living up to that. The exception might exist, just like a morally righteous evil goblin/orc/whatever, but its an exception. Dwarves in general are greedy, appreciate fine stone and metal, and hate goblins and orcs. You play to that? A-ok. You go against it? Also fine. Maybe your dwarven cleric of Moradin really wants to reform goblins and teach them the proper way, assuming Moradin is ok with that go for it. I don't expect it from any of my PCs, but I won't punish them either way. They're playing their character - the dwarfiest dwarf to ever dwarf or a new kind of dwarf breaking away from all the old sterotypes.

Tiri

2016-10-12, 05:38 AM

Bohandas

2016-10-12, 10:43 AM

For something like a paladin is pretty easy to say "well that's an evil act and I'm taking away your Paladin Powers" but at what point do you say "that's not a lawful way to behave and I'm taking away your ability to level as a monk"?

Monks retain their powers if they become nonlawful, they just can't advance further in the class

Barstro

2016-10-12, 12:22 PM

I don't see how you can justify evil acts with a hatred of the race of the victim. Racism might be integrated into D&D, but that doesn't absolve racists of their evil. Honestly, dwarves as written are more LE than LG. Just look at what you yourself typed. It's as bad as saying an elf who really hates humans could enter a human town, slaughter the entire population for no good reason and have that considered a nonevil act. I don't want to give real-world examples, but I'm sure you can think of some.

It's actually Speciesm. Part of the problem with attempting to bring "real-world examples" into this is that there is no such thing. Under d20 RAW, some races are Evil. That's not with a lower-case "e" either. It's more akin to say that it is a perfectly orange act to kill a green person and a perfectly green act to kill an orange person.

Your example is a creature from a race that runs the full gamut from LG to CE wasting another race that does the same. I'm pretty sure (again, by RAW) that such an act is considered evil, no matter the intentions. I think the RAW would say it is an evil act even if the creature were motivated by the honest and love-filled that everyone in the town needed to be killed in order to save the world. I disagree with that, but I think that's what RAW says.

If RAW says something, you cannot simply logic it away by applying the real world. Creature A is evil; the petty gods of good feel that it is right and just for other good characters to kill it.

Cazero

2016-10-12, 12:38 PM

I still wouldn't call it evil for a dwarf/anyone with racial hatred to to kill them.
Stop right there. You already made an assumption that doesn't fit the situation described.
The party discussed at length on various unusual and needlessly cruel methods of torture and/or killing before settling for killing babies in a long and painful way. We're not talking about racism-based pragmatic killing here. The only possible motivation is sadism. Evil act, full stop.

Barstro

2016-10-12, 01:54 PM

Stop right there. You already made an assumption that doesn't fit the situation described.
The party discussed at length on various unusual and needlessly cruel methods of torture and/or killing before settling for killing babies in a long and painful way. We're not talking about racism-based pragmatic killing here. The only possible motivation is sadism. Evil act, full stop.

Is it really all that evil to simply enjoy your work?
I hope I picked the correct color for that.

GrayDeath

2016-10-12, 02:02 PM

@ OP: You dont. Ever.
:smalltongue:

If you however want to know when to change your PC`s alignment (which the thread indicates, but the title ... not so much ^^) then a lot of good advice has already been said.

Let me add though: How did you and your players define the Alignments pre Game?
Are they regular "Completelly clear, cosmic Force D&D" Alignments?

Then, even if a bit cruel, the part with the Goblin Babies was no problem.

If they`re more "realistic" or lets say "not objective" at least its problematic, especially with the Goblins, but also with the monk.

So my suggestion would be talk to your players how THEY see the alignment question, make a clear fixed definition of how to rule them in your game, and THEN decide if and what to do. :)

Tiri

2016-10-12, 02:24 PM

If RAW says something, you cannot simply logic it away by applying the real world. Creature A is evil; the petty gods of good feel that it is right and just for other good characters to kill it.

I'm not trying to 'logic it away by applying the real world'. I'm just trying to say that being a racist doesn't make it okay to do evil things to the races you hate without any motive beyond that, which is the case both in the real world and by D&D RAW.

Kelb_Panthera

2016-10-12, 02:43 PM

It's actually Speciesm. Part of the problem with attempting to bring "real-world examples" into this is that there is no such thing. Under d20 RAW, some races are Evil. That's not with a lower-case "e" either. It's more akin to say that it is a perfectly orange act to kill a green person and a perfectly green act to kill an orange person.

This is... Not entirely inaccurate. It's actually not even all that far off, just not -quite- right. More on that later.

Your example is a creature from a race that runs the full gamut from LG to CE wasting another race that does the same. I'm pretty sure (again, by RAW) that such an act is considered evil, no matter the intentions. I think the RAW would say it is an evil act even if the creature were motivated by the honest and love-filled that everyone in the town needed to be killed in order to save the world. I disagree with that, but I think that's what RAW says.

Dead wrong. Killing a sapient creature is not aligned one way or another outside of context or regardless of intent. This is one of those things that trip people up. Murder is evil but murder is not simply killing itself, it's killing for perverse pleasure or as a means to nefarious ends. Killing to defend one's self is usually neutral on the good/evil axis and killing to defend innocents is often a -good- act. Killing as part of a legal excecution is lawful and so on and so forth. Context and intention -always- matter.

In the OP's case, if they had been killing the goblin babies so they wouldn't starve to death, it would be an act of mercy. Between killing innocnents and acting mercifully it would wash out to a mostly neutral act. Feeding them their parents for the lulz, on the other hand, (which seems to have been a serious suggestion from the description) falls hard into both evil and chaos; it's both needlessly cruel and serves no purpose at all. Simply entertaining the idea would have been a sign to watch for further such acts and prepare to shift alignments for that/those characters. Actually doing it would have been a strong step toward an alignment change in that direction.

If RAW says something, you cannot simply logic it away by applying the real world.

That's true enough, as far as it goes. Ultimately, DM rulings trump RAW in any particular game. If a DM decides goblins are all evil and generally cannot be redeemed, then there's nothing evil about killing them, regardless of age, unless the killer is needlessly cruel in the process. Such creatures -cannot- be innocent because of their nature. That is part of the nature of alignment. It's not just moral/ethical judgements, it's cosmic forces that influence reality and bind themselves to individuals when they behave in ways resonant with themselves.

In-spite of the distaste some people feel toward the idea; there are sapient, non-outsider races that do, in fact, have alignment tendencies that are part of their natures. Goblins and orcs are -naturally- sadistic and violent beyond simply having been taught to be so by their culture; a culture that glorifies strength and ruthlessness, certainly, but a culture that such creatures would create spontaneously even if they weren't raised in it. In particular, chromatic dragons are -hatched- evil. Something about their reproductive cycle has newly hatched dragons already aware of how things work in general terms and able to speak draconic. They needn't be taught anything to be as they are.

Creature A is evil; the petty gods of good feel that it is right and just for other good characters to kill it.

The gods actually have precious little to do with it. The cosmic forces of the four alignments predate the gods and outsiders of all kinds, including the gods, are made up of substance that is those forces in concentrated form. Even gods could, conceiavably, change their alignments.

Barstro

2016-10-12, 03:03 PM

Lots of stuff.

Please correct my ignorance, then.

I am working under the assumption that;
The rulebook says that certain creatures/races have a set alignment.
Part of a god's tenant could be to kill all evil (we'll just use evil for this scenario)
Ergo; murdering evil (even the wee babes) is fine.

Not a perfect comparison, but I look at it as the exterminator coming in to rid the house of fleas. Fleas may or may not be evil, but it is hardly wrong for the man to bomb them all.
By contrast, the widespread murder of a race that is NOT perfectly defined by RAW as evil would be evil.

Kelb_Panthera

2016-10-12, 04:14 PM

Please correct my ignorance, then.

I am working under the assumption that;
The rulebook says that certain creatures/races have a set alignment.
Part of a god's tenant could be to kill all evil (we'll just use evil for this scenario)
Ergo; murdering evil (even the wee babes) is fine.

Not a perfect comparison, but I look at it as the exterminator coming in to rid the house of fleas. Fleas may or may not be evil, but it is hardly wrong for the man to bomb them all.
By contrast, the widespread murder of a race that is NOT perfectly defined by RAW as evil would be evil.

Yeah, that's not even close to right most of the time.

There are creatures listed as "always evil" for which your comparison is accurate, such as evil outsiders (which the RAW explicitly gives you the kill-on-sight go-ahead). Most creatures listed as evil, however, are listed as often or usually evil (orcs and goblins are in the former category, IIRC). Such creatures must have done something to be worth killing or pose an imminent threat to you, some innocents, or otherwise be a valid enemy combatant.

By RAW, the goblin babies in the OP's circumstance are -not- valid targets for summary execution as a matter of convenience. They were under no obligation to care for the little blighters but the most callous, non-evil solution would've been to toss them the key to the cage on the way out. Like I said above, killing them as an act of mercy would've also been acceptable but it doesn't sound like that was the motivation they'd have had for doing so. The little gobbos are probably already evil but they're also innocent for the time being.

I wasn't kidding when I said the rules of the game were only moderately less complex than actual moral philosophy.

Edit: and again, the gods don't get to decide. They are -not- the arbiters of alignment.

Bohandas

2016-10-12, 05:21 PM

Has the party used detect evil on them?

EDIT:
And just because a creature is evil doesn't necessarily justify killing it. It has to be actively dangerous or both potentially dangerous and unable to be contained.

Barstro

2016-10-12, 06:31 PM

Most creatures listed as evil, however, are listed as often or usually evil ...

Thank you for removing some of my ignorance.

Deca4531

2016-10-12, 07:18 PM

These are two very different situations.

The first is you (or the module) posing a moral dilemma. The other is the players spontaneously deciding to engage in some mayhem.

I would say that, regardless of what you think about things, when you choose to pose a situation to the party as a moral dilemma, you have to accept whatever they decide as being in some sense the definition of their alignments and characters. You're essentially asking them - do you think its evil to kill goblin babies? If they say 'no', and you turn around and say 'bzzt, the correct answer was yes', then you remove the ability of the dilemma to help the players discover more depth in their characters. You want the cleric of Moradin to feel comfortable saying something like 'goblins are born evil; I say so, and my god says so. It's good to kill them' and the cleric of Pelor to say 'all life is sacred, we should give them a chance', without feeling that one or the other is going to get the rug pulled out from under them for taking a bit of a risk and trying to flesh out their views and their relationship to world a bit.

On the other hand, if the party just up and does something, and it seems to be completely disconnected from any norms of what would be considered reasonable behavior, then something is probably going wrong.

One possibility is that the players just haven't internalized that their actions should be considered unreasonable - e.g. they have an incorrect or mismatched expectation. For instance, since players are used to their characters receiving lethal-force attacks so frequently and recover instantly, they may expect that doing lethal damage with an axe would just take off 10-20% of the orderly's HP, and then the orderly would back off. Or they might assume that anyone who initiates violence is intending to kill, and therefore feel justified in using lethal force in response (since you know for a fact whether or not the NPCs are going to kill them, but the players have to infer it). In this case, using an alignment shift or some sign of warning about alignment-related things can help make it clear that there's this difference in expectations, and can provide a strong incentive to correct it. However, its probably better as a warning and a discussion of 'why' for this kind of thing than just a shift. Best would be to give the warning before the unreasonable action is taken, with the alignment shift promised: 'you can do this, but the cost of doing it is a change in alignment; do you want to proceed?'. Sometimes, the player may actually want to develop their character in a different direction, so they might say 'yeah, my guy is fed up with how law and order seems to keep getting in the way of us saving the world, so I'm just going to get things done and damn the consequences'.

But another possibility is that the players are doing this because they feel like there's a tension between what the game expects them to do and what their roleplay would normally have them do, and so they're in a sense giving up on trying to do things in a sensible way and reverting to scorched earth behavior. In that case, adding penalties on top of what they probably perceive as an unfair situation is just going to exacerbate things. They may have felt that the only way for the game to continue was to get past this one guy, and since they were being stonewalled, they may have felt as if their only choices were to either to give up on the campaign or break roleplay and just bash down the door. Yes, you might be able to list off 20 things that would have worked, but if the players feel frustrated then they will tend to simplify things rather than be creative (since they may feel like whatever creative things they come up with will just get shot down, making them even more frustrated). Anyhow, if its something like that, then changing alignment doesn't resolve the underlying problem; you could do it, and even be justified in doing it, but odds are that it will drive the players to amplify this behavior even further rather than make them say 'oh, I didn't want to go that far, I need to repent'.

This is almost on the nose for what the situation is. The 2 neutral players are somewhat inexperienced and the break in was, after speaking with them, confirmed to be mostly out of frustration. As for the babies, according to the book it's part of goblin culture to raise babies in cages, the my 2 neutral players are just cruel people. As for my good monk, the dwarves culture teaches them that races like orcs and goblins are evil to the core and born that way, so to a dwarf's perspective it's not evil. That's not to say that to others it wouldn't be, but in order to justify changing his alignment he would have to do something he know was evil, and that wouldn't have been.

Also, a lot of people talk about the unimportance of alignment to begin with, and for the most part I agree that it's a poorly designed system and should often be ignored. However, your alignment can have a big effect on how NPCs react to you. I was explaining to one of my players that if they keep acting that way people might begin to suspect they were involved in the murders. Unless you're playing an evil campaign evil acts should have consequences. If you're a know murder then ship keepers might refuse to do business with you, or charge you more. Town guards might follow you around or try to arrest you. Some towns might bar your entry entirely.

So far the party has had one character arrested for trying to rape a shop keepers daughter then try to kill her father when he walked in on it (the girl actually seduced him but cried rape when cought, but the player tried to run when the guards tried to question him and died) then when said player was being dragged back to the guard house (before the party knew he was dead) our rogue tried to force his way into the holding area and was killed. So before the first dungeon they already were developing a reputation, even the innocent ones by association. Now, since they have been asked to help investigate the murders, they have been overheard talking about torturing the victims father to get him to corporate, the same shopkeeper by the way from earlier and the same girl who cried wolf now dead. And now in top of that they have murdered their way through a hospital, killing the only witness to the first murders.

From the perspective of the town they are starting to look pretty good for the murder of the other victims.

Kelb_Panthera

2016-10-12, 07:33 PM

However, your alignment can have a big effect on how NPCs react to you. I was explaining to one of my players that if they keep acting that way people might begin to suspect they were involved in the murders. Unless you're playing an evil campaign evil acts should have consequences. If you're a know murder then ship keepers might refuse to do business with you, or charge you more. Town guards might follow you around or try to arrest you. Some towns might bar your entry entirely.

How do they know your alignment? It's not like characters' alignment auras are something that just anybody can sense. Everything you've said here is about reputation, not alignment. You don't need alignment to apply any of it.

Again, I -like- the alignment system but it's really, really easy to just toss out on its ear without effecting the game much, if at all. Unless you want to get into a bunch of philosophical arguments or cleave tightly to the RAW, you can just drop it and likely won't even notice its abscence unless somebody wants to play a paladin.

Grytorm

2016-10-12, 08:24 PM

Didn't read everything in detail. But for the idea of often evil races it is possible to have the tendency not be from actual tendency toward evil itself. Instead be emergent from other factors. So, if you houserule Goblins to have +4 Dex, -2 Str, -2 Wis which makes a bit more sense with the fluff then you can look at that and interpret thusly: Goblins are a short lived race known for trickery and viciousness. This reputation is in some ways deserved as they have at times some difficulty restraining themselves. In societies their impulsiveness tends to engender harsh response meant to keep them in line. This however is not very effective making them act out more to challenge others as well as confirming their typical goblin eat dog worldview. Their supposed hatred of dogs is a complicated subject. Dogs can be very dangerous to this species and will usually react to a creeping creature with some level of hostility. Its not that dogs hate goblins, it is just that they usually smell funny.

Darth Ultron

2016-10-12, 08:51 PM

. Such creatures must have done something to be worth killing or pose an imminent threat to you, some innocents, or otherwise be a valid enemy combatant.

And just because a creature is evil doesn't necessarily justify killing it. It has to be actively dangerous or both potentially dangerous and unable to be contained.

The problem with this is that it makes it impossible to play the game. You simply can't have a wacky politically correct 21st century debate before the characters can take any action.

And even more so, when you say ''alignment does not matter'', your just going down the slippery slope of ''You just get to decide what is right or wrong on a whim''.

How can you play a game that involves fictional combat and killing...when you can't do fictional combat and killing?

Tiri

2016-10-12, 10:57 PM

How can you play a game that involves fictional combat and killing...when you can't do fictional combat and killing?

You can, it's just that you can't kill people who haven't done anything to you if you don't want to be evil.

In-spite of the distaste some people feel toward the idea; there are sapient, non-outsider races that do, in fact, have alignment tendencies that are part of their natures. Goblins and orcs are -naturally- sadistic and violent beyond simply having been taught to be so by their culture; a culture that glorifies strength and ruthlessness, certainly, but a culture that such creatures would create spontaneously even if they weren't raised in it.

Now, this really isn't true. There is nothing to indicate that these cultures formed by orcs and goblins are what would happen every time an orc or goblin culture is formed. They may be portrayed as evil in D&D but that is because of cultures that already exist, and just happened to become evil.

Hurnn

2016-10-13, 03:35 AM

I'm not sure when to do it but it sounds like you are passed that time. In the cases you described the certainly acted in ways that are definitely evil, and chaotic to a lesser degree. The 2 neutral characters might be neutral/evil and the monk is not good, and probably not lawful. Id really love to hear their explanation of their "personal moral code" as a Lawful Good monk that excuses killing people who are not using lethal force stop you while you are in the middle of committing a crime.

Zanos

2016-10-13, 03:54 AM

I will say I think it's unusual that people think fictional sentient species could be more prone to Evil outside of their cultures. Inheritable biological makeup can lead to weird triggers for brain chemistry rewards.

If you want a setting that justifies certain races being Evil other than "they were created by an Evil god to spite human", which is true in some cases, you could just simply say that some species, while obviously sentient, evolved such that particularly cruel and violent examples were the most likely to survive and reproduce. Most players probably aren't going to care for a course on natural selection in their game though, for good reason.

I'm personally okay with the PCs assuming the goblins raiding the border settlements are okay to kill without an alignment hit unless they find evidence that suggests otherwise.

TheifofZ

2016-10-13, 05:44 AM

Yeah, that's not even close to right most of the time.

There are creatures listed as "always evil" for which your comparison is accurate, such as evil outsiders (which the RAW explicitly gives you the kill-on-sight go-ahead). Most creatures listed as evil, however, are listed as often or usually evil (orcs and goblins are in the former category, IIRC). Such creatures must have done something to be worth killing or pose an imminent threat to you, some innocents, or otherwise be a valid enemy combatant.

By RAW, the goblin babies in the OP's circumstance are -not- valid targets for summary execution as a matter of convenience. They were under no obligation to care for the little blighters but the most callous, non-evil solution would've been to toss them the key to the cage on the way out. Like I said above, killing them as an act of mercy would've also been acceptable but it doesn't sound like that was the motivation they'd have had for doing so. The little gobbos are probably already evil but they're also innocent for the time being.

I wasn't kidding when I said the rules of the game were only moderately less complex than actual moral philosophy.

Edit: and again, the gods don't get to decide. They are -not- the arbiters of alignment.

To break down the 'evil creatures' argument and explain this alittle more. There are 'Always Evil' aligned creatures out there. They come with a handy, dandy [Evil] subtype that says 'hey, these things are kill-on-sight because they will do horrible things to everything, just because. Every time.'
None of the creatures that are 'Always Evil and include a handy dandy [Evil] subtype' are, strictly, mortal humanoids. They are usually basically planar stuffing in a convenient, living shape. Sort of like stuffed teddy bears, if the stuffing were literally the firmament of existence. And, in this case, also pure evil.
This means that A: Killing one anywhere but it's home plane is very hard to make stick, and B: (This is the important one) they are physically incapable of being the opposite of whatever alignment they are made of, which, in this context, is pure capital 'E' Evil. Extending the teddy bear metaphor, no matter how patched up the teddy bear that the wool stuffing goes into is, it's still the same (EVIL) wool. It can't suddenly become a perfectly spherical ball of iron.

Mortal creatures though, they get a fiddly bit called 'free will' since they're soft and fleshy and not metaphysical concepts stuffed into a skin-sack. This thing called 'Free will' means that no truly mortal race has an alignment that is 'Always X', and the selection of mortal races with an Alignment subtype is vanishingly small (and usually requires templates be applied.)
This means that there are plenty of races with 'Usually evil' and 'Usually good' as their alignment, but it's important to note that there are always going to be exceptions to those rules.
Just like you have crazy dwarves that plan on starving babies by locking them in cages, you can have good goblins that want to return a small toy to a child who dropped it in the woods without anything weird happening.

Further, babies from mortal species literally lack the Int points to have an alignment other than True Neutral. Until they develop enough to actually make choices that lead to being assigned an Evil alignment, they aren't evil. (Much like how a rat with it's tail cut off will NOT give birth to tail-less rats.) So killing them is wrong in the first place, and torturing creatures just for fun is an Always Evil action, no matter the alignment of those involved.

All that said, if you have a party that does things like responding to non-lethal attempts to stop them from breaking the law by killing the guards, especially if the party had intent to use lethal force before it became necessary?
And that party is entirely 100% okay with torturing babies or leaving them to starve in locked cages?
Whether the party stays relatively the same on the L/N/C scale, they sound like they're firmly Evil. (With a possible between Neutral and Evil if one of them isn't taking part but isn't trying to dissuade them. Inaction is not, in and of itself, Evil.) Make sure that you're clear with them when things they do are moderately, or in this case, massively evil so that none of them are too surprised with you reach over and change half their alignment to Evil.

On a final note, which is a bit of a segue; Brain chemistry is weird, and certainly most races with a 'Usually Evil' alignment might be wired to get their fix of happy by doing terrible things, but outliers and exclusions exist in brain chemistry too, which is why Masochists get a pleasurable sensation from pain, which is something our brain is hardwired to avoid. So we can explain races with a 'usually X alignment' tag with brain chemistry, and it also conveniently explains statistical outliers via mutation or other things.

awa

2016-10-13, 10:23 AM

that's not quite true there are a number of non-outsiders in the srd alone with always in their alignments primarily dragons, of course a dragons a special case a baby dragon is often as smart or smarter than a normal person at birth and more then capable of defending itself

that said just because a creature is not always a specific alignment does not mean biology has no impact on its alignment, Aboleth are only usually lawful evil but that just means some of them are chaotic or neutral evil. The odds of one being good should be rare to the point of mental illness.

Tiri

2016-10-13, 12:32 PM

that said just because a creature is not always a specific alignment does not mean biology has no impact on its alignment, Aboleth are only usually lawful evil but that just means some of them are chaotic or neutral evil. The odds of one being good should be rare to the point of mental illness.

Well, aboleth are a special case as well, if you didn't know. They have a perfect racial memory. I don't know where you get the idea that good aboleth have to be mentally ill, though. True, a memory stretching all the way back to the first aboleth consisting of likely 99% or more of evil individuals probably skews it largely towards evil, but aboleth have enough individuality to distinguish between inherited and self-created memory, so it stands to reason that under unusual circumstances one might be nonevil.

awa

2016-10-13, 02:14 PM

yes one could be good but I’m saying that just because not all members are lawful evil does not mean they should have an even spread of the remaining alignments.
And due to an aboleths unique biology the odds of one being good should be less than one being outright insane. At best I could see a lawful neutral one that is mostly interested in minding his own business.

A lot of the smarter classic aberrations are like that they have bizarre built in biology that strongly pushes them away from good.

Klara Meison

2016-10-13, 07:08 PM

> When to change my players alignment?

When they ask you to shift their allignment because it fits their character development.

No, you don't know better than the player wherever their action was evil or not. You are working with incomplete information at best and disinformation at worst, so leave the judging to the player who actually knows everything.

No, your moral philosophy isn't the only correct one, and players aren't obligated to agree with you on it. I can cite 10 reasons why cannibalism is unquestionably Good, followed by 10 reasons why it's unquestionably Evil, followed by 10 reasons why it's completely Neutral. Same with almost all other moral problems. If you can't imagine yourself being wrong, you really have no business dealing with allignments.

No, %action% doesn't instantly turn a player to evil. If you think that that's not so, you likely just can't come up with an example of a situation where that's a good choice. Doesn't mean there is no such situation.

Allignment is a roleplay tool, not a "HA HA YOU ARE EVIL NOW" stick some GMs seem to use it as whenever players don't agree with their moral views. For some reason, I have never seen GMs asking questions like "When do you shift allignment to Good/Lawful?", it's always sliding in the CE direction that poses questions.

Leave roleplay to the players. It's their job in a ROLEplaying game for crying out loud.

Klara Meison

2016-10-13, 07:13 PM

To break down the 'evil creatures' argument and explain this alittle more. There are 'Always Evil' aligned creatures out there. They come with a handy, dandy [Evil] subtype that says 'hey, these things are kill-on-sight because they will do horrible things to everything, just because. Every time.'
None of the creatures that are 'Always Evil and include a handy dandy [Evil] subtype' are, strictly, mortal humanoids. They are usually basically planar stuffing in a convenient, living shape. Sort of like stuffed teddy bears, if the stuffing were literally the firmament of existence. And, in this case, also pure evil.
This means that A: Killing one anywhere but it's home plane is very hard to make stick, and B: (This is the important one) they are physically incapable of being the opposite of whatever alignment they are made of, which, in this context, is pure capital 'E' Evil. Extending the teddy bear metaphor, no matter how patched up the teddy bear that the wool stuffing goes into is, it's still the same (EVIL) wool. It can't suddenly become a perfectly spherical ball of iron.

Mortal creatures though, they get a fiddly bit called 'free will' since they're soft and fleshy and not metaphysical concepts stuffed into a skin-sack. This thing called 'Free will' means that no truly mortal race has an alignment that is 'Always X', and the selection of mortal races with an Alignment subtype is vanishingly small (and usually requires templates be applied.)
This means that there are plenty of races with 'Usually evil' and 'Usually good' as their alignment, but it's important to note that there are always going to be exceptions to those rules.
Just like you have crazy dwarves that plan on starving babies by locking them in cages, you can have good goblins that want to return a small toy to a child who dropped it in the woods without anything weird happening.

Further, babies from mortal species literally lack the Int points to have an alignment other than True Neutral. Until they develop enough to actually make choices that lead to being assigned an Evil alignment, they aren't evil. (Much like how a rat with it's tail cut off will NOT give birth to tail-less rats.) So killing them is wrong in the first place, and torturing creatures just for fun is an Always Evil action, no matter the alignment of those involved.

All that said, if you have a party that does things like responding to non-lethal attempts to stop them from breaking the law by killing the guards, especially if the party had intent to use lethal force before it became necessary?
And that party is entirely 100% okay with torturing babies or leaving them to starve in locked cages?
Whether the party stays relatively the same on the L/N/C scale, they sound like they're firmly Evil. (With a possible between Neutral and Evil if one of them isn't taking part but isn't trying to dissuade them. Inaction is not, in and of itself, Evil.) Make sure that you're clear with them when things they do are moderately, or in this case, massively evil so that none of them are too surprised with you reach over and change half their alignment to Evil.

On a final note, which is a bit of a segue; Brain chemistry is weird, and certainly most races with a 'Usually Evil' alignment might be wired to get their fix of happy by doing terrible things, but outliers and exclusions exist in brain chemistry too, which is why Masochists get a pleasurable sensation from pain, which is something our brain is hardwired to avoid. So we can explain races with a 'usually X alignment' tag with brain chemistry, and it also conveniently explains statistical outliers via mutation or other things.

>They come with a handy, dandy [Evil] subtype that says 'hey, these things are kill-on-sight because they will do horrible things to everything, just because.

At least in Pathfinder, that's not true. Evil subtype (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/rules-for-monsters/creature-types#subtype-evil). Pay attention to this bit: "Most creatures that have this subtype also have evil alignments; however, if their alignments change, they still retain the subtype". This means that you can have CG devils, it's just not really common.

Zanos

2016-10-13, 07:24 PM

No, you don't know better than the player wherever their action was evil or not. You are working with incomplete information at best and disinformation at worst, so leave the judging to the player who actually knows everything.

No, your moral philosophy isn't the only correct one, and players aren't obligated to agree with you on it. I can cite 10 reasons why cannibalism is unquestionably Good, followed by 10 reasons why it's unquestionably Evil, followed by 10 reasons why it's completely Neutral. Same with almost all other moral problems. If you can't imagine yourself being wrong, you really have no business dealing with allignments.

D&D's multiverse operates on an objective system of morality. If the overwhelming majority of people believe they're Good, and are Good as a result, alignment becomes pretty meaningless. Furthermore, the DM dictates the setting, so he is 100% in control of what actions correspond to what alignment in his world.

No, %action% doesn't instantly turn a player to evil. If you think that that's not so, you likely just can't come up with an example of a situation where that's a good choice. Doesn't mean there is no such situation.

A variety of actions can instantly mar a characters soul with Evil. Cold blooded murder, sadistic torture, and bargaining with entities of the lower planes are all examples. There is no "for the greater good" in D&D's system, and is, specifically an attitude that causes many otherwise Good creatures to fall.

Allignment is a roleplay tool, not a "HA HA YOU ARE EVIL NOW" stick some GMs seem to use it as whenever players don't agree with their moral views. For some reason, I have never seen GMs asking questions like "When do you shift allignment to Good/Lawful?", it's always sliding in the CE direction that poses questions.

Why would you actually care if the DM shifts your alignments to Evil? It doesn't prevent you from roleplaying your character the way you want to.

Klara Meison

2016-10-13, 08:02 PM

D&D's multiverse operates on an objective system of morality. If the overwhelming majority of people believe they're Good, and are Good as a result, alignment becomes pretty meaningless. Furthermore, the DM dictates the setting, so he is 100% in control of what actions correspond to what alignment in his world.

A variety of actions can instantly mar a characters soul with Evil. Cold blooded murder, sadistic torture, and bargaining with entities of the lower planes are all examples. There is no "for the greater good" in D&D's system, and is, specifically an attitude that causes many otherwise Good creatures to fall.

Why would you actually care if the DM shifts your alignments to Evil? It doesn't prevent you from roleplaying your character the way you want to.

>D&D's multiverse operates on an objective system of morality.

Neither GM nor the players live in such a multiverse, and thus have no objective way to settle their arguments. But that wasn't even my point. GM doesn't know what the character is thinking, nor does he know the reasoning behind their actions. Those things can and should affect the morality of actions.

>Furthermore, the DM dictates the setting, so he is 100% in control of what actions correspond to what alignment in his world.

No he isn't. Despite whatever Rule 0 may claim, there is still Rule -1, though it's not often brought up. The "There is no game without the players" one. Yes, GM is the final arbiter, but that doesn't mean he can just disregard the players in his decisions entirely. My point is that if there is even the slightest possibility that suddenly shifting the allignment of the player will provoke an argument, you shouldn't do it, because it is pretty much the stupidest possible reason to have an argument.

>A variety of actions can instantly mar a characters soul with Evil.

Your opinion. Now imagine that 4 of your friends(i.e. all players) disagree. Is this the hill you want to die on or will you yield?

>Why would you actually care if the DM shifts your alignments to Evil?

Same reason I would mind if GM changed the name of my character, or the color of their hair. It's not his turf and generally a **** move.

Zanos

2016-10-13, 08:47 PM

>D&D's multiverse operates on an objective system of morality.

Neither GM nor the players live in such a multiverse, and thus have no objective way to settle their arguments. But that wasn't even my point. GM doesn't know what the character is thinking, nor does he know the reasoning behind their actions. Those things can and should affect the morality of actions.

I'm not sure how the GM or the players not living in the setting is relevant. It's pretty clear based on the books what Evil and non-Evil actions are. And no, what the character is thinking doesn't really matter in many cases. Trying to justify your actions is, as I mentioned, how people become Evil to begin with.

>Furthermore, the DM dictates the setting, so he is 100% in control of what actions correspond to what alignment in his world.

No he isn't. Despite whatever Rule 0 may claim, there is still Rule -1, though it's not often brought up. The "There is no game without the players" one. Yes, GM is the final arbiter, but that doesn't mean he can just disregard the players in his decisions entirely. My point is that if there is even the slightest possibility that suddenly shifting the allignment of the player will provoke an argument, you shouldn't do it, because it is pretty much the stupidest possible reason to have an argument.

>A variety of actions can instantly mar a characters soul with Evil.

Your opinion. Now imagine that 4 of your friends(i.e. all players) disagree. Is this the hill you want to die on or will you yield?

I'll die on that hill, sure. Two scenarios. One is that I'm running my game for my friends, who are generally like minded or are not so invested in me having control over their alignments that it would make them leave a game they otherwise enjoy. The second scenario is that I'm running with new players I haven't met before, probably in an online game. In which case, replacements abound, and people who don't like my game can leave. I'm under no obligation to run a game I don't want to run, and aren't going to have people hold the game hostage so that I kowtow to their every desire. I'm not going to run a game for people that bully me to run the way they want, especially over something that minor.

>Why would you actually care if the DM shifts your alignments to Evil?

Same reason I would mind if GM changed the name of my character, or the color of their hair. It's not his turf and generally a **** move.
It absolutely is his turf. Alignment is a cosmic, primal force. The only thing it really effects is certain spell effects, and your fate in the afterlife. And if you care about your afterlife, maybe you should have listened more seriously to the teachings of the cosmic entities who control those afterlives.

Look, if you want your LG paladin to slaughter a town of people who are succumbing but have not yet succumbed to a curse that turns them into monsters, I'm not going to say "you can't do that, you're Lawful Good." But I am going to tell you that it's absolutely going to cause an alignment shift, because someone who is actually Good wouldn't resort to those methods, regardless of how your character might try to justify it in their heads. Because like fire, earth, air, and water, alignment exists outside of your characters head. They do not get to dictate it.

TheifofZ

2016-10-13, 09:35 PM

Amusingly, Rule -1 is 'There is no game without players or a GM'. Which means 'everyone should do their best to get along and make sure noone is having a bad time'.

Following that, the fundamental flaw in the argument going on here is that one of you thinks that alignments are entirely up to the players and that the characters get to decide whether what they do is evil or not. This is 'Subjective' morality. It means that whether an act is good or evil depends on personal stance in each instance of that act.

D&D does not follow subjective morality. D&D morality is Objective; meaning that whether you think something is good or not matters little, if it is fundamentally an Evil act, that's it. It's Evil, period. No arguments, no appeals. Good is Good, Neutral is either Neither or Both, and Evil is Evil.

No, your moral philosophy isn't the only correct one, and players aren't obligated to agree with you on it. I can cite 10 reasons why cannibalism is unquestionably Good, followed by 10 reasons why it's unquestionably Evil, followed by 10 reasons why it's completely Neutral. Same with almost all other moral problems. If you can't imagine yourself being wrong, you really have no business dealing with allignments.

No, %action% doesn't instantly turn a player to evil. If you think that that's not so, you likely just can't come up with an example of a situation where that's a good choice. Doesn't mean there is no such situation.
I am achingly curious as to when you think it's 'morally and judgementally a Good Action' to torture an innocent just for the laughs.
No seriously. Enlighten me. How about cannibalism? How is it potentially Good? I can see it being a Neutral action, but I would love to know when it can be qualified as good. I won't get into other things, just those two, since those are relevant to the thread.

Allignment is a roleplay tool, not a "HA HA YOU ARE EVIL NOW" stick some GMs seem to use it as whenever players don't agree with their moral views. For some reason, I have never seen GMs asking questions like "When do you shift allignment to Good/Lawful?", it's always sliding in the CE direction that poses questions.

Leave roleplay to the players. It's their job in a ROLEplaying game for crying out loud.
You are entirely and utterly wrong here. Alignment is not JUST a roleplay tool. As long as there are mechanics that function based on alignment (Clerics, paladins, druids, monks and bards are the most immediate examples) then Alignment has an effect on actual gameplay, and therefor is not something that can just be handwaved and forgotten. Saying that 'a GM telling the players that their alignment has changed' isn't okay is much like saying "oh, yeah. HP's a roleplay mechanic; I don't want my character to die, so the DM can't tell me when he's dead. Even though I'm at -100 HP and by all rights I shouldn't have a torso. I don't like that, so I won't accept it." If someone said that at a table I played at, I would literally choke them to death with their own dice bag. Which is an Evil Action, but since I'm already Evil, that won't ding my alignment at all.

Finally: You're right on one point. A DM should never spontaneously and arbitrarily (underlined to make it clear this is the important bit. Means 'randomly and suddenly, just because' if you didn't know.) change a character's Alignment. The DM can, and should, change players alignments when it is appropriate, but there should be plenty of reason, and the DM should give plenty of warning that the change is coming. In more extreme and sudden cases, such as a Paladin deciding to slaughter that town of cursed people, the DM should make it clear that that particular action will be enough on it's own to shift the Alignment from Good to Evil. It is the DMs responsibility to make it clear what consequences will occur and how they'll affect the players' characters. It is the players' responsibility to be able to accept the consequences for their actions, and be willing to not let any negative consequence ruin the game for them or the rest of the group.

TheifofZ

2016-10-13, 10:27 PM

Double post because I realized this point later, and it's important enough to separate.

Technically, the DM never decides to change your alignment. You do. You, the player, hold that power solely in your hands.
However, you never just say 'oh, I'm evil now.' Or 'hold on. My alignment is good.' That's not how alignment works. You don't just up and decide that your alignment has changed.
The actions your character commits, the things they say and do, show what alignment they are.
They don't save villagers and thwart evil because they are good, they are good because they save villagers and thwart evil.
They don't murder, torture, and pillage because they are evil, they are evil because they do evil things.

This is an important distinction to remember. It means that the DM isn't changing your alignment when he tells you that 'hey, you're alignment has changed to X'. He's informing you that you have changed your alignment to X by doing a bunch of X deeds, and need to note the change on your sheet.

Bohandas

2016-10-13, 11:14 PM

Klara Meison

2016-10-14, 02:21 PM

I'm not sure how the GM or the players not living in the setting is relevant. It's pretty clear based on the books what Evil and non-Evil actions are.

Huh, so I guess I just imagined all the scores of allignment arguments regarding wherever X is evil or not over the last year, since it's so obvious.

I'll die on that hill, sure. Two scenarios. One is that I'm running my game for my friends, who are generally like minded or are not so invested in me having control over their alignments that it would make them leave a game they otherwise enjoy. ... I'm not going to run a game for people that bully me to run the way they want, especially over something that minor.

So let me get this straight. You expect your friends to yield on minor issues 100% of the time, but don't want to do that yourself. Way to be reciprocating.

Look, if you want your LG paladin to slaughter a town of people...

If the player is actually roleplaying a Good paladin, they won't do that. If the player wants to do that, they likely want to pursue a fall storyline anyways and will ask for an allignment change themselves. Finally, if the player does do that yet thinks it's a Good action, you've got a philosophical argument with the player, not the character, on your hands, in which case I would definitely begin by talking to the player outside of session in regards to what they concider Good and what they concider Evil. And then I'd still err on the side of the player being right, because what happens in the game is not worth antagonising people, even a little bit.

All that you are doing by taking the allignnment switch into your hands is saying to the players "Yeah, by the way, I don't trust you to be reasonable people, and don't think you can get into character if your life depended on it.", as far as I can see.

Because like fire, earth, air, and water, alignment exists outside of your characters head. They do not get to dictate it.

When did I ever said the character got to decide their allignment? I said the players should. Players do not equal characters.

---

Amusingly, Rule -1 is 'There is no game without players or a GM'. Which means 'everyone should do their best to get along and make sure noone is having a bad time'.

Hey, someone gets my point! Hurrah! I like it when that happens.

Following that, the fundamental flaw in the argument going on here is that one of you thinks that alignments are entirely up to the players and that the characters get to decide whether what they do is evil or not.

And that's some sort of fallacy. Strawman? False analogy? Some fancy name I am forgetting, I am sure of it.

Players do not equal characters. Players should be able to decide on the allignments of their characters, just as they get to decide on their sex, color of their skin, class and feat selection and basically everything else. Characters may not get any of those choices, depending on circumstances. Characters don't get to decide wherever %action% is right or wrong, because they live in a universe where they can get a definite answer, provided an assistance from a friendly cleric/paladin. Players should, or at least shoudl definitely be able to affect GM's decision on the subject. And I personally would just leave all of it up to the player, since figuring out wherever your character is generally doing the right thing is one of the easiest aspects of roleplay.

D&D does not follow subjective morality...

Not going to bother with the rest of the subject, since I never said DnD had subjective morality.

I am achingly curious as to when you think it's 'morally and judgementally a Good Action' to torture an innocent just for the laughs.

O, I like these questions. I'll be using Pathfinder's allignment definitions, since those are only ones I actually know. If it's different in other editions, well, sorry. Also please remember that I didn't say it works with all moral problems, just most of them.

Good Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

Evil Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

Neutral People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent, but may lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.

It's pretty clear that saving lives falls under Good. It also seems quite clear to me that, say, saving the whole world from destruction is a Good act. So, let's say that your party has been captured by SpaceHitler who wants to destroy the world. Through general heroic shenanigans you have escaped your cells and managed to sneak into his ritual room, where the Ultimate Destructive McGuffin is powering up for a blast. You know you can turn it off, but here is the thing:such an action is only possible through a ritual where a person is being tortured just for laughs(Hitler installed it as a precaution, knowing that heroes generally will be against doing that, and as such won't be able to disable the device, while he can easilly do it). However, your party wizard says that he could mindrape one of you into enjoying torturing innocents, so that's not an issue. So here is the question:do you have the wizard cast the spell on you to save the world, or not? In my opinion at least, torturing an innocent in this case is a Good act, since the consequences of both choices are pretty clear(do it:1 person suffers, don't do it:everybody dies)

How about cannibalism? How is it potentially Good?

Well, that one is kinda easy I think, since cannibalism has been a cultural tradition in some real world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannibalism) societies. Imagine a tribe where relatives eat the body of the deceased as a funerary ritual to honor their passing. Such tribe would probably have cultural norms related to this-for example, they would think it "bad" if someone's body wasn't eaten, kinda like western world thinks it's not "okay" if someone goes unburied, even if such a burial takes time, resources, and potentually slightly endangers other humans(e.g. if someone dies on a polar expedition, people don't just dump the body over the side of a sled, they make graves for them)

Well, now imagine someone you knew has passed away in such a tribe. You know they would want you to eat their body, and would get offended if you didn't. So even if you don't want to, a Good action (honoring the wishes of the deceased feels like it falls on a Good side of the scale to me) would be to bring a stake knife to the funeral.

Here is an alternative. Imagine a couple(let's call them John and Lilly) survived an airplane crash, and is stranded in the mountains. They know which way to go to reach civilisation, but they only have enough food to go halfway there, even if they ration it like crazy. Fortunately enough, there are a lot of dead bodies around, and thus their only option for survival is cannibalism. But here is the thing:they don't have to both become cannibals. John can opt out of normal food, eat only human flesh, and thus save Lilly from becoming one herself(she'll survive on normal food just fine). I'd say that such would be a Good action-he is quite concerned for the dignity of his girlfriend.

You are entirely and utterly wrong here. Alignment is not JUST a roleplay tool.

I...didn't say it was? Please read my post again. As for allignment-based mechanics, they make up such a small part of the game you can safely cut them out without breaking anything, and I find that to be a very reasonable course of action.

Double post because I realized this point later, and it's important enough to separate.

Technically, the DM never decides to change your alignment. You do. You, the player, hold that power solely in your hands.
However, you never just say 'oh, I'm evil now.' Or 'hold on. My alignment is good.' That's not how alignment works. You don't just up and decide that your alignment has changed.
The actions your character commits, the things they say and do, show what alignment they are.
They don't save villagers and thwart evil because they are good, they are good because they save villagers and thwart evil.
They don't murder, torture, and pillage because they are evil, they are evil because they do evil things.

This is an important distinction to remember. It means that the DM isn't changing your alignment when he tells you that 'hey, you're alignment has changed to X'. He's informing you that you have changed your alignment to X by doing a bunch of X deeds, and need to note the change on your sheet.

Let me ask you a question. Why can't a player do that himself? Do you not trust your players? Do you think that they are just a bunch of murderhobos, barely held in check by your actions? No? You think they are actual human beings you can talk to, and who actually get what this "roleplaying" business is all about?

Then why don't you trust them to be able to determine the allignment of their character and how it changes with their actions?

dascarletm

2016-10-14, 03:39 PM

This really boils down to different game atmospheres.

One assumes a cooperative environment filled with mutual trust.
Another assumes a more players versus DM environment

My question is, in the first scenario (Klara Meison's) why are you so wary to discuss morality with the players? If the atmosphere is open and filled with trust, why are you afraid to potentially debate this issue?

TheifofZ

2016-10-14, 04:01 PM

If the player is actually roleplaying a Good paladin, they won't do that. If the player wants to do that, they likely want to pursue a fall storyline anyways and will ask for an allignment change themselves. Finally, if the player does do that yet thinks it's a Good action, you've got a philosophical argument with the player, not the character, on your hands, in which case I would definitely begin by talking to the player outside of session in regards to what they concider Good and what they concider Evil. And then I'd still err on the side of the player being right, because what happens in the game is not worth antagonising people, even a little bit.

All that you are doing by taking the allignnment switch into your hands is saying to the players "Yeah, by the way, I don't trust you to be reasonable people, and don't think you can get into character if your life depended on it.", as far as I can see.

There's a difference between being in your character's head and being able to understand the alignment they have. There are far too many massively Evil people, even in real life, that think they're good. That they do good. As long as that's a thing, then your point here is moot.

Hey, someone gets my point! Hurrah! I like it when that happens.
Really I'm saying that at the end of the day, everyone should be involved in making big decisions. Players don't get to overrule the DM if they aren't having fun and say 'no, that's not how I want it to work'. They should talk to the DM about it, instead, and try to resolve the issue in a reasonable manner.

It's pretty clear that saving lives falls under Good. It also seems quite clear to me that, say, saving the whole world from destruction is a Good act. So, let's say that your party has been captured by SpaceHitler who wants to destroy the world. Through general heroic shenanigans you have escaped your cells and managed to sneak into his ritual room, where the Ultimate Destructive McGuffin is powering up for a blast. You know you can turn it off, but here is the thing:such an action is only possible through a ritual where a person is being tortured just for laughs(Hitler installed it as a precaution, knowing that heroes generally will be against doing that, and as such won't be able to disable the device, while he can easilly do it). However, your party wizard says that he could mindrape one of you into enjoying torturing innocents, so that's not an issue. So here is the question:do you have the wizard cast the spell on you to save the world, or not? In my opinion at least, torturing an innocent in this case is a Good act, since the consequences of both choices are pretty clear(do it:1 person suffers, don't do it:everybody dies)
Except that the actions of mind-rape, and the torture itself, are both Evil actions. Yes, the saving the world bit is very Good, but those acts are Evil. The Book of Exalted Deeds actually has a similar example; if a Paladin is forced into a situation where he must kill a small child to save the world, then killing the small child is still Evil. It's the paladin's responsibility to either find a different solution if he wishes to maintain his alignment, or choose to sacrifice his alignment along with the life of an innocent. Small acts of Evil for the Greater Good are still Evil.

Well, that one is kinda easy I think, since cannibalism has been a cultural tradition in some real world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannibalism) societies. Imagine a tribe where relatives eat the body of the deceased as a funerary ritual to honor their passing. Such tribe would probably have cultural norms related to this-for example, they would think it "bad" if someone's body wasn't eaten, kinda like western world thinks it's not "okay" if someone goes unburied, even if such a burial takes time, resources, and potentually slightly endangers other humans(e.g. if someone dies on a polar expedition, people don't just dump the body over the side of a sled, they make graves for them)

Well, now imagine someone you knew has passed away in such a tribe. You know they would want you to eat their body, and would get offended if you didn't. So even if you don't want to, a Good action (honoring the wishes of the deceased feels like it falls on a Good side of the scale to me) would be to bring a stake knife to the funeral.

Here is an alternative. Imagine a couple(let's call them John and Lilly) survived an airplane crash, and is stranded in the mountains. They know which way to go to reach civilisation, but they only have enough food to go halfway there, even if they ration it like crazy. Fortunately enough, there are a lot of dead bodies around, and thus their only option for survival is cannibalism. But here is the thing:they don't have to both become cannibals. John can opt out of normal food, eat only human flesh, and thus save Lilly from becoming one herself(she'll survive on normal food just fine). I'd say that such would be a Good action-he is quite concerned for the dignity of his girlfriend.
Both of these examples are Neutral; the first one being close to good, but the nature of the deed itself still prevents it from being good. The second one is more clear cut; an actions base alignment is not changed by the circumstances that force it. Eating to survive is Neutral, which is why hunters can maintain a good alignment when hunting. No matter what reason he says he's doing it for, at the end of the day he's doing what he needs to so that he can survive. Strictly Neutral. The fact that he coincidentally allows his girlfriend to go without human flesh might make him feel better about the act, but doesn't change the basic nature of the deed.

I...didn't say it was? Please read my post again. As for allignment-based mechanics, they make up such a small part of the game you can safely cut them out without breaking anything, and I find that to be a very reasonable course of action.
... A small part of the game. Okay, cut them out. There go almost all of the deities, and most of the planes. With them the entirety of the cleric and paladin classes, along with their spell lists. Several spells from the Arcane classes, as well as the Druid spell list must be removed as well. Something close to a fifth of all Magic Items, gone in an instant. Every last Alignment based outsider in the Monster Manuals; Demons, Devils, and Angels, plus a not-insignificant slew of other Outsiders and other types of monsters can't be used either.
And that's from the core 3 books alone (Player's Handbook, DM's Guide, and Monster Manual 1). If we expand it to other books, the devastation is vast and sweeping; Whole books can't be used at all, and other books are left as nothing but leaflets or bookmarks. You think that's a 'small' part of the game.
I think your definition for 'small' is questionable.
There's something fundamental you're failing to 'get'. Alignment is a HUGE part of the game; it's literally part of the foundation of the entire game's universe, and therefor the the basis for huge sections of the game material. There are literally entire sections of the reality of D&D that are defined as being MADE of alignment. (All the afterlives, for a start, but there are plenty of others.)

Let me ask you a question. Why can't a player do that himself? Do you not trust your players? Do you think that they are just a bunch of murderhobos, barely held in check by your actions? No? You think they are actual human beings you can talk to, and who actually get what this "roleplaying" business is all about?

Then why don't you trust them to be able to determine the allignment of their character and how it changes with their actions?
In part because at the end of the day, if the player is roleplaying and getting in the head of their character, then they won't be thinking 'is this action good or evil'. They're thinking 'I'm [Character name]. I take this action'.
Let me ask you; How often do you stop and think 'which action would be good, and which evil?'
How often do you really look at that Alignment box on your character sheet and ask yourself 'have I been the alignment I wrote down, or have I been doing a lot of things that are different alignments?'
If the answer to the first question is not 'literally all the time' and the second isn't 'roughly once an hour or less', then having the DM be able to step in and let players know is, in fact, necessary on occasion. That's because Alignment is not about story arcs or character growth.
It's literally defined by the things you do in character. That's all it is. And if the DM tells you that your alignment is Evil now, then you've probably been doing alot of Evil things. If you disagree, you can ask for clarification (That the DM should be giving you every step of the way) but that doesn't change the core of the matter.

And again, see my initial point. We don't always know that the things we do are evil or good; we just think what we want to think. That the number of people who think they do good when they do Evil is a non-zero number renders the whole 'trust the players to know their alignment' argument entirely irrelevant.

Klara Meison

2016-10-14, 05:34 PM

Except that the actions of mind-rape, and the torture itself, are both Evil actions. Yes, the saving the world bit is very Good, but those acts are Evil. The Book of Exalted Deeds actually has a similar example; if a Paladin is forced into a situation where he must kill a small child to save the world, then killing the small child is still Evil. It's the paladin's responsibility to either find a different solution if he wishes to maintain his alignment, or choose to sacrifice his alignment along with the life of an innocent.

I'd like to see a list of all evil actions then, please, because as far as I am aware it's nowhere to be found. I always considered allignment to be actually, you know, flexible and based upon the rules I quoted, not on arbitrary evil action lists. For example, how is mindrape in that example evil if it doesn't hurt, oppress, or kill others?

Small acts of Evil for the Greater Good are still Evil.

I'd like to see a link to the rules in regards to that, because it certainly doesn't fit my idea of common sense-a paladin can defend a village from an orc invasion, kill a bunch of orcs and not fall, despite murder being Evil, because the local sum total of their actions is positive and generally Good/Neutral.

Both of these examples are Neutral; the first one being close to good, but the nature of the deed itself still prevents it from being good.

What? What nature? Cannibalism isn't inherently evil if that's what you are about, it fits no evil flags provided in the rules.

The second one is more clear cut; an actions base alignment is not changed by the circumstances that force it. Eating to survive is Neutral, which is why hunters can maintain a good alignment when hunting. No matter what reason he says he's doing it for, at the end of the day he's doing what he needs to so that he can survive. Strictly Neutral. The fact that he coincidentally allows his girlfriend to go without human flesh might make him feel better about the act, but doesn't change the basic nature of the deed.

You missed my point entirely. Deed in this case isn't eating to survive, it's altruistically letting the girlfriend keep her dignity despite an increased danger to himself (from prion disease and such).

... A small part of the game. Okay, cut them out. There go almost all of the deities, and most of the planes...

...no they don't. Take Iomedae (http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Iomedae) from Pathfinder. Cut out her allignment. Does anything change? Her relationship with other deities, ascension story, cleric domains, favourite weapon, teachings of her cult, general moral leanings? No. She is still the same god as before. But now without an allignment tag.

Same with planes. They don't need an allignment tag to function in the slightest. Planar beings won't even lose allignment subtypes since, figure that, those aren't actually keyed to allignment! A completely separate thing they are! Clerics don't even need a god to function, so I really don't see your point there. Paladins have a sad thing with their Smite now only working on undead and outsiders, but that's easilly fixable by letting them apply it to half effect on everyone.

I think your definition for 'small' is questionable.

Please re-read what I posted. I said "allignment-based mechanics", not "literally everything in any way related to allignment". Allignment-based mechanics are, as far as I know:

-some types of DR
-some specific spells, like Holy Word, Protection from Evil, Detect Evil and so on
-some weapon abilities
-some specific class abilities(e.g. Smite)
-some restrictions on classes/gods/whatever else

And...that's about it. Specific spells can easilly be re-keyed to work on specific creature types instead of specific allignments(e.g. Detect Evil turns into Detect Undead And Demons, and similar), specific class abilities are fixed 90% of the time by either allowing them to affect everything, allowing them to affect everything at half power or using the same trick as with spells, weapon abilities can be just dropped most of the time or replaced with better ones, and DR can be replaced with a more common versions of it.

That's. It. It's a 5 minute fix that doesn't break anything. A Succubus (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/demon/succubus) is still a succubus even if it doesn't have that allignment tag.

There are literally entire sections of the reality of D&D that are defined as being MADE of alignment. (All the afterlives, for a start, but there are plenty of others.)

Citation needed. Taking Elysium from Pathfinder:

Elysium (Chaotic Good)

A vast land of untamed wilderness and wild passions, Elysium is the plane of benevolent chaos. Freedom and self-sufficiency abound here, personified in the azatas native to the plane. In Elysium, selfless cooperation and fierce competition clash with the violence of a raging thunderstorm, but such conflicts never overshadow the lofty concepts of bravery, creativity, and good unhindered by rules or laws.

Now let's cut out allignment. We get this:

Elysium

A vast land of untamed wilderness and wild passions, Elysium is the plane of benevolent disorder. Freedom and self-sufficiency abound here, personified in the azatas native to the plane. In Elysium, selfless cooperation and fierce competition clash with the violence of a raging thunderstorm, but such conflicts never overshadow the lofty concepts of bravery, creativity, and good unhindered by rules or laws.

Did anything of importance change? No. It's still the same plane, with the same feel and same denisens, except not made out of allignment. If it was defined as "made of chaotic good" I wouldn't have been able to do this party trick, now would have I?

Let me ask you; How often do you stop and think 'which action would be good, and which evil?'
How often do you really look at that Alignment box on your character sheet and ask yourself 'have I been the alignment I wrote down, or have I been doing a lot of things that are different alignments?'

All the time and about...every second time I think about the character, how they are developing and how I might further progress their story? Otherwise known as "all the ****ing time too, but a bit less often"? I don't know, is it normal for people to not think about their characters and not care how they are developing?

That's because Alignment is not about story arcs or character growth.
It's literally defined by the things you do in character.

Those two sentences are directly contradictory. Character actions are character development.

That the number of people who think they do good when they do Evil is a non-zero number renders the whole 'trust the players to know their alignment' argument entirely irrelevant.

This works both ways, you know. The fact that the number of GMs who think their players do Evil when they in fact do Good is non-zero number renders the whole 'Take the allignment into my own hands' argument entirely silly.

I really don't see how you can in one sentence say "Player view is subjective and thus can't be used to judge allignment", and in the next be like "GM would obviously be able to interpret complicated philosophical questions completely objectively at any time of day"

Darth Ultron

2016-10-14, 07:27 PM

Regarding the killing of evil creatures, remember that even the killing of fiends must be only mildly good at best. Remember that (at least in settings that include the Blood War or some equivalent) the main pastime and occupation of fiends (especially demons) is killing other fiends.

I'm pretty sure the pastime of fiends is ''corrupting mortals'' and ''killing/destroying good''

Then why don't you trust them to be able to determine the allignment of their character and how it changes with their actions?

So, ok, a player determines what alignment they want to be when they pick one of the alignments described in the rules. This part is fine.

But what happens when a player chooses to not have the character act according to that alignment?

And again, see my initial point. We don't always know that the things we do are evil or good; we just think what we want to think. That the number of people who think they do good when they do Evil is a non-zero number renders the whole 'trust the players to know their alignment' argument entirely irrelevant.

This is not true for everyone. There are a lot of people that know what good and evil are and willing make choices everyday to follow one way or another. It's only the ''shades of gray'' people that just think they can do whatever they want all the time.

Bohandas

2016-10-14, 10:53 PM

I'm pretty sure the pastime of fiends is ''corrupting mortals'' and ''killing/destroying good''

The old planescape material as well as much of the newer material makes it clear that the lower planes are dominated by the Blood War (and, in the Abyss, by the internecine wars between Grazzt, Orcus, and Demogorgon

Zanos

2016-10-15, 02:41 AM

Huh, so I guess I just imagined all the scores of allignment arguments regarding wherever X is evil or not over the last year, since it's so obvious.
Probably because alignments don't do exactly what they say on the tin, and many people don't actually read the books.

So let me get this straight. You expect your friends to yield on minor issues 100% of the time, but don't want to do that yourself. Way to be reciprocating.

Issues can be asymmetrical. A minor issue for the character is a major issue for the world and setting.

If the player is actually roleplaying a Good paladin, they won't do that. If the player wants to do that, they likely want to pursue a fall storyline anyways and will ask for an allignment change themselves. Finally, if the player does do that yet thinks it's a Good action, you've got a philosophical argument with the player, not the character, on your hands, in which case I would definitely begin by talking to the player outside of session in regards to what they concider Good and what they concider Evil. And then I'd still err on the side of the player being right, because what happens in the game is not worth antagonising people, even a little bit.

I was using that primarily as an example of your "what I do is right in my head" character. Also, not antagonizing people? I'm not so much of a wet blanket that I won't confront someone who's playing poorly because I'm afraid I might hurt their feelings. I'll try to reach an amenable solution, but I'm not going to say "yeah okay do what you want" because someone went and got upset that I criticized them.

All that you are doing by taking the allignnment switch into your hands is saying to the players "Yeah, by the way, I don't trust you to be reasonable people, and don't think you can get into character if your life depended on it.", as far as I can see.

I trust people to RP their characters they way they wrote their characters. I don't trust them to have in depth knowledge of the mechanics of cosmic forces. Being Good is hard. Also, see the top of this post.

When did I ever said the character got to decide their allignment? I said the players should. Players do not equal characters.

You said the players should because "they know what their character is thinking better than anyone", implying that the characters thought process has a significant impact on the alignment of an action. I assumed this to mean that if a character could justify the Goodness of their action, it was Good. Correct me if I'm wrong.\

I'd like to see a link to the rules in regards to that, because it certainly doesn't fit my idea of common sense-a paladin can defend a village from an orc invasion, kill a bunch of orcs and not fall, despite murder being Evil, because the local sum total of their actions is positive and generally Good/Neutral.

ENDS AND MEANS
When do good ends justify evil means to achieve them? Is it morally acceptable, for example, to torture an evil captive in order to extract vital information that can prevent the deaths of thousands of innocents? Any good character shudders at the thought of committing torture, but the goal of preventing thousands of deaths is undeniably a virtuous one, and a neutral character might easily consider the use of torture in such a circumstance. With evil acts on a smaller scale, even the most virtuous characters can find themselves tempted to agree that a very good end justifies a mildly evil means. Is it acceptable to tell a small lie in order to prevent a minor catastrophe? A large catastrophe? A world-shattering catastrophe? In the D&D universe, the fundamental answer is no, an evil act is an evil act no matter what good result it may achieve. A paladin who knowingly commits an evil act in pursuit of any end no matter how good still jeopardizes her paladinhood. Any exalted character risks losing exalted feats or other benefits of celestial favor if he commits any act of evil for any reason. Whether or not good ends can justify evil means, they certainly cannot make evil means any less evil. Some good characters might view a situation where an evil act is required to avert a catastrophic evil as a form of martyrdom: “I can save a thousand innocent lives by sacrificing my purity.” For some, that is a sacrifice worth making, just as they would not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for the same cause. After all, it would simply be selfish to let innocents die so a character can hang on to her exalted feats. Unfortunately, this view is ultimately misguided. This line of thinking treats the purity of the good character’s soul as a commodity (like her exalted feats) that she can just give up or sacrifice like any other possession. In fact, when an otherwise good character decides to commit an evil act, the effects are larger than the individual character. What the character sees as a personal sacrifice is actually a shift in the universal balance of power between good and evil, in evil’s favor. The consequences of that single evil act, no matter how small, extend far beyond the single act and involve a loss to more than just the character doing the deed. Thus, it is not a personal sacrifice, but a concession to evil, and thus unconscionable. Good ends might sometimes demand evil means. The means remain evil, however, and so characters who are serious about their good alignment and exalted status cannot resort to them, no matter how great the need. Sometimes a situation might demand that a good character cooperate with an evil one in order to accomplish a worthy and righteous goal. The evil character might not even be pursuing the same goal. For example, a brief civil war has put a new ruling house in power in a drow city, and the new rulers start actively raiding the surface world. A party of good adventurers travels into the depths of the earth to stop the drow raids. At the same time, a party of evil drow loyal to the deposed house seeks to overthrow the new rulers and restore their house to its position of power. The two groups have different but mutually compatible goals, and it is possible—within certain limits—for them to cooperate with each other. However, the good characters must not tolerate any evil acts committed by an evil ally during the time of their alliance, and can’t simply turn a blind eye to such acts. They must ensure that helping the drow will put a stop to the surface raids, which might entail a level of trust the drow simply do not deserve. And of course they must not turn on their erstwhile allies when victory is in sight, betraying the trust the drow placed in them. Such a situation is dangerous both physically and morally, but cooperating with evil creatures is not necessarily evil in itself.
The bolded portion is pretty central to this discussion, and is what I'm talking about when I say that people don't understand what alignment is.

Also, the books make a pretty strong distinction between murder and killing. Killing is okay, murder is not.

Bohandas

2016-10-15, 11:47 AM

As for the goblin babies, I think the optimal course of action would be to find some kind of Cuthbert sponsored orphanage that could raise them to turn their inborn tendency toward brutality and officiousness against people that actually have it coming.

AnachroNinja

2016-10-15, 12:10 PM

I'm just making a note of this... I personally, and almost every DM I've played with, consider the BoED information on alignment to be completely ridiculous and do not use it in any fashion. It takes the objective alignment system that already sucks, and cranks it up to 11 for no reason at all. It seriously makes lying to avoid a world ending apocalypse into an evil act that no good character should consider. It doesn't get more bonkers then that.

If you're going to play with the objective morality stuff, let your players know so they can work within it. Don't be shocked when every play ends up chaotic neutral or some version of evil. As it stands, DND actually mandates the "Evil will always win, because Good is dumb " style of world.

TheifofZ

2016-10-16, 06:21 AM

More like 'Evil always wins because noone cares enough about low level maliciousness to not be, but plenty of people can't be bothered to put the effort in to be good.'

bookkeeping guy

2016-10-16, 08:47 AM

It's fine to change characters' alignments based on actions.

Leaving babies to die if you could not do so is usually evil. No babies are born evil (except maybe Unholy Scions) and it is very evil to kill them, but I could definitely imagine a dwarf killing goblin babies.

in response to above....technically the players killed babies too. Since the hospital staff were killed no one is left to take care of the neo-natal care unit. Thus the babies there will starve and die. :) Tell them they get points for that and see what happens haha. XD

Also in the case of goblin and orc babies I started a discussion on that once...normal babies are innocent but technically goblin and orc babies are like children of the devil right? So you can't fully say they are as innocent as human, dwarf, or elf babies.

bookkeeping guy

2016-10-16, 08:50 AM

If you're going to play with the objective morality stuff, let your players know so they can work within it. Don't be shocked when every play ends up chaotic neutral or some version of evil. As it stands, DND actually mandates the "Evil will always win, because Good is dumb " style of world.

In regards to what the guy above said, which I paraphrased above...

That is definitely not true that good is dumb. In reality too people want you to think that the only way to win is be a criminal. Evil does sometimes look cool to people but that's an illusion. Evil doesn't have stability or sustaining ability like good does too.

Tiri

2016-10-16, 11:21 AM

That is definitely not true that good is dumb. In reality too people want you to think that the only way to win is be a criminal. Evil does sometimes look cool to people but that's an illusion. Evil doesn't have stability or sustaining ability like good does too.

He wasn't talking about good (or Good) in general. That was in reference to the kind of senseless and impractical kind of good that exalted, or 'Ultra-Good' characters, as presented in the BoED, must engage in. You know, like 'I can't kill one innocent person even if the rest of the world's population will die if I don't.' That sort of thing.

Also, evil can be just as stable and sustainable as good. I'm not sure why you hold the view you have, since you provide nothing to back it up, but what you say isn't the case.

TheifofZ

2016-10-16, 02:01 PM

As long as Evil isn't of the particular flavor that goes around blowing up worlds or slaughtering entire countries for the 'Evulz' of it, then it's highly sustainable.

One could argue that a properly suppressed country is, in fact, more sustainable than one that's free.
Things like maximizing efficiency in the work force, minimizing waste, and so on... those are all easily done in an evil run country, but much harder when one allows the citizens pesky things like 'freedom of choice' that get in the way of that.
As well, an evil overlord can choose, in dire situations like plague or famine, the proper course of action, such as to sacrifice the old or useless, or to quarantine whole cities until the plague burns out.
A good ruler would be censured for such acts, and would be forced to make desperate choices later as he tries to save the most.

zergling.exe

2016-10-16, 02:27 PM

awa

2016-10-16, 04:02 PM

yes but a good dictator has very limited means of enforcing his rules while an evil one has far greater ability to force people to do what he wants.

NichG

2016-10-16, 10:50 PM

He wasn't talking about good (or Good) in general. That was in reference to the kind of senseless and impractical kind of good that exalted, or 'Ultra-Good' characters, as presented in the BoED, must engage in. You know, like 'I can't kill one innocent person even if the rest of the world's population will die if I don't.' That sort of thing.

Also, evil can be just as stable and sustainable as good. I'm not sure why you hold the view you have, since you provide nothing to back it up, but what you say isn't the case.

BoED isn't really trying to be about what's expedient. Not everyone has to be exalted. Same thing with core alignment really, not everyone has to be Good. It's an out-of-character problem when a player feels like other people not seeing their character as Good means that somehow they're being personally judged as being a bad person. The kind of justifications like 'well, this saved more people, therefore its Good' are ultimately unnecessary (unless you're going to suffer mechanical penalties as a result, which muddies the waters). If your character saves the majority at the expense of the minority, is proud of it, they continue to be heroic,go around saying 'I save people, its what I do', not betray their team, have real friends and relationships, etc - and on the sheet have Lawful Evil, and have that be fine. Just because your character is considered by cosmic morality to be Evil doesn't mean you have to suddenly become a jerk or be hated by the world at large.

But, with respect to the sort of Exalted morality, there is a sort of sense in it due to the power scale of D&D. That is to say, when you get to a certain point, you have so many options and abilities and ways to rewrite reality available to you that if you choose one that sacrifices someone else for any reason or risk then it's your fault for letting your own insecurities or lack of creativity prevent you from finding options 3 to 3 billion that don't require that. If you're omnipotent, you can no longer hide behind statements like 'it was necessary' or 'it was the only way to save the world', because there's no longer such a thing as an 'only way' when you're wielding that kind of power. So in that regards, it actually can make sense as an ideal for D&D PCs to aspire to, because once they start flinging around Wishes and Gates and such then its hard to seriously imagine a situation where they really had no other choice. For a character like that, saying 'I had to kill one innocent to do it, but the world is safe!' should conceivably feel like an admission of failure, not something to be proud of. And the BoED morality is an example of what kinds of contortions you'd need to do to get yourself into that kind of character's way of thinking.