The Logic Of D&D 3.5 That I Just Don't Understand

[Bartmanhomer]

Ok, here the logic of D&D 3.5 that I just don't get: Poison is evil but evocation spells such as Magic Missile and Fireball isn't evil even though both spells can damage someone. Like huh? This is a real head-scratcher and I've been playing D&D 3.5 for a few years now. Can someone explain this logic to me please? :confused:

[Aniikinis]

The problem you're having is that you expect 3.5 to have logic at all instead of being built from the ground up to emulate D&D of old in a new way. Poison isn't technically evil, it's just dishonourable and as such paladins can't use it. However, poison can be seen as evil since mostly evil people will use poison.

[Bartmanhomer]

The problem you're having is that you expect 3.5 to have logic at all instead of being built from the ground up to emulate D&D of old in a new way. Poison isn't technically evil, it's just dishonourable and as such paladins can't use it. However, poison can be seen as evil since mostly evil people will use poison.

Then what's the difference for poison being dishonorable and evil?

[Red Fel]

Then what's the difference for poison being dishonorable and evil?

Authorial fiat.

[MisterKaws]

Then what's the difference for poison being dishonorable and evil?

The difference is that a Paladin of Freedom can use poisons while smiting evildoers just fine.

[Bartmanhomer]

The difference is that a Paladin of Freedom can use poisons while smiting evildoers just fine.

So the Paladin of Freedom can use regular poison without no consequences at all but the Paladin of Justice can't? Where does the rules say that?! :eek:

[Flameclaws]

there are actually 'good aligned' poisons, look at 'Ravages and Afflictions'
*Ahem*
"Besides the curative abilities of clerics and paladins, the powers of good have their own answer to poison and disease: ravages and afflictions, magical traumas that turn the moral corruption of evil creatures into physical corruption that wracks their bodies. Ravages and afflictions affect only evil creatures, and are particularly debilitating to evil outsiders - despite the immunity to poison that is common among such creatures."

[Sereg]

Ok, here the logic of D&D 3.5 that I just don't get: Poison is evil but evocation spells such as Magic Missile and Fireball isn't evil even though both spells can damage someone. Like huh? This is a real head-scratcher and I've been playing D&D 3.5 for a few years now. Can someone explain this logic to me please? :confused:

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

[Bartmanhomer]

there are actually 'good aligned' poisons, look at 'Ravages and Afflictions'
*Ahem*
"Besides the curative abilities of clerics and paladins, the powers of good have their own answer to poison and disease: ravages and afflictions, magical traumas that turn the moral corruption of evil creatures into physical corruption that wracks their bodies. Ravages and afflictions affect only evil creatures, and are particularly debilitating to evil outsiders - despite the immunity to poison that is common among such creatures."

Oh I almost forgot about Ravages and Afflictions. D'oh. :frown:

[Buufreak]

Oh I almost forgot about Ravages and Afflictions. D'oh. :frown:

It's not like it is the first time. And honestly, the smart dollar says it isn't the last.

[Bartmanhomer]

It's not like it is the first time. And honestly, the smart dollar says it isn't the last.

Yeah. A stupid error in my part. :sigh:

[Crake]

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

This is pretty much the reason, yeah. Same reason why the contagion spell is evil. Bio warfare is just as bad.


The problem you're having is that you expect 3.5 to have logic at all instead of being built from the ground up to emulate D&D of old in a new way. Poison isn't technically evil, it's just dishonourable and as such paladins can't use it. However, poison can be seen as evil since mostly evil people will use poison.

BoED does state that poison use is actually evil, not just dishonourable, so paladins of freedom would not be able to use them any more than regular ones could.

[AvatarVecna]

D&D morality is kinda like Batman morality: it only works as long as you don't think about it too much. At it's core, D&D is a "personal improvement system" that revolves around looting ruins, murdering people, and taking their stuff. You can get your alignment dinged for doing inherently Evil things too often, but apparently mass murder and grave-robbing doesn't count because...that's the basic premise of the game by default, and if your alignment was an actual reflection of your murderhobo habits, players would feel bad about having an E on their character sheet. So it's justified: the victims are stupid and ugly and "always evil", so it's okay to slaughter them and steal all their stuff.

[NichG]

I won't defend D&D logic since it's a warped mirror of a bunch of tropes its designed to capture, but there at least is some precedent for the 'kind' of logic you're talking about.

Namely, you have to take a mindset where combat isn't a means to an end or a necessity, but is actually fundamentally ritualistic. In many forms of pre-industrial warfare (tribal conflicts, etc), the purpose of a military engagement wasn't to kill the other side but was more about establishing the cost of an outright conflict. So there would be lots of posturing from both sides, demonstrations that one side 'could hurt' the other without actually inflicting that hurt (things like 'counting coup'), and the like. So that kind of combat served a performative social role more than a life and death matter of survival.

Something that violates the assumed boundaries of a ritual, performative social endeavor puts the entire thing at risk. If the accepted mode of conflict is to inflict non-lethal but highly visible injuries (scarring the enemy), the one guy who thinks he's clever by poisoning his spear risks escalating a conflict that might result in 5% casualties on either side over the course of the year into one with 50% casualities on both sides, meaning both societies starve that winter. So since you can't usually just outright explain to people 'the purpose of this conflict is to scare them off, you should hold back' without weakening morale, the things you aren't supposed to do have to be enshrined in arbitrary rules.

For example, the concept of 'trial by combat' has some sense of 'let the gods decide' - it's basically abandoning culpability for making a judgement as to which side is actually in the right in exchange for creating a situation where both sides agree that their conflict is resolved no matter how it goes (and the rules and precepts around it can be designed to minimize the actual consequence to society). So that gives rise to concepts like honourable conduct. From a zoomed out perspective, poison is 'evil' because it isn't part of those structures and therefore its use breaks some function of combat in that society - someone who is poisoned before their duel will find it unfair and if they lose and survive, they'll still seek retribution, etc. From a zoomed in perspective, the use of proscribed methods violates the meaning of the ritual - the gods will not hold that combat as a demonstration of righteousness when it is done improperly, and so the entire thing becomes tainted by some other motivation.

I would guess that most cultures which consider poison evil to use against a person even in warfare have no problem using it against animals, because the purposes of a conflict with animals and a conflict with other people are fundamentally different.

Where D&D mixes things up is that there's this broad middle of 'monstrous humanoids' or other forms of sentient (and socialized) opposition where the relationship between PC society and those societies doesn't have any kind of convention or compromise structure. So things like ravages are a clumsy reflection of that feeling that 'well, there are some enemies that PC societies should be in total war state with no matter what (such as demons and devils), so we need a way to say 'poison is okay in those cases' without saying 'poison is okay''. The way the authors scratched that itch was to make poisons that only worked on designated total-war targets, and therefore were sanctioned by the gods.

But from a zoomed out perspective (e.g. looking at the reasoning beyond such things), this is really an ugly patch. And from a zoomed in perspective, it makes the moral system incoherent, because the reasons given for the rules don't match up with the rules themselves.

[ezekielraiden]

D&D morality is kinda like Batman morality: it only works as long as you don't think about it too much. At it's core, D&D is a "personal improvement system" that revolves around looting ruins, murdering people, and taking their stuff. You can get your alignment dinged for doing inherently Evil things too often, but apparently mass murder and grave-robbing doesn't count because...that's the basic premise of the game by default, and if your alignment was an actual reflection of your murderhobo habits, players would feel bad about having an E on their character sheet. So it's justified: the victims are stupid and ugly and "always evil", so it's okay to slaughter them and steal all their stuff.

I have never understood why people think dungeon-delving necessarily means murder and invasion. Yes, that is a form it has frequently taken, particularly in Old School stuff. It's also a form I very rarely willingly engage in, in part because I tend to play Paladins.

You don't invade someone's home if you know people live there. And I take a pretty broad definition of "people." You don't murder people, because murder is unlawful killing: "the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law," "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another," "the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought," according to various dictionaries. Since only humans are sapient IRL, it only applies to humans here, but in a fantasy world where there are many obviously-sapient species (and many more where it's less clear), any person striving to be merely Good, not even Paladin-level Good, must default to a presumption of sapience in the vast majority of cases because it's better to treat non-sapient beings better than necessary, than to treat sapient ones worse than you are obligated to.

Sometimes, you don't expect anything but the undead (which are generally well-known to be of dangerous, violent intent) and non-sapient animals. Sometimes, you're going because a greater concern than home invasion supersedes, e.g. there's a lethal curse that must be broken and the MacGuffin to break it is in this long-abandoned tomb. Regardless, you avoid unnecessary invasion, you take only that which you can be confident belongs to no one (or which none will care that it is gone), etc. Keep your nose clean.

And with murder--self-defense is a recognized form of killing that is not murder. Warfare, as bleak and terrible as it is, is another. Both have limits. Never take a life if you aren't willing to accept the potential (even likely) costs. Always regret taking sapient life (and perhaps non-sapient life too!) because that is a harm to both the victim and the perpetrator. To quote a post I made on another forum, "You regret taking lives, even slavers' lives, because even killing in defense of another is a Terrible Thing that damages the soul." There is no such thing as a good, noble, positive, happy killing. At best, you have "justified" and "unjustified" killings. And a sword, no matter how beautiful, historically significant, or awesome-looking, is a tool of violence, designed to harm and kill. You keep it in its scabbard not because you want to, but because you recognize that some people will not act morally unless they are greeted with force. It sucks balls. But ultimately, that is what it all comes down to: people either refuse to follow a rule (be it legal or moral) at all, or they follow it willingly, or they follow it because eventually law enforcement responded to their refusal with force.

[Azuresun]

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

Including poisons that nonlethally paralyse or send people to sleep.

[AvatarVecna]

I have never understood why people think dungeon-delving necessarily means murder and invasion. Yes, that is a form it has frequently taken, particularly in Old School stuff. It's also a form I very rarely willingly engage in, in part because I tend to play Paladins.

I can't speak to how it's handled in other systems, but certainly within 3.5 it's the systems default, even if (as I suspect) most groups rarely play it so straight. Evil is an explicitly real thing that can be detected and measured. Combat is the only way by default to gain XP, and is by far the most rewarding way to gain GP - partially because somebody optimized for combat will always earn more via murder than an equal-level character optimized for money-making skills, and partially because gaining XP makes you able to reach a higher level of earning no matter what earning method you're using; these factors combine to make the most effective method of accomplishing things being to kill anything between you and your objective, looting along the way. Refusing to kill things makes the game harder or requires the DM to make up ways to reward you for accomplishing goals and resolving conflicts; refusing to loot things makes your job harder than it needs to be as you level; refusing to do either of these things is so outside the basic assumptions of the game that people who reject the murderhobo lifestyle are considered "Gooder than Good", get blessed by the gods for it, and DMs are given special advice from the designers as to how to roll with this very weird character concept the player is playing.

The amount of work going into balancing combat and loot acquisition is only matched by the lack of effort going into alternatives. Diplomacy doesn't work on PCs, and Bluff only maybe works on the PCs (since even just knowing they made a SM check tends to put the players themselves on edge), so any kind of social conflict tends to be a one-way street; enchantments and illusions run into similar problems, where their vagueness is only ever argued in favor of PCs, and it's difficult to not metagame if the player knows its an illusion. Casting and traps are at their most balanced when they deal directly with HP, and break down more or less as soon as somebody starts looking at the utility they can be used for more closely - because those uses weren't balanced, because they weren't for combat, so it wasn't a concern. Speaking of traps, while they're technically balanced as far as "how much they hurt" vs "how much XP you get for beating them", a lot of single-use traps just aren't worth it, because the amount of gold necessary for getting a single-use trap that can actually affect and hinder high-level adventurers is staggering even if you craft it yourself...and it can be set off by even a single rat, most of the time. Of course, this is only a problem if you're the kinda schmuck who has to worry about resource consumption; if they idea of a budget is more a suggestion (like, if you're the DM), then the economic viability of traps doesn't matter...but it's just one more that subtly encourages players to be the ones breaking through traps rather than the ones holing up behind them.

Not every system is like this. Not every system with combat is like this. But D&D is. 4e is less subtle about it than 3e ever was. 5e still has the same issue even if it's trying - the social and exploration pillars exist alongside the combat pillar, certainly, but abilities playing into them are almost always considered ribbons, and it still has that same issue of "here's how much effort was put into balancing combat" and "here's how much effort was put into balancing everything else" just not really being comparable. D&D isn't a wargame, but it's got wargaming in its blood; anything in the system by default that isn't "kill things and take their stuff" rarely amounts to anything more than tacked-on window dressing.

[Crake]

Including poisons that nonlethally paralyse or send people to sleep.

There are plenty of real life poisons that will "nonlethally" paralyze you... they tend to still be incredibly painful though.

[Sereg]

As said, murder is a very specific type of killing that does not include killing enemy combatants in battle. Good is not the same as pacifist.

Edit: Also, I see I made a typo. "Collateral" damage.

[Morty]

Where does it even say that poisons are evil? The SRD doesn't have anything about it.

[Boci]

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

But it isn't. If I poison my blade, I'm only poisoning someone I stab with it, which is hard to do accidentally. The only other person in danger is myself if I don't have the use poison class feature, and I am willing to take that risk. As for "slow and painful", the first part is just incorrect, D&D poisons are all fast, and the painful part well that not the only way poisons work, especially fantasy poisons.

The argument above makes sense for diseases, but not poisons which are relativly easy to control. Sure, poisons are banned in warfare in the real world, but so is explosive ammunition, and I'm pretty sure flame burst arrows aren't evil in D&D.


Where does it even say that poisons are evil? The SRD doesn't have anything about it.

Book of Exalted Deeds said they were, unless they only targetted evil creatures.


There are plenty of real life poisons that will "nonlethally" paralyze you... they tend to still be incredibly painful though.

Source? The only paralyzing poison I know is the cone snails, and there is consideration that it could be used as a pain killer:

"The venom of cone snails contains hundreds of different compounds, and its exact composition varies widely from one species to another. The toxins in these various venoms are called conotoxins. These are various peptides, each targeting a specific nerve channel or receptor. Some cone snail venoms also contain a pain-reducing toxin, which the snail uses to pacify the victim before immobilising and then killing it."

[Azuresun]

There are plenty of real life poisons that will "nonlethally" paralyze you... they tend to still be incredibly painful though.

Ah, so I should do the humane thing and beat them round the head with a sap. Got it! :smallcool:

[Crake]

Source? The only paralyzing poison I know is the cone snails, and there is consideration that it could be used as a pain killer:

"The venom of cone snails contains hundreds of different compounds, and its exact composition varies widely from one species to another. The toxins in these various venoms are called conotoxins. These are various peptides, each targeting a specific nerve channel or receptor. Some cone snail venoms also contain a pain-reducing toxin, which the snail uses to pacify the victim before immobilising and then killing it."

It's literally the definition of neurotoxins. I put nonlethal in "" because paralysis is a lethal state in and of itself, because if you're fully paralyzed, your lungs don't work and your heart stops beating, so there's not really such a thing as "nonlethal" paralysis.

[Boci]

It's literally the definition of neurotoxins. I put nonlethal in "" because paralysis is a lethal state in and of itself, because if you're fully paralyzed, your lungs don't work and your heart stops beating, so there's not really such a thing as "nonlethal" paralysis.

Yes, and yet you chose to focus on the "incredably painful" part and not the kills you part, which was a confusing way to get your point across, especially since they were likely talking about D&D paralysis which is nonelethal. You also ignored the unconcious option Azuresun mentioned and that does exist, both in D&D and the real world.

[Sereg]

But it isn't. If I poison my blade, I'm only poisoning someone I stab with it, which is hard to do accidentally. The only other person in danger is myself if I don't have the use poison class feature, and I am willing to take that risk. As for "slow and painful", the first part is just incorrect, D&D poisons are all fast, and the painful part well that not the only way poisons work, especially fantasy poisons.


Firstly, you are poisoning anyone who touches your blade that you didn't expect. Secondly, you are also poisoning anything that eats or decomposes your victim's flesh, as well as anything higher in the food chain.

Thirdly, all poisons in DnD have delayed action. One extra second counts as "slow" for this purpose.

Edit: Incidentally, I DO consider rendering unconscious far more humane than paralysing. I consider paralysing someone against their will torture.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

{scrubbed}

The inconsistency in D&D is less that poison is considered an evil way of fighting, than that a number of other methods which either are similarly condemned in real life or would be if they existed aren't.

[Sereg]

I made an edit, but yes. That.

[Boci]

Firstly, you are poisoning anyone who touches your blade that you didn't expect. Secondly, you are also poisoning anything that eats or decomposes your victim's flesh, as well as anything higher in the food chain.

Not if its injury poison, and also, don't touch someones blade without asking first, that's just good manners, and most poisons will have broken down by the time others start to eat the flesh of the victim.

Neither of those is a strong argument against using poisons or for making their use evil.


Edit: Incidentally, I DO consider rendering unconscious far more humane than paralysing. I consider paralysing someone against their will torture.

So hold person is an evil spell?


Thirdly, all poisons in DnD have delayed action. One extra second counts as "slow" for this purpose.

All poisons in D&D are done in a minute. If that's slow what is fast? Instantanous?


Because poison is considered an evil weapon in real life. It's use in warfare is prohibited by customary humanitarian law and numerous international treaties (https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule72)

Just because something is a warcrime doesn't mean its universally bad. Not burying the dead is a warcrime, that doesn't mean I'm expected to do that if I find a dead body. Similarly, using poisons in warfare is illegal and immoral, but what about tribe that have and do use poison in hunting and fighting eachother, in the past and present? We don't consider them especially evil. No more than killing rival tribesmen without poison I would imagine.

[Sereg]

Anything not instantaneous is "slow", yes.

As for hold person, I acknowledge that it has non-evil uses, but using it to deliberately keep someone paralysed would count as an evil act to me.

Edit: And I disagree with your last paragraph. I do consider those things evil.

[Boci]

As for hold person, I acknowledge that it has non-evil uses, but using it to deliberately keep someone paralysed would count as an evil act to me.

So then wouldn't a paralyxzing poison also have its non-evil uses?


Edit: And I disagree with your last paragraph. I do consider those things evil.

So you're fine with tribal warfare, as long as they use arrows and spiked clubs, but not if they add poison to those? That's what I don't get. If you want to say tribal warfare is evil, I can get that (though some might argue us applying our societies laws and morality to a completly different level of civilization is judgemental and elitist), but I do not understand how its fine, but only if they don't use poison. Surely either both or neither are to be considered evil.

[MisterKaws]

So the Paladin of Freedom can use regular poison without no consequences at all but the Paladin of Justice can't? Where does the rules say that?! :eek:

The Paladin of Justice's code of conduct explicitly mentions the use of poison as a dishonorable act, whereas the Paladin of Freedom's code skips it completely(cause Chaotic Good has no such petty thing as honor).

[King of Nowhere]

poison in the real life and in d&d act differently. in real life they are slow, so they are not used in combat: if you put poison on your blade it would not give you any advantage. simply, if your opponent survived the fight he would die later. but they were more often used to poison food, or anyway for assassination. hence why the middle age considered them evil.
in d&d poisons are fast, it makes sense to use them in combat.

modern chemistry produced something better. however, most modern poisons permanently cripple. or they are persistent, and remain on the ground for years after they are used (for this reason also mines are banned or limited). and ultimately they won't even provide an advantage, becaue everyone can use them the same, and that's why they were banned. because nobody gives up an advantage in war for moral considerations. war is hell, and you do whatever it takes to survive. it wouldn't even make much sense to try to apply those kind of morals.
in d&d poisons do not cripple more than anything else.

anyway, d&d took pieces of the knightly code of honor. it is of note that medieval knights were the privileged elite who could afford top quality weapons and horse, and their code of honor is the way of fighting that ensures those advanages matter, while the way of fighting of the lower classes were "dishonorable". a solo challenge? how honorable! i have a sword and full armor while he has only a rusty knife? well, that's not important. the guys with the rusty knife are trying to overwhelm me with numbers? cowardly dogs, they have no honor!

so, the alignment thing starts from something laced with hipocrisy, and slap it to a situation that's entirely different anyway.

the only thing i don't understand is why some people insist using the manuals to determine good or evil. Nobody can dictate me what is good or evil, but a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game least of all.

[Bartmanhomer]

Where does it even say that poisons are evil? The SRD doesn't have anything about it.

Somewhere in the Book of Vile Darkness.

[Sereg]

So then wouldn't a paralyxzing poison also have its non-evil uses?



So you're fine with tribal warfare, as long as they use arrows and spiked clubs, but not if they add poison to those? That's what I don't get. If you want to say tribal warfare is evil, I can get that (though some might argue us applying our societies laws and morality to a completly different level of civilization is judgemental and elitist), but I do not understand how its fine, but only if they don't use poison. Surely either both or neither are to be considered evil.
I did say against someone's will, which combat implies.


I believe that the times when war isn't evil are few and far between.




the only thing i don't understand is why some people insist using the manuals to determine good or evil. Nobody can dictate me what is good or evil, but a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game least of all.

We can. You disagreeing is a separate issue. (Also, there are historical cases of different sides on a hit war acting differently for moral reasons.)

[Boci]

I did say against someone's will, which combat implies.

But that would make hold person evil too, it isn't cast outside of combat too often. Plus even a good alighned party will regularly be killing sentient creatures against their will, which seems worse than being paralyzed. I would rather be paralyzed against my will (D&D paralysis, not real world paralysis) than killed.


I believe that the times when war isn't evil are few and far between.

This seems to contradict your previous statement:

"As said, murder is a very specific type of killing that does not include killing enemy combatants in battle. Good is not the same as pacifist."

So good is not pacifist, but war is very really ever not evil. And why go to the legnths to explain away how fighting a war isn't muder, only to then claim war is evil.

And besides, if tribal warfare is bad, then its the warfare that is bad, not the poison use.

[Psyren]

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

^ This is the logic behind it, yeah. Whether your DM (or you if that's your job) find that logic compelling is up to them/you, not a message board.

[Azuresun]

As for hold person, I acknowledge that it has non-evil uses, but using it to deliberately keep someone paralysed would count as an evil act to me.

How about tying someone up with rope?

[Biggus]

Because chemical warfare is a warcrime, but simply killing your enemy isn't. Basically, poison is too likely to cause collating damage and is likely to make your enemy's death slow and painful.

This is the "real-world" reason, but there's another: D&D morality is story-book morality, not actual morality. Poison is evil because the baddies use it in fairy tales and fantasy books, and the goodies don't. Quite a lot of D&D morality works on that principle.

[ezekielraiden]

Not every system is like this. Not every system with combat is like this. But D&D is. 4e is less subtle about it than 3e ever was.

I mean, 4e actually offered explicit rules structures (yes, plural) for how to earn XP without killing anyone or anything: Quests, and Skill Challenges. It is in fact theoretically possible (though, I admit, not very likely) to advance all the way to maximum level without ever participating in combat. (I would say "without ever harming anyone," but Pacifist Cleric and Lazylord exist and I don't think they should count for avoiding some of your charges.) More realistically, it is entirely possible for a 4e character to get the majority of their advancement from Quests and SCs, especially in a game where there's a lot of politics and intrigue. I have personally played in a game that was about 50/50 balanced between combat and non-combat sources of XP. It was LOTS of fun. So....yeah.

(There's also the minor wrinkle--to bring back up the traps you mentioned--that 4e stats most traps as "combat" encounters that sorta-kinda blur the line between puzzles and fighting. And some Skill Challenges are to overcome a larger or more intricate trap mechanism. But that's neither here nor there.)

Beyond that, there are other considerations. Combat does not have to be lethal. I always confer with my DM and fellow players before I land a truly lethal blow, unless it is really, really obvious that a threat is just going to be a threat permanently. (For example, corrupted machine guardians that attacked us when we entered a facility.) I don't kill indiscriminately, and I take every opportunity even remotely feasible to take prisoners rather than simply kill. Hence why I balk at the characterization of adventurers as inherently LE home-invaders and grave-robbers. Have I taken things from grave sites, even as a Paladin? Yes. Have I caused the deaths of people whose only crime was picking a fight? Yes. Have I done so without really caring or doing something about it? No.

Again, I fully agree that D&D (a) comes from a combat-centric place, (b) is culturally much more inclined toward combat than even other similarly combat-supporting games, and (c) most editions have failed to provide meaningful sources of XP that aren't "steal treasure from the people whose home you invaded/grave you robbed" or "kill whatever things have decided to make their home in the place you invaded/grave you robbed." My lack-of-understanding focuses on why people act as though that is not merely a common trend or pattern, but all that there is to D&D.

[Sereg]

But that would make hold person evil too, it isn't cast outside of combat too often. Plus even a good alighned party will regularly be killing sentient creatures against their will, which seems worse than being paralyzed. I would rather be paralyzed against my will (D&D paralysis, not real world paralysis) than killed.



This seems to contradict your previous statement:

"As said, murder is a very specific type of killing that does not include killing enemy combatants in battle. Good is not the same as pacifist."

So good is not pacifist, but war is very really ever not evil. And why go to the legnths to explain away how fighting a war isn't muder, only to then claim war is evil.

And besides, if tribal warfare is bad, then its the warfare that is bad, not the poison use.
War is USUALLY evil. Add poison and that makes it worse. And casting hold person for the purpose of keeping them trapped would be evil.

I consider dying preferable to torture personally.

How about tying someone up with rope?

Better than paralysing them, but still an evil act to keep them like that for an extended period.

Let's put it this way I consider life in prison more cruel than execution.

[Jay R]

This isn't D&D logic. It's real world war crimes logic, so the rules of the forum don't allow us to speculate why.

[Psyren]

@ the Hold Person discussion: Hold Person isn't evil in a vacuum. All else being equal, it's a pretty humane way of neutralizing an enemy that you don't want to harm or fight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84JxpJMwqg4). Once a target is rendered helpless it's very easy to do evil at that point, but the evil comes from those post-hoc actions rather than from the spell itself.

HP has added security in that no matter how long the spell normally lasts or how weak-willed the target, eventually they will roll a natural 20 and break free. This makes it impractical for long-term incarceration and more useful as a short-term measure, such as capturing a foe in the heat of battle or transporting a prisoner from one secure enclosure to another.

[Quertus]

Thirdly, all poisons in DnD have delayed action. One extra second counts as "slow" for this purpose.

I love how this reads as "rocket tag übercharger, SoD, or evil". :smallwink:


I did say against someone's will, which combat implies.

I believe that Kantian ethics would say that, by attacking me, you have, in principle, consented to the consequences.

[Sereg]

I love how this reads as "rocket tag übercharger, SoD, or evil". :smallwink:



I believe that Kantian ethics would say that, by attacking me, you have, in principle, consented to the consequences.

I do consider the former the most ethical method of combat.

As for the latter, no. The point of Kantian ethics is that circumstances don't matter.

[Elkad]

Curare is a painless paralytic.

Like most paralytics, at high enough doses it can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation. It has no effect on heart muscle. If you provide artificial respiration, the patient recovers fully eventually.

We thought it was a painkiller. Turns out it just keeps you from screaming and thrashing while the doctor cuts on you. You are fully conscious and feel all the pain.

[Psychoalpha]

Nobody can dictate me what is good or evil, but a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game least of all.

Uh... what? I mean, sure the books can't dictate anything to you if that's not the game you want to play. You can decide that when someone gets hit with a sword a big 'SLASH!' word flashes in the air and they get knocked out but no blood is actually spilled, if you really want. More power to you, I guess?

I don't think anybody is saying that using poison is evil RL because a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game say so, so I can only assume you're saying that the rules of a roleplaying game can't dictate rules to you, which is a weird position to take.

[D+1]

Ok, here the logic of D&D 3.5 that I just don't get: Poison is evil but evocation spells such as Magic Missile and Fireball isn't evil even though both spells can damage someone. Like huh? This is a real head-scratcher and I've been playing D&D 3.5 for a few years now. Can someone explain this logic to me please? :confused:
Poison use is to Fireball use as digging up the mayors dead grandmother to look for jewelry is to looting the dungeon of the dead mad mage Flurbwix. :)

Use of poison against other people in real world society has long been associated with evil. We poison insects and pest animals and vegetation, but use against PEOPLE in combat is considered morally repugnant. Essentially, it's biological/chemical warfare even if it's just one-on-one usage. That's in the real world. D&D only codifies that perpective in alignment terms.

[Rynjin]

Use of poison against other people in real world society has long been associated with evil. We poison insects and pest animals and vegetation, but use against PEOPLE in combat is considered morally repugnant. Essentially, it's biological/chemical warfare even if it's just one-on-one usage. That's in the real world. D&D only codifies that perpective in alignment terms.

The funny thing is, the reason it's considered "morally repugnant" is in itself morally repugnant.

Poison is an equalizer; it allows downtrodden masses an inexpensive way to get back at or even the playing field against the nobility (who are usually better armed and armored) and in general allows weaker people (in many cases women, who have little other recourse in violent conflict, say against an abusive husband) to fight back against those who have inherent advantages; either due to their physicality or resources.

It's not at all a matter of it being "chemical warfare". Chemical weapons are banned because they destroy ecosystems and lead to massive loss of life...for the more altruistic surface reasoning, anyway.

Most poisons are small scale and naturally occurring in the wild in any case, particularly the ones that were historically used (cyanide, arsenic, belladonna, etc.).

"Poison is evil" is propaganda by the nobility that was used to cover their own asses by making sure anyone that used it to protect themselves or take revenge for whatever heinous act they'd committed recently would be shunned by all their peers, thus discouraging its use even further.

The idea has stuck around to the modern day because killing people IN GENERAL is more frowned on today, but killing someone with poison is no more or less moral than killing them with anything else.

[Azuresun]

Better than paralysing them, but still an evil act to keep them like that for an extended period.

How long does it have to be before it becomes evil? Say someone is transporting a dangerous prisoner from one jail to another in restraints, how many minutes would it be before the guards become evil? Can you get it down to the nearest ten? Can we avoid evilfication by changing out the guards at regular intervals? This information may be relevant to the prison service.

(not even touching the idea that the death penalty is "more humane" than imprisonment, no siree)

[Sereg]

How long does it have to be before it becomes evil? Say someone is transporting a dangerous prisoner from one jail to another in restraints, how many minutes would it be before the guards become evil? Can you get it down to the nearest ten? Can we avoid evilfication by changing out the guards at regular intervals? This information may be relevant to the prison service.

(not even touching the idea that the death penalty is "more humane" than imprisonment, no siree)

It's about attitude. "I am doing this as it is the only safe way to transport them" is not an evil attitude. "I am doing this as I want them to feel helpless" is.

[Alexvrahr]

Dishonourable actions tend to be whatever tactics the people in charge don't like, especially tactics used in asymmetric warfare. That chemical weapons have had an admittedly patchy ban for the century since WWI is a rare exception.

Anyway, the alignment rules are a snapshot of some wargamers beliefs in the 1970s, there's not a lot of point trying to go too far trying to analyse them.

[King of Nowhere]

Uh... what? I mean, sure the books can't dictate anything to you if that's not the game you want to play. You can decide that when someone gets hit with a sword a big 'SLASH!' word flashes in the air and they get knocked out but no blood is actually spilled, if you really want. More power to you, I guess?

I don't think anybody is saying that using poison is evil RL because a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game say so, so I can only assume you're saying that the rules of a roleplaying game can't dictate rules to you, which is a weird position to take.

If you consider alignments as part of the rules, i can see why you'd feel that way.
But the moment you start attaching real world labels like good and evil to them, when discussing them involves actual ethical values, then they are no longer just rules of the game. And i will not treat them as such just because they are thusly labeled.

And anyway, just because something is written in a book, it doesn't have to be a rule. Would you also consider a rule that food has to cost so-and-so because it's written? Would you have every king be level 40 because they own the kingdom and so by the rules of npc wealth by level you calculate the value of the kingdom and establish the king's level?
Do you believe that every spell, class and item should be available exactly as written because being written makes it a "rule"?

I certainly do not. I treat the material as a bunch of lego blocks: i take only what i want, and i craft it in ways that may not have been initially intended.

[Psychoalpha]

If you consider alignments as part of the rules, i can see why you'd feel that way.

Sure I consider them part of the rules. So does the guy who referred to 'a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game' dictating about what is good and evil to him, whoever that was.

Oh, right, that was you. Alignments are defined, albeit loosely, and listed as class/item requirements, spell descriptors, etc. Trying to argue that they aren't part of the rules would just be embarrassing for everyone concerned, so please don't.


But the moment you start attaching real world labels like good and evil to them, when discussing them involves actual ethical values, then they are no longer just rules of the game. And i will not treat them as such just because they are thusly labeled.

Like I said, 'SLASH!' away with your nerf sword, or whatever else you want to do with the game. If you want to throw out alignment entirely, or redefine it along a different set of definitions, more power to you. I personally give everybody Precise Shot for free because I think it's a ridiculous feat tax that doesn't add anything to the game. One of my friends developed an alternate system for alignment that works for his group. People make all sorts of considerations.

Pretending to some kind of quasi-outrage, like how dare they, or that they aren't part of the rules of the game because of said foot-stomping is just kind of absurd. If I said 'Nobody can dictate me what shooting into combat is like, but a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game least of all.' I would be soundly mocked by many people, and rightly so.

Most people seem to agree that the alignment definitions provided in D&D are only in line with RL beliefs in the extremes (sacrificing babies to your dark god in exchange for what you believe is personal power is almost certainly evil, selfless charity and kindness are almost certainly good, etc), and dubious in the specifics (poisons, animate dead, etc), and if they really want to they change things around. Or they just play it straight for the same reason that many people don't homebrew classes/spells/etc, because they just don't care that much and don't want to do the work, because they have plenty of fun playing the game the way it's presented. I don't understand how you don't understand that, I suppose.

[Quertus]

Redefining the alignment system is definitely one of the reasons most of my characters want to overthrow the gods.


I do consider the former the most ethical method of combat.

As for the latter, no. The point of Kantian ethics is that circumstances don't matter.

I don't know if the Necromancer Segev and the academia mage Quertus would get along, but you and I certainly seem to hold not incompatible moral stances. :smallwink:

As to Kantian ethics… it's been too many decades since college for my senile mind to be certain, but isn't Kantian ethics a) based on consent, and b) contains the notion of consenting in principle? For example, if you live in Drow society, and have the option to leave, but choose not to, and give birth to a 3rd boy, then you have in principle consented to sacrificing one of your sons?


Anyway, the alignment rules are a snapshot of some wargamers beliefs in the 1970s, there's not a lot of point trying to go too far trying to analyse them.

I mean, they've changed over the years. 2e "evil" is 3e "neutral", for example. So I think that there's a lot of point in discussing them, and encouraging the developers to do a better job (where "dropping them entirely" represents a better job).

[Sereg]

The point of Kantian ethics is that something is good if it would be desirable if every single person did it in every single situation and evil if that doesn't hold (also, you should dislike doing good in order for it to qualify as good).

[Psychoalpha]

(where "dropping them entirely" represents a better job).

That doesn't represent a better job, just a different one. Not having alignments puts the world into shades of grey, which is fine for some worlds, but not so much for others. Having defined Good and Evil (and to an extent Law and Chaos) allows for stories and characters to exist that would not otherwise. Even games that pretend to have no alignment system still functionally do just so they can play to those stories (see: Nephandi in World of Darkness), while D&D takes a stab at shades of grey with the Neutral alignment being as expansive as it can be.

Again, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with games that don't use it, but for many people (myself included) D&D works best when Good and Evil are concrete universal forces that filter down even to the relative plebes that are mere mortals and their actions (and up from them, in turn). Getting rid of that doesn't make it a better game, for those people, just a different game.

For instance, when the 4E playtest was pushed, and I think maybe the early game, the vast majority of people were Unaligned. You were only Good or Evil if you were an active, deliberate champion of a benign or malign higher power or larger cause. Good and Evil was for Angels, Demons, for Paladins or for the Wizard devoted to a Demon Lord, etc. I seem to recall that they scaled back on that later in its lifetime because, at least from my perspective, people REALLY didn't like alignment being so much less of a thing.

[Arbane]

"Because Gygax".

Gary didn't want PCs using poison, so he made it dangerous, impractical, and evil-by-fiat.

[Quertus]

That doesn't represent a better job, just a different one. Not having alignments puts the world into shades of grey, which is fine for some worlds, but not so much for others. Having defined Good and Evil (and to an extent Law and Chaos) allows for stories and characters to exist that would not otherwise. Even games that pretend to have no alignment system still functionally do just so they can play to those stories (see: Nephandi in World of Darkness), while D&D takes a stab at shades of grey with the Neutral alignment being as expansive as it can be.

Again, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with games that don't use it, but for many people (myself included) D&D works best when Good and Evil are concrete universal forces that filter down even to the relative plebes that are mere mortals and their actions (and up from them, in turn). Getting rid of that doesn't make it a better game, for those people, just a different game.

For instance, when the 4E playtest was pushed, and I think maybe the early game, the vast majority of people were Unaligned. You were only Good or Evil if you were an active, deliberate champion of a benign or malign higher power or larger cause. Good and Evil was for Angels, Demons, for Paladins or for the Wizard devoted to a Demon Lord, etc. I seem to recall that they scaled back on that later in its lifetime because, at least from my perspective, people REALLY didn't like alignment being so much less of a thing.

I think you've misunderstood me?

We can have "Wizard" and "Cleric" classes without having an explicit "arcane/divine" labels, or without having mechanics that explicitly interact with those labels.

We can have "Dragons" without having explicit "Dragon HD", or mechanics that explicitly interact with Dragon HD.

We can have a world that isn't just grey without explicit, defined "Good" and "Evil" alignment labels, or mechanics which interact with those labels.

Now, as to it doing a better job… I would argue that we *cannot* have such a world in 3e, which is simply "Evil" and "Evil" - and "Good" is often the worse evil. Both sides are morally reprehensible by RAW, IMO. Removing alignment would represent "doing better".

[Arbane]

Is it worth mentioning that there was a point in European history when crossbows were considered even more evil than poison? :smallamused:

[TheTeaMustFlow]

The funny thing is, the reason it's considered "morally repugnant" is in itself morally repugnant.

Poison is an equalizer; it allows downtrodden masses an inexpensive way to get back at or even the playing field against the nobility (who are usually better armed and armored) and in general allows weaker people (in many cases women, who have little other recourse in violent conflict, say against an abusive husband) to fight back against those who have inherent advantages; either due to their physicality or resources.

It's not at all a matter of it being "chemical warfare". Chemical weapons are banned because they destroy ecosystems and lead to massive loss of life...for the more altruistic surface reasoning, anyway.

Most poisons are small scale and naturally occurring in the wild in any case, particularly the ones that were historically used (cyanide, arsenic, belladonna, etc.).

"Poison is evil" is propaganda by the nobility that was used to cover their own asses by making sure anyone that used it to protect themselves or take revenge for whatever heinous act they'd committed recently would be shunned by all their peers, thus discouraging its use even further.

The idea has stuck around to the modern day because killing people IN GENERAL is more frowned on today, but killing someone with poison is no more or less moral than killing them with anything else.


{scrubbed}

On a tactical level, poison has almost never been a useful weapon of war for anyone - even the quickest acting poisons take too long to be of relevance. (It is much more useful thus in hunting, where a hunter may withdraw and wait for the poison to take effect.)

Apart from modern chemical weapons, the only significant exception to this are the very earliest projectile weapons, which were sometimes poisoned to compensate for their lack of power - the word "toxin" comes from toxikon, a poison applied by the ancient Greeks to arrows (toxa). Such bows, however, are in no way a precise weapon, and have virtually no capability to pierce armour. Thus, any casualties inflicted by them were inevitably indiscriminate and fell predominantly upon the lower orders of those antique societies.

Throughout most of history, the relevant uses of poisoning in warfare have been strategic, rather than tactical. The first notable form of these is attempts to spread infection and disease throughout the enemy ranks - generally in the crudest of ways, for example by the smearing of excrement on arrows fired into the enemy camp. The second is scorched earth - the poisoning of food supplies, livestock, wells, etc. to deny their use to the enemy. Again, one would have hoped it obvious that it is common soldiers and civilians who mostly suffer from these. Aristocrats are generally healthier, and generally the last to starve.

During poison's relatively brief and utterly unlamented hour as a serious battlefield weapon in WW1, suffice to say that much the same applied. Poison gases are by their nature indiscriminate and most effective against the most poorly-equipped or prepared troops - for example, colonial units.

It should also go without saying that all of the above make for thoroughly unpleasant ways to die, and almost as horrible to survive. They inflict long, painful and needless suffering on their victims.

In short, your beliefs about poison being a way for the downtrodden masses to "even the playing field" against the powerful are not merely wrong, but in fact the opposite of truth. Poison has always been a cruel weapon in war, both for the excessive suffering it inflicts and the undiscriminating nature of that suffering. It has been condemned throughout history for these reasons, not some inane conspiracy on the part of the powerful to suppress a weapon that has predominantly hurt people who aren't them. Banning its use is reasonable, practical, and eminently ethically justifiable.


Is it worth mentioning that there was a point in European history when crossbows were considered even more evil than poison? :smallamused:

It is not, because that's more or less fiction.{scrubbed} It was not actually a significant thing, while the condemnation of poison in warfare is more or less timeless and universal - even when people have used poison (which for the vast majority of history was far less often than not, in fact) they have rarely been proud about it.

[Morty]

The morality of using poison as opposed to other tools of war and violence can actually be a pretty interesting one, which can perhaps lead to some in-character conflict. One good character can suggest using it, while another may balk at it.

Labelling it as evil pretty much torpedoes such a question (which is generally all the alignment system ever does). Therefore it should be ignored... mind you, I've yet to see anything from Book of Exalted Deeds that this sentence doesn't apply to.

[Endarire]

@OP: You're thinking too hard about a game where creatures kill creatures for power in terms of title, EXP, and loot. Just consider 'Evil' to usually mean 'GM only tool.'

[Rynjin]

...This can be politely described as 'nonsense'.

On a tactical level, poison has almost never been a useful weapon of war for anyone - even the quickest acting poisons take too long to be of relevance. (It is much more useful thus in hunting, where a hunter may withdraw and wait for the poison to take effect.)

Apart from modern chemical weapons, the only significant exception to this are the very earliest projectile weapons, which were sometimes poisoned to compensate for their lack of power - the word "toxin" comes from toxikon, a poison applied by the ancient Greeks to arrows (toxa). Such bows, however, are in no way a precise weapon, and have virtually no capability to pierce armour. Thus, any casualties inflicted by them were inevitably indiscriminate and fell predominantly upon the lower orders of those antique societies.

Throughout most of history, the relevant uses of poisoning in warfare have been strategic, rather than tactical. The first notable form of these is attempts to spread infection and disease throughout the enemy ranks - generally in the crudest of ways, for example by the smearing of excrement on arrows fired into the enemy camp. The second is scorched earth - the poisoning of food supplies, livestock, wells, etc. to deny their use to the enemy. Again, one would have hoped it obvious that it is common soldiers and civilians who mostly suffer from these. Aristocrats are generally healthier, and generally the last to starve.

During poison's relatively brief and utterly unlamented hour as a serious battlefield weapon in WW1, suffice to say that much the same applied. Poison gases are by their nature indiscriminate and most effective against the most poorly-equipped or prepared troops - for example, colonial units.

It should also go without saying that all of the above make for thoroughly unpleasant ways to die, and almost as horrible to survive. They inflict long, painful and needless suffering on their victims.

In short, your beliefs about poison being a way for the downtrodden masses to "even the playing field" against the powerful are not merely wrong, but in fact the opposite of truth. Poison has always been a cruel weapon in war, both for the excessive suffering it inflicts and the undiscriminating nature of that suffering. It has been condemned throughout history for these reasons, not some inane conspiracy on the part of the powerful to suppress a weapon that has predominantly hurt people who aren't them. Banning its use is reasonable, practical, and eminently ethically justifiable.



None of this is really relevant to what I'm talking about, because I wasn't talking about poison as a weapon of war; if we were talking about that it would be even more moot in the context of D&D. Poisons are relatively fast acting and do not contaminate any secondary targets.

I'm talking about the propaganda of painting poison as "cowardly" or more often than not referred to as "the woman's weapon".

That's the main reason it is stigmatized in terms of assassinations or murders over other methods. Kill a man in a duel? Oh why certainly, that's upright and honorable! Stab a man in the back? Shady, but you know he really was asking for it.

Poison his breakfast porridge every day for a month because he's too strong for you to actually fight and you're tired of him beating you for only giving him girls? *splutters* how scandalous, make sure she suffers when she dies.

The truth of the matter is, dead is ****ing dead. You use what resources you have available and valor doesn't come into it once you strip away the niceties and propaganda tied to it.

[King of Nowhere]

Pretending to some kind of quasi-outrage, like how dare they, or that they aren't part of the rules of the game because of said foot-stomping is just kind of absurd. If I said 'Nobody can dictate me what shooting into combat is like, but a bunch of rules about a roleplaying game least of all.' I would be soundly mocked by many people, and rightly so.


Wait, wait, wait.

Perhaps i came across as more aggressive than i intended. Or perhaps you read me as more aggressive than i was. Anyway, you are clearly misrepresenting my stance.
The ambiguity comes from the double nature of alignments as rules of the game and descriptors of real world morality.
And alignment does both things pretty poorly.

So, when i said that i refuse to accept moral stances from a game manual, i was referring to the nature of alignments as morality decriptors.
And when i said that i don't feel bound by rules anyway, i was referring to alignment as rules (and really, do class/alignment restrictions add anything to the game? Is there any reason to forbid a monk/barbarian?).

And when i said that i don't understand people feeling tightly bound by the 'rules', i'm referring to the fact that this game has so many moving parts and broken interactions that if we took everything at face value, then all becomes infinite wish and breaking the economy combos. Which is a way to play, but not the one used by most.
D&d is a game that can be used to do a lot of different things, but it requires a bit of fiddling.
Everyone accepts that you have to adjust or ignore some stuff, so it goes for alignment too.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

None of this is really relevant to what I'm talking about, because I wasn't talking about poison as a weapon of war

Splinters, logs, eyes.

Firstly, you quoted a post discussing the use of poison in combat, in a thread that had been discussing the use of poison in combat, so yes, I naturally assumed your post was actually relevant to the previous, rather than going off on an unrelated tangent without actually mentioning that you were doing so.

Secondly, yes, you actually were talking about it in that context. You might not have intended to do so, but what you have written you have written:


it allows downtrodden masses an inexpensive way to get back at or even the playing field against the nobility (who are usually better armed and armored) and in general allows weaker people (in many cases women, who have little other recourse in violent conflict, say against an abusive husband)

The factors emphasised having everything to do with combat and little to do with assassination - people are not generally poisoned either way when wearing armour, and if your premeditated murder requires a contest of upper body strength, you are probably doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, you distinctly failed to mention anything actually suggesting a specific restriction of the topic to non-combat uses. I responded to what you wrote, I cannot read your mind.

Even if I had been able to read your mind, however, your statements would have still been just as inaccurate, and my answers more or less on the same lines. Poison is still a cruel way to kill someone, even off the battlefield - they will still die slowly and in great pain, no doubt worse than had you simply cut their throat in their sleep. It is still an indiscriminate way to kill someone, because of the high risk that the poison is consumed by someone other than your intended target. And it still punches down for much the same reasons - aristocrats can have food tasters and the like, commoners can't.


I'm talking about the propaganda of painting poison as "cowardly"

Well, yeah. Murder is traditionally not seen as particularly brave, no matter how you do it. What, you think Dr Crippen would be better remembered if he'd smothered his wife to death instead?


or more often than not referred to as "the woman's weapon".

Very specific turn of phrase, that - taking it from Game of Thrones, by any chance? Maybe Sherlock Holmes?


That's the main reason it is stigmatized in terms of assassinations or murders over other methods.

Nope. Firstly, the evidence of it being particularly stigmatised compared to other types of premeditated murder is weak at best. (It is of course seen of as evidence of premeditation, because unlike most other weapons you can't exactly poison someone accidentally or in a fit of rage.) People who strangled their victims instead got just as hanged.

Furthermore, even if that were the case, there would be plenty of reasonable causes to consider it among the worse methods of murder, as detailed above. Suffering is bad, poison causes more suffering than most other ways, therefore poison is worse than most other ways. Simples.


Kill a man in a duel? Oh why certainly, that's upright and honorable!

Assuming the duel is legal, then... yeah. Killing someone in a lawful manner has generally been seen as killing them in an unlawful manner. Is there supposed to be a point here?

I strongly disagree with the practice of duelling, but the difference is obvious. The other person has generally chosen to fight, and at the very least it's almost certainly a quicker and less painful death, with no chance of collateral damage. Not exactly commendable, but at the very least slightly lower on the cruelty scale.


Stab a man in the back? Shady, but you know he really was asking for it.

...No. No I don't. I don't know that. That is not what I think of when I hear "stab a man in the back". Literally no one thinks that when they hear "stab a man in the back", and they never have. Where on Earth are you getting this from?


Poison his breakfast porridge every day for a month because he's too strong for you to actually fight and you're tired of him beating you for only giving him girls? *splutters* how scandalous, make sure she suffers when she dies.

It does probably get quite scandalous when the bowls get mixed up or cross contaminated or someone swipes a bit extra (as will almost certainly happen over the course of a month) and you kill some of the girls as well.

I really have no idea what you're trying to prove here. Yes, killing husband dearest in a less slow and painful way would be morally superior to killing him in a more slow and painful way, particularly when that way has a high risk of also harming innocents. Even better would be a solution that does not involve murder. Wife-beating, while certainly vile, is not generally considered worthy of the death penalty.

If none of those options are available, then yes, in an imperfect world poisoning may still be a lesser evil. That does not make it good, and that does not make moral systems which discourage its use any less wise or right.


The truth of the matter is, dead is ****ing dead. You use what resources you have available and valor doesn't come into it once you strip away the niceties and propaganda tied to it.

I thought of writing a longer rebuttal to this, but it's such a fundamentally empty statement that all I can bring myself to answer with right now is: [citation needed]. Because I'm pretty sure I'd rather die with less suffering, thanks.

[Saint-Just]

Broadly speaking I have not seen anyone successfully defend 3.5 morality as self-consistent. What is usually done is either play by the book and ignore inconsistencies (because honestly, not every group needs or wants to spend their time exploring morality), or throw these parts of books away and redefine things from ground up. Or just disperse with alignments.

I think that both core and BoED/BoVD provide certain basic framework of morality (you can probably describe it as kinda-but-not-quite-humanistic) but then tackles on a a myriad taboos which are not readily derivable from the basic premises (masochism is evil, poison is evil, casting deathwatch is evil). The ideas of taint\corruption have been present in the system long before Taint or Corruption subsystems were published, and like most RL views you cannot logically derive forbidden behaviour even if you know what is considered good behaviour. Some things are just forbidden and that's it.

Going back to initial question - 3.5 has a fekkton of feats\class features which allow you to deal repeated damage. I think that for most of them you can argue how they are not evil (e.g bleeding is not painful, repeated damage is repeated, not continuous etc.) but it smacks of motivated reasoning. But two purest examples would be burning people with fire or acid. You just can't argue that the damage is not continuous in that case. Oh, I am aware that Fireball is supposed to be a laser or maybe an artillery shell - that all the damage is done in a fraction of second, but numerous spells inflict damage over multiple rounds. Or even simply dousing someone in an alchemist's fire. Yet nothing specifically calls those things evil.



On a tactical level, poison has almost never been a useful weapon of war for anyone - even the quickest acting poisons take too long to be of relevance. (It is much more useful thus in hunting, where a hunter may withdraw and wait for the poison to take effect.)


Tang and Song would like to have a word with you. Yes, military poison use is atypical - but to say anyone is to make overly broad statement.

P.S. I would like to broadly agree with both TheTeaMustFlow and Rynjin. That is, poison is a weapon which is more cruel, socially disruptive, and has greater risk of unintended consequences than most other weapons - and it also has been historically stereotyped as evil primarily because it's asymmetrical, not because people have been condemning cruelty or unintended consequences.

[Bartmanhomer]

@OP: You're thinking too hard about a game where creatures kill creatures for power in terms of title, EXP, and loot. Just consider 'Evil' to usually mean 'GM only tool.'

Power in what way exactly? :confused:

[Rynjin]

Very specific turn of phrase, that - taking it from Game of Thrones, by any chance? Maybe Sherlock Holmes?

It's a common saying in all sorts of media and has been for decades. I know it's shown up in the former, and probably the latter though, true.




Assuming the duel is legal, then... yeah. Killing someone in a lawful manner has generally been seen as killing them in an unlawful manner. Is there supposed to be a point here?

I strongly disagree with the practice of duelling, but the difference is obvious. The other person has generally chosen to fight, and at the very least it's almost certainly a quicker and less painful death, with no chance of collateral damage. Not exactly commendable, but at the very least slightly lower on the cruelty scale.

You kind of prove my point here. Even in cases where dueling is illegal (and illegal duels were relatively common), the perception is that it's more acceptable because the other person has bought in or some other horse**** and "consented" to being killed.

Even if the duel IS lawful, we're talking about morality here, not law. Killing someone for what is usually a petty insult in the case of a duel is not moral.





...No. No I don't. I don't know that. That is not what I think of when I hear "stab a man in the back". Literally no one thinks that when they hear "stab a man in the back", and they never have. Where on Earth are you getting this from?

Replace "stabbed in the back" with "killed in a bar fight" or something else of that nature; it's all the same, really.




It does probably get quite scandalous when the bowls get mixed up or cross contaminated or someone swipes a bit extra (as will almost certainly happen over the course of a month) and you kill some of the girls as well.

I really have no idea what you're trying to prove here. Yes, killing husband dearest in a less slow and painful way would be morally superior to killing him in a more slow and painful way, particularly when that way has a high risk of also harming innocents. Even better would be a solution that does not involve murder. Wife-beating, while certainly vile, is not generally considered worthy of the death penalty.

If none of those options are available, then yes, in an imperfect world poisoning may still be a lesser evil. That does not make it good, and that does not make moral systems which discourage its use any less wise or right.

The bolded statement is particularly telling, I think, especially in the context of seeing a legally sanctioned duel as any better. Insulting someone's mother isn't really considered worthy of the death penalty either, and a damn sight less worthy than repeated abuse would be.

The point, again, is a matter of perception, which is proven pretty handily here. Killing the man with poison is considered worse than letting him keep abusing you for the rest of your natural lifespan; getting your brother to kill him in a duel instead would be more socially acceptable.

Either way, as said, dead is dead.



I thought of writing a longer rebuttal to this, but it's such a fundamentally empty statement that all I can bring myself to answer with right now is: [citation needed]. Because I'm pretty sure I'd rather die with less suffering, thanks.

I'm confused as to how this is considered a rebuttal at all. Of course you'd rather die with less suffering (or preferably not die at all), but that's not the point.

The point is that murder is murder, death is death on a personal scale. Valor, honor, whatever you call it is ultimately just prettying up what is murder. As I said in the first post poison is no more or less moral than any other method of killing someone once you strip away the facade of chivalric virtues. Stabbing someone, beheading them, lighting them on fire, dousing them with acid, etc. are considered perfectly fine (and at least one of those involves both significant suffering AND potential collateral damage) while poison is not.

It is entirely a matter of perception, not reality, on a 1 to 1 scale, and still particularly hypocritical once scaled up. Any long term or "unintended" damage caused by, say, poisoning a well is equally matched or exceeded by the effects of a prolonged siege followed by a pillage.

It was only with the advent of truly indiscriminate chemical weapons that they were actually banned by mutual agreement rather than seen as simply distasteful, and that was also less moral judgment than one based on a similar idea of MAD as nuclear weapons are today.

[Sereg]

Broadly speaking I have not seen anyone successfully defend 3.5 morality as self-consistent. What is usually done is either play by the book and ignore inconsistencies (because honestly, not every group needs or wants to spend their time exploring morality), or throw these parts of books away and redefine things from ground up. Or just disperse with alignments.

You can't prove a negative. So the burden of proof is on those who claim inconsistencies exist. I have certainly successfully defended against such claims before in this very board. People disagreed with me on whether or not something is moral, but that is not the same as proving it inconsistent.


Going back to initial question - 3.5 has a fekkton of feats\class features which allow you to deal repeated damage. I think that for most of them you can argue how they are not evil (e.g bleeding is not painful, repeated damage is repeated, not continuous etc.) but it smacks of motivated reasoning. But two purest examples would be burning people with fire or acid. You just can't argue that the damage is not continuous in that case. Oh, I am aware that Fireball is supposed to be a laser or maybe an artillery shell - that all the damage is done in a fraction of second, but numerous spells inflict damage over multiple rounds. Or even simply dousing someone in an alchemist's fire. Yet nothing specifically calls those things evil.


Is motivated reasoning not entirely appropriate for discussing a belief system? Those things may be sometimes or even usually evil. That is not the same as always evil. Again, using poison in combat is a warcrime. It is considered to never be accepting in any circumstance. Partially because of collateral damage.




You kind of prove my point here. Even in cases where dueling is illegal (and illegal duels were relatively common), the perception is that it's more acceptable because the other person has bought in or some other horse**** and "consented" to being killed.


It is entirely normal for moral and legal systems to care about agency and consent. Rape is evil entirely because of lack of consent. Or do you claim that consent doesn't matter there? Most systems of morality are based on the idea of not doing things people don't want done to them.



Even if the duel IS lawful, we're talking about morality here, not law. Killing someone for what is usually a petty insult in the case of a duel is not moral.


Nobody mentioned petty insults. The claim is poison is evil for any motivation at all. To make a proper comparison, you have to claim dueling is exactly as evil for every motivation. Talking about motivation just makes your argument into a straw man. "Duel me, because if I am alive tomorrow, I will rape your family to death" must be as invalid a reason for dueling for your argument to hold water.






Replace "stabbed in the back" with "killed in a bar fight" or something else of that nature; it's all the same, really.


Again, premeditated murder is considered worse than death in a sudden altercation for good reason.



The bolded statement is particularly telling, I think, especially in the context of seeing a legally sanctioned duel as any better. Insulting someone's mother isn't really considered worthy of the death penalty either, and a damn sight less worthy than repeated abuse would be.

See above. You're straw Manning. The motivation has to be identical in each case or the argument holds no water.



The point, again, is a matter of perception, which is proven pretty handily here. Killing the man with poison is considered worse than letting him keep abusing you for the rest of your natural lifespan; getting your brother to kill him in a duel instead would be more socially acceptable.

Either way, as said, dead is dead.

YOU may not care how you die, but your claim would only be accurate if it was literally impossible to find someone who does care about that. Which it isn't. Or are you claiming that you cannot find someone who would say that the doctor trying to cure someone of a painful and debilitating disease who has his patient die on the operating table should not be seen the same way as someone who gleefully tortures someone to death as both had a victim die?





I'm confused as to how this is considered a rebuttal at all. Of course you'd rather die with less suffering (or preferably not die at all), but that's not the point.

The point is that murder is murder, death is death on a personal scale. Valor, honor, whatever you call it is ultimately just prettying up what is murder. As I said in the first post poison is no more or less moral than any other method of killing someone once you strip away the facade of chivalric virtues. Stabbing someone, beheading them, lighting them on fire, dousing them with acid, etc. are considered perfectly fine (and at least one of those involves both significant suffering AND potential collateral damage) while poison is not.

It is entirely a matter of perception, not reality, on a 1 to 1 scale, and still particularly hypocritical once scaled up. Any long term or "unintended" damage caused by, say, poisoning a well is equally matched or exceeded by the effects of a prolonged siege followed by a pillage.

It IS the point. "Dead is dead" means it doesn't matter how someone dies. If people care about that, it DOES matter by definition.



It was only with the advent of truly indiscriminate chemical weapons that they were actually banned by mutual agreement rather than seen as simply distasteful, and that was also less moral judgment than one based on a similar idea of MAD as nuclear weapons are today.
Agreeing or distaste, the point is that it was seen in a bad light.

[Saint-Just]

You can't prove a negative. So the burden of proof is on those who claim inconsistencies exist. I have certainly successfully defended against such claims before in this very board. People disagreed with me on whether or not something is moral, but that is not the same as proving it inconsistent.


That's why I used the word "defend", not "prove". I am talking about conversations (in some I participated, others I only read), where one side provided significant number of inconsistencies and the other side (which was actively participating in conversation) failed to satisfactory refute them. I am not really interested in doing so ATM, but I do have enough free time, so if you wish to - I'll provide the arguments.



Is motivated reasoning not entirely appropriate for discussing a belief system? Those things may be sometimes or even usually evil. That is not the same as always evil. Again, using poison in combat is a warcrime. It is considered to never be accepting in any circumstance. Partially because of collateral damage.

Unless you you subscribe IRL to the Planescape-ish philosophy believing that something is true does not make it true. So motivated reasoning will never improve your results.

Regarding the war crimes (why on earth would you write it as a single word?) - it is a very good example. Namely: there is no universally (or even nigh-universally) agreed list, even the most inclusive list has changed in the past by subtraction (something which was a war crime became not-a-war-crime), enforcement of even the most narrow list has never been consistent etc.

[Sereg]

That's why I used the word "defend", not "prove". I am talking about conversations (in some I participated, others I only read), where one side provided significant number of inconsistencies and the other side (which was actively participating in conversation) failed to satisfactory refute them. I am not really interested in doing so ATM, but I do have enough free time, so if you wish to - I'll provide the arguments.
Sure. Sounds good m


Unless you you subscribe IRL to the Planescape-ish philosophy believing that something is true does not make it true. So motivated reasoning will never improve your results.

I subscribe to the tautological necessity that believing something requires you to believe it is true. So when arguing about beliefs, belief is all the proof required.



Regarding the war crimes (why on earth would you write it as a single word?) - it is a very good example. Namely: there is no universally (or even nigh-universally) agreed list, even the most inclusive list has changed in the past by subtraction (something which was a war crime became not-a-war-crime), enforcement of even the most narrow list has never been consistent etc.
I thought it was one word. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that believing that poison is evil is something real world people have subscribed to strongly enough to declare it a war crime, so it is not an arbitrary decision of DnD divorced from real world beliefs.

[Psychoalpha]

Perhaps i came across as more aggressive than i intended. Or perhaps you read me as more aggressive than i was. Anyway, you are clearly misrepresenting my stance.

Well, I did say quasi-aggressively. When someone says "No X is going to dictate Y to me." it's generally in reference to something trying to lay down the law in a way that it cannot be disobeyed. Resistance to that is not really something people do in a passive sense, neh?

I'm more than willing to accept that it was just a turn of phrase that gave the wrong impression, though. Outside of the pedantic 'are they rules are not', I don't think we actually disagree here for the most part, in that we both agree that some discretion has to be used on just what makes for a fun game for our groups.

We do disagree on the usefulness of the alignments as presented in the books, obviously, but since we don't play in the same games it hardly matters.


Very specific turn of phrase, that - taking it from Game of Thrones, by any chance? Maybe Sherlock Holmes?

While I agree with you about 99%, Rynjin's entire idea of poison being stigmatized to try and disempower the weak is... wrong in so many ways, I'm kind of curious about the quoted bit and how you've never heard this before.

Poison being referred to as a woman's weapon has nothing to do with it being used by women to kill men they couldn't take physically, even though it was certainly used like that, and everything to do with the misogynistic assertion that anyone who has to rely on poison must be weak and cowardly and thus compared to a woman. Calling it a woman's weapon was just a form of insult, in the same way the reverse is true and direct confrontation even when it leads to inevitable failure will be complimented as 'facing it like a man'. The stereotype was further reinforced by how frequently women were expected to handle avenues for the delivery of poison: Food preparation, medicine, etc. Which only makes it more absurd, really, since it immediately makes them the prime suspect more often than not. This guy's wine was poisoned, who poured his wine? Off with her head.

I mean, yes, I'm aware that "Poison's a woman's weapon. Men kill with steel." is a literal quote from Game of Thrones, but like... GoT didn't invent incest and dragons, either.


Even better would be a solution that does not involve murder. Wife-beating, while certainly vile, is not generally considered worthy of the death penalty.

Agree to disagree, but I understand I'm wholly irrational on that point.


Killing the man with poison is considered worse than letting him keep abusing you for the rest of your natural lifespan; getting your brother to kill him in a duel instead would be more socially acceptable.

None of which changes the fact that despite the stereotype, women and other downtrodden through history, are not actually the primary users of poison to murder. It is not, and has never been, some kind of equalizer used by the oppressed.

[Azuresun]

"Because Gygax".

Gary didn't want PCs using poison, so he made it dangerous, impractical, and evil-by-fiat.

Whereas 5e did it by handing out poison resistance and immunity like candy. :smallwink:

[Quertus]

(It is of course seen of as evidence of premeditation, because unlike most other weapons you can't exactly poison someone accidentally or in a fit of rage.)

Clearly, you've never had my cooking. :smallwink:

[King of Nowhere]

None of which changes the fact that despite the stereotype, women and other downtrodden through history, are not actually the primary users of poison to murder. It is not, and has never been, some kind of equalizer used by the oppressed.

this is sparking my interest.
namely, how exactly was poison used throughout history?

I mean, we know it was used sometimes in assassinations among the elite. and it was occasionally used for murder by the downtrodden, mostly women.
the greatest incidence of poison use would probably be scorched earth tactics: poisoning wells, throwing corpses inside a keep, that kind of stuff. but that's not really poisoning, that's chemical (and biological) warfare, which is the same principle but applied on a different circumstance and scale.

but outside of chemical warfare, how common was poisoning? and in what circumstances?

the diffusion of food tasters among the nobility was a sign of common use, or was just paranoia fueled by a few highly visible assassinations? if poisoning (at least attempted) were relatively common, i can also see very well how the dominant culture - the aristocratic one - would condemn them as unfair and cowardly. Aristocrats were trained as warriors; facing someone armed on the battlefield was part of their job, and they knew the enemy and were fairly well protected. being killed by your food when your guard is down, though, is entirely another matter.

which make me think that perhaps the major issue with poison, that still hasn't been brought into the discussion, is perceived security. that is, in battle you can defend yourself (especially in a society with warrior culture, where everyone had weapons and training), you feel in control of your fate. not so with poison.
Sure, dead is dead. and today we mostly lost the distinction because if someone pulls a gun on us, we're still dead. we are not battle trained, and guns are too powerful to defend anyway. but look at how many people want to have a gun in their home even if statistics prove that it doesn't really do much for safety, unless you live in a very rough place - in many places, more people get accidentally killed by gun mishandling than they are killed by those criminals that the guns were supposed to defend them from. and those people often know the statistics, but having a gun, feeling that you can fight back, makes you feel safe.
so, regardless of how often it was used by the elite or by the weak, poison probably got a lot of its bad reputation from the fact that it made people feel unsafe. while death by war is something that you can see coming and you can defend from, so it's seen as less scary. even if war kills much more than poison. even if what matters for morality is why you kill, not how

[Doctor Awkward]

Ok, here the logic of D&D 3.5 that I just don't get: Poison is evil but evocation spells such as Magic Missile and Fireball isn't evil even though both spells can damage someone. Like huh? This is a real head-scratcher and I've been playing D&D 3.5 for a few years now. Can someone explain this logic to me please? :confused:

So if you have never been poisoned in real life, it's quite often very painful.

Poisons function on a molecular level within the body in one of three ways:

-Affecting the nervous system (neurotoxins), causing painful seizures, paralysis, and eventually death
-Affecting other cells (cytotoxins), which cause painful swelling, blistering, and eventually necrosis, and then death if it spreads too far within the body.
-Affecting blood and internal organs (hemotoxins) by attacking the membrane which binds red blood cells causing them to lyse. Enough of this and you get painful hemorrhaging from ruptured blood cells, internal bleeding, and then death.

Mechanically, this damage is represented by damage to a characters ability scores. Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of such damage is that Constitution damage is the only physical ability score which results in death when taken to zero. In reality, all three of them probably should. And an argument could be made it should hold true for mental scores as well.

The key element in all of these is a horrifically painful, slow, and torturous death. Contrast this with spells which, while equally lethal, often spare the victim several minutes of agonizing pain.

The fact that poisons serve no purpose other than to kill someone in some of the most painful ways imaginable is why utilizing them is considered an evil act.

[NigelWalmsley]

The fact that poisons serve no purpose other than to kill someone in some of the most painful ways imaginable is why utilizing them is considered an evil act.

The difference between the kinds of sedatives used by medical professionals on a daily basis and the kinds of sedatives that will poison people to death is literally nothing. There is an entire field of medicine dedicated to ensuring that, when we poison you so we can poke around at your insides, we don't poison you enough for you to die. In the real world, things that are exactly identical to poisons are used for good all the time. Insofar as there is a distinction at all, it is that we don't call it "poison" when your surgeon puts you under for a hip replacement. But in D&D these things are defined mechanically, and you can't make that distinction. D&D's rules have a bunch of edge cases when it comes to morality (and other stuff). Which is fine, because you're playing D&D to kill monsters and loot dungeons, not litigate if the fantasy Hippocratic Oath allows you to use anesthetic. But those edge cases are absolutely there.

[tiercel]

The fact that poisons serve no purpose other than to kill someone in some of the most painful ways imaginable is why utilizing them is considered an evil act.

Except that, as you and others have pointed out, D&D poisons don’t work like real-life poisons; many D&D poisons are outright incapable of killing a victim in any dose. Those that can, do so outright or in one minute, and if poison is especially awful because ability score damage especially hurts, then why isn’t other ability score damage [Evil]? (Yes, shivering touch, I’m looking at you, among others.)

This is not to defend poison use, but to say that there are presumably a lot of awful ways to die in D&D, and arguably the purpose of poison is often not to inflict pain and suffering per se, but to bypass hit points as a defense by attacking ability scores directly (again, cf., shivering touch).

[Morty]

I'm not sure what the value is in twisting logic into knots trying to justify it, instead of accepting it as part of BoED's general weirdness, shrugging and moving on. It's not even part of core rules, so you don't see a big "EVIL" sign when you look at poisons there.

[Saint-Just]

Except poison has been marked as sufficiently ungood for paladins in core.

Fun fact: Paladins who become Ashworm Dragoons (Sandstorm) remove poison glands from their ashworms. Text says "(followed by Cure spell so the ashworm doesn't suffer)" which if I read something like that IRL would probably mean that the procedure itself is sans anaesthesia. I think that operating on your pet without anaesthesia (even if after the end pain instantly abates because magic) merely to fulfill your religious mandate is probably in the same outrageousness ballpark as using poison.

[tiercel]

Except poison has been marked as sufficiently ungood for paladins in core.

Well... arguably poison is marked as sufficiently unlawful for paladins: “ Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth)....”

Cf. a paladin of freedom’s code, which doesn’t include such restrictions (as they are “liberty flavored” little goody-two-shoes instead of “honor flavored” little goody-two-shoes.)

[NigelWalmsley]

Except poison has been marked as sufficiently ungood for paladins in core.

The Paladin's code is pretty explicitly above and beyond the threshold of Good. You don't have to do everything on it to count as Good, and there are many reasonable circumstances where people would say that breaking some of the rules might still be good (primarily around lying to evil people to prevent them from doing evil things).

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Locked for review.