Neutral/Evil alignment

[gbaji]

I liked them better when they were pretty much mindless without having omnicidal desires. Or even better, when they were neutral, not evil to represent how mindless they were. Making them evil in 3E was a mistake and then giving them evil behavior to make people stop asking "why are they evil" was another one.

Yeah. That's another area where I really dislike alignment in general. You are correct that things that are literally just "things" and are not thinking, or plotting, or scheming, or whatever, but merely doing whatever someone else tells them to do, should be neutral (or really just not have alignment at all, anymore than a sword does). I suspect that this kind of decision is driven by game mechanics though. Does my "protection from evil" help against that zombie that's trying to kill me? How about "smite evil"? What are the alignment considerations for characters who kill/destroy/whatever undead if the undead alignment is actually neutral instead of evil?

Personally, I'd just have the alignment of an undead or construct be whatever the alignment of the person who is commanding it is. But now we're veerring away from "alignment as stat" and into "alignment as intent behind action".

Also, while I don't necessarily agree with this from a metamagical pov, there's a strong sentiment among many game systems/settings that anything that is necromantic in nature (like reanimating dead corpses) is automatically "evil", and anything that results is therefore "evil" as well. Of course, now we're equating alignment with some sort of concept of "positive/negative" energy within the game system (in addition to all the other silly things that tend to get tied into alignment).

And.... this is why I don't like alignment. It's like a dozen layers of nested rabbit holes.

[Jay R]

This decision was not made for alignment reasons. And to the extent that it was, it was based on Good tendencies. “There’s an Evil creature there. We need to kill it for the good of the people here.”

The impulse was Good. The information was False. The decision was Flawed. And the result was Tragic.

If I believed in changing the PC’s character sheet based on this action (which I don't), I wouldn’t touch the alignment. This action indicates low Intelligence and Wisdom.

The PCs of unintelligent and unwise players will do unintelligent and unwise things. No number on a character sheet will ever change that.

[KorvinStarmast]

The PCs of unintelligent and unwise players will do unintelligent and unwise things. No number on a character sheet will ever change that.

Player ability matters. Yes. It can also be improved.

[gbaji]

The PCs of unintelligent and unwise players will do unintelligent and unwise things. No number on a character sheet will ever change that.

Yeah. But with a minor caveat here as well. It's easy to say "unintelligent/unwise players have charactes who do unintelligent/unwise things". But in this scenario, it looked to me like the GM was actively trying to trick the PCs into killing the naiad. He succeeded. So how much of that was the players being unintelligent versus the GM rigging the game a bit (or a lot)?

Unfortunately, as I pointed out earlier, there are significant information gaps in the scenario in the OP, so it's very hard to tell exactly how much of this was about the player not playing their character's alignment properly versus the player not playing against the GM properly (ie: figuruing out that this was some kind of trick/trap).


And sometimes, those two things can be in direct opposition. If I'm roleplaying an impulsive, but otherwise good aligned character (he's CN, right?), that character absolutely should be susceptible to being occasionally tricked by NPCs making an active effort to do so. To what degree do we expect the player to intelligently realize that the GM is obviously setting something up here, and have their character possibly play out of character, simply to avoid the trap that is set before him? Would the charcter itself have noticed this, or are we assuming it's the "intelligent player" figuring this out, and adjusting the character's actions accordingly.


And yeah. In this particular case, I keep coming back to the fact that there were four other characters in the party, all of them paladins, and all of them took the information from the fiends, and all of them went to the building with the pool, and all of them walked down into the basement, and found themselves standing in front of it. If they didn't already have some plan of what they were going to do once they arrived there, then why were they there? I just have a hard time placing this all on the one CN member of the party, who is supposed to be a bit foolish and careless with decision making, when there were four other characters in the party, all presumably much more serious and thoughtful about such things by nature (paladins, right?).

[Jay R]

Yeah. But with a minor caveat here as well. It's easy to say "unintelligent/unwise players have charactes who do unintelligent/unwise things". But in this scenario, it looked to me like the GM was actively trying to trick the PCs into killing the naiad. He succeeded. So how much of that was the players being unintelligent versus the GM rigging the game a bit (or a lot)?

This was not the DM trying to trick the players. It was the DM running fiends and undead who were trying to trick the players. From my "Rules for DMs" document:

4. It is not the DM's job to oppose or obstruct the players. It is the DM's job to provide opposition and obstructions for the PCs.

Unfortunately, as I pointed out earlier, there are significant information gaps in the scenario in the OP, so it's very hard to tell exactly how much of this was about the player not playing their character's alignment properly versus the player not playing against the GM properly (ie: figuruing out that this was some kind of trick/trap).

They were suspicious.
They had used their Divine Sense.
Several of the staff pinged as fiends and undead.
: Do you need like 200-foot-tall letters or something?

And sometimes, those two things can be in direct opposition. If I'm roleplaying an impulsive, but otherwise good aligned character (he's CN, right?), that character absolutely should be susceptible to being occasionally tricked by NPCs making an active effort to do so.

"Chaotic Neutral" does not inherently mean "impulsive". There are lots of ways to play any alignment.

And "impulsive" doesn't mean either "gullible" or "stupid", either. Neither impulsiveness nor any other choice of actions is an automatic result of a specific alignment. It is simply not true that there are only 9 ways to react.

To what degree do we expect the player to intelligently realize that the GM is obviously setting something up here, and have their character possibly play out of character, simply to avoid the trap that is set before him? Would the charcter itself have noticed this, or are we assuming it's the "intelligent player" figuring this out, and adjusting the character's actions accordingly.

What's to figure out? Do you really think it ought to take high intelligence to know not to kill somebody doing nothing wrong now, based on the unsupported word of fiends and undead?

The players only had the information that their characters had. It came from a paladin's Divine Sense ability They knew that these were fiends and undead. Yes, the character himself knew that their word should not be trusted.

[I would have a problem with killing an unsuspecting victim based only on the unsupported word of an average person. But fiends and undead?]

And yeah. In this particular case, I keep coming back to the fact that there were four other characters in the party, all of them paladins, and all of them took the information from the fiends, and all of them went to the building with the pool, and all of them walked down into the basement, and found themselves standing in front of it. If they didn't already have some plan of what they were going to do once they arrived there, then why were they there?

If I were running one of the paladins, we would be going there to gather information in order to make an informed decision. But based on decades of experience, I'm aware that lots of D&D players go places without making advanced plans. See my previous comment about unwise and unintelligent players.

But since we are not given any information on what those four players did, we have no information to judge them on. As a math teacher, I do not grade a student's test unless I've seen their test paper.

I just have a hard time placing this all on the one CN member of the party, who is supposed to be a bit foolish and careless with decision making, when there were four other characters in the party, all presumably much more serious and thoughtful about such things by nature (paladins, right?).

No he's not; he's just not supposed to mindlessly obey the law. That doesn't require him to mindlessly obey fiends and undead. It just doesn't.

"Foolish" is not an aspect of this alignment – or any other. It is an aspect of low Intelligence and/or low Wisdom.

---

But I suspect that this isn't our real disagreement. I suspect we part company much earlier. I think it's wrong to kill a sapient being without knowing anything about its actions. It's certainly wrong to base that decision on the mere fact that fiends and undead don't like it.

[Satinavian]

Yeah. But with a minor caveat here as well. It's easy to say "unintelligent/unwise players have charactes who do unintelligent/unwise things". But in this scenario, it looked to me like the GM was actively trying to trick the PCs into killing the naiad. He succeeded. So how much of that was the players being unintelligent versus the GM rigging the game a bit (or a lot)?

Honestly, with the way the DM seems kinda shocked and upset about the PCs killing the naiad, i am pretty sure he was not actively trying to trick the PCs or players.

[kyoryu]

Chaotic does not have to mean crazy.

Chaotic just means prioritizing individual freedom over rules and structure, and having a distrust in the effectiveness of structure and organization.

Neutral is easy understood as being self interested, up to the point of harming others (though I don't like the use of the word "harm" in dealing with alignment, as self defense is perfectly valid, at a minimum, and other "harmful" acts might be neutral).

So a chaotic neutral person is just one that prefers responsiveness to planning, working with equals over structure and hierarchy, and prioritizing individual freedom, while primarily acting in their own interest.

None of that requires any kind of impulsiveness or foolishness. Those are traits not attached to any specific alignment.

[gbaji]

Well. We already had some discussions about what "neutral" means on the good/evil axis, but it seems as though the same excluded middle problem is uccuring on the law/chaos axis as well. Chaotic is not merely "doesn't strictly and mindlessly comply with the law/rules". That's what neutral is. Chaotic means random, unpredictable, disordered, unfocused, confused, etc (there's lots of meanings). Yes, there are also game definitions as well, but the point is that a person with a chaotic alignment is that person (and we all know a few people like this) who will do something that is mindnumbingly bizarre and strange and possibly harmful/negative, and when you ask them why they did it, they will answer "I don't know". The friend who you lent your car to and they parked it in a no parking zone, blocking a driveway, to a police station. That's "chaotic".

Doing random things without a good explanation is very much in line with a chaotic alignment. They aren't required to always do things this way, but it's certainly not a violation of their alignment to do so. If we set aside the moral question of killing the "monster" in the pool (cause we've discussed that to death already), can we at least agree that with regard to "decided to take action, all on his own, with no apparent rational reason", is absolutely in line with the "chaotic" alignment? I happen to think it is.

As to the rest, there's a rule I follow when reading things other people have written: What do they *not* actually literally say? What I meean is that I try really hard not to read into what is written, or make assumptions, but to take just the words, and what was literally written. Lots of people will, even subconsciously, tend to write/say things in a way that is literally truthful, but which leave out details so as to maximize the odds of the recipient of the information agreeing with them on whatever issue they are talking about. I can't say that this is what is happening here, but as I've posted several times now, there are some "odd gaps" in the information provided. Gaps which many posters have filled with assumptions that, while implied, aren't actually literally written down anywhere. Let me give examples:

Here's the only bit Hoboknight has literally said about the scenario at hand:

party was in another location and establishment, party was suspicious about its inhabitants, has cast Divine sense and several of the staff pinged as fiends and undead under cover of Seeming spell. Party was informed by these fiends and undead that "a monster" has occupied local pool within an establishment and should be killed. Party approached the pool and player A, without checking what "the monster" is ("monster" was hiding in a murky pool) fired several volleys in the pool, killing a naiad, who was hiding in a pool.

and this (after I posted asking questions about details, though I don't think HK was addressing mine at all):

And most interesting: Party is lvl 13 ATM. 4 paladins, 1 optimised ranged fighter. They are BRUTALLY strong (average hp 110, one maxing at 150, average AC 22, dozens upon dozens of magic/radiant damage output per turn, 4 different auras, adamantine armor(no crits), a plethora of spells and a ton of magical gear, 1x Holy Avenger included.). Not just that, two of them have maxxed out their Passive Perception/Passive Insight (24), so for most DCs I just give them the results(example: check vs DC 12 disguised fiends/undead). Yes, in my campaign, 99% of fiends and undead are evil. Smiting a "good" undead would have been an understandeable mistake.

As a "counter argument" B pulled out "what if there was a balor in a pool. We just dont know". At this point, I could have 3 balors in that pool and per stats, party would still wipe them.

Player A just likes to goof off - "look at me being all edgy". And his character was CN before the alignment shift.

Let's parse the wording here:

party was in another location and establishment, party was suspicious about its inhabitants, has cast Divine sense and several of the staff pinged as fiends and undead under cover of Seeming spell.

This was in "another establishment". Another releative to what/where? Not stated. So we don't know. What kind of establishment? Again. We don't know. All we know is that they were somewhere, and noticed that the staff pinged as fiends and undead. Got it.

. Party was informed by these fiends and undead that "a monster" has occupied local pool within an establishment and should be killed.

Ok. So the people who set the party to go after the "monster" in the local pool are "these fiends" (presumably the same ones they detected). Got it. Um... Where did this happen? When did this happen? Was it in the same establishment as the events in the previous sentence? Not said. Did the party know that the same people they detected as fiends in the previous sentence were the ones who sent them to kill the monster? Also unknown. Pay attention to what is *not* said here. At no point does he clearly state that the party knew that the people they were talking to where the same fiends they had detected.

We can maybe assume this to be true, but it's not actually said, so we probably should not. Is this just him as GM telling *us* (the readers) that these are the same fiends? Or was this information known to the party? I would normally not question this asociation except that he later mentions that 4 of the party members are paladins. So... Why are they even talking to fiends, if they know they are fiends? What is the situation going on here? The normal response a party mostly full of paladins should be to detecting a bunch of fiends and undead running an establishment (whatever kind of establishment that is), should be "lets plan how we destroy these things", not "lets have a conversation with them, and take a job from them". So... Something really huge is missing here. But I don't know what it is, but it would seem to be really super relevant to their decision making process.

Party approached the pool and player A, without checking what "the monster" is ("monster" was hiding in a murky pool) fired several volleys in the pool, killing a naiad, who was hiding in a pool

Um... Again. Missing information. What discussions did the party have here? The story jumps immediately from "fiends tell them to go kill a monster in a pool", to "they're standing in the room with the pool and then....". Why were they there in the first place? That would seem to be critical to any assessment of the CN character's actions here. But that is completely missing from the story.

Many posters have filled in those gaps with two assumptions:

1. That the party knew that the folks who gave them the mission were fiends, but decided to go there to checik it out anyway (certainly possible, but again, not known to be correct).

2. That, since they knew the above information, they were already suspicious of the fiends and their mission, and thus should have assumed that the "monster" they were sent to kill probably wasn't something they wanted to kill.

which leads to conclusion: The CN character was evil for doing what he did.

Perfectly valid conclusion, but it rests entirely on assumptions that aren't contained in the story we were told.

Here's an alternative (and equally likely) set of assumptions we could make from the story:

1. The fiends were detected in the establishment, so the party was suspicious of them

2. They went somewhere else (maybe?), to talk to what they thought was a completely different group of people, not knowing that they were actually the same group that was running the first establishment. These fiends were better at concealing their nature, so the party accepted the mission to go to the pool and kill the monster there as a serious important task.

3. They decide to go to the pool and kill the monster. They arrive, the monster is hidden under "murky water", and the party is considering how to proceed, when the CN character gets bored with the hemming and hawwing going on, and takes matters into his own hands to complete the mission that they had all previously agreed on.


My point is that the entire chain of assumption derives from the skip between the first and second sentences, where we might assume that the party knows that these are the "same fiends". The story makes it seem like they just wandered around a building full of people they knew were fiends and undead, talked to them for a while, found out about a "monster" nearby, and then went off to go do something about it, for... reasons. But that makes absolutely zero sense to me at all. Why on earth would a party full of paladins do this?


And, as I've said serveral times, this is the bit I keep getting hung up on. We're all focusing on what the CN character did, but ignoring the assumed actions by the paladins in that party, which must have happened prior to that point, for us to place blame on the CN character in the first place. I can't say for certain exactly what the full sequence of events was, but it does seem like the most critrical information (what the party knew and thought, and what they planned to do about it) is missing.

I tend to assume that the person presenting the story is attempting to pusuade us that they made the right decision in a post like this. But this is where "what is not said" comes in. If you were HK, and you had this controversial event happen at your table, and you were posting it to a forum to ask others if they think what you did was right, and the party did actually know that the fiends were the ones who wanted the "monster killed", were suspicious of the mission itself, and did have a conversation among themselves about this, and went to the poool to investigate what was there, expecting it was something possibly "good" that the fiends wanted them to kill (and thus the CN character killing it out of the blue was a clear case of wanton death for no reason), wouldn't you have written that in your description?


You would not be vague here. You would have writen that the party knew the fiends were likely lying about the monster. You would write that the group had a discussion about this, all agreed that most likely they should not kill whatever was in the pool, but attempt to communicate instead and find out what it actually is, and why they fiends want it dead (an assumption most people have gone with), and that the ranger just started firing for no reason. You'd literally write that. That's your "strongest argument" for your case, right?

Yet. Not only is that missing from the story, even after I (and others) asked for clarification, the onliy thing we got was the second post from HB. Which speaks to the party power level, but doesn't clarify at all what was actually known by the PCs, nor what discussion they had, nor what reason they had for going to the pool, their plan of action, etc. There was every opportunity to clarify things. If it was really as clear cut as most posters are assuming, it should have been stated.

So yeah. What's not there speaks very loudly here. All we have to do is *not* fill in the blanks, and we're left with what I've been saying all along: There is simply not enough information to make a determination here. We don't know what the party actually knew about their mission. We don't know what discussion they had, or what plan they agreed upon. How does the entire party just end up standing in front of the pool with the "monster" in it, without apparently having made the decision to go there, or have a stated reason for doing so in the first place? But, if we take the story as written, that's exactly what happened.

Don't fill in the holes with assumptions. Read only what is actually there. The story doesn't actually say what many are assuming. And no. I am *not* arguing for any specific alternative explanation at all. Merely pointing out that there are other alternatives that equally fit the data we have, so we should not make an assumption about any of it.

If the assumptions many are making were true, the story should have been "The party went to a pool, with the plan of communicating with a creature they thought might be a good creature being hunted by a group of fiends, and then the CN ranger just decided to kill it for no reason, while everyone else looked on in horror". Right? If that's what actually happened, that's what you would write. Not what was actually written. Certainly, if the plan was anything other than "kill the monster in the pool", then that should have been mentioned. But instead, there's this interesting sort of verbal tap dance around the subject, which suggests that they should have known this, and suggests that this should have been the plan, but without actually saying either of those things.

I find that... odd.

[Satinavian]

Hey guys,
- party was in another location and establishment, party was suspicious about its inhabitants, has cast Divine sense and several of the staff pinged as fiends and undead under cover of Seeming spell. Party was informed by these fiends and undead that "a monster" has occupied local pool within an establishment] and should be killed. Party approached the pool and player A, without checking what "the monster" is ("monster" was hiding in a murky pool) fired several volleys in the pool, killing a naiad, who was hiding in a pool.
Oopsie.

That is obviously referring the group just identified by divine sense in the earlier sentence. There is nothing whatsoever hinting at this happening at moving elsewhere any time lapse. Just the opposite, the sentence about the time and undead and their identification can only be relevant context when the group knew what their questgivers were.

I don't think there is a reasonable way to read it as anything else as "Yes, a group with for paladins took a quest from a bunch of fiends and undead they knew about and were suspicious of to slay a monster".
Also mind you, that a bunch of fiends and undead want something dead is not itself a hint that that something is good. I don't think the group believed the monster to be good. Player A just didn't care enough to actually check. Even evil fiends actually trying to deceive the party could have just tried to get them killed by a particularly dangerous monster or tried to get them to kill a monster that threatens them and later refuse the reward/attack the weakened party. Coincidentally those are both options where the result of player A blasting from outside the water would have been positive

[kyoryu]

Yeah, I'm really having a hard time finding another way to parse this.

I'm normally all about "we're not getting the whole story", and that's still possibly true. But even with that it does seem like that's not the source of any possible omission.

[gbaji]

I think maybe you guys are getting caught up in side speculations I'm making about other possible sequences which could have happened than what is implied, but which could be described using the same sentences. That's just about making the point about what is missing from the stated facts. I'm not actually arguing for any specific alternative. Just using them as examples of "what could be" based on what was actually stated.

The point is that what is missing from the description is anything about why the party was there (at the murky pool), and what their intentions were.

If that information was included it would *also* clarify the points I mentioned above. Saying "The party knew they were fiends and undead, and were suspicious of the job, but they decided to go there anyway to do <something>", would clarify things. Saying "The party didn't realize that the group of people they met in the back room where also fiends and undead, and assumed they were a faction opposed to the folks funning the establishment, so they believed that the monster in the pool was something evil that needed to be killed, so they went there to do <something else>", would clarify things in another way.

The core point here is that, if we don't know why the party was there, nor what they party intended to do once they got there, then we can't assess whether the ranger's actions were evil or not. Regardless of how they came to be there, or what they knew, or who what they knew came from, or what they thought of the people who told them to go there, if their intention for going there was "kill the monster in the pool", then the ranger's action was not evil. If the party's intention was "figure out what the thing in the pool is, and whether it's really an evil monster, and then go from there", then the rangers action is evil.

The story jumps directly from "fiends tell the party to go kill the monster" to "the party is standing in the room with the monster and the ranger killed it". Ok... What happened in between? Barring an extremely railroady GM who just tells the party "Ok. You are now standing at the pool with the monster, what do you do", I assume that some kind of conversation had to have happened, and some kind of decision was made to go to the location with the pool, with the "monster" in it. And that conversation had to have included at least some conversation of "what are we planning to do when we get there". That stuff in between is extremely critical, but is missing entirely.

If the party knew that the fiends were the source of the job, and knew that the monster may not be what they were told, and intended to go there to investigate, but the ranger decided to kill whatever was in the pool anyway, that's what HK would have said, because that would have highlighted the eviliness of the act itself (which is what he's trying to do here). The absense of that clearly stated part of the sequence makes me suspect that there was more to the story, and it wasn't nearly so clear cut. Is that speculation on my part? Absolutely. Again though, IME, when people leave out parts of a story they are telling, it's rarely the parts that highlight the point they are trying to make. It's usually the parts that may question or counter the point they are trying to make.

Does that make that absolute truth? Nope. But it does make me question the story, and ask for more details. Which is precisely what I did earlier in the thread. And have still not gottten the clarification. So.... I'm sticking with "there isn't enough information to make a ruling here".

[Jay R]

gbaji has come up with two different interpretations. The first one would reasonably lead to the DM's response, and the second one would not.

Since the DM was there, and gbaji was not, I suspect that the first one is closer to the truth.

In that case, I agree with gbaji that it probably isn't an alignment issue (yet). As I said before:

This decision was not made for alignment reasons. And to the extent that it was, it was based on Good tendencies. “There’s an Evil creature there. We need to kill it for the good of the people here."

The impulse was Good. The information was False. The decision was Flawed. And the result was Tragic.

If I believed in changing the PC’s character sheet based on this action (which I don't), I wouldn’t touch the alignment. This action indicates low Intelligence and Wisdom.

But let's suppose, hypothetically, that gbaji's second scenario is closer to the truth. In that case, the DM who told us about it gave us information that was not relevant, and did not give us information that was relevant. He told us that the fiends and undead told them about the monster, but did not tell us that other, less obviously untrustworthy people said the same thing.

In that case, the PC attacked and killed a creature that was doing no harm, based entirely on hearsay, without hearing the creature's defense. The impulse was still Good. The information was still False. The decision was still Flawed. And the result was still Tragic.

If I believed in changing the PC’s character sheet based on this action (which I don't), I still wouldn’t touch the alignment. This action still indicates low Intelligence and Wisdom.

There is simply no basis here to kill something you know nothing about, who is currently doing nothing wrong, based on hearsay.

---

If there is an alignment issue, then it's based on what happened afterward. In either scenario, once the PC found out that he killed a naiad, did he show remorse? Was he horrified? Did he offer to take the naiad's body to a priest and pay for a Raise Dead?

Maybe, just maybe, he was misled into committing a horrible act with no blame on him at the time. [I doubt it, and we have no evidence for it, but perhaps gbaji's invention happens to be true.] But if the PC is comfortable with that fact afterwards, in either scenario, then that is a serious issue.

If he shrugged it off as no big deal, then yes, the character is Evil. If he shrugged it off as no big deal, then any nearby paladins need to arrest him and deliver him to justice or they are no longer paladins.

[icefractal]

Sufficient recklessness can be evil, it doesn't require active malevolence.

"This forest seems like a good place to practice my new fire spells"
"Oh ****, it's all on fire now. Bad news for anyone living there."
"Oh well, it'll probably be fine" *leaves*
Evil act, 100%

"Hey officer, that house is full of gang members planning to go on a murder spree!"
"And your name is ..."
"Not really important. Anyway, you should go shoot that gang quick before they do something bad."
*shrug* "Ok, seems legit!" *goes in and shoots everyone*
*it turns out they were just a normal family that the person talking to the cop had a grudge against*
You're saying you'd consider that an understandable mistake? I don't think most people would agree.

[gbaji]

Maybe, just maybe, he was misled into committing a horrible act with no blame on him at the time. [I doubt it, and we have no evidence for it, but perhaps gbaji's invention happens to be true.]

I don't know either. But that's kinda the point. I'm not going to discount the possiblity. I guess my alarm bells go off here, because there's nothing directly stated in the text we are given that says that this *didn't* happen. A single line of text saying "The party knew that the information came from the fiends, and were suscpicious of it, so they decided to investigate and find out what was really in that pool", would have clarified things emmensely.

Remember. The OP is not an impartial reporter of the events in question. He has a viewpoint on things, and an action he took, and is presumably posting to get affirmation of that action. It's not unreasonable to assume the possibility that he might leave out details that might place his own decision in question. Therefore, it's prudent, if it's at all possible to iterpret what is said in a different way than implied, to ask questions to clarify those points. You think like a cop arriving on a scene, getting an initial statement. You follow up and ask questions. Ok. Did the entire party know that the fiends were the ones who told them to go kill the monster in the pool? What was the party's reaction to that request? Did you believe the fiends at the time? Why did you go to the pool then? What was your intention and plan? Did all of you agree on that course of action before you went there? What happened when you got there? Did you discuss what to do with the creature in the pool? What was your conversation, upon arriving, and discovering that the pool was murky and you could not see the creature? What spells/abilities did you use to determine the nature of the creature? I see that 4 of you are paladins. Did you use your detect evil abilities? What happened then?

There's a whole heck of a lot of "stuff missing" here. And yeah, I get making the story brief, but it still seems odd to me that the elements of the story missing are the very ones that would most allow us to accurately assess the situation. Maybe I'm suspicious by nature, but my initial reaction to a story with holes in it isn't to fill it in with the implication coming from the storyteller, but to assume those holes are there deliberately and are concealing something.

And yes. It could just be a communication style, and there's nothing there at all. But... doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Sufficient recklessness can be evil, it doesn't require active malevolence.

"This forest seems like a good place to practice my new fire spells"
"Oh ****, it's all on fire now. Bad news for anyone living there."
"Oh well, it'll probably be fine" *leaves*
Evil act, 100%

So... Elan is now Chaotic Evil? Cause he does this sort of thing all the time.

"Hey officer, that house is full of gang members planning to go on a murder spree!"
"And your name is ..."
"Not really important. Anyway, you should go shoot that gang quick before they do something bad."
*shrug* "Ok, seems legit!" *goes in and shoots everyone*
*it turns out they were just a normal family that the person talking to the cop had a grudge against*
You're saying you'd consider that an understandable mistake? I don't think most people would agree.

No. I wouldn't. However, if an entire group of senior officers took that information, assessed it, and decided to launch a raid on the home, and created ROE for that raid which included "shoot the bad guys", I would not blame the one rookie cop who was on the raid who shot someone as a result. In the scenario we're talking about, it was the paladins who should have been most suscpicious of the fiends, and also had the greatest abilities to detect what was actually going on, and make decisions about what the entire group should do about it.

This is exactly why I keep coming back to "how did the party arrive at the pool, and what was their stated plan?". If the entire police department decided that this call was legit, and that raiding the house was the correct course of action, once the cops arrive at the scene, they are already in that mindset. Also, and where the analog breaks down, these are not cops. They are adventurers. Very different job description. Adventurers in fantasy settings do actually do things like break into monster lairs and kill them. Often without spending a lot of time figuring out what exactly the monster is, or why it's there.

Which is why it's really important to determine what the entire party decided to do here. If the "plan" was "go there and kill whatever is in the pool", then the entire party is to blame for that decision, not just the Ranger because he's the one who pulled the trigger. Given that in this case, the entire party consists of 4 paladins and one ranger, that kinda really puts the onus of "make the right call" on the members of party for whom that is actually a class requirement, and not the one for whom it kinda isn't. We're going to blame the CN guy for pulling the trigger (likely merely because he was the only one with effective ranged attacks, and the monster was in a pool, where they could not easiily engage it in melee), but not the LG paladins? That ranger didn't appear at that pool, all on his own. The entire party did. Knowing why they were there is really important.

[Cygnia]

Looks like this is the direction the OP went towards...

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...-Courting-a-PC

[gbaji]

Looks like this is the direction the OP went towards...

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...-Courting-a-PC

Huh. Well. If the player is cool with that, then great. I'm not sure how well this will work in a party full of paladins, but maybe that's just a setting thing. I kinda get the feeling that HK's players don't really run their characters in a standard way to begin with. Weren't these the same folks who attacked a librarian for not letting them borrow a book or something?

It's a GMing style thing. I'm all for giving the PCs plenty of rope to hang themselves with, but I do kinda get the impression that HK facilitates this a fair bit. And that can certainly be a fun way to run a game, but is almost certainly going to result in a lot of conflict between the PCs (and between them an NPCs as well). It's not my personal style or preference, but if the players are having fun, then all is good.

[kyoryu]

Sufficient recklessness can be evil, it doesn't require active malevolence.

"Hey officer, that house is full of gang members planning to go on a murder spree!"
"And your name is ..."
"Not really important. Anyway, you should go shoot that gang quick before they do something bad."
*shrug* "Ok, seems legit!" *goes in and shoots everyone*
*it turns out they were just a normal family that the person talking to the cop had a grudge against*
You're saying you'd consider that an understandable mistake? I don't think most people would agree.

This is kinda the key to me, really. They went to kill something that didn't attack them, wasn't attacking anyone, and that they had no evidence had ever done anything wrong.

It wasn't an evil act because of it happening to be a good creature. It was an evil act because, even if it had been an evil creature, they went full gonzo without any attempt to verify anything.

I mean, basically, it boils down to

Person: "This sentient being is bad"
PC: "Okay, I'll kill it!"

That doesn't even make sense. While you could argue that that's a common quest setup, there's usually enough implicit information to actually provide evidence that the targeted creatures are actually bad, and in most cases they'll be in "attack first" mode, providing self defense as a justification. Or, the information will come from someone at least generally known to be trustworthy, or several sources.

This just doesn't meet the bar for due diligence.

Now, as I've said before, the GM should have let the players know "hey, you're going off half-cocked here. This is the kind of thing that can shift alignment". I'm 100% on board with that, and that's where the biggest error was.

[Vahnavoi]

I mean, basically, it boils down to

Person: "This sentient being is bad"
PC: "Okay, I'll kill it!"

That doesn't even make sense.

It makes perfect sense from the viewpoint of a player who wholly buys into the notion that D&D is a game about killing things for personal power (XP & Levels) and wealth (gold & magic items). Judged fairly according to D&D's own alignment guidelines, characters played this way would be moral equivalent to Assassins, as in, Evil. But, since D&D is also a game about "heroic adventurers" fighting against the forces of Evil, this creates incentive to excuse what the player characters do on the grounds that they are the "heroes".

[gbaji]

It makes perfect sense from the viewpoint of a player who wholly buys into the notion that D&D is a game about killing things for personal power (XP & Levels) and wealth (gold & magic items). Judged fairly according to D&D's own alignment guidelines, characters played this way would be moral equivalent to Assassins, as in, Evil. But, since D&D is also a game about "heroic adventurers" fighting against the forces of Evil, this creates incentive to excuse what the player characters do on the grounds that they are the "heroes".

I'd go a step further: The very nature of D&D is that the "who" matters more than most other things. How often, when discussing various moral question in a D&D game, does the story specifically mention the alignment of the NPC involved? Lots, right? Because, in D&D the alignment of the sentient being you are fighting/killing actually does matter (or at least, that is strongly the perception most players have). It's certainly the perception/assumption in this scenario as well.

When 90% of the game literally is "kill sentient creatures who are bad/evil", and that makes your characters the heroes, and you get rewarded with experience and loot, it's not a leap to assume the resulting behavior and choices are going to lean in that direction heavily. If we were actually measuring realistic morality here, it would be correct to say that the alignment of the creature in the pool should not matter. But... the very question posed in the OP assumes that it does. And that somehow, the entire problem here wasn't that they killed a creature in a murky pool, but that they killed a good creature in a murky pool.

Which, btw, is why I've been trying to point this the entire time back at "what was the discussion when going there in the first place?". Did the entire party actually believe there was an evil monster in the pool, and that therefore (by the rules of D&D) it was perfectly ok to murder it? In which case, just the one PC who happened to do the deed, should not be the sole one responsible. Heck. In his follow up, HK mentioned that one of the paladin players said "But what if it was a Balor?". Which strongly suggests that they certainly do view the alignment of the creature to matter here, and that, had it turned out to be an evil creature, that their approach was prefectly fine.

Which is why I kinda keep looping back to this being a bit of a "gotcha" scenario. The GM has put the PCs into a situation where, if they believe the NPC is evil, they believe it's perfectl ok to kill it. But... Ooopse! It's acually... good. So that somehow completely switches the morality around. Somehow. That should not be the case, but it is anyway. And a large part of that is how D&D morality is played out normallly. If GM's don't want that kind of morality in their games, then they need to treat evil creatures as having the same moral value/cost when killed as good creatures. But that's not what the game mostly assumes.

[Vahnavoi]

@gbaji: you missed my point. It is true that D&D alignment cares of what a creature's alignment is when killed - but players stretch this to places that the rules don't.

For example: killing orcs for fun and profit does not make any AD&D character Good. Why? Because AD&D orcs kill other orcs for fun and profit too and they're Lawful Evil! There are even non-D&D versions of alignment (though obviously inspired by D&D) that codify this in their very rules. For example, in Ancient Domains of Mystery, killing (strongly) Chaotic creatures makes a character more Lawful - but only if the character already is Lawful-leaning, with a track record of doing other Lawful things such as feeding the poor, being nice to children and showing mercy to opponents in battle. If a character is instead Chaotic on their own, with no record of doing any such Lawful things, their alignment doesn't shift one bit. Why? Because Chaotics kill other Chaotics too. Context and motive of action matters.

So, no. The player characters aren't off the hook just because they thought they were fighting an Evil monster. That's not the only thing that matters, and never was.

[gbaji]

@gbaji: you missed my point. It is true that D&D alignment cares of what a creature's alignment is when killed - but players stretch this to places that the rules don't.

I get your point (and am kinda agreeing with kyoryu a fair bit in my response). I just don't necessarily agree that the game system itself doesn't really funnel players into this conclusion. You can say that this is all about player peception, and that they're really just playing like an assassin (and are therefore evil), but the reality is that this is, in fact, the way most players do play. And it's entirely because the game itself really really pressures them to play that way.

For example: killing orcs for fun and profit does not make any AD&D character Good. Why? Because AD&D orcs kill other orcs for fun and profit too and they're Lawful Evil! There are even non-D&D versions of alignment (though obviously inspired by D&D) that codify this in their very rules. For example, in Ancient Domains of Mystery, killing (strongly) Chaotic creatures makes a character more Lawful - but only if the character already is Lawful-leaning, with a track record of doing other Lawful things such as feeding the poor, being nice to children and showing mercy to opponents in battle. If a character is instead Chaotic on their own, with no record of doing any such Lawful things, their alignment doesn't shift one bit. Why? Because Chaotics kill other Chaotics too. Context and motive of action matters.

This highlights a point I've made in past alignment threads though. The problem D&D (and a lot of games with relatively rigid alignment systems) is that it tries to treat alignment both as a "side" In some cosmic/ideological battle *and* have it comply with modern concepts of ethics. And the result is predictably nonsensical. The examples you just gave, lean into the "side" based alignment concept. that if you are "good", then killing "evil' is good. But if you are evil, killing good is evil (cause it's about becoming more aligned with your "side).

It's also the innate assumption in the example and follow up statements by HK. That it would be "good" to have killed the creature, if the creature was "evil", but is"evil", not due to the methods or rationale for the attack, but because the creature turned out to be good in the end. Flip around the script and have the monster turn out to have been a Balor afterall, and ask "would the GM have adjusted the character's alignment?". I'm guessing the answer would have been "no".

Where I agree with you is that this should *not* be the case. But the fact is that, for most D&D players (and most GMs) it is. We can lament that fact, and rail against if if we want, but that is an innate problem with the alignment system itself.

So, no. The player characters aren't off the hook just because they thought they were fighting an Evil monster. That's not the only thing that matters, and never was.

Again. I agree that it should not. But I'm not agreeing that it "never was". The reality is that if we actually applied that sort of ethical rules to D&D, no character could retain a good alignment, and ever be on the offense at all. They could only ever hurt or kill someone in self defense, and then should try to use the minimal force necessary, and attempt to capture instead of kill wherever possible.

It would also really restrain the types of scenarios that GMs could run. That, or we just handwave this stuff away. Rich had that amusing minor panel with the paladin justifying killing the goblins becuase they were defending themselves, despite that they were tecnically engaged in home invasion and the goblins were acting in defense themselves. That scenario is not really handled well by any sort of indepth analysis of the D&D alignment system.

Players absolutely tend towards: 'Were the good guys, they are the bad guys, so we are allowed to end them by any means necessary". Done. But is that actually "good" by the standard you are saying we should use (and also seemingly claiming is really core to the game rules)? No. It's not. A good aligned person should never use lethal force unless they (or soemone else) is in immenent danger of "risk of loss of life or severe bodily harm" and killing is the only way to prevent that. How often does that actually happen though? Those guards of the bbeg? Did they attack you first? Do you wait for them to do that? Or did you initiate combat (possibly from surprise)? His priests, gathering together for a powerful magical ritual. Do you actually know that they're about to blast you and your team with magical power, and you must attack them first? Or must you wait until you have absolute proof that they are engaged in hostile activity with intent to cause harm?

The kinds of ROE that we use in our modern world (and which some try to apply to alignment rules in D&D) are just not a very practical set of rules to use for most game settings. I suppose a GM can contrive all scenarios in the game to work using them, but those would have to be quite contrived.

Also, just to kinda make a cross thread point. I mentioned in another thread recently about the concept that player choices are more meangingful and death less about "roll or die" if the GM structures the adventures so that the players are the ones driving things, rather than merely responding to attacks by the GM run bad guys. But your requirements for "good" would require the opposite. The PCs cannot investigate something, discover some evil plot afoot, and then go in and take saiid evildoers out, without having to wait for the bad guys to take evil action against them first (or witness it being done to someone else). That's a... heck of a restriction on play.

And not one I'm a fan of. But that's just me. So yes. I agree that, if we apply modern ethical rules to these sorts of actions, then the actions shoiuld be "good or evil" regardless of what was in the pool. I'm simply saying that this is not how most fantasy RPGs actually run. Most game systems play lip service to the idea that "good/evil" (from an alignment perspective) are somehow associated with the modern ethical concepts, but then run directly counter to that in just about every single scenario, module, and adventure ever published. Which, maybe, is precisely why this topic generates so much debate and disagreement.

[icefractal]

Agreed on this:

This highlights a point I've made in past alignment threads though. The problem D&D (and a lot of games with relatively rigid alignment systems) is that it tries to treat alignment both as a "side" In some cosmic/ideological battle *and* have it comply with modern concepts of ethics. And the result is predictably nonsensical.

But not on this:

It would also really restrain the types of scenarios that GMs could run.
...
The PCs cannot investigate something, discover some evil plot afoot, and then go in and take saiid evildoers out, without having to wait for the bad guys to take evil action against them first (or witness it being done to someone else). That's a... heck of a restriction on play.

I don't think most people would consider, for example, "arresting (or even shooting) terrorists who were in the process of setting up a bombing" as unethical unless they were hard-core pacifists. So I don't agree at all with the second part, assuming that there is a concrete evil plot rather than just "well, you know, they're probably up to no good ..."

Like, yes, by this standard the adventure premise of "there are some cultists living in the old ruined fort, you should go kill them before they cause trouble" is not a good fit for good-aligned characters. But it's easy to make it suitable:
* The cultists are kidnapping and/or killing people.
* The cultists are in the process of summoning a powerful demon.
* The cultists poisoned the town's water supply, or are going to.

The enemies just need to be doing something more than simply existing. You can still attack before they put their plan into action, you just can't (if you're trying to be good-aligned) pre-emptively attack before they even start anything, and you may actually have to investigate and find out that they are planning something rather than just assuming it's the case.

[gbaji]

I don't think most people would consider, for example, "arresting (or even shooting) terrorists who were in the process of setting up a bombing" as unethical unless they were hard-core pacifists. So I don't agree at all with the second part, assuming that there is a concrete evil plot rather than just "well, you know, they're probably up to no good ..."

Like, yes, by this standard the adventure premise of "there are some cultists living in the old ruined fort, you should go kill them before they cause trouble" is not a good fit for good-aligned characters. But it's easy to make it suitable:
* The cultists are kidnapping and/or killing people.
* The cultists are in the process of summoning a powerful demon.
* The cultists poisoned the town's water supply, or are going to.

Sure. It's still restrictive though, and lends itself to the same "problem" that the OP brought up in the first place.

Unlesss the PCs actually personally witness the cultists kidnapping people, and personally track them to their lair, and personally verify that the people hanging out inside (or that they encounter on the way in) are the same people they personally witnessed previously, they're still kinda stuck trusting the person who told them "these people are cultists, and they kidnapped people, and they're at this location" were telling the truth.

Otherwise, how does this go? You arrive at some location. You see there are guards. Do you attack them? Or talk to them? If the latter, they tell you to leave. What now? Force your way inside? Kill the guards? Then kill the next group who come after you when they sound the alarm? Then, finally... after fighting your way into the building/whatever, you get to the "main bad guys", and it turns out it's actually a group of the kings guards, securing a secret meeting between a high ranking minister and his counterpart in another kingdom, engaged in sensitive negotiations, and your attack has destroyed those talks. You've now committed multiple counts of murder, treason maybe, and perhaps caused a war to break out instead of peace. All planned by the actual evil bad guy who set you up for this.


And that's just the first scenario. All three have problems if you try to apply the same sort of requirements for "good". You'd have to be able to see the summoning happening. But how do you know where/when it's happening? How do you get there? What are the odds you don't have to kill any of these "cultists" between the front entrance of the location and the inner sanctum where they are performing the ritual? And how do you absolutely know that these are "cultists" and are sumnonging a demon, and not some good group, doing a blessing ritual to do <something good>? Do the bad guys just have to say "we're good guys" and you have to walk away? Do you wait until the demon appears? And do you recognize it's a demon right away, or wait until the demon then does something "evil" before you act?

And the water supply thing? How do you know it's poison? How do you know that they are doing this in the first place? How are you certain, unless you wait until after they do it (and then perhaps watch as people drink the water and die), that this is actually true? How do you know exactly who the evil people are in all of this?


We see a lot of this stuff happen on TV shows and in films, but the writers for those things go to great lengths to contrive things so that the heroes are always unambibiously in the right (well, except when the story is about them not being so). But the reality is that, just like in a D&D game, most of the time, the heroes of those stories are acting as vigilantes, and breaking lots of laws, and harming lots of people, but we accept that because (again, most of the time) they turn out to be right, and these are evil cultists, and they are doing horrible things, and if they hadn't broken all those laws, and attacked, and possibliy killed people who, at the time, had only committed the crime of "guard this building from intruders", the bad guys would have won.

But those are highly contrived situations, and utterly dependent on the writers of those stories being honest with us. But this also sets up the PCs for the same sort of situation in the OP. They attack, assuming they are doing the right thing, and saving the world, or whatever, and most of the time, they are right, and they are hailed as the "good guys" for doing so. Well... until the one time it turns out the information was wrong, and they didn't kill an evil creature, or group of evil cultists. And now there's a problem.

Do we apply an alignment penalty for PCs doing the exact things they've done before, using the same methodology they've always used, because this one time it happened to be someone good they killed? And if it is true that this is what they've done before, and it's worked out fine, because the person they killed was evil, and you didn't apply an alignment penalty all those times, can you really do so now? And what does that say about ethics based on the action/decision itself, versus the alignment of the target of those actions?

The enemies just need to be doing something more than simply existing. You can still attack before they put their plan into action, you just can't (if you're trying to be good-aligned) pre-emptively attack before they even start anything, and you may actually have to investigate and find out that they are planning something rather than just assuming it's the case.

Fair enough. And I actually agree with that approach. Which is why my consistent response to the OP's scenario was to ask about what they discussed or planned prior to arriving at the "monster's lair", and what steps they may have used to confirm or test what they were told. And also why I've consistently stated that if they didn't trust the source but went there with the intent to kill the "monster" anyway, then it's on the whole party, and not just the one guy who pulled the trigger. But if they did distrust the source, and did discuss this, and went there to investigate instead, then it's on the ranger.

And yeah, even with all of that, there often comes a point in any adventure where the party has collected the information they can, and have to make a choice. And it's not uncommon for that choice to be "break into the <location> and see what's going on there". Sometimes, depending on skills available in the party, they can do this steathily and without killing anyone until after they have confirmed their suspicions about the potential bad guys. But sometimes... not. And in most cases, they're still most definitely "breaking the law" when doing this sort of thing.


I guess my point with this bit is that this is highly subject to the GM actually setting up the scenario so it's possible for the party to do this. If the GM chooses not to, they wont be able to be 100% certain ahead of time. I can't say if that was the case in the OP, but it's something to consider. If the GM consistently puts the PCS into situations where they must make a choice, with incomplete information, and with deadly results, which usually is the right (or even absolutely necessary) thing to do, but then punishes them for "being wrong", then that's on the GM IMO. GMs need to be very very aware of the patterns of expected behavior/response from the PCs in the adventure's they run. It's quite easiliy to unintentionally put the PCs into an impossible situation, and you shoud not punsih them for that.

And yeah. I guess a follow up to that is that you can rule on this how you wish, but must be consistent with it. If it's an evil act to kill something without first verifying that it's a dangerous person/creature engaged in harmful actions, then it's evil every time. Be consistent. If you have never applied an alignment effect on PCs who killed bad guys with the same level of uncertainty in the past, then you can't do it here. Pick a rule and try to stick to it.

[Satinavian]

Unlesss the PCs actually personally witness the cultists kidnapping people, and personally track them to their lair, and personally verify that the people hanging out inside (or that they encounter on the way in) are the same people they personally witnessed previously, they're still kinda stuck trusting the person who told them "these people are cultists, and they kidnapped people, and they're at this location" were telling the truth.

If you are not sure, do information gathering first. Ask relatives of the kidnapped, witnesses of the kidnapping, check and guard the water supply, check where the information the cultists target it comes from and whether the method makes sense. You could even sneak into the hideout to take a look or shadow the questgiver or lone cultists to listen into conversations and that is all without whatever supernatural information gathering is available.

Seriously, if you were playing Shadowrun, you would do the very same things as well instead of just taking whatever your Mr.Johnson tells you for the truth.


But in case you really are too incompetent to gather information, you still could just use nonlethal attacks. It is not exactly hard to not kill the suspects.

We see a lot of this stuff happen on TV shows and in films, but the writers for those things go to great lengths to contrive things so that the heroes are always unambibiously in the right (well, except when the story is about them not being so). But the reality is that, just like in a D&D game, most of the time, the heroes of those stories are acting as vigilantes, and breaking lots of laws, and harming lots of people, but we accept that because (again, most of the time) they turn out to be right, and these are evil cultists, and they are doing horrible things, and if they hadn't broken all those laws, and attacked, and possibliy killed people who, at the time, had only committed the crime of "guard this building from intruders", the bad guys would have won.

But those are highly contrived situations, and utterly dependent on the writers of those stories being honest with us. But this also sets up the PCs for the same sort of situation in the OP. They attack, assuming they are doing the right thing, and saving the world, or whatever, and most of the time, they are right, and they are hailed as the "good guys" for doing so. Well... until the one time it turns out the information was wrong, and they didn't kill an evil creature, or group of evil cultists. And now there's a problem.

Yes, such movies etc. exist.

But i don't agree with your assumption that those fit general fantasy RPG plots all that much. Sure, there are regularly adventures meant to work that way but i also see them regularly fail because the PCs refuse to break the law or dish out reckless harm or just refuse to act until they have certain proof. Because that is what they think is moral.

And going back to D&D

When 90% of the game literally is "kill sentient creatures who are bad/evil", and that makes your characters the heroes, and you get rewarded with experience and loot, it's not a leap to assume the resulting behavior and choices are going to lean in that direction heavily. If we were actually measuring realistic morality here, it would be correct to say that the alignment of the creature in the pool should not matter. But... the very question posed in the OP assumes that it does. And that somehow, the entire problem here wasn't that they killed a creature in a murky pool, but that they killed a good creature in a murky pool.

No, the problem is not that they killed a good creature. The issue is that they killed an innocent creature that was not in the process of doing some greater evil. Even recklessly killing an innocent, evil but harmless creature would have the same effect. Killing evil creatures is not good. It is only justified under the exact same instances that killing good creatures would be. This is why most players don't care about the alignment of their enemies at all. The reasons for killing would be just the same.

A good aligned person should never use lethal force unless they (or soemone else) is in immenent danger of "risk of loss of life or severe bodily harm" and killing is the only way to prevent that.

Nope, there are more options. The big ones are :
- War (If the war itself is justified and you are enlisted on one side, killing enemy soldiers is fine for good people)
- Punishment ( Needs crime worthy of death. Who is to dish out the punishment an whether the proper authority is needed is more a law/chaos thing.)

[kyoryu]

Sure. It's still restrictive though, and lends itself to the same "problem" that the OP brought up in the first place.

Unlesss the PCs actually personally witness the cultists kidnapping people, and personally track them to their lair, and personally verify that the people hanging out inside (or that they encounter on the way in) are the same people they personally witnessed previously, they're still kinda stuck trusting the person who told them "these people are cultists, and they kidnapped people, and they're at this location" were telling the truth.

You're making this awfully black and white. Given that it's a game, I think it's reasonable to ask for, effectively, "a preponderence of evidence". Some rando saying "they're bad, kill them!" and then blindly shooting without even knowing what you're shooting at does not meet that bar.

Like, a wartribe is, well, a wartribe and they do bad things. If those bad things have happened recently, and you find a wartribe in the area, that's pretty good evidence. Combine that with a healthy dose of the GM letting these groups get super violent and defensive when approached (thus attacking), and you get enough evidence to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

Arguably, that's one of the best arguments for "sides". If, even ignoring absolutely always evil orcs, your kingdom or whatever is at war with the orcs, and you find an orc wartribe in your lands? You pretty much know they're up to no good. It's what they do, and they shouldn't be there, and if they were there they for legitimate reasons they wouldn't do so in the form of a wartribe.

Same with cultists. Is there evidence of bad things happening? Do you have evidence that points to the cultists? Is there evidence at the site? You don't need absolute proof (though seeing cultists kidnap/sacrifice people would help), but you at least need a preponderence of evidence. Find some symbols of the cult, find evidence of the magic being used, blah blah blah.

As a GM, that's kind of where I draw the line - and I won't ding PCs for being wrong, especially if misled. I will ding them for being completely and utterly reckless in their usage of violence, however, doubly so if they know there's a good chance they'll be hurting innocents in the process. (Innocents may still get hurt in some cases, which is where the bar becomes "are you doing the best you can to minimize innocent suffering?")

[gbaji]

If you are not sure, do information gathering first. Ask relatives of the kidnapped, witnesses of the kidnapping, check and guard the water supply, check where the information the cultists target it comes from and whether the method makes sense. You could even sneak into the hideout to take a look or shadow the questgiver or lone cultists to listen into conversations and that is all without whatever supernatural information gathering is available.

Oh. Absolutely. That was largely the point of the long/meandering post(s) I've written. But whatever information gathering, or discussion, or decisions were made by the party in the OP scenario are not available. Hence, why I don't believe there is sufficient information to make a judgement about it. I was specifically responding to posts making the very broad claim that firing into the pool at the creature was automatically an act of evil because the ranger didn't stop at that moment to verify what the creature was.

Well. You may not know exactly what species that robed figure is, nor what exactly its alignment is. But... if you have a preponderance of evidence that said robed figure is a member of the evil cult in town, and has been responsible for multiple attacks/kidnapping/sacrifices in town, and it's hanging out in the area you have been told is the lair of said cult, you probably aren't going to stop and ask for ID before killing said robed figure (and may do so as quickly and lethally as possible if there's a conceren about an alarm being raised otherwise).

Now apply that back to the OP. We don't know that the players did *not* ask other businesses in town about the "creature in the pool". We don't know that they were *not* told confirming tales about this horrible beast, which rises out of the pool and murders people. The party may very well have been acting on what they believed was an actual "perponderance of evidence". But... the story just kind jumps from "they were told about the creature" to "they're standing in the room with the pool the creature is in", with no details about the how or why that they came to be there.

I'm trying to get folks to accept that there are, in fact, times when "attack first without talking first" is something that is done, and does not result by itself in an alignment change. And yes, it's entirely dependent in what other information the PCs knew at the time. Which... unfortunately, is entirely missing from the scenario itself.

But i don't agree with your assumption that those fit general fantasy RPG plots all that much. Sure, there are regularly adventures meant to work that way but i also see them regularly fail because the PCs refuse to break the law or dish out reckless harm or just refuse to act until they have certain proof. Because that is what they think is moral.

Sure. Which loops back to what I said earlier about the GM being consistent and paying attention to past player choices and actions. If the GM regularly runs the PCs into scenarios where the "robed figure we have evidence is a cultist, currently guarding/patrolling what we also have evidence is the cultist hideout" is killed judicoiusly and without a second thought, and no one ever gets an alignment penalty as a result, so the players have accepted this methodology and adapted to it, then the GM cannot later have a robed figure "turn out to be someone good" (under otherwise similar circumstances) and hit them with a penalty for behaving the same way towards that robed figure that they did towards all the other ones.

And yes. This is a fair bit of speculation on my part, but it's speculation I can't rule out here, especially since HK said that these players tend to be of the "shoot first, ask questions later" mindset already. Those play habits don't just appear out of nowhere. They build up over time, and a good amount of that is based on how the GM has reacted to past actions of a similar nature.

Killing someone without first stoping them, revealing what/who they are, and questioning them first, is only "evil" if it's "always evil". If that's true, then great! You are applying consistent rules as a GM. But... I suspect that, had the creature in the murky pool actually been a Balor, that HK (and many other GMs) would not have applied an alignment change.

No, the problem is not that they killed a good creature. The issue is that they killed an innocent creature that was not in the process of doing some greater evil. Even recklessly killing an innocent, evil but harmless creature would have the same effect. Killing evil creatures is not good. It is only justified under the exact same instances that killing good creatures would be. This is why most players don't care about the alignment of their enemies at all. The reasons for killing would be just the same.

I agree that it should not be about the alignment of the creature. I'm making the observation that, in all probability, it actually is. And that this is a core problem to the scenario at hand. And sure, I'm also adding in my own observations of player and GM behaviors over a few decades of playing RPGs (especially ones with alignment systems like D&D), and noting that this distinction is commonly made in scenarios like this.

My entire point is that it should not matter. But, for many GMs and many players, and at many tables, in actual play? It does.

You're making this awfully black and white. Given that it's a game, I think it's reasonable to ask for, effectively, "a preponderence of evidence". Some rando saying "they're bad, kill them!" and then blindly shooting without even knowing what you're shooting at does not meet that bar.

Kinda pre-answered this above. Same deal. I agree completely. What I disagree with was over whether that was actally the distinction being used by HK in this case. And, I suppose, how much evidence and/or discussion the party actually accumulated along the way (and how much of a decision they had made as a party versus just the one character).

I keep coming back to "there were four paladins in the group, they knew the fiends were fiends. So why were they in the room with the pool?". Knowing what information the gathered, what discussions they had, and what decisions they made prior to that point is kinda important. Critically so IMO.

As a GM, that's kind of where I draw the line - and I won't ding PCs for being wrong, especially if misled. I will ding them for being completely and utterly reckless in their usage of violence, however, doubly so if they know there's a good chance they'll be hurting innocents in the process. (Innocents may still get hurt in some cases, which is where the bar becomes "are you doing the best you can to minimize innocent suffering?")

Right. It's just not so clear to me how much of this was the party being misled.

When I raised that point, and observed that we were provided no information about what other information the party had about the creature, what efforts at information gathering, or even *why* they were in the room in the first place, I got a barrage of "It's always evil to fire at someone without checking who/what they are first!".

Which is what lead me to respond with a host of scenarios/examples where "good characters" may do excactly that, but still have a reasonable belief that the creature/person they are firing at *is* actually a horrible evil thing/person that must be killed, possibly quickly and quietly, and without giving much or any warning.

And yes. As both of you have correctly observed, this is 100% about what information the party has about the thing they are attacking and how much they believe that information to support such an action in the first place. Which is why I keep coming back to the fact that there were four paladins in the party, and the whole party arrived at that room with the pool. The didn't just appear there magically. They made the decision to go there. Why? What was their intention?

Same deal with the cultist scenario. if the entire party has decided that "these cultists are evil people actively engaged in evil things", and "we're going to go attack their hideout and take them out", and "this is where the cultists hideout is", and "that robed figure hanging out in that building is a cultist lookout", and then the party archer takes a shot at the robed figure from where the party is hiding, and kill it silentlly so they can proceed into the hideout without raising alarm, that meets the conditions of "killing something without checking who/what they are first", right? I mean, we believe this is where the cultists are, and we believe that robed figure is one of them. And we believe that he's a lookout. And we believe that if we don't kill him quick and quiet, he'll raise an alarm. But it's entirely within the realm of possiblity that we're wrong.... right?

But that lands us into the category of "tragic mistake" and not "evil act" IMO.

I'm not even arguing that the whole "naiad in the pool" meets that criteria. I'm just observing that, based on what we were told, we don't actually know for sure that it doesn't. We don't know if all four paladins decided "we believe there's an evil monster in that pool", and "the monster must be killed at all costs", and "The pool is right there in this room", and then they went to the room with the pool fully with the plan and intention to kill the creature within it, and the archer was just the one who actually took the shot.

[HoboKnight]

Hey guys,
due to my workload, I occasionally visit the forum (which is super helpful always) and I'll fill in some gaps in order for further clarification.

The module in question is Price of Beauty from Secrets of Canflekeep. Module is waaay to low a CR for my party, but I sometimes like to run lower level modules for my party... they've invested a lot to get to their current levels.

What happened during the trek to the pool? Here is my summary: party has entered the spa. Party talked to hags, cambion and scarecrows under effect of Seeming spell. Hags told the party that a hostile elemental has squatted the pool. Paladins did their Perceptions, Insights (suceeded) and Divine sense and when they got the info, Paladin of Tempus was like: Boyyos, these fiends are making my Holy Avenger itchy. Let's waste them. Other paladins (Helm, Kelemvor, Liira) were: Let's check things out more.

Naiad was hiding in a pool, she was previusly tormented by hags and has turned the water into acid-like liquid which would harm anyone dipping in it. Due to evaporation, I ruled air in the room with a pool does 1 acid dmg to a creature per 6 rounds. Not even remotely a problem for my party.

Party had entered room with a pool and our Shooter was... do I see "the monster". I said, there is a shape in a pool, but its rather blurry.

"Okay, I shoot it, full attack!" Paladins went: Don't do it man, don't do it! But Shooter went first and pierced a naiad several times, making her unconcius with a second shot and killing her with following. After the session we talked and he IC showed no remorse. "Hey, it's just how I roll. I'm a wild card."

Session later another paladin invested A TON of thing to ressurect her and jumped through several hoops to get on her good side. (Persuation, Illusion to appear as another man).

[kyoryu]

"Okay, I shoot it, full attack!" Paladins went: Don't do it man, don't do it! But Shooter went first and pierced a naiad several times, making her unconcius with a second shot and killing her with following. After the session we talked and he IC showed no remorse. "Hey, it's just how I roll. I'm a wild card."

That sounds pretty much full on chaotic evil.

[Cygnia]

That sounds pretty much full on chaotic evil.

Blatant "It's what MY CHARCTER WOULD DO~!"

And if your other post is anything to go by, you want to reward him and his toxic red flags by having Bhaal recruit him.

[Vahnavoi]

That sounds pretty much full on chaotic evil.

I reached the same conclusion pages ago:

Sounds like his character was one of those "Chaotic Neutral" characters where the "Neutral" is actually spelled "Evil" even before the change. Since it doesn't sound like you actually plan to prohibit Evil characters, you shoud just look A in the eyes and say "you know you're allowed to play Evil characters, right? You can just admit you want to play a Chaotic Evil character."

So this is just a rehash rather than new information. It seems, from the other thread, that HoboKnight has opted to follow a version of my suggestion and given Mr. Shooter a chance to double down on their awful ways.

---

Blatant "It's what MY CHARCTER WOULD DO~!"

And if your other post is anything to go by, you want to reward him and his toxic red flags by having Bhaal recruit him.

Hold your horses. Why do you think that is a reward? It's equivalent to being acknowledged as a murderer, by another murderer who might choose to do them in for no reason.

More generally, bad play is not always equal to toxic play. Shooting someone recklessly is bad both in the sense of being immoral and in the sense of being a tactical error, but it's not something a game of D&D is incapable of handling. It is, in fact, easy to get more game out of the situation by passing the ball to the other players and asking what they want to about Mr. Shooter.