7/28/2019 Change 'Evil' to 'Chaotic'

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Or at least to make it possible to do good/evil/neutral

Set Oct 5, 2011, 11:43 AM 

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Phasics wrote:

Now for the sake of this discussion, animating corpses of sentient humanoids is evil. you

wouldn't want someone digging up your dead grandmother and turning her into a killing

machine, its just poor form.

Worse than evil. It's stupid. Have you see the stats on a venerable human commoner? Ugh. Anyone able to cast animate dead should have a high enough Intelligence or Wisdom score to

know better than to animate people. It's offensive to their relatives and mechanically suboptimal

and a waste of perfectly good onyx.

 Animate a riding dog. *Vastly* better stats.

If you want mechanical energy, animate oxen or warhorses. Let them die of natural causes, if 

you want to feel better about it. Give the meat to the hospice or the church of Sarenrae. Donate

the leather to orphans and beggars. And then set those old bones to turning the millwheel for 

the next century, and reap the benefit of free mechanical energy, or use them to pull carriages,

or even 'walk' boats along the canals (underwater, walking on the bottom of the canal, since

they don't have to breath).Quote:

 And lets be clear negative energy is not evil by the rules, otherwise inflict light wounds, or 

enervation for example would have the evil descriptor.

I think the EVIL comes from the perversion of a sentient creature into a mindless slave. esp

since free will is such a big part of sentient culture.

 And yet dominate person (or various other effects that violate your free will, like confusion and

fear ), which does *exactly* that, isn't evil.

 Animate dead doesn't really do that, 'though. The sentient creature left for Heaven (or Hell)

when that person became a corpse. The lights are out. Nobody's home. What happens to the

meat and bones and blood has zero effect on the disposition of the soul, and maggots and

bacteria and fungi 'defile' human (and other sentient) corpses *all the time,* and it doesn't yankpeople out of Heaven (or rescue them from Hell). The animated skeleton / zombie remains

mindless, and has no trace of the alignment, memories or personality of the person that once

wore that meat-suit. (As evidenced by the animated body of an Int 10 Paladin being mindless

and no longer detecting as Good or Lawful, because *the Paladin isn't in there.*)

 According to WotC itself, skeletons and zombies were made evil in the switch from 3.0 to 3.5

*so that Paladins could smite them.* It wasn't a decision made for balance reasons, because

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skeletons or zombies were so incredibly uber or overpowered. It wasn't because stuffing non-

evil energy into a non-evil corpse some allows a mindless thing to become capable of malice

aforethought.

*Some* settings (and individual GMs) assume that animate dead can rip souls out of heaven (or 

hell), and that makes it evil (apparently even if one is using it to rescue people from Hell or the

 Abyss, or to destroy a demon or devil or god! that was once an evil human, by causing their fiendish spirit to be torn apart and trapped in their bones, on the material plane...), but that's not

what happens in Greyhawk, the Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Golarion, the Scarred Lands,

Spelljammer, Planescape, Ghostwalk, Kalamar/Tellene or most of the other settings I've played

in.

*If* that rule is the case, *and* there was some universal law or natural order that mandated that

souls must remain in their final resting place undisturbed, then, logically, animating dead (and

disrupting this natural order / universal law) would be a *chaotic* act, not necessarily an *evil*

one.

'Cause it's not 'evil' to violate a law. It's chaotic. 

Can one do great evil with necromancy? Sure. One *could* run around digging up graveyards

and animating grandmothers for no sensible or effective reason. One could also run around

fireballing nunneries and conjuring hound archons and making them eat succulent babies. That

doesn't make evocation evil or the conjuring of good outsiders evil, just because one can do

obnoxious and irrelevant things with them.

Guns don't kill people. Some people kill people, and some of them use guns.

Necromancy isn't evil. Some people are evil, and some of them use necromancy.

 A Man In Black (RPG Superstar 2010 Top 32) Oct 5, 2011, 11:42 PM 

4 people marked this as a favorite. 

Pathfinder is inconsistent about mindless undead and negative energy, just like 3e was.

Skeletons and zombies are inherently evil, despite the fact that they have no more potential for 

evil than an animated object. Arguing that it's because you're using negative energy makes no

sense, because negative Channel Energy and Inflict [foo] Wounds aren't evil at all. Arguing that

it involves binding souls doesn't work, because you can still use True Resurrection on someone

whose body has been turned into a skeleton, and anyway binding a (sentient!) elemental for a

golem isn't evil. Solving this problem takes house rules of some sort.

You can either set up your world so that negative energy is evil , either because it's sentient,

antithetical to life, corrupts the world, allows some otherworldly evil into the world, whatever.

This means that wielding negative energy makes you a bad person. Inflict [foo] Wounds or 

negative Channel Energy is sucking out someone's soul. Mindless undead are evil because

they default program is to eat the cat and tear up shrubs if not given other orders, or because

they eventually poison the land if they linger, or because you have to somehow damage or 

wound or pain or torture the soul of the original owner of the body to make them, or whatever.

 Alternately, negative energy is dangerous and gross. It isn't evil to make a skeleton any more

than it's evil to make an animated object out of a table. It's just gross, and the people who do it

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are both little antisocial and assumed to be graverobbers. Mindless undead defaults to neutral,

and Animate Dead is no longer an evil spell, just a spell you don't cast in a nice neighborhood or 

in front of people who could form an angry mob. Raising skeletons to carry your luggage isn't

any more inherently evil than using a construct or a horse to do the same. Create (Greater)

Undead is still evil, because shadows, mummies, and the like are sentient and evil in the sense

that they eat people, so summoning horrible abominations who exist only to feed on the living isstill an inherent dick move.

 All credit goes to Frank Trollman and K for this.

Nevertheless, I predict about five more pages of people arguing about the inconsistencies and

asserting that their perspective on the evil versus gross debate is the Only Possible

Interpretation.

Phasics Oct 9, 2011, 01:53 AM 

Hah sorry, I can confirm that there is a SWTOR beta and that I'm in the SWTOR beta, hence my

lack of posting.

 Anyway I figured I throw this on the pile

 Anyone read the Dresden Files books ?

I bring it up becuase you have good ole Harry a wizard of the "white" council who is a good guy

and tries to do the right thing using his magic to help and protect his fellow humans is tainted

heavily with "evil" powers.

e.g. mid series he's augmenting his magic with hellfire from a resident demon sharing his body,

now this is clearly an evil source of magic, but his applications are arguably good or at least

neutral.

personally I think something is lost in RP potentially if there isn't the possibility for morale

ambiguity. drawing on evil powers to do good, if in your RP world at least if there a chance

people might say that's okay while others won't tolerate it then I think that makes for a more

interesting game.

 As long as you can trust your GM to hand you both positive and negative responses to you use

of evil for good then I think its worth putting in.I would also like to throw this in that if you use evil spells alot and your GM therefore says your 

alignment has adjusted to something Evil that doesn't mean you then have to play evil. I think

an interesting challenge would be playing e.g. Lawful Evil do gooder Necromancer who detects

as evil but who goes out of his way to help those in need. (this might be a separate discussion

in itself though)

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 Quote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Its still good! 

So, is animating dead evil or not? After that link, I really want to play a necromancer! :D

Yes. No reason you couldn't do a Neutral necromancer though. Just make sure you save some

orphans to balance it out.

Get ranks in cooking and you'll have the only undead around that make the peasants try to eat

THEM.

TriOmegaZero (Pathfinder Comics Subscriber ) Oct 10, 2011, 11:26 PM 

Phasics wrote:

Perhaps the real evil are all the poeple who leave a corpse behind instead of telling their family

to cremate them thus leaving an ample supply of material for Necromancers who can't help whothey are ;)

In my first game, we fended off a group of orcs. Then left them where they fell.

Later we got jumped by zombie orcs. And then berated by an NPC for being so careless.