Or at least to make it possible to do good/evil/neutral Set Oct 5, 2011, 11:43 AM

3 people marked this as a favorite. 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 yank people 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

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

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 is still 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) ================

What does anything you said have to do with what I said? I was not talking about the Bestiary. I was talking about what undead and necromancy could be without any fuss in editions prior to 3rd. And how is creepy evil? Dark is not evil. You can dress like the Grim Reaper and weild a scythe and still be a paladin in good standing with all the angels of Heaven. You can be a Juju Oracle and roll with a crew of good aligned undead made by the rules and be perfectly NG. (totally called someone trotting out the "digging up Grandma" caricature how many posts back? Do I win anything?) Noah Fentz Oct 9, 2011, 11:13 PM

Wow, what a booming topic! Too much to read. I'll go out on a limb here and say animating the dead is much like 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'. Ask yourself ... Would a Paladin not ride an undead horse, if it was the only mode of transport available to save kids dying in an orphanage fire? I think he would. Would a paladin object to a Necromancer animating townsfolk recently slain while fighting the very same fire, if all hope had seemed lost? I would think not, since their dying wish had been to save the children in the first place! Evil and good are situational, in this case, and it's the intent of the Necromancer that defines him. Note: The preceding statement is purely opinion and is not intended to reflect the opinions of anyone other than the poster. BigNorseWolf Oct 10, 2011, 01:07 AM

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 who they 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.