Originally Posted by
eggynack
None of these arguments make any sense. Sticking poison on your sword is giving yourself an unfair advantage, but putting a ton of magical enhancements on your sword, or just broadly doing any number of far more effective things, is not. Causing extreme and debilitating pain is evil, when it's poison, but when it's the spell poison with its identical combat effect it's just fine. Poison strips away control somehow, but charm/dominate person is totally non-evil.
Hell, we don't even have to go that far. There's roughly a bajillion spells out there that render the target essentially powerless. Let's be maximally ironical and go with constricting chains, a frigging sanctified spell, one that can target good creatures just fine, which renders the target totally immobile and deals them non-lethal damage every turn. In a single sanctified spell, we have an effect more powerful and unfair than nearly any poison could hope to be, given that it's entirely lacking in a save and very difficult to escape, painful and debilitating (and the fact that this spell doesn't kill by itself is not pertinent given that a lot of poisons do not kill either), and it removes control from the target way more than some ability damage does. How is poison more evil than one of the most good spells in the entire game?