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2015-08-25, 07:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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2015-08-25, 09:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Given that there's plenty of LG "power centers" according to DMG (and plenty of LG "large community alignments" according to Cityscape) - I could see characters remaining LG while still being able to prioritise "the many" or "the community's long-term best interests".
They'll have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of actually directly harming the innocent, but it's still possible to maintain a Good alignment.
Waterdeep is one of the biggest cities in the Realms, and its "Open Lord" (the chairman of the city council) is a paladin in the 3.0 Campaign Setting book, and the 3.5 Waterdeep splatbookMarut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2015-08-25, 10:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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2015-08-25, 10:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
The thing is... this is outright impossible. They WILL, hopefully infrequently, but inevitably nonetheless, have to take actions or make decisions that directly harm innocents. To maintain an LG alignment in such a situation, they must always be trying their best to do the right thing. Some people will likely disagree with them, but nobody is perfect. Except maybe a few humans, because Zarus is a magnificent bastard like that... And on that note!
... dammit. I had a huge post I wanted to write that gets on back on topic about how Pelor and Erythnul are just sock puppets of Zarus, in light of the "Save the Goblin Children and Women!" situation:
Effectively - Zarus made humans have no Existential Debt to him, unlike every other race out there (Lolth broke the exsistential debt on the drow. The orcs cling to theirs so tightly even half-orcs struggle to reject it), because he has one goal, and one goal only - Have humans be the most awesome race at everything. As they are. They have the most numbers of all the nonevil races (Meaning more votes in good systems and greater overall value to the universe), without being hampered by a deity like Malybulgiat or Gruumsh trying to play "Command & Conquer" with their creations. In fact, he deliberately tried to hide himself from humans, to STOP the nonsense that is the Church of Zarus from forming - he's more like "Dudes, stop trying to talk about how awesome humans are, and actually start being awesome. Also - You reach greater heights standing on a standing elf's shoulders than a trampled one's back". Humans are not only the most environmentally adaptable, but also morally adaptable as well. The other "Good" races are hampered by their creators hard-wiring some of their own flaws into every one them. While lots of humans share some of Zarus' flaws, none share all of them, and some have none of them.
Anyway - the existential debt of other races make them damn hard to suitably adapt to changing moral situations. Pelor is Zarus' creation to help humans dominate the Good alignment spectrum... especially Neutral Good. Pelor's ideals are pretty much a human-dominance lifehack - "How to take over the world without even trying, or even pissing anyone off in a manner they can morally justify", so to say. Of course, humans (And all other races, often to a greater extent) tend to be stubborn with their own beliefs... so he created the Erythnul Sockpuppet diety to serve as a hammer to smash human cultures that are self-destructive... so Pelor can come along behind them, rebuild, and most importantly re-educate. Erythnul's also a great place to dump the incorrigible CE guys without detracting from human success the way other deities might (Particularly Gruumsh and ESPECIALLY Nerull. Pelor/Zarus actually hates the god of (Un)Death because he's transhumanist, while Pelor/Zarus is Humanist). As Pelor's influence grows, Erythnul's wanes as it's no longer needed. And because Pelor's faith is a religion and life guideline, it spans political and social boundries. On a world with the Zarus/Pelor/Erythnul trinity, humans don't inherently tend to any particular alignment, but circumstance, time, and an incredibly long-term conspiracy has pushed them to have only 5-15% of the total Human population to fall onto the lower alignment spectrum (Though humans are easily the most evil of mortals as well as the most virtuous)
Also - Pelor is not the sun, except as a symbol. The sun is merely the greatest paragon of being a Beacon, which is what Zarus' Pelor faith is all about.
What kind of alignment do you give such a Magnificent Bastard (Assuming all this crazy conspiracy is true), if, on one hand, they're only in for the advancement and dominance of a single race, and sometimes/has resorted to monstrous means... but is also inarguably also the greatest active source and spreader of True Good in the world?
Zarus is a HUGE fan of Paragon Commander Shepard.Last edited by Hawkstar; 2015-08-25 at 10:35 AM.
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2015-08-25, 11:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Last edited by hamishspence; 2015-08-25 at 11:05 AM.
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2015-08-25, 11:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
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2015-08-25, 11:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Considering this is "fanfic Zarus" and not "real Zarus" - I'm not sure.
The description seems extremely un-D&D-ish.Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2015-08-25, 11:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
I won't deny that D&D writers sometimes (often) get alignment wrong. The BoVD and BoED are both rife with horribly bad interpretations of alignment.
In a battle for life and death, civilians being used as human shields are something a good person HOPES to protect...but he is not evil if he prioritizes stopping the bad guy using the human shield over the human shield. Finding a third way is good and noble, and should be attempted if there's time. But a man who kills innocents because the villain is ensuring that they go if he goes is not committing an evil act. (There is nuance here; a man who kills them because it's just easier than the alternative, when the alternative was viable, is callous enough to term "neutral to evil" in terms of his actions.)
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2015-08-25, 11:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
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2015-08-25, 02:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Warlock Poetry?
Or ways to use me in game?
Better grab a drink...
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2015-08-25, 02:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
There's lots of badly thought out spells in the book, certainly. Since it costs the character casting it a level of experience, it's not going to see much use. It should really have only changed creature alignment on one axis, rather than "to that of caster".
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2015-08-25, 08:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
'The thing is... this is outright impossible. They WILL, hopefully infrequently, but inevitably nonetheless, have to take actions or make decisions that directly harm innocents. To maintain an LG alignment in such a situation, they must always be trying their best to do the right thing. Some people will likely disagree with them, but nobody is perfect. '
How often will they have to make such decisions? Is the innocent-harming-decision so bad that they remain in a non-LG alignment?
To be fair, NG or LN aren't so bad.
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2015-08-26, 07:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
I think d&d morality and real life moral complexes in general is a bad mix if strictly adhering to both as they often conflict. I think there has already been a lot of good insights so far. To show where I am coming from I briefly state my view on d&d alignments and afterwards point out some awkward explamples.
In my view d&d strict Evil and good alignment comes from fairytales (evil creatures, good heros) mixed with christian religion (good angles,evil devils).
In the simplest form it makes for easy battle targets like it is generally okay to kill evil opponents.
In practice it makes for weird moral conclusions.
1. Killing innocents makes you evil.
- Only actions counts: So at a trial a person is found guilty of murder. The punishment is death. The paladin kills him. He was Innocent = paladin falls. ( would be an efficient system with supplies of resurrection and atonement spells :)
- Only intention matters: the paladin fails his sense motive check. Believes whole village is evil cult members. Slaughter horde of Innocent men, woman and children alike, but does not fall.
2. self sacrifice is good.
- paladin trades his own soul to devil to save the worl, but the Paladin is now evil.
- The good ranger is helping a group of people escape. They need people to delay their pursuers. Only the ranger has survival skills. He sacrifice himself = good. The group escape and all die in the wilderness.
3. Start of hitch hikers guide. A house needs to be destroyed to make a road. Maybe slightly evil but not instantly fall to evil action and all alignments could do it for the greater good.
- Volorns needs to blow up the Earth to make a galactic highway :) Now we are on the evil scale.
... Approaching real life conflicts both sides usually kill civilians and Innocents unintionally (or not) so in dnd terms they would both be evil. And paladins or the real life crusaders would in dnd terms mostly be evil, invading foreign lands far from home....
If I asked the other players I have played with I get different views both on the dnd alignment system on real life moral and how they fit them together.
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2015-08-26, 07:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Personally, I feel that leaning towards intentions will make for happier players, especially since only the GM knows about who's 'really' innocent. Put yourself in the shoes of the paladin in the 'only actions count' situation: you already went through the trouble of acquiring evidence, putting the suspect through a trial, etc, and you were unlucky enough that you somehow arrived at the wrong conclusion anyway. You've already done your best.
I said leaning, since there could be problems if the players stop trying to find out the truth, and use 'only intention matters' as a pass to do what they want to do. If the GM sees that the players aren't really trying, said GM should at least prompt the players. 'Hey, are you sure that's the right thing to do, when you have a lack of information to go by?'
Mind you, the village slaughter could've been wrong even if there were evil cult members, but we've already argued that part earlier on in this thread, and I doubt there's much point continuing said argument.
I'm not sure how soul-trading even works, so it's hard to comment on it. The latter point about the ranger works with 'self sacrifice is Good', just that it turned out to be a pretty bad decision from the logcal and pragmatic point of view.
Sounds about right. It's a scale, after all.
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2015-08-28, 07:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
But are 1/3 of the human population in an evil cult, thieves' guild, or working as a mook for an evil warlord?
And are all those who do so evil that they can justly be killed out of hand even when not directly threatening you?
Is that fact, or just opinion?
If you mean in the real world, I don't think we can discuss that here.
If you mean in D&D, once you get past teh early editions where "Good" and "Evil" are more like team names, I don't think that is supported by either the descriptions of Good alignments, or the examples of Good/Evil behaviour or characters.
If you mean theoretically, it can easily go the other way. If you are refusing to take prisoners, you are likely to make people fight harder rather than surrender. If you deliberately target civilians, you are are almost certainly going to kill or injur more innocent peopel than you would otherwise. And anything you do to make the enemy hate you is likely to make them continue to fight even when it would be sensible to stop.
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2015-08-28, 07:12 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Yes.
And are all those who do so evil that they can justly be killed out of hand even when not directly threatening you?
Is that fact, or just opinion?
If you mean in the real world, I don't think we can discuss that here.
If you mean in D&D, once you get past teh early editions where "Good" and "Evil" are more like team names, I don't think that is supported by either the descriptions of Good alignments, or the examples of Good/Evil behaviour or characters.
If you mean theoretically, it can easily go the other way. If you are refusing to take prisoners, you are likely to make people fight harder rather than surrender. If you deliberately target civilians, you are are almost certainly going to kill or injur more innocent peopel than you would otherwise. And anything you do to make the enemy hate you is likely to make them continue to fight even when it would be sensible to stop.
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2015-08-28, 07:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Or, they can be "random NPCs" rather than "enemy mooks".
I lean to the view that D&D has been evolving out of "evil-aligned characters exist to be slaughtered" for a while.Last edited by hamishspence; 2015-08-28 at 07:22 AM.
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2015-08-28, 08:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
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2015-08-28, 09:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Humans aren't in the 3.0 and 3.5 Monster Manuals though.
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2015-08-28, 12:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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2015-08-28, 12:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Good people don't fight wars with other good people, unless at least one side isn't living up to its ideals (or there's tremendous miscommunication or deliberate deception by a third party going on).
Good people fight when forced to, to defend themselves and those about whom they care (which often, if they have the resources to support it, is just about any innocent ever).
Wars fought with rules of engagement which only allow lightly annoying the enemy, or which encourage the enemy to hole up in civilian areas, or which are prolonged because one side refuses to fight to win because it would be "mean," are ultimately longer and crueler to all involved save the bad guys who like the war and suffering and the powerful feelings it gives them.
This is as true in D&D as it is anywhere else. A lot of the supposed moral quandaries are built around this: allow the obvious villain who will go out and do horrid things to live, or kill his innocent hostages! Doing either is evil! You monster!
The truth is, a Good person can go either way on that kind of thing, but he should probably not be encouraging future situations like that and should be taking measures to ensure that the bad guy won't always have his "innocent kids armor" avaialble to him.
War changes the rules, because of its barbaric nature. If you've gone to war, "nice" has failed...or you're a bad guy who likes using war because you don't care who you hurt if you get what you want.Last edited by Segev; 2015-08-28 at 12:09 PM.
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2015-08-28, 01:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Eberron's notion that Evil Commoners can qualify as "those the paladin is obliged to protect" is an interesting one:
http://archive.wizards.com/default.a...ebds/20041122a
In a crowd of ten commoners, odds are good that three will be evil. But that doesn't mean they are monsters or even killers -- each is just a greedy, selfish person who willingly watches others suffer. The sword is no answer here; the paladin is charged to protect these people.
Something along the lines of "innocent till proven guilty - and Detect Evil is not proof".Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2015-08-28, 02:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2015-08-28, 02:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
It's not the killing them that is an Evil act - Their own lives don't matter. But in a setting with as massive, interdependent society as Eberron, killing someone Evil causes a chain reaction that hurts Good people more often than not. And in Eberron, it's pretty easy to do a little bit of legwork to prove that those 33% of people are in league with the Lords of Dust or Emerald Claw or most unsavory side of the Blood of Vol or secretly a Lord of Blades Spybot or Khyber Cultist or...
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2015-08-28, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2015-08-28, 02:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Last edited by hamishspence; 2015-08-28 at 02:53 PM.
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2015-08-28, 04:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Disgruntled and mean don't make one evil. That said, the types of guardsmen and beggars that ping as evil are a serious blight on society in need of removal as soon as practical. The latter because they're multiple betrayals and uninvestigated/unsolved murders that have and/or are waiting to happen. The former for a large number of serious and obvious reasons.
Falling into the Evil category carries a whole litany of convincing cases for the necessity of its destruction unless it's managed to make parts of society dependent on them (Which is extremely common in civilized areas). Also - Good implies a respect for life, but it's not the entirety or even mandatory for the alignment.Last edited by Hawkstar; 2015-08-28 at 04:22 PM.
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2015-08-28, 04:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Wrong. Being disgruntled and mean is absolutely enough to make you evil. You delight in the small sufferings you cause others and have no empathy for when other people are hurt or put down.
And yet they lack the capacity for any real harm. So yes, you are sentencing people to death because "Theyre mean and don't care when people get hurt."“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2015-08-29, 12:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Maybe we could all could Agree To Disagree about different interpretations of what "modern D&D" is all about - and move on to discussing a different "For the Greater Good" action than
"murdering (legally speaking) evil-aligned people".
Suggestions?Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2015-08-29, 03:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: What alignment is 'For the greater Good'?
Destroying the world to keep all the souls from being eaten and guys actually maintaining the world from being destroyed?
Destroying a fundamentally flawed, unfair, and horrible world to make one that works out better for the people involved?
Fighting to stop a dying world from being destroyed so it can be renewed?