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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7598313" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Let me relate a story from my own campaign to address this.</p><p></p><p>The party was investigating a murder mystery. Chasing rumors, one NPC revealed to the party that one of the town's leading citizen's maintained a secret temple outside of the town to an evil deity - Karophet, a deity associated with the misuse of knowledge, art, and technology. The party cast detect evil from concealment on the man and discovers he is evil. So now they have their leading suspect and they decide to go raid the temple to see if they can get more clues. After a couple of near death encounters with devious traps, they flee the temple with a book, which turns out to be a profane text sacred to Karophet. So they get arrested and charged tresspassing with grand theft for stealing a valuable book. The Mayor explains to him that as the temple is on man's property and outside the boundaries of the town, he's breaking none of the town's laws. A mob of townsfolk show up to lynch the PC's, because the man that they are threatening is their employer who has brought a lot of wealth to the town, and while everyone agrees he's a hard man, he's "hard but fair", and has the respect of his employees and the townsfolk. The PC's have to do a lot of talking, pass a bunch of social skill checks, and pay fines, and pay restitution to their "leading suspect" just to avoid getting hung. Moreover, the more they investigate, the less motive they can find for this guy to be the murderer, the better his alibi, and the more the clues start pointing elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>They eventually figure out that the NPC that told him about the man's "secret temple" in the first place is in the employ of the murderer. Detect Evil wouldn't have helped, because the 'informant' was Chaotic Neutral.</p><p></p><p>And that's just one example. If I wanted to be more devious, I could muck them up much further. Generally speaking, I find that if Detect Evil ruins your plans and lets you find out who the villain is, chances are your setting doesn't have a lot of moral ambiguity in the first place.</p><p></p><p>Moral ambiguity is when reasonable people can disagree over which response to the problem of evil and injustice is justice and correct. Detect Evil cannot help with that, or to the extent that it can, by the point that it can, you're already far down the wrong road.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7598313, member: 4937"] Let me relate a story from my own campaign to address this. The party was investigating a murder mystery. Chasing rumors, one NPC revealed to the party that one of the town's leading citizen's maintained a secret temple outside of the town to an evil deity - Karophet, a deity associated with the misuse of knowledge, art, and technology. The party cast detect evil from concealment on the man and discovers he is evil. So now they have their leading suspect and they decide to go raid the temple to see if they can get more clues. After a couple of near death encounters with devious traps, they flee the temple with a book, which turns out to be a profane text sacred to Karophet. So they get arrested and charged tresspassing with grand theft for stealing a valuable book. The Mayor explains to him that as the temple is on man's property and outside the boundaries of the town, he's breaking none of the town's laws. A mob of townsfolk show up to lynch the PC's, because the man that they are threatening is their employer who has brought a lot of wealth to the town, and while everyone agrees he's a hard man, he's "hard but fair", and has the respect of his employees and the townsfolk. The PC's have to do a lot of talking, pass a bunch of social skill checks, and pay fines, and pay restitution to their "leading suspect" just to avoid getting hung. Moreover, the more they investigate, the less motive they can find for this guy to be the murderer, the better his alibi, and the more the clues start pointing elsewhere. They eventually figure out that the NPC that told him about the man's "secret temple" in the first place is in the employ of the murderer. Detect Evil wouldn't have helped, because the 'informant' was Chaotic Neutral. And that's just one example. If I wanted to be more devious, I could muck them up much further. Generally speaking, I find that if Detect Evil ruins your plans and lets you find out who the villain is, chances are your setting doesn't have a lot of moral ambiguity in the first place. Moral ambiguity is when reasonable people can disagree over which response to the problem of evil and injustice is justice and correct. Detect Evil cannot help with that, or to the extent that it can, by the point that it can, you're already far down the wrong road. [/QUOTE]
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