Was V's act evil? (Probable spoilers!)

[Nymrohd]

Possible spoilers.

Let's rephrase the question.

Would killing a line of mosquitos be evil? Probably not, or we have some wicked, wicked exterminators in the real world.

Would killing a whole horde of illithid be evil? Aberrant, brain-sucking monsters? What if one of them was a vegetarian (ate the brains of Treants, maybe)? I suspect a LOT more people would say "not evil."

Miko, the pala-monk of questionable sanity, was perfectly fine with slaying the baby dragon because "its scales weren't all shiny." Roy had a run-in in the prequel books with a "good" party that was perfectly fine slaughtering orcs who were just waiting in line for concert tickets.

In the real world, up until relatively recently, you were considered good if you killed other humans who weren't of your tribe/religion/ethnicity/book club.

The only "correct" answer is that V's acts are evil if Rich Burlew defines them as such, since he is in fact the Dungeon Master of his world. Any other answer is arguable.

Whether certain cultures and the gods that support them judge something as evil or not does not translate to whether it is evil by our morality, or even by the generic D&D morality.

 

[Zephrin the Lost]

But there is no irredeemably evil creature in D&D. By the RAW you could sanctify Pale Night and she'd become lawful good. You could probably do it to Tharizdun if you could beat his Will save!

Someone should do that! In this instance, I doubt if 'sanctify' was included in V's now very deep spell catalog.

My vote was evil, btw, because at the end of the day, there needs to be a difference in how good and evil beings approach their struggles, and that seems to be in line with the spell descriptor logic.

--Z

 

[Nymrohd]

"Sanctify the wicked" is an exalted spell that costs one character level as a sacriifice. It is a sancitified necromancy [Good] spell that traps a soul into a gem for a year and forces it to reflect upon past evils and slowly find itself a spark of goodness. All you need to do is beat a Will Save and keep the very fragile gem safe for a year (if it is broken earlier, a very pissed evil creature comes out). The first book of the Empyrean Trilogy in FR shows an astral deva trying to do something like this to an alu.

 

[DaveyJones]

create greater undead by RAW is evil.

 

[Plane Sailing]

IMC it would be Eeee-vil. No ifs and buts, nothing to do with any spell descriptor (c'mon do you make someone evil because they cast Deathwatch to monitor the health of their buddies while frying them alive is OK?).

Indiscriminate slaughter, genocide, for the purpose of being really horrible to someone who threatened your family on the off chance that a relative might attempt revenge? Out and out evil. Doesn't matter what alignment the target race is.

Regards

 

[F5]

Legally, V might have an 'out' since he wasn't in the right frame of mind when he agreed to the deal and while subject to fusing thing he's probably only barely in control of his actions. At the least he's hearing voices telling him to do evil things.

I don't think V gets off the hook that way. V IS in control of his/her actions. Explicit in the Demon's deal-making was that V would be in control. Getting input from the 3 evil souls, sure, but V was driving, so V can't get out of it by saying "I was being controlled". V let hirmself be influenced, and that's different.

Quite frankly, I am now waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm fairly sure that you don't use a spell named familicide without some kind of karmic backlash. Or, given that it's an epic spell, some literal backlash, and not necessarily against the caster.

Ooh. That's nasty. I could see the backlash from an epic evil spell designed to kill a target's entire family skip over the caster, and do its backlash damage to the CASTER'S extended family. If V winds up killing the kids in order to fuel the spell, is there still any debate as to whether it's evil?

One last thing...even if ridding the world of a type of evil dragon was a good act, that's not what V did. V committed genocide, just to get back at one particularly nasty dragon. The arguably good act was an unintended consequence. Didn't Roy ultimately get off the hook in his own afterlife for some of the unintended bad consequences of his actions? In the long run, accidental Good or Evil doesn't count.

Evil act. No doubt in my mind.

 

[Agamon]

I prefer morally objectionable. Evil is subjective (and I just realized that stating that this far into the thread is redundant).

 

[Nymrohd]

One last thing...even if ridding the world of a type of evil dragon was a good act, that's not what V did. V committed genocide, just to get back at one particularly nasty dragon. The arguably good act was an unintended consequence. Didn't Roy ultimately get off the hook in his own afterlife for some of the unintended bad consequences of his actions? In the long run, accidental Good or Evil doesn't count.

Evil act. No doubt in my mind.

I think this is the best argument. An actual outsider in charge of judging alignment in the OotS universe makes it clear that intent is the primary criterion for ones alignment and for judging ones actions.

 

[Krensky]

I don't think V gets off the hook that way. V IS in control of his/her actions. Explicit in the Demon's deal-making was that V would be in control. Getting input from the 3 evil souls, sure, but V was driving, so V can't get out of it by saying "I was being controlled". V let hirmself be influenced, and that's different.

But can V tell right from wrong at the moment? I'm not saying it makes the act less evil, legally however, he might count as insane, acting as a mitigating factor on his punishment.

Or, in this case, make the Atonement spell work easier. Maybe. Depending on the actual mechanics involved. Still, agreeing to the deal in the first place is a good argument against mitigation by lack of faculties. Why I said 'might'.

And:

Spoiler

I'm half expecting to find out that V's partner and kids had a little black dragon blood in their veins.

Possibly because that's the sort of thing I'd do as a GM. Oh, and in every game I ran, this is E-VEEL. Hand me your character sheet and thanks for the new villain E-VEEL. Granted, agreeing to the pact would likely have triggered that.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Evil intent, not evil act in and of itself (at least the familicide).


Three things:

1. He created greater undead. That is an evil act.

2. The familicide spell is not evil if used to destroy all and only evil things. All black dragons are evil. Much moreso than all orcs. It's not their culture, it's their makeup. There are no innocents.

3. His intent was pretty clearly evil. The voices were talking to him about suffering and "the pain ended too soon". He agreed. Causing suffering for its own sake is evil. Had he done it purely to safeguard his family, it would have been less evil or not evil (the create greater undead is pretty uncool). He didn't. He did it to "win".

If you want to see real evil, I suspect that he won't kill the undead head. He'll put it in a magic box or something so it can live undead forever knowing that it brought on the death of every family member that it ever had.