Assassins Evil?

[Saeviomagy]

I find it interesting that in a world with concrete alignment and a guaranteed afterlife, it's actually not increasing the overall level of goodness in the universe to kill evil creatures.

After all, you know for a fact that when killed an evil creature heads off to one of the evil planes to become anything from sustenance for demons to a demon itself. Either way, it's alignment becomes incredibly difficult to change from evil.

Contrarily killing a good creature generates good souls which go on to their eternal reward, possibly becoming angels eventually. Again: alignment will almost certainly stay good for all eternity.

So if your aim is to increase the amount of good in the world, you should be killing good creatures before they have a chance to become corrupted, and redeeming evil creatures to prevent them from dying evil.

 

[WizarDru]

So if your aim is to increase the amount of good in the world, you should be killing good creatures before they have a chance to become corrupted, and redeeming evil creatures to prevent them from dying evil.

That only makes sense if celestials and infernals had unfetered access to the Prime Material Plane and influenced the world daily. That also assumes that servants of a particular deity immediately (or ever) become celestials/infernals. And that the source of a deity's power is not tied to worshippers on the prime. Since none of these are the case, the idea of killing the faithful before they become corrupted doesn't track.

 

[Hand of Evil]

The exact same could be said about assassins - they are weapons "wielded" by someone else and they, too, are "just following orders".

And in game that would have to be addressed by the mechanic of D&D the assassin is evil, I define what is evil in my games. If I wanted to make an assassin "good" in my games I would come up with a way for it. Examples of this is a taint rule system: The player builds up evil, that slowly overpowers their soul. To prevent this from happening, they have to visit their place of worship and be forgiven their sins. Or have where the guild, takes on the taint and feeds it to their god or places it in some underground vault.

This is why I say define evil in your games, don't just have something without explaining it, use it to build your world and setting.

 

[WizarDru]

Not really. Sniper is really more of a question of methodology, of tactics, than of overall motivation. So it's not like using dog and shark interchangeably at all. An assassin could be a sniper (Lee Harvey Oswald) because he chose that methodology to do his deed. A soldier could be a sniper (Vasily Zaytsev) because he was trained in, equipped in, and used that methodology.
The terms aren't completely interchangeable, no. But they are when they describe sets that intersect, which they certainly can.

The problem here seems to be the assumption that the methodology of the sniper is, in your mind, inherently evil. Lee Harvey Oswald was an assassin in the fashion that he killed someone outside of a theater of war, but wasn't an Assassin, a trained professional killer, in the D&D sense. He certainly wasn't a sniper, beyond the sense of using a rifle to kill at a distance. By that definition, anyone who kills at a distance is an assassin.

A sniper is normally a trained professional soldier who performs special tactics. The sniper's function may be to eliminate a command officer to disrupt an enemy unit. He may be there to paralyze a unit by pinning them down and allowing the sniper's allies to move freely. The primary difference between a sniper and a normal soldier is one of range and method of engagement. But I'm not seeing how shooting someone at 100 yards with an M4 is morally better than shooting someone from 500 yards with a sniper rifle. Soldiers kill on the battlefield; that's what they do and what they are expected to do.

The question here is can you have a trained professional contract killer whose specialty is stealthily killing non-combatants and have him not be evil. I think he general answer is Yes, but obviously YMMV.

 

[Barastrondo]

The "assassins must be evil" rule is one that would forbid players from, say, running characters inspired by certain Ubisoft protagonists and their stories, so it's a rule I don't have much truck with. If there were something notable to be gained for that sacrifice, I'd maybe make it, but as is, eh.

 

[billd91]

The problem here seems to be the assumption that the methodology of the sniper is, in your mind, inherently evil. Lee Harvey Oswald was an assassin in the fashion that he killed someone outside of a theater of war, but wasn't an Assassin, a trained professional killer, in the D&D sense. He certainly wasn't a sniper, beyond the sense of using a rifle to kill at a distance. By that definition, anyone who kills at a distance is an assassin.

A sniper is normally a trained professional soldier who performs special tactics. The sniper's function may be to eliminate a command officer to disrupt an enemy unit. He may be there to paralyze a unit by pinning them down and allowing the sniper's allies to move freely. The primary difference between a sniper and a normal soldier is one of range and method of engagement. But I'm not seeing how shooting someone at 100 yards with an M4 is morally better than shooting someone from 500 yards with a sniper rifle. Soldiers kill on the battlefield; that's what they do and what they are expected to do.

I'm entirely aware of what a soldier trained as a sniper does. What I'm saying is that Bullgrit's distinction between the two doesn't hold a lot of water since sniper is more of picking a method of doing what you're doing than the difference between, say, soldier and assassin. The sets do intersect (sniper and assassin) and can do so easily.
And you may not see a difference between picking someone off at 100 yards vs 500 yards, but I assure you, the unit the sniper targets does. Woe to the sniper who gets caught.

 

[Umbran]

I find it interesting that in a world with concrete alignment and a guaranteed afterlife...

Stop right there for a second, please.

I don't have my books on hand, but by my recollection, afterlife is not guaranteed in the core rules of 3.x. The Core gives you ways to make people who were dead alive again, but it doesn't speak to what happened to them while they were dead.

Afterlife is determined by setting, not by the game itself. Rather like alignment, actually. Details vary from campaign to campaign.

 

[Mallus]

The only question I care about is this one: would a non-evil assassin be an interesting character to play? For me the answer is: sure, why not?

I play D&D to make interesting (genre fiction) characters. I'm not so interested in D&D as some kind of nerdy ethics symposium. Asking if James Bond is a good man or bad misses the point entirely. What he is, is cool --well, circa Goldfinger/You Only Live Twice at least.

 

[hamishspence]

Stop right there for a second, please.

I don't have my books on hand, but by my recollection, afterlife is not guaranteed in the core rules of 3.x. The Core gives you ways to make people who were dead alive again, but it doesn't speak to what happened to them while they were dead.

Afterlife is determined by setting, not by the game itself. Rather like alignment, actually. Details vary from campaign to campaign.

I thought the 3.5 DMG included references to petitioners being mortal souls- with the Outer Plane being their afterlife?

Complete Divine does go into more depth though- without being entirely setting-specific.

 

[Crothian]

The only question I care about is this one: would a non-evil assassin be an interesting character to play? For me the answer is: sure, why not?

Do you need to be an Assassin class to be an assassin? No. the class in the DMG is for evil characters that are Assassins. There are other classes and prestige classes that might have different names but can still be very good assassins and not be restricted to evil. Some people confuse the class name with the character job and one does not need to have the class to have the job.