Assassins Evil?

[Mallus]

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.

Of course you don't need to be a particular class in order to be an assassin in the in-game world. On the other hand, I don't see why a not-so-evil character can't be represented in the in-game world using the assassin mechanics, either (thus, for all intents and purposes, being a non-evil assassin).

I've been totally won over to the idea classes are just ability packages. Alignment restrictions on them are of no use to me. I'll work out each particular characters personality, motivation and ethics gradient by myself.

 

[Umbran]

I've been totally won over to the idea classes are just ability packages. Alignment restrictions on them are of no use to me. I'll work out each particular characters personality, motivation and ethics gradient by myself.

And that's fine. But for purposed of the original question - in the original text, Prestige Classes were stated to be world building elements, not just ability packages. You are, of course, free to deviate from that in your own game.

Why are the Assassins in the book evil? Because the sample organization and/or setting element they're part of is evil. Asking why Assassins are evil is kind of like asking why demons are evil. There's no mechanical reason for it to be so, but there's no mechanical reason for your game to have any particular setting element, either. Some worlds don't have evil assassins. Others don't have dragons. That's cool.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just to add more confusion, apparently, American law enforcement (at the urging of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit) is moving from the term "sniper" for those who are not professionals to "long distance serial killer."

Not, of course, that those are mutually exclusive.

 

[Wolf1066]

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.

The biggest difference is that a sniper operates in the theatre of war during a time of war while an assassin is not constrained by either restriction.

If you are in a unit in hostile territory (and that could include a town your troops are occupying) during a war, a sniper may very well attempt to pick off key personnel. The thing is, war has been declared and, according to a famous adage, "all's fair" - including sending someone to pick you off at a distance (no matter how much you may not like it or what you'll do to that @$#%^@< sniper if you catch him). You are inherently at risk from hostile soldiers and you know it.

With an assassin, someone - a religious order, a foreign government or just someone who has a major problem with you - wants you dead, war may not have been officially declared (though it may have been declared by one or both sides) and you may well be in a "safe" area - your home area or neutral territory. You are not expecting imminent hostilities - though you may be aware in general that you have powerful enemies who may well want you dead.

The assassin may opt to use a rifle like a sniper does or may opt for something closer, quieter - the method is unimportant, what is different is that you are not specifically expecting to be attacked at that time or any time in the foreseeable future.

It's "WTF? I'm in Switzerland, I should be safe here." or "I'm feeling kinda funny after eating my breakfast - oh, crap!"

 

[Bullgrit]

"I'm feeling kinda funny after eating my breakfast - oh, crap!"

Hehe.

According to the sniper == assassin proponents, the above example must mean that cook == assassin, too?

Cooks are evil!

Bullgrit

 

[Wolf1066]

The cook's only problem is that he's easily distracted for long enough to introduce a new "ingredient". It's the official taster who was easy to bribe into pretending he'd checked the food who's "evil"...

 

[Gort]

However, to my knowledge, snipers are not drafted to be one, they often volunteer for the job, often out of a sense of patriotism.

And is that not a good thing?

What? Hell no. There are tons of situations in which "patriotism" is very harmful.

 

[Saeviomagy]

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.

Ok, switch "in the world" with "in the universe". Under both the cosmologies of FR and anything with the great wheel, dead people become petitioners, and their alignment is more-or-less fixed for all eternity, barring events which create universe-unique creatures.

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.

Core rules, schmore rules: this isn't the optimization forums. The great wheel and the FR cosmology (a big enough case that it's most likely the dominant one) both have alignment-based planes that dead things go to, where their afterlife happens.

I mean sure, if you're in eberron, no worries: dead people go to the plane of death and gradually fade away, but that's because they explicitly wanted to avoid the concept of a sure eternal reward.

The interesting thing is that my concept should technically apply to any character who absolutely believes that there are afterlives, and that good is seperated from evil in those afterlives, and that it's not possible to move between those afterlives, and that having more good in the universe is a positive thing. It doesn't matter those things are true or not: if the character believes those things, then it doesn't make any sense to kill evil creatures and spare good ones.

 

[fanboy2000]

The biggest difference is that a sniper operates in the theatre of war during a time of war while an assassin is not constrained by either restriction.

Not to pick on you, but why are so many people in this thread thinking that snipers are only in the military? For example, in the U.S. about 8 years ago there was The Beltway Sniper, a serial killer that shot people around the Washington DC area. John Allen Muhammad wasn't a sniper in the military, though he was in the Army, and he certainly wasn't in a war zone.

 

[Wolf1066]

Not to pick on you, but why are so many people in this thread thinking that snipers are only in the military?

The earlier post that made a comparison between assassins and snipers seemed to be referencing official military (or even Law Enforcement) snipers rather than homicidal maniacs and serial killers that happen to prefer using sniper tactics.

Ergo, the responses are bearing that in mind. The distinction between a military sniper and a paid assassin was the issue, not the distinction between a murderer/serial killer with a prefered MO and a contract killer.