D&D 5E Animate Dead and Alignment Restrictions

[Umbran]

What necromancers have "traditionally" done is not the issue.

Yes it is. Like it or not, words mean things.

If I say I'm serving pizza, but I give you a patty of ground beef with a slice of melted cheese on a bun, people will look at me funny. Yes, burgers and pizzas are both generally comprised of a form of bread, some meat products, and some cheeses, but that doesn't mean you get to call one thing another and not get the hairy eyeball from the populace.

If you want something that doesn't do what most folks think of when you say, "necromancer", why call it a necromancer? You got a new fictional thing, give it a new fictional name!

 

[Dausuul]

Yes it is. Like it or not, words mean things.

If I say I'm serving pizza, but I give you a patty of ground beef with a slice of melted cheese on a bun, people will look at me funny. Yes, burgers and pizzas are both generally comprised of a form of bread, some meat products, and some cheeses, but that doesn't mean you get to call one thing another and not get the hairy eyeball from the populace.

If you want something that doesn't do what most folks think of when you say, "necromancer", why call it a necromancer? You got a new fictional thing, give it a new fictional name!

Hold on. Which of the following propositions are we debating?

• 1: There should be a valid in-game reason why extensive use of necromancy would make you evil.
• 2: There is currently a valid in-game reason why extensive use of necromancy would make you evil.

I am solidly in favor of proposition #1, and have laid out some ideas for how I think it could be implemented. But I strongly disagree with proposition #2. As far as I can see, no one has yet put forward anything to support #2 except the argument that necromancy is disrespectful to the dead; but that makes animate dead no more inherently evil than a sword blade, which is highly disrespectful--not to say fatal--to the living. If you can justify killing people and looting their corpses, you can justify zombifying them afterward.

As for the traditional concept of a necromancer, it's quite relevant to proposition #1, and indeed is the main basis for it. It's completely irrelevant to proposition #2.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

[*]2: There is currently a valid in-game reason why extensive use of necromancy would make you evil.

I think that there were a number of reasons mentioned throughout the editions. Mostly in 2e, I believe, though I think there was some stuff in 3.5e.

For the most part it always said "Negative energy is the energy of death and wants death. Animating a creature using this energy is the equivalent of creating a creature of pure evil on purpose. It may listen to what you say since you magically control it, but it WANTS to commit evil. It IS evil. Which means the world is filled with more evil than it was before and you did it."

Plus, a couple of books have referred to using either the soul of the person or part of the soul of a person to animate their corpse. Though I believe the 3.5e books that talked about this specifically said animating a zombie didn't use their soul. Their soul was safe in the afterlife. It was still evil because the reason above(although incorporeal undead actually used the soul of the victim).

Though most of these explanations were in splat books and weren't very detailed. I think it was kind of left up in the air since people don't really like moral debates so they didn't want to start one by writing about it and because it is easier to leave it up to the DM to come up with his own reasons why exactly it is evil.

 

[Umbran]

Hold on. Which of the following propositions are we debating?

• 1: There should be a valid in-game reason why extensive use of necromancy would make you evil.
• 2: There is currently a valid in-game reason why extensive use of necromancy would make you evil.

Neither.

I'm just supporting the idea that it is okay for 5e to retain the traditional genre connotations for "necromancy" as the game's default.

 

[Mistwell]

WotC conducted polls on this topic, and when they put lawful-only monks in a playtest packet, the fan backlash was so overwhelming they quickly retracted that decision.

Do you have a link to a WOTC poll showing that people did not like the lawful-only monk? Because if you're basing it just on "then they changed it in the playteat" I don't think that's conclusive evidence of your position.

 

[Dausuul]

Neither.

I'm just supporting the idea that it is okay for 5e to retain the traditional genre connotations for "necromancy" as the game's default.

There's nothing wrong with upholding tradition, but I'm against "genre convention by decree." It was very common in the first three editions of the game to write genre conventions around alignment into the rules: Druids had to be Neutral, monks had to be Lawful, barbarians couldn't be Lawful, et cetera, et cetera. Lately, there seems to be a growing sense in both WotC and the community that this is counterproductive. DMs don't need prodding from the rules to implement genre conventions if they like them; if I want an evil necromancer in my game commanding legions of the dead, then I'll have one, and if I don't, I won't. Where the PCs are concerned, players often enjoy playing against type, and the rules should not forbid them from doing so without a good reason.

Obviously this is my own reasoning for why things changed, and might not match WotC's reasoning, though I'd bet I'm fairly close. Whatever the reason, alignment restrictions vanished from 4E and remain mostly vanished from Next, and I don't see a clamor to restore them. But animate dead is a throwback: The rules explicitly state that only Evil casters use it frequently, without explanation.

If this convention is to be written into the game, the game should present necromancy in such a way that the convention follows naturally rather than being imposed by fiat. There are lots of ways to do that and we've discussed many in this thread. On the other hand, maybe it's better to let individual DMs figure out how they want to handle necromancy. In that case, strike the sentence altogether and leave it to DMs to enforce genre convention, or not, by whatever means they feel appropriate. Or present a menu of options in a sidebar. What we've got right now is the worst of both worlds: It imposes arbitrary restrictions but adds nothing to the setting.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I totally agree that if the spell stays [evil], there should be something pretty explicit in the rules that dictates WHY that is. Assumed details make for messy edits.

 

[Cadence]

Even the very topic refuses to stay in the grave!!!
2002 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?6374-Is-Animating-Dead-Evil
2003 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?54266-Why-is-Animate-Dead-Evil

Along with the closely related...
2004 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?99818-Why-does-Undead-Evil
2006 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?176120-What-makes-Undead-Undead-and-are-all-Undead-evil
2010 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-harmless-as-talking-to-your-dead-grandmother
2011 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312716-Good-Cleric-with-Command-Undead
2013 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?342006-Why-are-undead-inherently-evil

And the tangential...
2003 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?39307-Healing-Necromancy
2004 - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?106792-Positive-Energy-vs-Negative-Energy-good-vs-evil


It's almost tempting to go back and mine out the good ones...

It's desecration of corpse.

Instead of having Animate Dead be an Evil spell, we should create a new category of spells called Rude and leave it at that!

Reanimating the corpses of fallen comrades and infusing them with the stuff of the Negative Material Plane so they can walk the earth as one of the dammed is totally natural and fine. Heck, my Mom's doing it on Tuesday for the town picnic. It should be a hoot.

Well, puppies can be loud, messy, and irritating, but I most people wouldn't go so far as to call them evil.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Well, Zeus is not a representation of the "natural order" in the sense we mean it today. Zeus was instead a figure of patriarchal power, and he killed Aesclepius either for taking money for the service, or for causing familial/political upset among the gods (Hades, fearing that he'd get no more spirits of the dead if the practice caught on, asks Zeus to stop Aesclepius), depending on which version you read.

Neither of which is an issue of "natural order" in the modern, pseudo-druidic, sense. They had Zeus' prescribed order, which isn't the same thing, as Zeus is a pretty petulant figure with all-too-human motivations.

Plus, Aesclepius wasn't practicing what we'd call necromancy today. He was practicing outright resurrection, which is outside of necromancy's ability to create a semblance of life.

That's true, I was just pointing out that people have been philosophizing about the meaning of death and things like the natural order for a very long time.

 

[Umbran]

There's nothing wrong with upholding tradition, but I'm against "genre convention by decree."

Considering how many fantasy books I can dig out of my library that have "necromancy = bad" and how few have "necromancy = okay", I find it hard to think of it as "genre convention by decree". It seems more "genre convention by accepting established genre convention".

That said, I find the objection a little lacking in perspective. They effectively decree so much definition with the mechanical design of the game that objecting to this item on that basis seems like spitting into a hurricane, to be honest.