D&D General Inherently Evil?

[Lyxen]

Negative energy is entropy and decay, evil concepts. Not merely death. I mean, Kali, Talos(pre 5e). Tharizdun and others are all upstanding citizens. No evil there.

Just to point out that, in the 5e PH, it's made fairly clear as well: "Like a dome above the other planes, the Positive Plane is the source of radiant energy and the raw life force that suffuses all living beings, from the puny to the sublime. Its dark reflection is the Negative Plane, the source of necrotic energy that destroys the living and animates the undead."

The words good and evil are never pronounced, but when you link the wordings above to the way undeads are aligned in 5e, I think it's pretty clear.

Note that in 5e, the positive and negative planes are no longer inner planes, and it seems that they are not outer planes either, they don't appear in the list and just englobe everything from above and below. And the Feywild and Shadowfell are echoes, neither inner or outer either.

 

[tomBitonti]

The thing about tags … in 3.5, there was (mostly) the sense that they had not just their defined interactions ( cold does double damage against vulnerable to cold) but also that they were descriptive (cold means the spell actually was cold). I say mostly, because not rarely people also had a second sense. In 4e, the tags only had their defined interactions. The tags did not (strictly speaking) have any additional meaning. A cold bolt could be described as a stream of butterflies, or any other description envisioned by the player. A particular tag was only syntacticly meaningful as a way of matching the tag against other tags.

This causes a problem when determining the effects of a spell with the evil descriptor. Is acting such a spell an evil act? The two different senses disagree in the answer.

This caused a problem in one of my games, not because of Animate Undead, but because of the various summon spells, which took on the evil tag when used to summon a creature that had the evil tag.

TomB

 

[Maxperson]

The thing about tags … in 3.5, there was (mostly) the sense that they had not just their defined interactions ( cold does double damage against vulnerable to cold) but also that they were descriptive (cold means the spell actually was cold). I say mostly, because not rarely people also had a second sense. In 4e, the tags only had their defined interactions. The tags did not (strictly speaking) have any additional meaning. A cold bolt could be described as a stream of butterflies, or any other description envisioned by the player. A particular tag was only syntacticly meaningful as a way of matching the tag against other tags.

This causes a problem when determining the effects of a spell with the evil descriptor. Is acting such a spell an evil act? The two different senses disagree in the answer.

Sure, but the second sense doesn't match RAW. The designers weren't going make the descriptors(not tags) acid, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, fear, fire, force, language-dependent, mind-affecting, sonic and water all be what the spells are, but arbitrarily not do the same to the alignment descriptors, especially without saying that the alignment descriptors are different. The people who are interpreting fire as fire, cold as cold, lightning as lightning, but evil as not evil are wrong.

This caused a problem in one of my games, not because of Animate Undead, but because of the various summon spells, which took on the evil tag when used to summon a creature that had the evil tag.

I don't understand this. Why would someone try and summon a demon or devil and think that it wouldn't be an evil act to do so?

 

[Lyxen]

The thing about tags … in 3.5, there was (mostly) the sense that they had not just their defined interactions ( cold does double damage against vulnerable to cold) but also that they were descriptive (cold means the spell actually was cold). I say mostly, because not rarely people also had a second sense.

3e = exhaustive

In 4e, the tags only had their defined interactions. The tags did not (strictly speaking) have any additional meaning. A cold bolt could be described as a stream of butterflies, or any other description envisioned by the player. A particular tag was only syntacticly meaningful as a way of matching the tag against other tags.

4e = technical

This causes a problem when determining the effects of a spell with the evil descriptor. Is acting such a spell an evil act? The two different senses disagree in the answer.

This caused a problem in one of my games, not because of Animate Undead, but because of the various summon spells, which took on the evil tag when used to summon a creature that had the evil tag.

Fortunately, we now have 5e where it's simpler, undeads are evil, it's evil to create them, and by contamination (in both directions) the negative plane is at the very least slightly evil. And on top of that, the DM can do whatever he wants and create exception if he so chooses and it's pertinent for his world.

 

[Vaalingrade]

undeads are evil, it's evil

Gonna need my ghost avatar again...

And I'm done entertaining the 'Negative Energy is Evil by Raw' thing. It's never stated, the Plane has historically been Neutral, and the most pure uses of Pos/Neg aren't even tagged. You can interpret that as you will, but if it's not written and the writing contradicts it, it's now RAW.

And tags are tags. They are rules elements to trigger off or trigger other things. 3e doesn't waste its time with 'natural language' and doesn't hold back when saying harming or not respecting the dignity of life is Evil or that lying is and evil act, so if casting X-tagged spell, it wouldn't try to be coy about it and hedge its language so you can mother-may-I with the DM, it would state so outright.

 

[Maxperson]

Gonna need my ghost avatar again...

And I'm done entertaining the 'Negative Energy is Evil by Raw' thing. It's never stated, the Plane has historically been Neutral, and the most pure uses of Pos/Neg aren't even tagged. You can interpret that as you will, but if it's not written and the writing contradicts it, it's now RAW.

And tags are tags. They are rules elements to trigger off or trigger other things. 3e doesn't waste its time with 'natural language' and doesn't hold back when saying harming or not respecting the dignity of life is Evil or that lying is and evil act, so if casting X-tagged spell, it wouldn't try to be coy about it and hedge its language so you can mother-may-I with the DM, it would state so outright.

3e also doesn't have tags. It has descriptors for the spells, as in descriptions of the spells. Evil, fire, etc. are part of the spell description, not just a tag like 4e uses.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My view of morality likely doesn't represent the community... or any significant segment thereof.

Hunting for food, morally neutral. Hunting for sport, bad.

Now if you were hunting Demons/Angels/Modrons/Elementals for food, that would be bad. 'Cause while they're incapable of making moral decisions (In a setting where they're unaligned) they're still intelligent and that makes consuming them cannibalism.

Eh, that's just being environmentally conscious. If you already killed them, you might as well eat them. It's just waste otherwise. Granted, eating modrons or elementals might be tricky.

 

[tomBitonti]

3e also doesn't have tags. It has descriptors for the spells, as in descriptions of the spells. Evil, fire, etc. are part of the spell description, not just a tag like 4e uses.

Not everyone agrees (or agreed) with this. Hence, arguments over whether using summon monster to summon evil monsters was an evil act.
TomB

 

[Steampunkette]

Eh, that's just being environmentally conscious. If you already killed them, you might as well eat them. It's just waste otherwise. Granted, eating modrons or elementals might be tricky.

Do you want to be Cursed by the Gods? This is how you get Cursed by the Gods!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What's the moral problem with cannibalism? I can see the taboo originating because of health concern and the contamination from the assumption that the cannibal kills an innocent to eat him (and the taboo against desecrating a corpse), but by itself, is there something morally wrong to eat sentient flesh? Using body parts of the deceased carries no moral value in itself: it's socially accepted with organ transplant. We don't see it as an evil necessity to save a life but as a thing that is morally neutral. I am pretty sure that if there were another sentient species, we'd readily eat them, much like we eat pork, whale, squids, dogs and monkeys, unless we had granted them the same rights as humans ; and then we wouldn't eat them not because it's morally wrong but because body part would presumably be as difficult to find as human ones are in the real world. Much like very few countries have actual laws against eating legally acquired human flesh ; it's just that it's impossible to find the required product. There is, for example, no legal problem with making human cheese (Breast Milk... Cheese? You've Got Questions, We've Got Answers). It's absolutely gross to me, but I think it results from the social taboo, not any moral explanation I can imagine against it, not different from the taboo I have against eating insects (which are a delicacy in many parts of the world).

So while your stance on cannibalism is that it's a moral wrong to eat sentient species and it was called man-eating because there was no other sentient species, my stance is that the taboo originated specifically from eating Homo sapiens after killing/desecrating it, not as a general taboo against eating sentient beings. It also depends on how alien you make your sentient species. If they are humans with pointy ears and darkvision and you consider orcs, humans and elves as six sexes of the same species, I can see a general taboo against sentient-eating emerging, as the taboo against "eating self" would apply. On the other hand, if you have a perfectly sentient species evolving with say, praying mantises like the thri-kreen, and praying mantis practice sexual cannibalism, would they evolve a taboo against eating humans?


In a fantasy world, I guess it would be a strongly contested practice and induce horror and be used as an excuse to go to war (these humans are hunting elfs like us! they say we taste like chicken!) and even within human communities the debate would be strong, but I don't see a published setting adressing it (they are eschewing a lot of things like gender inequalities, racism and slavery, I don't see them trying to include dietary habits of sentient species in a poly sentient species world ; especially if it's to have "it's OK to eat elves, but dwarf eating is gross!" and I can't really see it coming up a lot in a typical game anyway...). I'd also see a taboo against destroying corpses being much more prevalent, since it can block Raise Dead, so cremation would be seen as an evil thing to do to an opponent, even more than killing him, since you kill him and make his return more difficult.

The OP asked about an "inherently evil" biological species, the illithid came to mind, but I think their inherent evilness comes from other trait than their dietary and reproductive habits.

Yep. Considering eating sapients 'evil' is very human centric view. (Though I'd argue that as cetaceans posses near human-level intelligence, humans basically do this in the real world.) In my setting gnolls are not demon spawn, they're a species of naturally occurring cynocephalics. But if they come to conflict with humans (which they will, because humans are jerks) they will eat any killed humans. They do not have a taboo against such, and this doesn't make them evil. Some other sentient species behave in the same way.