Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Urbannen" data-source="post: 416553" data-attributes="member: 7643">I think for many of these moral questions, a pivotal consideration is whether the PC is Lawful or Chaotic.  A LG character would not (I believe) punish, kill, or smite someone of evil alignment unless the character/creature presented a clear and present danger or had actually done something evil.  As someone said, being evil normally shouldn't have legal consequences.  Committing most evil acts, however, probably does have legal consequences.    Most authorities are more concerned about what someone actually does, not about the state of their heart (if not, all morally neutral people would also be suspect).    Preemptive strikes against evil seems to be the purvue of CG, I would think.  In most situations, it is easier to attack CE than LE.  As for the baby kobold question:  I do not think that babies can make moral decisions.  Unless a baby has a subtype of Evil, it should have an effective alignment of N, for the same reason that animals do.  I would guess that intelligent creatures develop their alignment at some point during their late childhood or adolescence.  I guess that creatures like kobolds and dwarves develop their "normal" alignments because of cultural and not genetic reasons - surely part of being an intelligent, sentient creature includes the potential to make one's own moral choices.   Slaughtering baby kobolds could not then be considered a good act, although it might fall under the purvue of utilitarian neutrality.  Using detect evil as an excuse to kill people doesn't seem very "good" to me.  It does make sense to say that detect evil only detects the followers of an evil deity.  It seems that Good/Evil is often only used to create a source of conflict in campaigns, anyway.  The example of the Good and Evil warring factions is illustrative of this, I think.  Are Good and Evil forces of the universe embodied by deities, or do they describe actions taken by intelligent creatures?  D&D uses them both ways, but not always very effectively.</blockquote>

Verification