D&D General A paladin just joined the group. I'm a necromancer.

[Lanefan]

Yes (broadly). I want to play a game we all want to play. If someone doesnt want something in the game, and there is a good reason for that, then they're out.

Its consensus man. The tables social contract.

Consensus only works until somebody disagrees, which inevitably will happen. Sooner or later the majority rules and the minority is, while heard, out of luck.

Darth Vader .... [did stuff] ...

In what possible way did Darth Vader respect or uphold honour (he had none) family (he actively attempted to turn his son to the dark side, cut off his hand, and handed him over to the Emperor to be killed)

He'd been ordered to bring Luke to the Emperor; and he'd seen through that the Emperor would use Luke to replace him if Luke was worthy. He followed those orders anyway, even though he could see a clear path to his own downfall through doing so.

or tradition (he brought down both the Jedi and the Sith, the Republic and the Empire, betrayed both masters, and literally existed outside the law)?

It's hard to exist outside the law when to just about everyone you meet other than your boss, you ARE the law.

As a Jedi, Anakin Skywalker was rash, impetuous, hard to control and a loose cannon; powerful but with a strong moral compass.

As a Sith, Anakin Skywalker was just as rash, impetuous and hard to control. He personally led assaults and flew starfighters into battle with capital ships, alone. He served the empire (and the emperor) out of fear. Thats it.

Yes, before Obi-Wan chopped him to bits Anakin was a complete loose cannon. Started as CG when he was a kid then slowly drifted to CE as time went on and he got older.

BUT, I feel that after Palpatine brought him back and turned him into "more machine than man" he quickly drifted again, this time toward Lawful, so he could take his place in - and help build - the Empire.

You could argeue he stuck to the Sith tradition... but the Sith tradition (act however your hatred and fear dictate, betray your master and kill him) is a CE code.

The words "CE code" are a contradiction in and of themselves.

 

[Captain Panda]

The debate I'm seeing in the last couple of pages is why I think alignment should be tossed into the garbage (for PCs) and have no mechanical impact. For the most part 5e has done this, but even the last vestiges of alignment-enforcing that remain prove irritating. So yeah, it's RAW. It's also really dumb.

In the real world, actual ethics (not D&D alignment) sense, reanimating skeletons is not inherently evil. There are contexts where doing so would even by a good thing.

Example: Suppose you have a society that was hit by a plague and no longer has sufficient laborers. Before dying, the plague victims give consent to use their bodies to the local wizard. The local wizard reanimates them with instructions to perform 23 hours of labor and then disassemble one another so there is no risk of a skeleton going on a rampage. Let's say that the wizard, to ensure critical manual labor gets done, uses the spell frequently over the course of a year and in so doing saves many lives.

Is the wizard evil? The rules say yes. I don't think any sane person in the real world would say that the wizard is evil, or at least not on this basis. There is an implicit assumption in this rule that animating dead is associated with other dark things, like murder and conquest and kicking puppies. That doesn't really follow logically.

Generally this wouldn't matter, because generally 5e has kicked alignment into a trash heap where it belongs, but there are still a few grating points where it could come up. "No evil characters!" tables is one. And hey, I understand not wanting to play with a table of naughty word characters you hate, but if "evil" is defined in this way, I think it's counterproductive. I tend to read "no evil character" policies as "don't be a disruptive naughty word" policies, and necromancy is not necessarily disruptive. It can be, but is it necessarily disruptive by its very nature? I don't think so. I'd be more concerned about the chaotic neutral rogue killing and torturing prisoners than the alignment ambiguous necromancer using corpses as meat shields.

 

[Morrus]

I'm going to copy and past the above rules ad nauseum until you get it.

Yeah, don't do that please.

 

[Maxperson]

The words "CE code" are a contradiction in and of themselves.

He did have a LE code, though. The Sith Code. Part of the Sith code is that you advance by killing and replacing your master, so that betrayal was not a chaotic act, but a lawful one. You had just better be sure you can take your master out, because one of you will die.

Vader also had honor and treated his men well, so long as they succeeded. He valued loyalty and backed his men up, in LE sort of way. The books help you see that a lot more than the movies do.

 

[Dausuul]

Darth Vader is LE. A C-anything would never be able to function in the strict heirarchy of the Empire, nor hide his C-ness from the Emperor for any length of time.

The Empire as a whole is LE, but Sith ideology is as CE as you can get. I would argue that Palpatine is very much CE; the Lawfulness of the Empire is a holdover from the Republic, not anything Palpatine introduced. We can see from "A New Hope" how that Lawfulness is decaying; the Emperor dissolves the Senate and dispenses with the bureaucracy to rule by raw terror, backed up by the threat of the Death Star. (I always wonder what kind of blowback resulted after Luke blew it up.)

Vader's behavior is along the same lines. He doesn't follow any disciplinary process for officers who have performance problems--he executes them on the spot, in what appears to be a very arbitrary fashion, and promotes whatever subordinate he feels like. Can you imagine the chaos Vader's approach must wreak on the Imperial military? Vader holds his position in the Imperial hierarchy because Palpatine put him there, not because he worked the system to climb the ranks.

I haven't read the books, but my understanding was that Vader got respect from the Imperial rank and file because of his bravery, his combat prowess, his charisma, and the fact that he felt a personal bond with the troops under his command. The last item might cast doubt on his Evilness, but all of them are perfectly consistent with Chaoticness--in fact, it's a perfect portrait of the Chaotic Good leader, which makes sense given that Vader started out as the clearly CG Anakin Skywalker.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No, but the spore zombie will still be evil. - Probably because it no longer has any human impulses or ethics and will happily create more dead bodies for fungus to grow on.

Honestly, I'm kind of getting tired of going around in circles like this. I just don't get why DMs would force people to be evil based on a vague phrase like "only evil people do this frequently".

I also would like to point out, you just made plants evil. In fact, without human impulses and ethics, and a willingness to kill, you just made every predatory animal in the game evil.

Wolves don't have ethics and will happily kill to eat and feed their young, just like the fungus will happily create more dead bodies to spread itself. So, if fungus is evil, wolves are evil, and then we pretty much have no good creatures in the entire universe, because people enslave and kill creatures to feed themselves, which is worse, right?

Ah, maybe the difference is whether or not you kill to eat "frequently"

 

[Lanefan]

Honestly, I'm kind of getting tired of going around in circles like this. I just don't get why DMs would force people to be evil based on a vague phrase like "only evil people do this frequently".

I also would like to point out, you just made plants evil. In fact, without human impulses and ethics, and a willingness to kill, you just made every predatory animal in the game evil.

Wolves don't have ethics and will happily kill to eat and feed their young, just like the fungus will happily create more dead bodies to spread itself. So, if fungus is evil, wolves are evil, and then we pretty much have no good creatures in the entire universe, because people enslave and kill creatures to feed themselves, which is worse, right?

Ah, maybe the difference is whether or not you kill to eat "frequently"

Last I checked, undead of any kind other than Vampires don't need to eat; at least not in any way we know it. And I think we can all agree that the feeding methods used by Vampires are rather evil...can we?

So this means Skeletons and Zombies etc. are hunting for sport rather than sustenance, which is pure evil in the real world as well as in the game.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Last I checked, undead of any kind other than Vampires don't need to eat; at least not in any way we know it. And I think we can all agree that the feeding methods used by Vampires are rather evil...can we?

So this means Skeletons and Zombies etc. are hunting for sport rather than sustenance, which is pure evil in the real world as well as in the game.

Talking about Mold zombies, from Ravinica. Mold does need sustenance.

Also, "feeding methods" vary wildly from vampire to vampire. Many are not in fact evil.

 

[Lanefan]

Talking about Mold zombies, from Ravinica. Mold does need sustenance.

Also, "feeding methods" vary wildly from vampire to vampire. Many are not in fact evil.

No idea about anything Ravnica-specific as I've not yet read anything about that setting.

As for vampires, I'll be charitable and just assume you're not referring to the sparkly Twilight abominations*. But any vampire I've ever heard of feeds on blood (and, in my game and much of 0-1-2e, levels) and this process isn't exactly pleasant for the victim.

* - and if you are, I'll just pass along my best wishes for your recovery and leave quietly...

 

[Chaosmancer]

No idea about anything Ravnica-specific as I've not yet read anything about that setting.

As for vampires, I'll be charitable and just assume you're not referring to the sparkly Twilight abominations*. But any vampire I've ever heard of feeds on blood (and, in my game and much of 0-1-2e, levels) and this process isn't exactly pleasant for the victim.

* - and if you are, I'll just pass along my best wishes for your recovery and leave quietly...

Blood Banks
Willing Donations
Paying people to donate their blood
Feeding on animal blood (usually not super nutritious, but gets the jobs done)

I've read stories where the Leader of the country is a vampire, and they have a church whose members willingly offer their blood to empower their leader, and others where the vampire only feeds on their lover, making it an intimate moment between them.

"Eats Blood" doesn't immediately lead to "hunt them like rodents and rip their throats out"