Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 1618946" data-attributes="member: 15800">This is discussed briefly on page 250 of the setting book, and you can find more of my opinions at <a href="http://www.coveworld.net/eberron/rules.html#alignment" target="_blank">http://www.coveworld.net/eberron/rules.html#alignment</a> . To me, it's the question of how extreme you make alignments and how strictly you interpret them. What does it mean that someone is "evil"? If evil can encompass greed and selfishness, then you might find that there are an awful lot of evil people in the world -- even if very few of these people would actually perform murder or a similar act. But the paladin can't tell the difference between the innkeeper who's hoping to add a few coppers to the bill and the innkeeper who plans to murder guests in their sleep; he just knows that both are untrustworthy and put their own desires above the well-being of others.  There's also the question of how much "evil" is accepted by society. In a cynical post-war world, it may be taking for granted that there are a lot of evil people out there. Furthermore, for some jobs -- spymaster, for example -- you may want an evil person. It's less a question of black and white and more "Can this person get the job done, or will his morals get in the way?" Even in the Church of the Silver Flame, there are evil priests; the point is that they continue to pursue the goals of the church and may even do good -- they are just willing to perform actions a good character would find abhorrent. Evil characters can do good, and good characters can do evil (extreme lawful good can be just as scary as extreme evil, in my opinion); alignment just indicates an overall view of the world and preference. As a result, a character who relies on alignment detection may be thrown off-track. And telling a city guard "that man's EVIL!" just isn't going to do much for you. It lets you know how someone may behave, and it affects smiting and such. If you want to remove alignment in Eberron, you certainly could; the problem is the degree to which it is integrated into the mechanics of D&D. But that's your call!As for the Maltese Falcon, Sam aside, who of the main players wasn't evil? And I'd call Sam himself a shady neutral (though not as bad as he likes people to believe). To me, the point is that Sam knew what he was dealing with. He won't play the sap for anyone!</blockquote>

Verification