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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 3668834" data-attributes="member: 13966">It's mostly up to individual DM adjudication of alignment.Far as I'm concerned, the target only matters a little, D&D alignment seems to be more about actions than it is about consequences and intentions.  If you save the kingdom by slaying the orc woman who would have, in the near future, given birth to what would have been the greatest orc warlord in history, it doesn't change the fact that you slew an orc woman, nor does it change the fact that she was probably more or less incapable of defending herself.  Chances are she was a 1st-level warrior or 1st-level commoner, probably pregnant, and likely unarmed at the time you got that far into the orcish lair on your orc-slaughtering spree.  Orcs do not have the Evil subtype (in most settings) and are not Outsiders, so they are not evil incarnate nor even just-heavily-infused-with-Evil.  So mark 1 point in the 'evil act' column and 1 point in the 'chaotic act' column for that (it being a dishonorable and unfair act to slay defenseless creatures without giving them a chance to surrender or something).Now, it wouldn't be a terribly evil act, as she probably was evil-aligned and was at least indirectly contributing to the death of humans in orcish raids by raising orcish children who would most likely go on to join the tribe's warriors one day and begin slaughtering humans themselves.  But still an evil act to kill her.  Orc babies are less evil at first and it would be a more-evil act to slay them.  Still, it prevents them from perpetuating more evil, so it's not pure-evil to slay even defenseless orcs.  Most, if not all, orcs will never do any good, so their deaths only prevent further evil from being done.Fiends are of course pure evil, so killing fiends, even defenseless ones, is a good act.  It may be chaotic to kill them when they're defenseless, but it is not evil to do so.Some other acts, like slavery or, ugh, rape, are just plain evil.  They don't really serve to prevent further evil from being done, and are just evil themselves.  A slave may still abuse other slaves or try to escape and kill their 'master', for instance.  So they are inexcuseable.  Indentured servitude and similar stuff is more iffy and more likely to be neutral, depending on how they're handled.Imprisonment is the 'good' alternative to these, locking a dangerous individual away so they can do no harm to others, but it can be perverted toward evil depending on the manner of imprisonment and the circumstances that accompany it.  Banishment is also 'good' as long as it's banishment to a suitable place where the individual is unlikely to do any harm and won't simply be serving a death sentence by a different name (i.e. banishment to a frozen wasteland where they're likely to die of natural hazards).</blockquote>

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