D&D 5E Animate Dead and Alignment Restrictions

[Falling Icicle]

No, it isn't. D&D is based on the stories we in this world have told. It doesn't draw on this world for inspiration.

Yes, it absolutely is. There are human beings. There are familiar plants and animals, cycles and seasons, and countless other fundamental Earth-like elements. They just add to it and change some things. Add dragons. Add magic. Add beholders. But there is still grass, there are trees, there are birds. It's basically our world, but with a twist.

It draws on myth and legend, yes, but also on Fritz Leibur and Howard's Conan and Tolkien. It draws on stories explicitly set in worlds not our own it is itself almost always set in worlds not our own. Our world is only tangentially attached to the worlds of D&D.

Those myths and legends are also fundamentally based on our world.

And I'm saying, "So what?" Disagreement proves nothing. That fact is, in the D&D world certainly, some of those views are actually right.

They're "right" to who? To the gods? Which god? Not all gods agree, and they even fight amongst each other.

Incidently, repulsive isn't the opposite of sacred. The opposite of sacred is profane - which means 'to show contempt for things that are owed do respect'. The opposite of repulsive is attractive. But in a fantasy setting, the sacred, the right, and the attractive are generally all on a team and of a piece. Undead are repulsive, profane, and improper all of one easy piece.

Most people would consider "profane" and "repulsive" to be synonymous, but whatever. I refuse to get dragged down into an argument over semantics.

How would you know? Can you put that to the test?

No. How do YOU know? The only reason that animating the dead is "evil" is because the game's designer decided arbitrarily that it is. It can just as easily be changed, just as many things in DnD have changed. Your argument that some things just are is baseless, because they are only what the game's designers say they are. Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what "is" is. I've made my case for why I think it's not evil, your argument is "it just is, just because" which is no argument at all.

How do you know that conjuring up undead isn't the magical equivalent of depleting the ozone, polluting the drinking water with carcinogens, and spreading radioactive waste around everywhere?

For someone that insists that Earth has nothing to do with DnD, you sure do make a lot of comparisons to our world.

What are the physics of making the dead walk while remaining dead? What power is at work?

"It's magic." That's really all there is to it. I couldn't possibly tell you what physics make the dead walk because they don't exist. Magic, by its very nature, is supernatural and not bound by the laws of physics.

More importantly, in the stories people tell about animating the dead, these aren't happy stories. No matter how scientific minded the person, no matter how good his intentions, when he finishes his great work, Frankenstein looks up and realizes he's created a horrible monster.

I never said that necromancy didn't come without consequences. That's not even what I'm debating here. What I'm debating is whether or not Dr. Frankenstein should be labeled as "evil" as if such a thing is absolute and his intentions and motives don't even matter. Except, they do matter. When discussing morality, they're ALL that matters.

And your story is, "Oh posh. It's just a body; it's nothing of significance!"

That isn't what I'm arguing at all. I never once suggested that necromancy wouldn't be reviled, feared, and despised by many people in the game world. I never said that nobody ever should care. What I'm debating is whether or not the spell should be considered to be "evil" by the rules of the game.

Well, sorry, but your story doesn't seem to strike a very mythic cord. For one thing, people have never treated a body like it was just a body. We've been burying our dead and performing rituals around them and protecting them and caring for those bodies for something like 50,000 years. And for almost all that time we've been telling stories about restless spirits back from the grave. And you are going to tell a story about how corpses are just tools to be utilized, and you think that is going to resonate as the first and most important story about walking dead?

This is factually false. Not all societies bury their dead and care for them. 2,000 years ago, it was the common custom to cremate the dead throughout most of western civilization, not bury them.

No, you aren't get it. It's not that it feels disgusting. It is disgusting. We aren't talking about subjective disgustedness. I'm asserting that it a feature of fantasy worlds that disgusting, horrible and ugly and things of that sort aren't subjective.

Here you go again with the absolutes. Not everyone finds the same things disgusting. Not everyone thinks the same things are ugly. By your logic, steak, if anyone finds it disgusting, IS disgusting, no matter what. Everyone who think steak is delicious is just wrong. If one person thinks something is ugly, everyone must think it is ugly, because it IS ugly. Except it's not. Tastes and perceptions vary. Cultures vary. You're trying to make everything cut and dry, absolute, black and white, and turn things that are purely subjective into objective, absolute matters of fact. It doesn't work that way.

Sure, that sounds rational and reasonable. And you can tell an interesting story I think around the culture that accepts that dad, and your rapist, and the six kids from that family across town that just died from typhus, are all just tools to animate and use for the good of the community. You can try to convince me that obedient automatons composed of decaying corpses of your village love ones doesn't ruffle the social fabric at all, and that the powers of unlife aren't really in opposition to weal and life, and that there are absolutely no dangerous side effects, and undead that go uncontrolled and start attacking people because their master has an accident, or because some evil necromancer took control are treated as neutrally as car accidents and run away horses. I'm just not sure you can tell that story, come to the conclusion, "It never meant anything", and it be an interesting story. And if you want to blow up the trope, "I am Legend.", did that years and years ago. Most notably though, any time you blow up the trope - from "I am Legend" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", it involves proving that what's on the inside isn't a match for what's on the outside. You can't do that with mindless undead.

Wow. Now you're discussing rape and family and other touchy matters. I'm not even going to go there. I think you're getting a bit too emotional about this. Let's just agree to disagree.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I submit that making necromancy "neutral" then reduces it to just one more power.

Necromancy, as a class of spells, already is "neutral". The playtest pack has eighteen spells with the label "necromancy". One of these (only) is marked as evil when used in excess (Animate Dead).

For the class of spells, there is no necessarily evil association that so many are suggesting. Which should mean that one can specialize as a Necromancer (a specialist in spells from the necromancy school) without being evil.

The alternative is that all spells so labeled should be marked as non-good. But they aren't. (I'll admit that would be interesting, and comes close to the world suggested in Revenge of the Sith).

To single out one spell seems to me a needless complication. Even with that complication, however, there is no reason why a good mage might not specialize in the school (and possibly choose not to take the one spell that is causing problems).

 

[pemerton]

The spell has numerous problems. The minions are weak, they take up a lot of time in the game to roll their attacks and space on a battlefield, etc. It's really a fiat explanation for why the NPC necromancer has loads of zombies.

I also just noticed that the spell, at least in the playtest, has to be renewed every 24 hours. So not so much "hordes of undead" as "modest bunches of undead ".

Good people don't harm others unless they must.

<snip>

Using bones as a tool is not harming anyone.

Just FYI, the conclusion that you reach here is not uncontroversial among contemporary English-speaking moral philosophers. A significant number - perhaps a majority, but I'm not entirely confident of that - would take the view that the dead have interests, and hence can be harmed.

D&D is based on the stories we in this world have told. It doesn't draw on this world for inspiration. It draws on myth and legend, yes, but also on Fritz Leibur and Howard's Conan and Tolkien.

?? REH's "Hyborian Age" draws completely upon our own world. We're meant to be able to recognise Zingara as spain, the Black Coast as West Africa, Stygia as Egypt, Vilayet as India etc. It's REH's device for putting all those tropes and stereotypes into play without having to worry about the details that matter to historical fiction. (And credit where it's due: this is not my independent analysis, though I regard it as fairly plain; it's the analysis from the editors of the recent critical editions of REH - The Coming of Conan, the Bloody Crownof Conan, etc.)

 

[Falling Icicle]

Just FYI, the conclusion that you reach here is not uncontroversial among contemporary English-speaking moral philosophers. A significant number - perhaps a majority, but I'm not entirely confident of that - would take the view that the dead have interests, and hence can be harmed.

Legally speaking, perhaps. That's why I think if there is any alignment component to animating the dead at all, it's a law vs. chaos issue, not a good vs. evil one.

 

[pemerton]

Legally speaking, perhaps. That's why I think if there is any alignment component to animating the dead at all, it's a law vs. chaos issue, not a good vs. evil one.

I'm not talking about law. I'm not talking about moral obligation. A significant number of English speaking moral philosophers - and I would not rule out a majority, though I'm not confident of that - take the view that the dead, like the living, have interests (though obviously those interests are going to be different in many respects) and hence can be harmed. Also, those same philosophers would take the view that those interests can give rise to moral duties on the part of others, just as the interests of living people can give rise to moral duties on the part of others.

I'm not arguing in favour of this position (to do so, even were I so inclined, I think might violate board rules). And obviously there are important moral theories which would reject it - eg on most preference accounts of interests (which is the favoured theory of utilitarians and economists) the dead can't have interests because they have no preferences, because preferences are a type of mental state and the dead are devoid of mental states.

I'm just pointing out that your claim that the dead can't be harmed, and are not themselves objects of moral obligation, is a highly contentious one, at least among contemporary English speaking moral philosophers.

 

[SkidAce]

Animate Dead implies desecration of dead bodies, which may have no soul, but are still the bodies of someone's beloved relatives that passed away. One could argue that it's not a crime against the soul that used to inhabit the corpse, but the act will certainly offend those that remained behind. While you can surely create a setting where this is not a hideous crime against all that common people deem fair, D&D should use resonance in its favor and leave "desecrating dead bodies is not evil" as an alternative for those who want it.

This is the reason why I like rules such as "paladins are always lawful good", "animate dead is evil" and "gem dragons are always neutral" to exist in the game. First, they're very easy to ignore. Second, If you ever change them, it's a conscious decision about the kind of setting and game you want to play in. I believe standing for the rules elements that you want, how you want, and the reasons why you want them that way makes for a better experience once the game starts.

Cheers!

This is how you do it..."must spread etc..."

 

[Dausuul]

The problem with your argument is that you're assuming animate dead is something so cheap and easy to do that it can be effectively mass produced. How many spellcasters can a kingdom be expected to have that are both high enough level to cast that spell and also know animate dead? And what about the fact that spellcasters have limited spell slots and have to keep renewing them on the spell each day or the undead go out of control? There was a material component for this spell in older editions that they might bring back, but that also puts a cost on the spell that makes mass production of undead difficult. You don't see undead mass produced for the same reason you don't see magic items mass produced. In a high magic setting, such a thing is more likely. In a low magic setting, not so much.

That's a fair criticism - I suppose I'm biased from having spent so much time playing wizards in AD&D, where the only real limit on your supply of undead was the number of corpses you could get your nasty necromancer hands on. I tend to figure that anybody who makes skeletons and zombies is going to do so in bulk. It seems kind of sad and pathetic otherwise.

Of course, under 5E rules, there is not actually a limit on how many undead you can make; only on how many you can control. So perhaps that's the limiting factor on necromancy and the reason it's associated with evil. You can churn out lots of undead with animate dead, but you can only control a small handful of them unless you cut a deal with someone very big and very bad. And if you don't cut such a deal, then you're making an army of mindless killers that will attack any living thing they see.

 

[SkidAce]

(I'd also really like "necromancer" supported equally for both Clerics and Mages, which would then most naturally map onto a background or a feat. But I expect none of these things, even if they seem the right choice to me.)

This part I really actually agree with.

There's always be a weird divide between cleric necros and wizard necros that seemed odd.

Obviously they shouldn't be identical, they are two diff classes after all. But whoever studies necromancy should share the same type of abilities and methods, even if they were a fighter.

 

[Umbran]

But whoever studies necromancy should share the same type of abilities and methods, even if they were a fighter.

A fighter? Like, "I'll hit you so hard, I'll kill you and your corpse will reanimate!"?

 

[Dausuul]

A fighter? Like, "I'll hit you so hard, I'll kill you and your corpse will reanimate!"?

I homebrewed a fighter-necromancer class once, back in the early days of 3E. I forget what I called it, something like "dread knight." The idea was a warrior who wasn't a spellcaster per se, but had supernatural powers that revolved around creating and commanding undead. Basically, a dread knight is to a necromancer as a paladin is to a cleric.

No, it isn't. D&D is based on the stories we in this world have told. It doesn't draw on this world for inspiration. It draws on myth and legend, yes, but also on Fritz Leibur and Howard's Conan and Tolkien. It draws on stories explicitly set in worlds not our own it is itself almost always set in worlds not our own. Our world is only tangentially attached to the worlds of D&D.

Since you bring up Tolkien, I'll reply with a quote from his essay "On Fairy Stories":

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone, and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be "free with" Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.