D&D 5E Animate Dead and Alignment Restrictions

[Falling Icicle]

On the other side, life and death mean something. Life is to be encouraged, protected, enhanced, defended. Death is dark, scary, unpleasant, tragic. Life good, death evil. Those who support life are good, those who support death are bad.

Death itself isn't evil. Even good people have to admit that death is a necessary part of nature and the cycle of life. The sun may rise, but it also must set.

The school should really be named something like Biomancy or Vitamancy... a name that evokes the feeling of life/death energy without tacking on the baggage of being a 'Necromancer'.

I like the name "necromancy." Necromancers are a popular enough archetype to be their own class in many games. At the very least necromancy deserves to be its own school of magic, IMO.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Death itself isn't evil. Even good people have to admit that death is a necessary part of nature and the cycle of life. The sun may rise, but it also must set.

Depends on yer flavor of fantasy. Plenty of stories, myths, and media depict death as an objective force of evil in and of itself. D&D shouldn't disregard that flavor.

Neither does it need to enforce it, o'course. But the game certainly has a history of supporting it.

 

[Umbran]

Death itself isn't evil. Even good people have to admit that death is a necessary part of nature and the cycle of life. The sun may rise, but it also must set.

That's a very modern outlook.

Moreover, there is death as a natural end of life and aging, and there is death by having your life energy siphoned out of you by magic and then having the same guy animate your corpse and making it dance a jig.

Just so we know that the "death itself isn't evil" really doesn't address that latter scenario well at all. If anything, this makes a bit more obvious the basic argument - Necromancy isn't evil because death itself is evil, but because death magic is evil.

 

[Scorpio616]

There are reason why folks generally don't use human remains as tools and taking trophies of bodies is a war crime. Kinda disturbing that it keeps coming up that some folks don't understand why it is not just villainous, but unforgivably villainous to enslave the dead.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DueToTheDead

 

[tuxgeo]

The idea of putting healing magic under necromancy was introduced in 2E and kept in 3E. The switch to conjuration happened in 3.5.

That explains a lot. Thanks to Dausuul for the clarification.

Personally, I think the online SRD, which reflects information from the 3.5 edition, is a determining factor: if Wizards of the Coast wants to make the new game as compatible as possible with previous editions, one of their main concerns will have to be more than a nodding acknowledgement of the SRD; and if the SRD says that Healing magic is Conjuration, they'll have to go with that, regardless of how attractive and comfortable the earlier (i.e. 2E - 3.0E) classification of Necromancy might be to fans of that persuasion.

Fans of 2E are going to grow fewer and fewer as time goes on, simply through natural attrition; but the SRD is for all time, and isn't going away; and it is much more readily accessible to modern, Internet-connected society -- and therefore to modern, Internet-connected potential new gamers.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

Kinda disturbing that it keeps coming up that some folks don't understand why it is not just villainous, but unforgivably villainous to enslave the dead for our own modern society.

FTFY

That wouldn't necessarily be true in a D&D setting.

 

[Umbran]

FTFY

Please don't do that. You didn't "fix" it. You injected your own opinion.

That wouldn't necessarily be true in a D&D setting.

The players pretty much all come from a world in which it is creepynastyevil to play with the dead. So, it is pretty safe to expect that keeping that particular cultural aspect will still feel natural to players, and not actively put anyone off their fed by insinuating that it might be okay. Now, sure, one can (and will) choose to throw out some real-world tropes in favor of some differences. But this one?

Especially in the current zombie craze. If nothing else, "The Walking Dead" has pretty much cemented the idea that zombies are *not* okay to have hanging around in the minds of the wider potential audience.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

Again, it's disrespectful to the dead from the viewpoint of our modern society and in our world, which wouldn't always be true in game settings.

 

[Dausuul]

The players pretty much all come from a world in which it is creepynastyevil to play with the dead. So, it is pretty safe to expect that keeping that particular cultural aspect will still feel natural to players, and not actively put anyone off their fed by insinuating that it might be okay. Now, sure, one can (and will) choose to throw out some real-world tropes in favor of some differences. But this one?

I still have a lot of trouble with the idea that when the party paladin hacks off some guy's head, and then the party rogue goes through his clothes and takes the loose change, and then the party wizard animates the corpse, what the paladin and the rogue did was A-okay but the wizard is doing something unforgivable. It's a morality that seems thoroughly alien to me. In my book, making a corpse is a lot more serious than moving it around. If the guy deserved to get his head hacked off, why doesn't he deserve to have his remains hung on magic puppet strings too?

 

[SkidAce]

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

[MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION] said it.

But to clarify, I was alluding to the fact that anyone could study necromancy, just as anyone could study...shrubberies.

Granted the framework of DnD causes your class to dictate the majority of your abilities. So a fighter who studied up on necromancy wouldn't amount to much without multiclassing, but I was talking character concepts, not class abilities per se.