Assassins Evil?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not to pick on you, but why are so many people in this thread thinking that snipers are only in the military? For example, in the U.S. about 8 years ago there was The Beltway Sniper, a serial killer that shot people around the Washington DC area. John Allen Muhammad wasn't a sniper in the military, though he was in the Army, and he certainly wasn't in a war zone.

As I was pointing out in post #83 above, the use of "sniper" in that sense is being actively discouraged in American law enforcement.

Guys like John Allen Muhammad are technically called "Long Distance Serial Killers," L.D.S.K.s for short. Only professional sharpshooters are properly called snipers.

 

[rgard]

Of course you don't need to be a particular class in order to be an assassin in the in-game world.

So true. I bet we could find several old threads here that discuss how the wizard makes a better assassin than the assassin does.

 

[WizarDru]

Ok, switch "in the world" with "in the universe". Under both the cosmologies of FR and anything with the great wheel, dead people become petitioners, and their alignment is more-or-less fixed for all eternity, barring events which create universe-unique creatures.

But petitioners don't provide deities with power via worship. They're just servants for achieving tasks. Depending on the cosmology, this deprives them of power or even existence. Killing all of your followers to maintain their goodness before they might go bad isn't good sense. Further, if it was good sense, why wouldn't it have been done already? And if it was due to active interference from other deities (engaged in some war of attrition) why wouldn't that be the constant focus of all worshiper interaction? You have to start building pretzel logic to get it to all hang towards having assassins slay the faithful in large numbers as a benefit to a deity, afaict.