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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteelDraco" data-source="post: 5981556" data-attributes="member: 359">There are two distinct questions here - mechanical abilities and the morality of assassination.Mechanically, an assassin studies a target and kills him with a single deadly attack. I don't view this as significantly different than a huge volley of sneak attack damage, or dropping a raging barbarian on a target with buff-scry-teleport tactics. They're all methods of killing a target before they have a chance to respond properly. It's a way of removing high-value targets quickly and with a minimum of fuss. There's nothing about the mechanics of the assassin class that suggests to me that they have to be evil. PCs do this kind of thing ALL THE TIME - the mechanics of Pathfinder and D&D really support removing targets as quickly as possible to remove the threat they pose, since a damaged target typically isn't any less effective than an unhurt one, and can be healed without too much fuss if they're prepared properly. PCs regularly make plans to kill the Big Bad, and mechanically that's really all an assassin is doing.Morally defending assassination is difficult, but the fantasy world is inherently a much more violent one than ours. It's interesting to pose a world in which killing is morally wrong, but it's very different from the assumptions we normally make for fantasy RPGs. Assassination is really just more efficient killing, in a lot of instances. Is it more moral to kill your way through all the hired guards and then chop the Big Bad's head off than it is to put an arrow through him and disappear, leaving everybody else alive? In a lot of instances, I don't think so. It's certainly more HONORABLE to have a straight-up fight, by most definitions of the word, and thus probably lawful, but in the alignment system I don't know if it's as clear on the good/evil axis. I certainly agree that it's a very slippery slope towards "the ends justify the means", which I view as, at best, neutral on the good/evil axis.I've always made the assumption that assassination was considered a war crime mostly because the people who decide what is and isn't a war crime didn't want to get assassinated themselves. The real world and fantasy games don't play by the same rules.That seems unwarranted. It's hard to find a more subjective topic of discussion than alignment debates.</blockquote>

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