Does evil mean Evil? Is a paladin free to act against evil?
- Thread starter Quasqueton
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Thornir Alekeg said:
It's as simple as this:
If the person's not actually evil they won't detect as evil. Is that plain enough for you? People who are not actively engaged in evil activities (not necessarily at that moment - but in the long term) will not detect as evil.
So if a Paladin runs across a cleric of a god whose mission it is to cause disease and loves to torture, it's pretty safe the say the cleric is support an evil agenda. So, no, you shouldn't have to wait until the cleric pulls out the holy symbol and starts a spell aimed at some villagers.
If you want to run your paladins as 20th century cops that's fine. But you're making it sound like my way of playing is violating the rules. And that's just downright obnoxious.
Kalanyr said:
People exist on a bell-curve. I don't need the rules to tell me that. It's just the way it is.
If you consider that only a very narrow band in the middle of that curve could actually be called "neutral" then it could be true that 1/3 of the people exist at each alignment. However, 50+% of the evil people would be so close to neutral as to be almost indistinguishable from neutral (showing up as very faint by a detect evil spell).
Olive
Explorer
Geoff Watson said:
I'm not sure that you are suggesting that the only way to deal with evil is to hit it with a sword, but that's the only thing that the people here are saying shouldn't be the automatic reaction.
The paladin in my campaign just willingly made a deal with a necromancer/cleric of orcus. One of his key roles is as a protector for his people, and he knew that he wasn't in a position to protect his people with out negotiating.
Late that evening he used detect evil on a sage to make sure of what sort of people he was dealing with. They were'nt eveil, but if they were he wouldn't have wipped the sword out and smote on, he would ahve processed the information for further use.
Detect evil is very useful, even when you're not going to wack everyone you meet who it detects.
Kalanyr said:
Yep. 3.5 PHB, pg 104:
"For other creatures, races, and classes, the indicated alignment on Table 6-1 is the typical or most common one."
Table 6-1 lists Humans under Neutral.
Looks like we are told both. I personally hold to the idea that the tables in the section that defines alignments trump flavor text in the racial descriptions. In addition, the descriptions of neutral folk in the "Good vs Evil" and "Law vs Chaos" sound like John Q Public commoner to me. YMMV.
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
DGFan said:
Sorry you saw this as my trying to tell you that you are violating the rules. Others were quoting rules and saying they felt they supported the idea that Detect Evil=license to kill. I was trying to show that the rules are not that specific, and I interpret them differently. Takyris asked me an example with the evil cleric and asked how I saw it. I gave my thought on how I saw it. I never said he was wrong, or his (our your own) rules interpretations are screwed up. That's why I used a couple of phrases such as "IMO" (In My Opinion), and "in my mind..."
I guess I need one of those disclaimers in my sig: "The views expressed by this poster are his own and do not mean that the views of anybody else are incorrect...unless you are a player in my campaign, in which case you may be disappointed I do not agree with you."
Elder-Basilisk said:
WOW. Those are... odd.
I had read "the wilderness" not to read "someplace outside of town" but "miles away from nowhere". As in, you're on the tundra, with a long journey no matter where you're headed. You come upon a man by a campfire. He's evil. He's not headed your way. If you do nothing, he wanders off, and most likely continues to do evil. I see that lack of any other situational fallback for the paladin to use -- the paladin can't put his faith in the hands of local law enforcement, because there is none. If he doesn't do something, the guy goes off and continues to do evil.
This borders on political, but it's minor. In my local area (the California Bay Area), a mountain lion wandered somehow into the suburbs yesterday. He was in an area far from where mountain lions are, uh, supposed to be (the foothills several towns over), so the question of how this lion got here is a bit weird. To get to the 'burbs, it would have had to cross several major streets.
The police found the lion (well, had it pointed out to them) lying in a tree in the afternoon. The police tried to figure out their options. It was in a tree. It was dozing. It wasn't mauling children at the moment. On the other hand, school was getting out, and that lion was going to wake up at some point, and there have been several mountain-lion attacks on joggers and bikers on wooded trails in the region lately -- the cats have evidently forgotten to be afraid of the humans.
The police consulted wildlife officials about using a tranq gun, and were informed that the dart might take around a half-hour to work, and that the cat would likely be ticked off and angry because of the dart (and there were enough fences and bushes that the cat, if angry, stood a good chance of eluding pursuers if it ran) -- and in fact, the dart might not do anything except rile the cat. (Since this happened, other animal experts have since come forward with disagreeing viewpoints about whether the dart would have been effective and/or whether it would have ticked off the cat -- but the issue here is what the police believed in good faith based on what the experts they contacted told them.) In the end, in the interest of public safety, the police shot and killed the cat.
Now, I'm a vegetarian animal-rights pansy, so I'm really not in favor of killing animals. I think that this event was not a good thing. On the other hand, I can see the viewpoint of the police. They've had mountain lion attacks -- not here, but in rural areas. If they wait until the cat does something dangerous, it might be too late -- or, with its speed and agility, it might elude them. They don't, to their knowledge, have a reliable way to subdue it, and so they take the action that none of them wanted to take. The police officers in question weren't exactly jazzed about shooting a sleeping animal from fifteen feet away. It isn't gutsy, it isn't cool, and it isn't even sportsmanlike (for those folks who hunt). But it's what had to be done.
So, in the D&D world... if we take away Misdirection so that there's no doubt that this guy is evil, what we have is somebody who, by the rules in the book, is a threat to innocent people. According to the book, you don't get to be evil unless you either actively seek to harm innocents or, at the very least, have no problem harming innocents if it's convenient for you to do so. Does that mean that you're going to kill the next person you meet? No. But it does mean that you will attempt it at some point in the future -- if you'd just killed your last person and were never going to do that again, you would have just turned Neutral. An accurate "Evil" detection may be either a reflection of the target's past actions or a serviceable prediction of their future behavior. I don't know if you're the person saying "They could be evil but not acting upon it," but I don't believe that that works according to the rules. If we need to debate that, we can debate that.
So okay. We've got somebody who is almost definitely going to hurt innocent people in the future. What are our options? Let him go? If nothing happens, then sure, but if he kills somebody, people point fingers at us -- and they're right to do so, because our position dictates that protecting people is our calling. We were chosen by our deity to combat evil creatures in order to protect the safety of good and uphold the law. In the wilderness, outside the boundaries of civilization, the law is not a concern, so the only thing that applies here is good. Is it good to protect innocent people by subduing somebody who, it is reliably predicted, will eventually hurt more innocent people if left unchecked?
As far as I can tell, my points (listing them so that we can figure out where we agree and disagree):
Whether they're evil and what that means
1) Evil, by D&D rules, includes either active desire to harm innocents or willingness to do so should it be the simplest solution to a perceived problem.
2) A person who detects as evil thus has such a desire or willingness
3) A person who is no longer willing to harm innocents would not detect as evil; you only detect as evil if you are still willing to harm innocents for trivial reasons.
4) Thus, a person who detects as evil is willing to harm innocents for trivial reasons at best, or is actively interested in harming innocents for personal enjoyment.
Paladins and logistics
5) A paladin's duties include protecting the innocent and, where legal, punishing those who threaten the innocent or have committed past harm against innocents.
6) The paladin's duty to protect the innocent includes the removal of non-imminent threats -- that is to say, threats that are not immediate danger, but which the paladin can reasonably suppose will eventually have a very high likelihood of presenting a danger to innocent people.
7) In "the wilderness", laws do not apply; therefore, the paladin has no legal impediment to action
8) Barring additional magical abilities, the paladin does not have the ability to easily subdue his opponent and bring them to justice in a safe and unharmed manner.
I'm open to attack on any of these points. I think (6) is the stickler, personally. It's the one that made me feel like a real-world lawyer while writing it (not in a bad way, but in a "make sure I say this in such a way that the DM still has room to wiggle in his own campaign" way).
Whole buncha good points. I am impressed by your logic, and by the thought you've put into it.
As for "D&D can actually undermine the idea of Karma", I'd think that might be an argument in favor of "Then smite them, since it's not a matter of 'the deluded and greedy' versus 'the enlightened' -- it's a matter of those who actually have a concrete goal that is diametrically opposed, and whose goal includes the destruction of us."
As for "People can still do things because of social reasons", I agree, and I'd think that a Detection spell will indeed differentiate between a kindly slave-owner who treats people well and only beats them when necessary and thinks of them as his children, who get spanked if they misbehave -- and the merciless evil scummy guy. I'm having trouble seeing how that affects whether or not an evil person is evil. Whether they're an abolitionist or a slaveowner, an evil person is still evil. The only issue is the legality of their actions -- which, in the wildernes example, don't apply (unless we disagree on wilderness). If a paladin meets a guy who kills newborn babies and enjoys it and laughs and drinks their blood, and they're out on the tundra, and they guy says, "Yeah, man, that's what I do -- but it's legal in my town," should the paladin not smite away? Maybe he shouldn't. Dunno.
Anyway, you've made a lot of good points, and I can't honestly say that I disagree with them a ton. I'd never run what I feel is "by the book" D&D, the stuff I've been trying to argue. But it's an interesting discussion, in any event.
Capellan said:
I realize this is probably "house rules" but in my world things are a little different. Clerics can be one step removed from the deity's alignment. So a NE deity can have N, LE, NE, or CE clerics. A neutral cleric of that deity would not detect as evil.
This of course is not appropriate for all deities. The deity of murder probably wouldn't have a Neutral faction within the church. That would just be weird.
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