Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1556412" data-attributes="member: 5171">The headsman who likes hurting people and who has turned this desire to hurt people into a position as an effective headsman is not evil.  One psychological theory I vaguely remember from high school states that many excellent surgeons are people who had a deep desire to hurt or cut people but turned those instincts to something beneficial to society instead.  Any actual psych people, please feel free to blow that out of the water.The argument you should be refuting, the argument that I at least put forward, is that you don't get slapped with the "evil" alignment unless you have done something that, in the minds of good-oriented deities, merits you getting whacked.  You've successfully shown me someone who I don't think is evil.Which is again countered by the argument that someone not worthy of getting hit by a smite wouldn't detect as evil.  The obnoxious professor certainly deserves a lecture about his insensitivity, but he doesn't deserve to be killed, I agree, unless more information surfaces in this hypothetical example.  As such, I don't believe he'd detect as evil -- like I said earlier. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />No.Remember the whole "alignment is not a straitjacket" thing, the "people have good actions and bad actions" thing?  You don't become evil unless you both intend to commit and do commit a whole lotta evil, to the point where you bring your own personal alignment curve down.  You are bringing up neutral people doing individual minor evil actions and then claiming that they're evil, but not worthy of smiting -- but by the very arguments used against the "smite away" point, there are still neutral people.  They don't turn evil as soon as they commit one evil action.  It takes a consistent and repeated alteration of both your intentions and your actions to turn evil.  Someone who thinks evil thoughts all day long, every day, and even harder on the weekend, but never acts on it, is not evil.  Someone who keeps accidentally commiting evil actions despite having the best of intentions (trying to make dinner and accidentally poisoning people, trying to babysit and accidentally turning the kids into zombies, etc) is not evil.  You have to have both, and you have to have both consistently enough that it becomes your average state, not your "crossing the line this one time" state.</blockquote>

Verification