How do YOU detect evil?

[Dross]

Murder is murder, but only when it's murder. Slaying a dragon terrorizing the town: enacting the will of the town, Lawful. Killing a tiger that looks like it's trying to eat you: self-defense, Neutral. Ordering the assassination of your rival: murder, Evil.

I try to keep things simple. It may not be the way the rules interpret alignment, but it avoids many disputes I've had before enacting it.

I'm curious, because I would have thought invading one's home to loot and kill (admittedly in most cases evil) sentient beings as murder.* which is what most adventures tend to do.

*: I/my group just sidestep this issue following K.I.S.S. as you do.

 

[Voadam]

Ah, but what if your god specifically tells you to do so? Which rule/concept has precedence? Your silly little code of conduct or a message from GOD?

If your god asks you to violate the purity required for all your paladin powers and the code you are sworn to uphold do you do so and sacrifice your powers to follow the will of your god? It would depend on the situation and character, I can see reasons to go either way.

I generally see paladins as a class as champions of supernatural [Good] (with lawful tendencies) and not as deific servants unless you are in a specific campaign like FR. They can be servants of good gods like anyone else can, but they by definition are supernatural champions of [Good].

 

[Voadam]

I guess it's all down to how you play it, which is - I imagine - why the thread was started in the first place

The way I play it is that most PC's and NPC's haven't done enough "objectively-evil-stuff" to have accreted a significant quantity of badions: they hardly register on the moral geiger counter. However, the way I also play it is that creatures with an alignment subtype, clerics, paladins, blackguards and creatures who belong to races listed as always having evil alignments have a high enough badion particle component that they're always detected according to the table.

Two points:

1) Are these PCs and NPCs alignment evil or alignment neutral? If they have not done enough evil shouldn't they be neutral?

2) What races are you talking about that are always evil? Drow are usually NE, fire giants are usually LE, orcs are often CE, sahuagin are often LE, etc.

Outsiders and dragons are the only things I see with an always evil alignment.

 

[Voadam]

I know him well enough to know his answers:
"Fact," he would scoff. "That's your interpretation. Just because you say it's fact, doesn't make it so." (even though, probably 99.99% of us agree with you)
"The spell makes it clear that you detect evil auras. Show me in the rules where it says a person of evil alignment gives off an evil aura. Only for people like evil clerics does it say they have an aura of evil."
"But wait," you might say, "why does the table have evil creatures."
"Because," he would respond, "it's a catch-all. The writers knew they couldn't cover every creature, or potential creature. So, there are creatures who are neither undead, outsiders, clerics, nor items/spells that have given themselves over to evil and would show up as such. Like the blackguard, or a non-cleric PC who is in service to an evil deity and is tainted with an evil aura."
See, you really can't say it's a fact.


"Show me," he would respond, "where it says 'alignment' in the spell. Oh, look," he might add, "why do they specifically say alignment when talking about good clerics but never say the word elsewhere."

Some counterpoints to your friends' argument.

So things like the paladin's smite evil which affects evil creatures does not work on neutral evil drow or CE orcs?

How does the spell unholy blight work with the following language

"Only good and neutral (not evil) creatures are harmed by the spell."

There are clerics and paladins with good aura class abilities and clerics and blackguards with evil aura class abilities and outsiders with good and evil descriptors but I don't recall neutral descriptors.

Is there any place that Evil descriptor monsters are said to have an "aura" of evil outside of the detect evil spell? If he is talking about evil clerics having an explicitly defined aura and not evil rogues then there should be an explicitly defined evil aura for evil subtype creatures that is not there for creatures with an evil alignment who are not evil creatures. Same for undead.

Basically he's saying creatures with an evil alignment are not evil creatures. That is the core of it. Isolate and focus on that and it should be fairly easy to see it as a silly conclusion.

 

[radmod]

Some counterpoints to your friends' argument.

So things like the paladin's smite evil which affects evil creatures does not work on neutral evil drow or CE orcs?

How does the spell unholy blight work with the following language

"Only good and neutral (not evil) creatures are harmed by the spell."

I'm sure he would agree that they work since, AFAIK, they are not dependent on an aura.

Is there any place that Evil descriptor monsters are said to have an "aura" of evil outside of the detect evil spell? If he is talking about evil clerics having an explicitly defined aura and not evil rogues then there should be an explicitly defined evil aura for evil subtype creatures that is not there for creatures with an evil alignment who are not evil creatures. Same for undead.

See, this is where I think you could 'gotcha' him (if he didn't have his usual Globe of Invulnerability vs. Common Sense on).
AFAIK, there is nowhere that it says an 'evil' descriptor means you have an aura of evil.
For the undead part, he would probably say the act of creating undead, like Animate Undead's evil descriptor, is essentially a Permanent version of a necromantic evil spell and therefore has an aura of evil.

Basically he's saying creatures with an evil alignment are not evil creatures. That is the core of it. Isolate and focus on that and it should be fairly easy to see it as a silly conclusion.

Yes, that's the core of it. I imagine 'evil' to him is something you do, the actions you take, not the Good vs. Evil argument made (appropriately, IMO) above.
As to arguing it, I don't. If I'm DM, I do it my way. If he's DM, he can do it his way. As it turned out, our current DM does it differently so it doesn't really matter what either of us think.

EDIT: Actually, I'm going to have to correct myself. Now that I think about it he is the type who would say there is Evil and there is evil. Evil are the clerics, undead, 'evil' outsiders, etc. and evil is everyone else.

 

[El Mahdi]

RAW: "Evil is evil. Whether you are a monster with the evil subtype, just plain evil monster, evil cleric, or PC whose alignment is evil, your aura is evil. That's why there's a table!"

I believe the above is correct, for RAW...but it's not what I use.


I prefer a more realistic approach. I do agree that there is such a thing as pure, undeniable EVIL. But I also feel that in the real world, it's rare in the extreme. For the most part I feel that the concepts of Good and Evil are wholly subjective from the point of view of each sentient creature. It's also why I don't use the alignment system. In a D&D world, there are creatures that are purely Evil, but almost all of them are some kind of outsider or abberant.

If there's anything I've learned from 21 years in the military, it's this: every creature (especially humans) has an equal and infinite capacity for both Good and Evil. There really is no such thing as a "Good Guy" or "Bad Guy", there are only competing ideals and goals. The only concrete thing is that every creature has an instinct for Survival. This can be expanded in the creatures thoughts and instincts to include things like familial survival and species/race/culture survival, but preeminant is Self Survival. In higher order sentients and some other creatures, the instinct for Self Survival can be purposely suppressed in favor of the survival of another person or creature...but it's not necessarily automatic. Anything that threatens a creatures' instincts for survival, is considered Evil by that creature.

So, in my games there is no such thing as a Detect Evil spell as it's simply not practical. It would only be useful in extremely rare instances and on creatures that most would just assume are Evil anyways. A Detect Evil spell on a person, even a hardened criminal or murderer, would simply detect the same mixture of potential Good and Evil (or simply put: "Neutrality") resident in all sentient creatures.

If I did decide to use something like a Detect Evil spell, I would probably have it work more like it does in Star Wars. It would only sense those that have Evil Intent against you or those in your charge/care (intentions that threaten your sense of survival or the survival of those your instinct has been extended to). But for the most part, I think the spell is just impractical and more trouble than it's worth.