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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 1313242" data-attributes="member: 5890">Nope, I'm talking about the good old "there may be treasure in them thar hills, but watch out for it has powerful guardians" type looking for treasure - the intent is to defeat the guardian to get the treasure, and it's a fairly normal style of play for D&D, one in which the adventurers typically need not be evil.Wha? So if they go into a tomb with the intent of robbing it, they become evil, but then they become good again if there happen to be undead there?Ahh, so ridding the land of those nasty orcs is automatically an evil act. I see.Creating undead is certainly seen as an abomination in some D&D settings, and certainly the spell has the evil tag.However it's quite clear that the evil tag has nothing to do with imprisoning souls (neither trap the soul nor soul bind, both of which imprison souls are [evil] spells, so it's clearly not the aspect of imprisoning the soul that does it). Therefore the undoing of that particular aspect (ie - freeing souls) cannot automatically be a good action.Killing undead is a good act because (wait for it) undead are inherently evil (even, supposedly, those with no mind or motivations of their own, which sort of blows a hole in your "motivation matters" rhetoric below).Ok, so where does defeating great evils and taking their treasure as spoils of war fall in?In this particular case, we've got someone abetting evil (he's only killing evil creatures - it's been established already that in this campaign world this is a good or neutral act) in order to save his own soul, an act which could arguably bring a change for the better to the world (ie - if a powerful force for good becomes a devil instead of an angel, that's a net benefit for evil).It's not as simple as "murder for profit", not by a long margin.</blockquote>

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