<>How much evil could good endure before becoming evil?

[Harmon]

“I just want to torture him to death,” so says that NG wizard, feeling remorseful as he says it to his friend and confidant the Bard.

An assassin killed one of the people in his group nearing on two years ago, and the wizard has led his group after the assassin, now they are on him and the assassin is aware of their presence.

The party member (a Half Orc Fighter/Barbarian) was killed to stop him from fulfilling a prophecy about an Orc that would join all the trips together.

The wizard was rescued/saved by the Half Orc more times then he could ever count, and was abused by him verbally and berated by him. He didn’t view the Half Orc as a real friend until he was gone.

Now the wizard seems willing to sacrifice himself for revenge, but is he? No, not truly, he will kill the assassin. Torture him to death, nah, but he wants to see him suffer.

My question before the World of EN is this- how far could a NG person go in brutalizing someone to their death without losing themselves? Could they hire someone to kill him? Could they tie him up and break bones? Or would NG be more inclined to kill him (the assassin) in open battle?

The wizard has led this group for a while and has lost more then a few friends, party members (PCs and NPCs), he’s become a different person from the shop wizard he started as in the very first adventure.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

This is OT...how, exactly?

Torture? Oh, heck no, not for NG's anyway. Call him out in a fair fight, sure. Although...

The wizard has led this group for a while and has lost more then a few friends, party members (PCs and NPCs), he’s become a different person from the shop wizard he started as in the very first adventure.

Maybe an alignment change would be a good RP opportunity to show just how far this character has come since his early days of innocence. I for one think if it's in keeping with where a character is going, alignment change should be encouraged. No DM should ever use a character's existing alignment to say, "Nope, can't be done." People change, after all.

So challenging a known threat to life is definitely NG. Capturing and torturing him is more like NE.

 

[The Traveler]

I tend not to use alignment at all, but when I do I tend to use the Ravenloft books as good indicators as to what is and is not an evil act, and the severity of the consequences.

Evil acts in the heat of anger can be atoned for more easily than premeditated acts. If your Neutral Good character has been planning this torture for some time, the DM should be doling out alignment checks way before he actually commits the act. Something has snapped in this man, and if he begins planning it in detail he is already no longer Neutral Good.

 

[LightPhoenix]

On the other hand, if this is not premeditated but rather more of a confession of inner feelings, then I'd view as a step towards TN, but not there yet. Good people can have bad thoughts - it's the actions that count.

 

[Darkness]

Moved to GD.

 

[Galethorn]

Well, here's my take on how a NG person would/could deal with such a thing...

They'd want to see the bastard suffer, and sure, they'd want to exact revenge, but torturing them to death would mean crossing a line.

Now, there are three general courses of action I see...

1. Torturing him to death personally, or watching someone else do it. This is crossing the line, and no truly good character would do it without losing some of what makes them 'better' than anyone else. After doing such a thing, a good character would either begin to feel justified in doing other, even more horrible things for revenge, or else be fraught with guilt and forced to attone or go mad.

2. Killing him quickly and painlessly, or having somebody else kill him out of view. Doing this would mean not giving into one's darker emotions, while still removing a legitimate threat to oneself and other good people, and getting 'justice'; a good character would feel remorse for doing it, but they wouldn't have crossed the line.

3. Handing him over to legitimate authorities. This is what the truly saintly character would do, but it's bad logically (i.e. the threat is still out there, for all you know), and it's foolish to expect any mortal to do such a thing.


So, I'm gonna say that taking option 1 would result in either an alignment shift in the direction of evil, or feeling terrible until something could be done to attone.

But, of course, YMMV, and this is all IMO.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, wanting to torture him is dehumanizing him, and treating your enemies as people is kind of the hallmark of good, while treating your enemies as less than human is kind of the hallmark of evil.

Good recognizes the value in every life, even that of the wicked beings, though they absolutely fight against the wickedness wherever it arises. Evil thinks that the other side exists only to be destroyed, that any action they take is justified becuase the other side has no essential worth.

To reduce even a villain to the point where he has no worth as a living being is 100% Bad Guy material. He may have killed thousands, corrupted millions, and destroyed the hopes and dreams of hundreds, but he is a living, thinking, breathing being, and thus using torture on him would be bad. That's what seperates the Good from the just Neutral or Evil...they go that extra mile, compromise their own base desires, fight what they feel in their own hearts, to improve the quality of life even for the most vile and dispicable of creatures. Because the bad people are still people and there's some things that no person should have to endure, even if said person does exactly that to others.

Not that he can't be faught and killed, just that doing so without denying this bad person his inherent value as a *person* would be good. Torture eradicates your value as a person, and turns you into a tool for information or vengeance, both of which reduce you to a tool for someone else's selfish needs, compromising your own humanity. The person who tortures, for information or for vengeance, is aligned with Evil, even if that information or vengeance serves the greater good in the end.

At least, that's how it would work IMC.

 

[Gynsala]

Maybe an alignment change would be a good RP opportunity to show just how far this character has come since his early days of innocence. I for one think if it's in keeping with where a character is going, alignment change should be encouraged. No DM should ever use a character's existing alignment to say, "Nope, can't be done." People change, after all.

So challenging a known threat to life is definitely NG. Capturing and torturing him is more like NE.

There should definitely be an alignment change involved, and used for RP. This is a great opportunity for character depth. If the player really envisions the character as NG, then the future of the character will entail him fighting off his darker urges and seeking atonement or forgiveness for the evil he's discovered in his heart.

 

[WayneLigon]

I think it would be something only the GM and player could answer, really. Certainly his goodness has been, for lack of a better word, 'bruised' badly but as to when he's crossed over that line? Who can say.

One thing I will mention: the idea that not doing the act personally somehow lessens the impact of what happens (in a moral sense) is not a good one. If anything it adds a certain base, craven form of cowardice to the act. Someone he hires brutalizes his enemy while he sips wine, thinking his soft, sullied hands are clean? No, that's the way of mob bosses and politicians.

 

[Delemental]

I find the timing of this thread very convenient, as my own character (also a NG wizard) is going through some very similar things right now. For my part, I want the character to stay Good (the party weighs more in the Neutral range overall, and I enjoy playing the 'moral nag' in the group), so I'm still trying to work out a balance between his desire to remain a good person and the desire to express his righteous anger.

In my case, my character has recently learned of the existence of a cult that is specifically targeting his family (the cult used to be a sect of a deity's church that was meant to enforce a curse that deity had laid on my family line - the curse has run its course, but the sect was corrupted and doesn't know this). While trying to locate his family to get them to safety, he learned that one of the cells of the cult had captured his younger brother and sister. Subsequent scryings revealed they'd been tortured, and my character knew they would end up being killed in a horrible ritual. So, we did the usual Scry-Buff-Teleport thing to rescue them. My character wasn't in a particularly good mood when preparing for the rescue, and, well... let's just say his spellbook includes a selection of rather unpleasant spells from enemy wizards our group has defeated.

Our group defeated the cell, but my character's brother was killed by a cultist, which resulted in my character going on sort of an Anakin Skywalker-esque rampage through the complex (by that time there was little left but goblins anyway, but still). And when we captured the cultist leader, my character was very much in the mood to inflict a little pain. Had he followed through on that, I think my character might now be TN. However, during the interrogation his sister expressed her own desire to torture the cultist leader. When one of the other members of my party (CN, though only a hair's breadth from CE in my opinion) began to instruct her in techniques, my character came to his senses and quickly finished the cultist off with magic missiles.

I guess my point in saying all that is that the actions taken by the wizard you're asking about will be a bigger deciding factor than his thoughts. I don't think it's that unusual for even Good characters to harbor idesa of wanting those who have caused suffering to experience some themselves (if we were talking about Exalted characters, that's a different story, but Exalted is held to a much higher standard than Good IMO). This is especially true when the character has a personal connection to those who have suffered or died. It's only if the character acts on those thoughts, or becomes truly obsessed by them, that things like alignment shifts should be considered.

That doesn't mean there can't be consequences. My character originally was hoping there might be a way to get the cult to realize the mistake they had made, that the curse no longer needed to be enforced. Now, he's determined that the only solution is to eradicate them. And while he isn't really actively seeking to torture the cultists any more, he's not necessarily going to choose use 'quick and painless death' spells when he encounters them. And we haven't yet encountered the cultist main leader. So while the character is still Good, the temptation is still there.