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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6920941" data-attributes="member: 4937">One believes in mercy; the other doesn't.  What's so hard to understand?   'Evil' with a capital 'E' doesn't not deserve mercy.  It would be ridiculous to offer mercy to something that could never profit from that mercy.  Yes, we are told that.  We are also told that any attempt at lethal self-defense did not occur at that time, and the actual lethal violence was only considered and used after the bouncer had surrendered and begged for mercy.  Self-defense could have been justified while someone was attacking you with a sword.  It can't be justified after that situation no longer prevails.   Imagine explain to a judge or jury that you were cornered in your bedroom and forced to shoot at an armed burglar that broke into your home in the dark, but then after the burglar fled and was running down the street you ran out into the street after him and shot him in the back in self-defense.  If you shot an armed burglar in the dark in your bedroom, it might be self-defense, but its never self-defense to chase him out in to the street and shoot him in the back no matter how threatened you might have felt a few moments before.That's so obvious I'm baffled we are even discussing it.  I don't see how you can possibly talk about the OP's situation being self-defense. Angels, demons, devils, and particularly fallen angels all get into D&D by way of Catholic occult esoteria.  The way they are presented, certain details about their nature, and quite often the names that they are given come from those sources.  When you start mucking around with that, you end up with contrary ideas that don't fit well with the source material.   And in any event, I suspect the way I read those sentences are very different than the way you do.  None of that implies devils have a choice regarding their natures, and if "somehow" it ceased to be lawful evil, the implication is that it was forcefully transformed via a process that destroyed the essential nature of the devil.  It would be a wholly new being.   To me, the strongest implication of those sentences is that devils have a fundamental demon nature, being literally composed of evil and wholly lacking capacity or desire to choose to be anything other than what they are.I completely disagree.  D&D normally has defined orcs this whole time as monsters, wholly lacking in mercy, with no motivations other than violence, who always attack PCs and consider it wholly acceptable to kill on sight for arbitrary reasons.  The PC's, shown this definition, have no reason to imagine that your orcs are in any way different, and wouldn't attack them mercilessly on sight.  If your orcs aren't simply monsters, if they don't have a fundamentally demonic nature, then you have to show them that there is more to them than that.   There is nothing however arbitrary about killing something that always behaves monstrously.   If it turned out that both sides were noble and simply misunderstood and feared each other, then it would turn out that both sides had been equally evil and wrong - not equally good - and how they responded to the realization of that great tragedy would be very telling.And in point of fact, I think that D&D has often treated orcs as more than merely monsters, but also people.  But to the extent that a particular campaign does not, the PC's have no obligation to behave as if they might be people.  Quite often, fundamental assumptions of the setting are unstated.  It's no where stated in for example the 1e rules that orcs are people, yet you have inferred that they were.  You can't possibly believe that the game materials present a single complete and coherent cosmology with sufficient details that there are no fuzzy gray areas.  Of course different DMs have taken the same game materials and done different things with it, even without consciously trying to depart from what is written.</blockquote>

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