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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 2830414" data-attributes="member: 15800">It depends. In my opinion, yes. A good person can kill evil people, but I expect them to do it quickly and cleanly. They should not take joy in the suffering of others, nor should they kill if it can be avoided without placing innocents in danger. If torture involves a slow, systematic infliction of physical and psychological damage on another being with the potential of causing permanent maiming or psychological damage, I think it's worse than a pitched battle against a group of evil (or, for that matter, good) creatures who, if left unopposed, will kill innocents. Now, I believe that there's a strong pulp tradition of heroes being willing to rough up a suspect to get him to talk. In my mind, it's all about the extent of the injury you're willing to cause, whether you will employ violence if other options are available, and who suffers. Punching the goon to get him to talk? Fine. Punching his wife in front of him? Now you're not so good in my book. In Eberron (which I realize is not the topic of conversation, so my apologies) I see alignment as flexible. A good person can do something terrible if he absolutely has to. If the only way to save the universe is to eat the bad guy's children until he confesses, you may be forced to do that; you shouldn't have to say "I can't do that, I'm good." But it should be a traumatic experience for the good person as well as the victim, and something he hopes he'll never have to do again. If it's something he's comfortable with... if he carries around a bib in his pocket for baby-eating... he's evil. And I agree with the idea that the more you do it, the easier it is to justify it as acceptable... making it easy for good to slip into evil. D&D is based around violence and death. But I don't think that a good person is justified in bloodthirsty slaughter, even if the victims are evil. A CG barbarian may fight with rage in his heart, but in my opinion, if he's CG, he should be fighting in the defense of others... not simply because he loves killing things. Meanwhile, the bloodthirsty, sociopathic barbarian who truly only loves to kill things could serve a good cause, if he happens to be on the right path; he's fighting a war against demons, and if he wasn't killing the demons, they'd kill innocents. The result is good. But he himself is a very disturbed and evil man. I see Jack in the same way. He fights the good fight. The world may need him. His methods may be necessary. But that doesn't make him good. Again, in Eberron, you can have the evil king who wants peace; it's all about what he's prepared to do to get it. I think many spies and spymasters will be neutral at best or evil, simply because of what needs to be done to do their jobs efficiently. But, that's just my opinion, and one I've gone into far too much detail about on other threads... and one that has more bearing on Eberron than core D&D rules, anyway. So I'll shut up now and go back to lurking. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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