Is poison use evil?

[Sejs]

Hunting a band of Orcs and Knolls

Heh. I know it's only one letter off, but this made me laugh.

(1)What is the "code of conduct" for a paladin anyway?

(2)And does it say anything about "honour" in the Class description?

(3)Indeed, is a Lawful Good PC honourable?

(1) The example one is listed in the paladin class description in the phb.

(2) Yes, it does specifically mention honorable conduct and the use of poison. More to the point it says a paladin must behave in a lawful good and honorable manner, having them as two seperate requirements.

(3) They can be, but honor is not a function of alignment alone. A lawful good character can be honorable (say, a paladin), or completely without honor but still quite disciplined (lawful) and beneficent (good). Just because you're of a certain alignment doesn't dictate that you have to be, or have to not be, honorable. Or charitable. Or tolerant. Or erratic. Or malicious. Or any other of a number of personality traits - alignment says what kind of meal it is, but the individual character's personality says what ingredients went into the dish.

 

[Felix]

knew this one was gonna get someones panties in a bunch.

Pardon me? You mean you thought someone was going to reply? Would you prefer to be ignored?

People who want to stop hunters from killing Mountain Lions lack understanding of what it does to the eco system to have so many mountain lions running about.

You misunderstand. The Paladin is a base class in a rules system. As such it lacks thought, understanding, or opinions. Any given character has these things, but the class lacks it completely. So saying "the rules set that is a base class lacks understanding" is silly. Only a character can have understanding. "The Paladin" isn't a character. Get my drift?

Too my POV Paladins don't get the thought that animals use poisons to survive.

No, no. The code of conduct says "Paladin's don't use poison. They also don't do evil things. They cannot consort with evil creatures." It does not say "Paladin's kill anything that uses poison because poison is evil." See, poison is not necessarily evil, Paladins are banned from using it because it is dishonorable. I think any given paladin understands that creatures use poison to survive. Or perhaps you'd like to explain it to every paladin's player?

Depends on what they are killing. Hunting a band of Orcs and Knolls that have allied with a Necromancer and have "captured" allies and hold their corpses as undead. I don't see that pally as evil, I see him fighting for a just cause (defeating evil & freeing the souls of his friends).

A woman beaten, raped, and hearing her attackers talking about murdering her so she can't ID them in court, so lays under her bed in ambush with her husbands .357- that's not murder that's self defense (thou she might feel it was murder).

You were the one who said murder is murder. I have no problem with this argument, but it is inconsistent with your first post.

A highly trained killer vs a man that has never seen a dead person. I think that is enough or was that what you were looking for, personally I see it as completely obvious.

You dodged my question. What amount of extra training one combatant has will turn a fiar fight into an unfair one. You mentioned the example of a 1st level commoner vs a 20th level fighter. Ok, that's not fair, says you. I imagine a 10th level fighter vs another 10th level fighter is fair? So we have a range here. Unfair at one end and fair at the other. At what point does the unfair fight become fair? 10 levels of separation? 5? 2?

By this statement it appears to me that you seem to just be looking for someone to argue with. I aplogize if I am incorrect, it just looks that way to me.

Actually I was relating to you how I play in a party with a paladin and use poison myself. This quote:

Is throwing an Inhaled blindness inducing poison any more dastardly than throwing sand in someone's eyes? Does it make a difference if it's a medusa you're fighting who can kill you with her eyes?

...was meant to have you think about how a paladin might react to this kind of poison use. Not as an argument, but rather as trying to be helpful to someone who says they have a problem.

I think what we need to to define what Paladin defines as a poison.

The definiton is not up to the Paladin. The game rules define what is and isn't a poison.

...a Paladin would more then likely not see a P-Dragon as evil...

I agree, but you assume Paladins don't use poison because it's evil. Not so. Paladins don't use poison because it's not honorable.

Ya, well the law is pretty narrow in its thoughts as it is, murder can been see in lots of differing lights-
...
See the difference? Its in your own minds eye.

No, it is not in your mind's eye. It is according to the law. Saying something is murder does not make it so. I could think you're a cucumber, and see you in my mind's eye that way, but it's not true. Murder is unlawful killing. That's it. There might be a disagreement on what is lawful and what isn't, but that's why we have courts: to interpret and apply the law, sentiment and morality aside.

The woman I mentioned earlier. When all was said and done the DA brought charges against her. The judge threw it out- never got to court.

And so what she did wasn't murder... because the judge threw the charges out, nothing more. Because that's the law. Had he convicted her, she would be a murderer.

In most areas of the US the law is pretty clear on that- the dog gets no trial, just a death sentence.

And that's the law. No court, just death. A trial does not a murderer make. The law defines a murderer, and since animals killing humans is unlawful, any animal that kills a human is a murderer. If the law were the same for humans as it is for animals, then any killing we did would be murder.

I mentioned this before I think, I mean nothing by the words I am just looking to get thoughts rolling on something that I am trying to see others POV as I might need some of these agruements later while I play my Deepwood Sniper.

That's easy, tell the paladin this: "My poison puts people to sleep just like the wizard's spell. So arrest the wiz and me together, or bugger off."

Very true- its just the lead up to it. "He's out? Slice his throat."

It does not have to be that way. "He's out? Tie him up." is just as reasonable a follow up. The cutting of the throat, and not the rendering unconscious by poison, kills the fellow.

You are very much dead- but it wasn't a "miss Fort or Die poison."

Leathal and "Save or Die" is the same thing as dead.

I believe Saeviomagy was referring to the fact that most poisons don't attack CON. Str, Dex, Int, Wis, Cha poisons won't kill you, just render you paralyzed or unconscious. If they don't kill you, they arn't lethal. Being made vulnerable to a cut throat does not make the poison lethal.

Nah, I think he would explain why he must go, the others would talk about it, and the choice would be made to keep Amilor and tell Grayson that "its the road or the poison, your choice."

Again with the poison=evil. It's bleedin dishonorable, but not necessairly evil. And paladins can associate with dishonorable folk as long as they don't jeapordize their code of conduct. And if the Paladin doesn't use the poison, then he's not jeapordizing his code of conduct. No reason for the Paladin to throw you out of the party. Easy peasy.

"Is poison evil?" (1) Well, by RL morality, it's not any more evil than a longsword in a flat-footed orc's guts. (2) In D&D, per the BOED, it is. "Why?" Who knows? Only the gods.

And the DM has to decide if the BoED is part of the rules set. The book isn't core, so if the things in that book are not being used, then it should be discarded as a hard and fast rule. A precident, maybe, but not a rule.

I think I need to ponder this subject more.

Ponder away.

 

[WayneLigon]

One of my players has a real problem playing a paladin. He doesn't understand why a paladin has to act, as he puts it, "like a retarded Boy Scout." He doesn't understand that a paladin must behave that way ... because the gods say so. He wants a logical explanation for why his paladin, who could do so much more good were he allowed to use deception and trickery, instead has to risk death by being straightforward and upright. And, unfortunately for him, there is no logical reason.

Some part of me gets scared when I hear people equate honor with stupidity. It's not a religion thing since as you can see in the PHB a paladin does not nessesarily have to serve a god or even a pantheon. If anything, he serves the cause of Good itself. It's a question of honor, and standards.

To me, the reason a paladin does not use poison is that such use is dishonorable rather than evil in and of itself; as many people have pointed out, there are a lot of poisons that are non-lethal and their use might in fact even be a mercy to monsters and people that are usually mowed down by swords.

A Paladin, however, must be very watchful. He must not only be Good, he must strive to be a very paragon of that alignment. He should be played as the person we all want to be. Even he wants to be that person, and so he constantly strives to simply be better. He should be the person other Good people look to and say 'I should follow that example, and be even a better person.'

Poison use may or may not be evil, but it almost certainly is dishonorable (the same could be said about most battle magic, as well, but even spells require one save, not two). It does not give the victim a way or means to oppose the force sent against him. A person who approaches the victim head on with a sword at least allows the victim a chance at defending himself: he can draw his own weapon and put the matter to the test of arms. It doesn't happen in D&D combat very often, but in the real world people have managed to win through worse odds. Poison, though, is not something you can fight. It is the easy and purchased weapon of a coward who knows he cannot win a fair fight, usually administered by stealth.

Now what does that have to do with evil, though? A lot of the responses I see, including Wilder's buddy, show the attitude that 'the ends justify the means'. That attitude is a large step in the direction of Evil when it's not simply Evil in and of itself, which it usually is. That attitude is used to justify a tremendous amount of questionable behavior - perhaps not evil behavior in and of itself, but certainly questionable. And questionable behavior almost always leads to evil behavior, eventually. Poison use is part of that questionable behavior, that grey-that-leads-to-black path that is very easy to walk down.

Yes in some ways it might be easier for the paladin to use more questionable tactics, but so those truly lead towards Good, even though Good comes from them? For some, yes; for many Good characters such actions and tactics might be perfectly fine for a time but the paladin is held (and holds himself) to a higher standard of behavior. That means some things simply are Not Done, despite how efficient or expedient they are. He might slip. He will not act like a 'retarded boy scout' (as if there was something wrong with the Boy Scout creed of behavior, as written) all the time, but he knows that his slips require atonement. He tries to do his best at all times, under all circumstances. The paladin, perhaps more than any other class regardless of their alignment, knows that the ends never justify the means. Efficiency and expidiency do not justify the means. To think otherwise is Evil, and leads to Evil if acted on time and again.

 

[Dogbrain]

Some part of me gets scared when I hear people equate honor with stupidity.

In general, this is done by people who simply lack any and all vestiges of honor and decency in the first place.

 

[Mallus]

Some part of me gets scared when I hear people equate honor with stupidity.

Funny, I have the exact opposite reaction...

Codes of honor, as tradtionally understood, aren't neccessarily recipes for what most contemporary Western people would call good behavior. Honor might demand vendettas, blood-feuds, the killing of innocents in reprisal, the pointless death of soldiers, the shunning of crime victims [in the case of rape], etc.

Honor isn't all returning found money and opening a door for a lady...

 

[Particle_Man]

Since BoED was put out by wizards, it seems to be the official intent that poison use is evil. One way to reconcile this is to say that being poisoned (unlike with poisons in the real world) is like being tortured severely (not just wounded with a sword, but tortured by an expert torturer that knows how to make you hurt worse than you could possibly imagine). This is the kind of torture/pain that would make the average (i.e. non-evil) person say "I don't care what he/she has done - no one deserves *THAT* - just kill him/her and put him/her out of his/her misery) This torture lasts for a minute that seems like an eternity. Ravages don't hurt as much, so don't count as being as bad.

Intelligent neutral/good beings, when they use their own natural poisons, also secrete a powerful local anaesthetic so that, while one loses ability points, one does not feel the torture (or at least not as more than an average wound). Alas, this anaesthetic is very unstable, and cannot be bottled or used in any way by any creature other than the creature that secretes it.

Poisons that only cause unconcsiousness would thus not be evil (as per BoED ruling on drow poison). It seems that only ability damaging poisons cause this level of torture.

I am not trying to push for a view here, just showing one possible interpretation of wotc's apparant views that are at least consistent (i.e. logical), for those that want a logical reason.

 

[LadyIslay]

You know, one of the things I like best about being a DM is just being able to say "I don't care what X says, this is the way it is." (Oh yes, the power!).

I've been reading through chapters 1&2 of my BoED this morning, and some of it seems really very contradictory, to say the least. I am reminded, though, that this is supplimental material, and I can take it or leave it as a DM, and that when I'm a player, I should ask the DM for his or her take on the issue before the game gets started.

The description of a paladin's code in the PHB preclues a paladin from using poison, but I'm of the opinion that this has always been a matter of honour and law rather than good and evil. I'm also very much in favor of players writing up their own paladin codes if they don't like the general one suggested in the PHB. A paladin of Sune, for example, might have a very different code than a paladin of Helm, for example.

For me, I see poison being a tool, just like a magical spell that saps ability scores or a weapon that knocks someone out or kills them. That said, there's lots of reasons for character *not* to use poison. It could be against the law, considered dishonourable, and is generally associated with people that are up to no good. Sure, drow sleep poison might be 'harmless' if you use it to knock out the gaurd rather than killing him, but the NPCs in the world might not see it that way.

Another side to this discussion is that the use of poison could be considered evil because it is associated with an evil deity. In FR, at least, poison is in the portfolio of Talona, and simply using it is, in a way, empowering or worshiping her.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

It's not a religion thing since as you can see in the PHB a paladin does not nessesarily have to serve a god or even a pantheon. If anything, he serves the cause of Good itself.

Which is, of course, a religion.

Something grants the paladin his divine(!) powers. Something takes them away when he offends. It doesn't matter if it's a "god," a "force," or just an "ideal." It's a religion.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Another side to this discussion is that the use of poison could be considered evil because it is associated with an evil deity. In FR, at least, poison is in the portfolio of Talona, and simply using it is, in a way, empowering or worshiping her.

You mean ... poison use is evil because of religion? What kinda whack theory is that?

 

[Faraer]

In D&D fantasy, poison is evil. It's used by villains, but not by heroes. I think trying to rationalize genre tropes like that is pointless and a mistake.