No Animate Dead?

[robertliguori]

I'm fairly sure that the DMH or the PHB states that casting a spell with the evil descriptor is an evil act. There wouldn't be much point of the tag otherwise.

It declares that certain spells use moral energies, just like other spells use elemental energies.


Let us consider the hypothesis that we can determine the morality of casting a spell based on its descriptors as opposed to its effects and circumstances. Let us consider casting Holy Word in an orphanage. Were we to do so, all non-Good babies and children in the vicinity (which, given that children are under the age of accountability and would probably come to a bad spiritual end were Zaphkiel not looking out for them) would die horribly. One might suggest that the practical action of murdering a bunch of babies would outweigh the moral potential of the spell used to do so; however, in so doing, we contradict our initial premise. So, to sum up, if Animate Dead is evil, full-stop, Holy Word is good, also full-stop.

This means that either the alignment descriptor of spells does not determine the morality of actually casting them, or the alignment descriptor does describe the morality thereof, and what we call morality doesn't exist in D&D universes, having been replaced with the color of a football jersey and a preference for membranous versus feathery wings.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

the color of a football jersey and a preference for membranous versus feathery wings.

Seems to me that's exactly what it is.

 

[ryryguy]

Agree that the #1, primary reason for no Animate Dead ritual is the economy of actions thing, which generally precludes henchmen and so forth.

I suspect, though, that good-vs-evil may have a little bearing too. The 4e design philosophy, as stated, is to try to provide a baseline set of rules and fluff for a kind of lowest common denominator D&D campaign. The designers might believe that evil PC's, and morally shady tactics like animating undead, are problematic and/or uncommon enough that they don't fall within the baseline.

That doesn't mean that they think an evil PC campaign should never be run. It doesn't mean that the campaign with the LN guy who animates dead to fight evil is badwrongfun. But in the baseline game, the PC's are good or neutral heroes, and animating undead is not a standard tactic for those heroes.

Of course I do not really know what the designers are thinking, I'm just guessing based on stuff like the PHB note that PCs should be good or neutral. And I have no doubt that WotC will be happy to sell sourcebooks all about running campaigns with evil PCs who use kitten blood to power their undead minions, if they think people will buy such sourcebooks.

But with only so many pages in the core books, and so many potential problems with evil PCs(*), and Animate Dead generally something that would be used only by evil PCs, it makes sense to me to cut it out of the "baseline".

* - Sure maybe there are no problems at your table, but if you don't think that there would be problems at many other tables, particularly with newbie players and DMs, you're kidding yourself.

 

[Wrox]

Maybe you'll see it in Open Grave, coming out in January.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

If messing around with corpses was inherently evil then there will be allot of medical students going to hell.

This was actually debated a lot in the middle ages, and the whole stem cell debate is not much different.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Do you have a page number for that? I don't want to read the whole thing in case I get to play it in sometime.

It is on page 61, top of the final column

 

[Andor]

How I run my games has little bearing WHY wotc omitted animate dead, evil gods and evil cleric powers from the PHB.

No. The entire reason WotC failed to include it was that they wanted everyone to play games like yours because PC necromancers or evil clerics are badwrongfun and the thought police must prevent such crimes against the state.

I wish only to be shot while my mind is clean.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

No. The entire reason WotC failed to include it was that they wanted everyone to play games like yours because PC necromancers or evil clerics are badwrongfun and the thought police must prevent such crimes against the state.

I wish only to be shot while my mind is clean.

I know you are trolling, but I'll bite:

Once again, the only reason there is no Animating Dead, no Summon Monster/Nature's Ally, and no Familiars or Animal companions is because of the Economy of Actions.

 

[Zil]

And rigged specifically to make the primordials the bad guys hook, line and sinker.

Yea, I think it might have been a bit more interesting if they had gone with a straight law-chaos split (with the Primordials on the Chaos side). At least there would have been the possibility of ambiguity as to who really was the "bad guy" in the conflict.

 

[Andor]

I know you are trolling, but I'll bite:

Once again, the only reason there is no Animating Dead, no Summon Monster/Nature's Ally, and no Familiars or Animal companions is because of the Economy of Actions.

Not really trolling. There's no reason to put the evil gods in the DMG as opposed to the PHB except a deliberate intention to steer games towards murder and theft for team good as opposed to team evil.

And failing to put some means to animate dead into the DMG at the very least leaves us with undead monsters with no origin. More fluffless crunch.