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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4292752" data-attributes="member: 47776">Yes.  We are in agreement.  Animating dead is evil.  Evil can trivially turned towards harmlessness and be beneficial for all sentient life.  Holy Word is good.  Good can be trivially turned toward the callous murder of innocents.  Ergo, the planar energies of good and evil do not necessarily correspond to actual moral action.  It is certainly true that in most cases, Good magics lend themselves towards morally desired actions, and that Evil magics lend themselves towards morally undesired actions, but most cases is not sufficent to make blanket statements.  Most people running around waving an axe wildly and shouting are evil; this does not invalidate the existence of CG barbarian PCs.  Most necromancers call forth dark, unnatural things from formerly-human remains for purposes of conquest and slaughter; some call forth dark, unnatural things from animal corpses and use said things to further the cause of good.Another example: Some laws are pretty much universally agreed to be good laws.  (The illegality of theft and murder, for example.) Other laws are not so recognized, and exist as laws only because no one's bothered to strike them down.  (Laws against selling alcohol on Sunday, just as an example.)  In such a system, you can't claim "That woman is a lawbreaker!" and expect people to assume that the laws she has violated are the good ones; it does not necessarily follow that a willingness to break arbitrary laws implies a willingness to break the good ones.  So, yes, in the D&D-verse, you get moral spells; you also get a lot of people looking at what an absolute, arbitrary morality actually implies about the universe, and marking off the various aligned planes as potential post-mortem retirement homes as such a consequence.</blockquote>

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