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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ashrym" data-source="post: 9190510" data-attributes="member: 6750235">Open casket funerals are normal so we can see the deceased person and say our goodbyes.  That common practice is very much about looking at "a corpse" and remembering the person.  The reason I used "a corpse" in quotations is because this is how we dehumanize a person within our language structure.  In the case of an imprisoned person we would use words like criminal or inmate or prisoner.Dehumanization is in how we use that language.  The parallel isn't in the necromancy itself, it's in the language and results.<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-serpentine-path/202304/do-you-see-dead-people-sensory-experiences-in" target="_blank">Modern psychology</a> also demonstrates the attachment of the living people associated with the deceased person after that person has become "a corpse".  Reducing the deceased person to "a corpse" invalidates the emotions of the people associated with that person in life.I didn't say this applied specifically to necromancy.  I said the results parallel something that exists IRL.  Reducing a person to a statistic is also invalidating.  That's not to say statistics aren't useful in demonstrating scope or impact, or compartmentalizing a difficult subject, but it's still ultimately reducing a person to a number.  I'm not going to get deeper into that here.  PM me if you want more information on statistics as they relate to this topic an I will give IRL examples.  The concern would be that each one of those statistics is/was still a person.Technically is the best kind of accurate? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> It is accurate.  This gets back to the parallel.  In that flow the deceased person was always a person and by reducing them to "a corpse" we're invalidating the memory of that person.  In the flow I'm discussing we have a person -> suspect -> convict when words like convict are meant to dehumanize the person.  That dehumanization makes what happens to imprisoned people more acceptable.  Getting further into this discussion gets into punitive justice and labor exploitation as opposed to restorative justice and preventative social programs, which is why I don't want to spend a lot of time on the topic.  Going deeper in that direction moves away from discussing the morality and ethics of magic in DnD.  ;-)I'm not sure why you think this.  How the deceased person died isn't relevant to being used as a resource for free labor.  The actual question is whether or not we consider this labor.Free labor so wealthy people can become more wealthy by exploiting that free labor is why this is similar to the prison industrial complex.  If we are looking at a deceased person as the remnants of the person they once were working not for themselves or for their families, but for the benefit of the economy then we have a dehumanized labor force being used as that unpaid labor.If someone were to use the corpse of someone I cared about so that they can make money and I found out about it I would be upset.Okay, let's talk about consent?  No one mentioned it in regard to this example until you brought it up.  I am an organ donor and consent has been given to my body after I pass.  I never said voluntarily signing our bodies to science mirrored the prison industrial complex.  The difference is in the use of the bodies of the deceased persons involved so it's a false equivalent.However, if my fighter says to your wizard "if I die you have my permission to animate my body and save yourself" then consent has been given.  If someone walks into a graveyard and starts animating then how was consent obtained?  The icky part comes from a sense of entitlement to that person's body after they've passed without gaining that consent.  ;-)We could absolutely change the narrative by offering an upfront pay to the living person for service of their body after they become deceased for a specified amount of time for a specified purpose.  At that point both parties have the opportunity to benefit under a contract.  At that point we've also moved away from the prison industrial complex comparison.  We're still at my point on perspective and context.  To be clear, my comparison was not to say necromancy is necessarily "bad" other than game references to it.  The example had given the impression of entitlement to the remains of deceased people by dehumanizing them so that they could be used as unpaid labor.  In a game it's easy to distance ourselves from the reality of those deceased people, but I don't agree than we realistically would IRL.</blockquote>

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