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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1114798" data-attributes="member: 3146">Evil people don't always find their way to the top IRL either. I don't see any need to assume that they will ALWAYS find their way to the top in D&D's magical feudalism. Of course, that doesn't mean that there won't be any evil people at the top either.As for your suggestion, I think that it's very good. (It's also one of the reasons I much prefer the current Detect Evil rules to the "only evil outsiders and clerics" interpretation--the current version indicates that the town "seamstress" might be worth investigating; the "evil clerics and outsiders only" interpretation tells you that she's a succubus or evil high priest"). However, I think you exagerate the effectiveness of magically informed intervention.This is for several reasons. First, you seem to assume a Christian/Jewish (and possibly Islamic) approach to the worship of good deities--the majority of the deities worshippers gather in a single location to worship once a set number of times per week. This may or may not be justified. If, however, the worship of those deities is less communal--people stop by the shrine individually to make offerings, make offerings in shrines in their homes and only occasionally going to the temple with their family for special ceremonies, and/or celebrating in large public gatherings with the whole city, the population would probably not be detectable within the duration of the Detect Evil spells reasonably available to a temple not composed of paladins. For large public gatherings, it is likely that the crowd would be too vast for Detect Evil to cover all of the crowd and/or too densely packed to identify the individuals radiating evil.Second, the worship of good deities is somewhat self-selecting and many neutral (and possibly even some evil) deities are followed in D&D cities. So, many of the people who would radiate evil would either not be present where their evil might be detected or (in a genuinely polytheistic society where you offer prayers to Pelor for good weather and then to Hextor to defend your city) might well have their evil tendencies reinforced in another venue elsewhere.Thirdly, I think it's important to realize that magical detection and intervention would not represent a new element of society but would rather expand an existing one. It's not uncommon for RL religious leaders to recognize when a member of the community is slipping into sin and talk to them. (Lots of people do so without being noticed or ignore their counsel). Detecting evil would mean that fewer people fell through the cracks ("that guy back there? I don't know him; I don't think anyone does. So if someone needed to talk to him, nobody would know). Reliance upon detecting evil, however, would potentially make such intervention less effective as it's unlikely that the man who's starting to fall (thinking about cheating on his wife, or embezzling "only a little bit which I'll pay back when I've got the money", or just took a single bribe to find no suspect in a mob hit) will radiate evil until the choices he's beginning to make harden into habits. If magical detection of evil were the primary way to determine who to talk to, intervention would only occur in the late (and potentially more difficult) cases. Detecting Good (and noticing when someone who used to be good no longer radiated it) might actually be more useful when evaluating the moral health of a worshipping community.For that matter, it also assumes that people would actually listen to the cleric/paladins. One area where I imagine that Detect Evil (and Law/Chaos) would be used would be in evaluating suitors for marriage. Yet, IRL, plenty of people ignore sound advice and obvious warnings ("S/he's no good because x, y, z") from parents and clergy. I don't see that "because he radiates faint chaos/evil" would be much more convincing than "because s/he is a liar/has a criminal record/is in a gang/doesn't share your beliefs and priorities."For those reasons, I don't think that Detect Evil is likely to make as big a difference to the amount of evil in a community as you seem to believe--the difference would likely be incremental and local in nature rather than representing some kind of paradigm shift.</blockquote>

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