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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1811894" data-attributes="member: 5171">Or in the real world.  Harmful only indicates the potential to be evil.  It's the degree of harm compared to the degree of extenuating circumstances.I'd disagree on multiple levels here:1) It could be evil in a D&D world.  Your fighter could have challenged this guy to a duel, knowing that he has no choice but to accept, and also knowing that the fighter outclasses him with room to spare.  This essentially becomes legalized murder, if the court allows duels.  "Goading the supporting character into a duel that he can't win, and then killing him in the duel, so as to avoid murder charges" is an evil-person trick used several times in fiction.2) It could be not-evil in real-life.  A boxing match where somebody accidentally gets killed is a legalized duel, albeit with money rather than honor at stake.  That's harmful, but not willingly or knowingly undertaken by the duelist.Harmful to the person, but the harm is outweighed by the mitigating factor that you're going to starve to death if you don't do that, and you didn't know that the dog didn't belong to an already-dead plague victim.  Turn "pet dog" into "pet cow" and this isn't even distasteful, just an unpleasant and unfortunate turn of events -- because of the extenuating circumstances mitigating the degree of evil associated with an admittedly harmful act.Tweaking the nose of a supervillain is almost never evil.  On the other hand, if a hero breaks into the supervillain's lab, sees a picture of the supervillain and his family, breaks the picture, and grinds it under his heel while saying, "How's it feel to have something of yours damaged?", I'd argue that the hero is starting to cross that fine line in his anger.  The difference here is the degree of harm being inflicted.  (And yeah, if the mug were a handmade mug by the supervillain's dead daughter, the only thing he has to remember her by, and the hero knew that and broke the mug on purpose just to hurt the supervillain, I'd say that is coming closer to malice, not tweaking.)Well, "Degree of harm knowingly and willfully inflicted, compared to any extenuating circumstances that might exist for that action" seems like a start.  I wholeheartedly agree that it's not cut and dried.</blockquote>

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