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<blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 2767615" data-attributes="member: 198">You're correct. People who know that the character is a paladin and know about the detect evil ability and how it functions may work out what he is doing, but most people won't.Why do you think it may cause problems in the future? Detect evil as written is much less useful for getting valid information than many people think. For example, consider the issue of an aura's strength. A Ftr10 chaotic evil mass murderer detects as faintly evil. A 6 HD undead of any alignment detects as moderately evil. And a lawful neutral Clr5 of a LE deity detects as strongly evil&nbsp; (or overwhelming evil at Clr11). So detect evil can actually be dead wrong in detecting someone's alignment.Plus there are a large number of magical ways to fool detect evil. Undetectable Alignment, for example, lasts 24 hrs and is only a 1st/2nd lvl.Lastly, a significant number of people are evil, so a paladin using detect evil in any social setting will pick up a number of auras. Can he smite them all or haul them off to jail or follow them all around to see what they're doing? Nope. Detect evil as written leads to only one thing for paladins - lots and lots of cynicism <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="shilsen, post: 2767615, member: 198"] You're correct. People who know that the character is a paladin and know about the [I]detect evil[/I] ability and how it functions may work out what he is doing, but most people won't. Why do you think it may cause problems in the future? [I]Detect evil[/I] as written is much less useful for getting valid information than many people think. For example, consider the issue of an aura's strength. A Ftr10 chaotic evil mass murderer detects as faintly evil. A 6 HD undead of any alignment detects as moderately evil. And a lawful neutral Clr5 of a LE deity detects as strongly evil (or overwhelming evil at Clr11). So [I]detect evil[/I] can actually be dead wrong in detecting someone's alignment. Plus there are a large number of magical ways to fool [I]detect evil[/I]. Undetectable Alignment, for example, lasts 24 hrs and is only a 1st/2nd lvl. Lastly, a significant number of people are evil, so a paladin using [I]detect evil[/I] in any social setting will pick up a number of auras. Can he smite them all or haul them off to jail or follow them all around to see what they're doing? Nope. [I]Detect evil[/I] as written leads to only one thing for paladins - lots and lots of cynicism :) [/QUOTE]

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