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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Philip" data-source="post: 1238396" data-attributes="member: 10993">Thanx for all the responses, I have tried to summarize the reasons that use of poison is evil below:1. It does not discriminate between friend and foe.Unless someone treats a poison with great care it can hurt innocents. The stronger the poison, the greater the risk. In fact: the careless use of poison is evil, not the poison itself. In a fantasy setting this should be the same for spells like Fireball. Even then, as some posters indicated, its actually more chaotic than evil.2. It inflicts sufferingUsing a poison that causes someone to suffer needlessly is evil. But this is no different from like letting anyone suffer needlessly from anything else, like the blow of a sword or bite of a Melf's Acid Arrow. BTW, does this imply that Paladins should coup-de-grace fallen opponents at the earliest opportunity (put them out of their suffering, so to speak)?3. It is dishonorable. It is against the Paladin's code because it doesn't give an opponent 'a fair chance'. I think this school of thought is closely tied to the notion of chivalry, where you didn't attack an unarmed opponent, didn't attack from suprise and gave your opponent a chance to engage in combat. I think this only applied to upper class fights, not combat with commoners, let alone infidels. I certainly don't think it would apply to many monsters. Even then, its more chaotic than evil, because one breaks an unspoken code of conduct.4. It is unbalancingThis is a holdover from earlier editions of the game, where poisons were not balanced against other means of killing, providing a role-playing counter balance to its unlimited use by PCs. This is no longer true in 3rd edition.All in all, I think that when put to careful use against a selection of opponents, it wouldn't be evil for a Paladin to use it.</blockquote>

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