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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shayuri" data-source="post: 472217" data-attributes="member: 4936">On the nature of evilThe horror stories of paladins smiting evil kings and the general antipathy for Detect Evil and so on makes me feel compelled to note one or two things.I'll say up front that I have no particular attachment to alignments one way or the other, save for creatures from the Outer Planes which in many ways *embody* the alignments. And I think everyone's more or less in agreement so far with that, so I shan't belabor it.However, I think alignments can (and should) be used in a game without it becoming a bloodbath. People seem to equate "evil" alignments with "being involved in plots to end the world." Nothing could be farther from the truth.A schoolyard bully is evil, yes? He extorts money from the weak, hurting them and dominating them. Does the paladin slay this ten year old menace? <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    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Or what about the guardsman who does his job, and reasonably well, but also likes getting plastered and goes home to beat his wife up every night? One can have an evil alignment, yet NOT be a threat to the civilized world.One thing I was pleased to see in 3rd Ed was a far looser interpretation of alignments in the PHB, as well as clearer descriptions of what "evil" and "good" are. From those descriptions, we can see that any campaign world will be FULL of petty evils...much like the real world. A paladin may be gifted to see the stains on a man's soul, yes...but that doesn't give him the right to indiscriminately slaughter. The same for a cleric with that spell. Detect Evil can tell you "this person has committed sins, and repeatedly enough that his very spirit is smudged with them." It can't tell you what those sins are, nor what their magnitude is. Those are *very* important mitigators.Many of the complaints I've seen towards alignments and detection of such are, to my eyes, less complaints about the concepts, and more complaints about how those concepts are implemented.Remember always that a paladin stands at the crux of two equally powerful pulls. Goodness and Law.  For a paladin to strike down a KING without provocation, simply because he smelled a whiff of guilt on the man is a blatant violation of that second obligation. Not to mention the guard and the others that perished by his hand.A paladin that behaves that way is no better than the miscreants he opposes...and his Fall will leave him oh-so-vulnerable to the many, many enemies he will have earned...</blockquote>

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