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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 1758452" data-attributes="member: 5143">One thing you should consider is that in 3.0, all the mindless undead were all neutral.  The designers felt as you did, they didn't have enough will to be evil, they couldn't decide to be.However, I believe players were complaining about the fact that their spells that smited evil, did more damage to evil, etc. didn't work on skeletons and zombies.  Paladins everywhere were wondering why, when the classic fight in literature was the being of good against an army of mindless, walking dead, did their smite evil not work on them.Osiris and the greater mummy are both pretty much exceptions for the same reason: There still is a lingering concept (part of the reason this thread exists) of undead that are that way for a holy purpose.  When the BoED came out, someone decided to solve this by making the deathless type so that they could keep undead evil.  I believe this likely applies to the gravecrawler as well, but I can't remember.Yes, because of issues beyond the bounds of the books themselves, there are   problems with the logic at certain points.  When you have 4 different people who are writing a book, one of which may believe as you do and a couple more who believe as I do, then you tend to get parts of books that were written by one person ending up one way, and others ending up another.A good example of this is the planes.  They used to have a unifying reason for being there.  Each campaign world in second edition was part of the cosmology.  Some information about some of the old D&D worlds still being in existance in the 3rd Ed cosmology were there, despite the fact that they aren't supposed to anymore.  This was discussed by Erik Mona from Dragon Magazine recently.  He mentioned that there was unlikely to be any more references to the Spelljammer, despite the fact that one slipped into the Manual of the Planes.  It was one authors attempt to make D&D more like he wanted it than the "default" setting.What it comes down to right now, is due to game balance reasons(and likely disagreements between designers), the designers didn't make everything that used negative energy evil.  But they instead HINTED at in being evil, as things that used it were generally evil.  Monte, when he wrote the BoVD said that for the books to make logical sense, one would have to turn the spells that used negative energy ALL to use the [evil] descriptor.  Of course, I'm guessing there was enough disagreement amongst others at WoTC that it didn't make it into 3.5 edition.I understand wanting some logic.  Really, there are only two or three solutions to make it internally consistant:Say that EVIL exists and that negative energy is a form of it.  Then, you'll have to change the rest of the spells that use negative energy to have the [evil] descriptor and probably give the negative energy plane a evil alignment as well.  You'll also need to change all undead to evil aligned from older books. Another possibility is that negative energy isn't evil at all, and since mindless undead can't commit evil acts, that puts them firmly back in the neutral alignment.  You can also likely remove [evil] from Animate Dead.The last choice is that the mismatch of rules somehow makes sense and it is only because zombies and skeletons are evil that creating them is evil.  Perhaps it is because their soul is being enslaved or any other number of reasons not written in the book.  It could just be that the gods have their own, highly subjective and politcal reasons why one thing is innately evil and another isn't.It isn't a matter of no logic existing, just no logic being written in the book.  Being creative, I can come up with a number of different reasons (all logical) WHY the book can be right AND make sense.</blockquote>

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