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<blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 9221674" data-attributes="member: 10531">In the Doylist sense, animate dead is something only evil characters frequently do because &quot;PC sends his zombie horde to kill everything in the next room of the dungeon, animates the corpses to renew his force, and repeats&quot; is an inherently boring &quot;adventure&quot;, while &quot;PCs have to fight through the hordes of the animated dead to reach the evil necromancer&quot; is not.In the Watsonian sense, in 5e animate dead is a non-good act that only evil characters frequently do because creating homicidal maniacs to walk the world is at best &quot;Well, if we're very careful, we can use these in a way that serves the greater good&quot;, and the more you do it, the harder it is to be &quot;very careful&quot;.So, the reason skeletons and zombies were made homicidal maniacs (first in Pathfinder 1e, and then in D&amp;D 5) was to shut down what was then decades of Watsonian arguments in favor of it being okay to animate skeletons, in order to preserve the Doylist purpose of the restriction. If people manage to successfully argue that making homicidal maniacs isn't a non-good act only frequently done by evil characters, what will happen is that the next version of animate dead will make the spell more evil in order to serve the Doylist end.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="see, post: 9221674, member: 10531"] In the Doylist sense, [I]animate dead[/I] is something only evil characters frequently do because "PC sends his zombie horde to kill everything in the next room of the dungeon, animates the corpses to renew his force, and repeats" is an inherently boring "adventure", while "PCs have to fight through the hordes of the animated dead to reach the evil necromancer" is not. In the Watsonian sense, in 5e [I]animate dead[/I] is a non-good act that only evil characters frequently do because creating homicidal maniacs to walk the world is [I]at best[/I] "Well, if we're very careful, we can use these in a way that serves the greater good", and the more you do it, the harder it is to be "very careful". So, the reason skeletons and zombies were made homicidal maniacs (first in Pathfinder 1e, and then in D&D 5) was to shut down what was then decades of Watsonian arguments in favor of it being okay to animate skeletons, in order to preserve the Doylist purpose of the restriction. If people manage to successfully argue that making homicidal maniacs isn't a non-good act only frequently done by evil characters, what will happen is that the [B]next[/B] version of [I]animate dead[/I] will make the spell [B]more evil[/B] in order to serve the Doylist end. [/QUOTE]

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