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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9223821" data-attributes="member: 7035894">As I posted many pages ago, the moral rightness or wrongness of an act ultimately depends on context (apologies to Immanuel Kant). If animating corpses is going to be hurtful to people, that should be taken into account, and if your character is indifferent to the suffering caused to others, then they seem like a pretty nasty character.But given that we are playing a fantasy imagination game, I don't understand why we should have to shackle ourselves to real world assumptions about what is right or wrong. I can easily imagine a culture in which animating corpses is a sign of respect, similar to organ donation in our own culture. For instance, take that "evil" warlord above who is using zombies so that his people are spared the horrors of war. It is not hard for me to imagine a culture where people donate their bodies after death for just such purposes, reasoning that they no longer have a use for it, and it can still help their loved ones. Sign me up! (IRL, I not only am registered as an organ donor, I have it tattooed onto my body, inside a recycle symbol. It saves lives! Register to donate yours!).And there are infinite other possible scenarios. Like, plasmoids are unicellular sapient entities. I can't imagine that their conception of life, death, and the ethics thereof would resemble mine in the least. So why do we want to impose arbitrary limits on our imagination game? If the folks at the table are all having fun, then it's all good.Edit: And to respond to Snarf's position: why do we need the game rules to legislate the morality of our fictional worlds? How does that improve the game? D&D plays just fine without ever mentioning alignments. Better, even, because players have to think about their character's moral actions in context.Edit continued: The warlord example above is what bugs me about writing alignment into the game, as if everyone can be reduced to inherent qualities. Why the assumption that a warlord using undead has to be evil? The game conditions us to make that assumption, but to me that just exposes the alignment system for what it always has been: an attempt to legislate one one guy's morality and limit our imaginations. Maybe Gary Gygax couldn't imagine a world in which animating dead wasn't inherently evil. But I can.</blockquote>

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