Being Good in D&D: this one's for you, K and Frank

[tzor]

1189423309[/unixtime]]If motives are what matters, then how does anything that is mindless have an alignment other than neutral?

You raise a good point but I would take it one step beyond (just a few seconds before I take it one step backwards). A mindless anything cannot have an alignment at all. It's alignment should be "-".

So let's think of a mindless something as merely a tool. Can a tool be "evil?" Yes, but not in the sense it has an evil alignmet. A tool can be desiged to be the extension of the will of the creator. Evil creators might make tools that are etensions of the creator's evil will. So just like you can have a magic item that is [evil] you can have a creature be [evil] while not per se having an evil alignment.

Example: Suppose I create a skeleton and give it the command "kill all humans." (Assume for the moment I'm not human otherwise it's going to try to kill me right on the spot.) Clearly it's not killing humans for its own personal gain, it's killing humans because I commanded it to do so. The motives are in fact evil ... but they are my motives, not the tool that I have created.

(This of course avoids the standard argument that undead creatures somehow get "evil cooties" because the process of creating undead is evil. That's plain bullshit, and I won't even try to rationalize that stupid idea. Consider Frankenstien's Monster in Van Helsing. The church tried to use this same argument to justify why they wanted Van Helsing to destroy the monster, but Van Helsing saw through the fallicy and realized it is how someone is not how they were created that either justifies or condemns them and thus he allowed the monster to escape.)

[Fuzzy_logic]

Actually, I've always rather liked the "evil cooties" theory.

It doesn't mean that skeletons are *bad* or even morally weak. It just means Detect Evil picks them up and Holy Smite nukes them.

My theory is that Evil is an invisible substance that accumulates over time on people who do evil deeds, and *also* happens to to get splashed everywhere when Animating Dead, and also happens to be found in Tiefling blood.

[CalibronXXX]

So alignment is like karma or something?

[Cielingcat]

No, more like heavy metals or something.

[JonSetanta]

So one can get a chelation to remove Evil haha

[CalibronXXX]

If by chelation you mean atonement then yes.

[Koumei]

This would also explain the deformities (and possible death) caused by taint. Evil is just a heavy metal.

Which means Detect Evil very well might be radioactive, like an X-Ray.

[Crissa]

An X-ray is a lamp. A radiation detector is not.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

Nonono, Evil isn't radiation, it's a metal. You use the X-Ray to pick up the amounts of Evil they have inside them (okay, I don't know how it's showing you the final results, maybe it also prints them out, providing you with trace amounts of silver you can cash in every time you use it).

But would this mean that Good is radioactive? Thus, it builds up in you so that Detect Good (a radiation detector) pings?

This is such an awesome quirk to put into a setting.

"There are a bunch of goblins. They all look really dead."
"Detect Good!"
*that ticking/scratching sound associated with Red-detectors*
"Shit, there was a Holy Word dropped, quick, we need to get scrubbed down!"

[tzor]

1189454052[/unixtime]]It doesn't mean that skeletons are *bad* or even morally weak. It just means Detect Evil picks them up and Holy Smite nukes them.

You don't need alignment for the former, while the later may be open to question. Let's consider the poor humble skeleton.

Alignment: Always neutral evil

Detect Evil: You can sense the presence of evil.

Undead have their own line on the Detect Evil, they always detect as evil based on their HD. We can assume that if you detect evil, reguardless of the alignment you have evil.

"Once per day, a paladin may attempt to smite evil with one normal melee attack. She adds her Charisma bonus (if any) to her attack roll and deals 1 extra point of damage per paladin level. If the paladin accidentally smites a creature that is not evil, the smite has no effect, but the ability is still used up for that day."

A skeleton could easily have an alignment of - and still work with detect and smite. Why should we be making a decision on whether or not it is chaotic or lawful because we want it to be evil. The skeleton is always neutral evil, meaning that is in the middle of the lawful chaos scale. Does that mean that if it feels like it, a skeleton might not follow the commands of its creator?

[CalibronXXX]

If, as a mindless creature with no will of its own, it "feels like" doing something other than what it's commanded, then sure.

[Crissa]

Sometimes a PC 'feels like' not doing what you told it to do.

But usually that's because the 'telling' part fouled up somewhere.

Do Skeletons only have a 50% reliability rating?

-Crissa