Detecting Evil: Holy Smite & Holy Word

[The Giamarga]

Or misdirection.

The forbiddance spell also has the option of a password, btw. and there are other ways for overcoming it. (SR for example)

[cure]

I am very sympathetic to the comments of Rotipher. I would beg to differ only in respect to the suggestion that using spells to get after alignment would be wasting magic. If you have the magic - and the Church of the Lawgiver is frankly of an insanely high level for an otherwise low-level magic Nova Vaasa - you use it. What else is it there for? Let it be noted that Evil is a domain of the Lawgiver and is the recommended domain for its order of Teachers and the domain grants at 4th level Unholy Blight and at 7th level Blasphemy. You do not use this magic as a substitute for acts of devotion, but as a final check, just to be sure. Having a site off the beat and track yet close to hand that is protected with a Forbiddance spell is, at the very least, prudent.

Of course such a site may also be the death of any Lawful Neutral clergy who come upon it, to pick up the point of Mortavius. But it is clear that Lawful Neutral clerics are merely tolerated in the lower ranks, the better to rule the masses, and are excluded from the higher ranks. The Lawful Neutral cleric who prefers Tristen Hiregaard and the Cycle of the Stewarts to Othmar Bolshnik and his pretensions to the throne and consequently who aims to rise to a position where he can set aright the matter, will be beaten back into his place, which may well be six feet underground.

A Misdirection spell should (arguably) work but you have to have memorised it, you need someone/something of the acceptable alignment (constantly) at hand, you need to be given the chance to cast it, and you need a 7th level (for Unholy Blight) or an 11th level (for Fobiddance) cleric to fail his Will Save. Its duration of an hour per level is favourable at least. One could create/find an appropriately aligned item. But the Will Save is still hanging out there.

Nondetection also has a Will Save hanging out there. Worse, rather than defeating a Forbiddance spell, it may identify the bearer as having nothing in common with the appropriate alignment resulting in a possible 12d6 hit points of damage. Though I would not insist that the rules have to be read that way.

As to good religions, I agree with DeepShadow. If a good religion has a single preferred alignment, then high ranking clerics almost certainly are of it, and aligned Forbiddance spells in vaults or places of sanctuary are quite possible. Using such an area as a test of righteousness, with the option to refuse the test and (at the least) rise no higher in the religion, seems reasonable.

Carcer's point that one might be mistaken about one's own alignment is very much the point. The person who thinks he is the saviour of his Lawful Good church may be neutral or evil or chaotic in allowing his personal ambitions to get in the way of the good of the spiritual community and its god. Such a person needs to be stopped before it is too late, and the more so as he is blind to his own nature and cannot be made to see the error of his ways. (Outside of fantasy, it is very difficult to do evil on a wide scale without being convinced and convincing others that one is doing good. The category that covers the phenomena is ideology.)

Mortavius, I have been persuaded that fine distinctions of neutral vs good, as opposed to evil or not evil, are not generally possible for the reasons you give. Sometimes you get the sickness with Unholy Blight but sometimes you do not and judging relative degrees of hit point damage is a difficult art to say the least.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Because I was thinking about this, and ran across the old thread...


Cure, looking back with a grin on my face, this whole idea looks *really* silly. Why were we arguing about using 4th-level and higher spells to indirectly detect alignment when holy / unholy water, created at 1st-level, would do the same thing?

[Jakob]

Because I was thinking about this, and ran across the old thread...


Cure, looking back with a grin on my face, this whole idea looks *really* silly. Why were we arguing about using 4th-level and higher spells to indirectly detect alignment when holy / unholy water, created at 1st-level, would do the same thing?

Uh?
I thought holy/unholy water had effect only on outsiders and (in case of holy water) on undead...

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Wow, I was much more tired at work yesterday than I thought I was...

Anybody got a bonesaw? I need to get this foot out of my mouth...

[kottakinge]

Old topic but i was wondering the same thing as one of my player is a palladin an has holy smite.
IMC i decided that the ability always work as long as the palladin think the ennemy is evil.
There is no such way to detect alignement in RL, those spells simply don't work at all.
After all the palladin has a dread animal as a mount and he doesn't know it's evil no?

[Mangrum]

"Protection from Evil is said to work against those "known to be evil" but that is immediately qualified as "a very delicate matter best handled at the discretion of the DM."

This line was added by the developer after the chapter left my hands and, frankly, I think it's nonsensical rubbish.

[kottakinge]

This line was added by the developer after the chapter left my hands and, frankly, I think it's nonsensical rubbish

Ok John so what is ur opinion then?
What will you do about that?
I prefer to use the rule that in RL only darklords are aware of goodoers such the paladin, ordinary people cannot, by mundane or magical mean, detect the moral alignement.
What rule did u use IYC?

[Bluebomber4evr]

Futhermore detecting alignment does not reveal the degree of goodness or evil. A good character who detected the presence of evil would be no closer to knowing whether he was dealing with a murderer or a person who habitually lies about his past deeds in order to impress people. Both lying and murder can count as the actions of evil people, but few would say that lying is as a bad as killing someone. With that in mind, even knowing someone is evil doesn't tell you how should treat them.

Lying is chaotic behavior, not evil, so your example is flawed. The D&D rules state that evil is defined by the character's view on the value of life. Things like lying fall under the ethical axis of law/chaos.

[HuManBing]

Actually, lying could well be evil if it's done with a contempt for the value of trust, reliability, friendship, etc.

If it's done in an offhand manner with no malicious intent (such as selfishness in its purest form, i.e. without any intent of actually harming anybody but instead to just benefit yourself) then I can see it might be chaotic only.

If you lie because you like to see the confusion, anguish, and betrayed responses of those you lie to, then that's definitely evil.

Edit: Insofar as I understand the "reduce-all-humanity's-moral-spectrum-into-nine-squares" logic of D&D anyway.

[Sylaire]

I'd have to disagree. A specific lie can be an evil act, but "lying" as a general category is neither good nor evil when measured in AD&D alignment standards.

If it's done in an offhand manner with no malicious intent (such as selfishness in its purest form, i.e. without any intent of actually harming anybody but instead to just benefit yourself) then I can see it might be chaotic only.

To say nothing of "I've just lied to an innocent old woman that her dead son passed on fighting to save the town from demonic monsters rather than tell her to her face that her son was the one who summoned up said monsters," as a CG or even NG character would probably do without a second thought.

Meanwhile, many LE characters delight in manipulating and deceiving people by telling the exact, literal truth.

While I personally believe that "truth" is a Good Thing in real life, in AD&D's 3x3 grid, lying is a chaotic act. Whether it's a good/evil/neutral act on the moral axis depends on one's intent for the results of the lie, but by definition it's chaotic.

(Heh...that's just as I understand the nine-boxes-of-behavior...though in my experiences, that True Neutral box encompasses a lot of space, since it includes the Follow-the-Ways-of-Nature-Even-When-She's-A-Mean-Mother druid types, to say nothing of the We-Must-Preserve-The-Balance-So-Neither-Good-Nor-Evil-Gain-Too-Much-Power sorts that were so prevalent back in the original Gygax days.)

[Archedius]

I dunno- I don't like alignments in DnD and magic that goes off of them. Magic that distinguishes based on dogma is what I prefer. I don't have a real set of rules for how I would do this as non of my players like to be clerics and they don't encounter them much in an adversarial way.

[HuManBing]

I think part of this complexity of human morality is reflected in the entire Ravenloft system. It intentionally masks the good/evil axis because things aren't that clear cut. It's almost like saying "Okay, in this campaign setting, this sort of magic won't work because people behave in different ways here".

Azalin and Strahd both delivered their people from misrule and unified nations or otherwise imposed order. Both were ruthless leaders but reasonably lawful (or at least in Strahd's case, consistent). From a non-moralistic but purely objective viewpoint, a decent case could be made that their reigns were a "good" thing for the people (as in positive, not as in morally exemplary).

I suppose this is more a way for DMs to make characters that are complex, with some laudable traits and other not-so-laudable traits, without having to worry about how to justify that into the nine-square scheme of things.

As a single individual myself, I'd say in any given week I do things that could fulfill six or seven of the alignment squares myself.

[Sylaire]

I rather agree, H.B.; I can see how "Good" and "Evil" descriptors might apply to supernatural forces in a Ravenloft campaign, but never people. Frankly, the AD&D alignment system always seemed to me more about having the ultimate in shorthand (two letters ) personality descriptions than it was about a rule system--the logic always seemed to fall apart the instant it was applied to player characters (silliest magic item in the world: helm of opposite alignment...well, okay, silliest other than that girdle which switched the wearer's gender...once) with the possible exception of paladins (because Law and Good were so inherent in the character-class concept).

Most of the time alignment does provide a useful thumbnail, a building block if it were to develop a personality from. This is especially the case when you're dealing with a pre-published adventure ("I try to bribe the city guard with a cut of the take for letting the party get away with taking out the crime-boss." *DM notes that the guard captain is aligned LN* "The guard is not convinced by your arguments that you were serving the greater good and insulted by your bribe. He orders his men to 'arrest the vigilantes!'") In a setting like Ravenloft, where it's more usual to develop characters from their personality first, usually with a well-developed history, alignment becomes irrelevant from a story perspective and disruptive from a mechanics perspective.

Truthfully, it's a good rule of thumb whenever you're playing in Ravenloft that if a game mechanics debate begins, you're heading off down a wrong path.

[HuManBing]

As a single individual myself, I'd say in any given week I do things that could fulfill six or seven of the alignment squares myself.

...and of course married individuals probably do all nine alignment squares in the course of a week.

And I would agree with you, Sylaire, about the difficulties of incorporating alignment as a hard-and-fast separator for things like magical items and spell effects, etc.

The Girdle of Sex Change (or possibly "Femininity/Masculinity") is actually in my opinion slightly LESS artificial and clumsy sounding than the Helm of Opposite alignment. Sex is, at least, tangible and visible. (And if you're like me and you live next door to a noisy couple, it's clearly audible too. The swine.) Alignment? Ehhh... not so much, as Jon Stewart might say.

I kind of view alignment as a diamond, with LG at the top, and then LN and NG a step below, then LE, TN, and CG a step below that.

Then on the nether side you have NE and CN, and finally the most corrupt and unpredictable alignment is CE at the bottom.

LE people are those who are constrained by law from reaching their full potential to be destructive. NE strikes me as the ultimate in selfishness and "take care of number one". CE strikes me as being one step even further in depravity than NE - a CE person might actually take calculated risks to his own safety just to throw a spanner in the works of a social order.

To use a slightly controversial example, say somebody sneaks a clockwork bomb into Martira Bay and detonates it.

The act is clearly evil. It's killing a load of people he doesn't know for no particular justification.

If he's doing it because he's part of a church that has a clear edict that justifies this act, then it's still evil, but if the individual genuinely lives by the church's code, then he's lawful. This is even more strongly shown if he would never do something that would actually benefit him if the church forbids it (e.g. sleep with an unmarried woman or steal money he didn't earn).

If he's doing it because he wants to stop Martira Bay's trade entirely and thus profit handsomely from his own trading company, then that's Neutral Evil. The act itself is outside of the law, so it can't be lawful, and it's destructive and there is no justification on a personal level as to killing those people, so it's evil. However, the benefits to this person are clear. So the fact that he does it makes sense from a cost-benefit utilitarian viewpoint, even if the morality and axiomatic axes do not support it.

Somebody who does it for no personal gain, with no legal code (internal or otherwise) to justify it, and who does it merely to sow chaos and destruction, is clearly chaotic evil.

I'd argue that CE is a very hard alignment to consistently follow, in the same way (and for much the same reasons) as LG is a hard alignment to consistently follow. In fact, I'd argue it is at a basic level contrary to social intercourse itself, and so the concept of a CE society is something of a contradiction in terms.

You can see the game designers getting their panties in a twist when they try to create an "order" or "society" for supposedly CE creatures like drow and Tanar'ri. These creatures are so evil and antisocial that to me their societies seem under great stress and likely to splinter at any given time.

A LE society can exist fairly smoothly - everybody is out for themselves but will observe laws, so there is an objective norm of behavior that is at least reasonably expected.

A NE society no longer has the exterior laws to follow, but there is the law of the selfish preservation to guide others. The norm of behavior is more subjective than in a LE society, but it's still there and if everybody is out looking out for themselves and not extending anything further than that, there's a good chance you can figure out a niche of your own and fight to defend it ferociously, to the point that it's not worth it for others to try to transgress on your turf.

A CE society doesn't even have that. Any standard of behavior is shifting and intangible. When individuals don't display objectively observable behavior patterns, or even go out of their way to betray their previous patterns of behavior, a neighbor has no idea what the other person will do. Under these stresses and strains, a CE society struggles to grow beyond a level where each person knows each other person by face. Once you have to deal with people you've never met before and you have no behavioral yardstick to measure it by, society falls apart and splinters into small groups who know each other on an individual level.

You can see even Ravenloft's designers had trouble with this. In his earlier incarnations, Strahd was Chaotic Evil - but that doesn't make for a very sympathetic villain at all. This is especially true for Ravenloft, where each major villain needs something about them that the PCs can look at and identify with.

And of course once the "noble general" backstory came into being, CE didn't work at all.