1) Forgotten Realms (Before the Spellplague and before they killed Eilistraee and so many others.)
Not sure what swords of dubtlety are, but is the high AC you have from Rogue class features, or GP? I can't think of any besides the Offensive Defense talent, and even that isn't much. Also, how is the lay of the map during your combats? Are there a lot of small rooms where full attacks are easy to come by? He means swords of subtlety.
Mainly because a cleric still worships another deity. It is weird to me that you could worship yourself but I guess it could happen. Well, I wouldn't consider that case to be "worshipping" yourself but just being able to power your own divine spells. Also it would be a bit boring if clerics became copies of their gods, I'd prefer it like with Tempus and the Red Knight, that you become an exarch of your god and take care of parts of his portfolio he neglects.
My knee-jerk reaction: I STILL HAVE TO WAIT THREE THRIGGIN' DAYS UNTIL I CAN DOWNLOAD IT!
That would be an instant buy for me. The whole lack of templates (and especially half-dragons) made me abandon D&D 4E, and a few days ago I looked at Darken by Kate Ashwin again and really started missing the good old dragon/humanoid hybrids. The advanced race guide wasn't much help unfortunately.
If I learned anything from playing Skyrim it's that the easiest way to fix any power problem rogues might have is simply removing the 30 ft. range limit on sneak attack. :D
*headdesk* Where does that idea that chaotic good is the worst good come from? Just because axiomatic creatures are more prettyful than anarchic ones? Torture is never a good act and most certainly not a chaotic one. Heck, for the alignment that "hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do." torture should be among the most hated things ever.
So sitting on ones hands, when torturing a vile piece of undead garbage could save hundred or thousands of innocent lives. In fact a paladin that failed to save these innocents could/should face considerable repercussions from society for his failure to act. A social upheaval could lead to persecution of the paladins deity, a justifiable persecution. Okay, first of all it doesn't matter what kind of creature type you are. If you can be tortured doing so is evil. That this is about an undead is just a cheap excuse, living people can be far worse monsters than vampires. Now let's assume the PCs were running against the clock to stop the boss from extinguishing the sun forever (I've seen too many Dawnguard trailers) even though the OP didn't write anything about that. That's the point where you send the paladin away with someone away to go scouting. Then you start to threaten your prisoner (fun fact, torture is only bonuses on an intimidate check, something the inquisitor has as a class feature and that you can get with charisma buff spells etc.). You can explain to him that he can either tell you where his boss is, and live on in a world with normal day/night cycle until he crosses a vampire hunter or that there is a special reason that you didn't want your paladin here and it's not that he would disapprove of a deal with a vampire. Now if he absolutely didn't get the hint I would start using healing magic on him (no dismemberment, only stuff that can be reversed with a little bit of negative energy). And if that doesn't work threaten to kill him with sufficient force to back up that threat.Would that be an evil act? Most definitely. Would it shift my alignment? I hope not, in case it does I would seek out a priest of a good deity to atone. What does that make me? Someone who should not play a paladin or take exalted feats for the shiny benefits. I personally couldn't stand there and do nothing because some uptight artificial moral code/divine edict. I'd be driving wooden stakes into every vital organ of that blood sucker in reverse alphabetical order while smacking it along the side the head with a braid of garlic. And if that didn't get it talking I'd move on to water boarding, with holy water. Sooo, you would try to make him talk by burning off his face and tongue? Very smart....
Say you really were good, and somebody claimed you were evil from their detect spell. This means that... [list] All of these are as 'true' to you if you ARE evil and don't realise it as they are if you are not. Yeah, if you don't mind your angels smelling like brimstone and looking like they want to bite your head off. Most of you seem to be saying the depictions in the book are the only examples. That is false. Evil can simply represent extreme apathy. While good can be extreme empathy. Law and chaos are really the only ones that are restrictive and that is only if taken at face value like what most people seem to do. In the end alignment is superficial and is use as a general first glance of a person. It doesn't mean a CE wizard has to be a sadistic bastard. It could simply mean he only cares about himself and does everything on impulse. Sorry, but where are you pulling that from? What you describe is (chaotic) neutrality. Evil is about harming others either for personal gain or fun, good is about helping others out of the goodness of your heart, neutrality is what is between those two. I was using Kore as an example of how your character could be. No offense to Tarol Hunt intended but so far Kore has been a massively house-ruled boogeyman. And evil and good are subjective. As has been said by others. Where e'er e one person sees order another sees oppression. You are forgetting the alignments are guidelines not rules. Okay, let's roll with that for a while. I'm playing a paladin. Since alignment is completely subjective I can use smite evil on whoever I want, because if I say they are evil they are. I also claim that murder, rape, torture and slavery are all completely good acts that don't make me lose my powers. After all whatever I do must be good, I'm a paladin. Then a paladin who thinks that rape, torture and slavery are all wrong and that you have to kill everything and everybody as quickly as possible attacks you for being evil. Now can they both smite each other? They see each other as evil. But they see themselves as lawful good.O_O Sorry, but claiming that alignment in Pathfinder is subjective is complete and utter crap. Pathfinder is not Dragon Age. Alignment is a tool for developing your character's identity—it is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two characters of the same alignment can still be quite different from each other. Who claimed anything different? However people of the same alignment can ACT differently within reason (there's no such thing as a "good torturer" or "good rapist") however, they are SMOTE the same. King Arthur and King Richard were meant to be paragons something every Christian was supposed to aim to be. By definition King Richard was a paladin even by PF standards. To his people he was the Paragon of Law & Good. The slaves being white is meant to confer the fact that because of this they were over looked as being soldiers. George Washington later in the war made a army consisting purely of slaves who were forced into battle by their masters. Where do you get the idea that the (medieval) christian church was/is good? Because they say so? Sorry, guys in armor with swords are nothing like what a Christian should be like. The Bible: "And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also." The Crusaders: "Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His." Quite simply put, if the christian god would have granted spells to his priests and knights he definitely would not be seated in the Seven Heavens of Celestia or whatever the Pathfinder equivalent is now.
Thanks, sometimes reading the forums makes me doubt my sanity.
Well, he has cast a spell and Ears' special axe that can't affect paladins doesn't work on him, and it is acknowledged by Young-and-Beautiful's corpse that he is somehow "cursed" in a way that he can't lose his powers.
It does. Because killing innocents is always evil. It's evil to kill someone for having an evil alignment. It's also evil to kill someone for having a dragon ancestor 20 generations ago. While he THINKS that he is doing the right thing he isn't. Tieflings, dhampirs, half-dragons and sorcerers with their bloodlines all are born with the ability to chose between good and evil. The self-image of the aasimar does in no way affect that he will ultimately go to hell.
That is until the party Rogue started severing his digits, plucked his right eye out of socket and made him eat it and finally they resorted to torturing him to near death with positive energy (the min-maxing PCs used Selective Spell with Antimagic Field). Eventually he disclosed the location of his master after having lost a hand, an eye and both feet and being ritualistically tortured for a few hours. Okay, first of all that's not evil anymore, that's VILE. The Book of Vile Darkness made it pretty clear that ALL torture is evil. However mutilating a sentient being and feeding its own body parts to it goes far beyond the inflicting of pain to obtain information. It's just sick and would with me as the DM lead to immediate alignment readjustment and in case of a paladin a fall that would ram him into the ground. He could become an anti-paladin right away. The party melee unceremoniously decapitated the magus the same way they had his vampiric predecessor. (The players lied and said they would spare him if he sold his master out) For the Paladin's part, he virulently hates undead and has no interest in "redeeming" them, as his deity regards undead as abominations that are to be slaughtered on sight. Yeah, I get the feeling he took on the wrong job. It's nice that his deity feels that way, but being a paladin is in a lot of cases about being holier than your deity. If you don't feel up to that become a cleric or an inquisitor. Paladins are not allowed to act evil at all.
If you've ever read any of the half decent FR novels or even Dragonlance, you'll find that no matter what character you're talking about, whether it's someone as sainted as Sturm Brightblade, or as twistedly evil as Manshoon, you'll never see them refer to themselves or anyone else by an alignment table. They may describe themselves or others as evil or good, tyrannical, or benevolent, but those in qualitative terms. Don't be mad, but that seems mostly lazy to me. The authors simply don't want to bother with the alignment system. How exactly would you explain how an axiomatic weapon works? How the difference between a hound archon and an agathion? Why would a succubus and an erinyes try to kill each other? All of that is part of the game world. That some people ignore it doesn't suddenly let the law/chaos axis vanish from the game. This is even more true of novels not shackled to game systems. The alignment system is still a game mechanic, an abstraction of a story, not a story in and of itself. A novel "not shackled to a game system" has absolutely nothing to do with that because there definite moral alignments don't exist. They do however exist in D&D/Pathfinder to the point where you can detect with them magic and they make you vulnerable to attacks from opposing alignments. Very Very Few Evil people think of themselves as evil. The vast majority of people that we would consider evil will find justifications for their actions, the same way most people do for the petty sins they commit. It doesn't change the fact that they ARE evil. Yeah, that's pretty much the point of the thread, how in the nine hells this works in a fantasy world where alignments are tangible things.
I have to admit I find it a bit strange how many people claim that the people of D&D/Pathfinder worlds are oblivious to the alignment system. An evil cleric who has inherited a kingdom from his father, turned it into a tyranny and hears that a paladin is coming to slay him will most definitely not prepare Dictum and Protection from Chaos because the paladin rebels against his lawful authority. A Hell Knight that smites chaos will have some idea that his ability affects beings who don't like to follow rules instead of 1/3 of the population with a genetic defect. Good, evil, law and chaos are hardwired into the rules like light side and dark side in Star Wars. You can think that killing a bunch of helpless children is a great idea. It won't keep your eyes from turning yellow (if you are a force-user). Not mentioning aligned planes, outsiders etc. If there is no awareness what exactly you do when you cast any spell with an alignment descriptor they become pointless. Why I'm asking is because of a concept for a villain. An aasimar who thinks of himself as the perfect example that interbreeding between mortals and supernatural creatures can influence the alignment of their descendants. So to keep the mortal races from being slowly corrupted from within by half-fiends, tieflings, chromatic half-dragons, dhampirs and sorcerers with the related bloodlines he tries to eliminate them.
....without appearing to be completely insane?
Abomination 11 RP -0 Humanoid (elf, orc)
Hybrids of elves and orcs are almost as unheard of as loving relationships between both races. Most are put to death right after birth at the latest. Those few who are allowed to survive on the fringes of elven settlements until they can fend for themselves are left out of their native culture. Their only advantages are those they were born with.
It depends on what type of campaign you are playing. You don't want Gillmen in a desert campaign, you don't want Tieflings in Mendev, you don't want Drow at a high-elven court and you don't want a Paladin in a mafia campaign. The Centaur isn't that good for dungeon-delving or maneuvering in houses. But outside he's in his element.
There is a sickness that makes animals lose their fur, and whatever its name is your idea of catfolk would look like having it.O_o Gojūyon has not participated in any online campaigns. |
