You assume that rules and story are at odds. I do not. My games are extremely heavily story driven. I do not tie my players hands with obnoxious non-rules that change their alignment whenever I get a feather in my ass. The more definate and predicable the rules are; the more confident a player can be with role play. If a player is constantly worried I'm going to slap his wrist then he will play conservatively. If they are confident about clear rules then they will play more naturally. Clear rules are GOOD for role play. Muddy rules make for fantasy tea time storytelling.
+1 good sir.
To summarize, this argument could go on forever. Or at least over a thousand posts...
And it has. Many times over.
I know. I usually just ignore them or read / skim them. They tend to be repetitive. Every once in a while I fail my Will save and post in one... the result of which is usually... hey! That's it. Alignment threads are an evil act. I have penance to do :)
How about every g**@+! literary and mythological tradition on the planet?Source cite?Maybe Paizo could introduce the mechanic of corruption to counter the mechanic of redemption.There's no need to. Falling to evil is EASY to do compared to ascending the other way.Want to be a good guy? Be a good guy. Now you might be a good guy that used to be a bad guy.
Heck Darth Vader destroyed a planet, murdered children, slaughtered Jedi, force choked people for amusement, threw an evil old man off a platform to his death, and was a good guy again before he drew his last breath five minutes later, in time to show up as a light-sided force-spirit before the credits rolled.
Being good has nothing to do with being forgiven.
Minor quibble here: it was Grand Moff Tarkin's idea to use the Death Star to destroy Alderaan. His idea and his order. Granted, Vader just stood there like a very imposing hat rack with its best shade of night-camo on while it happened but still, not his doing. That's all, carry on!
Being dead certainly helped. Alive, Anakin Skywalker surely would have had to face trial for all of the atrocities he committed as Darth Vader.How about every g**@+! literary and mythological tradition on the planet?Source cite?Maybe Paizo could introduce the mechanic of corruption to counter the mechanic of redemption.There's no need to. Falling to evil is EASY to do compared to ascending the other way.Want to be a good guy? Be a good guy. Now you might be a good guy that used to be a bad guy.
Heck Darth Vader destroyed a planet, murdered children, slaughtered Jedi, force choked people for amusement, threw an evil old man off a platform to his death, and was a good guy again before he drew his last breath five minutes later, in time to show up as a light-sided force-spirit before the credits rolled.
Being good has nothing to do with being forgiven.
That would be Lawful, not Good.
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Being dead certainly helped. Alive, Anakin Skywalker surely would have had to face trial for all of the atrocities he committed as Darth Vader.
Trial and punishment have nothing to do with goodness. He would have still been a recently-good guy by the appearance. As I noted before, being Good doesn't mean you are instantly forgiven for your past transgressions. It means you're good.
But being Good is not hard, and going from being Evil to being Good is no harder than going from Good to Evil. For some people, being Good is easier than being Evil. I can't even be a bad guy when playing KotR II. :P
But being Good is not hard, and going from being Evil to being Good is no harder than going from Good to Evil. For some people, being Good is easier than being Evil. I can't even be a bad guy when playing KotR II. :P
Whenever I try to be a bad guy in KotoR II, I always wind up walking the middle-line. Of course, the same thing is true for whenever I try to be a good guy. Middle of the road is just much more appealing for me :D
"When one relies on sight to perceive the world, it is like trying to stare at the galaxy through a crack in the door"
-Nearyn
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It's evil magic, there isn't a shade of gray here. The spell is actually evil, it doesn't matter how your player wants to justify it, I would switch their alignment little by little if they keep using evil spells. Now it is your prerogative to do house rules on why a spell isn't "evil", but for me, it is a pretty clear situation.
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It's evil magic, there isn't a shade of gray here. The spell is actually evil, it doesn't matter how your player wants to justify it, I would switch their alignment little by little if they keep using evil spells. Now it is your prerogative to do house rules on why a spell isn't "evil", but for me, it is a pretty clear situation.
Actually it is never mentioned, nor inferred by the core rules on alignment, nor spells, that casting evil magic makes you evil, nor that it affects the alignment of your actions. That means that claiming that it does, is to make a ruling based on nothing but your own sense of "how I want the game to be", making the ruling that [evil] spell = evil act, the truest meaning of a house-rule :)
Make sure you do not mistake "What does the rules say" for "what do I want the rules to say". Claiming something incorrect (or at best, completely unproven) to be RAW will confuse people and create arguments, where there is no need for any.
-Nearyn
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Casting evil spells is committing evil acts, justified or not. Mostly why, clerics of opposed alignment can't cast evil spells, if not it would be fine and dandy for good clerics to cast animate dead, but by raw, they can't.
It's not what I want the rules, to say, you are still committing evil acts, which in alignment terms, mean your alignment is eventually going to shift after awhile. Casting an evil spell once from a good character is of course, not ground to shift alignment but doing it repeatedly is ground for an alignment shift.
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Casting evil spells is committing evil acts, justified or not. Mostly why, clerics of opposed alignment can't cast evil spells, if not it would be fine and dandy for good clerics to cast animate dead, but by raw, they can't.
It's not what I want the rules, to say, you are still committing evil acts, which in alignment terms, mean your alignment is eventually going to shift after awhile. Casting an evil spell once from a good character is of course, not ground to shift alignment but doing it repeatedly is ground for an alignment shift.
You do, of course, realize that repeating falsehood, does not make it correct, yes?
Because it appears to me, that you haven't the slightest clue what you are actually talking about. You claim that your presentation above is the alignment rules, when even a cursory reading of the alignment rules will tell you that they are not.
Here is what you will not find in the core rules:
A rule saying that casting an [evil] spell is an evil action.
A rule for "Repeatedly casting an evil spell is grounds for an alignment shift".
You can look at the Core Rulebook until you grow old and die, but you will not find anything to back your claim, short of fabricating evidence and glueing pages into your CRB.
The onus is on you to prove that the core rules back your ridiculous claim. If you cannot provide any citation, do not expect people to treat your "rules", and anything but the house-rules they are. And expect me, and other people who have actually bothered to read the rules, to call you out for it.
-Nearyn
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from the alignment section of the core rulebook:
This game assumes good and evil are definitive things. Evidence for this outlook can be found in the indicated good or evil monster subtypes, spells that detect good and evil, and spells that have the good or evil descriptor. Characters using spells with the evil descriptor should consider themselves to be committing minor acts of evil, though using spells to create undead is an even more grievous act of evil that requires atonement.
Here's your rule.
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from the alignment section of the core rulebook:
Here's your rule.
This game assumes good and evil are definitive things. Evidence for this outlook can be found in the indicated good or evil monster subtypes, spells that detect good and evil, and spells that have the good or evil descriptor. Characters using spells with the evil descriptor should consider themselves to be committing minor acts of evil, though using spells to create undead is an even more grievous act of evil that requires atonement.
Thank you for proving my point. You have NOT read the core rules, you are getting your rules off the SRD website, WHICH IS NOT the core rules.
The rule you have bolded is AN OPTIONAL RULE, that is specific to the setting GOLARION, and posted in the supplemental book "Champions of Purity".
You see what happens when just make claims, and don't check your sources? Your cited rule is no more part of the Core Rules than [acid] spells turning the caster into an ooze, over time.
-Nearyn
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Alight my bad on this then. Still tho, in game where evil and good are personified, guess I would be better off saying that I agree with how Golarion and Champion of Purity handles the uses of Evil descriptor spells shifting someone toward the evil alignment.
And you are perfectly within your rights to do that. I think the idea of a campaign where evil is an insidious force that seeps into your soul if you cast black magic, is flavourful and interesting.
My only point, and the part I was very adamant about, is not confusing this very interesting idea for the Core Rules, because it involves a bit of mental gymnastics on the GMs part, that should not be considered part of how the basic game is run. Rather a thing the GM can do to spruce up his setting for his players, should he decide to let Good and Evil have a more immediate impact on his setting and players :)
Glad we got this out of the way.
-Nearyn
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Since we're demanding book quotes, is there anything that says evil stops being evil if you put brackets around it?
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Since we're demanding book quotes, is there anything that says evil stops being evil if you put brackets around it?
Not those words exactly, but there is a definition of descriptors, descriptors being the words with brackets around them. Said segment on descriptors tells us how they work and what purpose they serve. This has been mentioned earlier in this thread. I'll re-quote and help clarify.
Appearing on the same line as the school and subschool, when applicable, is a descriptor that further categorizes the spell in some way. Some spells have more than one descriptor.
The descriptors are acid, air, chaotic, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, evil, fear, fire, force, good, language-dependent, lawful, light, mind-affecting, sonic, and water.
Most of these descriptors have no game effect by themselves, but they govern how the spell interacts with other spells, with special abilities, with unusual creatures, with alignment, and so on.
A language-dependent spell uses intelligible language as a medium for communication. If the target cannot understand or cannot hear what the caster of a language-dependent spell says, the spell fails.
A mind-affecting spell works only against creatures with an Intelligence score of 1 or higher.
Now, I imagine we're only interested in the bits where it says descriptors govern how spells interact with alignment. To me, that appears to be the last vestige of the [evil] spell = evil act, argument.
You COULD look at that spit of text and predicate on conjecture, saying that, despite it not saying so, this is proof that an aligned spell counts as interfering with the morality of an action, which is normally governed by an entirely different set of rules, those being the rules on alignment.
Now, as some, myself included, have pointed out, this is conjecture, whereas there is ONE part of the rules we KNOW for a fact provides an interaction between spell descriptors and alignment, and that is spell memorization for clerics.
A cleric cannot memorize spells in opposition to his or his deity's alignemnt. By looking at the descriptors, the player can determine which spells his cleric character can use, and which he cannot. If we did NOT have this descriptor to tell us how the spells interacted with alignment, that would mean that at EVERY. SINGLE. TABLE. all the many poor GMs would have to trudge through the INCREDIBLY tedious work of deciding, on each and every cleric spell "is this evil, good, chaotic, lawful, or a mixture of either?".
Therefore, we can safely say that we KNOW of ONE interaction between alignment and alignment descriptors, an interaction that does NOT signify that the casting of an aligned spell is an aligned action in itself.
Did that clear it up a bit?
-Nearyn
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This is the thread to determine what is written on the book or what is a reasonable way to interpret what is written on the book ?
Let's take a look on the consequences of both views:
Hypothesis 1: [evil] spells are really minor evil acts.
Expected (by me) pratical consequences: Some roleplaying interactions about not casting these spells, some players will describe the horrible corruption of their characters while casting these spells, others will simple ignore as they ignore all the minor evil actions all the murderhobos do in the curse of their days.
Hypothesis 2: [evil] spells are just a type of spell, without aligment implications
Expected (by me) pratical consequences: Wizards will cast Infernal Healing without guilt. Roleplayers still will roleplay the drama of their characters of having to cast [evil] spells but without any real mechanical consequence, neutral characters become more powerful because they can cast anything.
Hypothesis 3: [evil] spell have dire consequences on characters aligment
Expected (by me) pratical consequences: Paladins can't cast any [evil] spell. Neutral characters have to take a lot of care with what and how much they cast. Infernal Healing gets forbidden by a lot of gms. People will game the aligment system by casting [evil] or [good] spells. Wizards will troll their gms slaving angels just to prove a point. Roleplayers will still be brooding.
Nothing is obvious.
Everything needs a rule.
One day, Pathfinder will overtake physical mechanics in terms of specificity.
Since we're demanding book quotes, is there anything that says evil stops being evil if you put brackets around it?
And we are now just repeating arguments previously talked about in the thread.
Anyone that is actually open to having their opinion changed, please go slough that.
How about every g**@+! literary and mythological tradition on the planet?Source cite?Maybe Paizo could introduce the mechanic of corruption to counter the mechanic of redemption.There's no need to. Falling to evil is EASY to do compared to ascending the other way.Want to be a good guy? Be a good guy. Now you might be a good guy that used to be a bad guy.
Heck Darth Vader destroyed a planet, murdered children, slaughtered Jedi, force choked people for amusement, threw an evil old man off a platform to his death, and was a good guy again before he drew his last breath five minutes later, in time to show up as a light-sided force-spirit before the credits rolled.
Being good has nothing to do with being forgiven.
Um what? Redemption is = forgiveness?
I dont think you understand the implications of Vader's sacrifice. He gave is life, not only saving the life of his son, but his action resulted in saving the lives of billions. The entire galaxy.
One day, Pathfinder will overtake physical mechanics in terms of specificity.No, it won't. Paizo doesn't write it like that.
There's no way that was sarcasm. That's impossible.
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Redemption does not equal forgiveness, btw. If you never meet the people you've wronged again and they die cursing your name, that doesn't make you Evil. You turned a new leaf for all the right reasons and became a Good person, regardless of what you did before. Other people do not decide your alignment. You do.
Ok the PRD says that the descriptors are used to affect alignment.
Here Descriptors
[Descriptor]
Appearing on the same line as the school and subschool, when applicable, is a descriptor that further categorizes the spell in some way. Some spells have more than one descriptor.
The descriptors are acid, air, chaotic, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, evil, fear, fire, force, good, language-dependent, lawful, light, mind-affecting, sonic, and water.
Most of these descriptors have no game effect by themselves, but they govern how the spell interacts with other spells, with special abilities, with unusual creatures, with alignment, and so on.
So... everyone now knows the evil dedcriptor affects alignment.
As you bolded, the text says the descriptors affect the spells interacting with alignment. Fortunately, the PRD also specifies how the descriptors interact with alignment:
Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful Spells: A cleric can't cast spells of an alignment opposed to her own or her deity's (if she has one). Spells associated with particular alignments are indicated by the chaotic, evil, good, and lawful descriptors in their spell descriptions.
So now everybody knows the alignment descriptor only limits how aligned spells interact with cleric spellcasting.
Not true.
It also impacts what spells an individual druid can cast from the druid spell list based on the interaction of the alignment descriptor and the alignment of the druid and the druid's deity (if any).
Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful Spells: A druid can't cast spells of an alignment opposed to her own or her deity's (if she has one). Spells associated with particular alignments are indicated by the chaos, evil, good, and law descriptors in their spell descriptions.
Similarly so for Hunters and Warpriests.
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Actually it had absolutely nothing to do with that. That was all Han Solo's team shutting down the shield on the moon of Endor, and Lando Calrissian and Chewie actually blowing up Death Star 2. The whole scene with Luke, his father, and the Emperor? Strictly personal interaction which had no bearing on the outcome of the actual battle itself.
I dont think you understand the implications of Vader's sacrifice. He gave is life, not only saving the life of his son, but his action resulted in saving the lives of billions. The entire galaxy.
Depends on whether or not you accept any EU - the Emperor was using the Force to coordinate his troops and all that went to &%*# when he died. If you watch it isn't until after his death that the Rebels actually start winning the battle.
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Redemption does not equal forgiveness, btw. If you never meet the people you've wronged again and they die cursing your name, that doesn't make you Evil. You turned a new leaf for all the right reasons and became a Good person, regardless of what you did before. Other people do not decide your alignment. You do.
Have to agree with this, though I would add the caveat that someone who's been redeemed will usually feel some level of guilt for their past bad actions, and attempt to make amends for them. To continue the Darth Vader parallel, I'd expect that if he survived the Death Star he would've spent most of his life trying to make the galaxy a better place in penance for his actions. Not because he was required to do it in order to be good, but just because that's what a good person would want to do.
Actually it had absolutely nothing to do with that. That was all Han Solo's team shutting down the shield on the moon of Endor, and Lando Calrissian and Chewie actually blowing up Death Star 2. The whole scene with Luke, his father, and the Emperor? Strictly personal interaction which had no bearing on the outcome of the actual battle itself.
I dont think you understand the implications of Vader's sacrifice. He gave is life, not only saving the life of his son, but his action resulted in saving the lives of billions. The entire galaxy.
If vadar did not interfere, luke would be dead, and the two most single powerful people in the galaxy could escape as luke did.
Redemption does not equal forgiveness, btw. If you never meet the people you've wronged again and they die cursing your name, that doesn't make you Evil. You turned a new leaf for all the right reasons and became a Good person, regardless of what you did before. Other people do not decide your alignment. You do.
I take it you didnt understand that I was questioning ashiels making them the same.
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Redemption does not equal forgiveness, btw. If you never meet the people you've wronged again and they die cursing your name, that doesn't make you Evil. You turned a new leaf for all the right reasons and became a Good person, regardless of what you did before. Other people do not decide your alignment. You do.
I agree with you. Full stop, that is how things should be. Unfortunately, the rules want to be both subjective and objective. If alignment were entirely subjective like it tells you it is just before going on to contradict itself repeatedly, this would be true of the game too and I probably would never have actually house ruled alignment away. I'd have just ignored it because there wouldn't have been a difference between using alignment and not using alignment. Then the people who claim that alignment is a useful tool for DM's would be right and I'd have no issues at all.
But that isn't the way the game is. The game uses objective standards as well as physical objective evil force. And in a universe with objective standards you DON'T choose. You just are. And in order to change alignment you have to work at it. You can't just stand up and decide to be good now. You have to do actions which will change you from good to evil. Which is of course, a level of mind-numbing stupidity I'm more than happy to avoid.
Oddly enough, there is already a universe that has evil and good as physical forces which can be effected by trivial acts of good or evil. It's called the Care Bears. The Care-o-Meter tilts one direction or the other based the total sum of trivially good or evil deeds. Splashing mud in someones face can cause the global "care" amount to drop. While helping an old lady across the street has the inverse effect.
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Yeah, nothing in the core rules says specifically that alignment descriptors make casting spells an act of that alignment. Nothing says they do not either. It's open. Each group is free to decide on their own how they want it to go. Both types of games have merits.
Oh sweet god, the old "nothing says they don't" argument.
Humans fly at a speed of 1,000 ft. per round, and can shoot 20d6 laser beams from their eyes. My character build revolves around this fact.
What? Why are you looking at me like that? The book doesn't say they don't...
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How about every g**@+! literary and mythological tradition on the planet?Source cite?Maybe Paizo could introduce the mechanic of corruption to counter the mechanic of redemption.There's no need to. Falling to evil is EASY to do compared to ascending the other way.Want to be a good guy? Be a good guy. Now you might be a good guy that used to be a bad guy.
Heck Darth Vader destroyed a planet, murdered children, slaughtered Jedi, force choked people for amusement, threw an evil old man off a platform to his death, and was a good guy again before he drew his last breath five minutes later, in time to show up as a light-sided force-spirit before the credits rolled.
Being good has nothing to do with being forgiven.
Um what? Redemption is = forgiveness?
I dont think you understand the implications of Vader's sacrifice. He gave is life, not only saving the life of his son, but his action resulted in saving the lives of billions. The entire galaxy.
He did it because of his son. I'm not even saying what he did wasn't good. But he tossed an evil old guy over a ledge whom he already intended to kill sometime down the line to save the life of his son when his semblance of love and altruism got the better of him (which is totally cool).
It doesn't matter about the "billions of lives" that he maybe sort of might have saved, anymore than not murdering the random starving artist in town might eventually kill millions of people because the random guy eventually goes on to become a genocidal leader of men.
It also doesn't change that what he did, was in essence, minor, but he just decided to not be a bad guy anymore. That was apparently all it takes. It really is all it takes. Just don't be evil. It's not that hard.
In fact, because it's not that hard to be good, it's one of the reason we hold contempt for evil people. Because it really isn't that hard so we don't have great sympathy for them most of the time.
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Yeah, nothing in the core rules says specifically that alignment descriptors make casting spells an act of that alignment. Nothing says they do not either. It's open. Each group is free to decide on their own how they want it to go. Both types of games have merits.Oh sweet god, the old "nothing says they don't" argument.
Humans fly at a speed of 1,000 ft. per round, and can shoot 20d6 laser beams from their eyes. My character build revolves around this fact.
What? Why are you looking at me like that? The book doesn't say they don't...
I presume you're just as strict if a player wants their human to have green eyes and brown hair - the book doesn't say they can.
There are some areas where the book is silent that it's okay to use judgment on. I'm beginning to get the impression that you really have a problem with gray areas - the fact that there are places in the rules where it's intended that the table make a call. It's like you take every statement you disagree with to a ridiculous extreme conclusion; most groups have an easy answer for that - they don't take things to ridiculous lengths.
Not all GMs are dictators imposing their vision of table rulings and house rules on helpless players. In my groups we discuss what we want and come to reasonable group conclusions of how we want things to go. Like rational adults hoping for mutual fun. In such a setting the silence of the rules on an issue can really be resolved either way. Even your facetious example of the flaying laser human - heck, if the group wanted to play that way we could give it a try. I'd anticipate problems but we'd have a conversation about it before the campaign began.
Yeah, nothing in the core rules says specifically that alignment descriptors make casting spells an act of that alignment. Nothing says they do not either. It's open. Each group is free to decide on their own how they want it to go. Both types of games have merits.Oh sweet god, the old "nothing says they don't" argument.
Humans fly at a speed of 1,000 ft. per round, and can shoot 20d6 laser beams from their eyes. My character build revolves around this fact.
What? Why are you looking at me like that? The book doesn't say they don't...
And are you expecting to run across supersonic sharks?
This sounds reminiscent of a game system that has actually existed (although I haven't gotten to see it firsthand myself), supposedly with a 3rd Edition about to come out.
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I presume you're just as strict if a player wants their human to have green eyes and brown hair - the book doesn't say they can.
Those things aren't game effects. Alignment is a game effect. Alignment has rules and determines how mechanics interact with one another. When there is a protection from green eyes spell, we can discuss your silly analogy (which presently is wildly off mark).
And yes, you did just pull the "but it doesn't say they don't" argument. It's a fallacy. It's the same fallacy used by "munchkins". The entire rulebook is written based on exception design.
There is no weaseling out of that. You can try to imply some sort of nonsense about playstyles and try to defend your mistake by attributing some sort of archetype to me as a person (which is closely related to ad-hominem fallacy) but when you have to resort to "but it doesn't say it doesn't" as an argument for your "rules" you're basically admitting that you have nothing and probably never had anything to contribute to the argument.
There are some areas where the book is silent that it's okay to use judgment on. I'm beginning to get the impression that you really have a problem with gray areas - the fact that there are places in the rules where it's intended that the table make a call. It's like you take every statement you disagree with to a ridiculous extreme conclusion; most groups have an easy answer for that - they don't take things to ridiculous lengths.
It's called logic. When you apply it across the board, it should fit or reveal a problem. It's simply a matter of scaling for demonstrative purposes. When taken to its extreme it paints a clear picture of why the logic is faulty where a more subtle display of bad logic might go unnoticed by the cursory observer.
Not all GMs are dictators imposing their vision of table rulings and house rules on helpless players. In my groups we discuss what we want and come to reasonable group conclusions of how we want things to go. Like rational adults hoping for mutual fun. In such a setting the silence of the rules on an issue can really be resolved either way. Even your facetious example of the flaying laser human - heck, if the group wanted to play that way we could give it a try. I'd anticipate problems but we'd have a conversation about it before the campaign began.
I'd like to think few are and imagine still those that were would quickly be without players. I know my players would certainly abandon my games if I was acting tyrannical with house rules (I'm not even sure what you're even getting at since you're the one talking about a house rule and something not existent in the game), though I'd definitely say that I feel like my players very strongly trust me because they know I'm going to play it strait and discuss house rules with them.
Which returns us to what I said much earlier in the thread. These house rules you mention aren't necessarily bad but they are not the rules and would need to be squared away with the rest of the group ahead of time. If you have a player who wants to play something like a sacred servant Paladin of Anubis then you're going to need to resolve her inability to actually make use of her Death domain. And I would recommend that if you are going to make some sort of corruption house rule, go in for the pound and actually make use of a system that does at least a half-decent job of representing what you are describing, because so far you still haven't actually been able to put its effects into words, or explain how it actually works.
It certainly helps when we have a ruleset that we can default to stand on a common ground though.
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Choosing to interpret "[spell descriptors] govern how the spell interacts ... with alignment" from the Magic chapter as representing more than just a very oddball reference to class feature is not really on the same scale as giving humans 20d6 laser attacks. There is a rule, it's just not very well defined.
There are a couple of reasons I don't tend to list a litany of logical fallacies my opponent makes when arguing. One, it's overused on the internet, often poorly, and that can often cause the writer to lose their audience. Second, even if an argument is logically not valid it doesn't mean the conclusion is false, it just means the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. For example, your assertion that using "the book is silent on the matter of whether aligned spells are aligned acts" to justify my stance is equivalent to allowing anything at all not written in the rules is called a slippery slope. But just because you made a fallacious argument doesn't make your conclusion necessarily wrong, so I addressed it in good faith. Even if an argument is logically valid, however, you can still lose your reader if they consider it silly or nonsensical.
I apologize if you think I'm insulting you. Your posts come across to me as unnecessarily hostile. I'm trying to believe that you're just strident in arguing your side, as I don't believe there is anything here to really get angry about.
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Here's the thing though Ryric. The descriptors description say:
Appearing on the same line as the school and subschool, when applicable, is a descriptor that further categorizes the spell in some way. Some spells have more than one descriptor.
The descriptors are acid, air, chaotic, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, evil, fear, fire, force, good, language-dependent, lawful, light, mind-affecting, sonic, and water.
Most of these descriptors have no game effect by themselves, but they govern how the spell interacts with other spells, with special abilities, with unusual creatures, with alignment, and so on.
Now I -could- take from this that "spell descriptors govern how the spell interacts with unusual creatures", means that if I hit an Air Elemental with a [Fire] spell, the Air elemental becomes a Fire Elemental. It's based on my reading of a line from the above rules regarding descriptors and describes how a [Fire] spell interacted with the unusual creature(in this case an Air Elemental).
The logical response to this is: "What the hell are you talking about? That is not at all what the rules are saying, you cannot simply look at that snippet of rules-text and decide that, that is the intended RAW interaction between fire spells and creatures from the plane of air. That idea is based on you superimposing an idea you had on the rules, because the words do not expressly deny your obtuse angle"
And that is, in my opinion, the exact same issue with people who argue that [evil] spell = evil act. It is not based on any -real- reading of the rules. It is people who want their setting to have corruptive black magic, attempting to superimpose this idea on the core rules, because if their position was backed by RAW, it would be convenient.
-Nearyn
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There are a couple of reasons I don't tend to list a litany of logical fallacies my opponent makes when arguing. One, it's overused on the internet, often poorly, and that can often cause the writer to lose their audience. Second, even if an argument is logically not valid it doesn't mean the conclusion is false, it just means the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. For example, your assertion that using "the book is silent on the matter of whether aligned spells are aligned acts" to justify my stance is equivalent to allowing anything at all not written in the rules is called a slippery slope. But just because you made a fallacious argument doesn't make your conclusion necessarily wrong, so I addressed it in good faith. Even if an argument is logically valid, however, you can still lose your reader if they consider it silly or nonsensical.
Making an illogical argument doesn't necessarily mean the final result of your argument is wrong. It does however mean the path you took to achieve that is wrong and is worthless but you just got lucky.
As to pointing out fallacious thinking, that's a service for everyone's benefit, because such things should be rooted out at every opportunity lest it corrupt the minds of innocents.
Finally, if one argument is using bad reasoning and one is not, the latter is and should be taken as the most reasonable interpretation unless something better comes about which will likewise be grounded in reason. However, as far as this discussion goes, our argument has crossed all its Ts and dotted all of its Is, has addressed everything systematically within the system without adding or subtracting anything not already present. Ours is clean, reasoned, and well documented.
Others not so much.