RP and meta advice for dealing with big evil items...


Advice


tl;dr: A. Who has a legit RP standpoint to sell or use irredemably evil items? B. From a meta game standpoint, how do you deal with the loss of treasure from wrecking these items, as oft should be done?

So, my party recently commando entered an old keep and stumbled on an item of significant power. We haven't ID'ed it yet, and don't know if it's good or bad. We are likely about to fight a big evil group of clerics, so it may be bad.

This brought back up for me something I've thought of in the past, but never had a chance to play through with a PC: how do characters deal with very evil, very powerful items, via RP and meta?

From an RP standpoint, it seems like most of the alignments have a very strong incentive to destroy or hide unredeemable items. The good alignments should want it destroyed or unrecoverable (D&U) almost automatically. But most of the neutral and evil alignments would also want it D&U.

Ex.1) I play a NN Master Summoner who worships Abadar. I am a crafter and greedy, but also quite faithful. Most evil items are pretty bad for the stability of cities, despite their possible cash value to me; cities saved my life. Despite there being no in game consequences for my non-divine character, I'm certain I'll try to destroy evil artifacts we find because they are too dangerous.
Ex.2) A hypothetical cleric of evil god 1 finds an item of evil god two. Outside of giving it to my church to mess with evil god 2, why would I want it to be found?

From a meta standpoint, how do you balance the crushing loss of resources trashing big bad items brings?


from a meta stand point if your dm allows crafting your wealth is already way ahead of stand progression unless your dm is scaling treasure back to keep you in line.

from an rp stance a fighter might use a evil weapon if it means he might have a chance against an oncoming horde of bad guys.

A wizard might pollute/corrupt his own mind if an evil artifact might give his spells the punch he needs to save the party/town/world etc...

at least those are a couple things that come to mind rp whys


We ordinarily have some kind of benefactor (church, collector, what have you) willing to either reward us for turning evil items in to be destroyed or for bringing them in to private collectors who will keep them safely stashed away. That's a GM solution, not a player one, but it's worth considering for GMs.


@Rennaivx,

Since I mostly DM, that is how I handle it during DM'ing as well; it's a gift of service from the court of the god (typically spellcasting or summoning advantages) in exchange for doing the right thing, graded by how right of a thing the PC's did. I've got a chart of how impressed a god would be with a certain set of PC actions.

I'm just very curious how others handle it.

@Declind,

Good examples! The fighter one seems to make a lot of sense with the odd generic sentient weapons a PC can find.

I'm not really worried about my actual PC's wealth. I'm mostly curious about how players respond to the decision. There's a very clear reward system in Pathfinder, in the form of loot and xp. When one party kills a BBEG and gets "+5 item of general awesomeness" and another party kills a similar BBEG and get's "+5 item of evil unusableness", the emotions are different.

I find the decisions more clear cut as the power of the item grows; a whole campaign could be built around destroying an epic set of artifacts (savage tide). On the other hand, an impressive 60k evil talisman is super tempting for me to sell as a player when I'm running a low level character.


If an item of significant power is also significantly evil, then chances are it's more trouble than it's worth even for a metagaming standpoint. It *might* be harmless to you, but it might also be corrupting (not necessarily cursed, but damaging to your alignment), and depending on the whims of the GM, that could very easily end up costing you more resources to counteract than you are gaining from using the evil item.

That's how I would rationalize it as a player. That said, I'm more likely to use it unless I'm playing a Good character, just because I enjoy giving the GM opportunities to mess with us :D


The end of a campaign, I'm not saying which, an npc took the hand of you know who to help stop the big bad. Anyway, instead of just killing him it made him a litch and he took up residence in the local church of you know who.

Is the item going to destroy the world, or just the user? An awesome scythe of slay living may create undead on anyone it slays, but some undead might not have access to everything that previously made them invulnerable.

Ask your GM how he or she views things. Is it all black and white or shades of grey? When I GM, part of role playing is not every character makes the same choices. Some evil characters are not simple cowards. Some find that slippery slope and they grab their sled and enjoy the ride. In conventions, there were some PCs that collect curse marks.

On the other hand, what if no one wants that thing? Can't they telekinesis it into the portable hole with the undivided treasure, then bring it to the church and call it a tithe. This is the kind of thing they consider when raising, curing, or just healing someone.


Yeah, depending on the DM, tithing the Staff of Super Evil Corruption could be troublesome.


Sometimes its a way for the DM to put items on enemies without upsetting WBL (I've done this but was honest with the players); and occasionally a church or something willing to pay those who do good and donate the items to be destroyed or purified.

I've given over evil artifacts to Solars and Planetars before in exchange for their assistance.

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