Father Dagon's page

So in one of my campaigns, my two players were playing a pair of tiefling rogue siblings and had been working through an ancient wizard's tomb investigating a local legend. Of course said tomb was full of all sorts of devious grimtoothy traps and such as befitted their roguely persuasions. At one point near the the bottom of the dungeon, after having cleared out everything above them, they come across a large room with a wide trough of bubbling hot tar flowing sluggishly through the middle, spanned by a long, ten foot wide arch of stone. I had planned a setpiece to take place here later involving the NPC they rescued turning traitor while flying devils port in and all sorts of three-way melee breaking out over the perilous expanse of deadly tar. However, player A takes one look at the room, says 'that TOTALLY looks like a trap' which was expected, and then instead of investigating/disabling/avoiding the break-away section of bridge in the middle and getting embroiled in the events which would follow, just pulls out a one-shot dimension door item I had forgotten about ages ago and ports the small group completely across the room and into the next area. Rats!

THEN, this same player has a flash of insight / paranoia about the NPC they had come across, and decides to move straight into murder mode and sneak attack this poor wizard before he has a chance do do anything even potentially nefarious. The other player says 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and lays in as well, both totally trumping the suddenly terrified NPC in init and gutting him like a fish. At this point the devils port in, having been looking for this same NPC to drag off to hell for an aeons-old debt, and lay out their hellish demands that the transgressor be yielded to their custody for eternal flaying. The players shrug, kick over the body and wash their hands of it, completely avoiding the climactic combat. The devils leave, the players loot the final chamber of spectacular goods and get ready to go, hauling chests and heaped with jewels.

"So, how do you get out of here?" I ask, innocently enough.
"Well, I'm pretty sure we've cleared everything out of here, so we just walk straight out" says Player A. Player B looks up briefly from their tabulation of loot and nods.
"You just.. walk straight out? Across the stone bridge over the tar and up to the stairs?"
"Yeah, sure, sounds good."
I fix Player A with a stare for a few solid seconds to make sure he's comfortable with this decision.
"Alllll right, you head out and across the bridge across the boiling-hot tar trough. Reflex save, please."
"Sure. Aw man, rolled a 2. Does a 19 do it? What happened?"
"The trap you clearly predicted a short while ago was, in fact, exactly where you expected, and as you walk across it the bridge gives way, plunging you and everything you are carrying into boiling tar. The agony is mercifully brief."

Enslaving people isn't always evil. You can have bad slave owners but that doesn't make all of them bad. If a kingdom invades another, often people are taken as slaves. Would you rather them be killed?

Me, I'd rather that they just have to face ridiculous false dichotomies for the duration of the occupation.

Oppression is evil as well but being a slave does not necessitate oppression.

It is impossible to describe the absolute totality of how completely you are wrong about this.

Going back to Sunday school a bit...

Oh, the text which advocates slavery mentions a fictionalized account of how slaves were totally fine with slavery? Do tell!

In more recent history, in the USA, there were good slave owners and bad just the same. There were also methods by which one could volunteer for slavery in return for several benefits or it could be used as a way to pay back services which you owe to someone and are in severe default for. This was called indentured servitude and you were practically a slave all the same. Without such a system, the law had no way to handle debts. If history teaches anything, such gaps in law usually lead to vigilantism which often leads to needless death, which, by the way, is evil.

Oh FFS. There are so many unsupported conclusions, false suppositions and ridiculous rose-tinted historical revisions here it's not worth breaking down point by point. You were raised in South Carolina or Missouri or something, weren't you?

Robbery is absolutely an evil act. "I think I deserve your stuff more than you do, so I'm going to take it" is advancing your self-interest over others, to their direct detriment. If you later do something nice with the stuff you took, you can claim that second act is good, and hope that the good outweighs the evil (or at least comes to a neutral wash), but that doesn't change the fact that the endeavor started with an evil act.

A big portion of the Robin Hood mythos is also that he was specifically robbing, not just *rich* people, but people who had become rich by exploiting the poor through an oppressive power structure.. and then he gave the wealth he liberated back to those previously abused poor folks. Just robbing people who you think have more than enough to comfortably miss a few coins is rationalization to justify greed.

Another consideration is need - is it an evil act to steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving child, etc etc? Yes, it is a small evil - the baker definitely had something taken from him that he worked for, that *his* livelihood depends on selling. However, just about anyone would agree that it is a much greater good to feed the starving child (unless the child was a real jerk).

Basically, what it comes down to is - how you acquire your wealth is one act, how you apply it is another. Whether you find yourself more on the good or evil side of the scale all depends on if the ends justify the needs.

"Item Requires Skill to Use: Some items require a specific skill to get them to function. This factor should reduce the cost about 10%.

Item Requires Specific Class or Alignment to Use: Even more restrictive than requiring a skill, this limitation cuts the price by 30%."

Note the key difference in wording there - class/alignment/etc restrictions cut the *PRICE* of the item, the resale value, not the crafting cost. Why? Because they're just as hard to make, but a lot harder to move at the shop since so many people can't use them. If I specced to craft a 50k base cost weapon that can only be weilded by Chaotic Groovy Noodlemancers named Father Dagon, it would still cost me 25k in materials to make myself (or have another PC craft)... it'd just be treated as a 35k market price item should I ever want to sell it (meaning it'd only get me 17.5k tops, provided I could even find another store catering to Noodlemancers with the initials FD).