Hydro's page

Reading parts of this was like watching someone sink a three-point shot. It was hard not to jump up and cheer.

If I've gotten nothing else from this thread, a quick Google of John Stuart Mills was an interesting read.

In the D&D cosmology, where it is explicit that good and evil gods, demons, devils and daemons, exist and are fueled by the souls of good and evil creatures, killing any evil creature without attempting to alter it's afterlife trajectory is just handing power to Team Evil, while getting a creature to repent and turn to Iomedae or Heironeous or Torm is a win for Team Good (even if you promptly kill them afterwards, so that they can't 'backslide' into heathenry).

The deck is stacked in such a way that the most effective agents of good will be evil men, doing monstrously evil things.

And the reverse is also true. The gods of evil must cry bitter tears if a Paladin falls hard enough to become an Antipaladin or Blackguard, as the Paladins are so darned effective at sending evil souls down their gullets (Lamashtu "Waiter! Kill more goblins!"), while evil champions are more likely to kill good people, which just increases the power of the celestial heirachy...

The soul economy is messed up. :)

Effective agents of Good create a more Good world, which will produce more good souls in the future. Opposite is true for evil- if the gnoll race thrives collectively, lamashtu gets more souls in the long run. Blackguards are a long-term investment.

The gods are in no hurry; everyone has to die eventually.

If they don't, it's because they're thinking in-game rather than thinking mechanically.

I think that good rules avoid glaring differences between "what makes sense in-world" and "what makes sense on paper". Hence the groping for a houserule. There should be some incentive for keeping your hand free to punch people with.

I'm leaning towards a -1 penalty to attacks if one hand is occupied and -2 if both are (whether holding a weapon, tied behind your back, hanging from the ceiling, whatever). Probably with some kind of 'kicky-happy' feat to negate those penalties.

The other option is to say that just because you're holding it doesn't mean you're armed with it, and that a monk can't flurry while armed with a non-monk weapon. After all, let's be honest, flurrying and also making attacks of opportunity with a weapon that you can't flurry with does sound like a loophole. Problem is that instead of making the spear-monk balanced it kills the concept outright.

Something doesn't have to be overpowered to be unbalanced. "Overpowered" things disrupt games; "unbalanced" things just make character choices less interesting. For what it's worth, though, threatening at both 5 feet and 10 feet is better than having the Step Up feat (which, by some accounts, is a must-have in Pathfinder).

But it's not that this is a huge advantage, just that it's an unmitigated one. There are no drawbacks for it. I like that some monks do this, what I hate is that every monk should do this. Monks with longspears shouldn't be the status quo, they should be something cool and different, one school among many.

You get to make a melee attack as well.

If your melee attack was good to begin with, then this basically lets you deal channel damage as a swift action. Honestly, this looks pretty freaking brutal to me (especially for paladins), but I'm not going to judge it until I've seen it in play.

If your melee attacks aren't any good to begin with, then no, you probably shouldn't bother spending a feat to improve them. Just channel energy normally, or cast flamestrike

Does anyone else feel guilty when they make a goofy off-hand remark which someone else takes seriously (and takes the time to compose a thoughtful and reasonable reply to)?

That's probably a valid concern, but I think it's easy to write alignment-free versions of those spells.

Holy smite/unholy blight/etc: d6/level area attack that doesn't hurt your allies

Holy word/dictum/etc: Divine smack-down that inflicts crippling status changes based on victim's hit dice.

Holy aura: High-end multibuff

Did I miss any?

I would just use the [good] versions of all these spells as the baseline.

Smite: As holy smite but affects any creatures you choose as if they were evil. Ignore the extra effects for fiends and the diminished effects for Neutrals.

Divine word: As holy word but affects any creatures you choose as if they were evil.

Holy Aura: Works on anyone regardless of alignment (most of the effects of this spell don't care what the attacker's alignment is anyway).

As a side-note, "holy smite" isn't a cleric spell, it's a Good domain spell. If granting it as a general cleric spell I might bump it to 5th level, but I'd leave the other two as-is (even though not being limited by alignment makes them a bit more powerful).

There's no hard formula, we're just being insufferably sure of ourselves. ^_^

You really do just have to guestimate based on a creature's damage-dealing capacity and his staying power, as compared to other monsters.

I feel like it's fairly easy (easy enough to eyeball) when you're working between CR1 and CR4, and increasingly trickier beyond that, but I could always be wrong.

Oh, right. Smite.

Honestly? I would just let paladins smite anyone they want. I don't think the "evil only" restriction was ever necessary for balance purposes; a paladin who doesn't make at least a few attacks per day against an evil creature clearly isn't doing his job right.

As pervasive as alignment is in the thinking surrounding this game, it's deceptively easy to trim it out of the mechanics.

Really, without alignments, you don't need [alignment] spells at all. Protection from [alignment] is a broken spell and always has been; you shouldn't miss it. Detect [alignment] can likewise be removed. Give paladins +3 to sense motive.

One thing to watch out for is that players may sometimes take "no alignments" to mean "anything goes". In some games the threat of an evil alignment becomes a cudgel which DMs use to keep players in line, and it may be tempting to go balistic once that is removed.

Make sure you note that this is still a heroic game (presuming, of course, that that's what you want).

Personally, I think a "heroic PCs only" rule is much better than the "no evil PCs" rule which most games default to, as not all good or neutral characters make good adventurers, and not all evil characters make bad ones. But, as usual, it's far to easy to use alignments as short-hand for what we realy mean.