So your argument that ghosts are evil because they're undead is an extremely flimsy one. It says nothing of the sort, and basically says most are really pissed, and that that can turn them chaotic evil; because apparently whoever wrote the fluff decided that good people cannot stew on a desire for revenge against the folks who ever left them with their unfinished business.That is not my argument and you should know that. Ghosts are generally evil because of the circumstances that usually lead to their creation were hateful, painful, and/or bitter and their eternal inability to do anything about their situation tends to push the vast majority of them over the edge given time.
When Victor Fries in "Batman the Animated Series" is told that he should be glad that his condition makes him practically immortal, he scoffs in response replying that he would trade the others worst day for the eternity he must spend trapped in his Mr. Freeze armor.
Exactly. It has nothing to do with merely being undead. Just the circumstances of their situation. Which is my point. Sentient creatures have the ability to choose. Alignment is not a result of undeath. That's why evil undead are evil and not necessarily just victims of circumstance. That ghoul isn't evil because he's a ghoul, he's evil because he's evil and happens to be a ghoul. One sec, I'd like to quote something from another post I made recently...
If it has an Intelligence greater than 2, it is sentient enough to reason and understand right and wrong. That's smart enough for most undead. As it turns out, most intelligent undead are very intelligent undead. Ghouls for example are generally of above-average Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Ghasts are exceedingly so. They hunger, and yet they are capable of choosing to not eat sentient creatures. That's what makes the majority of ghouls and ghasts so disgustingly evil is because they know what they're doing is evil and they just don't care. O.o
For example, a ghoul could happily engage in a long, drawn out conversation about the nature of good and evil, and agree that snuffing the life of a sentient creature for your own satisfaction is pretty terrible, and that inflicting pain is pretty terrible, and oppressing others is pretty terrible, and really would hate it if people did those things to it. That's before telling you that the food has been poisoned, causing a temporary loss of muscle control, upon which he paralyzes you and begins eating your fingers and toes first and working his way across your body in whatever would be the the most agonizing way because he really likes how it tastes when the blood is still warm and it's more fun for him or her to watch the look of horror and pain in your sentient little eyes while they're eating you in front of you. ಠ_ಠ
Sure, immortality sucks is a common trope, but honestly there are plenty of reasons why that might not be. Sure, immortality sucks for Mr. Freeze. Seems to suck less for Elves since in some of the older games elves didn't die of old age, they just decided to leave and go off to elf land. Seems to suck really less for Elans. Seems to suck even more less for most outsiders.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, why you're immortal, and what that means to you. σ_σ
That is far from the only possible origin for undead. You can have undead born from people that just kept working on some important so diligently that they didn't even notice when they died. You can have noble champions of good willingly allowing themselves to be turned into undead guardians to watch over a sacred necropolis. You can have undead born from a single powerful regret that that soul now has one last chance to make amends for.
In all of those, those aren't cases of souls tormented by being denied access to their proper afterlife. Those are souls, knowingly or not, putting off their just rewards for the sake of others. Those are souls that have earned their peace but are still trucking in the name of good, souls for whom Heaven can wait.
This is pretty much the entire concept behind the Baelnorn and Arch-liches, who are good liches who have basically become undead to act as guardians, guides (like yoda figures for heroes), or to work on projects for the betterment of others that span beyond the limits of their usual lifetime. Such undead are often powerful enough to actually cast commune, contact other plane, or even just plane shift to heaven and know good and well how freakin' awesome it is and that it's where they're going where they die, and yet they choose to remain.
Likewise, undead guardians of sacred tombs, protecting saints, or driving away those who might release ancient evils upon the world in Diablo II style fashion? Yeah, good sentient undead are great for that sort of work too.
Seems to suck really less for Elans. Seems to suck even more less for most outsidersDepends on the world. It can really suck for Elans in mind since they're hunted and harried the way Mutants are in Marvel Comics. (I take a lot of inspiration from the Dreryni novels in running psionic characters in a largely non-psionic world.) Most outsiders on the other hand aren't really people as opposed to personifications of concepts and alignment, it's a general assumption that they don't have free will to the extent mortals do. And if your immortality is spent in a place like the Abyss or Hell, see Crapsack Immortality above.
Are we talking about the same Elans? Elans were humans that go through a process specifically to transform into elans who do not die from old age; at least by the lore in the WotC published EPH.
Also, I'm not sure where you get the idea that outsiders don't have free will. Hell, the idea that demons don't have free will pretty much flies in the face of their also being extremely chaotic. Likewise, the stories that those very outsiders are based off of suggest they have free will. Angels? Oh wait, yeah, everyone and their neighbor has heard of fallen angels. How did they fall? Oh yeah, free will.
In D&D/PF sentience indicates free will. The ability to choose. The ability to have a moral alignment. If you don't have the ability to choose, you end up with an alignment of "Neutral". Just like someone who is dominated isn't responsible for their actions. If these monsters do not have free will, then they aren't either.
As I've noted before, that's what makes them so terrible. Demons and Devils aren't just evil because they're demons and devils, but because they are evil. Angels aren't just good because they're angels, they're good because they are good. Funny that. Hell, even the WotC NPC gallery includes a succubus paladin who was turned by an angel she encountered (the story behind it is pretty lame, but not everyone is a great novelist). The writeup included the succubus at several levels, including a variation for if she eventually fell back to evil (becoming a blackguard, I think).
The fact they have a choice makes it more compelling as a villain, because they could change but they don't. Either because they don't want to, or just don't care to. That succubus whose chaotic evil and seems to enjoy ruining the lives of mortals, breaking up couples, tempting priests, and killing people? Yeah, it seems that way because she really does enjoy it. That's one of the things that makes her really evil. The fact she also was born of evil and has the chaotic and evil subtypes is icing on the cake. She's like Diehard Evil. Her love of evil likely knows no bounds, and her chaotic tendencies means she probably toys with people or even acts nice because it amuses her, but she really can't wait to screw you over in a not nice way later.
Angels and Azata are similar. If you come across one that's evil, then that means they have willingly given in to that. Be it out of a sense of rebellion, a sense of anger or righteous fury gone awry, or whatever, but they have crossed that moral horizon and gone where few angels or azata have gone before. Truly it is a as terrible and damned a day that an angel falls, as it is a blessed one for a fiend to ascend.
But yeah...long story short, take away their free will and they're not worth being called good or evil anymore. That's kind of the whole thing behind free will. If angels aren't good because they choose to be, and devils aren't evil because they choose to be, then they are as dust and wind.
You don't get it Ashiel. Outsiders have severely tempered free will because their ability to choose simply isn't as unconstrained as mortals. They were essentially made to orde to be servants for greater powers. That's why despite their great abilities, they're not the key figures of the universe. The Player Characters are. They are the ones whose choices matter since after all, they are the stars of the show.
That's why angel and infernal keep waging covert wars over the souls of mortals.... because being uncommitted those are the game pieces that decide the ultimate balance of the cosmos. That's why mortals matter.
That doesn't mean that outsiders don't have free will. Also, outsiders may be made by a higher power but everything in D&D supposedly is, and most outsiders are apparently born out of the raw awesomeness of certain planes. For example, most fiends are born out of the raw garbage of certain fiendish planes. Demons don't exist to serve anybody, except perhaps the demon lords, but that's just 'cause those are the strongest freakin' demons around and that makes them the boss. Inferals have a heirarchy that leads up to someone at the top (such as Asmodaeus in Golarion), but those aren't subservient to a god beyond just being part of the system. Heck, it's actually pit fiends that create most of the greater fiends out of lemures in Pathfinder, and can even make other pit fiends, but they don't have the ability to control them and are thus hesitant to create anything that rivals their power; because they could decide to stage a coup.
I seriously don't get how you figure outsiders lack free will. The beings all these outsiders are based off of (angels, demons, devils, djinn, elementals, etc) all have free will. Without free will you have no alignment. The fact that they are good, and they are evil, is because they are good and evil. They are paragons of good and evil. They choose good and evil harder than most mortals ever will.
But it's not because they have to, which is why they are actually good and evil.
EDIT: Also, competition over the souls of mortals is dicey. Infernals definitely want lots of them. Demons? I'm not really sure they care, but they love destruction, and slaves are probably pretty nice to have. Angels and such generally do what is best for all sentient beings, what with their being good and all, and tend to fight evil at everything it does; so if infernals are trying to amass souls in hell for evil purposes, counter it.
That doesn't mean that some Angels, Demons, or Devils don't change alignment. It is assuredly very rare, but they have the option. They have that ability. I mean, really... :P
I think they(outsiders with alignment subtypes) have an instinctive nature to be good or evil and so on. That does not mean they don't have free will, but it makes it hard to anything else since that is what they were made to be.
I think they(outsiders with alignment subtypes) have an instinctive nature to be good or evil and so on. That does not mean they don't have free will, but it makes it hard to anything else since that is what they were made to be.
Indeed. I never suggested that it was easy. Also, they always carry a certain amount of that with them. If an angel becomes neutral, for example, it is still affected by protection from good and similar effects as if it is GOOD because it's still a divine being.
Same with an demon who became Neutral. They're still just as vulnerable to a paladin's smite as any other demon. Just they have for one reason or another chosen to be different, or have been inspired to be different, if only temporarily.
There are just as many tropes concerning redemption or ascension to goodness as there are falls from grace. For some modern examples, Hellboy and Sparda from Devil May Cry. Sparda being a personal favorite, because not only did he decide to shake the tree, but he went the extra mile. Sparda "awoke to justice" and rebelled against the other devils, waged a guerrilla war against hell ('cause he was a very powerful devil, and also a cunning strategist), resided on earth, and wed a human woman begetting two half-fiend children.
Again, if they do not have any choice in the matter, then they are Neutral. Alignment requires choice. If you have no choice, you are not that alignment. Period. Even if you display qualities of that alignment, such as barbequing puppies and eating the hearts of priests, if it's solely because of your nature and not because of your choice, then your moral alignment is NEUTRAL (though you may possess subtypes as appropriate).
This is why if a Paladin is dominated and is forced to slaughter a bunch of people, his alignment doesn't take a hit. He might have a terrible crisis of faith, blame himself for not being strong enough to stop it, but the guilt of those deaths does not weigh on his own alignment. Again, that's why stuff like demons and evils are so bad. Because they can understand good, and they can choose good, but they don't; which makes them all the nastier for it.
I do wish skeletons and zombies would at least have an int of 1 so their evil could be justified. Right now they seem to be evil "just because".
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I do wish skeletons and zombies would at least have an int of 1 so their evil could be justified. Right now they seem to be evil "just because".
They'd need an Int of 3. Creatures of 2 Int or less are considered to be of animalistic Intelligence. I'm not sure if this is explicitly spelled out in Pathfinder, but it was in 3.x (both 3.0 and 3.5). That's why 3 is the minimum Intelligence that sentient creatures can have (even if their racial Int penalty would drop it to less than 3, it remains 3).
If they had an Int of 3+ then they would be able to make moral decisions. The problem is that also takes away from what they have literally always been since the dark of D&D, and that's mindless undead automatons. They're not very cunning, they can't make deep decisions, and they don't have an alignment to change. It would just piss everyone off just as much if not more, because by giving them enough Int to have a moral alignment, then you also open up the possibility for those skeletons to themselves choose to be a different alignment. Then you'd have skeletons who were any of the different alignments.
I personally like that skeletons and zombies are mindless, because they are essentially tools. If you made them intelligent, they lose everything that they are, and they would be come a long more potent, as they would have feats, skills, and so forth. Whereas right now, they are just Neutral, mindless, piles of negative energy and bone, who can be directed about magically to do anything from plow fields to burn down hospitals.
EDIT: Though I do agree. They are currently listed in the Bestiary as NE "just because". That's the only reason. That's the only reason that existed in 3.5. Every other edition that has included them, they have always been Neutral. Heck, check OSRIC, and skeletons and zombies are like the only undead in the book which are always Neutral (most of the others are generally evil).
The reason they were made evil in 3.5 was presumably in response to that god-awful book of vile darkness trying to make everything that used negative energy evil; which was a variant that was not part of the core and was actually contested by the planar handbook and other 3.0 books out at the time. However, that book also was released not long after Hasbro gobbled WotC, and Hasbro-D&D had a very common trend of making anything ugly or creepy evil. A lot of the intelligence and reasoning in the game seemed to vanish. Some suggested that the sudden shift was to give Paladins more enemies to smite. However, the first time they show up as evil is in fact in the Book of Vile Darkness where it tells you to slap the Evil descriptor on everything that uses negative energy or undeath, including Deathwatch.
Then the Book of Exalted Deeds comes along and gives use "positive energy undead" called "deathless" which is literally the dumbest thing ever, since creatures powered by positive energy are... oh yeah, living. Of course, adding to the long list of things that the Book of Vile Darkness has you condemn as evil only to get a good version of the same dang thing in the Book of Exalted Deeds.
In fact, that's why Deathwatch was screwed up all through 3.5. They fixed Deathwatch in Pathfinder, but they didn't fix the rest of the stuff that got screwed up from 3.0 to 3.5 concerning alignments and such.
When people try to argue that mindless undead being evil is somehow more "classic" or "how it's always been" or pretend like it's some sort of sacred cow, I kind of want to puke a little as a human being, and cry a little as a gamer, because they apparently missed anything resembling logical reasoning, and the past 5 or so editions before 3.5 (I think it was five, there was Chainmail, OD&D, Advanced D&D, Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, and 3rd Edition).
I don't them smart enough to strategize though. Even an animal can learn when it is doing something wrong.
I do want them to be evil however. Maybe an innate desire to kill and destroy, which I think is the basic explanation we have now will have to do.
I don't them smart enough to strategize though. Even an animal can learn when it is doing something wrong.
I do want them to be evil however. Maybe an innate desire to kill and destroy, which I think is the basic explanation we have now will have to do.
See my post above for more stuff.
As for animals knowing right from wrong, I disagree. They can be trained to not do something, and they might have attachments to certain people, places, and things. Certain instinctual things. However, most will say that animals cannot be evil. A tiger that eats babies is just a tiger. Same with D&D. Unless you're considered sentient, you get no alignment.
If you really want mindless undead to be evil for some reason, such as for your specific campaign where undead are evil because of factors not present in the core system, just give them all the Evil creature subtype. That would make them forever tainted with evil (it would also make their weapons pierce DR/Evil, making them more noticeably evil), and even if they're mindless they would be for all purposes evil. Detect evil? Evil. Smite evil? Evil. Protection from evil? Evil. Holy smite? Evil.
I've done that before in campaigns where I wanted mindless undead that were evil. It just creates a variant on regular mindless undead. If all the undead in your campaign are like that, then all of them are that type of undead. Easy.
I don't right and wrong morally. I mean they know when they have done something they are not supposed to do. As an example I had a player in my group. His dog was not supposed to be in the kitchen. Upon being seen he would quickly leave the area. If you saw him approaching the kitchen and he knew he was being watched he would turn around.
I don't right and wrong morally. I mean they know when they have done something they are not supposed to do. As an example I had a player in my group. His dog was not supposed to be in the kitchen. Upon being seen he would quickly leave the area. If you saw him approaching the kitchen and he knew he was being watched he would turn around.
One could say that said dog has been conditioned to not go into the kitchen. It doesn't necessarily mean that the dog realizes it's morally wrong to go into the kitchen, or what it's not supposed to go into the kitchen, but that the dominant creature chases it from the kitchen.
That being said, I know animals have more sentience in reality than people give them credit for. Our house cat can actually be spiteful, which suggests it knows at least enough to pull someone's strings intentionally, even if it doesn't realize that it's good or evil to do so (for example, if my mother punishes the cat for something, he will intentionally leave and go toss her decorative plates off the shelf).
But D&D assumes animals of all kinds are too stupid to have a language (which both crows and groundhogs do), and aren't responsible for their actions because they cannot tell right from wrong. Just what seems like a good idea at the time. So if you wanna give skeletons and zombies Intelligence 1-2 and then slap an alignment on them, then you need to slap alignments on wolves, sheep, deer, lions, and so forth as well; 'cause fair is fair and consistency is consistent.
Which is why I suggested that if someone wants Evil undead, the subtypes are there, almost explicitly for making Neutral things more evil.
That being said, I personally don't see why people changed it. We have sacred cows leading back to OD&D, and this is seriously the one people decide needs to get slaughtered? And without even a good reasoned backing for it? It surely doesn't add anything to the game, and definitely takes freedom of choice away from the game, and creates poor situations where people who do want to use Necromancers in a Diablo II style necromancy for good sort of way end up having to scrounge for some way to do so within the rules - such as going for the Juju Oracle - when both Cleric and Wizards are already in the core books.
But D&D assumes animals of all kinds are too stupid to have a language (which both crows and groundhogs do), and aren't responsible for their actions because they cannot tell right from wrong. Just what seems like a good idea at the time.Actually crows and groundhogs don't have language. They do have an instinctive set of calls they make and respond to, the same way bees have a built in code of pattern dancing to communicate information, but they do not have a vocabulary and grammar which are the two components of a proper language.
There was a controversial experiment which hinted that gorillas may possess the ability for both but the data has since come under question. Right now the leading candidates for true language are great whales and the aforementioned gorillas but nothing conclusive has been proven.
Part of the requirement is self awareness and only a couple of animal species have demonstrated it to the point where they are aware of the true nature of their reflections if they view it in a mirror, anthropoids and porpoises.
Last I checked, researchers had determined that groundhogs have words for things specifically and use them to relay information. Crows have regional dialects for their calls, and have been studied as passing down lore to latter generations.
However, I wasn't intending to suggest that I didn't understand or even agree with the D&D concept of animalistic intelligence. I support them all being Neutral, and I don't suggest they should be picking up languages anytime soon, barring certain extraordinary animals (such as animal companions and perhaps fantastic versions of mundane animals, such as advanced dire wolves, which might be like the god animals from Princess Mononoke).
EDIT: Wait, my bad, not groundhogs, it was prairie dogs. ^.^"
Last I checked, researchers had determined that groundhogs have words for things specifically and use them to relay information. Crows have regional dialects for their calls, and have been studied as passing down lore to latter generations.That in itself may be vocabulary but not grammar. What you're describing is the transmission of learned responses to stimuli but it does not involve the creation of unique new concepts.
Researchers are still studying it. Also, while advanced language may include proper grammar, that is not a prerequisite for language as a communication device. Basic lingual communication needn't be so complex. Merely being able to take an idea and transmit it.
Water. Over. Hill. Grammatically? Horrible. Does it allow one to discern the meaning behind it? Well I would assume there is water over that hill. Likewise, you say there is no creation of new concepts, but that also appears false, at least through the study of crows; who learn new techniques for getting food, identify new enemies, and appear to pass this knowledge on immediately to next generation crows through some form of communication.
Though I digress, because this is becoming tangential. Animal Intelligence or less = Neutral. :P
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I don't them smart enough to strategize though. Even an animal can learn when it is doing something wrong.
I do want them to be evil however. Maybe an innate desire to kill and destroy, which I think is the basic explanation we have now will have to do.
In my personal fanon, negative energy is not like 'the other white meat.' It's actually a *void* of energy. It can never create. It can only destroy. It can't make life, or power a machine, or create energy.
Any form of 'life' powered by negative energy will require an external power source, as unlife will be incapable of sustaining itself. An undead creature will not heal overnight, will not recover lost hit points, etc. (barring some special power that allows it to do so), as it's positive energy fueled biology has been replaced by a fragile negative energy conduit that requires constant feeding.
Ghouls and vampires keep themselves going in the same way humans do, by munching on other living creatures and sucking the juicy life out of them. (Living creatures also need actual nutrients, but, to a ghoul, the dregs of positive energy lingering in a bone that's been in a tomb for centuries at least give it a *taste* of life, and can temporarily stem the gnawing hunger at the core of them, regardless of whether that bone would have any nutritional value to a living creature.) Less corporeal undead are fueled by stolen life-energy (whether that energy drain manifests in the hit point damage of a ghost's corrupting touch, the ability damage of a shadow's touch, or the energy drain of a wraith or specter's touch).
Exceptions exist. Mummies use powerful magic (often divine) and the formation of canopic jars, to provide them with a constant source of energy, and have no need to feed. Liches also use powerful magic (often arcane) and a phylactery to do the same thing. Both more or less are *creating permanant magic items* to sustain their unnatural 'metabolism' and allow them the need to feed.
That leaves us with those pesky skeletons and zombies. The easiest 'fix' to bring them into line with this paradigm would be to make the animate dead spell temporary (and perhaps lower level). The arcane (or divine) energy sustains the skeleton or zombie, and when it runs out, they fall over, because negative energy is *not* free endless mechanical energy, it's a hungry void that needs filling, and with no filling, a zombie hydra is as useful as a SUV in a world with no fossil fuels. Option 2 would be to create 'hungry dead,' skeletons or zombies that can maintain their own unstable 'metabolism' by killing living creatures. The zombies might even bite and 'eat' their prey, although they would lose interest and stumble away after the prey is dead for a couple of rounds, as the meat isn't important to sustaining them as the killing (which is why so many corpses are lying around in zombie apocalypse movies, and why they never eat each other. Mere meat isn't what keeps their engine running...).
D&D tropes often have undead being found in tombs that have been sealed for centuries, and this wouldn't work as well in a system where negative energy based undead needed constant feeding, to stave off entropy and 'death.' And so, some sort of rule would need to be introduced to allow any kind of undead to fall into a state of hibernation. Dimly aware of the passing of aeons, the skeletons lie in a heap on the floor. When living explorers enter the tomb, they spring to 'life' and attack, desperate for the life-energy that will allow them to continue existing perhaps for more aeons, until the next explorers come... As their rusty scimitars cleave into the flesh of the tomb raiders, the blood flies in arcs, and when it strikes their browned bones, it seeps in, giving them sustenance, and allowing them to continue to exist.
Ideally, there would be guidelines as to what sort of 'life' is 'good enough.' If a vampire can just subsist off of the blood of his dairy of milk cows, he's less 'inherently evil' than I am for eating bacon, which can't be made without killing animals. If a shadow can kill cattle ready for slaughter at the abattoir or a ghoul can gnaw on butcher's bones for it's sustenance, they suddenly aren't any more scary or monstrous than a Scotsman eating haggis.
Plants should provide little or no nourishment to any form of undead. Since non-monstrous plants generally lack ability scores or hit dice or hit points or 'character levels' or any of the things that most undead inflict as damage with their negative energy attacks, that actually kind of works.
To keep undead feeding evil and nasty, feeding off of animals should be much less 'nutritious' to undead than feeding off of their own kind. Some sort of 'undead food pyramid' would be useful, starting with 'my own race' at the top of the tasty, going on to creatures with 'powerful blood' (dragons, outsiders, etc.), maybe including apex predators (who themselves kill and devour other creatures to survice), with herbivores being the thinnest of thin gruel, so that a vampire 'farmer' might have to spend hours each night drinking many gallons of cow's blood, in an attempt to get the same sort of nourishment from a few points of grade A human.
And so, Geb, as described, with larders filled with humans, instead of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, camels and chickens, would 'work,' conceptually, because chicken blood (or meat) is barely a drop in the bucket to the 'nutritional' needs of a vampire or ghoul. Desperate ghouls will, as a matter of course, kill and gnaw upon animals *anyway*, because they are just that hungry, but for a *real* meal, it's long pig, all the way.
Under this paradigm, negative energy spells wouldn't 'put negative energy in you,' such much as 'drain positive energy out of you.' It's not AC/DC, it's not matter / anti-matter, it's the difference between the spigot (positive energy) and the drain (negative energy). It never gives anything, it always takes, and takes and takes. The damage doesn't come from an injection of something that hates you and burns you away like acid from within ('cause that would be, *acid*, now wouldn't it, or at least poison??), it comes from a suction pump being placed against you and drawing your life-energy away into the endless void.
By making some relatively minor tweaks to the mechanics, the *flavor* of negative energy and evil undead can be maintained, and no longer be in conflict with the mechanics.
(Geb for instance, makes little sense when, mechanically, there's no reason at all they can't live off of chickens and goats, which, per pound, are the most efficient sources of protein (even more so if you don't kill them, just 'milk' them for blood). Humans are *totally* inefficient, and take ridiculously long times to grow meat on, compared to even such an inefficient animal as a pig or cow. A nation that raises humans to eat *and doesn't have to* is as absurd a concept as the machines in the Matrix using people as batteries.)
It's kind of easy to marry the flavor to the mechanics, or vice versa.
It's only strange how rarely that is even attempted, and so we end up with a race of goblins that are potentially as smart and wise as any human, even Einstein or Gandhi, who have a chart of random suicidal things they might do in any given round, because they apparently lack the smarts God gave a termite. We have *mindless* things that are capable of attempting skill checks, capable of using weapons, capable of wearing armor, capable of telling the difference between a living person and a statue, capable of following instructions, capable of understanding language, capable of *hating someone,* capable of malevolence (and yet, paradoxically, incapable of benevolence, orderliness or individualism...), etc. We have feats and class abilities and racial abilities that allow people to train bugs, because, for some lame reason, they don't have an Int score. We have exceptions out the yin-yang for how to deal with a creature that hasn't got a Con score, despite the Con score being an abstraction that can perfectly well describe how easy it is to gum up the systems of *my car.*
And these threads continue to proliferate. People argue vehemently to continue watering down and making irrelevant the alignment system, by allowing alignment to apply to mindless things, thus making the entire point of alignment, choices, and consequences, and responsibility for one's actions, utterly meaningless. Rocks can be evil. Flowers can be good. Up is down, green is red, poison is candy.
What's the point of even having an alignment system if it's most dogged defenders *want it to be meaningless?*
What's the difference between someone saying 'I don't use alignments' and someone saying 'Paladins should be able to kill baby sentient humanoids that might grow up to be evil and get away with it because it's too boring to have to deal with them otherwise, and mindless things should be evil, and therefore okay to kill, because they just are?'
TL;DR - Like many things in life, the d20 system is pretty flexible, and has some 'give' built into it. If something doesn't fit on the first try, and whomever you are playing with doesn't object, push harder and make it fit.