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This came up in our campaign recently.
We are playing an AP (which I won't mention) and we killed a dragon (young adult) a few months ago. We lost our Paladin in the fight but we were victorious and took some Dragon blood, teeth, scales (not enough for armor but we made some nice gloves), and took the wings off. We did not desecrate or dismember the corpse... just took off what we needed.
Later on in the campaign we killed a crapload of Yetis. My Gnome Druid wanted to skin (get some pelts) but the DM reminded us that skinning an intelligent humanoid (Yeti) is considered an EVIL ACt (my Druid is neutral Good).
I'm not disagreeing with the GM. Infact it opened my eyes to how things have changed since I started playing back in 1995. Back in 2nd edition EVERYTHING was just a monster. Infact it was a monster manual and we did actually skin some Yetis back then. As Adventurers we skinned just about everything (except other humans or orcs or golbins).
But now that everything is classified and tagged with different creature types, its sort of like the Modern Humans of this world have put their Morals and Ethics into a Fantasy world. For example its ok to Boil alive Lobsters but NOT Puppies. (Lobsters look like monsters, and puppies are cute, but they are both animals) Perhaps its for the better.
Its ok to Skin an intelligent Dragon type, but not an intelligent Humanoid type? I'm just curious if this has happened to other groups.
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I don't think that skinning any dead creature constitutes an evil act. It's dead. You can't hurt it anymore.
Skinning a creature alive would be evil, whether or not it was intelligent.
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What he said.
The closer something skinned is to whoever's wearing it, the creepier it's gonna be, though. But that's less about good and evil and more about NPC reactions.
This came up in our campaign recently.
We are playing an AP (which I won't mention) and we killed a dragon (young adult) a few months ago. We lost our Paladin in the fight but we were victorious and took some Dragon blood, teeth, scales (not enough for armor but we made some nice gloves), and took the wings off. We did not desecrate or dismember the corpse... just took off what we needed.
Later on in the campaign we killed a crapload of Yetis. My Gnome Druid wanted to skin (get some pelts) but the DM reminded us that skinning an intelligent humanoid (Yeti) is considered an EVIL ACt (my Druid is neutral Good).
I'm not disagreeing with the GM. Infact it opened my eyes to how things have changed since I started playing back in 1995. Back in 2nd edition EVERYTHING was just a monster. Infact it was a monster manual and we did actually skin some Yetis back then. As Adventurers we skinned just about everything (except other humans or orcs or golbins).
But now that everything is classified and tagged with different creature types, its sort of like the Modern Humans of this world have put their Morals and Ethics into a Fantasy world. For example its ok to Boil alive Lobsters but NOT Puppies. (Lobsters look like monsters, and puppies are cute, but they are both animals) Perhaps its for the better.
Its ok to Skin an intelligent Dragon type, but not an intelligent Humanoid type? I'm just curious if this has happened to other groups.
No skinning anything isn't evil.
Murdering that dragon might be evil (unless there were reasons why you fought and killed it)The DM has has issues with it.
Just going to toss this in there:
Yeti's aren't humanoids, and thus are safe to skin. They're -Monstrous Humanoids-
Did your decision to kill the intelligent creature hinge even partly on the possibility of using or selling its body parts?
Yes? Then killing it and skinning it is an evil act, even if there were plenty of other good reasons to kill the creature that were not the determinant factors for you.
No? You fully intended to kill the creature with the sole intent of saving the [damsel, villagers, city, country, etc.] and merely took advantage of the opportunity to benefit from its body parts after it was dead. That is not evil, just deeply creepy and offensive to any other person or creature who may see it as the harvesting of parts from dead people, rather than dead monsters. When it comes to dragons, most humans won't be that empathetic. Depending on how common good -aligned dragons are in a given campaign, players might not care too much what they think either.
"Eh, this scaled shield may enrage all dragons, but we only ever seem to meet the ones that need killing anyway."
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We had this come up in a homebrew about a year ago. It was glorious I was an evil monk/assassin (Deathstroke to be exact, we all made characters modeled after some recognizable figure) and I was skinning the heck out of these Desmodou(?)(Bat people) and the Paladin in dragonhide armor got all uppity with me... Best Doh! ever.
Just going to toss this in there:
Yeti's aren't humanoids, and thus are safe to skin. They're -Monstrous Humanoids-
They are INTELLIGENT monstrous humanoids.
and we only did our skinning when things are dead... never alive.
And the Dragon was Evil,
but one of the Villagers Cleric or Oracle stole all the Dragon Eggs and bashed them, and the Dragon started to attack the village. We tried to "parley", but the Dragon was too pissed off to listen much.
I've never seen anything in the rules that says skinning anything is an evil act.
Is he also one of those people that makes party members go insane and try to kill everyone because they cast too many spells with the [Evil] descriptor?
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I'm not disagreeing with the GM. Infact it opened my eyes to how things have changed since I started playing back in 1995. Back in 2nd edition EVERYTHING was just a monster. Infact it was a monster manual and we did actually skin some Yetis back then. As Adventurers we skinned just about everything (except other humans or orcs or golbins).
It's not how much D&D has changed, it's how much society has changed towards being morally relative hippies.
It's like those vegetarians that eat mostly soy so they save animal's lives. Except feeding a family with soy kills more animals than feeding a family with cow, because threshing a field of soy kills hundreds of small rodents, birds, and insects, whereas eating cow kills one cow.
Or there's a sect of Hinduism that wears veils over their mouths so they don't accidentally eat a bug and thus harm a living thing--except they don't seem to care about all the microscopic lifeforms they kill just by farting or whatever.
Human life is more important to humans than non-human life. It's trickier in a fantasy setting, but humanlike things are more important than non-humanlike things. They just are. Yetis are monsters. Skin those guys. Your GM is being weird and post-post-modern.
I don't see an issue of skinning a creature and using the resources its corpse provides as supplies or materials for gear or equipment or whatever mundane subject it may be. If anything, a Druid would find skinning a dead animal or other such corpse for sustenance as a means of survival, which is hardly a sign of evil. Of course, I'm only assuming that is the only reason why you would skin them.
Now, doing so while they are alive or just because you hate or dislike the creatures, on the other hand...
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So if I want to kill something for the craftable body parts that is bad but if I want to kill something to get my +2 longsword that is adventuring.
I've never seen anything in the rules that says skinning anything is an evil act.
Is he also one of those people that makes party members go insane and try to kill everyone because they cast too many spells with the [Evil] descriptor?
No no, he's not that type of GM.. and actually his Wife was DMing at the time but it was at the end of the module so he is now taking over again (he needed a break.. its hard to GM).
Like I said I agree with the GM, and perhaps my character would not have done that... I was in "We just beat the BBEG and lets tally up the treasure mode" and I put down 12 yeti pelts when it came up.
Sometimes in the heat of the moment.. you are so excited when the adventure ends, you make mistakes....
The DM gave me the option to backtrack the yeti pelts, Its not like he was unfair or anything. Infact he's been a great DM and his Wife did a great job of substituting GMing.
I was just curious about how other groups handle this.
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So if I want to kill something for the craftable body parts that is bad but if I want to kill something to get my +2 longsword that is adventuring.
Of course you are being facetious. Both would be "bad" reasons for killing intelligent beings.
OTOH, wearing an orcskin vest crafted of the flayed skins of the orcish marauders that killed half your village is only tasteless, assuming you killed them to stop them from committing more evil acts and not to get the niftiness that is soft, supple, orcskin.
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No no if it has my sword I'm going to adventure all over it.
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Can't see any issues in skinning defeated enemies. Might be gross and creepy and maybe even revolting and debatable, but it's a practice that bears no good or evil stigma.
Could be animals, monsters, humanoids, aberrations, dragons, etc.
Purposefully hunting intelligent creatures for trophy hunting - or just body parts - on the other hand stays definitively in the evil side.
Even if the hunted prey is the demonically infused red dragon that terrorizes the region - killing it and butchering the carcass just for profit is not even neutral aligned.
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Great, next it will be: "So... what's the problem if we EAT them? All that meat's just going to waste..."
Great, next it will be: "So... what's the problem if we EAT them? All that meat's just going to waste..."
What IS the problem, exactly?
You're presumably out in the wilderness, being attacked by yetis (implying you're in the snowy mountains where it's cold) and you need food to survive.
If the man eating yetis die trying to kill and eat you, I see no reason not to return the favor if they taste good and you need food.
Great, next it will be: "So... what's the problem if we EAT them? All that meat's just going to waste..."
The Book of Vile Darkness says it isn't evil (though it is the official book in 3.5 not Pathfinder).
It is evil if using to power a spell (vile sprells) or doing for pleasure (eating them for fun) not just nourishment.
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Oh no that's fine, my hulk build vivisectionist is always full and happy.
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Just going to toss this in there:
Yeti's aren't humanoids, and thus are safe to skin. They're -Monstrous Humanoids-
They are INTELLIGENT monstrous humanoids.
.....
Not this one, he spent all his money on scratch-off lottery tickets.
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Great, next it will be: "So... what's the problem if we EAT them? All that meat's just going to waste..."
It may be that you are confusing morals with ethics.
Eating dead people is morally wrong in most human societies. Most have a code of morals that defines "right" and "wrong" and that defines cannibalism as wrong.
Ethics, however, is not concerned with right and wrong except as those terms relate to good and evil. Eating the flesh of dead people is not evil in and of itself, although murdering people for their flesh would be. There are many things that break the moral code of one society that another society would be wholly unconcerned with.
Needless to say, showing wanton disrespect for the feelings of intelligent living beings who have done you no harm, even if you do not share those feelings, is hardly the mark of a good person. And in general, unless you come from one of those exceedingly rare societies that doesn't disapprove of cannibalism and thus have a nonstandard system of personal morality, eating dead dragons would appear to indicate that you do not consider them truly to be people, that you consider people very unlike yourself to be lesser beings. So someone uttering the line you have postulated would usually be nongood, but for those reasons, not for seeing the practical side of what to do with a dead dragon. The act itself is neutral.
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I would like a citation on that.
It's like those vegetarians that eat mostly soy so they save animal's lives. Except feeding a family with soy kills more animals than feeding a family with cow, because threshing a field of soy kills hundreds of small rodents, birds, and insects, whereas eating cow kills one cow.
You need a citation to know that small animals and insects live in farmlands and that being put through what is effectively a woodchipper/shake and bake that is generally hazardous to their health?
I would like a citation on that.
It's like those vegetarians that eat mostly soy so they save animal's lives. Except feeding a family with soy kills more animals than feeding a family with cow, because threshing a field of soy kills hundreds of small rodents, birds, and insects, whereas eating cow kills one cow.
This is kind of an inflammatory piece you might not like, but it links to all the relevant research and responses by vegans.
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Guys if we are all starving and like are stranded by a plane crash in the mountains and I die first...
...then you can all totally eat me.
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This is kind of an inflammatory piece you might not like, but it links to all the relevant research and responses by vegans.I would like a citation on that.
It's like those vegetarians that eat mostly soy so they save animal's lives. Except feeding a family with soy kills more animals than feeding a family with cow, because threshing a field of soy kills hundreds of small rodents, birds, and insects, whereas eating cow kills one cow.
Oh! But since oxen (let's be gender neutral in the spirit of Paizo publications) aren't really raised on pasture (except on TV commercials and pictures on milk cartons) we can kill both the ox AND the zillions of little whats-its that die to the corn thresher to make the heaps of silage or whatever we use to feed the things. It's win-win!
Oh! But since oxen (let's be gender neutral in the spirit of Paizo publications) aren't really raised on pasture (except on TV commercials and pictures on milk cartons) we can kill both the ox AND the zillions of little whats-its that die to the corn thresher to make the heaps of silage or whatever we use to feed the things. It's win-win!This is kind of an inflammatory piece you might not like, but it links to all the relevant research and responses by vegans.I would like a citation on that.
It's like those vegetarians that eat mostly soy so they save animal's lives. Except feeding a family with soy kills more animals than feeding a family with cow, because threshing a field of soy kills hundreds of small rodents, birds, and insects, whereas eating cow kills one cow.
Well, no, the point of the articles are that by least harm, we should eat a combo of plants and grass fed ruminants, rather than eating no meat or no vegetables or whatever.
And if you can't see the linked articles, I guess just do some research on your own? Steven Davis is the name of the main researcher on the subject, so start with that. I made a side comment, and did not intend to derail the thread with this.
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Minus 50 XP to the two jokers who marked an issue open to nothing more than moral interpretation by individual groups as a FAQ candidate. Clearly, you do not understand what is a rule and what is an opinion or a matter of fluff.
As to the matter at hand, it is something that just is. Most of us are going to have grown up feeling like evil dragons are beasts from whom we can - and should - take trophies.
Some of us are going to think the same about Yetis. To be honest, I grew up hearing tales about how these were ferocious beasts. So have some of my players, so I expect an argument if I tried to re-interpret them as thinking geniuses who should be treated with kid gloves, but whatever.
How we approach what creature we take trophies from is going to be influenced by the culture (movies, books, comics, etc.) under which we grew up. The lone exception I would give is toward humans and humankin. I would expect my players to treat the PC grabbing up a leprechaun pelt as doing something awful, but then I have no doubt the player in question would admit it was awful himself.
If he didn't, I would be worried about playing with him.
Yetis may have humanoid anatomy, but they are removed enough from humans to be considered beasts, and are thus skinnable.
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"Hey, it's okay! They were all evil!"
************
For what it's worth, I wouldn't say it was automatically evil, but it easily can be. And players shouldn't be surprised when other intelligent creatures react very strongly to such a thing.
Personally, butchering intelligent beings to sell off their parts or for trophies is pretty damn evil. Honoring a foe that you had to kill by implementing parts of them in ones armor or whatever would certainly be questionable in the eyes of many cultures and acceptable in others, but I'm not really seeing that as evil. If one's doing it for jollies, greed, or pride though, it falls right back into evil.
Dwarf with goblin heads hanging from his belt isn't really better than an ogre with human heads hanging from his belt if their reasons for having them are the same.
When we ran into cannibals that were murdering people to eat out of what seemed more desire than need, my character was outraged. This character also told those closest to him that if he died during the long trek over the arctic, to take what they needed of his body to survive if that's what it took.
Heavily Good-aligned.
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It's sort of interesting to speculate about the morality of intelligent cross-species moral obligations since in our own world we only know for certain that one species is intelligent enough to even grasp the concept of morality.
It is highly probable that in the past humans did actually deal with other intelligent species, perhaps up to half a dozen such species. There is no doubt that there were interactions between them.
I have long suspected that stories of "trolls" or "elves" or other similar things have an ancient root in the actual existence of other intelligent species with different customs, different rituals and different cultures. The "troll" legend was almost certainly inspired by interaction with neanderthals.
It is virtually certain, based on how frequently human beings go to war against each other, that humans clashed with those other races. Did they utilize neanderthal bones as tools? Did they hunt the little "hobbit race" people of Indonesia? Who knows?
The Pathfinder world, with it's bewildering mix of hundreds of intelligent races/species does make me wonder how cultures would deal with clashes between species.
Either there would be a general recognition of the sanctity of all intelligent life, or there wouldn't. I don't see any real compelling reason to suppose one way over the other. After all, humans have done nearly unimaginably evil things to each other on vast scales involving millions of people.
So in a Pathfinder world would a dragonskin make a human bat an eye?
Probably not.
What about trollskin?
Again, probably not.
Orc skin?
I suspect you'd find disagreement in different cultures on that.
Elf skin?
Absolutely...
The end result is almost certain that the closer the races/species are to each other in culture and history, the less likely they would be to skin and/or eat each other.
isn't there a giant hide armor in one of the books somewhere? I swear I saw something like this.
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It's sort of interesting to speculate about the morality of intelligent cross-species moral obligations since in our own world we only know for certain that one species is intelligent enough to even grasp the concept of morality.
It is highly probable that in the past humans did actually deal with other intelligent species, perhaps up to half a dozen such species. There is no doubt that there were interactions between them.
I have long suspected that stories of "trolls" or "elves" or other similar things have an ancient root in the actual existence of other intelligent species with different customs, different rituals and different cultures. The "troll" legend was almost certainly inspired by interaction with neanderthals.
It is virtually certain, based on how frequently human beings go to war against each other, that humans clashed with those other races. Did they utilize neanderthal bones as tools? Did they hunt the little "hobbit race" people of Indonesia? Who knows?
The Pathfinder world, with it's bewildering mix of hundreds of intelligent races/species does make me wonder how cultures would deal with clashes between species.
Either there would be a general recognition of the sanctity of all intelligent life, or there wouldn't. I don't see any real compelling reason to suppose one way over the other. After all, humans have done nearly unimaginably evil things to each other on vast scales involving millions of people.
So in a Pathfinder world would a dragonskin make a human bat an eye?
Probably not.
What about trollskin?
Again, probably not.
Orc skin?
I suspect you'd find disagreement in different cultures on that.
Elf skin?
Absolutely...
The end result is almost certain that the closer the races/species are to each other in culture and history, the less likely they would be to skin and/or eat each other.
So you're saying we beat the fairies, pixies and orcs to death in our own world millenia ago, and partied about it by feasting on dragon flesh?
Humans Rule!
Neanderthals weren't exterminated. They were absorbed.
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absorbed? Orally? Om nom nom.
Contributor
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Actually, the Humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans seem to also have got along, at least some of the time.
Nope.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens, indigenous to non African regions (I know they all originally came out of Africa, whoever is going to show up and correct me,....) all carry Neanderthal dna.
We assimilated them.
Jeff, sexual intercourse is not always consensual.
However, I do suspect that some consensual activity did occur. After all, humans have been known to interact in the same manner with sheep, pigs, horses and a host of other barnyard animals.
Spanky, some assimilation did occur, but with about 5% of Neanderthal DNA in our current genome, it's not likely that neanderthal-sapiens hookups resulting in viable children were common.