Putting the morlock incident aside for now, the sorcerer killed a lot of innocents because she panicked. That doesn't make her Evil, or even Neutral. It does mean she made a big mistake, and it was not a case of "for the greater good". Failing to feel guilt over accidentally killing a dozen noncombatants is not "a different way to handle death", it's brushing off an atrocity.
She never killed any noncombatants, or are you talking about the cacoons? She had no way of knowing they were living people. She saw spiders leaving them (spiders usually lay eggs in dead people).
I am referring to the cocoons, yes. Oh, and she didn't see any spiders, just for the record. It's not relevant, but she just assumed there were spiders inside.
And since we agree that they're noncombatants, I take it you have no problem with my assertion that she needs to show more remorse than "she felt bad but not really" to be called Chaotic Good?
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I've got to chime in here one more time about MORLOCKS in general.
Morlock CR 2
XP 600
CE Medium monstrous humanoid
Degenerate humans long lost from the world of light, morlocks have regressed through years of subterranean dwelling into ravenous, barely thinking beasts of the endless night. They no longer remember the civilized lives their ancestors led, although many morlock tribes still dwell in the shattered ruins of their ancient homes. Ironically, in many cases morlocks worship the statues left behind by these ancestors as their gods. Morlock priests of such ancestor worship have access to the domains of Darkness, Earth, Madness, and Strength. A typical morlock stands just over 5 feet tall and weighs roughly 150 pounds.
Morlocks move about on two legs at times, but often drop down to a creepy four-limbed shuffle when speed or stealth is necessary. Their wiry, often emaciated frames mask the strength of their limbs and their swift reactions.
Morlocks typically give birth to broods of three to four babies at a time, ravenous creatures born with a full set of teeth and a cannibalistic predisposition. The first few weeks of a brood's life must be carefully mothered to prevent attrition—it usually takes that long for the morlock young to overcome their natural inclination to feed on whatever is closest. Morlocks mature quickly, achieving adulthood after only 5 years of life. A typical morlock can live to a ripe old age of 60—although the majority of their kind die far sooner than that due to violence.
So in closing, killing a bunch of degenerate Chaotic Evil MORLOCK children who throw rocks or attack you is NOT evil in the least bit, it's rather quite the contrary, this is a GOOD act if anything, I would feel no remorse as a player or a PC doing this. The exceedingly rare Morlock who is "good" rather than Chaotic Evil is the infinitesimal rarity. These are monsters that ping pretty dang evil to a paladin and no paladin in my game world that I am running as the GM would incur the wrath of their deity from me, if anything they'd be patted on the back and given an "atta boy." If I am playing as the Paladin, I wouldn't even think twice about killing these beasts. Say what you will about it, but that's my stance and I will not stray from it.
To me, this ends the argument about killing "innocent" Morlocks, as there are really no innocent Morlocks, they are beasts to be put down as quickly as possible, frying them all with a powerful fireball is probably the best and most humane way to do it. Using the fireball means that they are instantly killed and wouldn't have to bleed out from multiple slicing/stabbing/puncturing wounds inflicted by normal weapons.
Are you under the impression that your personal concept of "morally good" is the only one there is?
I am under the impression that ideas of morality are fairly universal, yes. Don't kill innocents. If you kill innocents, feel bad. Of course, there are some who feel differently, but we generally see them as bad people.
Contrary to a previous post you made, there are different ways of looking at death.
Uh, no. I did not deny that. This has crossed the line from "misunderstanding" to "extremely offensive". Please go back and read my post before making these very nasty accusations. Now.
Everyone has their own temperament and personality. It doesn't always have to be bare-faced grief.
"She felt bad but not really".
Okay, so she felt kinda bad...but not really. That's not denial, or shock. It's not feeling very bad.Would you say that he isn't morally good because he doesn't break down in remorse on the spot because a patient died because he couldn't treat them?
Oh, for Celestia's sake. You've already got me upset with that snipe about how I deny people handle grief differently, now you're just being ridiculous. Who asked the sorcerer to break down crying? Nobody said she needed to cry. We're saying she needs to feel actual guilt at all. We have an insight into her brain. This is not a matter of "holding it back", this is a matter of not having anything to hold back.
Besides which, the doctor did not accidentally stab the patient with a syringe filled with toxin because he thought the patient was a serial killer. Your example stinks.
Oh, by the way, I think the idea with the morlock children was that they weren't after a fight, as stated in the OP. So killing them was still unnecessary, and they were still fairly innocent (they were only attacking because they were possessed). So some guilt would've been nice. Still, it's not exactly the primary issue here. It's just another example of the sorcerer being a bit too twitchy.
^Kyrt, your creepy little narcissistic/sociopathic philosophy seems a bit inconsistent. If we're all gonna die, why care about your family or self?
That's it. This thread is splintering, and it's getting me ticked. We've resolved the issue, but the OP doesn't care because he or she left ages ago. I'm outta here.
Actually the ultimate definition of evil, or modern sociopathy, IS "not caring". Not caring to the extent that you happily bulldoze anything that's in your way.You shouldn't drop a character's alignment for "not caring" about a tragic mistake they made. You can "not care" and still be neutral. The real litmus test would be if they knowingly harm innocents, that would be evil.
There is an ancient saying of wisdom:
"Know a man by his deeds, not his words."If you ignore what spilled from miss sorceresses mouth afterward you get a person who launches attacks at perceived hostiles without checking her target first. Attacking something you believe to be hostile to you is unaligned action... even good people do this. The big problem is in her not verifying her targets are truly hostile... this is why I called her first example evil. She was foolish, yes. She did evil as a result of that foolishness, yes. It was ONE evil deed done by accident. ONLY a paladin would have fallen... ONE deed shouldn't change your alignment. If she later shows a pattern of harming innocents and effectively doesn't learn from her error. Then feel free to lower her to CE. But since everyone uses different alignment definitions please warn her every time she acts outside of her alignment... after several warnings drop her down to the proper alignment. SO FAR she has NOT demonstrated she would willingly attack an innocent. If she had known about the victims in the cocoons she wouldn't have attacked with a fireball.
BTW: I don't use your version of alignments. I use my own version based on extrapolations of the RAW alignments... basically what I believe RAI is. Good vs Evil is as simple as do your deeds harm or help others.
And the point the OP made was that maybe they weren't inherently evil. It doesn't matter how your campaign would handle it. In this campaign, they're innocents, so sayeth the GM.
G'day, sirs.
^Sayings don't matter. Remorse is important. This character did not notable feel remorse, so she is Neutral at best. No matter what some may say, the OP made it painfully clear the sorcerer saw it as "whoops, oh well".
I'm gonna go work on my MLP fanfic now. That's a much more productive pastime.
And the point the OP made was that maybe they weren't inherently evil. It doesn't matter how your campaign would handle it. In this campaign, they're innocents, so sayeth the GM.
G'day, sirs.^Sayings don't matter. Remorse is important. This character did not notable feel remorse, so she is Neutral at best. No matter what some may say, the OP made it painfully clear the sorcerer saw it as "whoops, oh well".
I'm gonna go work on my MLP fanfic now. That's a much more productive pastime.
My counter-point to the "inherently evil" is that by the bestiary standards they are in fact CHAOTIC EVIL. Now the GM can play them the way that he/she wants, but in my games I run them by the book with monsters and their alignments 99% of the time.
The OP said that:
1) They were controlled by an evil power and may not be evil, not that they WERE not evil as far as they knew.
2) They registered to the paladin as evil
3) Meta-game wise - they are known as being CE.
4) With all of the evidence stacking against them that they are evil and want to kill us (regardless of how old they are), they should be taken out. Period.
MAY NOT BE evil is a chance I would NOT take as a Paladin or any other good aligned characters when these little beasts come after me and my party. I'm not going to sit around and try to figure out a way to stop them from eating me and my friends (as they are ravenous creatures), just to see if after their minds are back to their own (normally CE cannibalistic) selves if they can be reasoned with or are somehow "good" and just want to play hopscotch with us. That's just being silly and placing any kind of "innocent" tag on these evil creatures is just asinine to me. This wouldn't even be up for debate in my group, but some people like to debate the merits of "what if" they are the .000001% rarity of being good. Silliness, just straight up silliness.
OP: do not feel bad about this act, talk to your group and get the alignment system worked out, at worst you were CN and a bit clueless in regards to the frying of the cocoons, but with the Morlocks you are doing the world a favor in 99.9999% of campaigns.
...we walked through a temple full of Murlocks that were being possessed by evil brain things and seemed to come accross them often...
I know no one seems to care, and I said it earlier, but I really think this has some bearing on the conversation...
She wrote "Murlocks" not "Morlocks." Are we talking 'Video game inspired home-brew monster' or 'by the book baddie with a typo. I think both are reasonable (until she sets the record straight).
Dudes I hope she comes back and proves me right. I swear, I will punch my cat right in his bum face if it happens. (AC18 or not!)
Well if it was inspired by WoW, then the correct spelling is Murloc and they are evil little suckers that deserve to die too! That gurgling noise they made haunted my dreams when I was a low level character :P
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Morlocks are born with a Genetic Predisposition towards chaos and evil. they eat their own, and they eat other sentient beings. they even breed faster than flies and reach adulthood at the age of 5.
i see them as mentally, no different from the hollows in bleach.
they eat because they are hungry, don't care who they eat, and will even eat their own.
to protect your own companions from being eaten, it is recommended you slay them swiftly and expediently.
i also recommend that if you want to bribe them for short term physical labor, you bring a sack loaded with meat.
i remember with weekly william, being stuck underground in a cave in, my Suli Oracle, Kyra Steelskin, had recently slain a fair amount of local animals to trade their meat back in quadira. there wasn't a means to escape the cave, or so it seemed, and a group of morlocks rose from underneath us. the dwarven ranger, Mathias, requested my handy haversack of mwangi animal meat, it was loaded with the stuff, i agreed to allow him to use the meat to bribe the morlocks to dig us a tunnel. after and hour or few, a tunnel was dug, and the morlocks got the rest of the meat. and my haversack was free to fill up again. we went to our destination, cleared our objective, and completed the mission, all because i had some exotic meat and was willing to part with it to help get a tunnel. got more value than the trade good sale of exotic meat. not in gold, but in favors. the morlocks became allies because "Scarred Metal Lady" bring good meat.
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Never thought I'd see such a cunning argument for not eating beef from you, BBT.I am sticking to my guns.
If it's wrong to have sex with it, then it's wrong to kill it.
No matter the reasoning.
It is actually one of my life goals to eat every edible creature.
As long as it is legal, and non-poisonous, of course.
Is your other goal to have sex with every edible creature as well ?
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Is your other goal to have sex with every edible creature as well ?Never thought I'd see such a cunning argument for not eating beef from you, BBT.I am sticking to my guns.
If it's wrong to have sex with it, then it's wrong to kill it.
No matter the reasoning.
It is actually one of my life goals to eat every edible creature.
As long as it is legal, and non-poisonous, of course.
No. I don't eat people either.
Or captives from the last part of the dungeon.
i also recommend that if you want to bribe them for short term physical labor, you bring a sack loaded with meat.
true enough. but the sack of meat is more humane.
What's more humane than humanoids :P
humane may be the wrong term, more like socially acceptable.
This thread is imploding. Everybody is just kind of picking and choosing what they want the important facts to be and running with it. The OP made it pretty clear in two separate posts that the murlock children were innocent, her GM did not seem to disagree.
What has happened here is that the community has deemed it fit to say "We understand what you are saying, but the book says something different. We are going to ignore what you say and go by the book."
If murlocks in her game world are not evil, or are capable of good, that's up to the GM, not the message-boards. Flavor and fluff provided by the GM always trumps any book ruling. She came asking two questions...
One: What should her alignment be?
Two: With relevant stats presented, should her PC know the fundamental differences between alignment and how they effect the character.
The answer to 1 is debatable. Basing a judgment off of two encounters is unreasonable. A character's alignment is not based on any one or two individual moments. Without more real information on the decisions the character has made over the course of the campaign no one could make an accurate call as to the alignment of the character.
The answer to number two is a bit easier, and the answer is 'yes'. The character's mental abilities are above average. Even if the "personality" of the character is ditzy, she would still know the fundamental differences between right and wrong. In this case it falls to booth the player and the GM to work together and pay more attention the importance of knowledge and Int based checks.