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The best necromancy I ever saw was in a webcomic.
Everyone automagically assumed that The Necromancer was this gawdawful horrible person... when in reality he was a practical and (dare we say it?) decent person for the things he had to deal with.
He had the option of Urgathoan-style excesses, but he purposely and willfully gave it up as a personal sacrifice to help protect Reality, and made no bones (pun intended) about his necromancy.
I wish there was some way to model that in PF2 that wasn't available in PF1.
*without being automagically evil...*
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The best necromancy I ever saw was in a webcomic.Everyone automagically assumed that The Necromancer was this gawdawful horrible person... when in reality he was a practical and (dare we say it?) decent person for the things he had to deal with.
He had the option of Urgathoan-style excesses, but he purposely and willfully gave it up as a personal sacrifice to help protect Reality, and made no bones (pun intended) about his necromancy.
I wish there was some way to model that in PF2 that wasn't available in PF1.
*without being automagically evil...*
Evil folks can produce good outcomes. Wish folks could just be evil and not fuss about it.
echnically speaking, ∞/∞ is indeterminate (has multiple values depending on context) and not undefined (has no value) the way 1/0 is. x/x when x becomes infinity is ∞/∞, but is equal to 1, but the ∞/∞ produced by x/x^2 is 0.Another example would be that the quantity of infinity is itself variable, and that variance can affect your infinity in an infinite number of ways, as some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
For instance, compare the number of values you get when talking about multiples of 2, you end up with less multiples than multiples of 1, even though you have an infinite number of...
Well we can always use approaching infinity instead of infinity to get results. That is what I based my thinking over there.
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Evil folks can produce good outcomes. Wish folks could just be evil and not fuss about it.
The best necromancy I ever saw was in a webcomic.Everyone automagically assumed that The Necromancer was this gawdawful horrible person... when in reality he was a practical and (dare we say it?) decent person for the things he had to deal with.
He had the option of Urgathoan-style excesses, but he purposely and willfully gave it up as a personal sacrifice to help protect Reality, and made no bones (pun intended) about his necromancy.
I wish there was some way to model that in PF2 that wasn't available in PF1.
*without being automagically evil...*
Which is why I often say that alignment gives us a clear definition of what is Good or Evil, not about what is right or wrong. Paizo is pretty good at this.
A couple of LG censor archons, who live to protect mortals from that knowledge, attack them to retrieve the book and stop the ritual. Which is the Lawful Good thing to do. But not the right one.
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This is a good reason why spells shouldn't have alignment descriptors - but they do so intent doesn't matter in the current game.
Intent matters for any *other* action your character does - but for spells intent doesn't matter - casting 'protection from evil' is just as soul changing as 'animate dead'.
This is particularly annoying with spells like magic circle vs. evil, which you have to cast to bind and negotiate with a devil or demon, despite it being a [good] spell and problematic for you to cast if you are an evil person, who would logically want to summon and bind demons and devils...
I get the evil descriptor applying to a spell that allowed you to murder someone and get a power up out of it (like death knell). Or some of the spells in sources like the Book of Vile Darkness, where souls are being snuffed out or whatever.
But holy word? That's just a fire that burns evil people more than good people, it's not actually 'doing good,' unless the definition of 'good' now includes killing and maiming people. Ditto unholy word. Yes, it's killing people using forces that aren't particularly nice, but so are meteor swarm and creeping doom and circle of death, and they are doing it without a spell descriptor that says 'you must be 'this' evil to cast this spell.'
Indeed, in this particular case, having an alignment descriptor spell on certain spells is going *against* the trope of the evil, corruptive magic that tempts you into doing the forbidden thing and drags you over to the dark side. If a non-evil cleric can't cast the forbidden magic *at all,* then how the heck is he supposed to get corrupted by it?
It's a barrier preventing the exact sort of storyline it's touted to enable!
Because the cleric is simply borrowing power from an actual intelligent being. Their god isn't going to GIVE them that spell however much they pray for it.
Also clerics use planar ally, not planar binding, you only need the magic circle for the arcane version, where you actually trap a rando outsider instead of summoning a servant of your god.
Actually I think its that people dont like alignment so they take issue with parts of the game that make use of it.
Edit: and by people i mean SOME people, and by they i mean the same people in every thread.
Maybe the next blog needs to be the alignment one.
Oh man.
...anyone know where the fire break went? XD
I mean, I agree. All of these threads really come down to "alignment." Change alignments to: Good, Neutral, Evil and remove Order/Chaos and most of the paladin threads go away. Just renaming Law to Ordered solves entire issues on its own. In PF2e, Paizo might include that interpretation. We'll have to see.
Create rituals to allow good undead, and create spells that show good use of necromancy?
Possibly the same. Many, though not all, if these issues would go away. Paizo is already working on the spells. It's established that there's good necromancy in PF2e.
Mind, I think the paladin issue is also a design space/player choice from Core issue as well, but yeah, it isn't as though alignment isn't huge.
I'm more interested in finding solutions to these issues that aren't "throwing the baby out with the bathwater," so to speak, but still address them and still provide ideas and options. Hopefully we'll see talk about what is at the heart of it all.