I’ve been reading the strip for more than a year now, and just realized where Nale’s unusual name came from. I gotta pay more attention.
I would be willing to pay lots of money to sit down with Burlew as my DM. He should consider it as a side business.
Killing off a bunch of black dragons isn’t genocide. It’s pest control!*
By working for it or as gifts from other good-aligned peoples, mostly, although bronzes also specialise in salvaging sunken treasure and pearl diving. Not (and I quote the 2nd Ed MM) by “[capturing and questioning] humans, before killing them, to find out where stockpiles of gold, silver and platinum are kept.” Since “Black dragons are especially fond of coins”.
- apologies to the writers of Doctor Who.
Addendum: The gods do most of their work through their followers. For most gods, their most powerful followers are indeed clerics, but consider who Tiamat’s followers are. Dragons don’t need any class levels to forward the goals of their goddess.
And probably by killing off evil dragons and taking their hoards.
I think that comes under “working for it” - see “pests, control of”.
Coincidentally, dragons have a similar saying about humans.
A human killing a dragon in order to steal his treasure is good. A dragon killing a human in order to steal his treasure is evil. The two acts are different how?
Devil’s advocate: isn’t an evil dragon’s treasure, 99% of the time, gained by acts of wholescale slaughter and vicious plundering of other beings and species? Usually good/neutral?
ETA: I realize that most of the time, the dragon slayers aren’t going to be returning the dragon’s loot to its original owners. But that’s often because it doesn’t have names attached (I’d expect many might return stuff that was unique enough and tied enough to a particular individual or group), and/or the owners are dead anyway. Killed by above mentioned dragon.
I’m a bit dense - what’s the foreshadowing?
It helps that I play human characters, then.
Humans don’t eat the dragons afterwards? And a human killing a* Gold Dragon to get its treasure would* be evil.
That’s how the alignment system works. That’s also why I mostly play Rolemaster, where the kind of moral relativism espoused in this thread is just fine. But D’nD is more clear-cut than that, when I play it. Evil creatures are evil. Black dragons are cruel, vicious monsters, they’re not “misunderstood” or “potentialy” evil.
I mean, look at the double standard here - people are defending the dragon, but they’re just fine with assuming the 3 fiends are up to no good.
First, Vaarsuvius has had a dark edge for a while. S/he suggest killing the captured Linear Guild, for example. Combine that with an obsession with power that’s measured in how many people you can kill (note how few spells V uses that are not direct damage) and you have a formula for this kind of self-destructive rampage. V’s been set up for a long time (almost right back to the beginning of the strip having a storyline) for doing something very stupid for power and then handling it like a sledgehammer.
The fact that there was way too much treasure for an adolescent dragon was pointed out when V killed it.
Oh - I thought there was something specific I totally missed back with the strip 500.
I’ve seen that V is on the dark edge of neutral, yeah.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that. The black dragon is evil. But even in the D&D world, the fact that a being is evil doesn’t give you carte blanche to do whatever you want with it without moral consequences. I mean, Belkar is also a cruel, vicious monster, but the rest of the party still can’t skin him alive, even if they wanted to.
This. I don’t understand how anyone can argue that what V did was anything but pure chaotic evil at its finest.
I’d call it lawful evil, actually.
What can I say - it’s different for people.
And I’d peg V’s actions as CN, myself. Like I said, killing monsters is what heroes do. It doesn’t matter if it’s sitting down to a tea party at the time.
Is the act of creating undead considered evil in the D&D world, no matter what? Or can good/neutral characters do it?
The SRD lists animate dead and create undead spells with the “Evil” keyword.
Using an Evil spell is one of the few things in D&D that is explicitly an evil act. Most everything else is subject to quibbling and contradiction. However I don’t recall anything that would prevent good and neutral characters from using an Evil spell, other than the murky threat of alignment change, maybe.
Familicide might be a spell with the “Evil” keyword… but finger of death, power word kill and slay living all lack the “Evil” keyword (but do have the “Death” keyword), and the former seems basically just an amped-up version of the latter three.
They will, however, wear their skin as a coat.
Quoth MrDibble:
I’ve never understood this sentiment: “When we play D&D, we all try to mindlessly slaughter everything that isn’t the same alignment as us. But I don’t like that playstyle, so I prefer other games where we don’t do that.” If you don’t like that playstyle, then why do you play D&D that way? Nothing in the D&D books says that’s how the PCs are supposed to behave, and yet everyone seems to have that impression of D&D and D&D alone among all role-playing games.
Quoth Lightray:
Clerics cannot cast a spell with an alignment descriptor contrary to their own or their deity’s, but arcane casters can, with the caveat that doing so too often (and how often is “too often” is never defined) will cause an alignment change.