After reading some other posts, I got to thinking about undead and the "Evil or not?" question, had a couple ideas that I thought might interest some of you guys.

Again, I'm only addressing core D&D fluff, which states that there is an objective good and evil.

I'm not saying I disagree with you personally (because I actually agree), but that's not the point of the post.

You know, the alignment system actually manages to be semi-functional and fit with what you were talking about with good and evil (which, again, I agree with) if you disassociate "good" and "evil" from "right" and "wrong". In this interpretation, evil acts may be the right thing to do, but doing them is still evil - its just that one's motivations and the reasoning behind the act may very well stop that evil act from having a significant impact on one's overall alignment. Right and wrong are subjective and culturally impacted, while good and evil are objective - good acts directly help a person, evil acts directly hurt a person.

For example, a paladin slaying (an evil act) bandits probably does a lot of good acts - healing illness, helping the weak, etc, that strongly push their alignment to good because the motivations were good. The evil acts don't have as much of an effect on their alignment because they're motivated by a desire to do good overall and because the results are solidly good.

Paladins of vengeance tend to be neutral rather than good because they mostly kill bad things (an evil act motivated by good and done so to produce more good) and don't do quite enough straight good things (helping people) to tip their alignment firmly into good.

Again, this is just an alternate way of thinking about alignment, and I know it's helped me wrangle with the alignment system without changing it (coz damn, if I'm not a sucker for axis-combination stuff)

/r/dndnext Thread Parent