AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic - Assassign alignment discussion

Last edited by Mercedes on Sun, Sep 30 2012, 20:49 PM, edited 1 time in total.

<drink> Just poking around the search function and couldn't find what I was looking for...

Why can't Assassins be neutral again, if they can also pick up the hired killer job? Doing it for the gold-monies sounds relatively neutral; other than, that sometimes an assassination would just be warrented. You know, those kill one to save a thousand scenarios. I suppose righteous assassins are stretching it a bit, though.

Last edited by serbiris on Sun, Sep 30 2012, 7:20 AM, edited 1 time in total.

Just how D&D is unfortunately. Same reason why all paladins are LG when conceivably any extremes could fall under the same umbrella.

In 3.5 they eventually released a "patch" of sorts... the Avenger prestige class, as an alternative to Assassin. In which they basically pallette-swapped the Assassin picture from the DMG into white (does it remind you of anyone?) and loosened the restriction. So plainly even the designers eventually thought it was silly (or later management did).

Oh and inb4 arguments about Assassination being inherently evil. Though I don't think the argument is necessarily false.

Killing people for your own profit sounds pretty evil to me.

From the NWN wiki

"Unlike the blackguard, the assassin is not evil due to devotion to an evil power, but rather due to a complete lack of morals or ethics."

666WaysToHell wrote:

Killing people for your own profit sounds pretty evil to me.

Not that all adventurers including paladins go into creatures lairs, slaying everyone to get profit/loot from it? >.>

Uh, monsters =/= people. This is dungeons and dragons, not planet earth.

Last edited by AgainShe on Sun, Sep 30 2012, 8:37 AM, edited 1 time in total.

Standard reply, as if the brigands and say, wild hins, or duergar are not people :p My point is, I agree with the topic starter, there could be assassins of Hoar, for example. Slaying/punishing only the 'guilty' people. Assassins does not always mean evil, they just know how to kill a person effectively. Seen assassins allowed to be neutral on other roleplay servers.

It's a standard reply because it's right.

There are plenty of people in those lairs. (It seems AgainShe edited in some of the examples I had in mind.)

Killing someone out of hatred or for personal pleasure is evil. Killing someone for profit is business, and seems pretty neutral to me. Never heard of assassins lacking ethics, either. Generally they have pretty strict policies and standards they hold themselves to.

There's no good reason for assassins being Evil-only and arguing to the contrary is pretty hopeless. It's just how the game was made. Neutral assassins should be almost as common as evil ones.

DerkDerkistan wrote:

It's a standard reply because it's right.

Where is the lithmus test on this?

Anyways if monsters =/= people then like what was said before about brigands doing what they have to that you kill or say drow, sure most are evil but that doesn't mean they are not "people".

As for this argument. Its just how it is, a mechanical requirement and I doubt it will change since its attached to ultimately un"winnable" alignment debates, so using it as designed works well enough.

This is the black and white reponse of the D&D system where one requirement besides being evil you have to kill for no other reason than to become an assassin. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/prestigeClasses/assassin.htm). It also underlines the point that killing for money is considered an evil act by the dnd alignment system. This a clear requirement for the class so there's no getting around. There may be people killing for various reasons including religious and they're all quite welcome to it but in order to utilize the special abilities of the assassin prestige class you have to be evil.

In the length of this you could argue this have always been true in the world of Toril as well were all the deities of assassins tend to be either evil or extremely evil (Bhaal and Cyric being the prime example here). I don't think it should be changed as its a natural part of the prestige class, if you want to kill for money using the assassin class' abilities you take the whole package including the alignment.

Her first post clearly says "creatures", not people. Using brigands is a poor example. But in any case, sure it could be said that some assassins can be Good or Evil. I cited the game's definition of the assassin class because it's the best answer that can be given without being refuted. And since I really don't see alignment restrictions for assassin being removed like they were for Champion of Torm, that's really the best answer that can be given.

The use of poisoned weapons is pretty unethical to me, by the way.

Maias: you write as if we should care what the game says. You're just describing what the class designers seem to have thought. What relevance does that have to us? None. D&D should be a non-factor in this discussion. The only question here is whether we think there's good reason stick to the current rule or expand it according to our sensibilities. It's ultimately a gut feeling thing, I suppose. What kind of characters we feel would be cool to see around.

DerkDerkistan: it may be "unethical" but don't confuse ethics with the faceless energies of Good and Evil. In the setting we play, there's no connection between right and wrong on one hand, and Good and Evil on the other. As long as alignments are amoral forces and facts of (super)nature, they can't logically justify ethics. (This is something people hilariously seem to miss when they insist on a black-and-white world; there's logically no ought from is, in any imaginary world you try to make up.) Ethics is a matter of culture and, ultimately, personal decision. Good and Evil are a matter of cosmology. The two can't be reconciled. This doesn't have much to do with the assassin question, I'm just mentioning it since you brought it up.

Oh, I know that. I'm simply citing it in the context of the class definition given. It's not that I agree with it; it simply is.

I think what needs to be accepted that an assassin can feasibly be of any alignment, but an Assassin (the class, notice the capitalization) is a very specific group of the former, uncapitalized assassins.

DerkDerkistan wrote:

I think what needs to be accepted that an assassin can feasibly be of any alignment, but an Assassin (the class, notice the capitalization) is a very specific group of the former, uncapitalized assassins.

Yeah. I don't really have a problem with that. But there's always the question of why. If we want, as clearly someone does (since the topic was made), to do away with the arbitrary alignment restriction and expand the class to cover neutral people too (I think good people are a stretch and could be DM approved), why shouldn't we? Just because the class is what it is, doesn't mean it has to be. The status quo can't be justified only by the status quo.

It's just a class, and Amia has a long tradition of using classes liberally to represent different character concepts. We already don't enforce any lore on taking the Assassin PrC (or almost any other), so it's misleading to appeal to prerequisites of killing someone to take the class or something. If somebody has a good idea and wants to play a neutral PC with the Assassin PrC (not necessarily even an assassin IC), there's no reason to prevent it. Diversity is always a positive thing.

IronAngel wrote:

In the setting we play, there's no connection between right and wrong on one hand, and Good and Evil on the other. As long as alignments are amoral forces and facts of (super)nature, they can't logically justify ethics.

What does this even mean? Alignments are "amoral forces"? When did that happen? The very definition of alignments is "moral forces." The D&D multiverse isn't just some cosmic game of checkers, where people just choose to be on the Red team or the Blue team, with no value attached to that decision. Even in D&D, Good is still good, and Evil is still evil.

Lizzie wrote:

The D&D multiverse isn't just some cosmic game of checkers, where people just choose to be on the Red team or the Blue team, with no value attached to that decision.

That's precisely what it is, if you stop to think about it. And that's the realization that makes most alignment discussions so ironic.

And I'm not saying people in the setting always realize this themselves; many may try to justify their cultural and personal ethics by an appeal to a universal Good. But it's ultimately a veneer, and when questioned far enough you'll find them unable to justify the connection. In other words: there is value attached to that decision, but it's attached by the people and not the cosmic energies, and as such the value is contingent and arbitrary.

It boils down to Hume's guillotine, really. That's not the only or necessarily the best formulation of the problem, but probably the one we're most familiar with. Or it could be described as a naturalistic fallacy.

IronAngel wrote:

Lizzie wrote:

The D&D multiverse isn't just some cosmic game of checkers, where people just choose to be on the Red team or the Blue team, with no value attached to that decision.

That's precisely what it is, if you stop to think about it. And that's the realization that makes most alignment discussions so ironic.

I have stopped to think about it, thank you. And you're just flat wrong.

And besides that... wow, what a boring world you're describing. If no decision is morally better or worse than any other decision, then there's no reason to worry about whether you're doing the right thing, no reason to question the value of any action you might ever conceivably take. If buying a loaf of bread for lunch is morally no different than gutting the baker and stealing the bread, then you've subtracted from RP everything valuable about it. "Am I doing the right thing?" and "How do I decide what's right?"... these are the most interesting questions a character can ask herself. They're primal, and integral to engaging RP. If there aren't any possible answers to those questions, then you've taken the soul out of RP.

Haha. That could be my post, almost word for word. And it has nothing to do with the cosmic energies arbitrary labelled Good and Evil. It has to do with ethics, morality, right and wrong. Things that are real and relevant to people in the Realms, just as they are in the real world.

If ethics could really be reduced to Good and Evil, then none of what you describe would be possible. You don't have to concern yourself with what's really right; you just slavishly follow the blueprint in a textbook on (meta)physics.

Here's a clumsy analogy: the thought that "Poison is included in the cosmological parameters of the force called Evil, so it's wrong" is not unlike claiming that "Gravity pulls me towards the center of the planet; therefore it's wrong to go upward."

I'm not sure you get my point, because I champion exactly the kind of questions you bring up. And conversely, if I were actually wrong (the chance for which seems microscopic at this point), then we would be precisely in the situation you describe. Morality, by its very definition, cannot be reduced to facts of nature. What should be simply does not mechanically arise from what is. If you deny that, you deny the very meaning of those words.

I'm curious how you explain ethics and our preoccupation with right and wrong in the real world? We certainly don't have a cosmic alignment system in place, and yet those questions are real and pressing.

IronAngel wrote:

There's no good reason for assassins being Evil-only and arguing to the contrary is pretty hopeless. It's just how the game was made. Neutral assassins should be almost as common as evil ones.

No. You can't separate evil from Evil.

I'm not saying "poison is included in the cosmological parameters of the force called Evil, therefore it's wrong." I'm saying "poison is included in the cosmological parameters of the force called Evil *because* it's wrong."

It's not just Evil for no reason. It's there because (in D&D, anyway) it's actually legitimately Evil. Which things are Good and which things are Evil are not valueless or arbitrary. There weren't just a bunch of cosmological coin flips when the universe was created, randomly deciding which actions are morally justifiable and which aren't. The actions that are Good got clustered on one side of the line, and the actions that were Evil got relegated to the other. Intentionally.

Or are we supposed to believe that all the stuff that we commonly associate with being good (compassion, generosity, defending the weak and innocent, etc.) just happened to end up on the Good end of the alignment scale by some bizarre coincidence?

Lizzie: it's not really a bizarre coincidence as much as it is the unintelligence of the game designers. But you have a good point: there could be some universal consciousness that determined what it considers right and wrong and split the alignments according to that. The alignment forces could very well be the result of someone's actual ethics. But that someone isn't the living people of the Realms, and there's no guarantee their ethics will coincide with his or that they acknowledge his authority in this matter. If that authoritative demiurge had believed cooking children was good, would civilized societies be mistaken if they considered it wrong?

You're not addressing the relevant point here: good and evil to whom? Right and wrong in whose culture? The setting isn't relativistic in that there really is absolute Good and Evil, but those abstract forces don't absolve individuals and cultures from the responsibility of defining and defending their own ethics. It's also a question of language: good and evil, right and wrong are words in many spoken languages, and their meaning is defined by what the speech community understands them to entail. Plenty of people have very different ideas about right and wrong. A society that supports slavery of inferior peoples, for example, will consider it perfectly right and appropriate. They're not mistaken about their own language; that would be absurd. The contents of their "right" are simply not in line with the cosmological Good. Ethics, morality, right and wrong - these are terms that describe human society, behaviour and belief. They're not metaphysical terminology describing cosmic forces. Real ethics might coincide with metaphysical Good, but it isn't reduced to or justified by it.

Ethics (for which I've reserved the terms wrong and right) are a thing of social reality, of real life. Good and Evil are metaphysical energies. There's a gap between the two. They might coincide occasionally, but it's contingent; not in that it's a complete coincidence (as there may have been a demiurge behind it all) but in that it could be different.

As long as you can ask the question "I know it's mechanically Good but is it the right thing to do?" and make sense of it, it's apparent that the two aren't logically interchangeable. If they were, that question would make no sense.

And just to be clear: my argument is about meta-ethics. It has no implication on how people behave, what importance is actually given to right and wrong, or how spells or other game rules concerning alignment work. But until someone can provide a satisfactory counter-argument to Hume's Guillotine and Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy, my point stands. (If you can do that, you should probably consider an academic career rather than waste away on the internet, though.)

IronAngel wrote:

Lizzie: it's not really a bizarre coincidence as much as it is the unintelligence of the game designers.

Just because you disagree with the rigid black and white Good and Evil they designed does not make them unintelligent. It means that they designed their game differently than you would have.

IronAngel wrote:

You're not addressing the relevant point here: good and evil to whom? Right and wrong in whose culture? The setting isn't relativistic in that there really is absolute Good and Evil, but those abstract forces don't absolve individuals and cultures from the responsibility of defining and defending their own ethics.

Good and Evil to the cosmos. In the Forgotten Realms, there absolutely is absolute Good and absolute Evil. They are real things. The game tells you what those things are. And those forces do absolve individuals and cultures from the responsibility because those absolute Good and Evil things are included in the dogmas of the gods that behave in a black and white manner in regards to the cosmos. Tyr is always Good and never evil, because that is the very essence of him as demanded by whatever forces are behind the cosmos (Ao, or whatever is greater than him). Shar is never Good, because that is the very essence...you get the point. Mask may reward and approve of his followers being assassins, but that does not make it Good and right. Mask's position on the very real alignment scale is evil.

You can't use cultural context to try and define something that is above and beyond any culture. That's an entirely flawed perspective.

You're speaking completely beside the point and ignoring everything I've said so far.

Good and Evil are beyond culture. But ethics isn't, and that's what we're discussing. You cannot confuse these two different levels of language. That is the point I'm making from various angles. Ethics is human, right and wrong are words in languages, Good and Evil are metaphysical facts of the cosmos. These realities may touch upon each other, but one isn't reduced to the other.

I'm not sure where you're pulling this information about the gods from, though. I couldn't disagree more. The gods don't embody alignments and they can't even know the full extent of Good and Evil, any more than mortals can. If they could, they would always act in agreement, after all. (In their respective alignment blocks, that is.) I certainly don't think the gods getting into a quarrel and killing eachother over a misunderstood love triangle is an abstract embodiment of alignment. The gods are the embodiment of different cultural values and change through history.

The game designers aren't unintelligent because they disagree with me. They're unintelligent (or at least uneducated) because they haven't solved the problems I've brought up.

What you're not understanding is that, ultimately, ethics do not matter. They're completely undermined by higher philosophies. Ethics are culturally evolved and in the context of the Forgotten Realms, derived from the very gods that are a much bigger part of a person's life than a god or gods in our own world.

You're looking at this from the bottom (society) up (the cosmos) when really, you ought to be looking from the top down. Society and culture do not drive the cosmos, the cosmos drive society and culture.

IronAngel wrote:

The game designers aren't unintelligent because they disagree with me. They're unintelligent (or at least uneducated) because they haven't solved the problems I've brought up.

This much at least, I can agree with, though I wouldn't so much say "unintelligent" as I'd say "unsophisticated." But insofar as it's your assertion that the alignment system that D&D gives us is a thunderous clusterfuck of nebulous pseudo-philosophical psychobabble and unresolvable contradictions, then we're in total agreement.

DerkDerkistan wrote:

What you're not understanding is that, ultimately, ethics do not matter. They're completely undermined by higher philosophies. Ethics are culturally evolved and in the context of the Forgotten Realms, derived from the very gods that are a much bigger part of a person's life than a god or gods in our own world.

You're looking at this from the bottom (society) up (the cosmos) when really, you ought to be looking from the top down. Society and culture do not drive the cosmos, the cosmos drive society and culture.

Your points are somewhat more understandable with that perspective in mind. I can't imagine a worse perspective for running or playing in a believable, living world though. The grass root level should always come first. That's the only thing that interests us, and the only thing that matters to the people living in the world. There we'll just have to agree to disagree. Despite my philosophical training, I guess I'm still a historian at heart and the smell of human flesh marks my prey!

(You're simply mistaken about the relationship of gods, ethics and universal alignment, though. The gods are shaped by belief and interpreted in a cultural context, after all.)

Is this topic just for the sake of debating the idea, or was this supposed to role into a request? If it's the latter then I would say write up your request and put it in the request thread, there are exceptions to every general rule you use to try and quantify/classify people with.

My brain hurts now.

We should all remember the very key thing to all this: Don't apply Real World logic to the Forgotten Realms. I'm sure that helps. Wait, I think that makes it worse! :mrgreen:

But seriously, Good and Evil are relative to the Universe itself. My view is that the FR Universe is True Neutral without a care of going one way or the other in any direction. Certain acts, bone for whatever reason, are either Good or Evil or Neutral. They can also be Lawful or Chaotic or Neutral. Now, hoe the FR Universe decides this is sometimes really, really weird. But it's the Universe our characters live in. The only thing that would change that is a sudden change in All Things Alignment.

Also, remember that PC's don't give two hoots about all this (and most don't even know anything about it). They just know what is Right and Wrong based upon their deities and cultural beliefs. They can think something they are doing is Right but the cosmos can go 'lolno you're LE brah' and they wouldn't know it (for the most part). Which allows for really, really interesting possibilities for characters, actually.

The Assassin is remaining evil-only on Amia. That's all I have to say here, really.

Speaking as a player of an assassin, I think they should remain evil only. At the very most, you could theoretically have an ex-assassin who softens up later on, perhaps through regret or something else, I don't know. I don't think the sourcebooks list what happens to the abilities of an assassin who later becomes non-evil. This however, is the only way I could see an assassin being non-evil, an ex-assassin who softened up later on, but still has all the skills of the trade even after he's retired.

Talking about my assassin character, he's often considered to be of mixed reputation because he tended to side with more neutral and fought against evils worse than himself. However, he's completely ruthless, he's downright nasty, he holds absolutely nothing back if he's out to get someone. He's willing to do things like come after his target's whole family to get at his target, he has no problem with getting rid of innocents who are in his way. He's out for himself at the expense of everyone else. He's perfectly willing to kill people if he thinks he can get away with it and he feels like it. Remember that assassins can be anywhere on the law/chaos axis as well, which can help mold that personality. Still, even if they're evil, they don't have to be all 'BAHAHAHA I MUHDAH CHILDREN AND PUPPIEZ 4 FUN!', in fact that would likely make a very poor assassin. Even evil characters can show genuine feelings of liking someone, love, and general positive things. They don't have to be 100% evil all day every day.

But being an assassin takes a certain ruthlessness that you can only get by being evil. Even a neutral character should have problems with involving an innocent's family, or murdering innocent people for profit, or the multitude of other nasty nasty things assassins do in their profession. A paladin would fall for doing most of the things that an assassin would. Remember there's a difference between killing and murder. The assassin does the latter.

I suppose in extreme circumstances, you could have a good or neutral rogue/SD/something assassinate someone evil, but those are stretch cases and not a core of what they do. Even if they exclusively murder evil characters, they're treading on a very slippery slope there if they make it into a routine thing.

Like I said, the only way I could see an assassin ever becoming neutral is if they retire from it. In which case, I'm not sure if assassin represents them as well as rogue might.

In my character's case, he has a mate and children, and genuinely loves them very much. While he's with them his general sociopathy might not show a lot. He's now a city guardsman and is rather devoted to his job, getting a good performance rating with Selunites. But so help anyone who ever tries to harm his mate and/or children because he'll fall straight back to all of his old habits to get his revenge or his family back. It's a core part of his being, so he's still evil even if he's done a lot of good over the years. The only way he'd ever become neutral is if he gives up that completely, though since he's still holding to it, evil.

I am however, rather curious, would an assassin turned neutral keep his assassin abilities? Remember these aren't divine abilities like a paladin's. Monks and bards keep all their abilities, barbarians lose their rage but keep everything else. What does an ex-assassin keep and lose?