What's the most evil thing a lawful-good character is allowed to do?

Gygax, I respect your opinions on this, but you realize that dispatching prisoners seems very unLawful Good to do, right? Especially when you yourself specifically make clear there's a risk of backsliding - like the should only be able to do it if they don't get to linger on what they've done or go even further. And for most people, being Lawful Good means being the better man and turning the other check, not eye for an eye. That seems far closer to vengeance, which I personally would define as Lawful Neutral.

You're basically holding up a bunch of rules common in ancient and early medieval times, with a different understanding of morality and reason than we have today. It's not fair to expect players to be able to so easily work their way into this mindset. I can't consider your opinion on this a valid end to the debate.

I think it goes into the "what right do I have to let them live to commit further evil acts?" deal.

The thing I don't get about alignment threads is why it's assumed that people in a certain alignment can NEVER act outside it for a single moment without shifting forever. Hell, you could get a room of 10 Lawful Good people and have 20 different answer to whatever baby hitlerorc scenario someone though of for the week.

>kill a female villager to death and cut off her head and held it in front of a peephole to convince her children to open the door so that he could slaughter them as well
That's fucked up, user.

But the mention of the Anglo-Saxon punishment of rape makes it seem more like rule by fear rather than law. You know what I mean? You aren't doing what you're told because the law guarantees you're not punished for that, you're doing what you're told because you're afraid of the consequences of not doing so. There's no protection, no 'innocent until proven guilty' - only the paladin being considered a fair judge, jury and executioner. Which isn't a bad thing, assuming the paladin is really good and not abusing his power.

That is true in most cases, but some alignments are tied to certain classes that aren't supposed to deviate from them - paladins traditionally have to be Lawful Good, barbarians have to be Chaotic, monks have to be Lawful.

And then you get into that one philosophical argument, I forget the name - if you start stacking up grains of sand, at what point does it become a heap? At what point can you definitively say a line has been crossed in terms of alignment if you can stretch and tug at it so?

>ITT edgy relativists

>makes it seem more like rule by fear rather than law

Rule by X is still rule, and rule is law.

>rip the "do not remove" tag off mattresses

You're letting your modern liberalism get in the way.

In medieval times they didn't have huge prisons where they tenderly care for thousands of inmates who committed terrible acts. They had squallid hellholes that you rotted in for a little while, followed by brutal punishment. There's no rehabilitation or job training or education. Only suffering and punishment.

Dragging an ogre back to civilization just because it surrendered and claimed it would convert to a Lawful Good God not only doesn't change it's ultimate fate, it puts a huge burden on you AND it's dangerous for civilization.

Okay, but we're talking about LG here. Rule by fear is fairly LE/LN.

Dispatching prisoners after converting them to a good alignment is literally the most humane thing possible. If they die while good, they go to heaven. If they live long enough to return to their evil ways, then die, they go to hell. QED killing them is the best option.

But fantasy games, at least usually, aren't set in the real middle ages. You can have more modern ideas of prisons, or at least alternative ways of punishing criminals - forced labor, conscription in the military. You can take that orge and make him work for you. Don't just execute him - at least let some sort of due process handle things if you have the option.

Poop.

Unless you were important and/or had money, in which case you were afforded concessions according to your rank, or could buy them.

Sometimes you were merely confined for long periods of time while awaiting ransom, or to extract compliance on some issue your captor wanted.

Maybe you waited long enough and you were freed by a change in the political climate/leadership.

Although yeah, nice as the digs were compared to "The Hole" if you were getting beheaded you were still eventually gonna get beheaded.

But there were cases where conditions weren't so bad.

Thomas More was initially well treated, although they scaled back his luxury to turn the screws, for instance.

not tip the pizza guy

Alignment is not a straitjacket. A lawful good character can do anything he wants; he doesn't run on programming scripts.

This. You aren't placing yourself in the shoes of the people of the setting.

As a dirt farming peasant in DnD life is cheap. Wild animals, bandits, warlords, mythical beasts akin to natural disasters, evil intelligent abominations, fey spirits, and every other threat under the sun is constantly on the verge of violating you, your livelihood, and your mother six ways to Sunday. If you're lucky then you live in a place of law and there is someone out there up in the food chain to help you. Be they evil and defending their 'property' or good and actually trying to enact justice, ANY SORT OF DEFENSE IS A GREAT BOON. And trust me, if your sister has been dragged off as a war wife by an Orc tribe, you'd better believe you won't find satisfaction until you get some green skinned head on a spike.

Severe punishment is the only form of deterrence that has any hope of holding off the threats of the realm. Any less and you're just inviting unlawful tragedy into your land.

Dispatching judgement based on personal morality.

By that logic, paladins should all just kill each other en masse to avoid the risk of any of them falling. Similarly, it'd be best to kill any good creature you come across lest they be tempted by evil at some point and thus deny themselves salvation.

Consensual sex in the missionary position

Princess Ulena gasped as Sir Bercham suddenly wrapped his strong fingers around her slender digits. Her other hand came up instinctively, and before she could think it was gently laying upon his own hand. The knight seemed surprised to feel the warmth of her palm on the back of his hand, and as she looked up at him with her large brown eyes to seek reassurance, he could not meet her gaze. He tried to speak, to apologize, but any thought of words was stiffed as her thumb began softly stroking along a scar on his knuckle with a gentle, curious touch. She paused, noticing his attention, but he squeezed her hand again, urging her softly to continue. Red-faced, she gently pulled her hand out of his grip, only to bring their hands back together, intertwining their fingers, his rough hands dwarfing her dainty ones. Her heart was pounding, so focused was she on the warmth of his hands that she was taken by complete surprise as he, in a moment of sheer passion, brought her hands up to press his lips gently against the back of her hand.

Depends on the __DM__

>A lawful good character can do anything he wants; he doesn't run on programming scripts.

They do in my setting because all the characters are literal robots.

>Real humans are motivated by fame, green, lust, protecting family, rage, or thirst for revenge.
What about people who travel to shitty places to help people?

>The old adage about nits making lice applies.

I don't know this adage and I thought I'd a pretty comprehensive grasp of English idioms. : /

> What's the most evil thing a lawful-good character is allowed to do?
Literally anything.
You are basing your question on the faulty assumption that deontology is necessarily the determining factor in alignment issues.

Why not virtue ethics? People can still commit evil acts out of good intents, that doesn't make them Evil with the big E letter.
Why not consequentialism? It's all good as long as ends justify the means, as long as your good outweighs your evil, right?

No, instead it's deontology and objective morality, and cosmic global powers with things like "everything with positive energy is Good, while everything with negative energy is Evil".
No, fuck you! I ain't havin' that shit.

The problem is that alignment is a meaningless vague superfluous bitch that acts as astraitjacket, and its existence serves only for the purpose of people arguing about it.

Arguing about alignment is like arguing about morality in general. "Hurr, what is Good, and what is Evil?" - just play the fucking game, for fuck's sake!

Probably genocide.

>allowed

Once again, doing it wrong. The alignments are descriptive, not prescriptive.

Unlike the other guy I do not respect your opinion and would never allow your brand of shit at my tables. Adventure league out .

That's retarded, you could still put them to work to pay off their crimes. Remember Les Mis? Why lock them up and throw away the key if they could pay for the rent?

Hello Inquisition, haven't seen you in a while

Genocide
If done to some 'evil' race to prevent them from being a problem in the future

Wha-? Who'd do something like that...

>. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before they can backslide.

>be enemy
>hear (true) stories that if you surrender and renounce your vows this paladin will just kill you anyway
>my side is losing and time is running out
>equip suicide belt and go ahead to surrender
Eat shit, liar and traitor, if I die anyway you're getting a face full of shrapnel. This is exactly how suicide bombers are made.

Enforce a bad contract caused by their own stupidity.

So it's a paladin's duty to kill all good creatures and spare all evil/neutral creatures?

Wouldn't it be god damn wonderful to have a quasi-medieval setting where things are actually like they were in the Middle Ages for once.

Instead we have the Pathfinder devs saying deities are evil if they do not support gay marriage. I still find it hard to believe they are that mentally challenged.

There's something so appealing about a severely deranged paladin who goes around killing good, god fearing individuals to give them their afterlife reward while waiting around for evil characters to find the light just so he can kill them as well.

I now have my next villain.

That is not evil though.

Not only is forcing away or exterminating orcs, goblins or whatever that are a persistent threat to your people completely morally justified, not doing so means you have failed in your duty to protect your people.

Anybody who thinks the lives of orcs or ogres are actually relevant when they threaten humans would be seen as crazy at best and a traitor at worst.

Yeah, no. The discussion is about D&D, as it is portrayed in the book. In the book, alignments are objective moral facts. To the point that they alter the physics of the universe.

Some people can literally see Evil like radiation. (It is even blocked by lead).

That's just neoliberalism. No one missions in Africa because they genuinely want to help; they simply want to egotistic rush of being a white savior among starving nignogs, even though they accomplish little and often make things worse.

Why am I not surprised? Pathfinder art looks Tumblr tier as it is, not surprised the writers would be.

Thank god this hobby can never really die. We can always fall back on old editions, and there's really nothing these people can do to stop it.

The reason people hate it is because they don't understand that it's a cosmic force and not a measure of your own morality.

Even though this has been stated 620837 times.

>No one
I think I just heard the bullshit machine ping

Your fedora is showing.

As a general rule, whatever they need to do to uphold their Oath. They may start to slide towards Evil but 5e paladins dont have to be LG, they just have to maintain their Oath and believe they're doing the right thing.

Of course, a truly Righteous person may have trouble with that last part but thats for the dice to decide.

Virtue-signalling, generally.

Most of them want to feel good about themselves. I actually went to Africa to do that, because I was trying to get into the panties of one girl in the group.

She suffered heat stroke on the first day and was airlifted out. I stuck it out three months before I went home and voted Republican.

I AM THE LAW

Put people into isocubes for extreme amounts of time over minor offenses.

If you're the kind of person who'd become a suicide bomber, you're not the kind of person who should be allowed to live.

Better to kill you now, than to deal with a snake in the grass.

Ah, really?
>I would attack any squadron blockading a port. Nothing could prevent me from dropping out of the clear blue sky on to a battleship with 400 kilos of explosives in the cockpit. Of course it is true that the pilot would be killed, but everything would blow up, and that's what counts.
>— Jules Vedrines, pre-1914.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Védrines , by the way.

Yer being willfully retarded. If the only options left are to either die while making no difference or die while making a difference, the latter is always the correct choice.

There is a reason why pious folks are described as God-fearing.

Not all pious folks though. Specific, fire and brimstone style, pious folks typically.

Fear is not inherently necessary to be a good person, though in the absence of other more obvious motivations it does suffice.

Murder an innocent (in a particularly painful manner) out of rage.
Alignments aren't straitjackets. You can perform out of alignment actions while remaining your alignment, provided your character is provoked in the right way. Your character should feel incredibly bad about it, obviously.

>One of my characters stabbed a female villager to death and cut off her head and held it in front of a peephole to convince her children to open the door so that he could slaughter them as well.

That's not a Lawful Good character.
No way.

Is that you Ayn Rand?
Even if you are not one of them, there are people who believe that doing good is the right thing and not only because they make themself feel good

Kant, pls go and stay go. Kierkegaard disproved your ideologies already

>intro to philosophy detected
>no other philosophy classes detected.

Wipe out an entire omniverse. But only if his patron deity tells him to.

Alright, Ill bite.

Alignment is relative.
Lawful simply means you follow a code.

LE Assassin 1's code.
>Kill only for money and only take the highest paying contract in times of dispute.
>Erase memory of all witnessess.
>Protect Fellow assassins unless it could compromise your identity or risk your own life.
>Live for the guild

LE Assassin 2's code
>Kill any immediate threats
>Take all contracts
>In times of dispute kill all targets
>Kill all witnessess
>If another assassin screws up, they deserve to live by the consequences and are responsible to save themselves
>Other assassins are threats, associate with them only out of necessity.

This means a LG character can do whatever he/she desires without risk of an alighnment shift provided it follows his/her code.

As far as Good/Evil it is whether they are acting for their own precieved greater good or against the greater good.

...

>Pathfinder devs saying deities are evil if they don't support gay marriage

Please tell me this isn't an actual thing

I thought deities had bigger things to worry about than that

iirc one or two of them said they have trouble seeing a deity who's anti-gay as Good. /pfg/ blowing things out of proportion as per the norm.

If anything, that sounds more like the devs simply having trouble detaching their personal beliefs from the game

Well yeah, just saying it's not quite as bad as made out to be.

Oh yeah, Im agreeing with you there desu.

I mean, it shouldn't matter how the devs see it so thats kinda bullshit but then PF was never really intended as a straight port of medieval europe Id guess since it also includes plenty of age of sail shit and the likes.

Actions dictate alignment. Not the other way around. And there's nothing wrong with it.

Also, tip harder faggot

To balance their moral scale or live like a libertarian hippy

being a missionary would be cool

>One of my characters stabbed a female villager to death and cut off her head and held it in front of a peephole to convince her children to open the door so that he could slaughter them as well
Fuck off your character is not lawful good by any stretch of the imagination.
Not to mention you did all that edgy bullshit just so that you'd get more hit die. That's Neutral evil as all shit.

>getting triggered

I really like that picture but seriously the fact it wasn't transparent really urks me. So I fixed it for you.

You forgot the O's, but good effort.

Shit I didn't see those Os thanks for pointing it out.

Noice mate

>game designer creates a new type of game
>acknowledges that it's possible to play a "good" character who slaughters the children of his enemies because it fits the morality of a warrior in a lawless, violent iron age setting.
>acknowledges that it's all just pretend, and what happens in the game won't hurt you any more than reading a violent story in a book

>fast forward a few decades
>game designers in a twist about imaginary deities not having mores compatible with American liberals in 2016
>except for all that wanton slaughter and looting because gotta get that XP amirite XD

I have no idea.
I had a party aid and abet an Alexander the Great type guy in crucifying several thousand aristocrats and merchants because they had torn down a church and an orphanage to build a casino/brothel earlier in the game.
I let the LGs in the party stay LG, there is a certain degree of flexibility in the system. Plus, a single unrighteous act does not necessarily define a character.

Sounds like your players did the right thing anyways.

I would say so.
Although, one member (a CN Bard) complained that the LGs didn't fall. I didn't pay him much heed, though, he complains about any morally ambiguous things they do.

Giving a suspected witch a quick death rather than leave her and know she will be tortured for hours, if not days.

Well I agree with you, user.

Execute unjust laws.

> unjust
> laws
Do you even liberalism?

Nothing

Damnit shut up Meltzer. Your shitty Crisis got its stink all over the DCU and still hasn't completely faded two reboots on.

>An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is by no means anything but Lawful and Good. Prisoners guilty of murder or similar capital crimes can be executed without violating any precept of the alignment. Hanging is likely the usual method of such execution, although it might be beheading, strangulation, etc. A paladin is likely a figure that would be considered a fair judge of criminal conduct.

I'm not so sure about this. Just because a judge decrees it, doesn't make it right - would a paladin turn on the gas in Auschwitz?

Stand by and do nothing.

Killing evil things is a good act in D&D alignments, so, Lawful Goods can kill.

Would it be OOC for a CN Barbarian to cut out a reoccurring villain's eye before letting them go?
Would that be a blatantly evil act?

Unless he's lawful neutral, no.