Why do so many people these days seem to get butthurt when I say that undead, and especially mindless undead are evil?

>I mean, making a golem involves enslaving an elemental spirit.

even if we're assuming D&D, that's not how golems work anymore. the elemental spirit that is "enslaved" isn't even sentient. like, not even dog-tier sentience, it has no thoughts or feelings.

It's that way because that's how popular culture goes.

Think about it, whenever undead spontaneously arise in your game what do Zombies do?

Do they just mill about? No, they attack the living. Undead are inherently hostile to the living. Many sentient undead subside on living as well.

D&D is a game of "Cosmic Forces" where good and evil are not simply philosophical issues, but physical tangible energies. Not all settings act in accordance with this exactley, like for instance Golarion is more concerned with Positive and Negative not being inherently good or evil, but things often work in such a way because that's how the setting has been ordained to be.

It's people who try and press the issue when there's really no substance to the decision beyond "that's how we wanted it to work" it get's annoying because the only right answer is the GM's opinion.

Undead are evil (in D&D) because they are animated using negative energy. It has nothing to do with the moral implications of desecrating dead bodies.

And undead=evil isn't how undead worked for a long time, or is entirely dependent on setting.

So what's your point?

The negative energy plane was neutral in the edition that I played, did that change after 2nd edition?

Why is negative energy inherently evil?

The spell literally has the evil descriptor and it specifically states that casting the spell is worth an atonement spell.

Because narrative device with quasi-religious origins. Please stop looking for deeper substance than that.

So if you animated some non-undead construct using negative energy it would be evil, but making one with positive energy would be good?

That's weird. I mean, too much negative energy withers you, but too mych positive energy makes you pop.

>tfw houserules
Eat my taint OP

>Why is negative energy inherently evil?
Tautology.

Post-modernism, user.

If you're having a shitty day because people keep assaulting your intelligence with rhetorically and logically contradictory statements that, if you're sane, are impossible to suss out, you have been raped by post-modernism.

If you are told that a clearly superior ideology, technology, or line of thinking is no better than any other and that all ideologies, technologies, and lines of thinking are equivalent to some degree, you know the drill. Post-modern rape.

Just stop putting yourself into those situations and you'll be fine.

>So what's your point?

i don't know, what was your point talking about golems? if you wanted to say "depends on the setting" you should have said that from the outset.

Some of the source books I read a while back for Pathfinder talk about how some cultures also take issue with constructs and imprisoning elementals.

Undead get the nearly universal evil treatment because they're a common element of horror. A looming evil presence is a very common component of the genre. Zombie flicks always have the undead kill the living, vampires prey upon humans, werwolves cannot control their beastial bloodlust and so on.

There's also things like Frankenstein where the monster wasn't actually inherently evil, but it was an abomination that shouldn't have existed and it became evil due to it's circumstances and the prejudice it faced.

I wasn't talking about golems, so what is your point?

The only undead I remember not being evil off the bat are like 3 flavors ghosts and deathless.

Deathless get a pass because there is no negative energy and people willingly give themselves to the process. This along with them being from a specific setting that threw out the alignment rules.

I think his point was that he sees it a contradiction of golems not being evil, but undead are.

Think a lot of players these days don't understand that such things are supposaed to be these mysterious creations of powerful wizards who don't care for petty morality of common men.

When I GM and I always consider how the commoner would react in their setting. A golem while not radiating evil would probably freak out most people and only be reserved for defending kings or tombs and such.

In Pathfinder there's ghosts who can be good aligned, since ghosts are just basically souls with a semi-tangible form. And at least one sentient alchemical zombie who's not actually evil aligned despite being undead from one of their early modules.

I think it varies by edition.

One of the reasons I've heard around Veeky Forums is that negative energy destabilizes the material plane, so every zombie summoned is literally one more step towards the end of the world.

I guess that would cause issues with most Good aligned factions.

>that same faggot that completely misunderstands post-modernism in every thread where posts about it.

I'm sorry. I couldn't understand you over all the dicks in your mouth.

If there are souls and an afterlife, messing with that for your own ends can be evil in itself. How you like to die, go to heaven, and then get dragged back to get enslaved as cannon fodder for a creepy old spellcaster?

I don't think a corpse have thoughts or feelings

I hate the 'depends on setting' meme, but it really does. DnD/PF just makes a mess of things though, by claiming that negative energy isn't evil, but undead are evil for being powered by negative energy, while having non-evil ghosts in their published adventures.

There are certainly ghost stories about non-evil ones, either trying to help their living relatives or just wanting someone to lay them to rest. Even corporeal undead can be non-evil. Most in this case are those cursed to ruse without rest, and may be grouchy about it but mostly just want to break the curse and return to the grave. Others may be more like revenants, undead that rise for vengeance against their murderers. Could claim they're evil, but who wouldn't want some payback on a guy that killed you? One in particular was a tale from the american south, regarding a murdered man who rose after hearing his murderers speaking near his grave. They planned to target his daughter next in some plan to get their property. So the man dug himself out, went home to his frightened girl and called the police. He thrashed the killers when they arrived before the cops but left them alive to be arrested, wished his daughter a wonderful life, and crawled back into his grave. Undead justice.

Because D&D's cosmology deals in absolute morality as arbitrated by Gary Gygax.

D&D "Evil" isn't as wishy washy and subjective as real world "Evil" - makes smiting villains a little less of an innately dubious prospect in your fantasy land.

Why can't I animate a corpse using energy of FIRE?

I make a distinction between ancestors which intervene in a ghostly way or suddenly incarnate, (which are good) and the type of ancestors which shuffle around underneath a shrine or in the basement, which are evil but the villagers won't admit it.

There's no real logic behind it, I just like the two styles to be distinct.

That would be a neat setting which would have interesting consequences from wizards abusing there power.

The only reason mindless undead are evil in 3.5 and friends is so that paladins can Smite Evil them and it work.

/thread

not 908, but wow...there it is. 120 validates 908.

Because Evil is a literal physical element in D&D setting. It's not just some spirtual subjective mumbo jumbo. Evil is a palpable thing, and demons devils, undead are chock full of it. It's not the same as real life, and it's not supposed to be.

>thinks wanting to be the good guy nomatterwhat is post-modern

wew

Doesn't make it any less stupid though.

agreed, this is my thought process of why the creation of undead is evil, and i guess the undead themselves are evil because they serve the wicked person who created them

I am the person you hate, more or less, I think.

I fought against it for quite a while with my DM. I made the point that DnD has moved away from arbitrary absolutes, and that clinging to them isn't really the best.

If you consider the morality of burning someone to death ala immolation or using energy to resurrect a skeleton with no feelings and no spirit, it seems kind of silly.

What I ultimately realize is, it doesn't matter what the "objective truth" of the DM's world is. My character is probably the most noble, giving, and self-sacrificing of the group, and he uses skeletons every day.

Maybe Kelemvor hates him, whatevs. I hate Kelemvor anyway for being a shitter.

Why do so many people get butthurt when I say that undead--and especially mindless undead--aren't evil?

>I'm sick of these people who get all pissy because they want the evil undead raising without any of the consequences.
What consequences? Having an undead army?
Even if raising the dead is evil, why would that make the dead themselves--who are by definition mindless--evil? That's getting into territory where you might as well say children of rape are always evil, or that if your parents were Evil you're evil. Then again, in D&D there *are* plenty of Always Evil races, so clearly inherited sin is a thing. But if you commit no evil on your own behalf, how are you evil? It requires a mind to be evil.

I know the feel OP, though it is understandable why people have such a hard on for morally grey necromancy.
>Necromancers are cool
>players want to play necromancers
>Most games are good aligned
>The few games that are evil usually suck
>Players do not normally get to play necromancers
It's like holding fruit over their heads while chopping off their legs, denying an entire branch of magic because it's "evil."

I houserule that necromancy costs life to wield, your's or another's.
That way, good necromancers are careful to use their powers and evil ones are truly evil, undead by themselves have no alignment.

And on the note of "It's just evil, mkay?"

That's fine, I'm certainly past getting frustrated over it. Each refinement of DnD has stepped further and further back from constricting character and ability. If my DM took my character sheet, erased true neutral, and replaced with neutral evil, whatever.

It would have 0 effect on how my character played out.

Interestingly, I don't care if people THINK that undead are objectively evil. That's completely totally understandable. I've scare the shit out of a ton of peasants with my skeletons, and a lot of people have refused to deal with my character because of them .

TL;DR the alderman and gygaxian tenets of "objective" truth in a given setting are fine if people all like the idea of them I guess. But most people prefer the nuance and shades of grade afforded by shucking off that philosophy. It's equally stupid that it's "Lawful Good" for a paladin to summarily execute criminals or creatures.

...

Well, it's like fire. It's not evil by default, it's all about how it's used. And in the case of mindless undead, it's usually used for evil, and may even be powered by evil (ie. Evil or negative evil.)

>*negitive energy

Nice trips, Satan. So basically you want the soul of anyone who raises undead, eh?

It basically requires an inherent structural goodness to the game universe. There are rules, magic, souls, etc, overseen by a benevolent natural law. DnD started out Law vs Chaos, not good vs evil. Deviation from the Law is usually an evil thing. Raising the dead is unnatural, goes against Law, thus is minimum Chaotic, and usually evil as well.

Its evil because living and then dieing is what mortals are suppose to do, as dictated by the Gods/etc. and fucking with that is automatically bad if your universe is structuralist.

You can go amoral ethics if you want, but then claiming that your actions are Good is tricky. It'll be good for some, evil for others necessarily, rather than just one or the other. Doesn't really work with the alignment system.

because its burning hot, you can animate skelingtons with it

Why should non-sentient corpse you've built and ordered to stand guard over a tomb to be evil, while a robot that you built to stand guard over a tomb is not?

Are Flesh Golems evil, but Stone Golems are not?

Is the difference here the fact that one is made out of flesh and the other is not, and that the flesh itself is tainted with evil. To construct something from meat and bone is to construct something that is evil? Are humans naturally evil because they too were constructed of meat and bone?

> An animate skeleton just has some negative energy making it go.
> just has some negative energy making it go.

Negative energy is a force that tries to remake worlds into inversions of themselves. Making a undead is taking a small amount of that energy and anchoring it to your world.

Does it now make sense will it is evil? This was spelled out in 2e & 3e splat books.

Negative energy is naturally opposed to positive energy, so things powered by it are inclined to kill anything powered by positive energy, and will always do so unless stopped by magic or an intact mind that retains its old morals. Indiscriminately slaughtering the living is an evil act, so undead happen to be evil.

Sure, they COULD be used to make a shiny utopia where manual labor is obsolete and an ever growing army defends the peace, but only because magic is forcing them to do exactly what you want in spite of their natural urges. Its like using an enslaved succubus to teach theater. They'd be fucking amazing at it, but the risks are so high that paladins would be justified in stabbing you to stop it.

If the default setting of every single robot ever no matter who built it was "eviscerate children", they would get pegged as evil too.

How many ghost stories end up being about a spirit that can't rest because its corpse was desecrated? It's not just "flesh", it used to be somebody, and they're not necessarily gone just because they're dead.

They took the Ravenloft supplement point of view on the matter and made it baseline in 3e. The negative energy plane is neutral but putting energy from that plane to other places is a very bad idea. Read the Libris Mortis.

Alignment is stupid and you're stupid.

Evil and good are defined by equally arbitrary ethical frameworks. This does not depend on the setting.

What if the ghost was okay about it? What if he's content with the idea that his corpse is being used to construct a flesh-golem that will crush the thatched-roof cottage of his dickass neighbor Wilhelm who never returned that scythe he borrowed?

>Why is negative energy inherently evil?

Its not, BUT it causes very bad side effects to happen when it gets put places in the long term that it is not meant to be. To the level that making undead ( which are powered by trapped negative energy) can be viewed as a evil or immoral action because of those side effects.

So what if you cast speak with dead first and make sure the former owner of the body is cool with it?

Well now he's evul because Piazo and the WOTC can't into anything but very simple yet stupidity complex morality that usually leaves the players and GMs to just drop it and write up their own set of morality rules, like what happened in the game I'm in.

In some settings this causes the souls to die a slow and agonising 'death' too.

Except the ones that it does, you fuck

>the soul is energy for the corpse puppet
>skeletons are short-lived minions, since their soul energy burns off quite quickly
>the soul evaporates and the individual it belonged to is denied a heaven or hell
Now you can have wandering necromancers without the cliche tide of zombies.

The morality is dubious, if you get a good person you're doing wrong, if you save someone from hell you're doing right. Or are you?

Depends what the rules are for spirits and their remains. Golem creation may cause enough discomfort that permission would be hard to come by. As an analogy, what if I asked your permission to cast a spell that would give you a persistent, throbbing headache for the next ten years?

He's actual correct, and you're either a post-modernist or an idiot, or both.

The problem with post-modernism is that it has no basis in anything with basis. It doesn't purport to have or need one, necessarily, but if you get into an argument things often boil down to academic hand-wringing—Lacan this, Derrida that, "play", "performance". It's the Wile E. Coyote of philosophical schools. A branch off of modernism, wholly in modernism, without any sort of connection to ideological lineage—like building a bridge of 2x4s off a cliffside and reusing the same few boards as you make your way.

It simply has nothing to stand on, and if you attempt to poke any holes in it the whole system falls apart. Then people retreat to it being a tool, not an ideology, yet it fuels almost all modern ideology, meaning most modern ideology has no basis.

It's the critique of the critique of the critique of the critique. It's so far up its own ass it no longer remembers one could breath without smelling shit.

Post-modernism is philosophy for normies. It's feel good, easy to use, and everyone who uses it gets to feel superior-yet-equal. So yes, you're either a post-modernist or an idiot, or both.

In a world where the dead can be raised by magic there is literally no reason not to use them as a labor force besides lazy worldbuilding.

>b-but muh desecrate the dead

Doesn't trump the ethical value of a mass automated workforce

>b-but muh DARK MAGICS!

The risks still don't outweigh the benefits of a mass automated workforce

If it is possible to raise and command the dead in your setting and most major nations aren't using the literally infinite hordes of zombies who need no pay, shelter and minimum food to mass automated their workforce you are a lazy worldbuilder afraid to let magic influence your setting in a realistic way

>The risks still don't outweigh the benefits of a mass automated workforce
Oh yes they fucking do, you moron.

In most games, undead are default evil by nature regardless of how you raise them. In the most popular ones, they are also capable of self-will, even if they are mindless. The only thing 'mindless' means to the undead is that they revert to their basic instinct - evil.

As an example, undead in D&D have a wis score, and a cha score, meaning they are self aware and aware of that which is not self, and possess will to act. That they are mindless means they act of the default instinctive attribute - which for them is to act on the impulses they do have. Since they are evil they destroy that which is not self - I.E. everything that moves around them is not self, and must be destroyed.

That's why animate dead is an evil act - you are creating an immortal killign machine that seeks to destroy everything around it that lives, and is held in check only by the will of the caster - as long as he is alive and in control, which is never guaranteed. Because sooner or later something WILL go wrong. You know, like Chernobyl, a natural disaster like a tsunami that kills most of the living population and leaves hundreds or maybe thousands of undead masterless, or somethign as simple as the necromancer choking to death on a fishbone.

Murphy's Law trumps everything.

Yes, nothing could possibly go wrong with an automated workforce of easily programmed mindless undead in a world where magic exists. No one could possible take advantage of such a thing and use it to completely destroy all trust and value of such an incredibly useful thing. That would be totally unrealistic and absolutely lazy worldbuilding to presume that something could actually go terribly wrong.

After all, it's never happened in the history of the technological age, right?

Life is short, eternity is forever. Stealing someone's afterlife may be literally worse than murder.

Don't try to hide behind materialism in a setting where necromancy works.

>Don't try to hide behind materialism in a setting where necromancy works.

So either 1) you simply pull the soul back from floating around in the air(the existence of souls and necromancy does not prove the existence of an afterlife, be they desirable or not) and into a body. Thus the workers can just be 'immortal' and continue their lives from where they left off.

Or 2) you're just puppeting corpses with or without the soul's consent. Explain how this option would affect the soul's afterlife, when the soul is residing in an entirely different plane. Assuming, of course, reincarnation isn't a thing, in which case 2) matters even less.

Grant any sort of supernatural phenomena, and the idea of an afterlife gets a lot less far fetched, no?

>tfw your character can actually do this

The biggest problem is that most of the body will burn away and you'll just end up with a walking torch.

Scares the fuck out of the other guys, though.

Not really. If you have can commune with souls and most don't even mention heaven or hell...

Then there's the part where gods exist and you realize,...only a handful have anything planned for their followers. Even then it may not necessarily be something you have access to or want.

I like the idea that gods are cannibals. No one ever talks about or can prove the afterlife because their gods are eating their souls.

What system?

This.
Gygax took a wargame and just added depth to it. Complex moralities and motivations were never supposed to be part of it and came later.
Also, when original dnd was made there wasn't any post-modernism around to question or judge its ideas.

Almost Droaam

Checked. Undeads as a subject and trip 6.

> Why do so many people these days seem to get butthurt when I say that undead, and especially mindless undead are evil?
Why is something without intent "evil". A mindless skeleton / zombie awaiting orders cannot commit evil acts of its own volition. It cannot muster intent. It cannot choose to forgo its own morals to achieve its goal.

Assuming someone's evil because the action to create it is evil, ESPECIALLY if the transformation was unwilling is by itself callous and intolerant.

That said, it's not because it is not evil that you should not destroy it, especially if it is under the control of someone or something with evil intents.

Ultimately it comes down to a lack of in setting justification for declaring the act evil. This is why I intend to have any mindless undead in games that I'm GMing seek to attack the living and make it easier for other forms of undead to form in their presence.
This allows me to say that there isn't any absolute morality but still keep undead as a bad thing.

>Use undead for manual labour
>doing evil shit

It's all just homebrew.

Frankly if the DM didn't keep track of all his shit I wouldn't use the system, but he's good at coming up with things on the fly.

>usually

> Think about it, whenever undead spontaneously arise in your game what do Zombies do? Do they just mill about? No, they attack the living.
TBF, I've had at least 3 campaigns where undeads were used as cheap labor, one of them by a PC. They were doing dangerous yet simple jobs that nobody wanted, like cleaning the sewers, piling manure, working the fields and so on.

Heck, one player went mystic theurge, made a militia, covered them in so much plating that you wouldn't recognize them as undead at a glance and kept doing good deeds with them.

So, for the mindless undeads, we treat them like we would robots. We destroy them (or attempt to take control if able) when they try to destroy us and we employ them in ways that profit us.

It implies you're desecrating the corpses of random people in order to use them as slaves with magic, so maybe not "evil" but it's definitely unpleasant

They're just corpses. The person is long gone. You're just telepathicaly moving meat around.

Yes, nobody could possibly have a problem with destroying the natural order or burning the souls of your own ancestors for fuel. Or with creating monsters that hate the living then hoping nothing goes wrong.

Good fucking luck telling that to their families and friends. Scientists IRL struggle to get even non-sentient barely-formed fetus corpses for research that could eventually turn large chunks of medicine in general on its head.

Lets just ignore the fact that in plenty of settings their soul is sitting right in the corpse being tormented.

Also, this is without mentioning religious concerns and if it's actually just a corpse or if you're doing some sort of spiritual damage to its owner's spirit, which depends on the setting

That depends entirely on the setting.

For example, an undead in Warcraft is a person who has been forcefully reanimated and bound to a necromancer's will.

Even if they manage to break free of the necromancer's control, their existence is misery. They're not capable of feeling happiness and can feel their bodies rotting around them.

This isn't the only setting to treat necromancy like this, either.

And the actual arguments that make sense are as usual, completely ignored by the idiot "necromancy is all good" posters.

>A mindless skeleton / zombie awaiting orders cannot commit evil acts of its own volition.
WRONG.

Vermin are mindless, but they act of their own volition and can attack creatures. Why?

Because wisdom is the stat of willpower and intent. Charisma is the stat of self awareness and awareness of others. Both vermin and undead have wisdom and charisma. That means they can act, and have awareness of self and others.

In other words, a mindless undead acts on the only instinct it has - evil - because all undead are evil regardless of how they were created. When they are created they are evil, it is in the statblock as such. So yes, uncontrolled mindless undead have the will to act on impulses agaisnt things that are not themselves. Vermin act on the impulse to feed. Undead act on the impulse to kill.

a) Necromancy is based on capturing and deforming/torturing souls that could have been in a better place - evil
b) Necromancy threatens some kind of world balance, but is a powerful tool - mostly evil
c) Necromancy just allows getting cheap as dirt workforce or immortality if necromancer is good enough to create sentient undead - necromancy is good.

I guess necromancy became viewed as good because christian shit meme "don't try to prolong your life against god's will" finally started dying en masse.

Undead in most settings are not comparable to conventional automation. If the manager of some workers has a heart attack, nothing bad happens. If the operator of a machine has a heart attack, the machine might hurt someone, possibly lethally, but that depends on several circumstances.

If a necromancer controlling an undead workforce loses control, they *will* actively try to kill people, livestock, pets, and anything else within reach. If safety regulations were sloppy enough or non-existent, they might kill another necromancer and free his undead too, who might kill another necromancer...

Anyone smart enough to plan a magic revolution is probably smart enough to realize almost everything you can do with the extremely dangerous pollutant that is the undead can be done with other, much safer forms of magic.

>cheap as dirt workforce
Where did the meme that a fucking rotting corpse is capable of doing heavy labor come from anyway?

Zombies used to till Haitian farms. It's an exceedingly old story.