What was the reason for D&D 3.5 turning necromancy into an "almost always evil" affair? No...

>What was the reason for D&D 3.5 turning necromancy into an "almost always evil" affair?
Because skeletons and zombies are fucking evil, and necromancy has always been evil, and your question falsely presumes it had to "turn" that way.

Duh.

Even in 2nd ed they were FUCKING EVIL

gctm.free.fr/add/necromant/

Necromancy, not undead. Entwined but not the same.

Yeah, kinda like how murder and murders are "entwined". Dipshit.

Or fire and arson.

Or arrows and archers.

Or swords and swordsmen.

It's like asking why 5th ed made Druids into some sort of nature-themed priest.

Because necromancy requires either the desecration of the dead at best, or the enlacement of souls at worst. There is no way to do necromancy that isn't evil unless you start a cult that wants to worship you eternally or have people fill out release forms for their body, but then an argument could be made for fucking with nature.

>out of game reason

...

>out of game reason
Read.

The in-game reasons are the reasons. Stop trying to justify your fucking zombie fetish.

No because they're free to say magic works how they want.

OK, the out of game reason is that corpses and death and messing with the cycle of life and death is generally considered abhorrent in every form of media and repulsive to most mentally normal people.

>B-b-but muh edgy snowflake dark power!

You are That Guy, stop being That Guy, faggot.

The writers could tag Dominate with evil shit and they didn't.

If you have ever played with DM who considers magically dominating the free will of another sentient creature to be socially acceptable or "good" in any way... well, That Guys attract other That Guys I guess.

Because people like you are cockbags.

Simple, huh?

Yeah and they wanted to say necromancy was bad. Why is this an argument?

>Arguing that stripping a creature of it's free will isn't evil because the rules say so.

Holy fuck, you're actually serious right now, aren't you? You're beyond help.

>They're free to say magic works how they want
>They say necromantic magic is inherently evil and against the natural order
>"I DON;T LIKE THAT ANSWER! THEY'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY HOW MAGIC WORKS ANYMORE!"

Huh, it's like you're allowed to homebrew it working however you want anyway.

In 5e you can be a cleric of Nephthys with the Death domain to animate dead and she's a CG god, the book even says this.

Checkmate, 5e.

Convenient how blatantly evil things are the height of morality just because a religion says so.

Not that guy, but that wasn't what he was saying. He was saying that it's weird that Necromancy and raising the dead and all gets a free pass while Dominate doesn't get tagged.

It's a stupid argument anyway, because there's no real reason to waste wordcount on Dominate being evil because it so blatantly is, but you're no less a retard for misinterpreting it so wildly.

>Not that Guy
How to, at a glance, tell a samefag trying to save face on an anonymous internet forum.

What does "tagged" even mean. Spells don't have good/evil tags regardless of the edition. This isn't Star Wars with clearly defined Light Side and Dark Side powers. Your alignment score doesn't drop because you cast a certain spell. Everything is up to DM fiat.

Wrong, specialty priests/shaman of Anhur, Arvoreen, and other gods are GOOD ONLY and they get Necromancy as a sphere and Necromancy lets you raise dead.
dragonsfoot.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=42664
Check it if you don't believe it.

Hell, shamans of Corellon are GOOD ONLY and they get necromancy.

Priest of Sashelas? CG only, gets necromancy.

Garl Glittergold? LG/NG only, gets necromancy.

Hanali Celani, elven god of beauty? CG only, gets necromancy.

Ilmater, FR's Jesus? LG only, gets necromancy as major sphere.

as someone who played necro mostly in diablo 2
i like the tiny blurb in 5e that says not all necromancers are evil

something about spooky skeletons are really cool to me, and using something as terrifying as that for good is cool to me, edgelords be damned

but really, i dont think i ever gave a damn what the manual or the DM says, they can scribble EVIL all over my char sheet or make everyone call me evil, but i will never waver my characters pursuit for justice or righteousness

And necromancy is more than just raising the dead by your own admission, so good dieties getting this as a domain are irellivant.

Animation is still evil.

> Spells don't have good/evil tags regardless of the edition. This isn't Star Wars with clearly defined Light Side and Dark Side powers.

>Necromancy only dead centric spells
>Not the general magic field of life, body and soul
>No medicinical use
>No religious background making necromancers also take duty as morticians

And thus Pathfinder/3.5 became even more retarded than I previously assumed it was.

Hell in original folklore a necromancer was just someone who talked to dead people and acted as a pyschopomp

Setting where necromancy is a respectable field of work sounds fun. Like people hiring necromancers to communicate a last time with dead family members to say a final goodbye.

oh it's that thread again
Look, necromancy should have some cost, otherwise there's no point in not having lich oligarchies rule the whole world and things never fearing death because they can become skellies anyway.
Having a cost of "It's evil" is pretty dumb, especially with modern and postmodern morality system of "everything is subjective, life is absurd, do what you want". Feel free to replace it with "Your life force", "Others' life force", "Magic irradiation", "Blood", or giving the monopoly ovre death magic to some asshole everyone hates and have necromancy require doing jobs for said asshole.

Never underestimate just how retarded 3.PF can be. It's always safer to just assume the worst with that garbage """"""system""""""

they also make scary but dependable bodyguards
skellys to escort your escort
false life to buy the package more time
feign death, just in case you need to make a feint
blight/inflict wounds for extra firepower
high INT or WIS means that their decisions tend to be very good ones

There sure are a whole lot of idiots in this thread that seem to conflate the necromancy school, filled with plenty of non evil spells and even ones that are useful and beneficial, with the very specific evil ones of making undead. Necromancy is not evil, and has never been evil, raising the dead is evil, and those spells account for about 1% of the necromancy school. Many of the spells used specifically to destroy and eliminate undead and the corpses they come from are necromancy spells. Its also the big debuff school.

>In 3.5, a skeleton, absent orders, will just stand in place waiting for orders from something with the power to give it orders; otherwise, it's harmless.
Except that's wrong. Its specifically controlled undead that won't immediately attack. Controlled undead will stand there motionless, waiting for orders. Uncontrolled will roam aimlessly killing anything that is alive. This is true of 3.5, 4e, PF, and 5e.

PF eliminated the Evil descriptor from certain spells which made no sense to have it, like Deathwatch. However, any undead creation spells are always labeled with the Evil descriptor. Evil gods and demon lords gave people the knowledge of their use, and they want more souls in their hells.

if i use my skeletons for good, am i still evil?

Those are descriptors, and it is explicitly stated they have no game effect unless called upon.

Yes. Because in order to use the spell, you must either be someone who is Neutral leaning evil, or Evil. In addition, you've created a horrific abomination of unlife, a being which leaks literal anti-life all around it, and which if ever set loose will ravage and destroy any living thing in its vicinity to satisfy its lust for life energy. It's like walking a tiger on a leash down a city street, you might get lucky and it won't maul someone, but the minute you let go, it's going to kill people.

It freaks out any sane person, and marks you as the spawn of an evil cult. There is no doing good with skeletons since any town guard will see that skeleton, immediately inform his superiors and will bring the king's men and his mages down upon your head.

so it doesnt matter what good i do with my powers? my actions are completely irrelevant, and niether my intent nor actual good i do doesnt qualify me as good because i have skeletons?

You won't have the chance to do good before your monstrosity of unlife is found out and you're put to the sword. There is a reason reanimators live on the fringes of cities, away from all those people, it's because they know that if they walked into town with their horrific spawn, they would be killed on the spot. In order to use those spells, you must also be either a neutral (evil) or evil cleric or a wizard who thinks he will get away with being an idiot who flaunts the decency of any sane person.

Why is it that reanimatorfags dismiss the huge cultural background for their spells and think they will be accepted as normal or even good people by those who rightly and strongly fear their creations. That the religious significance of their act won't register upon the common folk who will cry for the Undead Smashers of the local death god to come and fuck your shit up and make sure your little flight from civilized decency is rooted out and stamped out forever.

Do you think the local psychopomps of the area are going to put up with your shit either? That the shepherds of the dead and souls are going to look the other way as you rip the bodies of the deceased from their restful graves? Your a fool and madman.

The system may say you can, but the game world will rightly and strongly put you down.

so my only choice is to give in and become evil and prove them right?
there is no way for me to to let my actions speak for me and to let everyone know that I can use skeletons for good?
it is too hard to be good, so why even bother, only people for whom good cpmes naturally should have that chance?

1e
>The act of animating dead is not basically a good one, and it must be used with careful consideration and good reason by clerics of good alignment.

2e
>Casting this spell is not a good act, and only evil priests use it frequently.

3.5e/Pathfinder
"Animate Dead" has the [Evil] descriptor.

4e
No reference to alignment in the "Animate Dead" spell.

5e
>Creating the undead through the use of necromancy spells such as animate dead is not a good act, and only evil casters use such spells frequently

Conclusion: the game has not significantly changed. Most editions agree that animate dead is typically bad but might be used by good characters in rare circumstances. 3e is a break in style rather than substance due to the introduction of [descriptors]. 4e is the odd man out for ignoring alignment altogether.

In D&D dumb morality terms, doing evil for greter good is still evil. And necromancy is evil because negative enrgy is radiation but instead of making you sick it makes you sick AND an asshole.

During D&D 3.5's late-cycle books (e.g. Complete Scoundrel in 2007), the writers decided to be more progressive with the morality of alignment-tagged spells.

The prime example of this is the malconvoker, one of the game's more powerful prestige classes. It revolves around summoning and binding (that is, with spells like planar binding) evil creatures and using them for good purposes. For example, a malconvoker might repeatedly planar-bind fiends in order to put them to work in hunting down other evil creatures.

Notably, a malconvoker *cannot* be evil. It is strictly a noble endeavor to turn fiends to good ends in such a fashion.

>There sure are a whole lot of idiots in this thread that seem to conflate the necromancy school, filled with plenty of non evil spells and even ones that are useful and beneficial, with the very specific evil ones of making undead. Necromancy is not evil, and has never been evil, raising the dead is evil, and those spells account for about 1% of the necromancy school. Many of the spells used specifically to destroy and eliminate undead and the corpses they come from are necromancy spells. Its also the big debuff school.
Yeah, but most of the posters in this thread started with 3.5 so expecting intelligent replies is a fool's endeavor.

>captcha is "Select all the dumbbells"

You calling Garl "just a prank bro" Glittergold a good and trusting the book doesn't really make your argument stronger.

That was after 2e.

I don't like the good necromancer meme, and by "necromancers" I only mean the undead raising/controlling characters, not random wizards casting finger of death or whatever. In my settings raising undead will always be evil, you may consider yourself a hero when your undead army defends a village from orcs, but for every zombie you raised, three ghouls will awaken somewhere else and go on an uncontrolled rampage.

Necromancy is a violation of a dead person's body.
It's like arguing why is rape bad.
Besides the issue of using someone's dead relative/friend/lover as an expendable servant by reanimating their remains. There's also the issue of how you acquired that knowledge, the years of experimentation that you had to do on living and dead things to end up knowing how to do that and why you pursued that knowledge.
Necromancy is just sadistic in nature.
The only way I wouldn't consider it evil in a campaign is if the necromancer comes from a culture where people don't consider it evil, where necromancers are accepted and are actually trained on dead bodies with the consent of the dead person or its family AND is limited to only using that power ethically, on the bodies of people that consent to it beforehand or when the family allows it. And if that isn't the case and you decide on desecrating that dead person, then you better have a pretty good reason to it or you're gonna get some evil points in your resume.

Just draw a parallel with how in real life there is people who desecrate dead bodies for personal gain. There's also old time surgeons that had to steal bodies to train their skills, but by doing so would cause suffering to the family of the deceased. And then there are the surgeons that go to a medical college and there they train their skills on a fresh body that was donated with full consent.

That is contrived. You can't convince your players of the general evilness of mystical graverobbing so you just say "It (somehow) causes evil monsters to spawn and it's all your fault!"

Does this asinine line of logic work with every other school of magic? For every fireball I cast, does a child burst into flames? For every divination I cast, some poor sap goes blind? If I mystically destroy the undead I raise does that, just as arbitrarily cause the three ghouls to fucking evaporate?

>The only way I wouldn't consider it evil in a campaign is if the necromancer comes from a culture where people don't consider it evil, where necromancers are accepted and are actually trained on dead bodies with the consent of the dead person or its family AND is limited to only using that power ethically, on the bodies of people that consent to it beforehand or when the family allows it.

The necromancy-focused Dustmen of AD&D 2e's Planescape had a corpse cart program for exactly such a thing.

>, where necromancers are accepted and are actually trained on dead bodies with the consent of the dead person
Sir, would you like to volunteer for some lively reanimation?
>.....

That's why finding a heart donor is so hard, then.

Orin is best kitty

Necromancy having tangible evil influence on the world keeps the setting coherent. See

But the post you're quoting is arguing against the auto-evil.

That post doesn't say it needs evil, just a cost

So why don't the other schools have this "evil influence" on the world?

It's not auto-evil, it's evil due to the associated cost. Making the cost "it causes bad shit to happen" is more or less in line with the tradition of having evil baby-eating liches and undead kingdoms.

Some settings/systems do make it have bad influence on the world, Warhammer is an example. But it's a stylistic choice in that case, whereas with d&d necromancy you need to something to keep the setting coherent. There is some other d&d magic that needs similar treatment such as infinite permanent conjuration/creation. You can make conjuration spells evil, or you can make a deity who specifically hunts down those who want to break a setting. And as I said, necromancy usually gets the "it's evil" because of tradition.

Because you aren't harnessing the power of the plane of destruction and anti-life to fuel horrific abominations that leak Fuck You energy all over the place. Otherwise there isnt a problem with the school of necromancy. Seriously, the only part of this that has any evil cost is creating undead.

No other school does anything close to what necromancy does with undead.

You're neglecting to mention that in AD&D necromancy was bundled together with healing magic under the same sphere, so any cleric who wanted to do one also had to do the other. It's stupid, but that's the way it was.

Wrong.
people.wku.edu/charles.plemons/ad&d/priests/healing.html

Healing is the sphere for that.

people.wku.edu/charles.plemons/ad&d/priests/necromancy.html

Necromancy is the sphere for doing spooky skeleton shit. All those good gods are letting their specialty priests do it.

You gave me an idea.
What price would destructive Evocation magic have?

It's all about the fluff, you retard.
You can't get knowledge and practice on the necromancy school of spells without experimenting with living and dead things. Basically, you need to get your hands dirty if you want that sweet knowledge of life and death.
You think you learned how to revive dead bodies, channel negative energy, make a death shroud, summon a ghost, and even erase the life of something, all that by simply reading a fucking book? The same way surgeons get to make brain, heart and spine surgeries after reading a quick pamphlet guide on how to do it? No. You learned that by stealing dead bodies from graveyards and experimenting on them, by imprisoning animals and people and torturing and experimenting on them, by making large amounts of people suffer so you could channel their pain and suffering. It doesn't matter if that necromancy spell isn't exactly about animating dead things, this applies to any spell in that school, you don't just magically learn spells by leveling up. That is what happens on the metagame, not in-game.

5e says that creating undead is not good. That does not make it evil, although only evil beings make a habit out of it.

About 50% of all alignment debates only happen because people forget that "neutral" exists. Not everything is good or evil. Sometimes it's just a thing.

With specific regards to Nephthys, I can totally see her as being okay with the creation of skeletons and zombies when the situation calls for it, but otherwise desire the bodies of the dead to be left alone in their rest.

>herpa durr necromancers are frankenstein
Most wizards went the same route those surgeons went, they went to school to learn the foundation of their career. Most surgeons don't start cutting until well into their schooling, and even then it's in controlled environments and all legally sanctioned. Just like necromancers would be who don't specialize in making undead.

This is a school of wizardry, not fucking sorcery. Wizards teach in schools, necromancers, evokers, transmuters, and all such others learn from their teachers. It's only when the students hear of dark whispers of power over the dead that they descend into the psychopaths who steal corpses and start torturing animals and people.

Once again, necromancy fine, reanimating not.

My particular goddess sees the soul as sacred, the body merely a meat puppet. Intelligent undead are taboo in that case, but mindless ones are not.

After all, what better use for the dead than to serve the living?

Fertilizer.

Hah, certainly.

I was rather amused when I was hired by a cleric of a small town to create him a zombie army to repel a coming goblin warband. They really had no recourse after losing most of their able bodied men, but had plenty of corpses.

My response after the initial shock and confusion at the rarity of the request was to remark that zombies were unsanitary, and a skeleton army much more effective.

Except those harmless spells are not even a third of all the spells available in necromancy.
The huge majority of them are spells that deal with death, dark energies, curses, fear, despair, magical diseases that infect your soul and other spells that interact with the astral plane of death. But those spells are all somehow learned and practiced in completely safe environments and by people with perfectly good intentions, right? It's not like you need a living subject as a target so you can practice your life draining spells on, right?
Necromancy is frowned upon for a very good reason, user.

I always imagined they were like medieval doctors, practicing on corpses of executed criminals, and with skelly bodyguards and blight just being nice side effects of their mastery of human anatomy and the secrets of life and death

the average user doesnt think about good or bad when it comes to research, only whether or not their ultimate goal of knowinh all about the secrets of life, and they are as good or bad as they come otherwise

skeletons being raised are just them learning to construct a crude simulacrum of life to learn just how complex life can be

wizards seek knowledge above all else, whether they use it for good or bad is up to the individual, and a little discrimination will never stop their research

That still makes it evil.
And that's my point.

it's just an art to be learned like anything else

its only bad when used by irresponsible people to harm others
when used by the righteous for a righteous cause, what does it matter that people don't like it

skellys used to save lives and to stop does who mean harm are hardly the works of a madman

and a righteous person would only train using bodies nobody would miss, and would swear a hippocratic oath to use his skellys for good

saving the world 3 or 4 times in full view of the public would be enough to convince people of thw righteousness of his cause, especially if he had paladin party mates to vouch for him

Knowledge can never be evil.

Necromancy is Evil but the use of it is something else. To raise undead is Evil but to use that undead to do good is obviously Good. It's the same logic behind summoning Devils and Demons being Always Evil, yet being able to do good anyway.

You've already acted; and are being judged accordingly. You acted to bring an autonomous mobile murder-machine made of radiation and cancer into the world through soul rape. Your excuse? "Oh, it can swing a sword or plow a field; because people arent doing that fine already."

>Knowledge can never be evil.

Perhaps not in the real world, but Things Man Was Not Meant To Know exist in fantasy all the time.

so it doesnt matter if I save the world with my skellies, or if I kill only the unjust, or usw them for any purpose other than for good?

>any undead creation spells are always labeled with the Evil descriptor

Unless they aren't. There's plenty of explicitly non-evil ways to raise undead.

That's still not considered Evil though. Like, reading the King in Yellow is fucking STUPID, but it isn't Evil.

So what about Conjure Elemental? That also summons an autonomous murder machine if you lose control. Is it always evil to summon up a Fire Elemental simply because it MIGHT go berserk and burn down the village?

>If I grab someone's eternal soul from paradise and shove it inside their corpse so they can get tortured eternally from all the negative energy, forced to be trapped inside their own rotting husk, so I don't have to spend 10 minutes doing my own dishes, am I evil?

Gee, I wonder.

skeletons dont normally have souls on them, they have a crude artificial imitation

Your description is completely arbitrary. You house ruled the evil radiation and soul rape aspects. In my setting Animate undead attaches a bundle of mana to a shell the same way animating a golem works. Simply put, the more points of articulation and detail the shell has the easier it is to animate, therefore using an actual body makes for incredibly easy to animate golems that are more fragile than one made from stone or metal.

My house rule says Skeletons are just robots made from recycled materials, yours says they are the worst crime imaginable. It's all up to the DM and the setting.

Yeah no, you're not getting out this one Steve. You just tore that nice old lady out of heaven so she could do your gardening. You're fucking evil.

Also, about 12 Paladins just kicked your door down after detecting .5 Hitlers on the Evilometer in your house, roll initiative.

But in some fantasy worlds it can be.

Look, if you want an animated corpse that isn't evil, study Transmutation and learn Animate Object. A corpse in D&D rules is an object so there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to raise it using magic that merely animates it and doesn't pervert the natural order of the universe to do so.

Through Animate Object zombies at my players once. Good times. Especially when the Cleric tried to turn them and it didn't work.

>You just tore that nice old lady out of heaven so she could do your gardening
That's uh
Not how necromancy works generally

>pervert the natural order
Not possible, I hate this meme. The very fact that I am physically able to do so means it's part of the universe.

Whoah what's that? Now the setting has the local Lawful Good clerics animating the bodies of the faithful for a few decades of charitable service as an act of faith!

Killing an undead is an act of heresy and a crusade of 300 Paladins is here to kill the transdimensional idiot who showed up and tried to assert his morality in a setting he doesn't belong to. Also FYI animating a skeleton absolutely and 100% does not affect the soul of the person the body belonged to, that is not up for debate, that is RAW.