Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called “Holy Word” that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.
When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It’s a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.
This is a weird one because despite being a “good” spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn’t seem like a good action to me.
It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.
Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.
There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our “home base”, a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we’d been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman’s household and the spell wiped them out instantly… except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.
Even though his alignment was evil, though, he’d never done anything wrong and didn’t seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren’t sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn’t illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we’d be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.
I’m pretty sure if you aren’t a creature from a celestial plane of evil or good, only your actions define your alignment, not the other way around.
Okay, he hadn’t done anything wrong to us. I guess we could have paused the main campaign to spend a while investigating him, but we were doing one of those save-the-world things so we didn’t have the time. :)
What is being good except having self-imposed restrictions to avoid doing something evil? This spell seems perfect. There will rarely be a time where a good aligned character could justify using it in an overpowered way. If it were inverted then you would see evil characters using it all the time. It’s a self-imposed balance. You have a very powerful tool, but you must avoid using unless absolutely necessary.
Ah, but there is an evil equivalent, Blasphemy. It affects non-evil creatures instead of non-good creatures, and as such has no self-balancing properties. There are even equivalents for Law and Chaos, which are… worryingly abstract.
Hmm, yeah. That doesn’t seem like a great idea to give to people…
Almost as if the whole objective good vs bad system is kinda poorly thought out…
I feel like there might be interesting ways to deal with it. Perhaps the mass killing of neutrals only ever happened the first time, which could have been many generations ago and under singular circumstances. Since then, only the odd one here or there ever dies during the purge. Perhaps it’s been decades or centuries since anyone died to the purge, reinforcing belief in it’s effectiveness as a basis for a pure society. It may have been so long that people wonder whether the purge is even real, or just a traditional ceremony carried out annually based on old myths. Then one year, it wipes out half the city. The party investigates?
The ritual could have been real, but was quietly faked so that a corrupt leader could avoid facing their fate.
Or, the ritual was always fake but used as a cover to assassinate specific targets without consequences.
Only good? What about neutral alignment? (if that was a thing)
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Here’s the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.
The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.
Then there’s Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!
Pick a side, you neutral scum!
Here’s the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.
Which is kind of horrifying because most of the population of any given setting is supposed to be neutral. The average commoner isn’t so greatly committed to following airtight moral codes that they’ll ping on a detect whatever spell, whether that’s good, evil, law, or chaos. Cast that on a crowd of randoms and you’ve probably wiped out three quarters of them.
Tell my wife I said… hello
Good.
What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Clinical depression
I have a sunny disposition that’s balanced out with depression. True neutral.
All I know, my gut says maybe.
Well, my parents were worshipers of Ishtar, so I was kind of born into it…
It makes perfect sense. The paladin found the exploit.
The sword’s power changes with time, and as it racks up more kills. Soon, it gains a +1 to attack and damage. Then, it can become wreathed in flame as a bonus action. Then, it grants advantage to checks made to locate creatures. Then, its base power inverts and it can only kill non-evil creatures.
Do not tell the player about that last one. Insist to the player that it works exactly as you first described. The Paladin can kill innocent shopkeepers and little old ladies, but cannot kill this assassin working for the BBEG.
Will he question his own stab-first ask-later methods? Or will he turn evil without even noticing?
I personally hate this kind of twist. If you need to actively lie to your player, not just mislead with some clever wordplay, it always feels like you’re breaking trust.
Why explain it in meta, instead of the old trustworthy totally-not-a-witch saying it only affects evil?
Still is a betrayal of trust if the player prices the sword effects are over way then it changes. Video games rarely do this because breaking that trust feels terrible.
If I were doing this, I wouldn’t describe the effects exactly (except the +1). I would just tell them it misses every time they attack a non-evil character first, and describe it being wreathed in flames. Then for the swap just tell them who it misses or hits still, but they have to figure out both times what the effect is (or that it changed).
Without lawyers, the kingdom was unable to resolve disputes and fell into chaos.
All the lawyers had previously been stabbed.
don’t paladins have an at-will detect evil?
or did they take that out in 5e?They do but it’s 1+charisma mod per day uses. The 5e players I know would immediately start stabbing people just to save on resources.
did they change what at-will means in 5e?
cos in 3.5 it means no usage limit, just takes a standard actionlike so
It simply says they can use the feature that often. It never says that it’s an at-will action/feature. “At-will” isn’t even a game term in 5e as far as I’m aware.
fair enough, i’ve only played 5e a couple of times and never as a paladin or gm
If one were to base their diet around moral responsibility, would eating only what the blade can cut be reasonable? Can it cut vegetables? Can animals be evil? Would training a cow to be evil in order to avoid starvation be morally justifiable?
A paladin whose diet consists of roast demonflesh. Hm.
TONIGHT… WE DINE IN HELL! TOMORROW, THE UNDERDARK. THAT CONCLUDES OUR ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR THE DAY.
See, here’s my problem with that: humanity is inherently evil so everyone would be killed by such a thing.
An human isn’t humanity.
Link: The Faces of Evil
COOL, HUH?
Now throw him a good character with some magic immunity that negates the effect of the weapon.