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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 9:26AM
#11
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Because detecting evil should never be that easy.
Dunno. Some times it should be pretty obvious. Like the necromacer who's destroying a town to get more minions. Or the guy who promises to pay you to burn down an orphanage.
Anyways. Insight is probably what you want to use to find out if the guy who just stabbed the orphan is doing so for good or bad.
And if you want a 4e version.
Detect Evil: Insight Utility 2
Encounter, personal, minor
You make an inisght check with a +5 bonus to understand someone's motivation. This does not help you understand what they are doing, only why.
In that case yeah. However it takes away from potential story.
For example last week in the summer finale of Burn Notice the group found an old enemy (most determinably evil) had kidnapped a man's wife and was holding her hostage on the threat of death so that Micheal Weston (main character) and the wife's husband would do whatever he says. Eventually they find the man's wife to be dead leading him to be the grieving husband. The whole time the man's husband is as helpful as he can possibly be warning them of Larry's (the old enemy) inevitable betrayal. So to save Micheal they blow up the room that Larry is in... only for it to trigger an explosion that kills two innocent people. After confessing to each other what they did the husband emerges and shows himself to be the man that has been behind the scene the whole time.
Point being this whole story would have been impossible if Sam Axe or Fiona (two other characters) simply pointed at the husband and said "Don't believe his lies! He is far more evil than Larry!"
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."-Douglas Adams
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 9:28AM
#12
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Date Joined:
Dec 11, 2006
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If this is true... I've only ever played 4e
How do you know this?
This is one of the most iconic spell in the entire game
But like others have said, a basic Intuition check gives you a similar gutt feeling. If my players make a hard arcana, nature, religion check on a specific monter and succeed, I personally give them their alignment as well.
Browncoats Unite...
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 10:56AM
#13
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Date Joined:
Nov 13, 2004
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I never have problems with Paladins checking everyone for 'the evil,' because I typically throw a bunch of evil NPCs in the game. The players keep a closer eye on the people who do 'ding' as evil, but from experience they know that a neutral NPC can cause just as many problems as an evil one, with the right motivation.
On the other hand, you don't need to know if someone is evil to smite them anymore, so the mechanical need for it is gone. I would houserule that paladins can use Insight to peer into someone's soul; one person at a time, not the ridiculous 60-foot cone though.
4e D&D is not a "Tabletop MMO." It is not Massively Multiplayer, and is usually not played Online. Come up with better descriptions of your complaints, cuz this one means jack ****.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 10:57AM
#14
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It goes along with the reasons detech lie, read mind and such spells are removed.
These spells can ruin a lot of plots in a game.
"I cast read thoughts(or whatever the name of that spell was)"
"You read that he is planning to kill the king"
"AH ha. King george. He is going to kill you"
Almost entire adventure ruined right there.
What a lot of DMs had to do was give the bad guy magic items to protect them from detection.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 10:58AM
#15
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Date Joined:
Dec 27, 2008
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I think anytime a story attempts to didactically tell the audience what is and isn't evil without showing them first, you are likely to have a problem. A novel or comic book can get away with that to some extent because the audience will just impute their own definitions of good and evil onto the character once they have been informed that the character is evil, but if you are working in a collaborative medium then you are going to encounter confusion since each member of the team will have their own interpretations.
Previous editions dealt with this by simply tasking the DM to define good and evil. As if the DM doesn't have enough to do. But worse than forcing the DM to arbitrate a few thousand years of human philosophy in addition to designing encounters and developing NPCs, using evil as an informed characteristic is bad storytelling. It is more dramatic, more impactful, and more involving to show your audience evil – even better, to show why a character or act is evil – than to simply report to them that it is so. As a storyteller, I would be remiss to include an ability like detect evil because it would flatten so many story arcs.
Looking at characters who possess something like detect evil in fiction, you find that it is routinely ignored by the creators the longer the story goes on. Spider-Man's spidersense is notoriously unreliable, sometimes triggering as a result of being merely spied on by a bad guy and other times not going off until a split second before a missile hits him. Buffy's ability to sense vampires was pretty much forgotten after the first season, dismissed ostensibly because the character was unwilling to develop it but really because it would violate every rule of drama if she could simply move from east to west through the town one bright sunny day and simply kill every vampire she sensed, thus solving the majority of her problems in one intense workout. In X-Men comics, where characters don't have a "detect evil" but psychics are a dime-a-dozen, it seems like anti-psychic shielding is available in every local grocery store right next to the tinfoil hats. That's a plausible reaction to the prevalence of psychics in that world, so it sort of works, but a PC with a super power that can be thwarted by every street thug and highwayman is a PC with no super powers at all. In my opinion it is not worthwhile to introduce a mechanic that so violates the rules of fiction that you then have to invent and seed your entire universe with another mechanic specifically designed to negate the first mechanic's use at any time that it might be useful.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 11:05AM
#16
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Date Joined:
Mar 22, 2005
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@lofgren 
3rd ed SRD, character sheets, errata & free modules4th ed test drive - modules, starter rules, premade characters and character builder & character sheet, errata Free maps and portraits, dice, printable graph paper, campaign managing website, image manipulation program + token maker & zone markers"All right, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back. GET MAD! I DON'T WANT YOUR **** LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?! DEMAND TO SEE LIFE'S MANAGER! Make life RUE the day it thought it could give CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I'M THE MAN WHO'S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that's gonna BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN!" -Cave Johnson, Portal 2
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 11:19AM
#17
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Date Joined:
Jan 30, 2007
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Because even if Evil is absolute in the world of D&D, it is not in the world of the player, and that means that the DM and the players will have differing ideas of what is and is not evil, and in the end, forcing absolute Evil will only cause issues.
For any reasonable character, you can find a decent number of people that would call him evil, good, or neutral. When you have 5 people at the table with differing opinions, then you can only end up with madness.
From the "I detect Evil in the town central square and then behead everyone who pings, for I am lawful Good" Paladin to the "You just lost your Divine power because your Paladin thought that it was unreasonable to smite down the evil shopkeeper since you didn't see him do anything wrong" to the "AHA, you were betrayed by a neutral bastard, just because detect evil doesn't ping on him doesn't mean he won't stab you in the back" to the "AHA, he is evil therefore plotting to betray us, lets gut him and stick his head on a pike as a warning", Detect Evil was generally more trouble then it was worth.
This is all totally valid, but sounds to me like a player problem rather than a rules problem. As long as it's very clear among the group what can and cannot be determined by a Detect Evil Religion check, I don't see a problem.
EDIT: FWIW, my interest in this stems from my personal desire to see more support for non-combat mechanics in the 4E rules. While I agree with the 4E design principle that you don't need rules for roleplaying, I do think that coming up with new and interesting ways to use skill checks and other non-combat mechanics is a good way to prompt and foster roleplaying.
You obviously (and thankfully) were not exposed to alignment issues that much.
Let me put it this way: Nearly EVERY single 3.5 game I played in, had a MAJOR argument in real life due to alignment, and how people believed it worked.
Heck, just look at the old 3.5 forum, and you'll see GOBS of "My DM forced my Palladin to Fall because I unknowingly helped an evil wizard," "LG cleric ruining fun of rest of party," etc.
In 3.5, if you changed alignment, depending on your class, that could COMPLETELY strip you of your powers. Level 13 paladin suddenly is the equivalent of a level 13 fighter with no feats, and doesn't have a horse anymore.
To be honest, as someone who played 3.5 a LOT, Alignment was STUPID. All it did was cause arguments, force people to act "according to alignment" instead of how they wanted their story to go, or caused the "I'm playing my alignment" card to be played when player X did something chaotic and mean.
Salla, on minions: I typically use them as encounter filler. 'I didn't quite fill out the XP budget, not enough room left for a decent near-level monster ... sprinkle in a few minions'. Kind of like monster styrofoam packing peanuts.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 11:21AM
#18
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Yes, it's a bad idea for several reasons.
First off, any ability that invalidates entire groups of plotlines needs to be at best highly limited if it's going to exist at all. If you allow detect evil, then that means you have to forbid paladins in mystery- and intrigue-themed games, and that's not fun for either the DM or the guy who wanted to play a paladin. (Bad enough that turn/rebuke undead can act as vampire detectors, as I discovered when I caught a "friendly NPC" in one, but that's at least remarkably LESS common.) This is also why Raise Dead has caveats about not working on just any random dude in the world, and why rituals in general were made somewhat difficult to use, so that plot-altering magic would always be solidly within the realm of DM discretion.
On top of all the above, abilities like detect evil have a very limiting effect on the sorts of worlds the game can represent, because it frankly makes no sense outside of ones with objective morality. In that respect it's similar to racial alignment, which also largely got the boot. (Also why alignment in general was overhauled.)
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 11:53AM
#19
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Date Joined:
Jun 18, 2010
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Many posters have emphasized that it destroys plots. What I want to make salient is that means that the ability will never actually be meaningful. No DM is going to spend an hours worth of prep time working on a convoluted political intrigue adventure that the Paladin will just break in 10 seconds by using his 'evil detection radar'. Hence the very fact that you have this power will mean that it will never really allow you to do much with it. When it works it'll always be because the DM really does not care if you happen to know this guys alignment.
In other words its practically a useless ability whose existence just means you can't go through a lot of potentially really interesting mystery/investigation type scenarios because the power makes them not worth writing. Ultimately that power - in tying your DMs hands in terms of building interesting adventures hurts you as a player because you'll never get to run through these interesting adventures.
In effect the removal of these kinds of powers from the players has opened up 4E to allow for many more interesting types of adventures for the players to run through....in the end you'll still figure out who is evil, but you'll do so through interacting with the NPCs and finding clues.
This is why its very important to really consider what kind of 'non-combat' type powers you actually put in the game. The idea that having more 'non-combat' powers means more focus on non-combat role playing is actually completely false. Using a power is not really 'role playing' at least not by any means to the same degree as having the players engage NPCs of interest in conversation in order for them to try and learn information or sneaking into some location in order to collect clues. You'll actually do a lot more role playing in the scene where you can't just use a power to answer all your main questions and this will compound outward as you players sit around the table descussing these elements and putting the pieces together.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 16, 2011 - 12:08PM
#20
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Date Joined:
Mar 18, 2009
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You obviously (and thankfully) were not exposed to alignment issues that much.
Let me put it this way: Nearly EVERY single 3.5 game I played in, had a MAJOR argument in real life due to alignment, and how people believed it worked.
Heck, just look at the old 3.5 forum, and you'll see GOBS of "My DM forced my Palladin to Fall because I unknowingly helped an evil wizard," "LG cleric ruining fun of rest of party," etc.
In 3.5, if you changed alignment, depending on your class, that could COMPLETELY strip you of your powers. Level 13 paladin suddenly is the equivalent of a level 13 fighter with no feats, and doesn't have a horse anymore.
To be honest, as someone who played 3.5 a LOT, Alignment was STUPID. All it did was cause arguments, force people to act "according to alignment" instead of how they wanted their story to go, or caused the "I'm playing my alignment" card to be played when player X did something chaotic and mean.
You're right, my 3.5 groups didn't experience the alignment issues you described - this despite having paladins and other alignment-heavy characters in the party. What you're describing are player issues. If a player in 3.5 feels forced to act a certain way with their character that they feel is out of character, then that player should reconsider why they wanted to play that character. Similarly, if a group is at odds over how the story should progress due to diametrically opposed alignments, well, that situation is entirely possible in 4E too.
Please note that I don't think the 3.5 alignment rules were flawless - far from it - but I don't think it follows that no alignment rules can ever help a game just because the players aren't understanding how those alignment rules work.
This is why its very important to really consider what kind of 'non-combat' type powers you actually put in the game. The idea that having more 'non-combat' powers means more focus on non-combat role playing is actually completely false. Using a power is not really 'role playing' at least not by any means to the same degree as having the players engage NPCs of interest in conversation in order for them to try and learn information or sneaking into some location in order to collect clues. You'll actually do a lot more role playing in the scene where you can't just use a power to answer all your main questions and this will compound outward as you players sit around the table descussing these elements and putting the pieces together.
You make a very fair point here, so I feel I should clarify: when I said I'd like to see more mechanical support for roleplaying, I shouldn't have used "noncombat" to describe it. What I'm interested in are more roleplaying-supportive things to do in combat encounters that are not combat themselves and provide a useful benefit to the party. Perhaps having dedicated game mechanics isn't the way to go, and using skill checks is, but that doesn't mean we can't have some routine/suggested combat skill check actions to fall back on.
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