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The friendliest class
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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See THIS is a more interesting version of the conversation. :P The one I saw was something like, "Raise Dead creates an Evil creature, and creating an Evil creature is an Evil act, per the rules. Period, end of story."
And heck, even without exploring shades of gray morality and cultural constructs, having raised dead trap the soul of the person is more interesting worldbuilding. Even if it's a black & white situation, it drives home who the villains are.
Oh, it also had the [evil] tag, which means that just how a spell tagged [fire] releases elemental fire into the world, a spell tagged [evil] releases pure evil energy, magically making the world a worse place… somehow. For reasons. 3.5 loved to give alignment mechanical effects, it had one or two books (Vile Darkness was technically for 3.0) entirely dedicated to hard rules for morality.
But 5e doesn't have tags like that, and alignment is almost irrelevant. Which is probably for the better, because alignment is incredibly subjective.
Because objective morality makes campaigns easier.
Why are you killing these goblins?
Because they like eating kids. They're eeeeeevvvvilll. Don't think too hard about it.
Of course, the very idea of an adventurer band is based on roaming mercenary bands, and 1st Edition progression was just straight up tied to getting rich with murder. It's just a natural idea to question "Am I the baddy?" once your culture grows up out of Cold War "Greed is Good" bullshittery.
I understood that as analogous to real-world pollution. The undead are animated by the hunger to consume all life, where the hunger to consume all life is a physical thing. You could put it in a jar. And you could leak it into the rest of the world... Sure, just one skeleton won't pollute the world very much, but it will pollute even if you only order it to do good things.