Dagger of venom for a good-aligned character
Rigel
Member Posts: 256
I usually play good-aligned character, and usually thiefs (Halflings particularly). I wondered if from a RP point of view, a good-aligned character would use a weapon like Dagger of Venom. Poison is associated in my mind (and in the game btw) to assassins or Black Guards. A good-aligned thief would use such a weapon ?
What do you think?
What do you think?
1
Comments
Not to mention being torn apart by packs of wolves summoned by my druid...
A paladin or blackguard could therefore equally use the dagger as their chosen weapon without fear or guilt. Similarly for Grave Binder, Krotan’s Skullcrusher or the Short Sword of Backstabbing. An item having a good or bad reputation doesn’t mean it necessarily has an alignment, unless it’s enchanted that way (such as Dorn’s sword Rancor).
Also, consider Varscona which has an evil history and a connection with a follower of Shar - despite this anyone can use it and it’s a good choice for a paladin or a thief.
It's interesting to note that according to the 3.5 supplement "Book of Exalted Deeds", the taking of a sapient life is NEVER considered a Good act. It can be a justified act, in the case of lawful executions, and in self-defense or the defense of another (or even in the case of killing for food, for beings like illithids who have to kill sapient beings to survive), but the killing itself can never be considered a Good act, regardless of your intents and justifications. At best, it can only be a Neutral act. The key criteria for when it crosses over to becoming an Evil act is if you ENJOY the act of killing, or do it for no other reason than to exult in the act itself. (Incidentally, this is also why a lot of Paladins have to be very, VERY careful in the execution of their duties, because there may come a time when the paladin has killed SO many evil foes that they begin to feel that their enemies "deserve" death, and that can put them on a slippery slope of enjoying killing, even if all of their targets are Evil creatures.)
Yes. A good discussion about the "evil" nature of spells happened here - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1071050/#Comment_1071050 (and below)
So while the poison might seem evil at first glance, the actual decision depends on your character's ethos.
Very little in terms of Action in the realms is uniformly good or evil. You can steal for good or evil. You can kill for good or evil. So on and so forth. They might write little nonsense lore in their rulebook about the inherent alignment of certain actions but it's usually inherently inconsistent with the very nature of a game where the vast majority of the gameplay mechanics are based around, at a bare minimum, inflicting some level of harm.
For that matter, poison doesn't necessarily have to be any more slow and painful a death than an ordinary stabbing, especially if the poison is applied via dagger anyway. Plenty of venoms are very fast acting, and the dagger of venom's venom seems to be among them.
On the whole, however, you're right. While the D&D system does fundamentally use an objective morality system, players and DMs are encouraged to mold and adapt it to suit the needs of their own individual game. If that requires wholescale bending or retconning of the rules, go for it! What you say at your table goes.
Personally, I'd restrict the assassin kit to non-good, and maybe slap some alignment restrictions on the other thief kits too.
I'm talking about the in game kit, associated with poison, that can be any alignment an ordinary thief can.
When the guy at the start of the thread said poison was associated with blackguards and assassins I'm pretty sure they meant the two in game kits that share the poison weapon ability.
I'm sure we've all seen war films where the good guys are infiltrating evil nazi base or something like that and creep up behind an unsuspecting guard to silently kill him. Not much different from a D&D thief backstab. If it is justified for the good guys to be killing someone at all, then it becomes Stupid Good to insist that it has to be a fair fight without the use of stealth, poison etc..
Admittedly you're on a slippery slope if you're supposedly good character is killing just because they can, or in ways that inflict lots of suffering when it would have been just as easy to do the job quickly.
The other issue of course is that the alignment system is pretty much broken anyway, and trying to shoehorn 21st century morality into a psuedo-medieval setting is bound to fail. Crusaders for example which are pretty much the equivalent of paladins in D&D aren't exactly good by modern standards what with all the killings of people whom their religious leaders say are heretics.
Fun argument you've got there.
People can elaborate all day about the various reasons poison is or isn't inherently evil, but none of it matters because you can just brush it off as "rationalization".
In D&D it seems necessary, and its often rewarded.
I don't think the relationship of poison to the two alignment dimensions (law/chaos and good/evil) was handled consistently across publication.
It being chaotic is also not universally true in my opinion, as a honor-bound assassin who always fulfills his contracts to the letter would be a text-book example of lawful evil, even if he uses poison.
Actually, when I think about it maybe the best that can be said that if you use poison you are probably chaotic or evil, but not necessarily both.
It makes the most sense to think of the alignments as a matter of motivation, rather than action. What you do isn't any particular alignment, but why you do it is.
But overall the alignment stuff is all nonsense anyway. I hear they all but did away with it in the fifth edition.
An interesting point was mentioned about Varscona - this blade should not be equipped by paladins I think, because it was devised for Sharran priests....
I think that Neb's dagger is alignment restricted just for the nature of the previous wielder, and not for the poison. It's actually RP consistent that some objects inherit the nature of the owner, at least in the Forgotten Realms.
Plus while BG2 might not have the Dagger of Venom specifically, it's not like venomous weapons were done away with entirely.
Arrows of biting for example, are still around, and still not restricted to any particular alignment.
That, and there's that one prestige class in Revised 3rd Edition rules that was pretty much a Paladin/Rogue multi-class. And then there was the Grey Guard.