Okay.... I'll try to make this as simple as possible because some people are not understanding the concept here (I mean no offense, honestly).

I really think people are confusing the modern-world definition of "assassin" (i.e. murderer: a killer, especially of a political leader or other public figure) and the PrC Assassin. Anyone can be an assassin by definition... especially in a world where killing is so prominent. However, to become part of the PrC Assassin, one requirement is that one must commit a singular act... the murder of what is in essence a random person. This singular act would cause a Neutral or Good-aligned person to swing to Evil. So, just to meet the requirements to enter into the PrC Assassin one must be Evil.

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"I once took the high road and it took me straight to hell and I stood there all by myself." -Hank III

That itself never really made sense and was probably the weakest part of the assassin PrC overall. There is no established connection to committing that one act and how the character obtained the abilities of an assassin, since there is no supernatural/mundane contract going on. In fact, that entire points seems to be some crap reasoning by the writers in order to justify it being an evil only class. I am pretty sure Amia has already made the precedent of ignoring/changing such elements in order to accommodate for a better setting.

Also, the NWN version of the class lists no such requirement and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of assassins on Amia who have not done their 'cold-blooded murdering for education' fee yet.

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your not getting assassin and get to be true neutral at the same time, get over it and accept protection from evil works against you if you want to be an assassin.

As already stated, murder is evil, assassins do nothing but murder, they are cold-blooded killers, this must be proven by killing a innocent to start training to be an assassin, that is evil.
Everything about the class reeks of evil, even their attack style is called "death-attack" hence no possibility that it can be used to just subdue someone, its meant to kill, without mercy without anything and while others kill too, no other class is so devoted to the task of slaying as an assassin is, so that is why it is evil, but this has all be stated before, which you blissfully dance over and your resulting reasoning is just..well stupid, you make assumptions about the writers applying the rule just to annoy people who want to be a good assassin to make a point that is vague to begin with.
The Class inst a interpretation of the word that was chosen to represent the class, in this case "assassin" its the class as a whole, and your really good at ignoring this fact to spice up your char.

guess ill end this with this.


Give me one good reason why you cant just call yourself an assassin and be a pure rouge.


*Edited*

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-Ja'acira Arrows'R'Us
-Balorin Wolfhammer- A dwarf so old he remember when the Beer stein was invented
Saisha Jai'diem Knight of bahamut, and abit of a looker

Ainjyll: you're ignoring the flip side of the argument. You can be an assassin without being an Assassin, but obviously you can also be an Assassin without being an assassin (ergo part of a tradition and practicing the trade). Classes are just classes and never in the history of Amia has there been a requirement to RP them in one specific way. You have to role-play your build, of course. But how you do that isn't predetermined. Appealing to the requirement of killing someone to become an Assassin is dubious anyhow, since that isn't part of the NWN class and neither does it make lore sense.

The Assassin PrC is a collection of feats, spells and skills. If I want to learn a paralyzing attack to incapacitate my foes, I pick the class to represent that. Nothing more, nothing less.

Remal: if you refer to a bunch of awful books on D&D Good and Evil, everyone will be unhappy. They are not sophisticated, consistent products we'd be ready to adopt 100%. We can be pretty sure that there will never be an established standard for alignment on Amia, because it's a task beyond any human. Nobody can account for everything, consider every argument and solve every problem satisfactorily, so it will always be up to gut feeling and case-by-case evaluation. A half-assed solution would be unacceptable.

Dark Immolation's argument is pretty damn good in showing the alignment system is not consistent. Don't pretend it is. I'm willing to allow for inconsistencies insofar as they are inevitable, but only as the result of individual, unique reasoning and evaluation. Sometimes you just hve to make a call even if it's not perfect. If you try to codify it into rules. it becomes unjustified.

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Paladin

Dragon Disciple

Palemaster

Shadowdancer

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Davion Telemos - Monk of the Four Winds
Korthan Isharnos - Dragon Shaman of Thunder Spirit Zamasham

druid

cleric

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-Ja'acira Arrows'R'Us
-Balorin Wolfhammer- A dwarf so old he remember when the Beer stein was invented
Saisha Jai'diem Knight of bahamut, and abit of a looker

Yeah. My post was bad and hasty. I'm basically just repeating points I made better in my earlier post. There's a line somewhere, and where to draw it isn't completely clear. There's a fairly clear existing formulation of the policy on how far class interpretation and emulation can go without approval, but the team has yet to reaffirm it in the Unwritten Rules topic. But personally I find it extremely difficult to justify the claim that you must murder someone in cold blood before you are physically capable of hitting a certain spot on the spine. A paladin's or a shadowdancer's abilities are pretty integral to their RP and arise from the whole of the class. Stabbing someone a little better isn't.

But no, I wouldn't go that far Kranium. Both can be freely role-played as, say, a shaman or mystic (though I don't remember the latter's class details from 2e); adherence to the same rules, mechanics and divine devotion is what matters so you'll never get special freedoms out of your personal interpretation. But just how you translate those parameters IC are your responsibility (and you'll answer to the DMs if you fail, not pre-emptively).

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but the shaman/mystic must adhere to the same rules as the druids/cleric, an assassin might call himself a bounty hunter, but he is still going to be a massmurdering fuckhead, its just how the class is, its what they are

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-Ja'acira Arrows'R'Us
-Balorin Wolfhammer- A dwarf so old he remember when the Beer stein was invented
Saisha Jai'diem Knight of bahamut, and abit of a looker

Bullshit.

Massmurdering fuckheads, as you charmingly wrote, are anything but an assassin.

But no matter. You are arguing with "killing an innocent to become an assassin" rule, which is not applied here. When you read the alignment description, a TN assassin is possible, in theory. CN one too, although with many "ifs". The decision it is not possible on Amia and denied by DM staff is unfortunate, but final.

Some say evil only, some say otherwise, but the last like... twenty posts are nothing but repeating same old same old.

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Mercadier - *sleeps six feet under the warm sands of Khem*
Alex - Life is adventure or nothing!
Eddie - Sex, drugs and rock'n... more sex.
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Obsidian (inactive)

wow you almost tripped me with that clever word game and ignoring all my previous posts, I clearly said it was because the class was devoted to murder and murder alone that made it evil.

Oh and killing innocents for no other reason than to kill a innosent always evil, but that's just the requirement of the class, the real evil lies in what the class does.

There is a reason why all the lords of murder where evil.
its faerunian canon

(jergal was evil when he held the domain)

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-Ja'acira Arrows'R'Us
-Balorin Wolfhammer- A dwarf so old he remember when the Beer stein was invented
Saisha Jai'diem Knight of bahamut, and abit of a looker

Uh, this actually isn't the case. Ex: A Shaman doesn't have the same druidic oaths, and has therefore a very unique outlook/responsibility. A Shaman/Shifter of a Nature deity (Talona in mind) can take and use undead shape, as a mechanical example of this.

But not to derail the thread, I suppose I can relate the Palemaster alignment requirements due to the nature of the procedures in which he becomes a palemaster to an assassin's "Rite of passage." And no one's saying that a level 30 Rogue couldn't be an "Assassin" for a neutral cause. Or a fighter serving a demon, performing the same actions as a Blackguard, but simply not receiving the "Graces" in return.

You can use same argument to pick up paladin class and then RP it as cold blooded slayer of what your toon perceives as evil. (Un)fortunately, it doesn't work that way.



You cannot account for every situation, but some baselines must be set, otherwise entire system is obsolete and should be removed. It's the same with laws, they cannot account for every damn situation no matter how detailed they are. That's why you have judges, to make decisions in such situations.
It's the same with DMs, they have some baselines and specific cases are sorted out as needed.
Those books cannot explain it all, but at least they set base standards for what is expected to be good and evil in this system. We can disagree and outright oppose those standards, but they are there.



His argument is loaded. Paladin will always give option to bandits to surrender, he won't kill unless really necessary, and he'll (or he should) use non lethal weapons ("Mercy" enchantment anyone?, weapons modified to do non-lethal damage etc.). It's not my problem most people never actually bother to research paladins and generally goodly alignments. I wished NWN would give me option to do subdual damage, arrest thugs, and put them into prison and them talk with them trying to reeducate and repent them. It doesn't. Should I not play paladin because of that? It's up to everyone individually to choose that.

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"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupry

That's a Slippery Slope fallacy. As has been repeatedly stated, there's a line and there are some rules of thumb.



They are there, yeah. They're fortunately not here. We don't have to subscribe to all the inconstistencies of D&D, and we de facto don't. Maybe you could argue we should, but I'm not sure how much support you'd really get if the case was laid bare and its implications considered.



I'm not sure how that has to do with the topic, but I may be missing your point. My point was that DI followed certain principles concerning intention consistently and seemed to come to conclusions we can't accept. It's the argument I used about Evil descriptor spells: if casting an Evil spell is always an evil act, then casting a Good spell should always be a good act even when it's used to do evil. Whatever else the implications, at least it shows the system is confused and unsophisticated and cannot be directly adopted as such. It's a classic argument: if our premisses lead to something absurd, we clearly have to revise them.

I've said my piece on the assassin question a few posts ago, though. Now I'm just correcting misunderstandings and sloppy arguments, so forgive me if I'm off-topic.

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I'm pretty sure anyone that gets to a epic level character is going to fit into this category... You know you can't be that powerful without ACTIVELY going out of your way to kill things.

Alot.



Once again I will draw the line the the assassin differs from all of these classes. Well, except shadowdancer maybe, but they don't really have any alignment restrictions so they don't count.

An assassin, unlike the above, HAVE NO FORM OF SUPERNATURAL CONTRACT or whatever you call it. Save from the written requirements in 3.5, which I bring in to question as acceptable in this fictional universe, there is NOTHING that should make all assassins evil. Granted, the assassin is focused in the art of killing more so than other classes, but it has not bearing on the characters motives, morality or allegiance. It is only an admission that his methods are probably going down the killing route, something EVERY class is guilty of in the end.

I will admit that it is perhaps true that most assassins are evil, but given the sheer opportunity for character variety in the Forgotten Realms, whether it be through experience or culture, ensures that not ALL assassins are evil

In the end, should a character not be bound by any form of supernatural contract (e.g, paladin, druid, blackguard), his/her alignment should be up to the discretion of how the player RPs him.

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I will raise one more point about the Prestige Class (though I'm not sure what I'm trying to achieve, as I don't care about the in-game prerequisites): has every Assassin PC on Amia killed a person for the sole purpose of taking the Prestige Class? Has any? How often do DMs get requests to run initiation rituals for aspiring assassins, and how often to they encourage or enforce such? I bet it's a precious few cases. Arguing on the basis of something that is empirically untrue in our setting is kind of dubious. If you stick to that PnP prerequisite you're also saying several, previously DM-endorsed PCs would have to be retconned. Good luck selling that to the public.

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I really don't argue it, because we DO use alignment system as presented in DnD, unless some massive changes are made I am not aware of. Unless you wish to say that forces of Good and Evil (angels, demons, gods etc.) operate so differently then presented in sourcebook material which is tied to basic DnD rules. And so far I haven't seen ANY system-shattering differences that can prove we are SO different.



It's really not absurd. Using Good spell to do evil has same consequences as doing evil deed in for the sake of good.

First one makes concession to good, unrelated to evil act, while other makes concession to evil, again, unrelated to good act. I don't mean that acts don't matter, they do, but that decision to to something that's inherently good or evil is also taken into consideration, and might resound even more in outer plains in shifting universal balance then what consequences of those acts can do on the prime.
It's not something what you and I can agree about, but it really doesn't matter what we think. It's how things are in the setting, how those forces work. Unless someone completely overwrote that stuff while I was sleeping.
And on that matter, there's actually certain gnome wizard who's actually pursuing Exalted ideals on Amia, and has actual spells and abilities connected to them. So don't just write off source material as irrelevant.

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"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupry

Now you're just splitting hairs. You know very well that there's no common consensus on the exact criteria of alignments on Amia. Otherwise these kind of discussions wouldn't crop up. Every DM has their own opinion and interpretation, as does every player. There's no unified "official" stance, and answers to specific questions will change as the DM team changes.

If we were to rely completely on some source material, it wouldn't be the Book of Exalted Deeds which isn't even part of our setting. It would be an extrapolation of known NPC and deity behaviour in the Realms and comparing it to their alignment. But that's a pretty big undertaking. The D&D "alignment system" (insofar as there is a "system" rather than "systems") is internally contradicted, incomplete, unsophisticated, unintuitive, or in short, a mess. It may have some good things, but it also has its problems. Whenever you want to apply it to practice, you will have to interpret it. You seem to think there is one possible interpretation, it arises from The Books of Exalted/Vile, and that it's the one we should adopt for our game. Why?

I can guarantee you, if we were to take every statement and every example about the alignments from the D&D corpus, you would not agree with all of them. You would make a choice, an interpretation, and the belief you'd form would not be in line with "the D&D alignment system". And once you've taken that step (which you will take, whether you realize it or not), there's very little prima facie reason to take one opinion over another. It boils down to convincing arguments. Arguments based solely on "this is how it is in the game" blatantly ignore this unquestionable fact and drown in their own impossibility.

I don't have an issue with the assertion that Good and Evil have a few clear criteria. But you act as if you know what the alignments "really" entail and you don't have to argue for it. The fact is, even the DMs don't have that kind of consensus and probably never will have.

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There may not be a consensus on the allignment system, but there is one on assassins. Always evil. We've made our reasons clear, and now the argument seems trapped in a loop about the shortcomings of the allignment system (which is a discussion we've had a number of times.) So I'ma lock this!

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