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From: lucius@tardis.UUCP (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: net.games.frp
Subject: Re: Killing PC's
Message-ID: <10053@tardis.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-May-85 02:17:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: tardis.10053
Posted: Tue May  7 02:17:50 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 9-May-85 02:25:28 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Harvard University, Cruft Lab (TARDIS)
Lines: 58

_
> This has been shortened to only look at the bits that I want to ! :-)
> 
> > There are occasionally other reasons to kill off PC's.  Here's a cute one
> > from
> > a campaign I took part in some time back.
> > 
> > We were all 3rd level characters for the most part,...
> > ...  We were mostly Lawful types, except for a NG gnome fighter-
> > illusionist and a CN human cleric of Dionysius....
	. . .
> > Well, the cleric decided that he didn't want to hear the fighter raving up
> > at him, so he threw a silence at him, which only maddened the fighter more
> > and took the cleric's spell-casting ability away.  
> 
> > Name:		G. T. Samson
> 
> Now, here is the problem, Why take his spell-casting ability away ?
> A Chaotic-Neutral, being badgered by another party member, does a fairly
> non-destructive spell on the PC to shut him up.  The clerics actions were
> perfect.

	The cleric's action was certainly chaotic enough, but it was also
stupid, because he was in the radius of the silence spell and did not have an
easy way to climb out of it.  That is why he could not cast spells (you can't
cast a spell with somatic components (includes all Clerical spells) from
inside a silence spell in most versions of AD&D (including the standard one
and the admittedly badly hacked variant we were playing)).  That does not
sound like a perfect action to me.  As you point out next, Chaotic Neutral
does not mean Chaotic Stupid.

> CN's are different, and do things like that.  Why?  Cause it's
> chaotic.  I would have given him bonus points for playing his alignment !
> Chaotic Neutral is not Chaotic Stupid, as some people tend to play it, but
> CN's to chaotic things.  Like killing party members when they are too weak
> to continue (it has happened twice to me).  At any rate, the killing of this
> poor chaotic seems to be against all the rules of Lawfull Goodness.  LG's
> do not walk around thinking about killing party members.
> 
> An enraged and shocked Chaotic Neutral (in Life and Fantasy)
> 
> Jim Sullivan

	I agree with you that killing this guy, given the circumstances, was
wrong by Lawful Good or Neutral Good rules, but I was one of those who didn't
have time to react before the fighter killed him.  Nevertheless, the fighter
could possibly still be described as somewhat Lawful Good of Neutral (as well
as an action-before-thought type).  Anyway, we weren't walking around thinking
about killing party members, but things led to that happening in this case.
It would take too long for me to describe the difficulty which the player who
was playing the Chaotic Neutral character has caused for many AD&D games, and
I can see how people might get fed up to the point of blowing their
alignments.


-- 
	-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
	{ seismo!tardis!lucius | lucius@tardis.ARPA | lucius@tardis.UUCP }