D&D 5E Is trafficking in soul coins ostensibly evil?

Necropolitan · Jul 8, 2024

Zardnaar said:
Slave trade is evil but what happens if you live in a slave owning society and you inherit property including slaves? Ideally you free them but what if there's no legal mechanism to do so?

Ine issue in Rome was people dumping elderly slaves (who faced starvation) and overall lack of social support. If you freed a slave for example there's no jobs for the (because slaves do it). Unless you provide a job as well.

So patronage emerges. You free a slave who then basically works for you and you're their employer now. What if you can't afford to pay a free slave a living wage because of debt?

And yes these were real social issues. Freed slaves found a patron, continued the cycle or turned to crime. Freed slaves became citizens which also caused issues with parts of the empire that lacked citizenship.

None of that has anything to do with this.

deadman1204 said:
I'm ignoring what the text says, because the book is comically incapable of determining good from evil. Burning someone alive for stealing a penny is an rightous act of goodness according to dnd (fireball on a goblin that stole someone's belt pouch). This is why we all ignore the alignment chart, because to call it utterly worthless is an understatement.

That's an outright lie, none of that is anywhere in D&D. In fact murdering a thief with a fireball is literally given as an example of an Evil act in the 3.5 Book of Vile Darkness.

Also the text spells out why it's evil, so that's outright denialism.

You're both making the exact same arguments IRL slavery apologists made and they're just as wrong in this case.

Zardnaar · Jul 8, 2024

Necropolitan said:
None of that has anything to do with this.

That's an outright lie, none of that is anywhere in D&D. Also the text spells out why it's evil, so that's outright denialism.

You're both making the exact same arguments IRL slavery apologists made and they're just as wrong in this case.

I'm saying good or neutral characters in a slave owning society would have had to make compromises. If you were rich you owned slaves it was almost impossible to become rich by not doing it.

If you were poor you were looking at starvation. Wages were very low due to slavery. From classics study iirc a sex worker price was comparable to a loaf of bread or two. If you owned slaves you provably could afford to free the en masse. If you did they probably become slaves again or risk starving.

If you grow up in that society you either don't want to become a slave (rare cases you did), or sent most of your time trying to exist. The problem of course was slavery exists.

Relevance to soul coins I argued earlier selling your soul even as a good act was worse than letting evil have it's day. Because you're actively participating in feeding the 9 hells souls. Since you willingly did it you're probably on the fast track to advancement relative to everyone else whose behavior sent their souls to hell for free. Your future devil forms goal will continue the cycle even if you're a lemure.

tomBitonti · Tuesday at 12:37 AM

R_J_K75 said:
Not sure what this has to do with what I wrote, but sure

I was commenting on rules that you quoted. (IMHO), those rules don’t fit with some notions of the outer planes and of the nature of souls. Souls become too easy to destroy, and too easy to send to a plane other than where they are judged to go. Again, in my opinion, souls should be nearly indestructible, and very hard to hold after death not in their adjudicated plane.
TomB

Stalker0 · Tuesday at 2:15 AM

Necropolitan said:
No. Slavery is an absolute evil.

I'm going to stick one toe into this murky pool and hope it doesn't blow up.

In dnd terms, I believe that a Lawful good society (big L, small g) could in fact own slaves, because to a strongly lawful society, freedom isn't actually that highly valued (whereas Chaotic Good highly values freedom). Such a society would have rigid rules around how a slave would be treated, and would expect a slave to be treated extremely well. Such slaves could be criminals that are being reformed by doing "good deeds", or people treated as almost a ward of a family.

A truly LG society wouldn't be tempted to abuse their power over another person, it would be seen as an honor and a duty, almost like a parent.

tomBitonti · Tuesday at 5:19 AM

Stalker0 said:
I'm going to stick one toe into this murky pool and hope it doesn't blow up.

In dnd terms, I believe that a Lawful good society (big L, small g) could in fact own slaves, because to a strongly lawful society, freedom isn't actually that highly valued (whereas Chaotic Good highly values freedom). Such a society would have rigid rules around how a slave would be treated, and would expect a slave to be treated extremely well. Such slaves could be criminals that are being reformed by doing "good deeds", or people treated as almost a ward of a family.

A truly LG society wouldn't be tempted to abuse their power over another person, it would be seen as an honor and a duty, almost like a parent.

I suspect folks are having different meanings of slavery. In the us, children of slaves were slaves, and slaves could be separated from their families. I doubt that would be allowed in a LG society.

TomB

Dannyalcatraz · Tuesday at 5:35 AM

The issue with a D&D society permitting slavery isn’t problematic on the Law/Chaos axis, but on the Good/Evil axis.

At best, I can see certain historical forms of slavery as Neutral in D&D, and the American version definitely wouldn’t even get that far.

It would probably be wise to stop poking the hornet’s nest of trying to assert a good society would condone slavery.

GrimCo · Tuesday at 9:17 AM

3.5 had races with alignment: always evil (or chaotic evil). Fireball on sight, even if they didn't do anything wrong, was good act. That's why alignment never had any sense. Kobold babies paradox.

Using soul coins is evil. Ok. Good thing would be breaking coin and setting soul free, yes? But, if soul is evil, it just becomes lemure. So you just add new devil to the armies of 9 hells. So, by doing "good" you actually do evil. Only "good" option is not using and not freeing souls from soul coins. Win by not participating.

R_J_K75 · Tuesday at 12:09 PM

tomBitonti said:
I was commenting on rules that you quoted. (IMHO), those rules don’t fit with some notions of the outer planes and of the nature of souls. Souls become too easy to destroy, and too easy to send to a plane other than where they are judged to go. Again, in my opinion, souls should be nearly indestructible, and very hard to hold after death not in their adjudicated plane.
TomB

I understand, wait for my GI Joe RPG Thread,,,now you know, and knowing is half the battle

deadman1204 · Tuesday at 9:49 PM

GrimCo said:
3.5 had races with alignment: always evil (or chaotic evil). Fireball on sight, even if they didn't do anything wrong, was good act. That's why alignment never had any sense. Kobold babies paradox.

Using soul coins is evil. Ok. Good thing would be breaking coin and setting soul free, yes? But, if soul is evil, it just becomes lemure. So you just add new devil to the armies of 9 hells. So, by doing "good" you actually do evil. Only "good" option is not using and not freeing souls from soul coins. Win by not participating.

being in a soul coin is kinda tortue and very conconsensual. Is stopping the torture of an "evil" person not a good act? Doing nothing is never a neutral act. By its very nature, doing nothing is endorsing whats happening, because there was an option to change things, but it was decided to let things stay the same.

GrimCo · Wednesday at 9:09 AM

It's not good if you believe that evil soul got punishment it deserved.

Doing nothing sometimes is best thing you can do when presented with 2 bad choices. Not freeing evil soul is just that. Least harm in the long run. Cause by doing good thing, aka freeing traped evil soul, you are directly responsible for creating new baatezu which can do even more harm down the road.

D&D 5E Is trafficking in soul coins ostensibly evil?

Necropolitan

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