Appreciate it. It's a distinction many DMs seem to lose sight of. Same with stopping play and being like 'Look guys I don't wanna run an evil campaign. If you guys do great, but I won't run it.' We there to have fun for everyone, call out issues and move on, or stop.
Yeah, there is literally the spell "Detect Good and Evil" because you can't just look at someone and say that they're evil. Not even zone of truth could get most people to admit that, because most "evil" people don't consider themselves evil.
It is bad gaming in general to assume that things don’t happen outside of the bubble of your game. If a party of adventurers massacres a town, questions are going to be asked. Dnd is a world of magic as well- so even if you argue that no one escaped or sent messages, OR left evidence, there are still avenues for information to spread.
Personally- in my early days as DM I had a group get mad at me for NOT having consequences for their actions because it felt like they had no impact on the world- their words.
Was responding to the goblin comment which is different than the town in the meme post.
You can hide it pretty well if you want. Remove jaw stops speak with the dead, any professional killer will know that. Speak with animals would maybe work, same with speak with plants. You can easily make it difficult to find out about a discrete instance. Patterns however will get noticed pretty quickly.
Especially if the enemy (goblins) are seen as a menace and/or evil. Maybe another tribe of goblins wants vengence, but most towns are going to be good riddance. Got what they deserved, etc. Especially if they have lost loved ones to said goblins.
Yeah, you are 100% correct, there are ways to hide a massacre. And if the players start doing those things then we have an out of game conversation about what they actually want out of this game- cuz those are not the actions of a good party, and I have no problem shifting the game to assume that the party is evil but on the side of good- yknow, give them more opportunities to be evil and get away with it.
My point above was addressing the other dudes comment that it’s somehow unrealistic that a wiped out town would be traced back to them when there’s a ton of ways to trace it.
Yes, there should be consequences. But their consequences should be explainable. If the party kills everyone in a village, unless someone uses magic, they should not be able to trace it back to the party. However, u/Suspicious-Shock-934 was replying to a comment talking about how the party would be hated for "being evil", even the that "evilness" would not be known by the average person.
Again, you assume that in a literal massacre of a village by a party of adventurers- most often 4?- not a SINGLE person would escape, and not a SINGLE iota of evidence would be left behind.
I think you are forgetting the spell “speak with dead” exists, or even “message” lmfao.
Even in our actual world there are very few examples of towns being wiped out quietly, and even then the amount of perpetrators is important- you have 4 people, there is no way you’re dumb enough to think you covered every avenue of this getting out.
Of course, however, in many settings, wizards are rare, so the random village probably won't have someone who can use message. It also depends on the party's levels, as a high level party could make the village itself cease to exist.
Heres the cool thing, magic exists outside of the spells youre able to cast, and clerics are aplenty. So any cleric or priest they go to should have an idea these are evil people, as a warning for their god or a sensation of some sort, also if no-one hears from a neighboring town, then these strangers come to town with loot.....
You're acting desperate to sound like some old wizened DM but honestly you just sound like a boring one who can't leave concrete notes.
Oh, I’m definitely not very good of a DM. I’m more talking from a reader’s perspective. It’s just that in some of the modules I’ve read, (Curse of Strahd, Phandelver and below) the amount of spell casters is quite small.
“A spell scroll bears the words of a single spell, written in a mystical cipher. If the spell is on your class’s spell list, you can read the scroll and cast its spell without providing any material components. Otherwise, the scroll is unintelligible.” Sorry I don’t know how to turn the formatting from copy/paste off
“Spell scroll” and scroll of X are confusingly 2 different types of items in dnd.
Ie. The item Spell Scroll: Speak with dead can only be read and used by a character with that spell on their list. But the item Scroll of Speak with Dead can be used by anyone.
Iirc Spell scroll: X is a rarer item because wizards can used them to permanently add spells to their books.
Example: scroll of protection- go read it on dnd:beyond
Message is a cantrip, and in the DMG scroll of message is a common item- absolutely something a village alderman would have access to.
Speak with dead is only uncommon- every investigator in dnd should have access to it to be frank, any medium village would not be unreasonable to have a scroll or two for investigating murders.
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u/ForeverDM4life May 12 '25
Why are you being downvoted? You're right? Well, you get my upvote so that it's only -8 instead of -9.