Are there any restrictions on usage of things like poison & poisoned weapons?
Also for Chaotic Good Clerics can the cast the reverse of spells such as cure fear & cure disease?
We are playing 2nd edition. It is my view that as good characters they shouldn’t but my players have tried to argue otherwise.
It’s been years since I played in or ran a 2E game, but here goes. To the best of my recollection
Poisoned weapons
All other classes besides rogue-based classes have a percentage chance of poisoning themselves when applying poison to a weapon.
CG Clerics
Any cleric besides a Lawful Good one can cast the reverse of Cure Fear, Cure Disease, and Cure Light wounds.
edit
Oh, my bad, it’s about good aligned characters and poison.
Any alignment except Lawful Good can use poison.
The way we play is that if a character uses poison it causes alignment drops though I always found it to be stupid that our DM will make us evil after using it, dropping them to neutral then to evil if they use it too much may work. I play 3E so this may be slightly different, but the only class that won’t havea 20% chance of poisoning themselves is the prestige class, assassin.
The only core class that is. But There are absolutely no alignment restrictions based on poison at all, some DM can be asses and see it as an evil act though but really poison is just another tool that has no innate alignment just like all of the destructive spells in the game. Only Paladins cannot use poison.
Thats how I feel too, but he won’t change it so it’s more a house rule that shows you can put in your own subtle restrictions if you don’t want players to do something. When I’m up to DM I put no real restrictions on poison, other than price and being able to find it.
OK I now agree about the reverse spells but my argument against poison runs thus.
Poison has only one use, to kill !
Therefore it should be a abomination to all who follow a goodly code.
Not one of my players has come up with a satisfactor counter to this.
I guess your campaign is a real diplomatic one then, not being able to use anything that causes harm and all without being considered evil. That must mean that all the police and militia in your world are of evil alignment. you probably feel that any good cleric that prepares inflict wounds is an abomination as well.
I understand that lawful good characters should follow a code of honor of sorts, but both neutral good and chaotic good characters usually think that the end justifies the means.
The point about poison is that it is totally indiscriminate, the cleric has the choice to harm or not to harm whereas poison, being an inanimate object, can only be used to kill without reference to good or evil. It has no other use.
Surly a good character should weigh the possibilities to decide a course of action, not all members of evil races are necessarily evil?
With a weapon there is the choice to use or not to use and a further choice to kill, injure or just threaten. None of these choices are available to someone drinking from a poisoned water source or just swigging down a bottle.
Maybe the choices still apply, to a certain extent, if you poison the edge of your blade but even then the choice to injure is probably removed.
If the police or militia were to go around hassling everyone without reason then how could they be described as good whereas if they only went after criminals, as is the job of the police, then they would be a force for good.
Even an evil aligned character would not go round killing for at least a half decent reason so the same must therefore hold true for other alignments.
The bottom line should be for every decision that is made there must be a knock-on effect. What is the real difference between wantonly slaughtering every suspected evil person and accidentally poisoning the good or harmless creatures.
Once again the choice to use the poison or not to use the poison is just like any other destructive thing, it’s wielded by the person using it and has no alignment itself.