Quote Originally Posted by Witty Username View Post
100%,
Killing someone because you wanted their stuff is perfectly in line with Evil behavior.
I would modify that to "killing someone as your first option to getting something they have and you want is in line with Evil behavior".

I think that you are correct, that as we add more variations to the equation, things get a fair bit less "evil" and a lot more "maybe this is more neutral" (at least IMO). And if we go far enough with the variations, it may very well become "this is good" (evil monster guarding the important quest item needed to save the entire universe from destruction sort of situations).


My observation with regard to the ranger shooting and killing the naiad was that we don't know the extraneous circumstances that may have been present. If this is just something the ranger did, out of the blue, and in the face of broad party consensus that "we're going to figure out what's really in that pool and why the fiends want to kill it", and if this is the kind of behavior the ranger has engaged in regularly in the past, then yeah, an alignment shift is wholey appropriate. If, on the other hand, the party for some reason decided to do what the fiends asked, or didn't realize the folks who asked them to kill the creature in the pool were the fiends they had detected, or one party member detected the fiends and didn't tell the rest for some reason, and the ranger arrived at the pool, with the rest of the party, fully expecting that they were there to kill whatever creature was in the pool, then firing into the pool without first double checking what it was, was at worst a reasonably chaotic neutral thing to do.

I've never said that this "can't" be evil. I've only said that it isn't "always" evil.