Twilight Sparkle: SUMMON MAGMA BEAST!
Pinkie Pie: Holy crap!
DM: That's a minor action?! Ohhhh dear. So all the ninjas you just slowed and immobilized are helpless when it starts following its intrinsic nature.
Pinkie Pie: And it resists the doorway-blocking fire it's standing in! So if Imoen's group wants to come back, they'll have to go through IT. And the fire.
Blueblood: Hmph. And you accuse me of being a psychotic supervillain…
DM: Fluttershy?
Fluttershy: How do I follow that up?! Um, Tending Strike. That's it.
As I was watching the progress of this sequence being made, this was the moment that I was like, "Yes, I'm going to use all of this." I mean, look at that thing!
Notice: Guest comic submissions are still open until this arc is finished! Guidelines here.
We were hired by a totally not evil baron to exterminate some "monsters" living on "his" land. Turns out they were peaceful lamias living with humans (the snake kind). Our lawful good cleric declared that 1. She had given her word to drive them off. and 2. They and all who associated with them were abominations and threw herself at the unarmed women and children along with most of the party backing her. The other (sane) cleric and I killed the rest of the party and got kicked out of the game.
That's actually one of the great roleplaying opportunities of Lawful Good- you most often see it with Paladins, but a Cleric works too.
It's the unbending nature of Law. Lamia are, I believe, classified as 'evil' creatures, no matter how they are acting- much like Goblinoids or Orcs. And even if they are being 'good' in this situation, unbending devotion to a god might tell the character that they should not even exist, and that all who associate with them are similarly tainted.
It's why you can have LG enemies in games- the overzealous, or misguided. And it makes for powerful roleplaying moments.
Gonna have to disagree with you there, Anvildude. What you describe isn't really Lawful Good, it's Lawful Neutral at best.
Lawful Good isn't either lawful or good, it's where lawful and good intersect. If an action is lawful but not good, a paladin isn't obligated to follow it, and in fact would be obligated to oppose it if the action were lawful but evil. Likewise, Lawful Good isn't required to support any actions that are good but not lawful, and could argue that their chaotic nature is inimical to a peaceful, benevolent (ie: lawful good) society.
Lawful Good starts and ends at "the law serves the people". If the law opposes the people, like with the lamia example you gave, then it ain't Lawful Good (neutral at best, maybe even evil). If the people oppose the law, then you're looking at anything from Neutral Good to Chaotic Evil.
Yeah, the scenario mentioned by ThatGuest is actually covered in supplements that examine the nature of Good such as the Book of Exalted Deeds. One of the things that's often stressed there is that good beings should be open to the possibility of redemption, even of creatures classified as "Always (Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic) Evil" (in 3.5, an "Always" in the monster manual alignment statistic does not actually mean 100% have that alignment, but over 90%). They don't have to be stupid about it, but it's not a good act to slaughter a creature just because creatures of that type are usually evil, especially when there's reason to believe this one might be an exception.
On the flipside, of course, it's possible that the situation wasn't as rosy as it seems. IIRC, snake lamia have some mind-influencing abilities, and having mind-controlled the populace is probably more likely than that they'd actually overcome their evil inclinations. But drawing weapons on them right away was probably not a good act, and attacking unarmed noncombatants with lethal force veers right into evil.
Unbending application of law, enforced by application of violence, with a dash of 'I can justify slaughter if I declare the targets abominations' is more lawful evil than anything else.
Dunno if I'd call it "evil" so much as "horribly underthought," but our party decided that our best tactic for repelling an invasion on a city was to call in favors to the Tricksters of the Summer and Winter Courts - bet Summer he couldn't do it, and asked Winter to troll him through random killsteals to encourage him. Our fey archer (not yet fully realizing how right she was) even told the city's ruler "For what is about to happen, you have the sympathy of all of history."
The entire city became a wild magic nightmare zone for the duration of the fighting, but we did eventually get all the fires put out.
We came across a forest infested with harpies. Our monk (lawful neutral) suggested the ideal way to deal with the infestation was to burn down the forest.
Fortunately,the opinion of his fiancee (playing a druid), that this was a STUPID idea, prevailed.
Does having the CN Rogue, TN Druid, and CG Gunslinger in my Ponyfinder party all share in using the "likely NE" enemy druid we disposed of as rations count?
Because, that's what happened after we put the smack down on this druid who thought experimenting on ponies was how you solved the campaign's slow-death of pegasus controlled weather (outside of it being many, many years since the Empire fell)... but the rogue (and to a lesser extent, the gunslinger) have been turning many of the sapient meaty foes into rations. Rogue apparently has the goal now of sampling every sentient race we run into, but is begrudgingly willing to work with the party because a heavy hand of ethics is "one of those pony things" that she doesn't quite have a firm grasp on (both ponies in the party are good aligned followers of Twilight Princess Luminance)
So basically the party I was in was tasked with saving a bee hive from gremlins (a fairy told us to do it). We came across a bunch of bee larvae. So what does our fighter suggest? Kill me all! Luckily, through the combined efforts of me (a bard), the ranger (I think), and the GM we managed to convince him otherwise and instead took a bee larvae and stuffed it in my backpack to keep it as a pet.
We were playing in a game world where the 12 Swords of Power (from Fred Saberhagen's books) existed, though with some modified powers in some cases. One of our players was carrying Soulcutter, which in the game was a negative energy blade that could do things like create undead over a 1-mile radius (adding to the despair that people felt ;) ). The party had been given positive energy amulets by a god that could counteract the despair effect, but the only reason they kept the sword with them was to keep it from falling into someone else's hands until they could find a way to get rid of it for good.
My character was new to the party, and was a Devil Bard (from the Book of Devils). The GM had approved my character and helped with his backstory; the party thought I was exiled and on the run, but I had actually been sent by one of the Lords of Hell to try and locate one of two specific Swords (not Soulcutter).
Anyway, we were in a Dwarven city that was under siege by an Orc horde and was about to fall. One of the Big Bads of the campaign had made it into the city, the Orcs were fixing to breach the walls, and the players were arguing about what to do. Someone suggested using Soulcutter (the guy carrying the sword was absent that session, so in-game he had fallen into a deep sleep and nobody could rouse him for his input), and the party got into a big argument about it... so being the one who supposedly didn't know about the Swords, I volunteered and pulled the blade from its sheath.
Good news: We broke the orc horde! All of the dead on the battlefield rose under my command... as did all of the honored dead in the Dwarven crypts. And the gravely injured who were near death were killed by the negative energy, and rose as undead. And as more Orcs were killed, they then rose as undead. The rest of the party went into the city to fight the Big Bad while I fought off the Orcs, and because they were in the city they missed my boss showing up to "borrow" the sword for a moment and seeing blood rain fall as a result of whatever he did with it before he brought it back.
In the end, I profaned the honored dead, killed the wounded and sick, and unleashed several powerful undead in the surrounding countryside (weaker creatures died when the Sword was put away, but the powerful ones actually managed to survive as independent creatures)… while the Big Bad just wanted to get revenge on the ruler of the city for some past slight.
There was one particular thing in the Call Of Cthulhu rpg that bothered me: there was a "summon demon/elder god" spell, but no spell to CONTROL IT!
TWILIGHT: "I SUMMON Magma Beast!"
GM: "The Magma Beast eats you and goes home."
Poor Fluttershy. All of us martial combatants in a group with wizards know that feeling. Especially when your GM has a bromance going with one of the wizards.
We had a GM who had the opposite problem. He was convinced that wizards were OP regardless of how they were played, so he built all of his campaigns to "star" the martial combatants. Sometimes I wondered if there was a wholesaler somewhere in the kingdom with anti-magic items on clearance.
As I was watching the progress of this sequence being made, this was the moment that I was like, "Yes, I'm going to use all of this." I mean, look at that thing!