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I run a role playing game with some friends involving magic, and a possibility occured to me. There is a spell which can make a person forget events. It occured to me that in conjunction with healing spells and some mundane measures, a person could be not only healed, but made to completely forget being assaulted or raped.

A similar possibility will one day be avalible to us with advances in nanotechnology, and nanobots effectively "saving" a complete breakdown of a person's body (including the brain architecture) and later "reseting" the person after a traumatic event.

If there is no injury, and no memory, ethically speaking, was there a crime? Could a person be violently raped or beaten, but the asailent be morally "off the hook" if they erased the victum's memory and ensured all physical scars and indicators likewise disapeared?

The core of the question was actually slightly different. That after having commited an assault, the person in question is restored to exactly the state they were in before the assault occured. One might think of it almost like going back in time, like in Groundhog's Day. If Bill Maurey's character had killed someone during his time loop, would it matter, morally speaking, since they would be up and well again the next day with no memory, consious or otherwise, of the events that had occured?

I am aware that no consious memory does not mean no effect, but that isn't quite what I'm reffering to.

I believe it is a crime simply because someone has done something to someone with out their permission or them knowing about it, and therefore it is injust.

sorry if you disagree with me, but I find things morally injust if something has been done to someone or someone's things without their permission.

Groundhog Day is a bad example - his character was not restored to factory settings like the rest of the world, and so the crime would still have taken place and it would be his fault, even though there would be another instance of the victim wandering around.

If he was, then the crime would still have taken place but the next morning when he woke up it would not be his fault, since the person who woke up would be a different instance (who did not commit a crime). The instance which did commit the crime would presumably no longer exist, and neither would the victim, the evidence, or the world in which the crime took place, but from an external point of view it still happened.

One last post, I promise.

In this case, there still would be evidence - the backed-up person will lose part of their memory, for instance. Again, the crime still occurred, and the victim has suffered from it, and unlike the Groundhog Day scenario the victim still exists, depending on how you view backing up and restoring humans (if temporary death is still legally counted as death, wouldn't you make sure that you (the most recent backup) were the first beneficiary in your will?).


Heh. I never got why those spells weren't evil, but animate dead (which doesn't touch the soul of the deceased, only animates their body and leaves it awaiting commands - IIRC it explicitly states that they don't go on a KILL ALL HUMANS rampage without orders, they just stand around doing nothing) was - life would be far easier if the dead in a farming village could be raised as skeletons to act as part of the workforce. Now I will shut up before I start ranting about negative energy...

Suicide is legal. This would basically be assisted suicide (yes, that's not quite the same as suicide, but I don't have too much of an ethical problem with it, assuming appropriate safeguards and such) with the creation of a new individual.


I have to say yes, otherwise you end up with a situation where one murder is wrong, but if you keep on killing until there's no-one left who knows about it or is affected by it it becomes right, or at least not wrong.

Hell, if you end up on a desert island and find that someone else is there, who was stranded there years ago and has no living relatives, friends, or people with whom they came into contact then killing them (without a valid reason) wouldn't be wrong.


Eh, basically the only argument supported by the rules and generic fluff for D&D against the creation of undead (skeleton workers, in this instance) being a neutral or good act is that it involves negative energy (you can handle consent issues, you're not dealing with conscious beings, and there aren't likely to be any KILL ALL HUMANS rampages - you're basically summoning animated tools). Unintelligent undead are sometimes given with an evil alignment in various sourcebooks, but this is explicitly against the rules, which state (IIRC) that unintelligent monsters don't get an alignment.

With those out of the way, the remaining argument (or at least the one the "undead are always evil!" folk run to when they're forced to concede the others) is based on the use of negative energy. Of course, negative energy is amoral and unaligned - if you think it's evil because it kills you, go hang out on the positive energy plane and see how long you last. Furthermore, while it can be used to harm, so can fireballs and magic missiles and swords. An Iron Golem is made of iron, and you can use one to hurt people. You can also make a sword out of iron and stab baby orphans! However, iron isn't evil. There are also some spells which use negative energy to directly harm people, such as the first-level Wizard/Sorcerer spell Touch of Fatigue.

And yet raising someone's lifeless body to assist their family after their death, with their permission, is somehow "evil".

This only applies in standard D&D using the RAW, of course. Setting-specific fluff or crunch can change this.

Yup, that's why I noted that assisted suicide is different to suicide.


I have to disagree there. Wiping someone's mind and replacing it with something completely different is pretty much equivalent to physical death, only with the added bonus of creating someone new. While I'm sure you could use it to torture someone, that would be comparable to torture, not murder.


I do not, and so my opinion may be inappropriate for those who do.