No, he's no longer "Good" because his actions are no longer purely selfless. He inflicted undue suffering, their actions were excessive and not proportional to the threat, and this his more or less how paladins and Celestials fall in this universe - by taking things too far.Taihou,Oct 30 2016 wrote: For example let us take objectively selfless character, devoted to ideals of Greater Good, who really does not want anything for himself, just to save the world, but for his mission, he forsakes mercy and compassion and begins to vivisection sentient beings, destroy whole settlements to root out whatever is cause of possible disaster and so on, thus committing what most would describe as "atrocities". Is he "still good"?
What I was saying, that there are two systems of "good" and "evil" when it comes to DnD - one is "mechanical", which is some kind of OOC driver. It could be represented not necessarily by selfishness, as example above shows us, that there are loads of ways to make character be nice, selfless and with wholly good intentions, but system-wise "evil", second is In-character, or actual one, which does take into account, what character would think of others and what is the basis of taking the decisions, which would in turn rely on some understanding of "sin" and "virtue" to set up some more suitable system of In-character rights and wrongs from the in-character point of view.
P. S. As for DnD evil/good and selfishness, by the way, person who defies rules of nature (in this sense, the purpose for which reproduction mechanism exists. Also, note that if such hazardous deviations occur in nature their subjects for obvious reasons are eliminated via natural selection) and remains in claws of his base desires is selfish, thus evil, whatever he will mask it as.
Playing a Good character in D&D is walking a fine line between doing too much and not doing enough.
Going into fight and killing a bunch of goblins to stop them from raiding helpless villages? - "Good" act, the innocents were saved. It would be preferable to not having to kill the goblins, but very likely negotiations weren't possible anyway.
Going into fight and killing a bunch of goblins for the same reason, and then piling some torture and finishing wounded on top of it, then raiding their camp and finishing their children "just in case" - "Evil" act, it was taken too far. The cruelty inflicted was more than needed and certainly not propotional.
Though characters in universe don't refer to themselves in dry mechanical terms like "Good", "Neutral", "Evil".
It's perfectly possible in this universe to have a character who thinks themselves as being good and honest whilst doing terrible things out of the sheer fanaticism... But the Multiverse will count them as "Evil" anyway. They'll die and end in Abyss or Baator, much to their surprise. :X
Though characters like that are very likely to be called for their cruelty IC-ly and if it was a PnP campaign there wouldn't be of any surprise for anyone else if an Angel was sent down with a divine punishment...
... especially if said fanatics are doing this kind of things in the name of a Good deity.
Your personal interpretation of what is a selfish act in terms of personal interactions is also, just that - personal interpretation.
You're free to RP it in game, but don't expect being always taken seriously or this being considered a valid criteria if you'll try to use it in game to judge anyone's character alignment.
This will be taken as seriously as a justice warrior calling Paladin a racist...
Because it belongs in the same place - a person projecting their IRL values into RP and expecting everyone else rolling with it. Especially when said person reserves to themselves a pretty delusional right to judge when the relationship is genuine and when it's selfish. :X
