"Legal" paladin trickery Forked Thread: Would you allow this paladin in your game?

Forked from: Would you allow this paladin in your game? (new fiction added 1/21/08)

BBQLord said:

Ah, but now you're dodging around the issue that truly matters; if a matron found it, for whatever undiscernible reason, okay to allow paladins the use of drow poison, would these paladins be able to use this 'Good/Neutral' poison? As even the BoED states that the use of drow poison isn't inherently bad, I see no problem here.

Basically one has to make a choice: either agree with the RAW unthinkingly and without looking at the context or go with the RAI and think the paladin's code of conduct through, given whatever situation he finds himself in.

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Ok, it's getting off topic, so I'm forking the reply.

To me it wouldn't matter much, especially given circumstance. I think it's a largely moot point to begin with, given the traditional nature of drow items to lose their effectiveness. A paladin would almost certainly not be granted permission from a drow matron to use sleep poison anyway, unless it's some rebel city of repentant drow worshipping Eilistraee or something.

But even then, it wouldn't bother me. Say the paladin has a a mission to apprehend someone so that person can be brought back to trial. The party recently beat a group of drow, and acquired some sleep poison. As a DM, I wouldn't be at all concerned if the paladin let the party use the poison to apprehend their target, his mission is to bring the person back alive, and using the sleep poison minimizes the chance the party accidentally kills the target. It would be no different than the party wizard casting sleep.

To me, it's just another matter of battling the stereotype of the stupid paladin. And the stupid paladin I think emerged as DM tried to reign in the class by making them basically fight stupid (you got to fight face to face, bows are for cowards, never surrender, never retreat), that sort of thing, or lose their paladin abilities.

I agree. For a long time, I've been a believer in the "say yes" philosophy as it applies to Paladins in my home game.

That said, I don't run 1e. If I recall correctly, Paladins were explicitly forbidden the use of poison in the PHB of that edition (it's possible it came in with Unearthed Arcana... or I might simply be imagining it), which would have included Drow poison IMO.

The Sleep Poison the drow use is not actually poison at all:

a substance with an inherent property that tends to destroy life or impair health.

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So it is not really against the paladin's code.

delericho said:

That said, I don't run 1e. If I recall correctly, Paladins were explicitly forbidden the use of poison in the PHB of that edition (it's possible it came in with Unearthed Arcana... or I might simply be imagining it), which would have included Drow poison IMO.

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Yeah, I think they might even have been forbidden the use of flaming oil. Every class, in those days, had a 'use poison?' disclaimer, just as every monster had a '% in lair' chance.

I don't see why drow "poison" would be against the paladin code. If anything, tranquilizing your opponents so you can (take them to trial)/(punish them more severely) is more moralistic than hacking someone's body parts apart and giving them a quick death.

Isn't this very similar to a situation in an article in Dragon on clever players with the player who wanted his paladin to use the Dagger of Poison they'd just found? When the DM said that it would be Evil, the player returned that he'd be filling the Dagger with Holy Water.