Book of Exalted Deeds - Exalted feat question

[rkanodia]

So I guess every time a criminal is wanted for a capital crime, the police should just go in with guns blazing... come to think of it, when those marines pointed M-16s at Saddamn and put him in zipties, they should have just shot him because those two things are morally equivalent...

In a D&D world, people who really care about principles should be twice as careful to give everyone a chance. You never know when shenanigans are going on. Can you really trust common villagers to recognize the signs of dominate monster? Or maybe they were attacked by summoned gnolls. Or the gnolls have some not-so-great-but-not-utterly-evil motivations, like needing to bathe a sacred stone in the blood of humans to keep a powerful demon bound in its prison. Maybe they're caught up in ethnocentric thinking and never considered the real harm they've inflicted on sentient beings, and, after years of repentence and sorrow, they'll one day become model citizens striving to repay society for their unthinkable crimes. Or maybe they just want to kill people for sport and run away with their loot, and, as soon as you wake them up, they're gonna reach for their flails and go down swinging. But unless you're an Exalted Necromancer, you probably aren't going to find out by killing them in their sleep.

[QUOTE="Lord Pendragon]A PC that believes every gnoll he comes across can or will be redeemed isn't Exalted, he's stupid.[/QUOTE]
He doesn't have to believe that they all can be redeemed. He only has to believe that they deserve the opportunity.

 

[Nail]

As an aside: I'm not sure every Exalted character believes that everything can be redeemed. That is to say "Belief in Redemption" ?= "Exalted"?

What do the rules say?

 

[Trainz]

As an aside: I'm not sure every Exalted character believes that everything can be redeemed. That is to say "Belief in Redemption" ?= "Exalted"?

What do the rules say?

Exalted is more in the way you do things than the end result itself. It's a way of life. It is very a case-by-case thing, and is hard to really pinpoint down, except for the "end doesn't justify the means" thing which is quite spelled out.

Redemption ? An exalted character isn't forced to redeem anyone, although Paladins are excellent at this (as are Clerics). Clearly the other non-exalted players will be pissed if the Paladin always wastes game-time to redeem every critter they capture. Soon the players will go out of their ways to make sure there are no critters left alive, and the Paladin, if he's true to himself, will not stay around a group that acts like this...

... it ain't easy being exalted.

 

[Abisashi]

Exalted ~ Deontology.

Kant presented the case of the inquisitive murderer, which goes something like:

Bob is upstairs in your house, and a guy knocks on your door.

"Hi, I'm looking for Bob so that I can murder him. Is he here?"

Kant says that you should tell the murderer that Bob is there because you have a duty to not lie. You can't know what will happen, and you aren't responsible for the murderer. Perhaps he will redeem his ways. (modern deontologists suggest that conflicting duties or the like allow you to not tell the murderer, but that's besides the point.)

Now, it might seem that Kant must therefore be a pacifist, but he wasn't at all and thought that war was acceptable in the right situations. I'd say Exalted characters should be deontologists. Exalted philosophy might have slightly different rules, but it matches well to the idea of Duties and the idea that "The ends do not justify the means."

As for those of you who feel that this leads to silly conclusions, I agree. My sig once read, "Never let morality keep you from doing that which is right."

Utilitarianism for life.

 

[Kaji]

Look, guys: this is what makes playing Exalted PC so fun! It's the moral conflict!

Killing evil gnolls in their sleep is Evil. Plain and simple. An exalted character cannot do such a thing and remain exalted. He must think of a different way. That's the point.

Don't like it? Fine. Don't be Exalted.

I'm in agreement. I think your DM let you off light. I would suggest that you should lose access to the feat, if even just once the next time you tried to use it, as a "hint" from the gods that you made a mistake.