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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Viktyr Gehrig" data-source="post: 5523021" data-attributes="member: 9249">I think it does. Players can only operate according to the knowledge they are given by the DM; not even Paladins can be held accountable for things that they have no way of knowing. I think that holding characters to moral standards that the DM not only hasn't explained, but refused to explain, is fundamentally and grossly unfair. The characters whose alignments we're concerned with are members of a Good-aligned religious organization; if their actions were contrary to the teachings of that organization, or contrary to the will of the gods they serve, they should have known that in advance.If the Good-aligned gods are not the final arbiters of morality in the campaign world, then the players need to be aware of this if issues of morality are going to be significant in the campaign.In that case, the race of the goblins is no longer a factor, and the issue should be considered as if these were human cultists. The question then becomes a matter of what the PCs' options were; morally, there's no difference between killing them and hauling them back to town for the townsfolk to kill, so it's a matter of whether it is better to kill them or set them free.Punishing the characters for their actions is a definitive answer; it is also, as I pointed out above, grossly unfair. This is information that their characters should have known-- and if they did not know, it is because the gods themselves have been ambiguous on the point.We're playing D&D, not Mao. The players are expected to be able to know the rules in advance.I haven't seen anything inherently Chaotic in their actions; the ethical axis has no bearing on this discussion.   Yes, it is-- because if they treated him as a person, it means they recognized him as a person. This is a deliberate and knowing Evil act, which is worse than an ignorant Evil act even before considering your ambiguity concerning the morality of the game.That's irrelevant. They live in a world where such evidence exists.If someone was threatening to unleash biological or nuclear weapons against my people, I would absolutely support killing them without a single doubt or reservation. I would kill them, and I would kill anyone that supported them, and I would kill anyone-- no matter how innocent-- who got in the way.I'm not Good-aligned. Not by a long shot. But in this case, the PCs didn't do anything that I wouldn't uphold as Good behavior. What they did was arguably necessary.In that case, the PCs had a choice between killing the cultists or setting them free. There's no moral difference between killing the cultists personally and delivering them into the hands of their executioners. The PCs had a compelling reason not to set the cultists free, and if the cultists had proceeded to summon a demon and turn it loose the PCs would have been morally responsible for the consequences.I see one Evil act here, for which "ignorance" is no excuse. The other two acts were morally ambiguous at worst, and you created that ambiguity by not providing the players with information their characters would have known.</blockquote>

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