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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Envisioner" data-source="post: 8006102" data-attributes="member: 6749263">Acts can be performed while paying lip service to the idea of a "greater good", but that doesn't mean those actions are actually being done for the sake of Good as a cause; it just means the villainous person is able to lie and to manipulate gullible people.  This is a universe which has literal gods, angels, and magic; if you're a sufficiently powerful being or a sentient cosmic force (like the "Good" which gives Paladins their power and will take it away if they break their Code - that's going by the 3E version of the Paladin, before the more recent shift to "oaths"), you're capable of penetrating those webs of deceit, and can take away the powers of a Paladin who just performed an Evil act while claiming to be acting in a Good cause.I question that.  If the Punisher is "pitiless", it's because he recognizes that pity is a weakness which Evil people will exploit in order to make Good screw up so they can defeat it.  When all the people he murders and tortures are themselves murderers and torturers, it's distinctly possible to argue that his actions are neither Good nor Evil, but simply Just, and thus consistent with an LN alignment.Sometimes you do really have to get your hands dirty.  I could go into real-world examples, but the mods on this board are a bit on the hypervigilant side, so if you want to have that argument we'll have to go to PM.Genocide is unlikely in most applications of the oath.  If you swore vengeance against the orc warband which burned down your farm, then you don't have an oath compelling you to kill every orc on the planet; you just have to kill that one particular warband, and maybe others that behave similarly.  You're not going to murder orc babies, and you might even adopt an orc baby and raise it to follow in your footsteps as a defender of the civilized world.  But then, let's say that instead of orcs, the warband that killed your family were literal demons from actual Hell (or devils from the Abyss or yugoloths from Gehenna or whatever).  Those beings literally do not have free will, they are simply living, humanoid-shaped extensions of the cosmic force of Evil, and this fact can be proved with magic or by querying the actual creators of your particular cosmos.  At that point, if you want to wipe out all of these demons, I would argue that isn't an act of genocide, any more than tearing down an old brick wall is an act of mass murder against an entire community of bricks.  The demons aren't really "alive" in any meaningful sense, they're like lightning bolts emerging from a stormcloud called Hell, and slaying or smiting them is like putting up a lightning rod to harmlessly ground those bolts so they don't destroy your house.</blockquote>

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