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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1555251" data-attributes="member: 3146">Fair enough, there are a few other fairly common punishments that you're overlooking though: 1. Corporeal punishment--5, 10, 20 lashes, etc. 2. Fines (historically applied to a lot of things we would treat differently today). 3. mutilation--off with his hand! (I don't think a paladin would support this kind of thing in most cases)4. Public humiliation--stocks, the scarlet letter, branding, etc.5. Ostracism--often goes with #4 but is not necessarily entailed by #4.Not that it's relevant. I wouldn't have a problem with a paladin smiting this guy (the brothel owner) in the appropriate circumstances either but I don't think the forest of no context where the paladin has no knowledge of his specific crimes is constitutes appropriate circumstances. (And while he is begging and pleading for his life wouldn't constitute that either).And, what if he's doing it in order to advance an agenda that he sees as good by indoctrinating the students and ensuring they never hear a different side of the story? I agree that, based on this behavior alone, it's hard to tell whether the guy is a neutral jerk or evil.But justice isn't always a synonym for "lop their heads off with your greatsword."I'm not trying to get postmodernist with the text. However, it doesn't seem too farfetched to imagine someone who doesn't have the capability to inflict physical harm on most other persons but rather enjoys inflicting mental harm on them. I don't think it would be stretching to call that person evil.True. I guess it's not clear that simply enjoying the oppression is sufficient to make the first group evil so it's not particularly helpful.True. Actually, I'm not sure you need to take away anything from the descriptions to render the evil persons non-smiteworthy but that's a minor point. However, I agree that someone would be worthy of being attacked by a paladin without being evil and could be evil without being worthy of being attacked by a paladin.I disagree with that. It seems like it minimizes the evil tendencies and actions of ordinary people to exclude them from the evil alignment. Villains are a special category of evil people who have to be stopped by heroes. The guy who's plotting with his mistress to murder his wife so that he can collect the insurance is probably evil but it doesn't necessarily take heroes to stop him. He's evil but not a villain in the literary sense of the word.While it smacks of word-games, the notion of a "monster" is a pretty fluid one in D&D. For instance, both orcs and kobolds are monsters in traditional D&D parlance (and, indeed, are usually evil), but it has become quite ordinary in recent years to treat them as basically another PC race. Orcs you negotiate with and kobolds the PCs are supposed to befriend rather than kill seem quite common these days. (Sometimes, I want a mod where the kobolds are all EVIL  babyeaters and need to be killed just to get something different). Indeed, it seems that more than a few people seem to be applying that to demons, undead and devils if the number of people I've seen talking about their half-fiend, risen demon, lich, vampire, or tiefling characters is any indication. If it's quite common for monsters to be evil without being villains, it raises the question of why PC races would need to be villains in order to be evil.Now you're playing word-games but I take your point. See above.I'm not sure why you insist on disconnecting the notion of "justly punishable by death" from worthy of smiting. From the rest of this post, it doesn't seem like you'd want to punish every evil NPC who fits the description of the evil alignments with death. In fact, you might agree with me that doing so would often be unjust. Why then, would evil alignment make them worthy of smiting by an extrajudicial paladin if it doesn't make them worthy of death from a judicial body?That's odd. I interpret the change from 2e as a move towards a grayer system. In 2e, Detect Evil functioned like detect bad guy. If the guy walking down the street radiates evil, he's probably either on his way to torture puppies or on his way to kill someone. Either way, he represents an iminent threat to someone. In 3e, you can't draw that kind of a conclusion from the fact that someone radiates evil.This last example seems more of a question of proper decision-making technique than anything truly relevant to the discussion of what evil alignment means. It's certainly interesting though, so I'll bite with one caveat.Caveat: In this situation, it would not be common for a paladin to actually detect evil. Since it will take the paladin several rounds to get any useful information out of his detect evil ability, the paladin runs a very serious risk that whoever he should help (assuming he ought to interfere) will be beyond help by the time he finds out who (if anyone) is evil. Generally, the paladin would have to make a decision without knowledge of who was or wasn't evil.So, it seems to me that the proper way for the paladin to decide who to help is to weigh the possibilities. How certain is he that one man is in the wrong and how certain is he that his help would bring about good? Are the consequences of not acting likely to be as bad as the consequences of acting wrongly? If I knew how to write probability calculus, I could probably put all of those into a pseudo-scientific and vaguely informative equation but, unfortunately, I don't.Let me change the example slightly so we can have a clear example of this to contrast with your deliberately ambiguous one. If the paladin sees an evil man in armor, wearing a symbol of Hextor striking a non-evil man in peasant armor with a quarterstaff, the paladin is justified in riding to the aid of the apparent peasant. It is, of course, possible that the evil is a result of misdirection, the symbol of Hextor an illusion, and the apparent peasant is a murderer whom he is bringing to justice. That, however, is unlikely. The paladin needs to act on the information he has. And, if he's wrong and it is an illusion then the paladin acted wrongly but justifiably.If the situation is reversed as in your case and the non-evil knight is fighting an evil peasant, the course of action is not so clear. The knight is likely to win without the paladin's interference so the cost of inaction is much lower while the certainty that the knight is in the right is lower by virtue of several fact:1. Unlike the Hextorian, the evil peasant doesn't fit into a recognizable category that gives a plausible explanation for his actions.2. The peasant is apparently at a disadvantage so it doesn't seem immediately probably that he started the fight.In this case, the paladin might do well to ride his horse between them (in game mechanical terms, I suppose he'd have to bull-rush one or both of them) to stop the fight. Alternatively, the paladin might choose to call out something to the effect of: "Stay your hands and tell me what is the cause of this brawl that I may aid the one in the right!" (I don't think it's immediately clear that this would not work). If neither of those is possible, the paladin would probably do well to aid the non-evil person but to ensure that nobody is killed (non-lethal damage) until he has figured out what is happening.This situation changes if the peasant radiates moderate or higher evil. In that case, the peasant DOES present a danger to the knight because he clearly has a either a strong enough soul (ie high level) that his allegiance shows clearly or he is something other than he appears to be (evil priest, demon, devil, or undead). So, in that case, I would think that, all other things being equal, the paladin should aid the non-evil fighter.As to the last statement, I think you're right about the substance of the disagreement but not quite right about the substance of what makes a paladin act. Imminent threat is one factor. However, past guilt is another. A paladin has a duty to bring the guilty to justice (or perhaps visit justice upon them) in situations where violence would not be justified on the basis of an imminent threat. For instance, the paladin simply seeing a faintly or even moderately evil black knight eating breakfast in a tavern is ordinarily not cause to walk up and kill him. However, if the black knight was responsible for burning a village the day before, the paladin might well walk in with his sword drawn and say "defend yourself villain, for I have come to bring justice to you for the destruction of Woodsedge!"</blockquote>

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