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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 3463040" data-attributes="member: 22424">I can see "Evil but necessary", but not "Neutral but necessary". Which makes it a no-no for a Paladin who doesn't want to fall, but is otherwise not the biggest issue for other Good characters.If you want to persuade me otherwise, provide a reasonable argument that killing the child is okay... if the child is Human.As for whether the DM has the last word on alignments or not, I'm in the camp that says the DM and the players should discuss this ahead of time, and an understanding reached. Whether this is the DM stating his conventions or the group deciding them together is really up to them. However, once that understanding has been reached, I am firmly of the view that monitoring alignment is the DM's responsibility, as is applying the consequences. And, yes, once the understanding has been reached, I do consider the DM to have the last word.And as I noted in my first response to this thread, I have a major problem with that. In fact, if the DM insisted on that interpretation, I would walk out.I know what you meant, and I disagreed.My argument is that it is not the DMs place to enforce a course of action on PCs, even paladin PCs (barring magical compulsion and the like), but it is the place of the DM to enforce the consequences of those actions. So, if the player of the paladin decides his character is going to engage in infanticide, then he's entitled to do so... but his character will cease to be a paladin.Broadly speaking, I adhere to the same view, and also view alignments as being very wide, rather than narrow. However, there are also a lot of arguments I simply won't accept:"My character thinks that..." Sorry, alignments are absolute, not relative. Your character is free to think he's still Good; after all, he doesn't read his character sheet."The prevailing opinion of my culture..." Same problem applies - in this case it's your culture that may be wrong."My god says that..." Does he really? Or do you just think he does? Even if he does, alignment and alignment changes apply to the gods just as they apply to mortals.Sometimes, there are no Good options available. It sucks, but it does happen. And, after wiping out every adult in the goblin tribe, the PCs have reached a point where they simply don't have any Good options available to them (assuming they're not in a position to care for the child themselves, to take it back to appropriate foster parents back home, or can find another goblin tribe to adopt it). So, they may have reached a point where the best option that is available to them is to kill the child...but that still doesn't make it non-Evil. It just makes it necessary.What this case misses, though, is that this scenario doesn't come about in isolation. There's a reason the PCs now have a goblin child to deal with: they've just wiped out the entirety of the goblin tribe, most likely including some elders, wounded and women (or men) who were non-combatant. They could probably have instead decimated the tribe to a point where it was no longer a threat, and then stayed their swords. Their own blood-thirstiness has, to a certain extent, brought them to this impasse.And it's worth noting that I did list a number of options above that would have remained Good that would handle the situation. If these are discarded because they are impractical, given the seriousness of what is being contemplated, is hardly a Good path. In fact, it strikes me as a perfectly Evil thing to do, to place expedience over morality.</blockquote>

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