D&D 5E Paladin just committed murder - what should happen next?

[Doug McCrae]

Would it make a difference if the paladin's player had made a show of his character being morally conflicted, not liking the situation, railing against the dragon's evil, etc before handing over the NPC? Imx portrayal of character has a lot more to do with what one says about the action than the action itself.

That kind of thing allows paladins to look like dogmatic sticklers, without actually being dogmatic sticklers.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Actually, it does. It sounds like the CN Barbarian has a strong sense of personal honor. Meaning that, while he doesn't necessarily feel like he has a duty to anyone else, he would rather die than lose respect for himself or allow anyone else to disrespect him.

Meanwhile, we are discussing a Paladin with no sense of honor at all and no sense of duty to the weak and helpless as if that was normal.

Wasn't a common complaint that the Paladin devotion to LG in past editions was too much of a straight jacket and needed to be changed? They were lawful stupid since they wouldn't cut corners and make the ends justify the means. So now we have CN paladins and the code is more along the lines of the pirate code.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

It is so bizarre to me that anyone would even consider applying "evil" to "I choose not to gamble my life at a thousand-to-one odds." Neutral? Yes, definitely. A failure to live up to paladin ideals? Depends on what you consider those ideals to be, but in many cases, yes. Evil? Absolutely not.

In all editions of D&D, there have been different levels of punishment for paladin misbehavior. "Fallen paladin" is the ultimate punishment. Applying it in this situation is like imposing the death penalty for jaywalking.

Answering the call to Paladinhood probably means you will one day lose your life against impossible odds that you should have ran from. Honor and duty before life. Throwing an innocent into the maw of a dragon is pretty bad. Would you view it the same if he did that with an infant? But as I said, 5e isn't very strict in this regard compared to earlier editions. Some love it, some think its a terrible change.

 

[Celebrim]

Would it make a difference if the paladin's player had made a show of his character being morally conflicted, not liking the situation, railing against the dragon's evil, etc before handing over the NPC? Imx portrayal of character has a lot more to do with what one says about the action than the action itself.

No, but it makes a really big difference who the character reacts to having failed.

That kind of thing allows paladins to look like dogmatic sticklers, without actually being dogmatic sticklers.

Which is venal hypocrisy.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Everyone: This isn't wrong. If I had been in this situation, I would have done the same thing. gives list of reasons why

Paladin: No Thank You, Evil!

Wow, good day to you too. And a plague be on your opinion and those who share it; it's a relic of adversarial DMing that needs to die. Push that kind of fossil-grognard no-win paladin horror story on me at the table and my hands would be around your throat.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

I don't plan specific outs with my encounters, I reckon that's up to the players to figure out. That's what I'd want if I were a player, open slather freedom to respond in character to whatever encountered.

And sure, if I were playing a LG Paladin of Devotion in impossible circumstances (very rare imo) I could even find myself surrendering to evil - and then play out the torment of failure.

Not much freedom in the scenario above. More like a choice between eating cow dung and arsenic. Why do so many DMs love springing those choices on their players?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Wow, good day to you too. And a plague be on your opinion and those who share it; it's a relic of adversarial DMing that needs to die. Push that kind of fossil-grognard no-win paladin horror story on me at the table and my hands would be around your throat.

You are going to scare people away with those displays of ferocity!

Now as a adversarial referee I wouldn't put a Paladin in that position unless it was going to lead to something interesting or I had the impression that being a fallen Paladin was what they were looking to play. Putting a player in a situation with that kind of choice would have to have some much larger reason behind it.

 

[Wiseblood]

No, he's not even doing that. At the absolute best, he's telling me how he perceived my character commit one action. If a mother kills something threatening their child, some could see the mother as evil, others not. Saving one's own life under duress is not necessarily evil.

Even it if is, that's one action, regardless of anything else how the character had been played. Considering that the ogininally posting DM had different expectations of what his first blush of how the paladin would respond, we can pretty well assume that the character had not been played evil.

Alignment in 5e is solely an RP tool - there is no mechanical connection, no way to detect it, nothing it interacts with within the rules. It does not affect reputation, give an "alignment language" (for us Grognards about), or have anything to do with how people in the world see you. It's listed in the personality and background section of the PHB - it's an RP tool.

So let me correct my statement. At best, the DM has decided to take one action under duress that likely does not match with how the character is generally played, deciding how they perceive it is the only possible interpretation, and then act on that to change an roleplaying-only guide on my character sheet. Since it has no affect except RP within the rules, there really is no assumption besides he expects it to affect my RP unless you want to posit that it's just a power trip that is not supposed to have any meaning whatsoever.

It was a choice

No. It has no meaning because they didn't write the rules that way.

I suspect they didn't write the rules that way, because the alignment system and its variations of the years just didn't work very well. Even if you believe in moral absolutism, or want it in your game, stating it so that the players can make informed decisions takes... an entire textbook on moral philosophy to do. And they are playing D&D, not The Good Place RPG.

Did you refute my claim? I don’t think you did. Moral relativism was the root of the arguments against the alignment system. Players want agency not constraints. Nine alignments and usually about nine paragraphs about what they are. Is it any wonder the system didn’t work well?

We don’t need to argue, I am just playing devil’s advocate.

 

[Umbran]

Can we all at least agree that under the traditional definition of good that this paladin was not good in response to this trial?

Traditionally good is that the ends don’t justify the means. the means should be good and the ends as well.

As Oofta noted, it is not at all clear there was a Good option available. This doesn't seem to have been a case of, "There is a Good option, but I don't want to pay the cost." Dying for a man that he cannot save does not reduce the pain and suffering in the world. It makes no life in the world better - so it isn't itself a good act. Barring raise dead, doing so severely limits the Good the paladin can do in the future.

What we are really talking about is the paladin following an expected behavior pattern, aka acting like an honorable knight. Honor and rules aren't about Good. They are about Law. I will accept that the Paladin may not have done what folks would expect from an honorable knight.

So, in traditional terms, the GM pitted the Law against Good. It was the Law that he should fight a fight he could not win. But surviving serves the Good afterwards. From this perspective, this is Kobyashi Maru - a challenge the Paladin cannot win.

 

[Celebrim]

Wasn't a common complaint that the Paladin devotion to LG in past editions was too much of a straight jacket and needed to be changed? They were lawful stupid since they wouldn't cut corners and make the ends justify the means. So now we have CN paladins and the code is more along the lines of the pirate code.

I earlier held up Steve Rogers as a familiar pop culture example of a Paladin. But you can make a legitimate complaint depending on your real world philosophy that Rogers is lawful stupid. I mean, the very first time we meet Rogers he's fighting a bully twice his size despite not having any chance of winning, and he refuses to give up and keeps saying stuff like, "You want more. I can keep this up all day."

And sometimes his 'lawful stupidity' (if you want to think of it that way) gets more serious. In 'Infinity War', Vision makes the statement that for the good of the universe he has to be killed, and Rogers vetoes this plan because it involves making a dishonorable choice. Rogers essentially says, "Saving the universe is less important than maintaining our moral integrity." This is exactly the criticism people are making of attempting to defend the helpless against the dragon rather than making a compromise with it.

Rogers idealism versus Tony's pragmatism is a huge element of what makes the drama of Avengers so good. If Rogers is a utilitarian pragmatist, he just isn't the same character and there isn't a lot of drama because what are we really fighting over? What makes Steve's presentation so good, is that even though he's clearly this lawful good Paragon, he's not lawful stupid, or at least to the extent that he is, it's not stupid in a simplistic stereotypical manner.

My personal feeling is that at some level paragons like Rogers are offensive, not just because of 'lawful stupid', but because by upholding a higher standard they imply the rest of us aren't meeting it. And contemplating that we might be falling short makes a lot of people offended.