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

[Celebrim]

No, what happened was a scenario that required a mind reader to properly navigate

No, it just required him to follow his Oath blindly even if he couldn't see how it could possibly lead to a good result, and even if it didn't lead to a good result.

Everything else about the scenario is speculation. We don't know if it was set up by the DM or by the actions of the PC. We don't know exactly how he planned to run it. We don't know what the session zero looked like. We don't know whether reasonable expectations were set before hand. We don't know what clues happened. We don't know that the OP made mistakes. All we know is what happened in game.

 

[Xenonnonex]

I invented and popularized decades ago (though, for all I know it was independently discovered without me as it's just common sense)

I do not care about the "discussion" but is that really relevant?

 

[Celebrim]

Thought it might explain some of your decisions regarding them.

More importantly, you said you like your characters to have codes they follow. That's a far bit different than a Paladins code where your DMing style has you as DM solely determine if their Oath's are kept and hand out punishments to them if they fail them, while also being able to provide "impossible" challenges like the one presented in this thread.

Does having to put up with those 3 things particularly appeal to you and your internal character code style characters?

Yeah I kind of figured that you were going for some sort of gotcha moment, but I have played clerics as well, and they have basically the same issues as paladins.

 

[Imaculata]

That really doesn't sound similar at all. Was it a guaranteed TPK set up by the DM, the other party members died after your character's heroic charge anyway, and when it was over, did the DM say "Well, you could have just talked it down"?

There were no guarantees. After all, our DM did not tell us the hitpoints of the dragon, we only knew that the very next attack would kill any of us. And this DM was known to do that, and that would have been fine. There shouldn't be guarantees that you win every fight, especially against a dragon.

Now this wasn't a moral choice set up by the dragon, but it was a situational choice of letting my friends die, or dying myself. My character chose to die heroically... and much to our surprise, that final attack killed the dragon, and we all lived.

 

[Imaculata]

It is always amazing to me how different people see alignment.

So to confirm, many people on this thread believe that if someone holds you at gunpoint, takes away someone from you, and you don’t try to get yourself killed by stopping them...that you are a murderer and an evil person.

Really? People really feel that way about this kind of situation?

This is pretty much what Ra's al Gul argued in Batman begins isn't it? Should Bruce's parents have acted instead of doing nothing? He believed the death of Bruce's parents was the fault of his parents for not acting.

But of course we're all looking at this from a fictional angle, not a real life angle. What our heroic character might do at gunpoint, is of course very different from what we would do in real life when in such a situation.

 

[Hussar]

Well, I don't agree at all, and in any event nothing in the Oath suggests that you get an exception to these rules to preserve your own life.
/snip

Sure, you could have an Oath that attaches a duty to protecting the person of the Oath maker that says something like, "If you can save no one else, save yourself." But this is not that sort of Oath.

So, basically, all paladins MUST be suicidal. They can never, ever surrender, nor can they retreat. Ever. Because to do so would be to violate how you interpret this oath.

Yeah, as I said before, a bit too lawful stupid for me.

This is not an evil act. It is arguably a cowardly one, but, this isn't a chivalric knight. Honor is not that important here. Doing the most good is the important thing here and needlessly commiting suicide by dragon in such a way that will not save this man is not only blindingly stupid, but, also, abandoning all hope. After all, the paladin is alive. He could potentially save the man. The man might escape. Any number of things could happen. Where there is life, there is hope.

But, rolling over and dying? Yeah, that's the true coward's way out.

 

[Hussar]

snip

Death before dishonor (whatever the deity defines as dishonor which of course varies widely) is the obvious standard. I mean, what is death anyway in a universe with a knowable afterlife? There certainly would be no mismatch of expectations in my game world. This would be Session 0 stuff.

Yup, a complete misreading of the 5e paladin colored by years of earlier edition stuff. Sorry, @Celebrim, but, what you are saying here is in direct contradiction to what is in the PHB. Please, PLEASE, actually READ the 5e PHB for yourself before continuing.

 

[DammitVictor]

Really? People really feel that way about this kind of situation?

There is something almost reassuring about the fact that Wizards could make alignment as mechanically irrelevant as possible without discarding it entirely, and it still manages to ruin games because of the utter incapacity of a substantial portion of the playerbase to exercise the most basic moral reasoning or... simply... compromise on their divine proclamations for the sake of a good game.

It would appear that the best possible way to expose "human morality" for the arbitrary and self-serving farce that it is... is to apply it to the fiction of a game we supposedly play for fun.

I used to think I argued in favor of removing alignment from D&D entirely for the sake of improving the quality of roleplaying and avoiding disputes like this one.

Now I've realized I'm largely doing it to reduce my own unbearable existential horror of sitting in a room full of human beings who might actually believe any of the inane, vapid garbletrash that composes so much of any forum thread about alignment or Paladins.

 

[CleverNickName]

Yeesh. So many strong emotions over a game. A game, people. It's nothing to get worked into a lather over.

@firstkyne, I'm curious how you decided to handle this at your table. (But I completely understand if you don't want to share it. I can already hear the orchestra pit tuning up, getting read to play the You Did It Wrong Overture, and the Well Actually Sonata.)

 

[DammitVictor]

Yeesh. So many strong emotions over a game. A game, people. It's nothing to get worked into a lather over.

My next paragraph notwithstanding... in one sense, it's just a game like you say. In another sense, it's the capricious misapplication of the DM's authority, at the players' expense and noone's benefit. It's not the just the game that's worth getting upset about, it's the way people are justifying and encouraging using the game to exert the pettiest little shred of dominance.

@firstkyne, I'm curious how you decided to handle this at your table. (But I completely understand if you don't want to share it. I can already hear the orchestra pit tuning up, getting read to play the You Did It Wrong Overture, and the Well Actually Sonata.)

Yeah, actually. I mean, I want to preface this by saying I'm not a fan of the gotcha setup in the OP or the mischaracterization of the "Paladin's" response as murder... but the rest of the OP seems like you're trying to work with the player to turn this into a satisfying story beat and I am genuinely curious about how it's gonna work out. Between the two of you, a ball was dropped and you're trying to pick it up and run with it... and I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the people telling you to rub your player's nose in it.