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

[GrahamWills]

I don't know why I've been brought into this 20 pages on. I've already said pretty much all I wanted to say, and anything I'd say would be just repeating myself.

But, to repeat myself, suppose a known serial murder/rapist grabs a kid on a playground, and a cop is standing nearby and the serial killer has the drop on him. He's got no chance to draw his gun and resist without taking a bullet. And the serial murder/rapist says, "Let me have the kid, and I'll let you live."

Well, this guy that stepped aside for the dragon, he's not a hero.

And we have a winner for false equivalency!

1. changing from "an NPC" to "a kid"
2. changing locale from wilderness to a playground
3. changing the act from "adult killed by a dragon" to "child raped by a man"
4. changing the choice from "both die / man dies" to "cop dies / child dies"
5. changing the core question from "did he act against oath?" to "is he a hero?"

Honestly, if you need to make the huge emotional and moral switch you do in (3) alone to make your point valid, it's not making your argument look good. If you need to change the discussion from death by dragon to kiddie rape, it's probably best NOT to repeat yourself anymore, because that is not a switch in conversation I am willing to entertain.

 

[pemerton]

Great post, pemerton.

Thanks!

I think morality existed in 1974 OD&D.

It did in the sense that you point out with your examples. But I don't think it did in the sense that there is morality in (say) LotR, or The Quiet American, or even Apocalypse Now.

I agree with @lewpuls (in the other current alignment thread) that, in the classic game, alignment was another piece of the puzzle. The point of playing a Lawful character wasn't to explore (in aesthetic and emotional terms) what it might mean to be good in a world full of orcs and demons. It was to see whether you could meet the game's victory conditions (ie aquiring loot, with a willingness to kill monsters in the course of doing so) while abiding by certain restraints. In return, you get the benefit of (i) greater team stability in what is a team game, (ii) a greater degree of friendliness from non-opposition NPCs, and (iii) better access to buffs and healing.

In that context, the scenario described in the OP isn't one that is to be resolved by thinking onself (intellectually and emotionally) into the place of the paladin and deciding what to do when confronted by the dragon. Rather, the player has to make a rational decision that involves trade-offs: if I stick to my aignment and code I run the risk of death but, if I survive I get to keep my paladin bennies; if I throw the NPC to the dragon I'm guaranteed to keep my PC but probably in a de-buffed form.

Whether it's fair for the GM to force that sort of choice in classic D&D play is a further question: I think there are no abstract answers to that question, and rather they depend very heavily on the norms, expectations, what's come before, etc at a particular table.

 

[Yardiff]

Great post, pemerton.
I think morality existed in 1974 OD&D. Although it's not explicit it's fairly clear from the context that Law = good, and Chaos = evil. 7th level and higher clerics must choose to be either Lawful or Chaotic. Patriarchs (8th level clerics), treants and unicorns are always Lawful. Elves and wereboars can only be Lawful or Neutral. Undead, orcs, goblins and Evil High Priests (also 8th level clerics) are always Chaotic. Some Lawful creatures will only associate with Lawful PCs. Artefacts are always Lawful or Chaotic. There's a strong Tolkien and Moorcock (but with the powerful items reinterpreted as good vs evil) influence, probably stronger than in 1e AD&D.

"Only a maiden (in the strictest sense of the term) of pure and noble heart may approach the fierce and elusive Unicorn. Unicorns may be ridden by maiden-warriors and will obey them."​

Strangely the maiden isn't specified as having to be Lawful tho.

The 'pure and noble of heart' might be deemed as lawfully aligned.

 

[pemerton]

In light of the further details we got of the situation described by OP, all I'm reading is that you're condoning, or even mandating clumsy no-win DMing.

I didn't say anything about GMing. Nor did I imply anything about GMing.

I explained the differnce between failing to rescue someone to who no duty of rescue is owed, and expediently sacrificing someone who is in your care. That is a distinction that (while obviously admitting of marginal cases and producing millions of words of trolley-problem and related lliterature) is, in its fundamentals, relatively straightforward and widely recognised in law as well as philosophy.

There are a million ways to run interesting RPG scenarios in which the ideals of honour, duty, chivalry etc can be explored, tested, and refuted or vindicated. Very few paladin threads exemplify any of those ways, though. But that tells us nothing about the issue I was responding to.

If you want to see how I approach GMing a knightly game, here's my most recent Prince Valiant actual play report. I don't have actual play posts for the Burning Wheel game where play a knight of a holy military order, but in the last session that I played of that game I was doing battle with a demon to keep it away from my companion (who had swooned from the strain of casting a spell). Knowing my own stats, and having a rough sense of the stats of the demon, I knew I had no chance to defeat it. I was able to hold it off long enough that its tie to the material world dissolved. As a result I gained an infamous reputation, in Hell, as an intransigent demon foe.

My PCs Beliefs are:

*The Lord of Battle will lead me to glory

*I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory

*Harm and infamy will befall Auxol [my ancestral homeland] no more!

*Aramina [my companion] will need my protection​

And my PC's Instincts include:

If an innocent is threatened, interpose myself​

So it would be inconceivable for me to bargain with the demon for my safety at the expense of Aramina's.

The main obligation of the GM in Burning Wheel is to establsh situations that put the PCs' Beliefs to the test. The main obligation of a player is to play his/her PC to the hilt! I trust my GM to be fair, in the sense of not arbitrarily hosing my PC. But loss and suffering are completely fair game. In the BW campaign in which I am GM and my GM is a player, his PC - as a result of pursuing his Beilefs - has spent the last two sessions in a dungeon cell, trying to escape while having to make hard bargains with the various NPCs (allied and opposed) who have come to speak with him.

But to reiterate - good and bad GMing techniques have nothing to do with the inner logic of a morality of duty and an ethic of honour.

 

[pemerton]

I read it as a choice: The other person dies, and you live ... or you both die. Not a simple swap lives. For a lawful character it makes perfect sense to swap one person's life for two. So a lawful good character is conflicted. Thus I would not say this is a definite no-no.

As Gygax defines Lawful Good in his DMG, it is Benthamite utiltarianism - the greatest good to the greatest number, or as Gygax puts it "whatever brings the most benefit to the greatest number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest."

However, paladins are an obviously non-utilitarian archetype: they evoke a morality of duty and an ethic of honour, not the "shopkeeper's morality" of Benthamism.

This is one instance of the more general point that Gygax lumps all standard approaches to morality - human rights, wellbeing, duty, honour, consequentialism - under the label "good" and leaves the details as something to be sorted out on a table-by-table basis.

That's one reason why looking to the alignment descriptors to try and resolve these sorts of paladin questions is largely fruitless. A Benthamite paladin is anachronistic and (in my view) aesthetically jarring; others might disagree; but either way it's not something the rules answer for us.

As another poster said, don't make it a moral issue. Instead just look at the god they serve and ask yourself what they would think. It's basically the FRP equivalent to a standard Christian morality question -- don't consider the intrinsic morality or try and work it out from ethical principles, just go with "What Would Jesus Do?". So ... what would Pelor do?

To me this is fine if the player gets to decide what Pelor would do. But at many tables the assumption will be that Pelor is the GM's NPC and hence this is really the player asking the GM how to play his/her PC - which I think is a pretty degenerate state of affairs in a RPG.

The problem only gets worse if the GM then tries to answer the question of what Pelor would do by (i) looking up Pelor's alignment (NG?) and then (ii) trying to interpret the alignment principles - because as per the earlier part of my post, those principles provide no answers to these sorts of questions.

One thing to be careful about is that Paladins are not the exemplars of goodness. Because they serve both good and the law, they are always in conflict. If they are faced with choosing between evil and chaos, there is no strong reason why they wouldn't decide to do the evil lawful thing rather than the chaotic good thing.

Your Neutral Good priest is not so conflicted. Trust her ahead of paladins.

This I don't agree with. It's an idea that is incipient in Appendix IV of Gygax's PHB, is hinted at in the Manual of the Planes but that comes fuly into its own with Planescape. I think its incoherent.

It's clear in Gygax's alignment descriptions (in his PHB and DMG) that LG isn't some "diluted" form of good. LG persons aspire to be maximally good, and believe that law (whatever exactly that means) is an essential means thereto. Conversely, the CG also aspire to be maximally good, but they believe that individual self-realisation rather than social order is the best means thereto. That is, the disagreement between LG and CG is not about whether law is intrisincally valuable but rather about whether it is a means or an osbtacle to realising truth, beauty, wellbeing etc.

The incoherence that reaches its pinnacle in Planescape is the following: that the Seven Heavens, Elys8um and Olympus are all in some sense good. If the convictions of the LG, as presnted by Gygax in his alignment descriptions, are correct then it is impossible that Olympus should realise the good; and mutatis mutandis for the CG and the Seven Heavens. The way that Planescape deals with this is by decreeing that both Oympus and the Seven Heavens realise good to some degree, but that in each case its diluted by another value - Law or Chaos. And then Elysium gets presnted as purely or maximally good.

Not only does this contradict the alignment descriptions - which is one source of incoherence - but it makes no sense on its own terms. Because if pursing law and order dilutes goodness then what rational person woudl possibly do that?!

 

[Hussar]

I didn't say that, nor imply it.

But there's no account of the morality of warfare that I'm familiar with that requires soldiers to make pointless sacrifices to try and rescue their comrades. Likewise in parallel situations (eg mountain climbing).

A parallel criminal law example: If A and B are climbing together, roped together, and the rope breaks and B falls, A is not guility of homicide for faiing to rescue B. If A and B are climbing together, and both will die and only A can save him-/herself by cutting the rope and sacrificing B, then A will be guilty of homicide. (The availability of necessity as a defence to murder/manslaughter is highly controversial.)

Of course if B cuts the rope and sacrifices him-/herself, the situation is completely different.

You don't have to agree. But the analysis isn't hard to understand. In (more-or-less) contemporary moral philosophy, look at (say) GEM Anscombe, or Philippa Foot and all the ensuing literature on the trolley problem. Or a lot of mainstream Kantians. In law, look at the laws of armed conflict and assoicated ideas in just war theory; or the criminal law examples I've just provided in response to Maxperson (I'm drawing on Anglo-Australian criminal law, but I don't think US criminal law differs wildly on these issues. I don't know Japanese criminal law.) In literature, look at the attitudes displayed in JRRT's work, or in mediaeval and early modern Arthurian stories.

The view that dying is the cowared's way out is essentially modernist (eg it seems to take atheism as a functional if not intellectual premise - so you could locate it in some Hellenistic ideas also like Epicrueanism, but they're the prototypes for modernist thought). It's no surprise that modernism has no room for the paladin archetype! I mean, you can do it at the table if you want to - after all, Gygaxi did, by bringing a class called "paladin" into a game whose ethics model that of Advanced Squald Leader - but it's plain as day that the resulting fiction will make no more sense from the paladin perspective than Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee - ie at best it will be an ironic commentary on the paladin as "lawful stupid" or similar. At worst it will just be an incoherent jumble.

D&D is a modern RPG played by modern people.

Can my paladin murder peasants without consequence? After all, a Samurai of feudal Japan could do so without any repercussions and was not viewed as evil whatsoever.

Can I do any number of absolutely abhorrent, by modern standards, acts without tripping people's Paladin Oath quota?

I mean, heck, in this situation, if that man was just a commoner, then, the paladin would likely be honor bound NOT to sacrifice himself. He should only sacrifice himself for his liege at his liege's request. To do otherwise would be to dishonor himself.

Appeals to medieval morality don't really work.

I don't know why I've been brought into this 20 pages on. I've already said pretty much all I wanted to say, and anything I'd say would be just repeating myself.

But, to repeat myself, suppose a known serial murder/rapist grabs a kid on a playground, and a cop is standing nearby and the serial killer has the drop on him. He's got no chance to draw his gun and resist without taking a bullet. And the serial murder/rapist says, "Let me have the kid, and I'll let you live."

And the cop says, "What choice do I have, take the kid."

While we might not charge the cop with murder, we'd probably give him some deserved stink eye for doing nothing. Whereas, if the cop tried to stop it, said, "Over my dead body you will.", and was shot and killed, even if he didn't save the child, we'd think of that cop as a hero.

Well, this guy that stepped aside for the dragon, he's not a hero.

This is garbage. In your example, there is a significant chance that the human with a gun will not kill the cop - he is wearing a bullet proof jacket after all.

A better example would have your murderer in a tank where there is zero chance of stopping the murderer and even the attempt will simply be suicide.

And, no, that cop was not a hero. He threw away his life needlessly, did not prevent the murder of the child and now, no one knows anything about the missing child because the one witness is dead. There is no police manual in the world that would agree with you.

Throwing away your life for nothing is not heroic. It's blindingly stupid and cowardly.

See, that's where @pemerton makes the mistake in invoking things like Arthurian stories. In the Arthurian story, the wounded man survives because of the knight's sacrifice. But, this isn't being written. It's a game. So, the knight dies for nothing, the man still dies and there is nothing anyone can do.

 

[Maxperson]

But there's no account of the morality of warfare that I'm familiar with that requires soldiers to make pointless sacrifices to try and rescue their comrades. Likewise in parallel situations (eg mountain climbing).

There's no duty for paladins to make pointless sacrifices, either. Risk their life, sure. Pointlessly dying, no.

 

[pemerton]

@Hussar.

First, apologies for some quote tag errors upthread. I'm going to fix that up after I post this.

D&D is a modern RPG played by modern people.

<snip>

Appeals to medieval morality don't really work.

In my experience it is very straightforward to play a RPG in which the moral framework for knights, samurai and the like broadly corresponds to LotR or an Arhturian tale rather than to Conan or The Punisher.

This doesn't involve "mediaeval morality". It involves a morality of duty and an ethic of honour, rather than either a utilitarian morality or an ethic of self-aggrandisement. For FRPGers the most well-known illustration is LotR. In film the best two examples I know are Excalibur and Hero. For a presentation with a biting twist, see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

See, that's where @pemerton makes the mistake in invoking things like Arthurian stories. In the Arthurian story, the wounded man survives because of the knight's sacrifice. But, this isn't being written. It's a game. So, the knight dies for nothing, the man still dies and there is nothing anyone can do.

RPGs are also written - the GM chose to frame the PC into this situation.

And they have action resolution mechanics, which - if designed and applied in the right way - can produce all sorts of outcomes.

There's nothing about the nature of RPGing, or even D&D as a RPG, that makes it true that the knight must die for nothing. As I've said above and in a post not far upthread, I've played and GMed RPGs with knights and paladins and had none of the issues you suggest must arise.

 

[Hussar]

I really don't care about hypotheticals.

We're discussing a specific situation where there are two possible outcomes:

1. The paladin lives, the man dies.
2. The paladin dies, the man dies.

That's the long and the short of it. There are no other outcomes that were obvious from the description. No other outcomes were even hinted at.

It's like your mountain climbing example. We're mountain climbing together, you're in front, I'm behind. There is a rockslide and I'm knocked unconscious and we're hanging by a single piton that is coming loose. You have the choice of cutting the rope below you, and letting me fall to my death, or cutting the rope above you and both of us dying.

Which is the moral choice?

 

[5ekyu]

I really don't care about hypotheticals.

We're discussing a specific situation where there are two possible outcomes:

1. The paladin lives, the man dies.
2. The paladin dies, the man dies.

That's the long and the short of it. There are no other outcomes that were obvious from the description. No other outcomes were even hinted at.

It's like your mountain climbing example. We're mountain climbing together, you're in front, I'm behind. There is a rockslide and I'm knocked unconscious and we're hanging by a single piton that is coming loose. You have the choice of cutting the rope below you, and letting me fall to my death, or cutting the rope above you and both of us dying.

Which is the moral choice?

Hauling you up, killing you eating your body for energy, looting your supplies then utting youmloose and climbing out.