On the mountain-climbing example, obviously opinions differ. Utilitarians say "cut the rope". Other moral persspecives may disagree - and it may depend on other contexts, like what promises we made to one another (eg did we agree to allow rope-cutting in such circumstnaces?), what caused you to be unconscious (is it your own fault? - in which case that my vitiate or at least reduce the stringency of duties owed by me to you), why the piton is coming loose, etc.
In the OP scenario as I understand it the threat arises from a dragon. It's a sentient being. So on most theories of morality of duty, it makes a big difference whether I kill you, or it kills you. One of the key differences between such moralities and utilitarianism is that the latter does not care about the particularities of agency, but the former do. Adding in an ethics of honour makes the parituclarity of agency even more accute.
A particularly important consideration when we add a paladin - at least as traditionally conceived - into the mix is the importance of hope. To cut the rope is to abandon hope. To treat the dragon's victory as inevitable is to abandon hope. This is the great theme of LotR, unsurprising given the theological underpinnings of JRRT's writings.
A paladin who abandons hope has not only turned his/her back on divine providence, but has - hubristically - elevated his/her own assessment of the situation above that of the divinity to whom s/he should be submitting. S/he is supposing that providence has ceased to play out in the situation. So closely allied to the wrong of abandoing hope is the wrong of prideful judgement. (Another recurring theme in LotR and the Silmarillion.)
How a RPG handles the place of hope and providence is a matter of mechanical design, GM framing, and GM adjudication. Obviously having the paladin and friend be spirited away by divine intervention would be a fairly clunky way in most contexts; but its not the only possibility - there are any number of reasons why the confrontation between paladin and dragon need not result in a dead paladin. And many of these are quite compatible with the outcome being a "story loss" for the player of the paladin, if that's what the proper resolution of the situation requires.
And of course sometimes what is required is that the paladin die. Though I'm very sentimental as a GM (aw was JRRT as an author!) I can acknowledge that sometimes that's the outcome that duty and honour require. How this is to be sorted out in a RPG - eg under what condidtions it's fair for a PC to die, and how (if at all) a "death flag" is to be raised, etc - is a matter partly of system and partly of table understandings.
Now if a GM is running a game in which. from the outset, hope is futile or naive (see eg most approaches to CoC), or is running a game in which the only proper source of hope is an individual's capacity and prowess (see eg REH's Conan), then therre is already no room for the paladin archetype. In the CoC-type game the whole idea of heorism becomes redundant. In the Conan-esque game the arhcetype of the paladin has been supplanted by REH's rule-transcending, self-realising, rather Nietzschean barbarian.
To me it seems that a good chunk of paladin threads arise from games that are essentially Conan-esque in their moral, ethical and theological orientation and yet players are being invited to play paladins sincerely rahter than ironically. It seems obvious that that's a recipe for a poor play experience!
In the OP scenario as I understand it the threat arises from a dragon. It's a sentient being. So on most theories of morality of duty, it makes a big difference whether I kill you, or it kills you. One of the key differences between such moralities and utilitarianism is that the latter does not care about the particularities of agency, but the former do. Adding in an ethics of honour makes the parituclarity of agency even more accute.
A particularly important consideration when we add a paladin - at least as traditionally conceived - into the mix is the importance of hope. To cut the rope is to abandon hope. To treat the dragon's victory as inevitable is to abandon hope. This is the great theme of LotR, unsurprising given the theological underpinnings of JRRT's writings.
A paladin who abandons hope has not only turned his/her back on divine providence, but has - hubristically - elevated his/her own assessment of the situation above that of the divinity to whom s/he should be submitting. S/he is supposing that providence has ceased to play out in the situation. So closely allied to the wrong of abandoing hope is the wrong of prideful judgement. (Another recurring theme in LotR and the Silmarillion.)
How a RPG handles the place of hope and providence is a matter of mechanical design, GM framing, and GM adjudication. Obviously having the paladin and friend be spirited away by divine intervention would be a fairly clunky way in most contexts; but its not the only possibility - there are any number of reasons why the confrontation between paladin and dragon need not result in a dead paladin. And many of these are quite compatible with the outcome being a "story loss" for the player of the paladin, if that's what the proper resolution of the situation requires.
And of course sometimes what is required is that the paladin die. Though I'm very sentimental as a GM (aw was JRRT as an author!) I can acknowledge that sometimes that's the outcome that duty and honour require. How this is to be sorted out in a RPG - eg under what condidtions it's fair for a PC to die, and how (if at all) a "death flag" is to be raised, etc - is a matter partly of system and partly of table understandings.
Now if a GM is running a game in which. from the outset, hope is futile or naive (see eg most approaches to CoC), or is running a game in which the only proper source of hope is an individual's capacity and prowess (see eg REH's Conan), then therre is already no room for the paladin archetype. In the CoC-type game the whole idea of heorism becomes redundant. In the Conan-esque game the arhcetype of the paladin has been supplanted by REH's rule-transcending, self-realising, rather Nietzschean barbarian.
To me it seems that a good chunk of paladin threads arise from games that are essentially Conan-esque in their moral, ethical and theological orientation and yet players are being invited to play paladins sincerely rahter than ironically. It seems obvious that that's a recipe for a poor play experience!
