Prickly moral situation for a Paladin - did I judge it correctly?

[Mean DM]

No deity or church could possibly ....hold him accountable for split-second decisions that in hind-sight may not have been the best option.

IMC the diety would. Aren't you glad your not playing in my game .

Cheers,

Mark

 

[wally]

Not the exact situation here, but has anyone ever seen the original Star Trek episode called "And The Children Shall Lead?"

It was similar in that the children were becoming evil and controlling of others by using the powers given them by their 'friendly angel.' They caused their own parents deaths and were controlling and killing others.

I am wondering if there was any thought given in game to destroying the evil powers that corrupted and empowered the children, and whether that would free the children and cause them to be normal again.

Just a thought.

 

[Tsyr]

What is the point of having an encounter like that, just to make it 'easy' on the participants?

It was an easy question, however, to my eyes (and others). Regardless of what the "point" was... The "point" of an encounter doesn't matter at this point.

ForceUser, apparently, wanted a moral quandry (hope I used that correctly)... and he sure as heck got one.

No. He didn't get one. The paladin saw through the attempt at making a moral quandry out of a situation that wasn't one, and the DM apparently didn't like that.

 

[takyris]

Dragonblade: Complete agreement on the paladin getting only 10 seconds to figure out what to do. That was an idea for how I was thinking about things, not how the paladin should have thought about things. My arguments only make sense if the paladin had access to information that, at the time, he didn't have access to -- or time to weigh.

Tsyr: The fact that we have a 7-page thread suggests that there was some moral quandry. The fact that you are not quandered does not mean that the quandry does not exist. That's somewhat analogous to saying "Well, since Amanda decided not to euthanize her vegetative husband, it wasn't really a quandry, was it? I don't see why everyone is arguing over it like it's some big moral issue with multiple facets and good points on both sides." The paladin's actions are not the determinate for a state of quandry. The 7-page thread is.

Or, in other words, please differentiate your opinion from reality.

As I said in the beginning -- my advice for the DM was to avoid penalizing the paladin and to give a few more hints about backstory, so that the players could make a more informed choice next time. I'd also have left the gods out of it, leaving the moral determination up to the players (ie, no loss of paladin powers, no orders directly from the gods). I still think that's the right thing to do, in my opinion -- but I can see that other points of view exist, and as both a player and a DM, I can respect that.

 

[Scarbonac]

Exactly right!

And the punishment for selling your soul to evil powers, mentally enslaving multiple villages, and sacrificing their inhabitants should be...what? A stern talking-to?

J

No cartoons or desserts for a week!

wally: "Hail, hail, fire and snow..."


If my DM ripped off that episode for an adventure, I'd consider divorcing her.

 

[Tsyr]

Tsyr: The fact that we have a 7-page thread suggests that there was some moral quandry. The fact that you are not quandered does not mean that the quandry does not exist. That's somewhat analogous to saying "Well, since Amanda decided not to euthanize her vegetative husband, it wasn't really a quandry, was it? I don't see why everyone is arguing over it like it's some big moral issue with multiple facets and good points on both sides." The paladin's actions are not the determinate for a state of quandry. The 7-page thread is.

As someone is fond of telling me, it's a false arguement.

Just because people argue about something doesn't mean there is a moral quandry; people will argue about anything given the chance. What happened was the DM wanted to make something into a moral quandry, but it failed. Other people found a moral quandry, but to the most relevent player, there wasn't one. The fact that some people here find it morally ambigous is not what I was adressing, because the DM wasn't creating the situation for us to argue about initially (I would assume! )

I guess we are just looking at it from two different perspectives.

 

[Taelorn76]

What they found shocked and disturbed them: the children, under some evil influence, had sacrificed their parents in an infernal rite. In truth, the children had long ago made a deal with a fiend - in exchange for periodic sacrifices, the fiend granted them immortal childhood and certain unholy powers, including the ability to dominate the minds of adults. Using these powers, they would then insinuate themselves into a community, make the adults meet their every demand, and then upon bleeding their benefactors dry, sacrifice them to their dark patron.

I say that the paladin was right in doing this. The children were evil. They had committed this act to other communities. I see it as The Children were doing this out of free will. Initially they should have contained them, as per cardinals orders, but as soon as they attacked, the paladin had every right to attack back and smite the evil before him.

 

[takyris]

Intelligent reply snipped

True. I was under the assumption that, despite a few new posters who come in after reading the first few posts and say, "I think the paladin did fine," most of us have kind of moved on to more general discussions. You are right that the original situation was not, to the paladin, a moral quandry.

I would argue, however, that you are suggesting through tone and word choice that the DM was wrong/stupid for creating this encounter. Balance issues aside (and everyone has caught up with posts and knows that the children could only cast Dominate once every other round, with a DC14 save, as a collective group, right? Our fears of 24 Dominates per round were unfounded), it seemed like it did create a quandry, since various members of the party apparently disagreed over the best way to handle the situation. This means that, in my opinion, his attempt to create moral ambiguity for the group succeeded. If his attempt were to create moral ambiguity for the paladin in particular, then yeah, he failed. While this thread started as being about the paladin in particular (and, again, I agree that whacking the paladin for his decision, based on the info that the paladin had at the time, was not necessary), I would posit that, from the info that the DM gave us, this encounter was meant to be a morally ambiguous situation for the whole group -- in which case, it succeeded, up until it became a TPC.

 

[nimisgod]

Remember that in a medieval setting, the punishments are going to be considerably more brutal. Death is not that hard to get condemned to, especially considering a situation in which you're committing demonic evils.

A thief might have his hand cut off or otherwise mutilated so he wont steal again. An individual with mental powers? The best way to nullify that threat and inflict punishment is execution.

You keep referring to the fact that its a medieval setting. I think that's a false analogy.

By technology it is, but it is not entirely the same. The presence of Gawds and magick change a lot, so using history as a reference is not entirely accurate nor a sound argument. Thus, these punishments and attitudes can vary.

Funny how as the thread goes on, and more of the story comes out from both sides, that the paladin's side gets more and more acceptable.

Ad Populum. Just because a lot of people agree on one POV doesn't mean it's correct.

 

[Carnifex]

Hmm. I went back and reread the first post, and it seems I must admit to havign slightly misconstrued something. I thought that the world was heavily based on the real medieval world, rather than, as it turns out, A Magical Medieval Society.

As such, some of my arguments about the extreme reaction of the church are partly invalid, since with variant religions all sorts of other attitudes are possible.

Nonetheless, I still find that the bulk of the context of the situation in which the paladin found himself points towards his actions being perfectly acceptable, all things considered.