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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tsyr" data-source="post: 1207388" data-attributes="member: 354">No, the DM wanted something to be a moral quandry that wasn't. It's not up to the DM to decide what is and isn't a moral quandry... That's up to the players experiencing the event. The DM can set something up that he himself would see as a moral quandry, but the players might not (and in this case didn't) see it that way. It's not the player's fault if they didn't angst over something they were supposed to.The DM assumed that because these evil beings were child-shaped, that some how made for a moral quandry, when the paladin simply looked past the cute casing the evil was housed in. Go not down that road if you want to keep players for the long term. If you start thinking of everything as "Could it be a test? Maybe I shouldn'd to that. It might all be a trick..." you won't have fun for too long. It gets old. And the fact that the game is ravenlost esq is, IMO, all the more reason FOR the paladin to have done what he did... In ravenlost esq games more than another other type of game, you DON'T give evil the benefit of the doubt. That's suicidal. Paladins have mercy when it is applicable, yes. That doesn't mean they don't get the right to defend themselves when attacked by evil. Nor does it mean they have to angst over every killing of evil, "Oh, could I have redeemed him?" and "Oh, should I have mercy on him?". And hard as it may be to accept, there are times a paladin has to kill something. Darnit, I'm sorry to be the one to break the news. But it seems like anymore every time a paladin kills something we get a message board arguement over if he should have or not. The paladin is the martial arm of the church. They kill stuff. From a metagame perspective, that's the reason they get a high BAB, good weapon profs, etc. To kill stuff with. No, that doesn't mean they can go around hacking up every petty pickpocket. But when you are fighting for your life is not the time to stop and have an ethical debate with yourself -- it endangers you, your team mates, and (in the case of stopping an evil from fleeing) potentialy countless more people. A cleric might have the luxury of sitting in the temple debating ethics. Paladins have the unhappy duty of having to actually DO stuff in the real world.And in the end, the Church isn't the one to judge a Paladin, his God is. A church is made up of just a bunch of people. They can be wrong. They can be corrupt. They can just be mis-informed but with the best of intentions. If a Paladin's god sees fit to not chastise the paladin, the Church can punish him all they want. Provided anything close to the norms are being used for the classes, there is one big difference between a paladin and a cleric: A cleric can choose to be what he is. Like it says in the PHB, "No one ever chooses to be a paladin. Becoming a paladin is answering a call, accepting one's desitny. No one, no matter how diligent, can become a paladin through practice. The nature is either within one or not, and it is not possible to to gain the paladin's nature by any act of will." A paladin by his very nature has to act instinctivly at times. And by his very nature, he is equiped to do so. A cleric can decide the right course of action. A paladin knows. This doesn't mean paladins are immune to alignment shifts, or that everything they do is always right. They can screw up too. But just because a paladin's logic doesn't jive with yours doesn't mean he is wrong, either: to tie this in to the point, just because the rest of the players were trying to subdue the hell-children (And, from all reports, not doing a very bang-up job of it either, what with being dominated and having to be rescued and all), perhaps you need to consider that the paladin's first instinct - to kill them - was, just maybe, the correct one.</blockquote>

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