Should there be Repercussions for This? (opinions wanted)

[MerakSpielman]

Though I'm all for paladins being goody-two-shoes and rightious and honerable to a fault, I have to admit that this gets pretty encumbersome in lots of typical D&D dungeon crawls. If you run into more than, say, five or six people surrendering to you in a row, all pleading for mercy and a chance to do good in the world, it begins to get too complicated. The paladin is now so caught up in taking these people to town for fair trial or trying to teach them how to repent their evil ways that he no longer has time to, say, prevent the Temple of Elemental Evil from conquering the world.

It's so much more convenient when they fight to the death instead of surrendering.

Luckily my paladin has been running into fairly unintelligent, ravenous monsters lately, or undead. Those are easy, you just kill 'em. Groveling prisoners promising to repent if you just show mercy are tougher to deal with.

 

[BSF]

In a game I play in, we have a very honorable, righteous monk. At one point in the game, an Assassin was trying to hunt him down. We were in a large city at the time, and the authorities were friendly to us. With their help we setup a plan to trap and try to capture the assassin. During the ensuing battle, the assassin threw down his rapier (of puncturing!) and surrendured.

While we were happy that we were potentially capturing him, we were less thrilled that he was conscious. While waiting for the city watch to arrive, we tried to remove an unholy symbol. Bad move, that summoned diabolic (We are pretty sure it was a devil, not a demon) aid. In the ensuing mess, the assassin was slain, by the creature. Evaluating all the equipment afterwards, we came to learn that the assassin had a number of vile poisons on his person, as well as armor that would allow him to go gaseous. By all appearances, his surrender was a sham. Great villian that was going to take advantage of the fact that we weren't going to slay him outright if there was another choice.

But, this brought up some great in-character discussions on how we would deal with prisoners in the future. As a group, we agree that if we are in a situation where a prisoner can be dealt with by the "proper authorities", we will do that. But, the monk summarized other situations very well. Basically, if we are in the middle of nowhere, taking a dangerous foe prisoner is foolish. In that event, if an enemy threw down his sword, the monk would pick it up and hand it back to him, so that the fight could finish honorably.

There are times, and there are foes, where surrender is not an option. While it might be possible for an Evil Cleric to renounce his vile ways and try to atone for a lifetime of evil, a Paladin is not obligated to facilitate that. A Paladin should be able to make that choice. But, a Paladin should also be able to decide that surrender is not an option unless the foe is also willing to accept the Paladin's judgement and possible sentencing, including execution. However, a Paladin shouldn't relish this action.