The "orc baby" paladin problem

[Hypersmurf]

RAW? Who cares!

I think the phrase you're looking for is "RAW! (Huh!) Good god, y'all!"

-Hyp.

 

[Agamon]

Threads like these make me think that alignment is the work of the devil....

 

[Aaron L]

Lets just change what Good means in every campaign based on each individual DM's preconceived notions of real world good and evil. That way, we can all wonder together what sort of rules we're playing under daily!

RAW? Who cares! I say killing evil dogs that eat human babies is evil, and so it is! pg 107 phb is stupid anyway!

???


I admitted I was wrong about the PHB definition of Good and conceded my argument. Was there a reason for the snark?

 

[Seeten]

Mostly because I'm a bad person?

I already admitted it on page 7. Why dont you just drive the point home further, and make me feel even worse about myself?

 

[Seeten]

Also, I kid, I kid! I'm sorry Aaron, I'm snarky by nature. Its a character flaw. No personal insult intended =)

 

[Torm]

I get the sincere feeling that, yet again, a Paladin thread has devolved into needless semantics and comments that border on insults and name-calling, and to two or three posters that seem to enjoy beating their heads against metaphorical walls, since their arguments differ from each other on a fundamental level. (And yet, I would wager that the morality they demonstrate a belief in in their daily lives is much more similar - making the assumption that they are good people - but I digress.) This whole argument really boils down to Rule 0 in any given campaign, and no amount of player debate will really change that.

If I'm out of line to do so, I apologize, but the God of Paladins calls upon a mod to kindly drop the curtain on this bad boy. Previous experience indicates that it is right about now in these threads that someone does something that will cause you to do so anyway, best to nip it in the bud.

 

[TarionzCousin]

After dispatching a pair of murderous river trolls (scrags) in their underwater cave, the party discovered a series of water-filled barrels brought to the area by the trolls. Each contains a scrag tadpole. The paladin sees them registering as evil, but he also doesn't believe they will be a threat for quite some time.

The rest of the party wants to dispatch them. The paladin is aghast at killing helpless tadpoles.

So, what would your paladins do in this situation? As a DM, what's your read on the spiritual burden on a paladin, depending on his actions?

Regardless, this is a nice dilemma. I applaud you for making your players think in character. Good job.

\I didn't read the previous eight pages of posts.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Thus, every time they do a good or evil act, their alignment shifts until the act is then perfectly balanced by an opposite act.

No, see the second part of my post: it is habitual action. If they don't habitually perform many good or evil acts, then they are neutral on the whole. I don't remove a Good alignment for one Evil action, either.

And what evil does a troll infant habitually do? Either the definition you are using is wrong, or it is not consistent with the parameters of the OP, or you have a definition of "doing evil" that is identical to "being evil," or you have conceded the argument.

At the very least, the scragpoles were eating humanoids. Now, because they are evil, and they must have done something to get that way, "eating humanoids" could be inferred to mean that they were eating people not because they needed to or were desperate to, but because they truly enjoyed the extra pain and suffering they inflicted upon these otherwise innocent humanoids.

That's just inference from Whizbang's own posts. It's quite possible they've done much more, "offstage," as it were. Rape, pillage, murder, devil-worship, all on a scragpole scale, but done nonetheless, are all entirely possible. Specifically, we don't know, and neither does the paladin, but we don't need to know, and neither does the paladin. Because if they are evil, it is inferred that they performed actions to make them thus. Thus, the paladin is given the moral imperative to destroy them: they have done things that make them evil, things that they deserve justice for. The specifics are between the scragpoles and the moral authority of the multiverse, the paladin is just an agent of justice.

Who habitually does evil? Someone who is evil. Who is evil? someone who habitually does evil, according to you. How does someone become habituated to evil in the first place?

I think the only answer is that they acquire an inclination toward evil.

I think knowledge of complex motives is well beyond the capacity of even a trained diviner. The paladin doesn't need to know the whys and the wherefores, just the facts of the scenario: evil is as evil does, and they can discern where evil is, and be assured that evil has been done.

If Evil was based on actions, wouldn't a mass murdering tyrant have a more powerful aura of evil than an annoying imp? Yet auras in D&D are based on personal power (HD) and relationship with supernatural powers (clerics, outsiders, undead). Also, in D&D, you must have at least an Int of 3 to have a non-neutral alignment.

Alignments seem to be a question of moral choice, not guilt.

I don't see how this proves your case. Mass murdering tyrants are obviously going to be higher level (more HD) than petty thugs. Imps, according to D&D, are made from the souls of many expired mass murdering tyrants (because these souls compose the stuff of the plane of which they are made). Clerics draw on the powers of generations of mass murdering tyrants. And one can't really comprehend the ramifications of one's actions if they don't have an INT capable of understanding the nature of cosmic forces.

I don't see how moral choice and guilt are incompatible.

But that is natural to them. Killing and eating humans isn't evil for them any more than killing and eating cows is for a human. You could butcher a human and feed them to a human toddler, it still wouldn't make them evil. Wolves aren't evil.

Aaaaah, there's the relativism.

And it's obviously different. Wolves aren't evil because they don't understand the cosmic forces. Killing and eating cows, similarly, isn't inherently evil because the cows aren't capable of being "innocent." However, the scragpoles understand the cosmic forces (or are made from the cosmic forces). They know full well the evil that they are perpetuating. The fact that they have an Evil alignment proves this.

Killing and eating humans isn't "natural" to them. If it was, they wouldn't be evil. If they didn't understand what they were doing, they wouldn't have that alignment. They have that alignment, thus they are fully aware of the moral choices they have made, and the guilt which they bear is because of that awareness.