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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 2708272" data-attributes="member: 3424">Okay, here's my feeble attempt to get the thread back on-topic. A couple of general comments, first.This doesn't have anything to do with how practical the paladin's code is in the real world, or whether good and evil are absolute or relative. This is D&D, and the paladin's code is practical because the DM sets things up so that it is (there should always be a way around the problem that allows him to follow his code), and there is an absolute (though occasionally poorly defined) standard of good and evil.To me, the essence of a Lawful character is that he adheres to a code of conduct that is imposed on him by a group he belongs to, whether it is his country, his faith, or his culture. He doesn't come up with his own ideas of what is acceptable and unacceptable (that would be Chaotic). As a Lawful character, a paladin could choose to follow his country's laws, or his faith's tenets, and so on. It doesn't mean he can't break them. It would be a chaotic act, but it wouldn't turn him chaotic immediately.Finally, to the paladin in question. Someone quoted Vimes early in this thread. I'll now quote Carrot, possibly the most paladin-like of Terry Pratchett's Discworld characters: "Personal isn't the same as important." I believe the paladin acted rashly and unwisely. If it goes against one of the principles he is committed to uphold as a Lawful character, then it was a chaotic act. Given the elaborated scenario, the paladin was probably frustrated that he couldn't get any information out of the obviously-lying halfling, and assumed he was more of a threat than he seemed. Surely an ordinary stooge would have broken down and confessed everything he knew when confronted by a high-charisma paladin in full wrath mode, no?I wouldn't take away the paladin's powers, but I'd find some in-game way to warn him about the dangers of acting rashly and unwisely in future, and then threaten his wife and child again and again to see if this will push him to increasingly evil acts <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" />. Of course, the ultimate cheesy ending would be for him to go on a murderous rampage after someone told him his wife was killed and become a blackguard. Then, the next campaign could be about his twin children (his wife lost the will to live and died in childbirth) with him as an evil NPC. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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