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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PowerWordDumb" data-source="post: 1029460" data-attributes="member: 8614">Paladins aren't guidance counsellors, they aren't psychologists, they aren't behavioral scientists, and they sure as hell aren't foster parents.  They're holy warriors.  See that little word at the end, "warrior"?  What does a warrior do?  That's right, a warrior ultimately kills stuff when he must.Moralizing, trying to sway someone's soul toward good, all those things are the province of the cleric.  The paladin may try, but iti's really the cleric's work.  The cleric is the social conscience and the living example of a god's mercy and forgiveness, not the paladin.The paladin is the god's clenched fist.  They are the tactical nuclear missiles of the gods.  The gods point them in a direction (stuff their heads full of beliefs of righteousness and morality), give them a target (someone who's annoying them), and set them loose to remove the problem.To listen to some of you talk, any time the paladin has to *gasp* kill anything evil, he's committing some sort of moral outrage and is a complete failure as a champion of good.  After all, we should capture evil, and nurture it until we've soothed its pain, right?  Pardon me while I vomit!Given the initial question, a paladin charged with deeply-felt knowledge of right and wrong, has the opportunity to go back in time and destroy an evil-doer before some tremendous evil event is accomplished.  Nowhere does it state he's killing children in their cribs, or that he has the remotest opportunity to redeem the villain, so stop reading that into it.  For all you know, the villain is a demon who is born evil to the core.  As presented, it's black and white - at least, from the paladin's perspective, and after all that's what paladins are best at; black and white interpretations of right and wrong.Modern-day apologists for criminal behavior and their pop-psychology interpretations of motivations and environmental effects on the psyche are out of place in this discussion.  In D&D terms, evil is absolute, is very much defineable, and a paladin is gifted with the ability to recognize it and destroy it.  There is no room for modern moral relativism in the discussion, unless you've house-ruled alignment that way, and even then you're not playing core D&D any more.</blockquote>

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