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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 2165345" data-attributes="member: 307">It depends entirely on the movie. In some, such as Hang 'Em High, the hero takes the bad guys on a long and dangerous (for him) journey to the Federal judge for the Oklahoma Territory. The instances are too numerous (and varied) to generalize, but in almost all, the good guy doesn't kill captured bad guys, even when not doing so poses a significant and potential threat down the road.The sequence is this:Bad guy menaces Luke.Kenobi intervenes, tries to talk bad guy out of doing anything.Bad guy produces gun.Kenobi produces lightsaber.Bad guy fires, Kenobi deflects blast.Kenobi attacks.Exactly how would a paladin get into the situation of owing a major crime lord money for dumping a shipment of contraband as a result of a failed smuggling run to begin with? It seems extremely contrived to have a paladin get into that situation and still be a paladin to begin with.A paladin may only work in a universe in which good is a force in and of itself, and not a somewhat flexible set of moral precepts. In standard D&D, good, evil, law, and chaos aren't simply moral choices, they are primal forces of nature. You can sense them, imbue objects with them, dispel them, call upon creatures that embody them, and so on. Good is objectively defined, and doesn't fluctuate depending upon the situation at hand.In any event, think of a paladin in terms of the devout early Christans. Many of those people would rather suffer persecution and sacrifice their lives than violate their moral principles. A paladin is similar: obeying the code of the paladin is more important than mere expediency or practicality. That a bad guy might come back and kill him later is likely not a sufficient reason to justify killing him while he is helpless, because that would violate the paladin's code of good, just as giving lip service to the worship of the Roman Emperor while intending to go back to following the Christan path was insufficient for many 1st and 2nd century Christians.The problem is that Bond, Mal, and so on don't live in a universe in which good and evil are palaple primal forces of nature. But, in any event, no, it is probably not possible for a "grim and gritty" protagonist to remain "good" as opposed to some strain of "neutral", because that's more or less the nature of "grim and gritty".</blockquote>

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