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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6043028" data-attributes="member: 42582">Given that judges, in the much higher stakes of real world legal disputes, sometimes have to make-do without "errata" - ie they have to make sense of legislation that has not been purged of drafting errors or oversights - than I think it is more than reasonable to expect the same of RPGers.Which is to say, I am also talking about the RAW. I think you are misinterpreting those rules, by putting a literal interpretation on the use of "evil" in the Atonement spell description which that word was not intended to bear."Conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care" or "reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others" is not the same thing as intentionally harming others. A clear example would be a construction worker, high on a building site in an urban area, simply tossing a brick or a piece of steel piping over the side onto the street below. If that object were to land on someone and hurt or kill them, it would be highly arguable that the construction worker had been grossly negligent. But the construction worker has not intended to kill or hurt anyone. (What would be a possible instance of non-gross negligence producing the same harm?: the construction worker fails to adequately secure his/her pile of bricks or pipes, and one falls from the pile and lands on someone.)In the case of negligence, the duty is one of reasonable care - the avoidance of the risk of forseeable harm. Gross negligence is simply failing to meet that duty in a particularly bad way: namely, reckless disregard of the need to take reasonable care, or - to flip it around - taking flagrant risks in a reckless fashion.A fat person is fat. A grossly fat person is really, really fat. A negligent person is someone who fails to take care. A grossly negligent person is someone who fails to take care really, really badly - like my brick-tossing construction worker above.A paladin who acts dishonorably violates the code. A paladin who acts really dishonorably grossly violates the code. I think talking about "conscious and voluntary disregard of the code" can be misleading, because it makes it seem like the paladin's mind should be on the code. But that is not what the code requiers. It requires, rather, that the paladin's mind be on those things that the code requires. The code is a statement of duty, but it is not itself the subject matter of the duty: the paladin's obgligation is to do certain things (like grant mercy) and refrain from others (like poisoning people).So, if you want to phrase it in parallel to gross negligence, it would be "conscious or voluntary poisoning of someone", or "conscious or voluntary failure to grant quarter". But I don't know that that adds much, and I'm not sure it covers all the cases.I emphasised, upthread, that it is important to think about the description under which a person intended an action - because this goes to the person's belief about what s/he was doing, which in turn goes to what exactly it is that is "conscious and voluntary". The construction worker who, in my example, tosses a brick over the side and kills a pedestrian has intentionally performed an act (namely, the brick-tossing) that kills a person. But s/he has not intentionally killed a person, because what she intended to do was not to kill a person, but simply to toss a brick. (Contrast an assassin, who deliberately drops the brick on his/her victim.) The gross negligence consists in the fact that s/he ought to have had regard to the fact that falling bricks in urban areas can hurt pedestrians, but failed to do so.It seems to me that a paladin who hands someone a poisoned drink, thinking it not poisoned, is less culpable than one who deliberately hands over a poisoned cup. My feeling is that the latter, but not the former, is a gross violation, because more dishonorable, and more dishonorable because the paladin intended and desired to get the benefit of poisoning the person. She "consciously and voluntarily" poisoned another. Whereas the paladin who didn't know the cup was poisoned did not "consciously and voluntarily" poison anyone. She accidentally poisoned someone.As I said upthread, one kick to the groin, in extremis, would almost certainly not count as a gross violation: the paladin has chosen dishonour over death, but not under that description: the immediate threat to which s/he was subject, not a conscious prioritising of life over honour, has motivated him/her. A repeated pattern of groin kickings, on the other hand, would be a different matter, because the paladin should be having regard to such things, after the fight at least, and a repeated pattern would suggest a readiness to prioritise life over honour that is wilful and therefore a gross and culpable violation.My own view is that spitting in the face of the king, even when the paladin thought the face to belong to a peasant, could well count as a gross violation, because a paladin - cultivating the virtue of humility - should recognise that any pauper could be the king in disguise, and hence that any face could be the face of the king, and hence not to be spat upon. While I could see some room for disagreement with that judgement, it's hard for me to conceive of a situation in which spitting in someone's face takes place in the same circumstances as a one-off emergency kick to the groin. This would be an instance in which the paladin commits a gross violation of the code, although the violating action - spitting in the face of the king - wasn't intended. I think this shows that the "conscious and voluntary" analysis has to be deployed with care (here the paladin is consciously and voluntarily taking a risk of violating the code, in circumstances where - given the demands of humility - that risk was not permissible).(If someone took the view that humility was not itself a further paladin requirement, then they might reject the above analysis.)The measure of "really dishonorably" isn't to do with the degree of intention behind the act - it's to do with (i) the degree of disregard of the demands of honour, and (ii) the severity of the consequences that result from that disregard. Nearly all breaches of the code will be intentional actions - the point is that, in many cases (like the accidental poisoning, or the impromptu groin-kick) they will not be "conscious and voluntary" breaches, because not intended under the requisite description. And in some other cases - like the face-spit - they will also not be "conscious and voluntary" breaches, but nevertheless gross violations because of the culpability in running the risk of breach.</blockquote>

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