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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 303680" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have several serious problems with the Paladins behavior.Let me first state what those problems are not:1) The Paladin sought vengence.  I'm ok with that.  He is well within his rights to want to slay these people.2) The Paladin executed villains.  Again, I'm ok with that.  He is well within his rights to want to slay these people.3) The Paladin resorted to cunning to identify his foes and separate them from thier allies.  Again, I'm ok with that.  Sometimes you have to use cunning ambushes and such in battle.The problems arise with his specific application of his rights.1) The Paladin was duplicitous.  It is not ok to mislead people into believing that he wants to hire them when what he really wants is to kill them.  A Paladin can be as stealthy as he wants and can in the course of a lawful war, perform ambushes and so forth, but he cannot deal dishonorably with his foe.  This particular lie would have been a minor problem except for the fact that...2) The Paladin gave his duped foe no alternative to a speedy death.  Having deceived his foes, the Paladin has no business placing himself as the judge, jury, and executioner of his foes.  The Paladin should have honorably confronted his foes (even if doing so might have been less advantageous) and told them that they must either submit to trial or face him (or he and his allies if confronting them at once) in honorable combat.  When he has clearly placed his foe in an untenuable position, he _must_ honorably given them chance at surrender unless his foe is some being beyond reasonable hope of redemption (like a fiend).  3) The Paladin executed them for having committed war crimes.  This is always a tricky situation.  Were the Bandits acting as lawful combatants on behalf of some sovereign power with the legal right to field combatants?  Given that they were hired and that his own men were lawful combatants (and not innocents).  I think that generally a distinction is made between common soldiers and those that ordered the war crimes.4) The bodies of the executed were treated barbaricly with no real justification.  Having executed the foes, the Paladin was somewhat bound to bury them in a lawful fashion unless some much more pressing need prevented it.  Leaving the bodies on the field of battle to press on to rescue the Princess is fine.  Burning the bodies in some sort of mass cremation is fine, if better arangements can not be made without causing undue economic suffering (on someone other than himself!).  Disentigrating them because all bodies (his own men included) are being disentegrated because of a plague is fine.  Disentigrating them so he can more convienently murder thier fellows is not.All this taken together is very bad because it hints that the Paladin is not really taking his code that seriously and is looking for ways around it.  It is clear that he is trying to obey merely the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, and that is enough I think to attract the disfavorable attention of the deity.  One minor transgression can be overlooked, with the Paladin merely recieving a warning.  Serious planning to premediatatively perform a variety of transgressions concurrently is a problem.The biggest problem is probably in fact that the Paladin had so many resources at his disposal and the Justest and most Honorable plan he could come up with is this?  Seriously?  With all these resources I think he could have managed to think of a plan that relied on far fewer moral ambiguities.  Instead, it is clear that the primary impetus behind the plan was not its justness or honorableness, but the fact that it was of all the plans the Paladin could think up the one that exposed him to the least danger without clearly breaking the letter of the law as the Paladin understood it.Celtavian is I think in the right.  Given the obviously tremendous resources at this Paladin's disposal, rounding up the bad guys would not have been too much more trouble.</blockquote>

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