I'm running a 3.5e campaign and one of my players is a paladin...

I'm running a 3.5e campaign and one of my players is a paladin. To spice up the story a bit I'm planning on placing the paladin in a situation where he has to activate an ancient machine in order to proceed with the story. However the machine's activation will set off an entire countryside of explosive runes. An entire kingdom will be blown off the face of the planet, thousands killed. He's previously taken an oath of pacifism and will lose his benefits if he harms anything. At the very least he is going to fall from grace and lose his divine powers. How would you go about handling the situation were you him?

Get someone else to activate the machine.

Stop being a dick GM and trying to screw over paladins for no fucking reason just to have an edgelord doomsday weapon set off bby a main character for "muh deep narrative" or whatever you edgelord idiots are after. DMs like you are the reason people hate playing paladins, and you might as well put a barbarian on sedatives or have a wizard in a fucking antimagic field for half the campaign.

Have you just played Spec Ops: The Line?

Does the paladin know that activating the machine will blow the countryside? Because if he doesn't it's not an Evil act, for all he knows the inscription of "THOUSANDS WILL BE SENT TO PARADISE" on the big red button simply means a portal to heaven opens. He can't violate his oath of pacifism if an action of his resulted in the harm of others without his knowledge.

Oh hey, it's this shit again. You pulled this exact same thread with slightly different circumstances three fucking days ago. Give it a rest, shithead.

DO NOT REPLY JUST MOVE ALONG HE DOES THIS EVERY DAY

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Sperg out aside, has a point. Why give him a no win situation that will catastrophicly fuck him like that? What purpose does it serve in the narative to make him responsible for the unforseen and by your wording, unavoidable deaths of thousands of innocents? Also why was this thing rigged to blow up a kingdom? Who the fuck does that and then just leaves it sitting around.

Maybe with the right context and a Lot of explaining you could prevent a table flip but it sounds like you just want to dickbutt the pally (and i get why in the general sense, fuck pallys) if it's just a "you fell and lost your vow trololo" I'd not, you'll only piss your players off with such a ham handed dick move.

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