A paladin finds a new, freshly-turned vampire. It has not done anything wrong yet, and says that it wishes to be cured

How hard is it to acquire a new potion of cure vampirism? How likely is it that the Paladin will die in combat or be turned himself if he attacks the vampire?

There's another thread going in which this caused a shitstorm. The gist of it was that a paladin comes across vampire that hasn't done anything wrong and has access to a cure for vampirism. The paladin decides to kill the vampire anyway. People were arguing for and against this. Some said that the job of a paladin is to destroy evil, not cure someone. Others said that a paladin is supposed to do good more generally, and that if there is an available cure he should use that.

>a paladin kills an innocent, a victim at that, in cold blood knowing full well it would kill them and he had the means to instead save them with little if any downside

Gee, sounds like they definitely shouldn't fall.

I'd say it depends on the individual paladin, as well as his order and their teachings. Some orders might preach that, once converted, you are irreparably tainted, and even if cured, you will remain evil. The kindest thing to do would be to end the vampire's existence.

Others would take a kinder stance (Think like Michael Carpenter of the Dresden Files) and believe that they have a duty to save everyone they can, regardless of their crimes, whether hypothetical, or actual.

Personally, I like that even under the most stringent interpretations, two paladins can be very different individuals, with their own ways of enacting their dogma upon the world, even if they are of the same faith.

For our purposes, assume the cure is relatively easily available, since in the previous thread the GM stated that was the case in the campaign where this apparently occurred.

The vampire is obviously lying about wishing to be cured.
It'll just destroy the potion.

>scenario 1
>use the sword
>you have defeated the vampire and still have the potion

>scenario 2
>give the potion
>vampire destroys the potion
>use the sword
>you have defeated the vampire and have no potion

If you can restrain the vampire without causing yourself harm and forcing it to drink the potion, then maybe that's another option.

>the cure is relatively easily available

If the vampire is recently turned and not completely evil then it would be evil, or at least not good, for the paladin to withhold the cure and attack the vampire.

>innocent

It's the orc baby shit all over again. You haven't even once considered the settings' universal laws, have you? For example, if the paladin is operating in a setting where there is no such thing as an innocent evil being.

Who /ethics101/ here?

If a vampire is so metaphysically different from the person it was before being turned that it is always evil-aligned regardless of what its original personality was like before being turned, then the vampires is essentially a different being distinct from the person that it once was.

I would argue that using the potion to cure the person of vampirism *is* destroying the vampire, so the paladin would be fulfilling their oath to destroy evil regardless. At that point, the only difference between "curing" the vampire and slaying it is that administering the cure also saves a good person.

I agree with that premise, but how does the paladin know if it was recently turned? How does he know it's not a trick? The safest route is to kill it. Offering to save it MIGHT risk the paladin turning himself. Offering to save it MIGHT risk the vampire attacking him. Killing the vampire risks NOTHING and is part of the paladin's job description.

The orc baby is somewhat different, since it's stuck being an orc no matter what. In this case, there is a way to turn the vampire back into a regular person.

How the fuck do we know it was a good person before they were turned? How does the paladin know? For all we know this is newborn vampire Hitler.

So if the paladin had a potion to transmogrify the orc into a human, he should use it on the orc babies? See how stupid this is?

> paladin isn't willing to put himself in danger
> not even if it might save an innocent life
What kind of paladin are you?

Depends on the setting
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Except he literally has a potion that would turn them back into the person they were, not an always chaotic evil or whatever vampire. Even by that reckoning it's still killing an innocent as a result since he's intentionally not doing so when he can, easily, and is instead rendering that salvation permanently impossible. There's really no way this works out except 'you fall so hard you leave a fucking crater'.

> So if the paladin had a potion to transmogrify the orc into a human, he should use it on the orc babies? See how stupid this is?
I mean, not really? If a paladin could just turn something into a non-evil creature, why shouldn't he?

>Vampires are inherently evil, even if they haven't committed any evil acts, right? In that case the paladin's well-being outweighs the evil being's.

go to bed John Calvin...

while the creature certainly has a greater tendency towards depravity it has not fallen to temptation yet and is therefore not depraved.

For that analogy to work, it would have to be an human baby that was polymorphed into an orc baby, and you have the option to turn it back to normal or kill it.

From there the question becomes if spending a few minutes as an Always Evil creature makes you continue to be Evil after you've been turned back to normal.

Source of this shit tier thread made by a sore loser that lost an argument in another thread:

>He thought he was justified in doing every single one of these things. He was a Paladin and constantly threatened, tortured and even, as I said before killed an innocent.
>I could go into detail about every one of those but I'll explain the innocent part.
>We were chasing down this vampire cult that had infiltrated a castle town. After some runnning around and my character nearly getting buttloved by a vampire, we found an underground net of tunnels that the bloodsuckers used. We got in and killed and routed most vampires but we found the body of a victim that was just bitten and transformed into one of them.
>We tried talking to her and she was fully aware of her surroundings and spoke clearly to us. So we decided to help her cope with her unwanted vampirism. The paladin had great >Heal skill and we decided he should help her recuperate and we explicitely told him about 5 times "Don't use Lay on Hands or anything of that nature, because you'll just kill her." He looked at us nodded and told the DM "I use Lay on Hands on her.".
>The DM just looked really sorrily at us and told the table "She dies from the holy radiance". Everybody was just freaking flabbergasted at how stupid and stubborn that motherfucker was and as my character (and me) angrily chased down and killed every single vampire, the paladin huffed and had the nerve to say "Now he's going to get pissy because of that".
>I swear to god, dude had no idea of what roleplaying motherfucking means.
This GM then kicked the paladin out of the group, while the group constantly bullied him.

Part 1 out of ???

How do you know it's an innocent? How does the paladin know it's an innocent? The paladin is out smiting vampires, and you're going to create this incredibly inane situation just to force him to fall? That just shows how retarded the DM and this whole situation is. Imagine a video game where you are killing random rats and slimes to level up then OH GAME OVER ONE OF THE RATS WAS A GOOD GUY IN HIS PREVIOUS LIFE

Did 3.5 and following drop the ability of evil clerics to turn paladins as if they were undead? Just asking.

(Especially interesting that clerics couldn't be turned by other clerics; it was only pallys that were vulnerable. Like they were Jesus-zombies or something.)

>If a paladin could just turn something into a non-evil creature, why shouldn't he?

You mean like killing it?

>yet

A ticking bomb is still a bomb and will be disarmed before it explodes.

Sense motive checks exist for a reason. If you think the vampire is lying, then you can roll to try and see

> I'm going to kill you because I'm not sure you're innocent
That's a terrible way to look at the world.

Honestly, I'd say that's the paladin's perogative. The characters certain are in the right to be shocked by this, but I thinkl kicking the player out is a bit extreme. I've seen rampant Tha/tg/uy activites that get overlooked for years

Then another poster agrees with the GM kicking and insulting the paladin by posting this:

>This is why I explicitly allow my players to "cancel" one guy's stupid decisions by unanimity minus one.
>"I kill that one NPC the other players all want to help" No you don't, this is a group game and the fun of four people is worth more than yours. I don't care if your fun is right and everyone else's is wrong, you can just leave.
This evolved into a shitstorm the size of a hurricane for GMs enforcing such power on players acting like the original story.

Then this OP posted that same paragraph/situation to which he got these two following replies:

>A paladin encounters a new vampire
He smites it right away, before giving it a second thought.

>that has done nothing wrong and wants to be cured
The vampire would never get a chance to speak. If he dare to speak. To the Paladin's hear it would be the Devil's words. The Paladin would then recite his training about how he would not be tempted or fooled by the evil forces. Then, proceed to smite the beast into ashes.

>The paladin has a potion that, if the vampire drinks it, will cure the vampire
What kind of fucking shit awful setting is this?

AND

> then the paladin's job is to cure that vampire
Rehabilitation is not the job of a paladin. Healing is not the job of a paladin. Curing disease is not the job of a paladin. Paladins aren't there to brew potions or change bandages. Paladins are there to kill evil creatures.

Then This OP couldn't reply anymore and he made this thread

The End Part 2 of 2

It's a fucking vampire, nigger.
If he fails the motive check and kills it, he still falls despite doing everything right, because this entire situation is fucking forced and retarded.

>if I have not seen your entire life start to finish to ensure you are pure and good I have no reason to assume you shouldn't be killed on the spot

Does the Vampire sparkle?
Wait I forgot are sparkling vampires good or evil...

>Innocent has a bomb forcibly strapped to them by terrorists
>They are now a suicide bomber
>Do you kill them for being a suicide bomber, or remove the vest to turn them back into a normal person?

If killing it happens to be the way to do that, yes. But if you've got something like a potion or a spell or whatever that can make someone no longer evil, why not use it? You'd still be removing evil from the world, and this way you potentially gain another good person on top of that.

Part of why this question and those like it cause such a shitshow is that no matter your answer, somebody will chime in with a new layer of "what if?" to promote argument.

It's That Guy: the Conversation, and it will always suck.

Y'all niggas is stupid, just have the fastest party member yell stop and roll to tackle the paladin if you want the dumb bitch to live so badly.

Well in the newest edition of Dnd there are no alignment restrictions for paladins.
So he does whatever the player decides is most fitting for his character.

Plenty of Nazis were good people.

It wasn't the first That Guy thing he did. He had also been torturing and terrorizing other innocent people despite supposedly being a paladin. This was just the first innocent person he straight up killed, and he did it over the strenuous objections of everyone else in the group.

>If he fails the motive check and kills it,

How does that make any sense?

>Roll sense motive, roll poorly
>You don't think she is lying
>No reason to kill her

>Roll sense motive, roll well
>You know she is/isn't lying
>Only have reason to kill her if she was lying, in which case you don't fall

Do you think a bad sense motive roll on a truthful statement somehow means you think theyre lying?

Cure the vampire.
If this is D&D (which I'm guessing it is because these questions are never imaginative enough to be anything other then "default fantasy" D&D), then vampires are intrinsically evil but only while they are still vampires, and evil can be redeemed by choosing to not be so.
In this case that choice is curing the vampirism.

Besides, all I need to do is watch her drink it. If she does right then problem is solved, if she doesn't I get my smite on.

Ever watch American Sniper? They shot the Muslim kid to stop the IED.

Yes, and?

>This was just the first innocent person he straight up killed
I thought you said it was a vampire

test

Because a paladin's job is to smite evil.

I would hope that a Paladin is better at being Lawful Good than the American Military

And in that case they didn't have an easy way to resolve the issue non-violently. In this case you do.

Christ there's a lot of spergy fucks on these types of threads.
No wonder nobody on Veeky Forums can get or hold down a fucking game.

There's no point in even rolling then if you're just going to railroad that hard.

The story centers around the one case where he attacked innocent, check the wording out yourself

>He constantly threatened, tortured and even, as I said before killed an innocent.
>I could go into detail about every one of those but I'll explain the innocent part.
See? He then went on to talk about the recently turned vampire. The owner of the story assumed the vampire was innocent, it wasn't.

>lie movie based on lie book by professional liar
What's that got to do with anything?

>Healing is not the job of a paladin. Curing disease is not the job of a paladin.

Nice digits, Lucifer, but I can't let that shit slide.

>The owner of the story assumed the vampire was innocent, it wasn't.
Got proof that it wasn't?

IT'S

A

VAMPIRE

>sending a truly repentant soul into hell where it will be tortured for eternity / used for raw materials for demons because you *might* need that magic item later
Really gets the noggin joggin. Supposing the Paladin is infected right now, he still has a duty to hand the potion over. And then kill himself before he fully turns.

Then another poster agrees with the GM kicking and insulting the paladin by posting this:
>This is why I explicitly allow my players to "cancel" one guy's stupid decisions by unanimity minus one.
>"I kill that one NPC the other players all want to help" No you don't, this is a group game and the fun of four people is worth more than yours. I don't care if your fun is right and everyone else's is wrong, you can just leave.
This evolved into a shitstorm the size of a hurricane for GMs enforcing such power on players acting like the original story. Then this OP posted that same paragraph/situation to which he got these two following replies:

>A paladin encounters a new vampire
He smites it right away, before giving it a second thought.
>that has done nothing wrong and wants to be cured
The vampire would never get a chance to speak. If he dare to speak. To the Paladin's hear it would be the Devil's words. The Paladin would then recite his training about how he would not be tempted or fooled by the evil forces. Then, proceed to smite the beast into ashes.
>The paladin has a potion that, if the vampire drinks it, will cure the vampire
What kind of fucking shit awful setting is this?

AND

> then the paladin's job is to cure that vampire
Rehabilitation is not the job of a paladin. Healing is not the job of a paladin. Curing disease is not the job of a paladin. Paladins aren't there to brew potions or change bandages. Paladins are there to kill evil creatures.

Then This OP couldn't reply anymore and he made this thread. The End Part 2 of 2 Fixed the Reddit spacing, sorry for those that replied already.

of course you give them the potion you nimrod

The potion is for yourself in case of a vampire ambush,though

It's not the users on this website's fault - arguments about alignment, and especially the role of Lawful Good and whether a Paladin is supposed to redeem evil or kick it's ass, have been the single largest bone of contention in D&D history. I've heard about some groups dissolving over it, other groups descending into arguments and fisticuffs.

The biggest one was the POW issue. Let's say a group of Kobolds surrender, all of them women and children. Does the Paladin take them prisoner? Return them to town, where they'll be killed anyway? Set them free and risk reprisals? What is the role of Good in this world, is it to redeem and heal, or is it to cut away evil like a surgeon's scalpel?

What railroading? You doubted they were telling the truth. Sense motive is for detecting lies, and rolling low just means you take what they say at face value.

If they tell the truth and you rol lot confirm it, then there's no question.

What pqrt of that is a railroad, outside of the fact that the girl wasn't in some quantum state to orchestrate your fall regardless of your actions?

If you accuse the innkeeper of being a demon, kill him, and the DM makes you fall, is that a railroad?

>mindlessly obey
>powered by forces of good
Yup, basically good-aligned zombies

A non-sperg would have just walked away without saying anything. We're all spergs here, you included.

If a freshly turned vampire asked a paladin for help knowing full well what they were, they would ask for a swift death, not assuming they had a potion on them.

You can also use it to eliminate vampires by turning them back into regular people. So really it's dual use.

Yes, a paladin can heal, but is it his job?

A computer engineer knows about computer, his job is to put harddrives and shit into cases. He also, knows how to fix internet connections on the side. Is he a telecommunication employee? He is not, but his degree required for him to learn some telecommunication skills.

I believe that same logic applies here.

I really like that concept.

Maybe not as a general evil cleric turn power, but it could be a neat moment, where a good aligned party comes across some weird savant evil cleric and it Turns the party paladin because he's so aligned with the celestial realm or whatever.

>Sense motive is for detecting lies, and rolling low just means you take what they say at face value.

Why the fuck would the paladin who wants to smite her take her word for it?

>job of a paladin is to destroy evil, not cure someone

Wouldn't curing someone of evil be the same as destroying it? You destroy cancer cells to cure a person.

If the innkeeper was ACTUALLY A FUCKING DEMON? Then yes, idiot.

>Why the fuck would the paladin who wants to smite her take her word for it?

Because you rolled low on sense motive and believe what they're saying is true? Acting otherwise would be metagaming.

see
I really hope you didn't delete and repost that as a trolling tactic.

You could easily argue that the orc baby could be raised to be a good person just as much as the vampire could be cured of vampirism.

But he straight up used Lay on Hands on the vampire and was punished for it. He was just doing his job, as per your own implication.

>you are still "you" after being bitten by a vampire and just need a cure to be okay
>but anyone else who is bitten is now a vampire who needs to be slain
Either you save the newly turned vampire, or you kill them and accept that you must kill yourself if you're ever turned into a vamp.

A freshly turned vampire might not know what they were. They're going about their day, minding their own business, when suddenly someone attacks them, the disappears off into the night. Then they turn pale, grow fangs and claws, and start feeling these strange urges to attack the people that they thought of as their friends, family, and neighbors. Then a paladin shows up. It's pretty reasonable for them to ask the paladin for help curing this strange affliction that they've come down with. They don't want to die, but they also don't want to hurt people. So they ask for help, hoping that there is some sort of cure.

If he was a vampire he wouldn't want to kill himself. That's why he needs the potion to revert back to human, so he can then time travel and kill himself.

That entirely depends on the oath of the paladin or the god(s) they serve.

>If the innkeeper was ACTUALLY A FUCKING DEMON?

He isn't, just as the Vampire is being honest about wanting to be cured.

You accuse them of lying and kill them. You fall because they were telling the truth and you acted on a wrong assumption.

Now, where's the railroad?

> the job of a paladin is to destroy evil, not cure someone.

Can't a paladin perform healing though? How would this be different?

A paladin should be held to a higher standard than some random 9-to-5 civilian. He's literally been empowered by a god to be a force for good in the world. That's a bit more than just a job title.

>Vampires are inherently evil
Said no one ever. Sons of Kain cannot be good

I think it depends more on how corrupting the influence of being a vampire for a short period can be.

Which, based on the existence of Potions that cure it, of which the paladin is carrying one, it seems logical to think that someone who has recently turned into a vampire and hasn't had to kill to stave their thirst yet could be turned back and redeemed fairly easily, or that transforming into a vampire takes a while to have its full effect.

Otherwise, why would the Paladin have a potion to cure himself if he became one? Since apparently he'd instantly fall with no chance for redemption if he was bitten.

Except the vampire is a vampire. You can kill them regardless of what they say without falling. This is why you're railroading.

>Said no one ever.

Except for D&D, which is the context of the conversation.

No, like I said at the end, I did it to fix the Reddit spacing, it was painful to read as I originally posted it.

If they weren't, why is this situation even being discussed? You would be smiting a non-evil being. This entire situation only warrants any discussion at all because vampires are inherently evil and smite-worthy no matter what, at all times, or so it goes.

>vetoing a valid action because you wanted to railroad that NPC's storyline
>calling a valid action invalid
>forcing falls for no reason
>not railroading

Yeah I fucked it up lol, read closely, it looks like I was disagreeing with him when we were actually making the same point

Paladins who get hung up on things like the exact wording of their job description make shitty paladins.

Example: A paladin sees a child drowning in a river. Does the paladin say "Well, my job isn't to be a lifeguard, so I'll just walk on by"? Hell no. A good paladin would try to save the child as best he could.

Getting autistic about what exactly is your problem versus not your problem is something that regular people get to do, not paladins.

>if curing evil/brining good into the world is more good, cure vampire
>if destroying evil is more good somehow, probably just by removing potential, kill vampire then kill everything ever