Choices, Part 2. Dungeons and Dragons and Alignment.

Staying with Quark for a moment. There is an excellent episode of DS9, Business as Usual.
In this episode, Quark finds himself on hard financial times, when his cousin, Gaila comes along and offers Quark a job showcasing weapons in his holosuites. Quark is reluctant, but his poor financial prospects and the promise of great profits cause him to agree.
During the course of the episode, Quark confronts several situations where it is made clear that his profits are coming at the cost of lives. Eventually, Quark decides to get out of arms merchant business, with some clever planning.
The choice here isn't "Does Quark want wealth?" Of course he does! The question is "What is the limit of Quark's greed?" Does he have a limit? In this case, the answer was yes, Quark does not want wealth if it comes with the knowledge that he would be responsible for the deaths of millions. for Galia, the answer was different. He was fine with it. There is no right answer here, because the question isn't "Is it moral to sell weapons?" The question is "What will the character do for profit?"

Let's get back to D&D with the concept of paladins. A paladin is a holy warrior with a code that is required to choose the lawful good alignment. This here is an excellent point to test the character's values. Does a particular paladin value good over law? Or the other way around?

I'm going to make an important point here. When setting up scenarios like this, never penalize a paladin character for failing alignment due to such a scenario. The very point is to explore the character's motivations, not to test their paladinhood.

So, I'll set up a quick and dirty scenario testing the character's value of law versus good.

Let us say it is the law of the land that deserters must be executed. A group of the King's guard are ambushed and all but one are slain. The survivor is a young lad, barely a man. Scared and hurt, he deserts the battlefield and hides in a nearby village. Our paladin character discovers the lad, and learns that he ran from the battlefield. 

Is it moral for the paladin to execute the lad? Is the law just? Is it the place of the paladin to question the law? Is it the place of the paladin to judge the lad, even though the law says he must?

The interesting choice here isn't whether the paladin should execute the lad. The question is, why did the paladin make whatever choice he made?

Of course alignment isn't the only motivation for characters, which is why I chose Quark for the first example. But alignment can drive some interesting choice scenarios.

Now, taking in mind my previous statement about penalizing characters, I'll address that in the next part. Choosing Evil.