Quote Originally Posted by Jade Dragon View Post
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That's Vow of Poverty, not paladin. Paladin just has to help. That could be as little as giving 5 GP to an orphanage.

WBL is RAW. It's right there in the DMG, and it isn't in one of those "variant rule" sidebars.

As for your scenario? I say he kills the succubus. If it's a local orphanage, any average citizen in town would know where it is. Then he donates 2000 GP of his massive WBL to the orphanage, which, given that a farmer can feed his entire family on one silver piece a day, will help the kids stay fed for a hundred days or so, easily long enough for him to go kill some more monsters, watch as his wealth increases exponentially, then come back and donate much more money. For his entire life, he could go around the countryside facing random encounters and easily support the orphanage and the town on that alone.

And last of all, the paladin's code says "punish those who harm or threaten innocents", which the succubus is most definitely doing. It doesn't say "prevent innocents from dying". So we get into whether his actions are an evil act. So we turn to the BoED/BoVD. Which state that letting a fiend live is always an evil act. But, as far as I can tell from all the quotes in these discussions, doesn't state "if innocents die as an indirect result of an action, it is an evil act".
He hit this one on the nose.

Quote Originally Posted by toapat View Post
Vow of Poverty is 1% of WBL kept, Paladin Code is 10%, but the horse eats 11% worth of food.
I just double-checked the D&D 3.5 PHB. There is absolutely nothing at all under the Paladin's code that mentions only being able to keep 10% of their Wealth By Level. There's not even anything about them having to give 10% of their WBL.
I'm honestly curious where you're pulling that notion from. I've never seen RAW support for it.

If you stop and think, the notion makes no sense; if Paladins can only keep 10% of their WBL, they're inherently held back because they won't ever keep up gear-wise with the rest of the party. Considering their poor mechanics anyways...

Point is, Jade Dragon's right. The Paladin can easily work hard and keep the orphanage fed for the rest of his life, and after a time will have enough money to set up a long-term account where the orphanage can live off the interest and such, without needing constant influxes of cash from him, or worse from a murdering creature made of pure evil.