![Quote](images/sand/misc/quote_icon.png)
Originally Posted by
Jade Dragon
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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".