Baby Monster Dilemma

This Golarion samurai opted for option #3 and is now regretting his decision.

The Baby Monster Dilemma is a question used to challenge the alignment of Paladins (especially to distinguish the Lawful Good from the Lawful Stupid). It sometimes refers to a contrived situation concocted by That DM to force a Paladin to fall.

The dilemma is usually presented thus: during a raid on an Orc encampment (or some place of residence of evil creatures), the players come across an orc child. They are "forced" to make a choice of:

1. Sparing the child, risking them growing up into an evil creature, or
2. Killing the child, which is frowned upon because the child isn't evil yet, or might never be.
3. The secret option: adopt the child and raise it to be a good person.

Bonus points if the Paladin is serving a god that doesn't care too much about that baby orc being a baby - it's an orc, is therefore unclean, and is to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Even if you ignore the other implications of that, it's still railroading at its most blatant and an objectively shit form of storytelling that a poor DM can use to shoehorn the paladin into falling, no matter which they pick. However, a good DM/party can present/make a choice that isn't a false dichotomy, and has a fair chance of leading to a good outcome (or at least an interesting one).

For an example of interesting outcomes, Marvel Comics used this dilemma in the origin story of one of their oldest villains, the trickster-god Loki. Allfather Odin (a Lawful-Good superhero version of the Norse god from the Edda) is fighting a war with ice giants and finds an ice-giant baby in the wreckage of a cottage. This comic-book Odin chooses option #3 above, raising the child as his own son and step-brother to Thor. Loki grows up to be a peer to his brother and other gods of Asgard, a nasty schemer and a colossal dick to the superheroes of Earth, destined to be the cause of Ragnarok, the Asgardian doomsday event. Bad news for Odin's adventuring party, but great story hooks for Odin's player.

In recent years, the Dilemma has been gradually disappearing. Partly because nowadays everyone knows about it, mostly because the whole Always Chaotic Evil concept itself is increasingly falling to the wayside. An ever-growing number of settings have orcs as normal blokes with the same capacity for good or evil as any human, so the Dilemma makes no sense there; killing a baby orc in Eberron, for example, because it had evil parents would be comparable to killing the infant child of a bank robber in real life because you think it would grow up to rob banks... which is to say, it would be completely batshit insane and certainly not the kind of thing a heroic Paladin would ever do. That's not even getting into the fact that, as of 5E, Paladins no longer have alignment restriction and their codes of conduct are clearly spelt out in the PH rather then left to the whims of the DM, so the Dilemma just plain doesn't work if you're playing that edition.

See Also

• Always Chaotic Evil, the source of the dilemma.
• What Dilemma?
• Lamia child, in which the character chooses option number 3.
• Red Dragon Inn, in which the character Serena is another example of option #3.