I don't believe the alignment rules were invented as constraints for pawns.
I'm only going on what I've read (eg in articles in Dragon and White Dwarf back in the day), and then on posts I've read on these boards that have helpe me make sense of what I was reading back then.
if there are jerks at the table, even if it's just from time-to-time, you can abandon or change rules to remove all ambiguity or interpretation, but you will still have problems.
alignment can be a useful tool, perhaps as a role playing guide.
I tend to allow character's character (ahem) develop organically, based on what seems like the right response to stimuli throughout play. So, alignment is completely descriptive... but what exactly have I gained by attempting to describe these actions? In what way does alignment become useful to me? At best, it's trying to pigeonhole complicated stimulus/response patterns into poorly fitting and somewhat arbitrary buckets. At worst, it devolves into philosophical wrangling between the player and DM about what is or is not appropriate for an alignment, or is used in an attempt to bludgeon player behavior.
I've never once had a good experience with alignment. At best, it's merely superfluous and pointless. At worst, it's an active detriment to having a good time at the table.
What Hobo says here is true for me - it's the starting point of why alignment serves no purpose for my play. The reason that alignment is an active impediment for me, as opposed to merely a waste of time, is that by pigeonholing behaviour into pre-determined moral categories questions are answered by stipulation that I don't want to answer by stipulation.
And I certainly don't need aligment as a roleplaying guide. If I, or one of my players, wants to play a paladin, or a sneaky thief, or a chaotically tainted drow, or whatever, no guide in the form of alignments is needed. Having decided what to play, we just play it - and then let the character evolve in play as Hobo describes.
This doesn't relate to playing with jerks. I play with people whose company I enjoy. It doesn't mean that we have the same moral outlook, or have the same ideas about how to develop PCs or respond to situations posed in play. Sometimes I'm shocked by the things my players have their PCs do. I can express that shock by saying as much - I don't need to do anything additional like telling them "By the way, that shows that your PC is evil".
if the answer is so obvious the Paladin would know it, then this gets pointed out to the player before he commits.
This is exactly what I mean by the player having to subordinate his/her judgement to that of the GM: this is the GM telling the player how his/her PC should act, given that the player wants his/her PC to do the right thing.
I personally don't see the attraction of that sort of play. As a GM I want the players to play their PCs, and as a player I want to play my own PC. If we are assuming that the player is playing sincerely, then why should the GM's opinion as to what is right be given priority over the player's?
When presented with a hard choice, my view is that the character does not have clear guidance on how to proceed. The fact is that had choices have no easy, right answers. Given that, I consider it inappropriate to impose negative consequences to any choice made.
And if alignment doesn't have any bite when choices are not "obvious", then for the reasons that Hobo gave it seems superfluous.
I don't think this is a good comparison
We have plenty of rules for combat with the dragon, enabling an objective determination of whether the Dragon or the PC's won. We don't argue over whether the Dragon should or should not be able to fly. We accept that Dragons can fly. We don't assert that, through sheer power of belief, a given PC should stand unharmed in the inferno of the Dragon's breath weapon - we look to the rules.
Many of the alignment arguments come back to debating the rules.
I continue to think that, for my purposes, it is an apt comparison.
Yes, we have rules for combat with the dragon. Why? And why those rules, rather than rules that I described in which the outcome is determined via metagame discussion between the game participants? Because we don't want to resolve the outcome via negoitated consensus. (Nor by GM stipulation as the alternative to consensus.) Rather, we want the players to make action declarations for their PCs, and to see how the interaction of these things leads to a result against the dragon.
For me, as far as evaluation is concerned, I similarly want the players to make action declarations for their PCs, which prompt judgements by them and by the other participants, which might then lead those others to have their characters do certain things in the game - and the overall situation, and its value, is the outcome of those choices and their intersection. I don't want it predetermined either via consensus or via GM stipulation.
In the passage I quoted above N'raac posits that the GM would frame a choice for the paladin PC, and then tell the player of that PC the best way to choose. From my point of view, the player looks pretty superfluous in that situation!
In that case, you are unhappy that his powers are not immediately struck from him due to a failing the character perceives as justifying such punishment, but the deity does not.
Huh? The context of yor post suggests that "you" is meant to refer to me, pemerton, but the view you attribute to me is not one that I ever asserted. I haven't said anything about being unhappy about powers not being struck from a paladin.
In the situation I described and to which you were responding, the player decided that his paladin had done the wrong thing and hence the PC went off to do penance in the wilderness. I rolled an encounter, which turned out to be a demon encounter. The demon started taunting the paladin for having done the wrong thing. My initial thought with the encounter was that the player would reason as follows: a demon never speaks the truth; hence the demon is lying; hence the paladin didn't do the wrong thing; hence no penance is required. But the player actually interpreted the situation this way: that the paladin had done the wrong thing; that this rendered him on a par with a demon; and that the demon was here to invest him into the ways of evil. The players response to his interpreation, therefore, was to have his PC put up no resistance as the demon proceeded to beat him to a pulp, until it got bored and wandered off. (The PCs friends then tracked him down with some sort of divination spell, and nursed him back to health.)
This is an example of play which alignment rules would not have helped, and would have impeded.
In the case of the vow of chastity, you are unhappy when failure to abide by the restrictions imposed does carry consequences.
More imputation of emotions that I never said I had!
In the case of the chaste paladin, the question I had, as a player, was "Should I marry the other PC and consumate my feelings for her?" I had to make a decision as to what my PC ought to do. Either way there of course were consequences - for the other PC (and her player), for the party as a whole, for the campaign, as well as for the outlook and values of my PC.
This is another example in which alignment rules don't add anything except getting the GM to make the choice instead of me. What's the point of that? I may as well have not turned up to the session!
To me, your issue is more around who decides what happens, yourself or the GM, and whether the concept is embedded within the rules or not.
<snip>
From your comments here, and in prior posts, it seems you want the question of whether the Paladin's actions are, or are not, honourable to be somehow decided by a die roll
You are correct that the issue is, for me, one of who decides what happens in the game, and what its value is. I hoped that I had been clear on that.
You are incorect that I want the question to be "somehow decided by a die roll". I have repeatedly said that the question
does not have to be decided as part of the mechanical resolution of play. It is about provoking real evaluative judgements and motivations in the participants.
It is a weakness in a case where fighting dirty would be to the player's, or character's, advantage. If we are letting matters be decided by the dice, and our PC can gain an advantage by throwing sand in his opponent's face, or by sniping with a crossbow rather than facing him in open combat, then an advantage is foregone by not "fighting dirty", whatever we perceive that to be.
once the game starts, a paladin may find himself in a situation where it is more expedient, safe, etc. to go against those trappings depending on the in-game circumstances, and since it is still a game and one can suffer loss and even death in-game, a player could easily be tempted to ignore those thematic trappings when convenient or when their back is against the wall.
EDIT: In the model you (and I believe pemerton) propose, nothing stops this from happening and, I have to ask, why would a player not choose the most expedient or optimized route if it is available and there are no repercussions for it?
Because you could have every intention of playing the paladin correctly up until the point where you have 3 hit points left, an unscathed giant is bearing down on a mother and her child and you think... sacrificing myself in a hopeless situation isn't REALLY about commitment or duty... it's just senseless stupidity... and so you decide to hide or run as the mother and child are killed
These characterisations of "advantage", or of "temptating the player of the paladin to have his/her PC act expediently rather than honourably", seem to me to make a whole lot of assumptions about both mechanics and playstyle.
The mechanical assumptions are that the paladin player will be more mechanically effective when making attacks that are sneaky rather than honourable. That is not true across all RPGs, and not even true across all versions of D&D - for instance, it is not really true in 4e, where the paladin's powers are designed so as to mechanically support the play of an honourable warrior. (This is 4e's approximation to the sort of approach suggested by [MENTION=23240]steenan[/MENTION] upthread.)
The playstyle assumption is that the GM is not adjudicating in a "fail forward" style, and hence that, unless the
PC achieves immediate victory in the confrontation, the
player will have "lost" the game. Once you change that assumption, the player does not need to worry that if s/he compromises her conception of the PC's values, s/he will lose the game (eg by having his/her PC die and hence his/her participation in the campaign terminated).
I don't understand whether this is a rebuttal to the quote you posted or simply a development of an interesting point about gaming and philosophy in general (or both!).
Who says the mindset of the Paladin is that the universe is on the side of good?
This actually relates to the issue about weaknesses and advantages.
There is a moral/cosmological tradition - found in Plato, and also in a number of mainstream religions - that the good person
cannot suffer. If this is true, then the paladin who succumbs to expedience is not getting an advantage at all, and to the extent that things might look that way the paladin is making an epistemic error.
How does this relate to some of the issues in this thread?
First, a paladin who is a participant in such a tradition does take the universe to be on the side of good (which doesn't mean that good will triumph without effort - see Tolkien, for instance, as an example of a world on the side of good but in which good won't triumph without effort).
Second, a game
can be set up so as to make the tenets of such a tradition too - say, by letting players earn mechanical benefits for doing the right thing. This is tricky to do, though, because in the tradition the "non-suffering" tends to include views about an afterlife of some sort - but can be seen in such rules as the Oriental Adventures rule that lets a new PC get benefits from the previous PCs honour score. Also, most versions of this I know tend to rely on GM adjudication, which I don't like for the reasons I've given at length.
Third, a game can be set up so as to leave the tenets of a tradition
open. This is my general preference, as articulated in this thread. A player can play his/her PC in a way that treats this as true, and adjudicated in a way (including some of the techniques I've described above) that doesn't rebut that. (Although it's confirmation of that may be only in the eye of the beholder.)
Fourth, a game can be set up so as to reveal such traditins as
mistaken. Planescape does this: it establishes that the universe is indifferent to individual's moral choices, and that there is no greater likelihood that a good person will avoid suffering than an evil person. As I've said, this can work for a cynical game, or a Conan-esque game about moral self-creation, but not for romantic fantasy.
