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Paladin moral delima

Haakon1 the no win dilemma for paladins I have seen DM do. The paladin can face Koby Maru situations all the time (it would get boring). And Vault of Drow slave choice you mentioned is good example. And depending on how in depth the roleplaying, game style, dm and the Paladins code of conduct; there may be minor penalties paid. Ex. 2 or 3 days serving in soup kitchen back at home base as penance . Or no penalties. Again DM and players input required.

On Conning the Con man. Think of the ATEAM with BA being the Paladin and not wanting to involve Face as the thief. Or if John Wayne was the pally and was out gunned at the moment. This also depends on if the party had a thief.

“Preach on, Brother Jasper!” Amen my brother! Don’t forget the Paladin Ice Cream Social on Saturday. Pirate Cats Grandma has already put in for 3 quarts of your Peachy Pale Pink Ice Cream.
 

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I'd add that losing their Paladinhood would seem to be a major issue, and not one that the God would lay down just for the heck of it. Of course, that also depends on the God (or organization or whatever gives them their abilities).

Perhaps the next few of these "is THIS something that causes a fall" could include a bit more information other than "he's a paladin and LG, does not saving/doing/thinking X cause a fall"?

It going to depend on the players, the players’ styles, and how detail the campaign world is.
So in beer and pretzels type crowd, it would properly take half the table dropping their jaws over what the paladin just did for him to lose his paladin hood.
Then you get into how detailed the campaign world is: City/States, with names orgainzations and religions.
Then how many and what religions are allowed: Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, Demihuman, Enworld Gawds, TP gawds.
Then how detail the religion is: The TP gawds range thru all 9 alignments. What would a paladin of the TP CG gawd John Wayne do? Aka "I know you stole from the poor, but I not going to hit you. No. I not going hit you." Pow.
Or if Paladin was under LG Charmin gawd. Blueberry Bear the Wonder Paladin would only make sure you used 3 sheets.
So the poster would have to give how detail the world and game style is. Otherwise you see how the range of answers are going to be in this thread.
 

I think situations where there's no "right" answer means that the paladin isn't making a Paladinhood Choice. If both choices are bad, all the paladin can do is try to minimize the damage. its not his fault the situation didn't allow for him to save both.

That's a great insight, and one that bears repeating. I think a lot of the "what's a paladin to do threads" fall in this category, which leaves most people saying "of course he can do whatever" and other people agonizing over it.

I think a Paladin would try to be honest whenever he could, and would try to avoid needing to lie. However, if the situation did come up where lying was the only way to do the right thing (perhaps lying to a bad guy), then he would, but probably as minimalistically as possible.

It's almost never necessary to lie outright, when bending the truth is close enough. For example, the party I'm running in email (no paladin in this one) came to a walled town and was asked their business for entering. They said they were tracking werewolves that they thought were in the region, and wants to rest for a few nights. That's the partial truth -- they originally headed that way tracking a werewolf. But they left out the part about how they met with the military in the next city back and were given the mission of spying on the walled town's ruler, and if the rumors were true that he plans to seceed from the country, were ordered to prevent him from doing so by any means necessary. ;) A paladin being along for the ride wouldn't have changed the party's approach, I think.


Granted, a Paladin is a martial class. Defined by his manly ability to kick butt and respecting those that also kick butt. Poison as G. Martin says, is a woman's weapon. Better to look a man in the eye and see which is the stronger.

Do you think a paladin is a masculine role? I'd say it is about 90% of the time, but given percentage of male characters I've seen (~75%), it's not a huge difference. Still magic users, thieves, and druids seem to be female more often.
 

Don’t forget the Paladin Ice Cream Social on Saturday. Pirate Cats Grandma has already put in for 3 quarts of your Peachy Pale Pink Ice Cream.

Mine? As in Haakon-Daaz?

Anyhow, I will indeed be playing my 4th Edition Roman-type Paladin on Saturday. Which is remarkable since (1) this is the group I'm just a rank-and-file payer in, while I DM an email 3.5e group and a live 3.5e group, (2) I'm not a fan of 4e, but like a good paladin I accept the things I cannot change, which in this case is the edition the DM likes best, in order to be a good servant to group, and (3) both this group and my 3.5 group only play maybe 4 times a year in a good year, so any given Saturday I'm actually playing is pretty remarkable to me.
 

Anarchists do have organizations, but they are seldom organized. More importantly, even within an Anarchist organization, you will when you investigate seldom find a common goal beyond regime change. Exactly what they want to do after that is something everyone in the organization will have different incompatible opinions about. If you call for a rally of Anarchists, expect them each to show up with a different pet cause, and often will march while together screaming totally incompatible slogans.

You'd think so, but I think of two counterexamples.

In the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the Republican side was a coalition of Communists and Anarchists. Yes, there was a major anarchist labor union, anarchist military units, and anarchist generals. And they had a specific goal -- they wanted to defeat the Nationalists, and they wanted to implement anarcho-syndicalism (rule by self-governing, autonomous groups of workers).

The other organized anarchists that spring to mind at the violent anarchists in anti-WTO/anti-globalization protests, like the Battle of Seattle in 1999. These "Black Flag Anarchists" seem to plan ahead on what targets they want to attack, and what tactics they will use to counter police tactics.

Perhaps Drow are similar -- organized yet chaotic?

In fact, in the real world, anarchist organizations are often financially backed by groups who have long term goals quite the opposite of anarchy. If the anarchist group is larger than a cell and shows any sign of organization at all, dig into the funding of an anarchist group enough, and you'll usually find some government actually behind it.

I can't think of an example of this. I'm not aware of government-backed anarchists. The Republicans in the Spanish Civil War did have support from the Soviet Union, but unsurprisingly, the support went mostly to the Communist factions, not the Anarchist ones.

But we're straying from D&D into political science (another of my favorite topics, so I'm easily distracted by it).


Agreed. Drow in my campaign world are organized along social lines similar to lion Prides.

Makes sense. I see lots of internal feuding between clans, and likely a lot of assassination and backstabbing, in what to outsiders mostly appears to be a united front.

Vader's moral journey within the second series does not make sense within the moral framework of the prequels

This reminds me of the "Chewbacca Defense", used by animated Johnny Cochrane in an episode of South Park.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1QI4P0YqtM&feature=related]South Park - The Chewbacca Defence - YouTube[/ame]
 

You'd think so, but I think of two counterexamples.

In the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the Republican side was a coalition of Communists and Anarchists. Yes, there was a major anarchist labor union, anarchist military units, and anarchist generals. And they had a specific goal -- they wanted to defeat the Nationalists, and they wanted to implement anarcho-syndicalism (rule by self-governing, autonomous groups of workers).

The other organized anarchists that spring to mind at the violent anarchists in anti-WTO/anti-globalization protests, like the Battle of Seattle in 1999. These "Black Flag Anarchists" seem to plan ahead on what targets they want to attack, and what tactics they will use to counter police tactics.

Congradulations, you just picked two of the three concrete examples that inspired my comments. Even a cursory discussion of these examples may go beyond the rules of the forum, but I will first note that the structure and content of the bolded sentences in 'counter-example' almost exactly parallels the structure content of the sentences you quote.

As for the Battle of Seattle, one safer direction this would lead us in would be a discussion of the military value of bottom up organization. While I don't want to get into this deeply either, in a brief overly simplified way, there are two ways to 'organize' a response in a battle. Most militaries have a chain of command, with an authoritarian leader, and he analyzes the situation and says, "A,B,C,D...X,Y,Z go here", and then each leader under him in turn gives commands to the units under him, all the way down to the leader of individual soldiers who manages there disposition. This works really well but requires an extremely high degree of organization and professionalism. If your troops lack organization and professionalism, there is another method that works almost as well and in some cases better. Everyone takes it on themselves to listen and without orders goes to the sound of battle by whatever means they can devise. You'll end up with the same appearance of coordination, and in some cases individual acts of coordination, without an organization and even often without prior planning.

To claim that this latter, 'bottom up' approach is organized in any normal sense is to deny that you can be anything but organized. And the anti-government units (I can't call them anarchists, because that's not diverse enough of a description) in the Battle of Seattle weren't even animated by a single axiomatic principle.

I would argue that any reasonably well thought out Chaotic society would exibit this bottom up approach to some degree, and that Lolth therefore ought not to be the top down controller that she is portrayed as if you want to have Lolth be CE or to have the society she encourages be CE.

I can't think of an example of this. I'm not aware of government-backed anarchists. The Republicans in the Spanish Civil War did have support from the Soviet Union, but unsurprisingly, the support went mostly to the Communist factions, not the Anarchist ones.

Digging into the funding of any large US anarchist organization, and you'll ultimately going to find money from somebodies secret police, either directly in that the organization is a front group (of a front group of a front group), or indirectly, in that for the purpose of achieving certain desired goals that group has partnered with a group (for example outsourced media releases, coordinating efforts, or sign production for a protest) which recieves direct funding from some governmental front group. Often the aims of the financial backers would be abhorrent to those that recieve the funds.

And I'm sure the same sort of thing flows the other way as well, in as much as for example, some of the 11 or so disparate political groups on the anti-government side of the current Libyan civil war have quasi-anarchist aims (distributing ownership of the national oil company amongst the citizens, liberalization of the societies social mores, etc.) and are probably also recieving funding directly from one or more governments at least some of which have the actual aim of negotiating favorable trade agreements or more direct usury of the oil by foreign corporations.

And I've probably already said more than I should even with this cursory discussion of the problem, so I'll stop there unsatisfying innuendo though it may be.

This reminds me of the "Chewbacca Defense", used by animated Johnny Cochrane in an episode of South Park.

I don't understand how it applies to what I'm saying. Are you saying that any claim that two things don't make sense is made for inherently hypocritical and deceptive reasons? I don't want to launch into a detailed discussion of the incoherence between the two trilogies to prove my point, but a simple high level overview would be, "In the Prequel trilogy, Anakin's moral fall is the result of his attachment to his loved ones. In the original trilogy, Anakin's moral redemption is the result of his attachment to his loved ones."
 
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Do you think a paladin is a masculine role? I'd say it is about 90% of the time, but given percentage of male characters I've seen (~75%), it's not a huge difference. Still magic users, thieves, and druids seem to be female more often.

In D&D-land, anybody can be a paladin. But as a stereotype of real world examples, most the warriors were men, manly men.

On the topic of Celebrim's "In fact, in the real world, anarchist organizations are often financially backed by groups who have long term goals quite the opposite of anarchy. If the anarchist group is larger than a cell and shows any sign of organization at all, dig into the funding of an anarchist group enough, and you'll usually find some government actually behind it."

Haakon couldn't think of an example. This delves into politics so let's no go further, but your clue is: If you don't like drinking Tea, this Party looks like this when you see their signage at rallies.

Not necesarily true, but if you disagree with their clause, Celebrim's statement brought them to mind immediately. Moving on...
 

Nod, Janx, if that's what he means, that makes sense to me (though it's an off beat use of "anarchist" in my view), but anyhow we need to drop the topic.

If that's not what he's talking about, I guess still never mind, 'cause I'm not getting it, but we also need to drop it.
 


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