D&D 5E Should classes retain traditional alignment restrictions in 5E?

[Elf Witch]

I know, but why can't it be the default option anyway? I'm not saying that you then have to have distant gods. Far from it. I'm saying that your group is then free to decide how it wants to portray its gods (and hence its divine characters), and doesn't have to cross out a line in the PHB to do it.




And if I think that those powers which scream lawful good to you also fit my idea for a chaotic good or lawful neutral character, what's the harm in me picking the class as written?



Is it less evil to kill something quickly and painlessly, or to stab it repeatedly with a big bit of sharp metal until it dies?

If a paladin can be good and kill things, I see no reason why an assassin can't be good too. Do you really have to kill things while people are watching to be considered good?

For me it is a big flavor thing with paladins I have been playing since 1E and paladins scream lawful good to me. To me it is very much a part of what makes DnD well DnD. I would like to see rules for holy warriors of different alignments in the players handbook.

If they don't put in the alignment restriction it will be something I house rule in. already house rule all clerics must match their god's alignment.

If they make holy warriors of different alignments they have better chance of pleasing everybody those who want paladins to be lawful good like they always have and yet give options for those who don''t want the restrictions.

There is a huge difference between the way a paladin kills something and an assassin does. A paladin confronts his enemy openly and engages in honorable combat taking the chance of losing his life in the process. An assassin kills by trying to not give the enemy a chance to fight back. He has no issue with poisoning a bottle of wine or slicing someone throat as they sleep. Those are not good acts ever.

I don't know how you run your games but in mine there is a difference between defending your self and murder. Killing an unarmed person who is not trying to kill you is considered murder.

 

[Rampant]

On the other hand Paladins go to war. Assassins end their conflicts, or at least try to, on a small scale. That knight in shining armor can easily end up causing or ordering the death of hundreds or thousands while an assassin might solve the same problem with a few murders, some intimidation, and a liberal dose of blackmail.

The assassin may or may not be evil, but he's probably caused less pain and suffering than the pally.

 

[Nivenus]

To be entirely fair to assassins, The Book of Exalted Deeds, the book on playing good characters, more or less defines killing under any circumstance as bad. It just happens to be one of the sins that most good characters can routinely get away with because, compared to some of the other stuff, it's relatively minor (and let's face it, you couldn't have an RPG where killing was verboten for all good-aligned characters).

On a personal note, I do see a difference between killing a person in open combat and killing a defenseless one, even if both are equally poor examples of humanity. However, I'd also agree there is a difference between killing a single person - even a defenseless one - to resolve a conflict quickly and playing the honorable card and inadvertently starting a war that kills many more.

In my ideal alignment system, the first conflict (killing a person in combat vs. killing a defenseless person) might be an example of good vs. evil but the latter (good of the one vs. good of the many) would be an example of law vs. chaos.

 

[pemerton]

There is a huge difference between the way a paladin kills something and an assassin does. A paladin confronts his enemy openly and engages in honorable combat taking the chance of losing his life in the process. An assassin kills by trying to not give the enemy a chance to fight back.

<snip>

there is a difference between defending your self and murder.

Well yes, but not all a paladin's killing is self defence. It is possible to confront someone openly and engage in honourable combat, and yet to be an aggressor.

On the other hand Paladins go to war. Assassins end their conflicts, or at least try to, on a small scale. That knight in shining armor can easily end up causing or ordering the death of hundreds or thousands

<snip>

The assassin may or may not be evil, but he's probably caused less pain and suffering than the pally.

Well, in at least one moral tradition, this is what the doctrine of double effect is for. Although perhaps even that doctrine is not needed, given that the suffering caused by war depends upon the free agency of all those other people.

you couldn't have an RPG where killing was verboten for all good-aligned characters

I assume we're talking here only about RPGs of fantasy heroism. I agree it would be hard to have an RPG without conflict, without protagonists and antagonists, but fighting is not the only means of conflict resolution - even in fiction - and killing is not the only way of resolving a fight.

 

[Rampant]

You'd be amazed what you can do with laxatives and obscure senate bylaws.

 

[Nivenus]

I assume we're talking here only about RPGs of fantasy heroism. I agree it would be hard to have an RPG without conflict, without protagonists and antagonists, but fighting is not the only means of conflict resolution - even in fiction - and killing is not the only way of resolving a fight.

Okay, sure, but I think you're stating what was the obvious for no particular reason.

Yeah, of course I was talking about heroic fantasy RPGs. That goes without saying. We're talking about D&D.

 

[Elf Witch]

On the other hand Paladins go to war. Assassins end their conflicts, or at least try to, on a small scale. That knight in shining armor can easily end up causing or ordering the death of hundreds or thousands while an assassin might solve the same problem with a few murders, some intimidation, and a liberal dose of blackmail.

The assassin may or may not be evil, but he's probably caused less pain and suffering than the pally.

I think this is nit picking I really do. Yes paladins may end up killing more people in a war then an assassin does in his life but it still not the same as sneaking around and killing someone who is helpless and can't fight back.

The killing may be a legitimate order from the ruler of the land but it is still a form of state sanctioned murder. It begs the question why the person was not brought in for trial. Usually because it is more expedient to just get rid of the person.

I know there is a fine line here a wizard firing an area spell at the enemies from a distance or a ranger acting as a sniper is similar to what assassin do.

But paladins are usually held to a higher standard of what they can and can't do. Which is one of the challenges of playing one.

 

[pemerton]

Okay, sure, but I think you're stating what was the obvious for no particular reason.

Didn't mean to. It's just that the topic was the morality of killing.

And I think it goes back to what people want D&D alignments to do. The 1st ed AD&D books define good and evil in roughly contemporary liberal (although non-utilitarian) terms. But the character tropes are all drawn from pre-modern, pre-liberal heroic fantasy (as found either in pre-modern sources or writers, like Tolkien, who deliberately echoed such sources, or in non-liberal modernist writing like a lot of the pulps).

This is a mix that I think is bound to cause trouble in play. I mean, it's not an accident that alignment (and related issues, like whether or not people are playing their clerics and paladins properly) has been just about the most vexed table issue in the history of D&D.

 

[Nivenus]

Maybe it's because I don't ever require players to stay a single alignment the entire game and allow them to shift based on their playstyle, but I don't see alignment arguments as being a problem. Not really.

I mean, when it comes down to it, has there ever been a non-controversial way of measuring morality, fictional or non-fictional? The fact that people argue about alignment I think has more to do with the way humans think about morality generally than the D&D alignments themselves, which, insofar as their definitions are concerned anyway, are generally more flexible than most moral systems (for better or worse).

 

[Dausuul]

I think this is nit picking I really do. Yes paladins may end up killing more people in a war then an assassin does in his life but it still not the same as sneaking around and killing someone who is helpless and can't fight back.

I don't see how being able to fight back is relevant to whether the killing is good or evil. A prisoner on the scaffold, bound and hooded, has no way to fight back, but most paladins have no problem with executions. You might be able to argue that assassins are intrinsically chaotic, as their approach subverts the rule of law*; but IMO, if you can justify the killing at all, then you should be looking for the most reliable way to accomplish the goal with minimal harm to anybody else.

Suppose you're dealing with an evil general leading a horde of monsters. The paladin rallies an army to face the general. Result: A bunch of innocent people die fighting the horde in order to get the paladin to where she can deliver the killing stroke. Alternatively, an assassin sneaks into the enemy camp, kills the general in his sleep, and glides out again, putting no one else at risk.

How is the paladin's approach more defensible, morally, than the assassin's? Or, in the immortal words of Tywin Lannister: "Explain to me how it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner." The assassin can quite legitimately argue that the paladin is being cowardly and selfish by putting others in danger, when there is a way to get the job done alone.

And this, by the way, is why I detest alignment-driven mechanics.

[size=-2]*Note that I am not endorsing the "assassins are intrinsically chaotic" argument, merely pointing out that it is a reasonable one. The Law/Chaos axis makes Good/Evil look like an exemplar of clarity and precision.[/size]