kicking a player out of the game is excercising complete control of his character and makes the (temporary) loss of his characters abilities pale in comparison.
I don't agree with this. Controlling someone's character is a move in the game. Parting ways with another player isn't a move in the game at all. It's a social thing.
When I led my group in a coup against our GM 20-something years ago, that isn't comparable to a player exercsing authorial control over the GM's gameworld. It's sending a real-life message to the GM that we don't like his style. But if can find some players who do like it (and that GM did, I think) then he can go to town.
Likewise if I part ways with a player who sets out to play a paladin, and then has his/her PC burn down orphanages and/or rob and kill innocent shopkeepers. That player is welcome to play his/her PC however s/he likes - just not in the same game as me!
see the DM ultimately deides what LG is or what deities think in his world.
<snip>
ultimately it is upto the DM to make the final call. LG, deities, etc... aren't (in default D&D) nebulous things that are subject to relative morality... they are forces and beings that are defined and exist in the world, and when a player chooses to play a paladin he is choosing to pledge himself to an objective force, created by the DM, in the gameworld.
The reference to relative morality doesn't add anything, I dont think. Morality might be as absolute as you like - people can still disagree over what it requires.
But anyway, the broader claim - that it's all about the GM adjudicating the gameworld - is certainly one approach. I don't see how it gets to be default D&D, though. It's not default in 4e, for instance. And in practice there have been a range of approaches to alignment for as long as people have been playing D&D.
If there were universal forces providing that power to the paladin, and there are restrictions these universal powers are placing on the paladin, how is it NOT the role of the DM to determine when a player breaks these restrictions?
Because the role can be given to someone else. The player. Table consensus.
Does the player have a conflict of interest? That depends heavily on the game. If the game was about disciple vs deity, then the player
would have a conflict of interest. But if the game is about
what follows from my compliance with my god's dictates, then the player - in my experience, at least - can determine what those dictates are without any conflict of interest,
provided they are confident the GM won't burn them for their choices.
why is it ok for a PC to decide how the version of Bahamut in your campaign world judges certain actions? Why is it ok for him to determine what the inscrutable forces of law and good deem acceptable. He has agency over his character, and thus the choice to act in a certain way or not... what he doesn't have is agency over the beings and forces in the campaign world who he has pledged himself to and grants him his power.
It's not the
PC determining that - the PC is a
servant of Bahamut. It's the
player. And why is that OK? Because, in my game at least, it adds to the quality of the play experience - I'm not interested in finding out whether or not the players can follow my dictates as to how their PCs should behave. I'm interested in seeing what
they think is an interesting behavioural expression of their PCs' loyalties and commitments. (I'm about to post a long example to show what I mean.)
It is my experience most players want to play the paladin BECAUSE of the restriction not despite of it. People have known forever there are alignment restrictions. Players I have found take it on because of the roleplaying challenge.
I have two players in my game currently playing paladin characters. One's class is (literally) paladin. The other is a fighter multi-class cleric with the warpriest paragon path.
Both players want to play those characters because those PCs are bound to certain oaths and codes of conduct. That can all happen without the GM's enforcement.
I gave an example upthread, that I'll restate more fully as you may have missed it:
The PCs took as prisoner a cleric of Torog. The capturing of the cleric took place some time after midnight. The PCs had to meet the Baron of the town at dawn. The PCs wanted to interrogate their cleric captive before that meeting, and had a few hours in which to do so. They decided to conduct the interrogation in the beer cellar of the inn near which they had captured her - no openings for the cleric to teleport out of (and they knew she could teleport from the two times that they had fought her).
The party's "social" team consisted of a drow sorcerer/demonskin adept with very strong Bluff and good Intimidate, a tiefling paladin of the Raven Queen with good Diplomacy and Intimidate, and a wizard/divine philosopher (who served Erathis, Ioun, probably Vecna although it's a bit amiguous, and in the past at least had served the Raven Queen) - this last character had reasonable Diplomacy, plus a 1x/enc "Charm Person" cantrip to use Arcana in place of a Bluff check.
There were two other PCs: one a ranger/cleric with good perception but zero social skills, and whose player was interstate on sabbatical - so that character was given the job of guarding the stairs. The other was a dwarven fighter/warpriest of Moradin, who has poor social skills but who (due to the way previous events have played out) was the "leader" of the party in the town the PCs were in - "Lord Derrik", "Lord of the Dwarfholme of the East", accepted by the Baron as a peer.
As the interrogation began in the beer cellar, Lord Derrik was sent upstairs, to the apartments in the inn where their enemy had been staying, to do a thorough search and also to drag all the furninture in the rooms over the top of a teleportation circle that they had found (to stop bad things teleporting in). In over 20 years of GMing, this is the first time I remember the players doing the whole "send the paladin (or in this case, the fighter/cleric of Moradin) to another room while we interrogate the prisoners" thing.
But anyway, it worked. With the sorcerer taking the lead (with Bluff), the (actual) paladin offering support (with Intimidate and a bit of Diplomacy) and the wizard joining in too (using Diplomacy, and Charm Person to make one crucial Bluff role), they managed to persuade the captive cleric to talk. I ran the persuasion as a skill challenge (requiring 8 successes before 3 failure), the idea being that once they had persuaded her then she would answer whatever questions she could without any more rolls being required from the players. (The rationale for this was that persuading her, and the way that played out and the consequences of it, was likely to be interesting - but that once the persuasion itself was sorted out, I was very happy to just let the players have a whole lot of fairly central plot information, that they'd been trying to figure out for many months of play.)
The crux of the attempt to persuade her was that she had no objection to suffering (being a cleric of Torog) but that she didn't want to die; but also if she did die, she was very confident that her soul would not go to the Raven Queen but straight to her divine master. At first the captive tried to bargain for a safe passage in return for providing information; and she indicated that she would be willing to swear oaths not to return to her life of warfare and consorting with hobgoblins, as part of a deal to spare her life. But it became clear fairly quickly that the PCs - particularly the paladin of the Raven Queen, who was fairly fanatical about exacting vengeance for the deaths of innocent villagers caused by the cleric and her raiding hobgoblins - were not prepared to agree to this.
The wizard threatened her with death and resurrection as an undead corpse which he would then interrogate at his leisure (and he showed her some documents detailing necromantic rituals to back up this threat), but the force of this threat was a little blunted by the objections coming from the paladin of the Raven Queen.
The captive herself then started insisting that Lord Derrik (whom she, like everyone else in the town, was treating as the leader of the party) guarantee that the Baron would not execute her. (The grounds on which she might be executed were many - levying war against the town would be the most obvious one.) The drow sorcerer, through subtle manipulation (and an excellent Bluff check) managed to persuade her that this would be done, although no such actual promise was given - it was more that he worded things in such a way that gave her the impression that the undertaking was understood by all to have been given. And neither the wizard nor the paladin did anything to contradict the impression that had been created on her part. And thus she started spilling the beans - of which she had many to spill.
And then at about this time the player playing Derrik decided he had had enough of watching the others go at it, and so decided that Derrik had finished sorting out the furniture upstairs and was coming back downstairs to see how things were going. The ranger on guard had been instructed to try and dissuade Derrik from coming down, and he made a half-hearted attempt, but a PC whose player is absent is never going to persuade a PC whose player is present and wants to get in on the action! So Derrik came in.
He was very pleased to see the captive talking, and being so cooperative. And she was very pleased to see him, explaining that she was glad that he (through his agents) had promised to persuade the Baron to spare his life. At which point Derrik almost started pulling out his beard in frustration (and I think the player might not have been following all that was going on also - my memory is a bit hazy, but I think Derrik's player may have been doing some child wrangling while Derrik was not in the action - and so he was a bit surprised and frustrated also!). But being a warpriest of Moradin, and a dwarf of his word (even if given carelessly by others!) he could not go back on a deal that she had so obviously been made to believe had been struck, and had relied upon in exchange for giving up her information.
Derrik did try to weasel out of things a bit by saying "he would do his best to persuade the Baron to spare her life", but the captive pointed out that the Baron owed his life and his town to Derrik, and Derrik was therefore in a position to extract the guarantee of mercy, not merely ask for it. And so when the PCs then met up with the Baron at dawn, the first thing Derrik did after pleasantries had been exchanged was to hand over the prisoner while explaining that he had promised to her that her life would be spared. And as she had foreseen, the Baron had no choice but to comply with Derrik's request.
So Derrik (and Derrik's player, at least somewhat) was upset that a prisoner had been spared whom he thought ought to be tried and justly punished - because the interrogators had been careless in making promises that they shouldn't have. The drow was upset that Derrik had instructed him to lead an interrogation, and then come in and mucked it up before it had reached its conclusion (which I think the drow envisaged being a swift execution so that Derrik need never know of the duplicitous means used to extract the information). The paladin was upset that someone who deserved death, and who had brough death to so many undeserving, was being spared.
Both the (literal) paladin and the dwarven "paladin" in that episode of play were PCs labouring under restrictions. From the point of view of the players there was a roleplaying challenge (and, in my own view, a more interesting challenge than the challenge of having to keep to the GM's mandated guidelines - I don't see that as much of a challenge, especially once you pay your 1000 gp for a phylactery of faithfulness).
An enforceable code would add nothing to the game session I just described. In fact it would wreck it; because it would no longer be about the player engaging with the situation and making a judgement about the values to which the PC in question is committed. It would be come about the player making a judgement about what I as GM thing is acceptable.
