Between reading the rules in two editions of AD&D rulebooks and the 3E SRD, and reading all the posts on this thread, I have come up with two pictures of how alignment works.
The one that seems to be run most strongly on this thread - eg by [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] and [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and I think also [MENTION=16726]jsaving[/MENTION] - is that alignment is a series of labels for sets of things that might be valued. Those who value authority and innocent life are LG. Those who value freedom and lack compassion are CE. And so on.
On this picture, it makes sense for a character to decide that the right thing to do is something which is labelled evil - for instance, the right thing to do is to kill an innocent person, thereby "debasing or destroying an innocent life" - because the character decides that, on balance and in these circumstances, there are other things more important than valuing compassion.
And from the point of view of the universe, on this approach, there is no answer to whether or not that character has done the right thing. Of course if s/he is a paladin s/he will fall, for knowingly and wilfully committing an evil act, but that might just show that his/her god is mistaken, and needlessly fetishes compassion for the innocent over other, potentially more important, things. (There is a puzzle, on this approach, as to only why authority-and-compassion fetishists bestow their warriors with divine power, but we'll let that pass.)
This cosmological approach makes the paladin archetype impossible as soon as it becomes known, because on this approach the universe itself is essentially uncaring. There is no providence. There is no reason, ultimately, to be LG rather than CE.
An alternative approach to understanding alignment is my default understanding. [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] and, at least as I have read him, [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] have articulated similar views in this thread. On this approach, it is taken for granted that there is always a reason to be Good rather than Evil, and hence that the Evil are doing the wrong thing. This is also the worldview of the paladin, although (i) the archetypal paladin has a different sense of what is good from the typical modern person (eg more militarist, and less democratic) and (ii) the paladin also has providential convictions which are probably less common among modern people than they once were.
The problem that alignment mechanics pose for playing a paladin, on this approach, is that they put the GM in charge of deciding what is Good. So the player of the paladin can't know what his/her PC has a reason to do until s/he asks the GM what would count as Good or Evil in a particular situation. Hence putting the GM in ultimate control of the PC's actions.
As I've already stated upthread, my way of dealing with this issue is to dispense with alignment, and to let the player of the paladin decide what counts as meeting the moral demands that the universe lays down. (And I've also talked about various techniques that can be used to help this work - eg don't systematically frame the game in such a way that the player will have a mechanically easier time of it by having his/her PC depart from the convictions that s/he has laid down for it. A simple example I've given upthread is this: if the players decide to have their PCs take prisoners, whom they then release on parole, as a GM have the prisoners keep their promise.)
The difference, as I see it, is that in a world in which there is no inherent reason to be Good rather than Evil - these are just two approaches to valuing order and compassion for the innocent, which one picks and chooses between as seems right - then the code is essentially a contract: the paladin promises to do X and refrain from Y in return for power.
Whereas the true paladin archetype, as I see it, answers a providential call, and thereby honours those values which are the only true values, departure from which simply betrays a misunderstanding of the demands of honour and duty, and of the ways of providence.
I don't agree with this. I don't see the code as arbitrary. I have a fondness for the treatment of this in the Dragonlance trilogy: the Knights of Solamnia had come to treat their code as if it were arbitrary, but Sturm Brightblade showed, by his actions, that this itself was a type of fall from grace, and that the code existed for a reason and had to be understood and complied with in the spirit of that underlying reason.
On the worldview of the paladin, as I understand it, anti-clerics and anti-paladins (to use the original game terms) are not blessed at all. They are cursed. Fallen. Guilty of fundamental error.
You characterisation of Blackguards and Evil Clerics treats them as basically symmetrical with the paladin, in cosmological terms. In my view, once the game overtly affirms such a cosmology, it has ruled out the paladin archetype as I understand it. For instance, if the correct way to think of a Blackguard is as blessed, like a paladin, but just by a different god, then the paladin's conviction that providence is on his/her side is revealed as objectively mistaken. S/he is simply playing for a different team.
Of course the paladin has to accept that the Evil wield power. But s/he does not have to accept that they are being rewarded. In fact, s/he denies that. It only looks like they are being rewarded, because the workings of providence have not been factored in. Hence the error I described, in thinking that it is necessary to do Evil in order to realise good things: this thought is both false (because it disregards that providence will ensure justice) and a great sin (because it is a betrayal of faith in the workings of providence).
I think you are both right and wrong to talk about "only Good gods existing". On my preferred approach, alignment is not used. Hence, it is up to each player, in the course of playing his/her PC, to decide who is on the side of providence - and hence genuinely good and (if you like) genuinely a god - and who is simply a devil or demon or at best a flawed exemplar of divinity.
I can give some examples of what I mean by reference to my current 4e game. The fighter/cleric of Moradin - who is for functional purposes a paladin - regards the Raven Queen as simply a jumped-up usurper of divine power, and not as a genuine god. The chaos sorcerer is an Adept of the primordial Chan, who describes herself as the Queen of Good Air Elementals. This character regards Chan as on the side of providence. But another PC - who is an invoker serving a range of gods including Erathis, Ioun, Pelor, Bane, Levistus, the Raven Queen and Vecna - regards Chan as first and foremost a primordial, and hence an enemy of the gods and of the divine plan. The fact that Chan has some friends among the gods, such as Corellon, just proves that those gods aren't properly on board with the plan, and are potentially dangerous backsliders!
In the playing of this game there is no metaframework to answer such questions as Who is really good?, or Which "gods" are really worth serving?, or Are the primordials really all evil? Disagreements about these questions, among the PCs as played by their players, is what gives the game most of its energy and forward momentum.
I don't fully understand where temptation comes from in a mechanical alignment system. Most of the examples I see tend to work around issues of expedience, rather than conflicts of value: for instance, to go back to the prisoner example, the player believe that sparing the PC would be the Good thing and that killing the prisoner would be Evil; but the player also believes that if the prisoner is spared then the GM will use the prisoner as a game element to make life harder for the PCs and thereby the players; hence, the player is tempted to declare that his/her PC kills the prisoner.
If that is a fair model of how the temptation works, then it rests on a number of assumptions about how play works that I don't share, particularly about how the GM will act and also the connection between "hard for the PCs" and "hard for the players". But as I said I don't fully understand the issue and am interested in what others have to say about it.
It is my experience that in a system without alignment that temptation generally arises in the form of conflicts of value: for instance, the invoker in my game had to choose, in a session earlier this year, whether to serve Vecna or the Raven Queen. He chose the Raven Queen, and therefore suffered retribution from Vecna. Another example happened a while ago now: the "paladin" of Moradin had to choose between a prisoner meeting the death that (in his view) she deserved, or honouring a promise that the other PCs had given in his name to have her spared, in return for information. (The other PCs had planned to kill her after manipulating her in this way to reveal the information. But the paladin came back into the interrogation room before they could bring this plan to fruition.) He chose to honour the promise, even though he hated the fact that the prisoner was spared.
On this sort of approach you are not going to have a PC fall unless that is what the player wants, but it doesn't follow that the fall has to be scripted (and hence non-dramatic). There is no reason why it couldn't be very spontaneous, just as the outcomes in the two examples I just gave were spontaneous.
These decisions have weight because of the values at stake. You can't both honour your promise to spare the prisoner, and execute her. You can't both honour your pledge to fight the duke honourably, and poison him. These are questions of value, not of expedience.
A view that I hold very strongly is that the game should be fun and interesting to play whatever choices the players make in the course of playing their PCs. Hence whether a player choose to have his/her player act expediently, or not, the game should be fun. Hence, from the player's point of view, there is nothing expedient about having his/her PC act expediently. (The 4e DMG 2 makes a point in a similar vein when it notes that, on p 87, that although the PCs "probably don't like being attacked by drow assassins in the middle of the night, but the players will probably have fun playing out the encounter.")
This is why I think that the meaningful choices for players are generally choices about value (including "Do I want to play a PC who sacrifices value to expedience?") rather than literal instances of temptation of the sort that they might experience if actually, in the real world, asked to weigh up adherence to values against acting expediently.
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