D&D 5E Is Anyone Unhappy About Non-LG Paladins?

[Greg K]

Marjou,
Nobody had an issue on the first attempt. What you missed is that the Paladin has the AC and hit points. If he misses the attack he still presents a target and gives the shaman a chance to get out of the way. Instead, he stayed behind everyone and kept attempting over multiple rounds despite failing at his attempts leaving the two "squishiest" members of the party. Hell, if he had rushed up in the front trying to turn, I don't think everyone would have had as much of an issue (other than retrying an action that kept failing) as he could still interpose himself between the dragon and the Shaman. And, I believe it was Hussar (I could be wrong) whom, when I posted about this encounter a few years back that stated a Paladin has such a low chance of turning a dracolich that he was, essentially, wasting an action.

I must be missing something. If the turn attempt succeeded, didn't that mean he successfully defended his friends from the threat? Wouldn't that go "Look, I turned the dragon, he is no longer attacking you, you are all saved. Bask in the glory of my deity who helped me defend you from the dragon!"?

The only reason the action he was taking wasn't defending them is because he failed in the roll? Wouldn't that meant that if he ran up and attacked the dragon in melee and missed but the dragon then attacked his friend anyways that he was equally failing in his duties to protect the weak?

Yeah, I believe I would be equally annoyed if this happened to me in a game: "You mean I not only have to defend the weak and innocent above all else, but I have to do it using the exact actions you tell me to? Why am I even playing my character? Just make him an NPC and be done with it."[/QUOTE]

 

[pemerton]

If knowing what the players knew about the deity going in and you were still annoyed, everyone at the table would tell you shut the hell up or leave, because you agreed to play the Paladin of a particular deity and follow the tents laid out and failed to do so.

The default approach at my table is roughly the opposite of what you describe here - the other players (and me as GM) tend to take the paladin (or cleric) player's behaviour and professed convictions as indicators of the tenets of the deity in question. (That said, there are features of the ingame situation you're describing that I'm not following - like [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION], I don't really see how the paladin was better able to protect his friends by engaging the dragon in melee rather than trying to turn it.)

fighters and rogues don't derive their powers from their vows?

In the fiction they might, though - for instance, part of a player's backstory for his PC might be a mysterious blessing from a god, or benefaction from a religious order.

And hit points and saving throws (at least in most editions - 3E may be an exception) are seen as reflecting divine blessings among other factors (eg Gygax, DMG p 111-12: "the accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces").

this is a game where we give a lot of power to the DM because we generally believe in his ability to make fair judgement calls.

That seems to be begging the question somewhat - it's a statement of the proposition that the GM should have the power, but not really a statement of a reason as to why. And tradition is not a reason in an of itself, because there is no single tradition here. Not all versions of the game give the GM the power to strip PCs of mechanical abilities for code/alignment violations (eg 4e doesn't, B/X doesn't).

if both the player and the DM believe that the PC is failing to live by those standards, what happens? In the pre-4E game, it's pretty clear what happens. After that I'm not really sure anymore, because we don't have rules for priests or paladins who fell from grace.

I'm sure something could be worked out. Rebuild the PC. Apply a curse. Forfeit some ability for some period of time. It's not as if D&D has ever lacked for mechanical devices useable to give effect to metaphysical punishment and suffering. (Even in AD&D, as far as clerics were concerned Gygax didn't feel the need to be precise (DMG p 38): "If they have not been faithful . . . it becomes unlikely that they will receive intermediary aid unless they make proper atonement and sacrifice. . . making whatever sacrifices and atonement are necessary . . . before [receiving] those powers once again.")

 

[Sadras]

I must be missing something. If the turn attempt succeeded, didn't that mean he successfully defended his friends from the threat? Wouldn't that go "Look, I turned the dragon, he is no longer attacking you, you are all saved. Bask in the glory of my deity who helped me defend you from the dragon!"?

His deity gave him insight which let him know that his Turn attempts were almost impossible to pull off against such a foe, hinting that he should (due to greater probability of success) rather engage in melee should he wish to save his comrades.
One must also take into account that in @Greg K's setting, the divine powers come from his deity, they are blessings/gifts from his deity, which includes Turn Undead.

The only reason the action he was taking wasn't defending them is because he failed in the roll? Wouldn't that meant that if he ran up and attacked the dragon in melee and missed but the dragon then attacked his friend anyways that he was equally failing in his duties to protect the weak?

He purposefully ignored the vision sent to him by his deity. Not once, but twice, while his allies were desperately scrambling to do his work/his duty. Engaging the dragon in melee is his sworn duty, attempting to Turn is calling upon the Deity of his power. When the deity tells you the latter is not a viable option and you persist, you are directly disobeying a superior's orders. Imagine that happened in the military? You a soldier, disobeying a superior's orders - you expect to be punished. Unfortunately in the military they cant take away the skills you learnt, but they can take away your freedom. In this setting the deity can take away his powers.
I truly don't see anything wrong with that.

Yeah, I believe I would be equally annoyed if this happened to me in a game: "You mean I not only have to defend the weak and innocent above all else,

This part you (the player) already agreed to when you signed up to the play the character, too late to throw that in as a problem.

but I have to do it using the exact actions you tell me to?

In this instance, perhaps. You're playing an archetype - either play the role, or agree from the start you cant play that archetype.

Why am I even playing my character? Just make him an NPC and be done with it."

So your basis for not playing the character anymore is based on one incident where your superior told you that your current course of action is not the best course of action? That seems harsh.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry if this seems obtuse, but why didn't the shaman move behind the paladin in the first round? Why did the shaman stand toe to toe with the dracolich?

And, did the paladin actually have any chance of success? If not, did either of the two visions state that?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That's not a no-win situation. That's the DM saying that all orcs are irredeemably evil, and that the duty of the paladin in his milieu is to destroy all orcs. In that situation there is a win - kill the orcs.

Nope, and that's a good illustration of how problematic DM meta-gaming and DMs ignoring player input can be.

It's not a "win" to do that, because that requires meta-game "knowledge" that orcs are always evil and impossible to redeem, even though love and faith, miracles and the divine! Knowledge, too, of something not true in normal D&D games/settings (certainly not the FR). Rather the DM has decided this, and when the PCs don't agree, inserts this meta-game knowledge and insists they act accordingly.

They disagree, and being basically good IRL are never going to remotely comfortable with this genocidal approach/not-even-god-can-redeem-them approach (which would work for demons/undead), so there is an impasse.

Either the DM backs down, and goes with the normal D&D scheme, or he is going to end up not being the DM to that group any longer. In the latter case, his setting's creepy-to-me "perfection" is preserved, but he no longer has anyone to play D&D with. Choices, choices!

(The latter is pretty much what happened in actuality.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How boring at least it would be for me to play a game with no moral dilemmas. Again why is it against lawful good to kill monster babies? I would think any good alignment should have a problem with killing helpless babies especially if they are not born evil.

I'm confused. Are you answering your own question here? It seems like it. This isn't a moral dilemma. That's the problem. There's no dilemma for anyone who is Good. There is only one course, which is to try to save them. Neutral or Evil PCs might face a dilemma, but not Good PCs.

(It could become a dilemma if, by saving them, you had to risk other lives in a more immediate way - i.e. had to divert from stopping a dragon or something - but that's really just asking for splitting the party or the like.)

There are so many ways for the group to handle it they can kill the babies or non combatants because they will just rejoin another Orc tribe and become a danger. They can kill the babies because they have no way to care for them and that is more merciful than allowing them to starve slowly to death or they can try and save them and find a home for them.

Only the last one of those is Good, though. PCs who aren't Good may have a choice, but most PCs, in my experience, are Good. The first option is certainly "lawful", but it's not Good. The second option is, frankly, so corner-case it's hard to believe it's ever actually occurred, and even then, it's pretty un-Good to not at least try.

A DM should do what he knows his players enjoy if they don't enjoy moral dilemma then don't have monster babies and make sure all the NPCs die on the field so you don't have the prisoner dilemma.

I agree, but again, this isn't a "moral dilemma" for Good PCs. There are plenty of dilemmas for them, just not this one.

Though a DM acting like that is being a jerk. A paladin does not fall over something like that. He is turning them over to a higher authority the church that in no ways violates his alignment.

Though I would say it depends on how ORCs are played in the campaign world. Are they always evil and they don't have any choice and no matter how kind you are to them they will turn and act evil when older then yeah I can see to a point the DM questioning why the paladin would allow them to live regardless of how helpless they are as babies. Now if they are usually evil that is not the same and I could see a paladin choosing to give them a chance depending on the paladin. In either case I would as DM have no problem with the paladin choosing to kill the babies or not if they were usually evil.

He was acting like a jerk, I agree, but you're kinda agreeing with him, whilst you're saying that. The problem is, D&D is a world of magic and miracles. There's a first time for everything. Orcs aren't demons in any mainstream D&D setting I'm aware of, they're living beings who make choices, and can choose not to be Evil, even if it's really hard. This world was the FR, specifically. The Paladin's brave counter-argument, was, as I recall, more or less that miracles happen, and it seemed to him that doing this not only broke his code, but dishonoured the gods by not allowing for that miracle (even if orcs were auto-evil).

(I should note that the church he was suggesting taking them to was not of his faith, or part of his religious hierarchy)

Further, PCs are played by human beings who actually care about stuff and have moral limits. No matter how many times a DM explains it's okay for me to kill helpless babies of a decision-making, binary-gendered, learning species, I am not going to agree. Nor would almost any adult I'd game with.

If we have orcs as manufactured monstrosities, created in the spawning-pits by a wizard, programmed from birth with pre-coded instructions from which they cannot deviate, that's something else, without the same moral dilemma, but it's also not what we had here (and it's basically "biomechanoids" or "robots", rather than typical fantasy orcs, I'd suggest). But this whole situation couldn't come up, then.

EDIT - This whole incident was kind of an amusing example of a "Ruthlessness and brutality is fine!"-style 1E DM slamming head-on into a "Paladins & Princesses"-style 2E group.

 

[Aenghus]

The DM normally has a good level of control on what the game focusses on, what's zoomed in on and what's referred to but not show on screen.

Nowadays my default DM solution to the "baby orc" dilemma is to avoid it entirely by fading out of any scene it might arise. The issue can and has derailed whole sessions and even entire campaigns, and I prefer to avoid it entirely unless the resolution of the dilemma is actually a major theme of the campaign in question.

I consider it a special case of the "prisoner dilemma" i.e. what does the party do with prisoners. Similarly, I don't dwell on the prisoner dilemma nowadays unless it's a major theme of the campaign. My game time is valuable and I don't find the issue interesting most of the time.

If one or more of the players expresses an interest in the issue, there may or may not be an OOC discussion on the topic.

Re the paladin and dracolich issue, I remember that in most editions dracoliches are immune to turning, which seems relevant. (My largest character sheet ever was for my old Cult of the Dragon PC Balthazar, I looked up ever recipe for undead creation I could find in D&D, that being 1e and 2e at the time).

In most games I saw up to 3e there was an unofficial agreement that melee PCs who engaged monsters wouldn't be ignored in favour of attacking the squishies, despite a lack of defender mechanics to formalise the situation.

But players agree to stuff all the time in theory, and then find out that for whatever reason they don't like the practice. Some players don't like the defender role or other roles involving teamwork and prefer to act unilaterally. Discussion and maybe rewriting or changing characters can maybe solve such problems when they arise.

 

[GSHamster]

Nobody had an issue on the first attempt. What you missed is that the Paladin has the AC and hit points. If he misses the attack he still presents a target and gives the shaman a chance to get out of the way. Instead, he stayed behind everyone and kept attempting over multiple rounds despite failing at his attempts leaving the two "squishiest" members of the party. Hell, if he had rushed up in the front trying to turn, I don't think everyone would have had as much of an issue (other than retrying an action that kept failing) as he could still interpose himself between the dragon and the Shaman. And, I believe it was Hussar (I could be wrong) whom, when I posted about this encounter a few years back that stated a Paladin has such a low chance of turning a dracolich that he was, essentially, wasting an action.

Sure, but is that not the essence of faith? To believe in the power of his god, to trust that the divine will manifest its might through him and defeat the evil, even though the rest of the world scoffs?

If anything, there's an argument that this is exactly the type of paladin behaviour you should be rewarding, instead of punishing.

Tactically, the player chose a low-probability but high-reward strategy.I think that denying the paladin player that option is excessive. The rest of the party could have recognized that and fought defensively to buy the paladin time.

Personally, I think that this is an example of micromanaging player choices, which is the temptation of paladins for DMs, and should be avoided.

 

[Imaro]

Sure, but is that not the essence of faith? To believe in the power of his god, to trust that the divine will manifest its might through him and defeat the evil, even though the rest of the world scoffs?

On the other hand it could just be hubris... stupidity... stubbornness... or guided by any number of other motivations, the facts are that he was a paladin of a god whose tenets included defense of the weak from the front line... The relevant question is... did he embody these ideals in his actions? Another question I'd be curious to know the answer to was did the player and his comrades think he did...

EDIT: I would think his faith would be best exemplified and most powerful when he is acting in accordance with the deity he follows...

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

In the fiction they might, though - for instance, part of a player's backstory for his PC might be a mysterious blessing from a god, or benefaction from a religious order.

Fine, but then you're using a reskinning technique. No problem, I've done it in the past, but what you have here is a player that wants to play a cleric or paladin, but prefers the mechanics of the fighter or rogue class. It treats D&D as a game without an implied setting, and I don't believe that's the case. I don't go to D&D for generic fantasy, I go to it for a specific kind of D&Dish fantasy, and in that kind of fantasy a character with the fighter abilities is powered by himself, while a character with the abilities of a paladin is powered by an external source. I prefer to keep it that way, and when I want to change those assumptions, I opt to play other RPGs. Once more, this is very personal, and I see no problem in people using it differently.

And hit points and saving throws (at least in most editions - 3E may be an exception) are seen as reflecting divine blessings among other factors (eg Gygax, DMG p 111-12: "the accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces").

More of a 2E guy here, and I don't remember David "Zeb" Cook ever making a similar statement about the nature of hit points or saving throws. Honestly, I see this statement of Mr. Gygax as one more in a long line of things he said that don't apply to how I play/want to play the game at all.

That seems to be begging the question somewhat - it's a statement of the proposition that the GM should have the power, but not really a statement of a reason as to why. And tradition is not a reason in an of itself, because there is no single tradition here. Not all versions of the game give the GM the power to strip PCs of mechanical abilities for code/alignment violations (eg 4e doesn't, B/X doesn't).

Curiously, you've pointed to two editions I neither run or play, and would avoid to run or play, if possible. That said, while we shouldn't keep things because of tradition, we shouldn't remove elements for the sake of breaking tradition either. For our group to abandon the paradigm of DM judgement, it would have to mean an immediate and real improvement to our game, that we don't see happening. I know, though, that not all groups are in an equivalent situation, and I see why some rulesets have tried to "protect" players from DM judgement. We simply don't need and don't want it.

I'm sure something could be worked out. Rebuild the PC. Apply a curse. Forfeit some ability for some period of time. It's not as if D&D has ever lacked for mechanical devices useable to give effect to metaphysical punishment and suffering. (Even in AD&D, as far as clerics were concerned Gygax didn't feel the need to be precise (DMG p 38): "If they have not been faithful . . . it becomes unlikely that they will receive intermediary aid unless they make proper atonement and sacrifice. . . making whatever sacrifices and atonement are necessary . . . before [receiving] those powers once again.")

Basically, you don't have a problem with attitude, it's a matter of intensity...