Paladin behavior question

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm a big fan of dreams, omens, and outright sending angels to scold and warn. I don't think this is a 'paladin has strayed so far he can never come back' situation, or even, 'paladin has strayed so far deity is rethinking the relationship' situation.

Agreed on both counts; although I'm not a DM, if I were a DM I would treat relatively few characters as "completely beyond redemption" (partially because that's kind of a theologically important point for me). However, Paladins are at a lot bigger risk of that than other characters, because they generally do take some kind of oath, make some kind of contract or covenant, or follow some kind of code--it is their "purity," in some sense, which gives them their power, and violating the trust placed in them is why it comes with penalties.

Following up on my prior post though, my point is that how this is judged depends on the specific beliefs of the deity that the paladin is attached to. He's not a paladin in abstract; he is concretely the servant and personally selected champion of a specific deity and his role and authority depend not on his class, but on his social standing. The paladin isn't being judged in isolation, but according to how he is following a concrete code that is written down somewhere (lawful, remember?), and how he relates to his group (lawful), and whether he is obeying his superiors (lawful). This is at least as important as the question, "Was the paladin being good?", because as a lawful good character whether his actions are good are matter of law and custom.

We have to tread a rather fine line, as is always the case with corner-alignments. That is, if we take Alignment as a Serious Thing, then "Lawful Good" means aligning oneself with two distinct, non-identical concepts of behavior, and the fact that they are distinct and non-identical means that they may not always agree. This is part of why I make such a major point out of ensuring that the code my Paladin characters follow isn't just written down "somewhere"--it needs to be written down by me and my DM, agreed upon between us, and well-understood by both parties. Because when you simply ascribe to a "code" as a set of nebulous philosophical concepts (like "Law" and even "Good") rather than a code as an actual set of behavioral instructions, those concepts can be irreconcilable, and yet the character can still be "held responsible" for failing to obey irreconcilable commands!

So, in general, I pursue a code which highly values laws, but which is not a slave to legislation. That is, as my Dungeon World Paladin's code (his personal summation and distillation of the teachings of Bahamut's church) puts it, "Justice without mercy is tyranny. Mercy without justice is impotent," and borrowing from St. Augustine, "Laws exist to serve the people. An unjust law is no law at all." Thus, although laws are very important (mercy without justice is impotent), it is entirely possible for one or more of a nation's laws to fail to actually be just, and laws which fail this requirement not only can, but should be disobeyed, and ideally should be repealed and replaced with other laws that are just.

Hence why, when I speak of this character, I emphasize that he is Lawful Good: his oath, his creed, is specifically about doing right by others and improving the lives of the downtrodden and forgotten, giving protection to the weak and succor to the weary. He genuinely believes that laws are the best way to achieve this...BUT that laws can also get in the way of it. When they do, there is no fault in disobeying them--laws are the (vastly) preferred means to the morally appropriate end, but they can also be misused for other, morally inappropriate ends. In fact, I'll just post the bit I've actually written (a brief but succinct summary of most of Bahamut's teachings--parables and stories boiled down to punchy sentences):
[sblock]Justice without mercy is tyranny. Mercy without justice is impotent. Laws exist to serve the people. An unjust law is no law at all. Any who will stand to fight injustice are my allies.
All deserve honor and respect, even my enemies. There is no dishonor in survival, only in desertion. It is a victory to vanquish evil, but a far greater victory to convert it. I will render aid to any who honestly seek atonement and redemption.
Truth is a greater weapon than any sword.
I will defend the weak and shelter the weary. The downtrodden and forgotten are my charges. Bahamut's wings give succor and solace to those who have none. Those who give freely to others are Bahamut's hands in this world. I live to serve, protect, and build the future. That which is built endures, and that which is loved endures. Selfless love may do that which should be impossible.
As He is my Shield, I will be His Talon. I will strike down those who prey upon the innocent and defenseless.
I am a Paladin of Bahamut.[/sblock]

Is it customary in your campaign world for this to happen? Or is someone going to be saying, "Bah. He wants everyone else to uphold the law, but when it comes to his actions, he makes his own law. Curse him and his god." Because that's not the sort of response his deity was going for when he made the paladin his champion among men.

It's certainly a thing to consider. What social perspective will this have? Technically, it sounds like the action was taken in a place far from "inquiring minds," as it were, so it might be that nobody will know. The Paladin in question can simply say, "I dealt with the threat--the ogres should bother you no more." You can thus argue that there is no "social context" to the action, outside of the Paladin's party, and it would take some relatively dickish fellow-adventurers to start spreading rumors about him taking the law into his own hands.

But yes, I definitely think that a Lawful Good deity is going to consider questions like "how will my champion's actions reflect on me?" Whether it's a world where God Needs Prayer Badly (e.g. FR-style "gods die of something like starvation if they aren't worshipped") or not, deities generally want to have lots of people worship them. For Good ones, coercive methods to getting more worshippers are a big no-no, so you really have to be setting a good example that will be attractive to mortals--more attractive than the alternatives. Even if the Paladin is technically upholding at least the letter of his code, his actions could make people question whether they really want the "protection" of a god who allows such things.

This is yet another reason why I would (even in a 3e-style "one false move and god pulls the plug" system) have a "we need to talk about this" kind of attitude from the deity. Unless the act is really, really clearly okay (e.g. a St. Cuthbert kind of "destroy the wicked and lay low the proud" approach to evil).

 

[Celebrim]

It's certainly a thing to consider. What social perspective will this have? Technically, it sounds like the action was taken in a place far from "inquiring minds," as it were, so it might be that nobody will know. The Paladin in question can simply say, "I dealt with the threat--the ogres should bother you no more." You can thus argue that there is no "social context" to the action, outside of the Paladin's party, and it would take some relatively dickish fellow-adventurers to start spreading rumors about him taking the law into his own hands.

But is that the perspective of a lawful character?

In my experience, the hardest part of playing any lawful character for your average American is that you are so used to Individualism as a core unquestioned belief that they without thinking about it play characters that "follow the dictates of their own conscious", are first accountable to themselves and then (maybe) to others, whose beliefs are ultimately personal based on their own understanding and reading of the law, and so forth. And it's perfectly natural for such a person to think, "I'm alone here. I'm responsible. I have to make the decision by myself."

But I put forward that lawful people aren't used to behaving in that manner. Instead, they think: "I'm alone here. I can't be solely responsible. An important decision must be made collectively." And that mode of thinking is pervasive, even with decisions we would think should be made privately - like who should I marry (or even more to the point, who should I have sex with).

As for your point that paladins should have a physical written real world document summarizing the expectations of their code, I fully agree. I don't agree your example list of axioms and aphorisms for Bahamut constitutes such a code. In many cases, I have no clue what it means and what it mandates is very unclear and is very much subject to interpretation. Such aphorisms may well exist alongside some code to address what the spirit of the code is, and what the code is meant to accomplish, but in many cases it doesn't tell me what to do and as a player I'd be very uncomfortable with it if I thought that was the standard my behavior would be judged by. It's for the most part no better than a code that says, "Be good. Be lawful."

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

In my experience, the hardest part of playing any lawful character for your average American is that you are so used to Individualism as a core unquestioned belief that they without thinking about it play characters that "follow the dictates of their own conscious", are first accountable to themselves and then (maybe) to others, whose beliefs are ultimately personal based on their own understanding and reading of the law, and so forth. And it's perfectly natural for such a person to think, "I'm alone here. I'm responsible. I have to make the decision by myself."

The player is actually a Mexican, living in Mexico (and playing with us via the wonders of the Internet), but point taken.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

So, does this impact his paladin status in your campaign? Why or why not?

Most meaningful response is that the answer to this issue should already be known by both the DM and the player in any campaign before it ever happens.

IMC? No impact. The villain is evil, yes? The villain was engaged in evil. Yes? The purpose of a paladin is to destroy evil. Not sure why a paladin would have agreed to a bargain with an evil villain, especially one threatening his family, but I wouldn't consider that necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if it gives the paladin a year in which to grow stronger and return to find a better solution - but in the intervening year be able to COUNT on the safety of the village? Maybe. Maybe. But let's just go with yes for sake of discussion. On returning the village is sacked anyway and the villain is helpless. KILL her and kick yourself for not having done it in the first place.

Only way the bargain makes sense in the first place is that the paladin was under some form of duress, basically not having a better option than suicidal blaze of glory. Keeping the bargain counts for bupkus. If it comes down to keeping your word or doing what's right - which is ridding the world of yet another evil - then it's not a hard choice to make. If making the original bargain wasn't a problem then NOT keeping it later sure isn't.

 

[pemerton]

If you enter into a treaty with this brigand in the first place, then in doing so you are recognizing her legitimacy as a someone who can be lawfully treated with. As such, you are de facto not holding her past crimes against her as something which requires justice. You are essentially saying, "We can't justly address what has gone before this point, but so that this situation will not persist, let's clarify what just dealing will be between us in the future." or perhaps, "We mercifully forebear from holding you accountable for your past crimes, provided you enter into this agreement." You enter into that sort of situation when the past is complicated, restitution is hard, and attempts at justice now will only create further injustice and suffering. Fine. It might not be wise, but it lawful and good in intention.

But if you do that, you can't decide to hold those past crimes against her now unless she's broken the agreement.

<snip>

if you could exercise mercy back when she was leading a band of brigands, what prevents you from exercising mercy when she is tied up by one? These actions make it look like mercy was never the issue, but rather that earlier they entered into the treaty because they feared her, and now when they don't fear her, they kill her. That isn't justice. That isn't idealism. That's a pragmatic cold-blooded calculation

In my experience, the hardest part of playing any lawful character for your average American is that you are so used to Individualism as a core unquestioned belief that they without thinking about it play characters that "follow the dictates of their own conscious", are first accountable to themselves and then (maybe) to others, whose beliefs are ultimately personal based on their own understanding and reading of the law, and so forth.

<snip>

I put forward that lawful people aren't used to behaving in that manner. Instead, they think: "I'm alone here. I can't be solely responsible. An important decision must be made collectively." And that mode of thinking is pervasive, even with decisions we would think should be made privately

My own sense is that it takes quite a degree of enculturation to internalise notions of "rules" or "duty" in one's reasoning, which I think is what is at the heart of your (cogent) analysis in the first of the two passages I've quoted.

A practical example from my work life: at my University there is a requirement that all appeals from a faculty's discipline decisions (eg to kick a student out for cheating) must be heard, in the first instance, by an academic from the Faculty of Law. And as one of those academics, it is a recurring shock to see how cavalierly other faculties approach the issue of acquiring and relying upon evidence, allowing the student to know the basis on which a decision is being reached, etc. They don't take rules seriously.

To play a character who takes oaths and obligations seriously of course one doesn't have to have internalised those values, but one has to at least have thought about what it would be like to have done so.

I've never RPGed with an American, so can't comment on that particular sociological observation. But I certainly agree that different social formations make it more or less easy to imagine oneself into the outlook of that sort of character.

I think D&D, as traditionally presented and played, raises an additional problem for this: at one and the same time it wants to evoke the radically modernist fantasy of REH's Conan while also deploying and celebrating the tropes of Tolkien-esque romantic fantasy, of which the paladin is the paradigm. That's an unstable combination that, understandably, can be hard for individual tables and participants to pull off.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But is that the perspective of a lawful character?

Depends on what "lawful" means. If "lawful" means "supporting organized society," then you could argue yes; things done outside of the reach and observation of organized society, which appear to ensure the continuation of organized society, would be definitionally Lawful. If "lawful" means "adhering to the legislation of the sovereign territory you're currently in," it would depend on the legislation of the territory in question, which we don't know; one of your earlier posts touched on this a bit, but left some presumptions which don't necessarily hold true. That is, we do not know if this Paladin is vested with the authority to act as judge over criminal activity...but we also don't know that the local legislation assumes innocence instead of guilt (something that not all human societies IRL have assumed). In many feudal states, knights vested by the power of some body (such as the church or whatever else) were able to act as judge, jury, and executioner--they could do almost whatever they wanted to the serfs, and they could certainly do whatever they wanted to bandits. In many cases, no one would bat an eye at breaking a promise to a Moor, for instance; fewer still would argue that it was in any way morally or ethically wrong to fail to live up to your end of a deal when the thing you were promised by an outsider (like a Moor) failed to happen, even if it wasn't their fault.

In my experience, the hardest part of playing any lawful character for your average American is that you are so used to Individualism as a core unquestioned belief that they without thinking about it play characters that "follow the dictates of their own conscious", are first accountable to themselves and then (maybe) to others, whose beliefs are ultimately personal based on their own understanding and reading of the law, and so forth. And it's perfectly natural for such a person to think, "I'm alone here. I'm responsible. I have to make the decision by myself."

But I put forward that lawful people aren't used to behaving in that manner. Instead, they think: "I'm alone here. I can't be solely responsible. An important decision must be made collectively." And that mode of thinking is pervasive, even with decisions we would think should be made privately - like who should I marry (or even more to the point, who should I have sex with).

While I agree that Unitedstatesians (such as myself) tend to think more individualistically, I think it is a mistake to pin it just on the US. Europe is also pretty far on the individualist side, albeit not as far, and there are several nations which are much more collectivist (Japan, China, and South Korea, for example). I disagree that individualism or collectivism is necessarily lawful or chaotic. Remember that most Socialist revolutions start out extremely chaotic, and gradually shift toward law...while still retaining at least a degree of lip-service to the idea of being collectivized. Similarly, while the United States is almost notorious for its "I go my own way" spirit, we had one of the first democratic revolutions that did not re-create a monarchy and which did not fall back into anarchy afterward. The Constitution is enshrined almost to the point of being sacred, and citizens of the United States are far more likely to profess belief in an all-powerful God than citizens of basically every country in Europe, and religion in general is a highly collectivist endeavor (even Protestantism, for all its commitment to everyone reading the Bible for themselves etc., seeks a uniformity of doctrine and behavior!)

As for your point that paladins should have a physical written real world document summarizing the expectations of their code, I fully agree. I don't agree your example list of axioms and aphorisms for Bahamut constitutes such a code. In many cases, I have no clue what it means and what it mandates is very unclear and is very much subject to interpretation. Such aphorisms may well exist alongside some code to address what the spirit of the code is, and what the code is meant to accomplish, but in many cases it doesn't tell me what to do and as a player I'd be very uncomfortable with it if I thought that was the standard my behavior would be judged by. It's for the most part no better than a code that says, "Be good. Be lawful."

Wait. So, you're saying that a code of nearly 200 words gives you no information whatsoever beyond what a two-letter acronym could have told you? Either I've profoundly failed in my mission, or we have a very different understanding of what "a code" means. Are you suggesting that a code should be a rigorous list of absolutely permissible, absolutely impermissible, and conditionally permissible behaviors? If so, that seems kind of...well, to be frank, hypocritical, since you chose (above) to avoid evaluating the permissibility of impermissibility of lying because it was a too-thorny ethical subject.

The whole point of the code I listed was that it gives a system of priorities, and intentionally avoids making excessively specific pronouncements. It's structured to be a religious text--a litany, specifically--and not legal-technical jargon. Does it explicitly forbid telling lies? No. But it does tell you that you should value the truth. Does it explicitly forbid killing? No. But it does tell you that, if you think it's possible to redeem someone rather than killing them, you should try. Does it say how much you need to gift to the poor? No. But it does tell you that the poor need to be helped.

Boiling that down to "be good, be lawful" would be like summarizing the moral code written into the New Testament as "be loving." Yes, love is supremely important in Christian theology, but what "love" means as a word all on its lonesome is not clear. 1 Corinthians 13 is a code of love; it is very similar in structure (though not in content, specifically) to the code I provided, in that it identifies priorities within the concept of "good" and various virtuous activities, without inflexibly specifying what behaviors are good or not good.

I mean, sure, if you really want to you can replicate the Law of Moses with its dozens of pages of X is clean, Y is unclean, never do Z, the punishment for W is stoning, the punishment for Q is fifty lashes, etc., etc. Will that actually lead to much interesting gameplay? Will that produce meaningfully more circumspect behavior from the Paladin following this hyperspecific code instead of a 1 Cor 13-style code?

 

[Celebrim]

Depends on what "lawful" means.

As I use the term, it means simply that you consider something outside of yourself to be the primary source of judgment, reason, and authority and that you subordinate yourself to this external thing - whatever it is. So it could be 'organized society' (whatever that means) or it could be (and often is) your nation, tribe, or some other social identity. But the important point is that, if you find yourself in a situation where your judgment and your consciousness are in conflict with the judgment and consciousness of this external entity, you consider yourself to be in error and the judgment of this external thing to be the superior guide.

As an example, you wish to marry a certain man. You are sure in your heart that you love the man and that he loves you, but you go to ask your father's permission and blessing over the conjoining and he tells you, "No." If you then tell the man, "Sorry, I love you, but I can't marry you; father won't give his permission.", then that is a lawful perspective.

As for your example of feudal law, I won't quibble to much with your characterization but I will note that in theory, regardless of the right to do something, the dealings of the knight where supposed to live up to ideal of both chivalric codes and church ethics. The Paladin is intended to represent and is drawn from this very ideal, so seldom if ever realized in actual practice, but as a heroic model of virtue, modesty, honor, chastity, mercy, and prowess of arms. I won't quibble that in the real world, few lived up to the idea, or that in practice the society was seldom idealistic rather than pragmatic and even tyrannical. But in a fantasy story where a figure draws real supernatural power from his honor and righteousness, I think we can assume the fantasy paragon acts like how knights were supposed to act, and not how they usually acted.

I think it is a mistake to pin it just on the US...

Oh, I'm by no means saying we own a monopoly on it. I'm just speaking of what I know best.

I disagree that individualism or collectivism is necessarily lawful or chaotic.

Well, it's often not well defined what law and chaos represent, but for me this divide loosely described as individualist versus collectivist (though, this latter term strikes me as distinctly misleading) for me is the one that is most interesting and leads to the least contradictions.

Remember that most Socialist revolutions start out extremely chaotic, and gradually shift toward law...while still retaining at least a degree of lip-service to the idea of being collectivized. Similarly, while the United States is almost notorious for its "I go my own way" spirit, we had one of the first democratic revolutions that did not re-create a monarchy and which did not fall back into anarchy afterward. The Constitution is enshrined almost to the point of being sacred, and citizens of the United States are far more likely to profess belief in an all-powerful God than citizens of basically every country in Europe, and religion in general is a highly collectivist endeavor (even Protestantism, for all its commitment to everyone reading the Bible for themselves etc., seeks a uniformity of doctrine and behavior!)

So yes, societies can become quite complex. But I think that there is a distinct difference between being an individualists and upholding individualism as a virtue because it is enshrined in the national myth, the national identity, and the national law or because it is believed to be a natural law. You might say that in some cases societies are trying to strike a balance between the competing tendencies of society and the individual. It's also worth noting that a lawful society could evolve (and often would evolve) so that the leaders are self-serving or self-seeking, or conversely that the rulers of a nation where individualism was the prevailing mode of belief might tend toward a more orderly approach and desire greater conformity and unity of purpose than what is normally seen. In the case of a ruthless ruler, you might see a cynical promotion of collectivism not because the ruler wished to serve the state per se, but because the ruler wished the society to serve him as the head of the state. Or you might see that individualists would seek to create a small limited government expressly to protect the rights of individuals, or that in a sufficiently large nation multiple competing cultures might arise with slightly different takes on what it would take to make the nation great.

Wait. So, you're saying that a code of nearly 200 words gives you no information whatsoever beyond what a two-letter acronym could have told you?

I'm saying the application of the code is wholly subjective and often confusing, and what a player needs is a list of 10 or so imperatives so that at least he has some idea of how this all is supposed to work out in play. A statement like "Truth is a greater weapon than any sword." is axiomatic and notably not imperative. So what does this code compel me to do? Taken literally, am I supposed to truth speak dragons to death and foreswear swords? It doesn't even say, "Truth can be a better weapon than any sword", or "Truth can cut through things that a sword can not." What does it mean? When is it applicable? It tells me that if I value weapons, then truth is better than a sword, but should I value weapons and how valuable is a sword anyway?

Other parts are little better: "There is no dishonor in survival, only in desertion." Ok, that at least compels me to not commit suicide, I think, though I'm not sure that was the intention. But as a player trying to play a PC, what I really want to know is what must I do, and what must I not do, if I don't want to end up atoning or a permanently bad fighter. Should I literally interpret this like the 1e Cavalier code - no running away from a fight? I'm supposed to obey the law unless I think it is an unjust law? Can't the code at least specify how I'm to recognize an unjust law or how to know when the laws aren't serving the people? If you are going to claim that there are unlawful orders, you better define what they are. But yes, when you say something like, "Justice without mercy is tyranny. Mercy without justice is impotent.", I really do feel you've said nothing that isn't equivalent to, "Be good and be lawful." Striking a balance between justice and mercy isn't exactly intuitive. I would presume that with a code like that, I've got pretty far latitude and the DM isn't going to throw any gotchas out there.

 

[Aenghus]

Nowadays I would never choose to play an old-school paladin in a new game until I had figured out how the referee runs his or her world and what the other players are like.

IMO the problem with old-school paladins is they incorporate multiple game-endangering points of failure in one shiny armoured packaged. It can potentially all work out fine, but there are many, many examples of situations where it didn't.

First, people disagree about matters of good and evil in the real world all the time, with lots more information and evidence around than in a mere game, where information bandwidth is massively limited even for face to face games, not to mind online games. In many cases the issue is a disagreement on the nature of good and evil between the player and the referee, which is far too easy to get personal and nasty.

Secondly, the paladin has to get on minimally with the other PCs, some or all of whom may turn out to be evil or may turn evil during play. At which point the paladin under many codes has to shun the evil PCs, which directly contradicts one of the main mantras of D&D "Don't split the party". Even without that, paladins often are required to object to many fairly standard D&D tactics, which can be irritating and unfun to other players. Prisoners, truthfulness, tolerance of evil, association with evil characters, intolerance of others can all be game wrecking problems with the wrong handling and/or the wrong group or personality dynamics.

Thirdly, the old-school paladin's code can be totally impractical in some settings, and in some groups. If there is no lawful authority, no judges, no law, the paladin still has to be playable despite there being nowhere to take prisoners. In a lot of worlds a paladin handing a monster over for judgement to a local lord would be treated like Don Quixote, with lots of eye rolling as they take the monster away and summarily execute him once the paladin has left. Being an example of Lawful Stupid and an object of derision by other players and even the GM himself isn't any fun. Paladins don't belong in every world, and even in worlds where they can fit, a subset of potential paladin-like concepts are probably viable, while others aren't.

What it comes down to is better communication, and everyone being aware what each others expectations are beforehand to prevent gotchas and impossible Paladin dilemmas turning up every two seconds.

As to the OP, there's loads of info I would need to make an informed decision - how much evidence of wrongdoing by the prisoner existed, the regions history of troubles with monsters, the legal position of monsters - are they legally people, and lots of other factors. I may be incorrect, but I felt there was subtext that the referee had plans for the prisoner's story that the execution disrupted, and there may be some resentment of that colouring the question of the paladin's actions.

The sort of clarifying questions that can be useful for a referee on paladins is asking themselves is there *any* circumstances where a paladin executing someone is permissible or even expected? Sometimes the answers to these questions exposes the fact that there is no right answer and the paladin is being set up to fail, which is unfair to the player unless they want to play out said fall.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Depends on what "lawful" means. If "lawful" means "supporting organized society," then you could argue yes; things done outside of the reach and observation of organized society, which appear to ensure the continuation of organized society, would be definitionally Lawful. If "lawful" means "adhering to the legislation of the sovereign territory you're currently in," it would depend on the legislation of the territory in question, which we don't know

A paladin PC who cannot perform the expected actions of his class without inherently ENDANGERING his class by doing so is in a game setting where the class doesn't belong in the first place, and where it would make little sense for the archetype to have ever arisen to be considered as a character class.

Information that I give to players is that Lawful has nothing directly to do with king's decrees, legislation, or criminal codes - the opposite of lawful, after all, is not "lawless" or "criminal" but "chaotic" so the implication is far more general. It's the belief in and usually the promotion of order and structure to life in general. Having written law is a common product of that but following laws isn't what makes a PC lawful. A PC would act that way whether written laws told them they had to or not. Written laws are intended to guide and elicit desired behavior from NON-lawful people. At most they merely REMIND lawful people of what they probably already believe (keeping in mind that there's lawful EVIL as well as lawful good so OBVIOUSLY the written law produced by those two polar extremes aren't what's going to guide the actions.of the opposite of the spectrum.

Wait. So, you're saying that a code of nearly 200 words gives you no information whatsoever beyond what a two-letter acronym could have told you? Either I've profoundly failed in my mission, or we have a very different understanding of what "a code" means. Are you suggesting that a code should be a rigorous list of absolutely permissible, absolutely impermissible, and conditionally permissible behaviors? If so, that seems kind of...well, to be frank, hypocritical, since you chose (above) to avoid evaluating the permissibility of impermissibility of lying because it was a too-thorny ethical subject.

You need to keep in mind the purpose of alignment in the first place - to guide players choices of actions for their characters; to produce characters whose actions are GENERALLY reasonable and consistent (if not always nice). It's NOT to create a functional REAL-WORLD religion or philosophy. A list of permitted and non-permitted COMMONLY encountered actions during play would be far more effective as alignment definition than 1000 words about the ethical nuances of lying. Can the PC do this/that? Yes or no? Great. Alignment then did it's job and the game moves on WITHOUT the extended debates about morality and ethics. Alignment is supposed to ELIMINATE that kind of game disruption and time-wasting, not perpetuate it. It needs to provide quick answers - even if a real world code of morals and ethics would have a hell of a lot more nuance to be expressed about the subject. If a player can't look at a description of their characters alignment and have a reasonable idea of what a PC might/might not be allowed to do - AND to have the DM agree with that assessment - then, yeah, it probably needs to be reworked.

Can you kill things that are "known" to be evil even if you haven't first forensically PROVED that they're evil? How can you handle prisoners and untrustworthy opponents who surrender? Can you torture or PERMIT your allies to do so? Will you tolerate theft with a lecture or cut off the hand of the offender? In what circumstances can you lie or withhold details of the truth? THOSE are the kinds of questions that alignment really needs to be answering for both players and PC's. Answers that will merely SIMULATE a vastly more detailed and well-considered (but USELESSLY complicated) system of religious beliefs and philosophy. It doesn't have to all make sense in the real world - it only has to work to guide the actions of PC's during play.

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=32740]Man in the Funny Hat[/MENTION]: That's the sort of rant that I find I can half agree with. On the one hand I want to just XP you and fully concur with your assessment that alignment has been so muddled over the years by different often contradictory descriptions, and that what players need is greater clarity, lists of what they are normally compelled or not compelled to do by the alignment and a way to easily and symmetrically judge at least a high level where a particular set of beliefs ought to go in the grid. Yes, I fully agree that alignment has never been presented well in D&D's published canon and that that is I think at the heart of why it is abandoned or scorned despite being an integral and novel part of D&D.

But on the other hand, you seem to make the assumption that investigating philosophical concerns in game is not a part of fantasy play, and that the purpose of alignment is to handwave such concerns away so that the players can get on with whatever the real focus of play is. And I kind of agree with you if what you mean is that clear alignment answers should stop OOC debates between the players, but what I think alignment should never do is take focus away from IC game debate, exploration, and examination of moral philosophy. Because otherwise, we don't have much justification for making 'good' and 'evil' part of the story at all, and if no justification for that, then not much justification for playing fantasy which seems to be as a genera rather about heroism and consequently ethics and morality. For example, most of the major works in the genera - The Lord of the Rings, the Earthsea Cycle, The Book of the New Sun, or even something like Chronicles of the Dragonlance or Feist's D&D inspired Riftwar Sage - are explicitly novel length explorations by their authors of what it means to be good, and even the fairy tale or the heroic epic which is the foundation of fantasy is fundamentally on the same theme.

And finally, while I agree that greater clarity is desirable, and that simple to use lists are also desirable, I think it is also important to consider that I think more than anything it has been seemingly 'simple' lists provided for classes like Paladin, Ranger, and Cavalier that has led to the endless debates, table conflict, and frustration. Because too often you see on those lists gamist imperatives like 'never run away' which lack a lot of the nuance and practical wisdom found in real world ethical codes and the arguments end up being over, "Was this meant fully literally?" (fundamentalism) or "It's the spirit of the thing that counts, and this it open to interpretation" (jurisprudence)?