D&D General Deleted

[James Gasik]

Actually that brings up a question. Is poison spray evil in 5e?

 

[Krachek]

View attachment 365348

And the Warlock whim, « nobody think I’m the bad guy of the party ».

 

[Umbran]

Sticking to the questing knight, how would we create a RPG where the quest is analogous to a Grail Quest without linking that to righteous violence, assumptions about which places are to be treated as subordinate to other places, understandings of whose claims to truth and right really count, etc?

I don't know that we have to divorce from righteous violence, since we already allow loads of unrighteous violence. The game is allowing for murderhobos who kill things to take their stuff. Why should we have an issue with someone at least trying to do some good in the process? We only accept violence when it is cold, "just business, nothing personal"?

The Crusades were a lot more than "assumptions about which places are to be treated as subordinate," so this strikes me as a red herring. The questing knight isn't about taking and holding territory, and could be thoroughly respectful of local sovereignty as they quest through.

The questing knight is likewise not about imposing claims to truth and right on others. It is about personally living up to a vision of truth and right.

Indeed, the questing knight is a construction of the romanticists - who gave emphasis to inspiration, subjectivity, and primacy of the individual. There's a strong argument that, literarily speaking, the questing knight is a direct and explicit rejection of the Crusading knight that lays claim to objective truths and enforces it on others. So, our link to the issues can be about contrasting with the assumptions of real-world history.

My point is that we don't escape the underlying archetype by pointing to the occasional departure from it.

I think the point may be that the departures are not "occasional". They are frequent. If you dismiss them each as individually not meaningful, you dismiss the forest by dismissing each tree. But you still end up standing in the middle of the forest.

Similarly, while it may be true that contemporary D&D play often dilutes or ignores the religious, as opposed to moral, component of the archetype, the underlying archetype endures: the notion of truth, righteousness, etc. I mean, even the 5e D&D paladin doesn't just have a hunch, an inclination or even a conviction. They swear an oath!

They swear an oath for themselves - it being personal is important to the romantic movement that defined the Questing Knight. That oath generally doesn't include virality - the oath isn't about making others stick to the oath.

 

[MGibster]

And, IMO, that's a good thing. The fantasy genre that D&D attempts to model is also a lot broader than it was in the 70's. And the game has a broader fan base as well. So, distancing the paladin from it's "lawful stupid" roots and allowing a wider array of character types to be represented in the class is a good thing.

What fantasy genre does D&D attempt to model? At this point, I feel as though D&D is pretty much its own thing. Actually, I came to that conclusion way back in 1991 when I tried using AD&D 2nd edition to run a campaign using the setting from Wheel of Time. It got 15 year old me thinking about how AD&D really didn't fit any fantasy book I had ever read. (I had never read anything by Jack Vance or Michael Moorcock so the whole origin of the law/chaos or fire & forget spells was lost on me.)

I certainly won't deny D&D was influenced by fantasy works. You can clearly see the DNA of Tolkien (despite the protestations of Gygax), Howard, and even Rowling these days. But does it emulate any of those works? I don't think so. Maybe they were aiming to model those kinds of things in 1974 but it quickly grew into its own thing.

 

[MGibster]

Probably the next question should be - what MADE a Paladin Lawful Stupid, and is every LG paladin actually LS?

In my experience, players made the Paladin Lawful Stupid. And I don't just mean the Paladin's player. I've seen groups try to distract the Paladin while they torture a prisoner, steal, or otherwise do pretty bad stuff. And I mean in the most obvious stupid ways possible. The Paladin isn't stupid and when he comes back to see the prisoner missing a few fingers and teeth he's going to put two and two together. But plenty of groups expected the Paladin to buy whatever flimsy excuse they gave him and often the player did just to avoid interparty conflict and derailing the game.

One of my worst experiences as a DM in dealing with a Paladin was when I was running a Living Greyhawk scenario for a group of folks I didn't know. There was a Paladin in the group who would cast Detect Evil every single time they encountered a new NPC. I don't remember the specifics of the scenario, but the first half of it involved talking to a lot of different NPCs in town. After the 4th or 5th time I told the player to stop asking and that I would tell him if he ran into someone who was evil.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know that we have to divorce from righteous violence, since we already allow loads of unrighteous violence. The game is allowing for murderhobos who kill things to take their stuff. Why should we have an issue with someone at least trying to do some good in the process? We only accept violence when it is cold, "just business, nothing personal"?

Yeah, D&D is a game where violence is largely the point. Characters will be killing things, that is part of the fun, I don't see any reason why it can't be righteous. That doesn't mean people have to take a simplistic worldview of violence and morality into life. It just means people enjoy playing martial characters with honor codes (which exist in anything from Arthurian Romance to Gangster movies to Wuxia)

 

[Kaiyanwang]

D&D -- especially 3.x -- has some very wonky definitions of Lawful and specifically Lawful Good.

Lawful is somehow the worst described component of the entire disaster of the alignment descriptions: a fetid pile of ideas that don't necessarily go together: civilization, honesty, honor, law-abiding, ordered, regular, blah, blah blah.

Then the examples of Lawful entities is worse: literal robot men who fight the concepts of change and freedom with extreme, unrelenting brutality.

Then-then the iconic Paladin is straight up a psychopath, described as 'fighting evil without mercy' and the Paladin code paints a picture of a very unpleasant person who can't work with your standard home invaders with a mandate D&D party who can't step out of line even once or the DM is carefully instructed to punish them.

All in all, it's a miracle that ANY reasonable Paladins got played, because the instructions clearly tell you to play one of the worst kinds of people: a holier than thou hypocrite who murders when they don't get their way for fear of God giving them a spanking for not doing so.

To me this sounds just a failure of understanding context or willingly doing to for an advantage by some problematic player. Also the robots are LN, not LG. Not relevant.
Your interpretation of the code is also less than charitable. I frankly don't see anything hampering usual adventuring unless the party is evil. In that case, that's not a paladin-appropriate campaign.
Actual, true evil should be fought without mercy indeed. Is a threat to be destroyed. I can understand early examples about orc babies but we are past that since 3e.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

Yep. The Paladin had always been far too heavy on the "destroy anything that deviates" and putting...basically zero emphasis on being a good person. 3.x just made this phenomenon dramatically worse because of the presentation and the specific implementation of failing to uphold one's alignment.

Well, that and the rules almost cried out for DMs to be bungholes about it too. "Be lawful or be good, either way you're f---ed" is a stereotypical Bad DMing Horror Story for a reason.

There is absolutely nothing in 3e doing what you suggest. 3e defines good, defines LG, and defines what a Paladin should and should not do, in the extent of its expectactions.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

Yes. The OP's initial concern was, very specifically, that that legacy remains too strong in the existing thing.


Not at all. The claim--which I don't agree with, but take far more seriously than you do--is that merely dropping the "it's specifically Christians fighting specifically Muslims and declaring them Pure Evil to be Destroyed Without Mercy" isn't enough. I would draw analogies to other archetypes that one could compare, but...well, I mean, by definition they're going to be deeply inflammatory because that's the whole point, that this archetype has roots that are necessarily Extremely Bad and we should think about what that means.

My conclusion is that for other reasons than you claim (because I dispute those reasons, but not other reasons), the Paladin is fine. It has genuinely grown both beyond and apart from its origins to the point that it's a distinct thing now.


If you'd read even one of my earlier posts, you would know how I feel about this, and would never have said such a thing. If you're going to claim to be arguing seriously, it behooves you to actually engage with the things others have said. I have repeatedly said that I think the Paladin has grown beyond its roots.

But the archetype has not roots there. I have even shown that thinking every crusader was heavily armored is another historical misconceptions. Axe to grind?

 

[Kaiyanwang]

In my experience, players made the Paladin Lawful Stupid. And I don't just mean the Paladin's player. I've seen groups try to distract the Paladin while they torture a prisoner, steal, or otherwise do pretty bad stuff. And I mean in the most obvious stupid ways possible. The Paladin isn't stupid and when he comes back to see the prisoner missing a few fingers and teeth he's going to put two and two together. But plenty of groups expected the Paladin to buy whatever flimsy excuse they gave him and often the player did just to avoid interparty conflict and derailing the game.

One of my worst experiences as a DM in dealing with a Paladin was when I was running a Living Greyhawk scenario for a group of folks I didn't know. There was a Paladin in the group who would cast Detect Evil every single time they encountered a new NPC. I don't remember the specifics of the scenario, but the first half of it involved talking to a lot of different NPCs in town. After the 4th or 5th time I told the player to stop asking and that I would tell him if he ran into someone who was evil.

I think the first paragraph is mostly about people that enjoy playing psychopaths and pay no consequences if a LG character able to inflict violence is around.
I feel more the second part, but I am personally against at-will magical detection.