D&D General Deleted

[TwoSix]

The idea that it is prideful for the paladin to act outside of their oath, because it means they did not trust their god/goddess... assumes that god or goddess is omniscient and always correct. For it to be wrong to see a situation where it appears your oath will cause greater harm than good, when your oath was created potentially thousands of years ago in a completely different context, would require the entity who made that oath to be able to predict this situation and know that the path of the oath as you interpret it, would be the better path.

This is not how deities in DnD work. They are not omniscient. They are not always correct. We know this, because they have been lied to and deceived in the past.

Sure. But I don't think it's much of a stretch to acknowledge that the initial concept of the Paladin was built using the model of medieval Christianity, in which the paladin's deity was defined dogmatically as both omniscient and omnibenevolent.

Does that make the paladin concept kind of incoherent with D&D pantheon henotheism? Almost certainly! That's why we've been arguing about it for 40+ years!

Additionally, it feels very "paper clip maximizer" to me, to consider that they are correct, but only in the long term. That, for example, allowing a small, preventable tragedy would cause more good in the long-run because that is what the math of universe says. This, again, feels like it misses the spirit of what a Paragon archetype should be, and Paladins are the Paragon class. It shouldn't be an equation of maximizing goodness. It should be true-hearted, kind, goodness reaching out to help everyone you can.

And therein lies the tragedy of the paladin.

Yes, the paladin knows that telling a lie to this city guard will save these four orphan children from incarceration and most likely death. But his god has told him he must never lie. If his god has told him he must never lie, then lying here is certainly going to cause pain and evil to flourish. Your god almost certainly has a plan for those children. But now they're crying, and that guard has a cruel look in his eye....

Some players will look at that example and say "That's terrible. You're putting the player in the no-win situation, he has to either break his code OR let terrible things happen to those children." To my mind, those situations are exactly the point of playing an old-school paladin. If my paladin is never in a situation where they were on the absolute cusp of breaking their code, why play a paladin?

 

[Cadence]

Yes, the paladin knows that telling a lie to this city guard will save these four orphan children from incarceration and most likely death. But his god has told him he must never lie. If his god has told him he must never lie, then lying here is certainly going to cause pain and evil to flourish. Your god almost certainly has a plan for those children. But now they're crying, and that guard has a cruel look in his eye....

Some players will look at that example and say "That's terrible. You're putting the player in the no-win situation, he has to either break his code OR let terrible things happen to those children." To my mind, those situations are exactly the point of playing an old-school paladin. If my paladin is never in a situation where they were on the absolute cusp of breaking their code, why play a paladin?

And now I'm wondering if it is wrong for a Paladin to watch a podcast from a Devil on "how to tell the truth and still get what you want".* Does the not lying side of law require telling the whole truth?


* If nothing else they need to know that some lawful beings might use creative wording and be prepared for that.

 

[TwoSix]

And now I'm wondering if it is wrong for a Paladin to watch a podcast from a Devil on how to "how to tell the truth and still get what you want".* Does the not lying side of law require telling the whole truth?


* If nothing else they need to know that some lawful beings might use creative wording and be prepared for that.

Personally, I'd leave that to be a question for the paladin and their deity. But I can't imagine a paladin code that requires them to be a rat or not be allowed to omit any information that isn't asked for.

 

[Cadence]

Personally, I'd leave that to be a question for the paladin and their deity. But I can't imagine a paladin code that requires them to be a rat or not be allowed to omit any information that isn't asked for.

So what's the he best way to set up the business plan where the LE person can make the training material and get most of the gold for the training sessions... but never has to show up in person so that the paladins never gets to use the detect evil on them?

Is it bad that the Paladins will know the LE tricks? Sure, but it syphons off their gold and the use of creative wording could become a habit and lead to infighting and lack of trust, and could be the first step to some of them falling.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, if you read Gygax's PHB and DMG you will see that his description of good encompasses all the major moral outlooks: Benthamism (greatest good of the greatest number), wellbeing, human rights, all the widely recognised values (happiness, beauty, truth, self-fulfilment).

And he describes evil as pursuing self-interest without accepting any sort of moral constraint on legitimate choices.

So the alignment system will not answer any moral questions. I've seen some people suggest that utilitarianism is evil in D&D terms, but not on Gygax's acccount, Nor is Kantianism. Nor is a straightforward virtue ethics. (Some forms of virtue ethics, like Stoicism, probably end up True Neutral in Gygax's scheme, but these are peculiar in that they deny the possibility of human action producing good - in Gygax's language, they are "naturalistic" philosophies.)

It's only if you try to force alignment to answer moral questions, or if you treat statements like Although it's good, it's not what I ought to do as coherent, that alignment breaks down. The poster child for this sort of breakdown, of course, is Planescape.

My complaint with AD&D alignment is more with forcing the L-C/N/G-E into 9 different categories. Some are easier to wrap your head around than others, some feel more intuitive and like real world morality than others, but many seem murky, and not well defined. I think broadly doing G and E would have been fine, broadly doing C and L would have been fine. Again, I can play to the 9 categories of alignment. and I do like having an alignment system in D&D (because I think it can be a cool mechanic to key to things like magic items, spells, character classes, etc). But I must admit I find the 9 alignment system wonky.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I haven't used alignment for decades. The game plays the same. Getting rid of Vancian magic would fundamentally alter the game's design and play, and so I agree that doing so would make the game feel less like D&D.

And I don't object to people disliking alignment or not using it. My only strong disagreement with your post was that these things can't be imagined.

I agree they have different effects on the game. I just think alignment is enough of an essential characteristic of D&D for me, despite my complaints about its particulars, I think removing it or reducing its affect to an aesthetic loses something important to the game for me.

But alignment has always been basically cosmetic. It was originally just there to divide characters and creatures into teams, and then it got a weird cosmology tacked on. It was never hard to do without; there used to be a few more spells and items that you had to alter slightly when you didn't use alignment, but very few. In 5e, alignment really serves no purpose beyond scratching a nostalgia itch for grognards.

I wouldn't see it as cosmetic, if only because it does have palpable effects on characters. For me I don't think it is nostalgia. I play all kinds of RPGs and most don't have anything like alignment. And I can play in a campaign of D&D where the group approaches alignment differently just fine. But I do think alignment adds a certain feel to the game that goes beyond cosmetics (I would even argue that feel is exactly why many people don't like it). Again Ravenloft is my favorite setting and stuff like powers checks don't really work without some concept of alignment (I would argue that Ravenloft its less important to think in terms of all the 9 subdivisions, but the GM is being asked to make calls on whether a particular action is good or evil and those have very real effects on the characters and the setting).

Edit: I don't use it, I run campaigns for beginners every term, and not one has ever asked for it. I just ask them to come up with a backstory and some basic motivations for their characters, and they are off to the races. Asking them to choose an alignment and then try to figure out what that means for how they should play would be clunky, weird, and arbitrary.

That is a fair opinion. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. For me it depends on the game I am playing. I do like some form of alignment in most of my D&D campaigns but I have also run it without alignment. And presently in my fantasy wuxia RPGs, I like using positive and negative Karma (which can matter when players are dealing with things like immortals, gods, monsters, etc).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And now I'm wondering if it is wrong for a Paladin to watch a podcast from a Devil on "how to tell the truth and still get what you want".* Does the not lying side of law require telling the whole truth?


* If nothing else they need to know that some lawful beings might use creative wording and be prepared for that.

For my part: One should avoid intentional deception, except in the case of dealing with an outright enemy. But "outright enemy" does not exclusively mean "literally in the field of combat right now, weapons out, currently attempting to end the life of myself or my allies." It also includes things like "you are a law-abiding Hutu whose Tutsi neighbor is hiding in your basement, and the genocidal government's goons come a-knocking." Such people--those actively engaged in behavior that is utterly unacceptable, regardless of whether they have laws behind them or not--do not merit being told the truth. Their conduct has forfeited that, and duty requires you to protect the innocent.

Now, if possible, you should still stick to the truth, and ideally without varnish. However, if the choice is between speaking the unvarnished truth and preventing objective evil, you should do the latter, while putting effort toward not needing to do that in the future. Likewise, varnished truth is better than outright speaking falsehoods. Careful avoidance of inconvenient facts and intentionally shaping a particular impression, without ever actually telling a falsehood, is preferable to just straight-up telling a lie. But, again, if the choice really, truly is "tell a lie to a wicked person in order to protect the innocent and victimized, OR tell the truth and let an innocent person get murdered", you should 100% of the time tell the lie and make penance for it later.

Being lawful does not require blind adherence--not even LN, though it comes closest since LN passes no judgment about what laws are for, and merely about whether they do what they're made to do. Being LG requires being meticulous; it's the expectation that all of your (morally-relevant) actions have a clear, reasoned, consistent justification. A revolutionary can be LG to the hilt, but their reasoning, choices, and manner will be radically different from a CG or even CE revolutionary. LG is not "what happens when you are torn between being LN and being NG." It is its own distinct thing.

The woman who takes up arms against her King only after having failed to achieve change by any reasonable (and perhaps even some unreasonable) patient means, is not somehow less Lawful for the doing. She is Lawful; she has merely determined that the institution is no longer capable of supporting Good law, and thus, being Lawful Good, it is her duty to abolish that system so that a new system may be constructed in its place that lacks the infirmities preventing Good law.

The actions she takes as a result of that determination will be very different in many ways from the actions a CG person would take. She is likely to remain respectful of, and friendly toward, the King and other authority figures, so long as they surrender. The CG revolutionary? Who the hell knows!

 

[Umbran]

So what's the he best way to set up the business plan where the LE person can make the training material and get most of the gold for the training sessions... but never has to show up in person so that the paladins never gets to use the detect evil on them?

Is it bad that the Paladins will know the LE tricks? Sure, but it syphons off their gold

The older versions of paladin aren't allowed to accumulate wealth for you to siphon off.

Of the new paladins, only the Oath of Devotion has a specific element of Honesty. And you cheat them, the Paladins of Vengeance are going to come knocking, and they have terms of "No Mercy for the Wicked" and "By Any Means Necessary."...

 

[Retros_x]

I feel like the Paladin is the smallest of problems in terms of problematic cultural upbringings of Dungeons & Dragons. While I rarely see a campagin where holy knights travel across the world to bring horrible deeds to followers of a different religion in D&D, I see quite often adventures leaving the "safe and civil" city into the wilderness full of uncivilised savage tribe cultures like goblins, go to their quarters, invade them, kill them all, loot their corpses and chambers and bring the treasures back to the motherland, uhm, hometown. Colionalism and imperialistic Western-centric views are the bread and butter of D&D, holy wars not so much IMO.

But if I would want to get rid the Paladin of that "Crusader" notion I would do basically what 5e already started. Getting rid of that holy warrior notion and focusing more on oaths that are so strong they bring magical power to their bearer. From "holy" crusader to mystic knight. Knights of the round table, not crusaders of the church.

 

[Yaarel]

In my view this way of talking about alignment makes no sense, because if they are just habits then why would LG people conflict with CG people, or for that matter with CE people? This is the issue with Planescape - the contrast between LG, CG and CE seems to be purely an aesthetic one, not a genuine moral or even political one.

LG people also conflict with LG people.

Lawful people disagree with each other about which laws to implement, to keep, and to abolish.

Lawful Good think about how to build the best structures to better the lives of various communities.

There are limited resources, so how people want to use them can conflict with each other.