So often on ENworld people use the second person, or in this case the plural first person, when they should use the singular first person.
I have no reason to doubt that you are talking truthfully about how you play D&D, and that you interpret your dice rolls as signs of the happenings in a nihilistic fiction. But your generalisation is false, at least as far as I am concerned. It's false in regard to the power imputed to the GM - why would the GM have to be the one to make the determination, in order for it to be true in the fiction? - and it is false about what "we" know about the narrative.
Because the idea of Providence, which you have pointed to repeatedly, is the realm of the Gods. And the Player is not the person who determines what the Gods think or how they act. So they are not the ones who can declare whether or not the Gods favor someone.
Here is an actual play example from 4e D&D (and the mechanic did not even involve a die roll, just an instruction that a certain effect imposed by a NPC would come to an end at a certain point):
Contrary to what you (Chaosmancer) say that "we" know and do, you will see that (i) the player established the fiction, and (ii) that the fiction did not pertain to mechanical inevitability but rather to divine intercession.
And this is still a LIE. The Raven Queen did not intercede, because we know why the effect ended, and it had nothing to do with anything except time. The paladin would also be establishing the exact same level of fiction if they declared "But my anti-frog underwear turned me back!"
And this is IMPORTANT, incredibly so, because the difference between a Providence and a self-aggrandizing story is whether or not it is actually TRUE.
In the novel Watership Down, one of the villains is killed before they can kill the protagonists. The Rabbit Protagonists believe this was Divine Intervention, that the gods acted to defeat this evil villain... he was hit by a train. We, as the human readers, know that this was not Divine Intervention, the train was simply running like trains do, with no regard to anything that a bunch of rabbits were doing.
And this is a common descontruction of Providence narratives, of showing or revealing that it is all a lie, that what they thought was Divine Intervention was nothing of the sort. That it is a self-delusion, which is exactly what you are presenting here. The Paladin says the Raven Queen saved him, but the exact same thing would have happened if any other party member was turned into a frog, or if any random monster that cultist targeted was turned into a frog. Because we know the duration of the ability, and we know the truth. The Paladin is wrong.
Here is an actual play example from Burning Wheel (I posted an outline of my PC Thurgon
upthread):
The successful dice roll
at the table establishes something about
the fiction, namely, that the Lord of Battle has answered Thurgon's prayer.
But this is a completely different situation, because the mechanics of Burning Wheel allow you to pray for divine favors. You are essentially rolling a persuasion check on the Gods, to convince them to do as you ask. That isn't anything like what you have been calling for, because it is a different system.
To use this same character to form an example of what I feel like you have proposed, imagine for a second you rolled for this prayer, and the GM after you failed said "The Lord of Battle has found Thurgon is too cowardly to continue his quest, he has removed his favor so that he may find a more suitable champion". That
could be a valid interpretation of the god not answering his prayers, but that would be a rather terrible way to respond to a single failed roll, to force upon your character a cowardice that previously did not exist, simply to explain why you failed. But, if you were truly meant by Providence to continue, then you wouldn't have failed, so if you failed, it must be Providence deciding you are unworthy. Which I find deeply problematic.
In other words, the way that you approach action resolution, and its relationship to the fiction, is not the only possible way. Which is something I have posted upthread more than once.
I never said it was the only way. But when the entire point of Providence is that there is no random chance, looking at random chance and declaring it Providence is used to undercut the entire literary point. Multiple stories have been written featuring religious characters who have believed random acts have divine significance, and shown them as frothing at the mouth fools for reshaping their entire lives based on a truly random event of no significance.
In this particular instance, looking at random dice and declaring them Providence is exactly in lie with the literary tropes that mock and subvert the tropes of Providence. You can do so, but you may as well say the story is showing the Divine Right of Kings by having a random person of common birth stumble into a coronation, get crowned, and run a state into the ground. You can claim it was their Divine Right to Rule, but you are engaging in the anti-thesis of that trope in the process.
What do we know about the fiction, until it has been established? What do we know about ultimate victories, until they have been played out at the table?
Perhaps faith is irrational, and hope will be dashed. That must have been how it looked to some of the faithful, as they were washed up on the shores of Middle Earth. Or to some of the people of (fallen) Arnor, as their kingdom fell into ruin under the depredations of Angmar. Etc. But hope (Estel) prevailed in the end.
Suppose that I am playing Thurgon, and am defeated in single combat by a knight who is false? Does that show that it is not true that no knight who is false can beat one who is true? Does it show that there is no providence at work in the world? Or does it push me to ask, as Thurgon, "How was I false? What sin have I not purged?" Or even, "What purpose is at work here?"
You are assuming nihilism, and then drawing nihilistic conclusions. That's your prerogative. But it's not the only possibility in FRPGing.
Again, you can make up whatever you want, but once you are looking at random dice and making up whatever story they are telling, you have moved away from the conceit that an all-knowing higher power has pre-written the events. It is a false premise at that point, a self-delusion. Because you know that you are adding meaning on after the event has passed. And again, this is the EXACT thing that is done to deconstruct Providence stories. The character who loses, and thinks they lost their gods favor, but did not lose because of that, is a character whom I have seen in literature. And they are not a character who is blessed by Providence.
Again, assertions that may well be true for you, but are not true in general.
Here is Gygax from p 81 of his DMG, discussing the in-fiction logic of the saving throw roll:
A character under magical attack is in a stress situation, and his or her own will force reacts instinctively to protect the character by slightly altering the effects of the magical assault. This protection takes a slightly different form for each class of character. Magic-users understand spells, even on an unconscious level, and are able to slightly tamper with one so as to render it ineffective. Fighters withstand them through sheer defiance, while clerics create a small island of faith. Thieves find they are able to avoid a spell's full effects by quickness/
Obviously if the saving throw fails, this casts doubt on the cleric's faith. If my roll, playing Thurgon, had failed to invoke the desired miracle, that would have cast significant doubt on Thurgon's faith. Or perhaps would have suggested some other divine purpose. I don't know exactly what the fiction would have been, because it didn't have to be authored, and so wasn't.
But the general point is that there is no reason, when playing a PC in a FRPG that takes the paladin ideal seriously, to assume that the player is always able to determine the strength and adequacy of their PC's faith.
I may be mistaken, but weren't saving throws their own roll back in the day, not tied to ability scores? So Gygax's logic on how they worked no longer applies, because they function entirely differently? I mean, how is my sickly wizard failing a constitution saving throw against snake venom, because they don't understand a spell?
And, I would say unsurprisingly, Player Agency over their characters has increased quite a lot since Gygax wrote that all those decades ago. And since you are trying to sell that all Paladin narratives need this idea of Providence to function properly, if random die rolls are determining the faith of every Paladin PC, and no other character, we have a serious issue with the structure of the game.
I don't know what natural law has to do with this. As I already posted, Arthur is not making a prediction or purporting to state a natural law. He is affirming his faith, and announcing his conviction in the workings of providence.
Mediaeval people were not unaware that bad things could happen to good people; that sometimes cheats were victorious. There are various ways of responding to this, both in real life and in how one engages with faith and providence in fiction. You are asserting that FRPGing must take one particular approach. I know from my own play experience - some examples have been given just above - that you are wrong.
Right, but unlike medieval people who could only speculate whether or not bad things happened to good people because they were really, secretly bad people, or if it was because there was no providence, the players at the table factually know why it happens. Any speculation we add on top of that is an excerise in self-delusion.
Is it? Much ink has been spilled on this question, not to mention much blood in the Wars of Religion. It doesn't seem to be something that will be settled on these forums.
If you are talking about real-life? Sure, but talking about real-life seems entirely beside the point when speaking about literature written by an author with complete control of all aspects of the story, and a game where dice are rolled. Neither of those is real life.
When the Monks wrote tales of God's Knights being protected by Providence and allows overcoming their foes because they embodied the virtues of the church... they weren't secretly reaching over to their dice cups to roll and see if the Knight succeeded. They also didn't follow a real knight and record their real actions. They were writing a story that they already knew the ending to, and they knew exactly why those events were playing out the way they did. That was the origin of Providence in literature. It was not added into the story after the fact.
I find you use of "lie" to describe the process of "making up imaginary stuff in the course of playing a RPG" rather annoying. What I call it is authoring or imagining. As for you saying that I am pretending the rolls are not random, given that you quoted me posting "it is random at the table" I'd prefer you not impute to me a belief that you know I don't hold.
The fact that your game was "a mess" tells you something about you. It tells you nothing about me. I have GMed games with paladins, and knights errant, without those games being a mess. I've given a few examples in this post. If you're interested, I'm happy to post more about the techniques that I use. They don't involve the sort of GM-driven thing that you seem to be envisaging.
The fact that things rub you up the wrong way is your prerogative. I would therefore advise you not to play PCs who have a providential mindset. (I also note that you frame the response to the character losing in second person terms - "you lost the duel . . . you must not be as pure-hearted a character as you claim". This again, to me, suggests your idea of how shared fiction is established is via GM dictation. You might notice that the examples of play I have given involve the player speaking about their character in the first person.)
I have no problems with stories featuring Paladins and Knights-Errant. I have had plenty of those. I had a problem with a game of Fated Destiny. Of "these are the things that will happen". Of course I see that as GM-Driven, because only the GM could possibly enforce a specific set of actions coming to pass leading to a specific result.
You can't play a game where you guarantee that Aragorn will rise to be the King of Gondor, because in his fight against the Ring-Wraiths he could be stabbed six times and die. IF you then still want to hold that he is going to be King, you need to bring him back from the dead, have him be king while dead, or have the real person who is going to be king name his son that, none of which was the original destined ending. Which means that there was no destiny. Again, the very concept of Providence is deeply tied to the idea of a Divine Plan, a Divine Plan that does not deviate or change. I call declaring actions as Providence after they happen a lie, because it involves declaring that whatever changes happened to the plan, were the real plan all along. Which, again, is a satirzation and deconstruction of Providence narratives. The idea of changing the plan after a random event, then declaring that plan always to have been the true plan, is not how a story of Providence is structured.
I have already stated that I regard Planescape as incoherent.
Sticking to the core of AD&D, nothing states that the gods of Limbo are "equally as important as good", nor that chaos is a "worthy goal". Yes, these beings grant supernatural powers to their adherents. That doesn't tell us anything about their value. I've already quoted the passages from Gygax's PHB and DMG which make it clear that things of value are subsumed under the label "good". Chaotic neutral people, and their gods, affirm freedom, randomness, disorder and entropy even when this is at the expense of value. That is not good. Nor worthy. Upthread I've described it as type of fetishism. You could say that it is a type of nihilism, or even a type of aestheticism. (Perhaps a caricature of a certain approach to existentialism.)
Nothing in the system requires me to accept that, although a type of disregard of value, it is nevertheless valuable.
If you only define value as good, then of course anything non-good is defined to have no value. But that isn't how the system works. You know it isn't how it works, because you keep declaring the modern version of how DnD works as Planescape and calling it incoherent, and instead trying to force the discussion to be about Gygax and his insistance that Lawful Good was the only real alignment of any value.
Seriously? Your first two sentences here are neither coherent nor logical, yet I argue against them thus: if someone asserts that 2+2 = 5, they are not asserting something coherent or logical. They can be refuted, by producing a set-theoretic demonstration that 2+2 = 4. Or even just by the process of counting - holding up two finger on one hand, and then two on another, and then counting them off "1, 2, 3, 4" (credit to Wittgenstein for this particular argument).
As for the last sentence, do you really regard it as a sufficient refutation of a proposition that someone else denies it?
You seemed to think just saying "Plato thought that was a dumb idea" was enough. Are we supposed to just blindly accept that every single view of Plato or Kant is true without further consideration?
I at least give them the benefit of the doubt that their arguments went beyond "this is dumb and incoherent, you are wrong" like I would say to someone who wanted to insist that 2+2=5 without any mathematical proof. You keep accusing me of nihilism, which is a philosophical position, and someone had to argue it, and argue it after Plato made his arguments. Was that person simply immediately wrong because Plato thought the opposite? Or do you believe he is wrong for REASONS, which can be explored and discussed, which if you take and hold certain things as true, make complete sense, but you disagree on those things which are held true in that excersise?
You, however, do keep taking the position of just declaring that you are correct, and any view that is more nuanced is incoherent and wrong, even if in the game world we are discussing, it is presented as an objective fact.
Yes.
@TwoSix said that "If the paladin is deciding what's right and good, and placing their own judgment AHEAD of the judgment that their deity has rendered already (by creating the oath), that's the chaotic act of pride that requires the paladin to atone."
I don't really follow what the argument is here.
The paladin, being LG, is convinced that a certain degree of order and external discipline is necessary to permit valuable things - life, happiness, truth, beauty - to flourish on a widespread scale. They may be right or wrong - I've said nothing about that, and as per what I've already posted that would be something to discover in play - but that is their conviction, as noted by their LG alignment.
The LN person asserts that order and external discipline ought to be submitted to
regardless of whether they foster valuable things.
And so we can see where they come apart: suppose it turns out that order and external discipline are not fostering valuable things, for the paladin this will prompt a crisis of faith -
perhaps the CG people were right after all! - whereas for the LN person this does not prompt any sort of crisis at all. Even if beauty and truth and happiness are being crushed by the order and the discipline, they take comfort in the fact of order itself.
Now you may not think this contrast between worldviews, and the sort of scenario that would bring it to light and make it something to care about, is very interesting. Fair enough. In that case Gygax's alignment system has nothing useful to offer, and you would be best off just abandoning it.
Oh, I abandoned Gygax's alignment, well, technically I abandoned 3.5's non-gygax alignment, forever ago. I think the entirety of the system is fundamentally broken and ignore it at every opportunity.
However, despite that, it is still how the game is presented.
And, yeah, I get that you don't understand the argument, because you refuse to consider that value can exist outside of goodness. What if that LN individual could prove to you that beauty, truth, and happiness could not possibly exist without order and external discipline? What if, sure those things are nice, but the truly valuable things are something else entirely? After all, beauty being Good would mean ugliness is bad, and that's a dangerous position to take. I particularly hate Sune from FR (and I do mean HATE) because she takes the position that ugliness is evil and all that is ugly must be destroyed. Truth? The truth can be cruel and ruinous, and we've already discussed quite a bit about how lies are not presented as automatically evil in DnD. Happiness? Demons would be hapy devouring and torturing people, is ensuring their happiness good?
You keep attempting to argue from a position of already being completely correct. You are arguing that the only things of value are LG, that LG is correct and has the only things of value, and therfore the other alignments have nothing of value and are wrong. You've presumed your conclusion, and refuse to see if there are any other positions that are possible.
