D&D General Deleted

@Levistus's_Leviathan's concerns are quite valid, IMO.
Agreed 100%

Paladins, as originally described, both in the text and in the artwork, borrow heavily from sources that are, to put it mildly, icky.
A bit less agreed. I would say it's less the text and artwork, than the connotations that they bring with them.

I agree with @Levistus's_Leviathan in making the comparison to the connotations that Orcs bring with them.

The thing is, the 5e paladin, and the whole alignment baggage that comes with it, has largely ejected most of the imagery and ties to the historical crusader paladin.

<snip>

We ARE fixing this. We are aware of the issues and steps are being taken to move past this. It's no different, really, than the ten thousand other bits of ickiness that fantasy as a genre is full of. We've gone a long way towards stripping Lovecraft out of the Mythos. We've gone a long way towards stripping Tolkien out of orcs.

And all of this is a good thing. Are we finished? Is it job done? No, not really. But, we should recognize that we've come a long way from Orcs of Thar.
I don't play 5e D&D, and so can't really comment on the way that it presents paladins. I do think it's fair to say that there's no simple recipe for eliminating these connotations.
 

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Sorry, but, what's an "Arborea"?

The D&D The Plane call Olympian Glades of Arborea, its the Chaotic Good Plane with 3 layers. Top layer is the most diverse, with both Mount Olympus and the Seldarine, along the homes of other Gods, most not human Gods. And the Hall of the Senates.

2nd Layer is a big ocean some say with islands on top, home to a bunch of Aquatic Gods, Oceanus Dragons and other cool stuff.

3rd Layer is a giant desert filled with Mysterious Ruins, some suggestions of connections with the Mulhorandi and Untherite Gods.


 

Have you not noticed that, like, half of American government buildings are modelled on Greek and Roman architecture?

You're really conflating a lot of things that had complicated origins, mostly unconnected to the Crusades. It's impossible to pin an exact starting date on the concepts of knightly chivalry, but they largely grew out of the traditions of the court of Charlemagne, or at least as those traditions were later romanticized. The notion of a knight errant comes from the tradition of chivalric romances that, again, evolved over many centuries (the term itself comes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem written well after the Crusades but connected to the Arthurian mythos which predates the Crusades, extended through the time of the Crusades, and remains popular today). Chivalric romances weren't about crusading at all; they were about courtly ideals and tales of daring.

As well, the Crusades were not a monolithic event in the high middles ages in Europe. They were very significant at certain times, but very intermittently and regionally. How, when, and where they were conducted was a result of a lot of factors, especially trade, feudal politics, and the complicated relationships between church and state. But most of the time, most places in Europe were not concerned with any Crusades, and they were not the raison d'être for knighthood or chivalry.

In your OP you also sort of caricature knights as all being basically like henchmen for higher ranking nobles - enforcers, and so forth. This is a gross over-simplification. The rights and responsibilities of knights were vastly different across Europe and at different times. In general, though, knights were considered respectable and important, and many had considerable power. There were knights and there were knights.

Crusading was usually considered a badge of honour, for sure, at the occasional times and places when there was a crusade being organized. But these were always also political events of a very complicated nature, which is why they pretty invariably went sideways.

TLDR: Knighthood was and is a lot bigger than the Crusades, and I very much doubt that most people immediately think of the Crusades when they think of medieval knights. I suspect that most people think first of King Arthur and his court, which comes from chivalric romances. I think that is where the notion of the paladin, specifically a questing knight, resides.

Edit: You mentioned questing for holy relics and such. Holy relics were big business throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, before, during, and after the Crusades. Holy relics are still big business today, for that matter, and not just for Christians. But most knights in chivalric romances weren't questing for religious relics. It was usually love and honour.

I think it also bears mentioning, that questing for Holy Relics was not unique to Medieval Europe. Jason and the Argonauts was a story specifically about a prince going on a quest for a Holy Relic, the Golden Fleece which was from a winged ram sacrificed to Zeus and symbolized kingship and authority.

Now it wasn't common, most Greek Myths involved questing to destroy monsters or save towns... which was also something medieval knight stories covered, with freeing towns from illegitimate rulers or destroying beasts such as dragons.
 

Ummm, yes?

Yes, you should have an issue with the image of the crusader knight. I'm not really sure how anyone can honestly not have an issue with the imagery. The holy warrior that kills the unbeliever is pretty hard to defend as a morally just image.

So, yeah, given the choice? I'm going to side with the idea that everyone should have an issue with this.

Now, as I said earlier, and repeatedly, I believe that D&D has moved well past this imagery. The "crusader knight" hasn't really been part of D&D for a very long time. And both the classes and the art surrounding paladins has largely rejected the "crusader knight" as a trope.

And this is a point where I think there can be a lot of nuance that goes beyond the static imagery.

  • The holy warrior that kills the unbeliever? Yep, that is bad, not a fan of that.
  • The holy warrior that defends the faithful? I... don't explicitly have a problem with that. It is generally harder to dislike the idea of defense, because anyone that a guardian style character tends to fight, was generally picking a fight to start with.
  • The holy warrior that kills unspeakable monsters from beyond time and space? I again don't have a specific problem with this one. Face Eating monsters are bad, I don't want people to have their faces eaten.
Now, one could argue, likely successfully, that these concepts can get blended together in problematic ways. The person who defends by going out and killing those who believe differently... isn't really defending in my book. But people have and will make that claim, because of course they will.
 

Yeah attacking and defending leaves no room for nuance - such as reclaiming from the "unbeliever" thats why I'm not such a fan of ppl painting (romanticising) history the other way.
Hence my post upthread about Paladins existing on both sides...and just leaving it grey.

EDIT: Paladins are good guys in D&D, from their perspective. They can also be wrong about their position.
 
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The 5e terminology requires clarification. Spelljammer is part of the 5e Astral Plane, and players can encounter Alighnment Planes while travelling the Astral Sea. Also many features are now in the Ethereal − Feywild and Shadowfell − rather than in the Astral Plane.

Generally, there is the alignment "plane" as a whole, such Chaotic Good Arborea. But then this plane itself is made out of many planes. An alignment plane can include exclaves, namely islands that are part of the alignment plane yet separate from it..

It helps to refer to an alignment plane as a whole as a "plane". However every alignment planes is actually made out of a network of planar "domains". When diagramming a conceptual map, these domains can have any relationship with each other, but all form portals connecting to each other because, within the mindscape, they all have the same alignment in common. Sometimes one must be in one dominion before finding the access point to an other dominion, hence there is a concept of layers. There can be "layers" of dominions.

For example, the domain of Sigil is inside the domain of True Neutral Outlands.

Comprising parts of Chaotic Good Arborea, the elven dominion of Arvandor "borders" the Greekesque dominion of Olympus, but since one can arrive to one without the other, really both are "first layer" neighbors.

Etcetera.

One can travel by spelljammer to any first level dominion. Visually it is a dominion that appears as an "island" in the Astral Sea. These islands are bigger on the inside than they appear from the outside, sometimes infinitely so. The appearance of these islands look like the drawings of them in earlier D&D Astal maps. One can see the entire mountain of Mount Celestia on its island, with its seven terraces layering upward. Even if trying to reach a higher level directly by spelljammer, it is impossible, it skews either upward above the island or downward onto the foot of the mountain on the island itself. It is spacially anomalous. The only way to reach an upper Celestine dominion is to travel thru the lower dominions indirectly.

Because an alignment plane can have many separate domains, any of these planes by itself can represent the entirety of a alignment plane. For example, in some settings Avandor might exist, but Olympus doesnt exist, or conversely, Olympus exists but Avandor doesnt. An other setting might have something completely different for its Chaotic Good mindscape. This fluidity allows multicultural representation. Any reallife culture can have something that inspires the idea of a Chaotic Good place, namely a place that heightens the concept of "altruism among individualists". This place is for D&D a "dominion" with the mindscape of the Astral Sea.


Certain "dominions" that formerly existed in the Astral Sea in previous D&D editions, now exist as "domains" within the Ethereal. For example, the Eladrin are now natives of the Feywild, rather than Avandor of Arborea. The Eladrin homes are Fey domains. Or rather, the Eladrin governmental courts are now part of the network of "Fey Courts", and each court is its own domain. As natives of the Unaligned Feywild, most Eladrin dont have Chaotic Good alignment, and those who dont would feel little or no personal affinity with Avandor in Arborea, even if Corellon their sacred ancestor happens to be personally Chaotic Good. Thus most "Trances" are about the Feywild, not about Avandor.

Elsewhere, "Hades" used to serve as a name for the Neutral Evil alignment plane. But now since 4e and 5e, Hades is the same thing as the entire plane of Shadowfell. Namely the concept and location of the "underworld", that is any grave individually or grouply. Within the Astral Plane, the Neutral Evil alignment planes does better to go by its other name "Gray Wastes", or perhaps simply "Wastes". Its inhabitants can be Wasters or Wastelanders. Wasters refer to the True Evil alignment that is predatory and via tactics of either Lawful groups or Chaotic individuals exploits and parasites others for ones own gain and at their expense.


The Norsesque areas of Jotunheimr and Ásgárðr are animistic concepts and dont belong in the Astal Plane. They are very much part of the Material Plane. Moreover, assigning the same Chaotic Good alignment to an entire reallife culture is problematic. (I think a "faction" can exhibit an alignment because it comprises conceptual ideals and policies. But to stereotype an entire ethnicity is inevitably a bad game design.) The Norwegian view of Þórr, Óðinn, and Loki is more like Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, and Chaotic Neutral respectively. Probably Þórr has tendencies toward Good, and Loki tendencies toward Evil. These figures are aspects of nature. The fertilizing summer storms, the sky as a whole, and the concept of "entanglement", whence borderlessness, including interactivity, even genderfluidity, as well as trickery and misdirection. Christian traditions associate Loki with the satan as a "deceiver". However, the Norse tales never portray Loki as a liar who says something untrue. Rather, Loki is a trickster who says things that are true but in a way that can outwit opponents.

All of the Norse concepts are animistic ones. One is literally looking at Þórr when looking at anay storm clouds, similar to the way certain American Indigenous are looking at a Thunderbird when looking at a storm cloud. Þórr can project a humanlike form, but is the clouds and lightning literally. In D&D terms, the "hidden" activities of nature beings are happening within the Border Ether. In the context of Fate, the "Primordeal Law" (ørlǫg), the nature beings such as Alfar that orient toward success, life and new posibilities, seem more Fey and are part of the Positive Ethereal Border. Oppositiely, the nature beings such Dvergar that orient toward failure, death and cataclysmic entropy, seem more Shadow and are part of the Negative Ethereal Border. Yggdrasill itself is a cosmic tree, whose ethereal branches spread out over the material known world and whose roots pervade its subterranean. The "Sky" (himinn), also called Ásaheimr, exists ethereally among the clouds, where the clouds are like "wide muck" flung across the branches. However, Ásgarðr is a place on earth, a field on a mountain, a sacred natural landscape feature where the sky beings project from their respective features of the sky, traveling down the rainbow, to the earthy place of their parliament, to vote on cosmic issues.

The Norsesque D&D is Ethereal, including Fey and Shadow, and never away from the Material Plane.

The D&D Plane of "Ysgard" can be something else. The rare Norse term "Ysr", means something like "throng", crowds, tumult. This can be a name for Individualism, where crowds of people would be assisting each other in a bewildering diversity of different ways. But it wouldnt be the Norse places. The "courtyard of a throng", the stronghold of diverse crowds, would be a different kind of concept, orienting more clearly with the concept of Chaotic by Chaotic Good.


In sum, the 5e cosmology is nonidentical with the 3e and 1e cosmologies. There are places that are in different locations, and reallife cultural sensitivities have more priority. There needs to be official clarification.
 
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The necessity or inevitability is a property that obtains within the fiction. Not a property of the process of authorship. For instance, and as is well-known, JRRT took several goes to get Strider's identity and lineage sorted out in his writing of LotR. So it's simply not true to say that - from the point of view of the process of composition - Strider was always going to be Aragorn, the destined scion who would restore Gondor to grandeur.

But this fact about the contingency of the process of authoring the story does not affect the content of the story.

Likewise in RPGing. You, the player, see me roll the dice. That doesn't mean that your character saw dice being rolled "in the heavens". Contingency in the resolution process does not preclude necessity in the fiction. I mention, again, the example of Traveller, which uses dice at many points in the resolution process without therefore being committed to any view on whether the physics of the sci-fi world is deterministic or not.

It isn't a matter of authorship, it is a matter of readership. My character may not have seen the dice in the heavens, but the fiction does not exist within my character's mind. It exists within MY mind. And I cannot build a story that I take seriously as "pre-destined" while factually knowing that NONE of it was pre-destined. Because it feels exactly like engaging with 40K's machine spirits and declaring that they are angry with me for not performing the rites with the sacred oils, when I KNOW because the subtext makes it clear, that the real issue is that machines need maintenance and oil, and the characters have simply layered religious significance on top of basic maintenance because they are too ignorant of how it works to do anything else.

I am not sure how many different ways I can try and explain that just because you have a character declare something, doesn't make it actually true. Even if you are a player, just declaring something about the fiction at the table doesn't make it true. See any time the party is in a crime drama, declares they know who the culprit is AND IS WRONG. Even if they never agreed that they would all be wrong.

But of course it can be. A tale about an immutable, divine plan of action can be conjured up on the spot, spontaneously, just as much as it can be written carefully and with revisions. The GM can roll the Ogre up here-and-now on a random encounter table, and then - when framing the encounter with the Ogre, decide that the Ogre's presence right here and now, in this very spot, is some manifestation of a providential plan.

The group could even do this retrospectively if they wanted to, just as JRRT did in respect of Bilbo's encounter with Gollum.

No, I don't believe it can be. Just like I don't think I could play the part of a murder-mystery, pretending to find clues, if I was told who did it, where they did it, and how they did it.

Do you have a god complex? I don't. I am not talking about whether or not the GM, or anyone else, willed something or made it inevitable. I am talking about the content of the fiction, not the process by which it is created.

This is rude beyond the pale. How dare you. Just because I disagree with how one can form narratives in a shared fiction setting does not mean I have a frickin' god complex you insufferable person.

This is why I mention Fate. Suppose that my Fate character has the aspect Chosen by Destiny, or (even better) Providential Purpose. And then that is used to trigger some event which reflects my character's destiny or purpose. By definition, that event was (in the fiction) fore-ordained from the beginning of time, even though (at the table) we only decided here and now to make it part of our story, as part of the process of bargaining over fate chips.

ANd the exact nature of that is being negotiated, which means it was vague. Stories of Providence as written by medieval scholars or by modern day religious writers ARE NOT VAGUE. They don't get bargained away from what they wanted to happen. They don't roll dice to see if they get their way. It is a fundamentally different type of story.

But you don't know that it was possible in the fiction for another thing to happen. All you know is that, at the table, it was possible for us to narrate a different fiction. The latter does not entail the former. Obviously so. It is obvious that from the fact that people write fictions in which determinism is true, or in which determinism is false, we can infer nothing about whether determinism is true or false in the real world. And the converse is likewise obvious: from the fact that there was a random element in what fiction was narrated, and hence it was (in some sense) not necessary or inevitable that that fiction be narrated, it does not follow that in the fiction, the narrated event was not necessary or inevitable. If things were not as I am saying, then it would follow that - if the universe is, in fact, not deterministic or foreordained, then no one could ever tell a story about providence because there would always be some random or contingent factor contributing to their decision as to what to narrate.

Again, as a consumer of the fiction, I see behind the curtain and know that it isn't true. That ruins the entire point of the story. I can't buy in to the fact that it was all fated to happen, when I know as the consumer of the story that that is a lie.

It is like believing the main character of a show really did die in episode three of season 1... when there are seven more seasons with their face plastered all over it. You know that they didn't die. You can't be tricked into believing they did. No matter how much in the fiction everyone believes they are dead and gone forever, you know that isn't what is going on.

This gets to the crux of it. Your PC can't talk to the GM. The process of authorship of the fiction is not itself an element of the fiction. Unless you are breaking the fourth wall in an ironic or absurdist RPG (like Over the Edge).

But the PC has a highly limited viewpoint ANYWAYS. To them, the spell ended and the paladin just went off about it being the will of the goddess... and they have no way to prove or disprove that. Just like if someone watched a statue get struck by lightning and declared it was a sign from the heavens... we have no way to tell if it was, or it wasn't. And so we could react with skepticism.

But you seem to want to insist that just because your character declared that they believed it was true, it was therefore true and everyone must accept it, because you said it was true. Which is almost hilarious, because you keep talking about shared authorship, then indicating that your authorship was the only one that could possibly matter. If I disagree with your authorship, then as another player, we suddenly have a disconnect in the fiction, and only one version is actually true. Because it is one story, not everyone's individual alternate realities.

But of course, I'm supposedly the one with the God Complex, according to you.
 

Yes, i understand that.

And that's the point. At one time, it wasn't all that unusual to see a paladin with an actual cross on their shield or tabard. It was fairly common in D&D art at the time.

Now? No, you never see it. And that's my point. We've gone a long way moving forward from where the paladin was in 1982. And that's a good thing.
Hmm....erasure and/or cultural appropriation? ;)
 

Hmm....erasure and/or cultural appropriation? ;)
Well, you could argue it's the same culture (the West) 800 years down the line.

Or go for power dynamics (which are further in the West's favor at this point, since the Crusaders were ultimately defeated and Jerusalem went to the Mamluk Sultanate).
 

I am not sure how many different ways I can try and explain that just because you have a character declare something, doesn't make it actually true. Even if you are a player, just declaring something about the fiction at the table doesn't make it true.
It is in Neotrad, and other playstyles. You two are arguing from completely different worlds.
 

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