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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 3302287" data-attributes="member: 20741">Torture was not habitually used in the common law systems from the late medieval period onward.  That is one of the reasons the english common law system was favored by many and was seen as more just and lenient.  The French citizens in Quebec insisted on the common law for criminal matters after 1759 to avoid the practic of interrogation and to secure the beneifts of the jury.There was a tradtition in England in the 12th centrury where one could be put "under pressure" (essentially a flat pallette was placed on your chest and stones loaded on to it that made it difficult to breathe - but none of the vast array of torture that became de rigeur on continental europe was officially pemitted.The post about the "lawfulness" of a tortured interrogation is misleading.  It is one thing to say that a confession obtained by torture was admissible evidence.  It is another to say the torutre that procured that evidence was lawful.In the common law system it was not; saying it was so does not make it so.If you want to impose a moral and legal standard of 6th century Denmark or 11th century France in your game - go ahead. But let's not confuse your preferences for the fact that D&D has never assumed this moral and legal atmosphere in its default game world. D&D does not presuppose a simulation of medieval times; instead, it supposes a versimiltude kit-bash of modern ethics, gender equality, medieval weapons and fantasy magic.Lastly - there has oft been a repeat of the statment that "lawfulness" is adhering to one's personal code, whatever it happens to be. While that is true to a point, the quote has clearly been twisted beyond all sense of its original meaning in this discussion - with the result that many people then wholly mistate the concept. Put simply: many posters are confusing lawfulness with consistency.  And they are not the same things at all.The concept of lawfulness of an individual in D&D in such matters relates not to one's sense of wholly arbitrary "personal honor"; it is instead a sense of personal honor that has been  voluntarily adopted from an external code of conduct.And so the Cleric, Wizard, Paladin, or Knight, or Ranger or whatever else you might think up may have a set of rules governing its order and the conduct of members that falls short of "law" but has the force of personal honor behind it. That is an adopted personal honor that falls short of law, but which is nevertheless the yardstick used to measure lawful activity vis-a-vis that character.But Lawfulness is not a buffet of moral beliefs and unrelated ethical practices that you pick and choose over and say your character believes in this, but not that - and then simply acts consistently during gameplay with whatever thuis advantageous buffet selection presupposes is the character's "personal sense of honor".  That's not "lawful" alignment in D&D and never has been. That is consistency - and that's all it is.A Chaotic evil character could act "lawfully" if the salad bar standard of personal honor was the real meaning behind the term of "lawfulness". This does not expose the inherently  borken nature of lawfulness (though it is, indeed, broken in many respects); instead, it exposes that your presumption of "salad bar personal honor" in D&D is an incorrect application of the concept of personal choice over what code of honor the character will adopt.It may be consistent roleplaying - but that's all it is. Lawfulness goes deeper and has an external objective quality that a character's conduct may later be compared to.</blockquote>

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