Breaking the stereotype of the chaste paladin

[NewJeffCTHome]

Do you envision a scenario where casual, consensual sex is not a base vice? There seems to be an implication in your statement that sex for a paladin is essentially a sin regardless of the circumstances, and that even marriage would be considered a vice.

Several folks seems also to be almost suggesting that having children, for a paladin, is a terrible thing. Frankly, that almost makes it sound like children are a penalty or a consequence, not a goal, which is hard for me to wrap my head around. Is a paladin nothing more than a suicide squad member?

It seems that the Arthurian myths are filled with plenty of knights who had consensual sex. One also has to consider that Mallory filtered many of the stories, because he had his own goals to bring to his interpetation, some of which included his own statements about making commentary of love and religion in the England of his time. None of which invalidates peoples notions of what he wrote, just pointing out that there are lots of variants.

Well said WizardDru. While the thread has often gone off on tangents, include one making the paladin a philanderer, I have not said I had intended to make my paladin that way. I had just intended him to father multiple children through marriage to a like minded woman - maybe just a devout follower of the L/G god, or maybe a female cleric of the deity, a female adventurer or noblewoman, or even a female paladin.

 

[WizarDru]

Exactly. I find it easy to envision an order that provides protection at the chapterhouse for the paladin's family, as devout followers. The paladin's family may or may not be in more imminent danger than virtually anyone else. Is there a danger? Certainly. But this applies to many professions and even standard NPCs live at risk in a D&D world. A sheriff or noble is as much a target as a paladin. The paladin may even consider it a duty to raise a family in the face of such adversity, to show that he has no fear that his god would protect the faithful and the just.

 

[fusangite]

I think part of the debate here in this thread is a tension between modern and medieval Christianity. I think that what you guys are doing is updating the paladin into the post-reformation world.

Until Calvin's reformulation of Christianity, Saint Paul spelled it out pretty clearly: "better to marry than to burn." The asexual life was always morally superior to the sexual life. With the advent of Calvinism, the cloistered monk and mendicant friar were deposed as the social ideal and replaced with the patriarchal family.

I think the issue is that for some people like me, having people think in pre-Reformation yet Western ways is central to suspension of disbelief whereas for others, this isn't a particularly important thing at all.

Thus, in modern Christian morality, be it fundamentalist or liberal, there is no inherent conflict between marriage and the embodiment of an heroic ideal. But, in the culture from which we receive the paladin archetype, this conflict was real.

One of the reasons we know this conflict was real is that it is consistently presented as a tension within the heroes of Arthurian romances. The sexuality of the characters humanizes them; it makes them real; it makes readers identify with them. What it does not do is bring them closer to the ideal for which they strive.

I don't think any of us who strongly link fantasy gaming and certain pre-modern forms of thought are stating that it is always wrong for people to de-couple these things. I think what we are doing is noting that there are consequences to this. When you drag the Fighter class across the 16th century, the archetype(s) on which it is based are almost completely unscathed. The same is true of the Wizard. But when you drag the Paladin forward, sideways or backwards in time or geography to when people thought about virtue differently than medieval Europeans, great violence is done to the archetype. Much the same thing happens when you drag the Monk class outside of an Asian setting; the class survives as a mechanic but is not meaningfully linked to the archetype that inspired it.

We can all agree that since 2E, the game mechanics have permitted paladins to support households; so clearly this thread cannot be engaging a mechanical or technical question. It must, therefore, be a cultural question. Issues of resource distribution are essentially irrelevant. Some people are taking the position that the paladin class is inextricably linked to a medieval Christian value system; others are arguing that the idea of paladin as champion can be generalized to other cultures.

This leads me to a certain conclusion about the basic core classes: unfortunately, D&D classes widely vary in how universal or transcultural the archetype on which they are based actually is. At the one extreme, there is the completely transcultural Fighter. At the other are classes that clearly refer to a narrow range of cultures at a particular point in time such as the Monk and Paladin. Different classes can be situated at different points along this continuum. Or, like the Ranger, they may not appear on the continuum at all.

This thread reflects two schools of thought in how we deal with classes at the Monk end of the continuum. I am on the side that limits the use of these classes to circumstances where they fit with the archetype to which they correspond. WizarDru and others are on the side that generates new social roles, behaviours and cultural characteristics in order to accommodate the use of the core classes in any world regardless of whether it is connected to the archetypes on which they were originally based. Neither approach is wrong, per se -- I think it just speaks to the tastes of the GM or player in questions.

I think the reason conflict has arisen in this thread is that those of us which see cultural archetypes as a limiting factor assumed that the initial poster had the same concern and responded as though he shared our values. At the end of all this, I am bewildered because I can't really figure out what NewJeffCTHome wanted to know. If you wanted to know if modern Christian morality, the alignment system and the mechanics of the game permitted you to do what you wanted, the answer to your question was, of course, an unequivocal 'yes.' But if you're actually interested in harmonizing your class with the archetype from which it is derived, I cannot understand how you have found the opposing arguments persuasive.

 

[WizarDru]

This thread reflects two schools of thought in how we deal with classes at the Monk end of the continuum. I am on the side that limits the use of these classes to circumstances where they fit with the archetype to which they correspond. WizarDru and others are on the side that generates new social roles, behaviours and cultural characteristics in order to accommodate the use of the core classes in any world regardless of whether it is connected to the archetypes on which they were originally based. Neither approach is wrong, per se -- I think it just speaks to the tastes of the GM or player in questions.

I certainly don't think there is a 'wrong' answer, obviously. I think part of the issue may be, as you specify, a cultural and personal interpetation. The paladin has always, afaic, been subject to often drastically different interpeations, and the code even moreso. Personally, it's not that I don't recognize that the moral code that I envision for the paladin is anachronistic...it's more that I'm willing to apply it along with all the other anachronisms inherent in the system and have grown comfortable with, over time. I mean, we are talking about the archetypical christian holy warrior ideal...in a game where Christianity doesn't exist.

To me, the nature of the paladin within D&D is directly related to the deity he venerates. I am curious, though...now that I think about it, isn't Jesus' basic doctrine essentially one of 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's'? (please excuse the rough nature of the interpetation here...no offense is meant....my Catholicism lapsed many moons ago ). How did the archetypical Christian warrior deal with this conflict? Was it perceived as one? I only ask because you sound more informed on the topic, and I'm curious for your take. Was this an issue for the Templars, Hospitallers or crusaders, for that matter?

 

[Kilmore]

One thing that occurs to me is that this is one pretty hot thread. We're up to 115 posts right now and we have not come to any sort of agreement.

Now seeing as this is an adventure game, and adventure is bred in conflict, this would make a fine problem to fit into the game. Just as in the real world, there are different interpretations of faith and law, the game world should have the same. I suggest creating several paladin orders for the characters to choose from or modify for their own beliefs. The order that the paladin chooses may have a great disagreement with the other orders, possibly resulting in violence, even though all are supposed to be Lawful Good. The DMG states that Evil isn't monolithic, good doesn't have to be either. This may open a whole new vista of depth in the campaign.

 

[Darth K'Trava]

Hmm, interesting. Until when where Catholic priests allowed to marry?

And Gez beat me to it; Orthodox priests can marry, as I would imagine the priests of many of other branches of Christianity.

Obviously most of them. I've yet to have seen an unmarried priest at any church I've been to.

I wouldn't see my paladin "fooling around" as, unlike all the other responses abt paladins revolve around MALE paladins, mine's a female and not wanting to be "sidelined" nor does she feel that anyone would be much too interested in a half dragon..... Closest she'd ever gotten was threatening to kiss the male cleric/paladin in the party for sleeping thru a melee fight.....

As far as I know, noone has any paladin subscribe to the "MUST BE CHASTE" doctrine in any game. Anything sexual doesn't really come up in gameplay so it doesn't really matter. Besides, our paladins are too busy playind "Judge Dredd"... (both are worshipers of Tyr in the FR world)

Just remember, not all paladins are guys......

 

[Stormrunner]

I seem to recall a very small list of the maximum number of items a paladin was allowed to own. Perhaps someone with a 1E PHB will jog our memories.

Me! Me! (raises hand and jumps up and down)

page 22-24 (23 is the famous "A Paladin in Hell" full-page illo):

The following strictures apply to paladins:

1. They may never retain more than ten magic items; these may never exceed:
armor, 1 suit
shield, 1
weapons*, 4
any other magic items, 4
* - these include daggers, swords, etc., and such items as magic bows and magic arrows are considered as but one weapon

2. They will never retain wealth, keeping only sufficient treasure to support themselves in a modest manner, pay henchmen, men-at-arms, and servitors, and to construct or maintain a small castle. Excess is given away, as is the tithe.

3. An immediate tithe (10%) of all income - be it treasure, wages, or whatever - must be given to whatever charitable religious institution (not a clerical player character) of lawful good alignment the paladin selects.

4. Paladins will have henchmen of lawful good alignment and none other; they will associate only with characters and creatures of good alignment; paladins can join a company of adventurers which contains non-evil neutralsonly on a single-expedition basis, and only if some end which will further the cause of lawful good is purposed.

5. If possible, paladins will take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status).

Paladins do not attract a body of men-at-arms to service as do regular fighters.

 

[NewJeffCTHome]

Just remember, not all paladins are guys......

I never forgot that. If you look at my original post way back when, you'll see that I said that I never remembered seeing a requirement that a male or female paladin go without sex (chaste or celibate or however you define it... I had meant it to mean that the paladin forgoes sex completely)

While childbirth obviously precludes a human female paladin from adventuring for the better part of a year and is quite inconvenient for a female PC paladin, there is nothing that says that it can't happen to an NPC paladin. Heck, it could be a good campaign idea: Female NPC paladin takes a 9 month in-game break for the last 7-8 months of pregnancy and a month or two after childbirth, and then returns "out of the blue" to assist the PCs in a dire situation. I'm guessing that if it's an intense campaign, she could have been almost forgotten by the PCs (something similar happened in a campaign of ours several years back, just not involving an NPC paladin...)

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

As long as they can do so within the limits of their code and alignment, paladins should, in fact, be able to "get some."

In our Birthright game, the priest-paladin married and had children. He didn't do quite the sowing of wild oats as did certain other party members, either. His cohort, who also had paladin levels, married a woman he dallied with after an encounter led to pregnancy. Of course, in that case, the "woman" was a dragon in human form, which the cohort had no idea about. Of course, other party members did, and we had visions of a swarm of half-dragon children wandering around...

Brad

 

[fusangite]

I am curious, though...now that I think about it, isn't Jesus' basic doctrine essentially one of 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's'? (please excuse the rough nature of the interpetation here...no offense is meant....my Catholicism lapsed many moons ago ). How did the archetypical Christian warrior deal with this conflict? Was it perceived as one? I only ask because you sound more informed on the topic, and I'm curious for your take. Was this an issue for the Templars, Hospitallers or crusaders, for that matter?

Well, there are many contradictory or apparently contradictory statements that Christ and his interpreters make about church-state relations. At different times, different ideas on this front have been ascendant. But remember that for most of history, the lines between church and state were very blurred. It was hard to discern where on started and the other stopped. The Holy Roman Empire's creation, the Spanish ownership of the New World -- these were things decreed by the pope. And, of course, until 1870, there were the Papal States in Central Italy. Other versions of Christianity often conflate church and state even more; in the Eastern Orthodox faith, the Emperor or Czar is described as "equal to the apostles."

While there was a fair amount of what we would now call church-state conflict in the medieval world, nobody thought that the solution to this was to disentangle the two things. Such an idea would be beyond people's frame of reference.