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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 1874687" data-attributes="member: 1465">As I see the issue with Paladins, the "archetypal" D&D pally should probably be both chaste and celibate, to imagine that the life of paladinhood implies total devotion (and therefore shouldn't have family duties to "distract" them from their life quest) and lack of bias towards some individual (shouldn't have a relationship, otherwise they may put the beloved one over the needs of others).Incidentally, these are also the reasons I heard many times (when I was a child and went to the catholic church to learn religion) about why catholic priests and nuns shouldn't marry, shouldn't have a relationship, and shouldn't have intercourse - although I don't know the exact vows. The reason is that they would not be able to (1) attend full duties to their "life mission" and (2) treat all the people with the same love and care - because they would have partners and/or children and it would be much more difficult not to love those more.Anyway, I don't like stereotypes very much. In early D&D days (for me), when classes were very rigid and basically all represented kind of archetypes, it was actually very interesting to have an extremely standardized paladin. Nowadays I can barely stand to see another pally played this way (not because it doesn't work, just because I expect something more original), and usually I point out to the players that the Paladin character idea can be extended to that of a holy warrior*, which can be very different for each deity in the setting. I still think the paladin / holy warrior should be very dedicated to its mission (as is a cleric by the way), whatever code of conducts it actually implies.So in my campaigns it's pretty simple and open: if you want to play a Paladin you're encouraged to make up your code of conduct according to your faith. I'd probably expect celibacy to be one of the most common points in those codes (chastity much less common however, even less than abstinence from alcohol for example).*Going even further, this may mean to allow paladin variants of other alignments, but that's going too far from this thread... just want to mention that those would need a code of conduct too!</blockquote>

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