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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1878441" data-attributes="member: 7240">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.</blockquote>

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