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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9475943" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can see two possible meanings of "could" here.One is: do the rules of the game, as set out in the rulebook, give the GM such a power? In Gygax's AD&D, the rules do expressly give the GM the sort of power over paladins and clerics that you describe, as a particular application of broader rules for alignment. This means that, for the player of a cleric or paladin PC even moreso than any other player, a key challenge posed by the game is adhering to the requirements of alignment as adjudicated by the GM.4e D&D is in sharp contrast to Gygax's AD&D in this respect: it has no rules for the adjudication of alignment by the GM, nor for consequences to follow for a PC's abilities based on such adjudication.I'm not aware of any rules in 5e D&D for the GM to adjudicate a player's play of their warlock PC. Even when it comes to paladins, the rule is stated in much less strict terms than it is in AD&D:If a paladin willfully violates his or her oath and shows no sign of repentance, the consequences can be more serious. At the DM’s discretion, an impenitent paladin might be forced to abandon this class and adopt another, or perhaps to take the Oathbreaker paladin option that appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.(That's from the Legacy class description on DnD Beyond; I didn't see any similar text in the 2024 class description.)For the 2014 Warlock, all I can find is this:Work with your DM to determine how big a part your pact will play in your character’s adventuring career. Your patron’s demands might drive you into adventures, or they might consist entirely of small favors you can do between adventures.That doesn't even purport to give the GM unilateral power.That idea of unilateral power brings me to the second meaning of "could": namely, can the GM actually change the shared fiction, and the mechanics, in the fashion that they are attempting to? And the answer to that depends entirely on what the whole table is prepared to accept. No one can have a shared fiction on their own.But the GM can't just, unilaterally, declare that "rocks fall, everyone dies". If the players decide that this is nonsense, and that their PCs are still alive, they can keep going - perhaps appointing one of their number to continue as GM of the game in lieu of the GM whose attempted contributions to the fiction they reject.This is not just idle speculation, either. Players express doubt about, or outright reject, GM contributions to the fiction all the time. In D&D this is most common in the context of combat, which is the most heavily rules-regulated part of the game, and hence the place where the GM is most likely to make a mistake. But it happens in other contexts as well. Probably the most common is when the GM forgets some prior-established fact about a person or a place (prompting a player response like "But hang on, didn't we <do/change such-and-such> last time we <were here/fought this person/etc>"?). But a player can equally contest some adjudication of a consequence as inappropriate or unfair, and it's not a given that the GM will stick to their initial position.I think the notion that the GM has some unilateral authority over the whole of the fiction tends to make for bad play. But I also think it leads to inaccurate descriptions of the way that play actually works.</blockquote>

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