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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9367742" data-attributes="member: 6988941">The Paladin is based on medieval literature and ideals of knighthood, not on medieval history. While I don't remember as much as I'd like from my graduate reading on the subject, one thing I remember multiple historians noting is that the literary knight actually arrives shockingly fast, arguably within less than a generation of the first actual "knights" (as someone who was focused on the history of history writing this fascinated me so it stuck with me). Now the first crusade did happens between the late 11th century emergence of knights (or "proto-knights) and the early twelfth century establishment of the literary knight, and indeed crusade literature (which also emerged quickly) was a substantial influence in developing the latter. It was nowhere near being the sole influence however, it was simply an influence. Literary knights did spend a lot of time slaying Saracens (who often appear as faceless evil creatures in the same way orcs traditionally are treatd in an rpg), but it's unclear how closely readers associated the literary Saracens with actual Muslims (the literary ones are sometimes quite fantastical, and at times oddly enough pagan, the paper I wrote on the subject in grad school argued that more educated Europeans would have seen this as a poetic conceit rather than a realistic portrayal). More importantly literary white knights also spent a lot of time pursuing the holy grail, fighting monsters, rescuing damsels, and (in my readings their largest preoccupation) fighting various black knights (medieval literary Europe was just lousy with evil knights).Now personally I was trained to study history to develop understanding, not pass judgement (not the way the world or even academia seem to be heading these days, but oh well), so I don't particularly care if some element of crusader has slipped into an rpg paladin. If you want to embrace that or abjure it in your character choices that's your call in my book. But, focusing on the paladin as a pop culture infused distillation of literary knights rather than of actual factual knights, I just don't see that much crusader in the mix these days. Any that slipped into earlier variation of the rpg paladin has been further diluted by the particular evolution of a character class. If they are like crusaders that is generally more a character choice by the player than something forced upon them by contemporary lore or rules. I guess my answer to "solving the problem" is to just let them develop on their own weird path a bit further until still more trace of their roots is lost. Say what you will about WotC's "play what you want" approach to character building, but if you don't like some aspect you think is baked into the core dna of a class's lore, this is a golden age for that lore getting diluted away.</blockquote>

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