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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9369505" data-attributes="member: 42582">I am talking about playing a paladin in accordance with the rules of AD&D, as found in Gygax's PHB and DMG. These rules tell us what counts as good. It is a capacious conception - roughly, anything that has been treated seriously as valuable in human life counts as good. They tell us that evil people are those who scorn value, and who do not treat value, and the obligations to which it gives rise, as imposing any constraints on their action.If an individual player doesn't prioritise the beautiful in their conception of the good, I don't think that is likely to do any harm to play. But there is no point, in the play of the game, in contesting the idea that beauty is, on the whole, valuable and hence good. If you want to make that sort of contestation a component of your play, then you need to just drop the alignment system. Because it has no resources to help such contestation, and will actively get in the way.Likewise for "truth". This is one reason why making truth and honour part of lawfulness rather than goodness generates incoherence: because it creates a situation in which it is supposed to make sense for someone to assert that truth is valuable but not a good. But that doesn't make sense - it's prima facie contradictory, and trying to untangle the apparent contradiction is not going to improve play!What Gygax's alignment scheme puts into contention is not what is valuable but rather is law or chaos the appropriate means for realising value?I regard it as very telling that you see such an injunction as directed to the GM - who presumably will then use it to tell the player how to play their PC? - rather than as directed to the player.No. You have a problem resulting from the players not knowing how to pursue RPGing with players whose goals and means are opposed.If you want to play a game in which expedience is rewarded, in which moral trade-offs are encouraged, in which the protagonists never clash over questions of means or of ends, that's obviously your prerogative. It strikes me as obvious that such a game has no room for the paladin ideal, though.Thankfully there is nothing about FRPGing as such that limits it to the sort of game you seem to be advocating.</blockquote>

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