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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9369700" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I dropped the alignment system decades ago because it is utterly worthless to me and makes these sort of claims. And again, you keep insisting on Gygax's AD&D version, which has not been in print for even longer than I've played DnD. I keep telling you, I don't care about Gygax's system. I have never been talking exclusively about Gygax's system. And frankly, if you can't see how ideals of "beauty" or "truth" can be used for evil... you need to expand your horizons. Many horribly evil beings and characters utilize "truth" to destroy people, and "beauty" is nothing. Again, Sune from the Forgotten Realms actively has her followers kill anyone and anything that isn't beautiful, because she has declared ugliness as evil. That sort of thinking is literally the basis for at least one dystopian society I am aware of in literature, if not more. Yet we want to declare "beauty" as purely good just because Gygax said so and didn't give us any text in the first edition of the game to challenge that?Yeah, funny thing about being the referee in charge of enforcing the rules. The rules tend to be directed towards you to enforce. I mean, suppose it could be that the rules are given to the players, so that the players can decide whether or not they want to follow them, and the DM could... huh, what would the DM do if they had no knowledge of the rules? Make up new ones that then the players could decide on? Now, before you continue on your high and mighty horse, I am not the type of DM you seem to think I am, nor am I the sort of player you seem to think I am. But I have seen a paladin player who got to decide for themselves what the alignment system meant. I was playing a Cleric, they were playing a paladin who believed the gods were evil and corrupt and they were the only truly good thing in the world. They declared my cleric evil for showing mercy to our enemies, destroyed shrines to my gods, murdered with impunity.... and because they insisted they were good, the DM let them take and hold an artifact that could only be held by people with the good alignment, cementing to them that they were correct in all of their actions. Does that sound like how things are supposed to work to you?"Never clash over questions of means or of ends"? They CAN'T clash if the paladin is in the party. That is the bloody point I keep making about those old restrictions. If a paladin "will not adventure with people who do X" then if the party engages in X the paladin is forced to leave. If a paladin cannot adventure with an evil character, then a paladin cannot adventure with a warlock who sold his soul for power, and those two characters cannot clash and have interesting discussions and scenes, because the paladin CANNOT adventure with them. They must, at the least disruptive, leave the party and never return. Or, they must smite the evil-doer and kill the other player's character and force them to make a new one.This is why those restrictions were such a terrible idea. Because they meant that the paladin could not be in a party who disagreed with them. If the rogue wanted to steal the McGuffin, they couldn't argue with the paladin over whether or not that course of action was correct, because if the paladin participated in any way and did not turn the rogue in as a criminal, then they were an oathbreaker, forced to abandon their oath and no longer be a paladin. And that isn't fun for anyone. It isn't fun when one player is forced to constantly say "Guys, we can't, because my character will literally cease to function if we do that." That one player then is forced to dictate to every other player the types of things they can have happen, and force everyone else to either lie to them about what they are doing, or also play LG characters. And not only is it abysmal for both sets of players for the Paladin to be the Party Cop, policing everyone's behavior, but it isn't even how a Paragon archetype SHOULD act. They should not be the Morality Police keeping a close eye to make sure you don't do anything they disagree with. But that is exactly what those restrictions did. And again, I am so glad that we abandoned Gygax, Cook, and everyone else's previous versions of this in 5e, and left it in such a way that a Paladin can actually be a hero with a moral code, instead of the mess they were previously.</blockquote>

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