Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4172510" data-attributes="member: 47776">Define 'legitimate authority'.  The principle of authority and law is to serve the public trust. Doing this requires equality and a sense of fairness and justice.  The Arbiter's failure to recuse himself from this situation on account of conflict of interest (or even explain his actions) means that he was by definition not acting as legitimate authority.  In the Paladin-view of the world, great authority carries with it inherently great responsibility; the Arbiter's attempt to use his granted authority for personal business was a violation of that responsibility, and de facto abdication of authority on his part.  Evil or not, the paladin's obligation to give him the time of day ended there.Also, if the head-of-state status of the king is a problem, all the paladin needs to do is declare all the lands and waters of the Prime to be under his dominions as benevolent ruler and protector.  Now he's the lawful authority.Now, he could well have been simply inarticulate, and had no malign intentions towards the child.  Indeed, caution should have been exercised on the part of the party, since this is family stuff and people can be strange about family stuff.  However, there was certainly a reasonable doubt that handing over the child to the Arbiter would have resulted in evil.So, IMC, no first-degree code violation.  Whether or not it was an actual code violation depends on whether or not the Arbiter actually was malign.Also, in 3.XE, paladins do not serve gods or churches.  They serve Goodness, full-stop.  If the will of the church or even the gods goes against Goodness, then the churches and the gods just lost themselves some followers.  In D&D, Good is an actual, tangible, quasi-sentient force in the universe, and is not subject to redefinition by anyone (other than the GM, who is not a force in the universe).</blockquote>

Verification