NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8839050" data-attributes="member: 42582">The AD&D PHB defines LG thus (p 33):Characters of lawful good alignment follow these precepts [of law and order] to improve the common weal. Certain freedoms must, of course, be sacrificed in order to bring order; but truth is of highest value, and life and beauty of great importance. The benefits of this society are to be brought to all.The DMG adds (p 23) that "Law generally supports the group as more important than the individual" and thatCreatures of lawful good alignment view the cosmos with varying degrees of lawfulness or desire for good. They are convinced that order and law are absolutely necessary to assure good, and that good is best defined as whatever brings the most benefit to the greater number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest.We also know that LG is consistent with feudal systems of government, because we are told (PHB pp 22, 24) both that paladins must be LG, and that they "will take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status)."Feudal government is based around group membership. Social and political status is conferred in virtue of the group (family, village, etc) to which one belongs; there is not individual freedom of occupation and individual political entitlement and responsibility. The descriptions of LG alignment are consistent with this - they refer to "certain freedoms being sacrificed" and emphasise collective, not individual, participation in the benefits of society.The descriptions of LG are not precise enough to entail any particular theory of punishment. Life is said to be of "great importance", but not pre-eminent importance. So the death penalty is not necessarily excluded. And to me these alignment descriptions clearly seem consistent with the possibility of collective punishment - "sins of the father" is just a counterpart to "rights of the father" which is the principal that underpins feudal nobility.Obviously none of this is defensible within an enlightenment framework, but an enlightenment framework has no room for paladins who take up service with fighters and clerics of noble status. DL is not trying to present a vision of the enlightenment. It's using non-enlightenment tropes for its storytelling purposes.</blockquote>

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