Hijacked Thread in need of closure.

[DM with a vengence]

In a purely metagame sense, the paladin being it's own class of LG holy warriors is not balanced with the other alignments lack of holy warriors. However, from a sense of D&D as a perspective, you should keep the paladin.

D&D should not be a game about phat l3wt or pillaging villages, it's a game about being heros. Having the paladin as a core class increases the focus on Lawful, Good actions, such as loyalty, bravery, honesty, piety, and charity.

The D&D alignment system is innacurate, with it's detect spells and very granular system, but that's part of the charm. There are good guys and there are bad guys and they're on different sides. If you want to have complex shades of gray, then maybe you should be playing another game.

 

[Lela]

Re: Re: Re: In the 4th Edition, or Edition 3.1 whatever, should the Paladin be scrapped?

Can you tell I'm biased a touch?

I can tell that everyone here is biased. Including myself. It's where the discussion comes from.

 

[Enkhidu]

One of the things my gaming group has tried with paladins is to make them divinely inspired judges. Their patron is a highly LN god who's purview is truth, justice, and judgement.

Needless to say, this make paladins far more Lawful than Good.

In fact, paladins are often called "The Hands of Justice" for their habit of riding into a territory and becoming judge, jury and executioner in cases that local authorites are simply incapable of handling. Their not always well liked, but are extremely well respected because they are considered divinely inspired - in some countries, a Hand's word is law, royal decree notwithstanding.

And if you thought that a paladin's code was tough, you'd cringe at the code of the Hands of Justice, and at the punishments for even minor infractions.

The Paladin's abilities set, of course, was changed to reflect their new duties - for example, smite can be used against those who have been rightfully judged by one or more Hands, their spells are more concerned with truth and the discovery therof, etc.

By the way, to get a good idea of what this sort of paladin would be like, just think Judge Dredd.

 

[jgbrowning]

Read the books Gygax was stealing from, and the much better books he wasn't. Paladin has been used that way for a long time.

I work with linguists. They are not "literate" people. They are literAL people. There's a HUGE difference.

Also, LANGUAGE EVOLVES. By your strict interpretation, no one has used anything but slang in about 1000 years. Unfortunately, when all you've been doing with your dictionaries for a century or so is cut and paste, you rapidly lose relevance. Even some linguists will admit that.

Instead of trying to make me a straw man and claim that somewhere in my post i made the claim that "no one has used anything but slang in about 1000 years," how about you and i discuss the fact that the world "Paladin" doesn't mean what you think it does to most of the world.

It means champion, defender of a cause, a paragon of chivalry, a heroic champion. What it doesn't mean is Lawful Good and exclusively Lawful Good.

Now it may mean "Lawful Good" to readers of fantasy literature who play DnD and to DnD players who dont read fantasy literature.

But the concept of chivalry, again historically here and not in a DnD sense, does not contain the DnD sense of "Good". The social order at the time of chivalry was definitely not what you would define in DnD as "Good."


to respond to Lela: yes by DnD terms a paladin is defined as good and that is what i was referring to in my earlier post.

Why does Pelor care if his paladins lie, if by doing so they promote good? Why would he take away their power?

Why would a Paladin of Wee Jas lose his abilities if he passed by a peasant being attacked by a demon, because the paladin was ordered by his king to go with all haste and report to someone?

What i was addressing was that the changes made in the system of worship and devine magic have rendered the DnD concept of a Paladin asbeing only LG silly.


joe b.

 

[Dragongirl]

D&D should not be a game about phat l3wt or pillaging villages, it's a game about being heros. Having the paladin as a core class increases the focus on Lawful, Good actions, such as loyalty, bravery, honesty, piety, and charity.

D&D should be about whatever the players want it to be. Not just what traditionalists would want. Having a holy warrior core class instead of just paladins would not change how those that want paladins would play. It would just give people options of being a warrior devoted to a different god then just LG, and gaining powers through that devotion.

 

[Lela]

One of the things my gaming group has tried with paladins is to make them divinely inspired judges. Their patron is a highly LN god who's purview is truth, justice, and judgement.

Needless to say, this make paladins far more Lawful than Good.

In fact, paladins are often called "The Hands of Justice" for their habit of riding into a territory and becoming judge, jury and executioner in cases that local authorites are simply incapable of handling. Their not always well liked, but are extremely well respected because they are considered divinely inspired - in some countries, a Hand's word is law, royal decree notwithstanding.

And if you thought that a paladin's code was tough, you'd cringe at the code of the Hands of Justice, and at the punishments for even minor infractions.

The Paladin's abilities set, of course, was changed to reflect their new duties - for example, smite can be used against those who have been rightfully judged by one or more Hands, their spells are more concerned with truth and the discovery therof, etc.

By the way, to get a good idea of what this sort of paladin would be like, just think Judge Dredd.

Anyway you could e-mail me the information on these guys? I think, with a little tweaking, The Hands of Justice could make a good PrC for an idea I have floating around in my campaign.

Of course, this post might give some the impression that I have flipped sides. Just in case you didn't read closely enough, I havn't.

It's just that in studying to be a teacher, I've found that I can only be as good as the people I've stolen ideas from. I usually apply the same idea to my DMing. And to do that, I have to constantly be on the look out. Even if it may imply something else. It's part of being a good DM.

[Edit: Typo]

 

[Lela]

D&D should be about whatever the players want it to be. Not just what traditionalists would want. Having a holy warrior core class instead of just paladins would not change how those that want paladins would play. It would just give people options of being a warrior devoted to a different god then just LG, and gaining powers through that devotion.

Ironically, D&D is a Lawful game. All the rules interact in spicific ways; always the same for every situation, be it for PCs or NPCs. And, as I'm sure you'd admit, tradition is part of being Lawful.

Now, the Chaotic part comes in with the House Rules. But, of course, they are just that. House Rules.

Of course, I'm applying D&D to real life, which doesn't often work. It's simply an analagy (sp?).

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Dragongirl- I've been wanting to reply to this for a while, but I got caught up in other things...

I never said make evil paladins, I said scrap paladin as a core class.

Didn't mean to put words in your mouth. You may not have said to make "variant paladins", but some people on this thread did.

If your character wishes to be a champion of some god, who does not accept LG followers then they have no choice in the core books but to start out as a cleric, or some other class.

The mechanics are a part of the flavor. Chun-tzu, DM with a Vengeance, and Alhandra have hit this already, but I'll give a specific example. During those few periods of his life when Lancelot was in a state of Grace (including when he was "1st Level"), he healed with his hands, performed a miracle, and had an aura of invincibility. He was also the mightiest fighter in the world until Galahad came along. Now that's NOT a Fighter/Cleric. Sounds like a D&D paladin. The mechanics of the class is required in order to model certain kinds of characters. And the flavor is something that adds in a significant way to many people's games.

Why should only those gods that allow LG followers get a core class? All gods have some cause or vision.

I would call that patently untrue. With the exception of nature deities (who, IMO, are a lot more Lawful than people apparently want to admit), very few non-Lawful deities have an actual cause. And the truly Chaotics only "vision" tends to be either nihilism, pure freedom, trickery, or getting drunk.

Odin had a cause. Thor sure didn't (in the myths. The comic book Thor had lots of them, but he was Lawful). Zeus' only "vision" was getting as much action as divinely possible. Athena, though, she had vision, oops Lawful again.

I challenge you to find a non-Lawful Good deity who has a "cause" or "vision" that doesn't equate to "put myself on top of the heap." Again, nature deities don't count. They're either a special case, or they're actually Lawful (just like Nature in RL).

 

[Umbran]

Read the books Gygax was stealing from, and the much better books he wasn't. Paladin has been used that way for a long time.

It isn't just books. Check TV, too. 1957, Have Gun Will Travel. Main character named Paladin. One might then notice some similarities to Murlynd, the six-gun toting paladin from Greyhawk...

However, the idea of a "paladin" being a highly honorable knight probably dates back to somewhere around the year 800. The 12 most illustrious knights of Charlegmagne's court were known as "paladins".

I think something close to 1200 years of history and legend probably renders this usage more than "slang".

Note how my little paperback Random House dictionary showed that, where jgbrowning's definition does not. This goes to show a major lesson - don't try to be authoritative with anything less than a full Oxford or Webster's Unabridged definition. Everybody else is summarizing, and will probably miss one or more meanings.

 

[johnsemlak]

I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned the rules for the Paladin character in the old Basic D&D system, actually in the Companion rulebook. There, a Lawful (Basic D&D had three ALs, Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic) fighter could become a Paladin at 9th level. S/He recieved most cleric abilites at a level equal to 1/3 their fighter level. There was also a Chaotic equivelent, an Avenger.

I changed this so that fighters could convert at earlier levels, like 6th or even 3rd, but I liked the simplicity of the system.

In many ways, it's like the current prestige class system, but much simpler.

All that said, I think the Paladin should stay more or less as it is. It's a very popular class, as the paladin's supporters have shown on this thread. I think the paladin is way too popular to make it a PrC. However, Players/DMs who want to make changes can easily do so in their campaigns.