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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 5826041" data-attributes="member: 16726">Depends on whether you're talking about law or Law.  If you're simply talking about following laws or traditions or customs or codes, then yes, it will be totally ethnocentric and setting-dependent.  You wouldn't have any idea what a "lawful" person would do in any particular setting until you first studied the relevant laws, traditions, customs, and codes to see which direction they pointed.  And woe to you if there are disagreements amongst the various laws and traditions and customs and codes, because then you would also need a full-fledged allegiance system so you could rank which sources of authority take precedence.  But to my way of thinking, this would be a very unsatisfactory way to define Law in 5th edition.  The reason is that, in the past, Law and Chaos have been distinct and almost personal forces around which armies have rallied and fought and died, in the best Moorcockian/Gygaxian tradition.  If Law is nothing more than people having codes or following traditions, then lawful people wouldn't have much of anything in common and you'd lose the sense of conflict that's animated the lawful/chaotic alignment axis.  To be sure, James Wyatt (the 4th edition designer in charge of alignment) wanted to lose it for precisely this reason, because he thought it was too complicated and "muddied the waters" in ways that were undesirable.  Good characters of all stripes should immediately understand, in the view of the 4e team, that they're all on the same side and should work together against uniformly sinister enemies similarly bound by the Evil part of their alignment tag.But assuming one does want to salvage Law as embodying universal values rather than being ethnocentric, there are things one can take from various editions of the game to do this.  One example is modron-like perpetual stagnancy.  Another is keeping your word and not using poison.  Another is valuing societal order over individual freedom.  Some of those might work better than others, but they would provide unifying principles around which people could rally, just as "sacrificing on behalf of others" has generally done for the Good-aligned.  As to the issue of whether paladins should be LG in the new edition, is it even possible to answer that question before we know what being LG will mean?</blockquote>

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