Have a coherent, consistent design vision for your game, or get off the pot and let adults who have a clue and a backbone take the helm for 6th ed. I saw a half-orc "paladin" in my last Encounters game play the most ridiculously selfish, cowardly, and non-heroic character I've ever seen, and the DM said and did nothing about it, beceause there were no rules support.
Basically 5th ed (and 4th), it's okay to murder children with your divine smite without limit because there is no way the DM can limit your abilities. Alignment is BS and has zero design space or force of effect in 5th ed.
Weren't you criticising another poster in another recent thread for being critical of aspect of D&Dnext? Or am I misremembering?Have a coherent, consistent design vision for your game, or get off the pot and let adults who have a clue and a backbone take the helm for 6th ed.
There are many D&D players who don't share this conception of distribution of responsibilities across game participants, and I'm glad that the WotC designers acknowledge that.Paladins don't really make sense without an ethos. To have an ethos, a code, and derive benefits from it, requires a tradeoff for violating it.
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The entire original design of a paladin is, you trade off roleplaying restrictions for combat benefits.
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the alignment restrictions for paladins should have mechanical effect otherwise the entire alignment system is a waste of paper and killing trees for no good reason.
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I saw a half-orc "paladin" in my last Encounters game play the most ridiculously selfish, cowardly, and non-heroic character I've ever seen, and the DM said and did nothing about it, beceause there were no rules support.
Basically 5th ed (and 4th), it's okay to murder children with your divine smite without limit because there is no way the DM can limit your abilities.
The complication here is that they're planning on pushing adventures and campaign settings much harder this edition. They've already mentioned that the PHB contains the pantheons for most of the major properties (FR, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, &c.) and this idea works well for some settings and terribly for others. Not every pantheon "fills the grid" or even uses both of the alignment axis. The way they're going now doesn't even entirely negate the direction you'd like to go with things, it just shuffles that away from the default assumptions of the class, ideally tying it much more into the specific campaign settings where it both belongs and can have the most impact.I have several issues with LG paladins. One is that your deity is your same or similar alignment as you, if you are a cleric. So why be lawful if you are a paragon of your deity's whims?
If your god is LE or CN, and you are an avatar of that god, you should be a champion of their ethos. So if they design Paladin with Oath of Justice to be defined as the classic LG paladin, that should be explicitly restricted to LG or LE or LN gods. But they aren't. So they're trying to achieve independence of the alignment system having any repercussions, while also trying to force a strong alignment ethos by skirting it entirely.
It is beyond stupid. If you're LG, the be an LG paladin of an LG god. If there is such a thing as a NG, CG, or LE or CE "paladin", those should be defined by appropriate subclasses where there are actual rewards for behaving in such a way.
Basically 5th ed (and 4th), it's okay to murder children with your divine smite without limit because there is no way the DM can limit your abilities.