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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 6336012" data-attributes="member: 40398">I don't care for all of the changes that 4e made either -- tieflings, the 'divine empowerment ritual,' and most notably the wizard -- but I think you're overestimating the number of people who get hung up on names. A car used to be an unreliable horseless carriage that required manual cranking to start up; post-its and kleenexes used to be specific brand names, before being adopted as improper nouns; Coke used to be a medicinal tonic; history is filled with changes in definition and naming. And mind you, these are all real things, and far older than the D&D paladin.I'm going to agree again with Hussar here -- sure, changing the class name to champion or holy warrior would have solved the problem for many of us. But for whatever reason, the 4e team and now the 5e team has decided that an inclusive paladin class is more valuable than both a champion/whatever class and the traditionally restrictive definition for 'paladin.' And who's to say they're wrong? Like I said earlier, any decision is going provoke griping, and there's no guarantee that a different decision would result in fewer disappointed fans.Well I can't imagine why I would bring borscht to any meal. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Anyhow, I'm not arguing that paladins and civil rights are equivalent issues -- that would be patently absurd. Civil rights are vastly more important than paladins. However, paladins are much easier to redefine than laws. D&D has only existed for about 40 years, so there's less traditionalist inertia; there's no bureaucracy that must be navigated to change the definition, whether it's an official change or a house rule; and there's no risk that some minority of violent extremists will start killing people over the change. (Particularly petty nerdrage might result in a broken nose or two, though.)What I'm saying is that this paladin issue is strikingly similar to some real life issues in concept, if not in importance. And the point of bringing real life issues into the conversation is to demonstrate that......Debates can and sometimes are both of these things. I wouldn't use the phrase "butthurt whiners who only want their own way," but history is full of struggles between those who want consistency, equity, and freedom, and those unwilling to accept change even in the face of an arbitrarily problematic tradition.And of course the sizable middle-ground of fence-sitters, uninformed, and uninterested, who eventually just start rolling their eyes at the old guard who have defined themselves into exclusion.</blockquote>

Verification