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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1862223" data-attributes="member: 18832">Actually, that reminds me of another thing I disliked about Second Edition (and specifically so; my experience with First is much more limited).Many of the so-called "roleplaying tips" were pretty much nonsense. There didn't seem, to my mind back in 1990 or so, any genuinely consistent set of design principles behind things like the paladin's code vis-a-vis the rest of the alignment system, no clear and logical outline of what alignment means and certainly no consideration for a playable and sensible rationale for it; arbitrary, First Edition Gygaxian punishments for changing alignment (experience loss) coupled with a more progressive interpretation of alignment that suggested it wasn't a massive metaphysical part of one's PC the way it had been in the earlier days of alignment languages and other rubbish.Third Edition completed the step away from the original Gygaxian "take" on alignment and enshrined within the rules the principle that alignment was a label applied to a character after consideration of her actions, not a prescription for character behaviour and certainly not a straightjacket within which she must remain or suffer dire game penalties. These days, a paladin's code matches up more or less to lawful good alignment because the alignment's principles are a convenient shorthand for describing a paladin's principles; a paladin's code demands she acts thus and therefore she is Lawful Good, so it's convenient to require her to maintain that alignment.(Even so, the equivalency is not exact. The paladin's code is clearly more concerned with the principles of Good rather than Law; it's Evil acts which cause a paladin to immediately fall, and Chaotic acts are much less proscribed. There are, however, characters who could perfectly aptly be described as Lawful Good who would concern themselves more with lawfulness than goodness, and thus would make poor paladins. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)Most of the other things I can recall were equally silly. The druid class' crazy "to advance in level you must FIGHT!" flavour was completely over-the-top and inappropriate, as you can probably guess I think, in a ruleset aiming to be useful in more than one specific campaign setting (and Second Edition AD&D didn't even have the excuse of being explicitly set in "Greyhawk Lite"!).</blockquote>

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