Apologies for posting three times in a row, but I just realized I forgot to reply to some people.
"Paladins" was a proto-prestige class, and probably didn't have any business becoming a core class in 3e but was grandfathered in, even if the Assassin didn't make the core class cut.
There's a lot of truth to this; maybe the Paladin *should* have been a prestige class. (Though honestly, it always had more traction than the Assassin did, at least in my experience.)
But there's something to the idea of a 1st level paladin which does appeal, I can't deny it.
DMZ2112 said:
That's interesting. I'd've never said that the lawful/chaotic divide was /unclear/. If anything, I think the problem with the standard nine-point alignment system is that it is /too/ clear. "Moorcockian primordial powers, degrees of societal organization, level of commitment to a society's laws, level of commitment to a personal code, predictability or lack thereof of personal habits..." commitment to an alignment means /all/ of those things, and that's the problem. There's no sense of scale.
I think that you're correct about the lack of a sense of scale, but I see that as the least of it.
The list of things I reeled off isn't even coherent with itself. Being devoted to a society's laws and being devoted to a personal code are practically orthogonal to each other.
The classic version of this dilemma is, "Is a paladin required to follow an unjust law?" Experience with gamers for over 30 years, and with Internet arguments for around 20, convince me that there simply is no universal answer to this question. It all depends on what aspect of 'Lawful' you choose to emphasize over the others, and how important you see it for a paladin to be 'Lawful' as opposed to 'Good'.
And the result is a complete mass of confusion. If you hold that a paladin, being Lawful, must follow the law, you reach a point where he returns runaway slaves to their masters to be tortured to death because the law says so. If you hold that his personal code outweighs the written law, many people will flatly call that Chaotic. Others will not.
The only way to cut the Gordian knot that I can see is that the terms mean allegiance to one set of supernatural beings over another. And that doesn't really interest me for my campaigns. And in any case, I ask, why should a paladin hold allegiance to Law as opposed to the will of his own deity (or whatever he follows)?
As long as I'm on the subject of alignment absurdities, let me just mention completionism. Every alignment needs its own plane for some reason, and each plane needs its unique set of denizens. So we end up with a whole set of eladrins (to name just one example) that don't really add much of anything to the universe. I like the distinction between demons and devils, because it drives conflict and adds some variety. Archons and eladrins, not so much.
Ever since I was an 11 year old kid reading the AD&D books for the first time, I've wondered, "Wouldn't it make much more sense for each pantheon to have its own plane, rather than jamming diverse beings together in the name of alignment?"
(Then there's the crowning absurdity of the slaadi, who are supposedly the essence of Chaos... yet they all take the form of humanoid toads, and fall into rigidly color-coded castes. Oh, and they're Neutral between Good and Evil, but violently implant eggs in sapient beings to forcibly turn them into others of their own kind. Which isn't Evil, honest!)
(I mean really, if you saw everything about the original slaadi statblocks except their alignment, would you have chosen 'Chaotic Neutral' for them? I'd have thought that 'Lawful Evil' would have come nearer the mark, but what do I know? This is why I say don't bother with alignment. Describe your beastie and how it acts, and let the chips fall where they may.)
(P.S. If you think this contradicts what I said above about not agitating against the slaadi, you haven't understood me. I'm not against the slaadi - they're pretty cool monsters. I'm against pretending they're something called 'Chaotic Neutral'.)
EDIT: Forgot one!
Imaro said:
Will they? What kind of true code would a chaotic good/neutral/evil paladin even follow? Better yet why would a chaotic character ever be bound by a code, isn't that a lawful behavior? And if he or she wouldn't, why can a chaotic character be a paladin (outside of the "because we dropped alignment restrictions" reason)?
You're not taking my point. I'm advocating getting rid of alignment entirely, at least for mortals. On this view, there are no 'chaotic characters' any more, there's just characters.
Not to say there won't be characters who might act 'chaotically', and you're right, they probably wouldn't be interested in the Cavalier class, or whatever it ends up being called. But in the end, there's just the code; if it isn't followed, you're in peril of losing your powers.
Stop worrying about whether or not a person or an action is 'lawful' or 'chaotic'. Just describe a person, and describe a code, and then decide if that person would be interested in that code. Or, if you prefer, listen to your GM's description of a code, and then describe a person who would, in point of fact, be interested in that code.