Musings on the "Lawful Jerk" Paladin

[MarkB]

The monster manual? The game world is not the real world. Orcs, as written in the monster manual, good and evil as defined in D&D doesn't exist in the real world.

What's funny here is that this is supposed to be a thread about how people have a hard time with judgmental paladins. Yet I'm being judged for taking D&D at face value, that orcs are an evil race. That a presumption of many campaigns is that true good and evil exist. Somehow I'm suddenly a sociopath for accepting the game at face value and not concerning myself with the morality of a fictional character killing fictional monsters.

Good grief.

Sorry if it came across that way - it wasn't my intention. It's a gameworld assumption that makes me uncomfortable, but that's about me, not you. Don't let my baggage bring you down.

 

[Oofta]

I think I'm agreeing with you, but it's hard to tell.

The game world is not like the real world. Most paladin problems occur when there's a misunderstanding about how the world works. It's not fair to judge the paladin by the standards of our real world, because their world is a different place where absolute evil is a known fact. If any particular game world lacks the concept of Good and Evil, because everything is some shade of gray morality, then the paladin doesn't make sense in that world.

A few things. First, I don't think it makes sense to judge a world similar to most D&D campaigns based on modern day ethics and laws. In many campaigns the world is harsher, punishment is more brutal, people live with what we would consider low level warfare. So if people don't have a lot of hesitance about killing goblins that are known to steal children in the middle of the night for a midnight snack, it's kind of understandable.

Even if it's not a world of black and white, it's still not our world.

So I'm not sure I go quite as far as paladins not making sense in a world without clear cut black and white, but certainly there are a lot of assumptions in the base game of conviction granting supernatural powers.

I also think people get a little too serious about a game of fictional characters fighting fictional monsters. My PC's ethics certainly don't always reflect mine, but I think they make sense in the context of a world where good and evil are as real as electricity.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Honestly, the idea of thinking of any sentient species in these terms rather makes my skin crawl, even in a fictional setting. I'd be distressed to be asked to even play a character who thought of sentient beings in those terms.

Have to agree here. It's basically espousing genocide, which I can't see as anything but an evil concept. I also like a little more nuance in my games, where evil can be redeemed, rather than just murdering orc children to save time of killing them later. It would be really weird for me to see a paladin remotely OK with that, let alone that be considered undeniably good in the game.

 

[Oofta]

Have to agree here. It's basically espousing genocide, which I can't see as anything but an evil concept. I also like a little more nuance in my games, where evil can be redeemed, rather than just murdering orc children to save time of killing them later. It would be really weird for me to see a paladin remotely OK with that, let alone that be considered undeniably good in the game.

So disinfecting a beaker that held ebola is genocide? Orcs are not people, they were created by Gruumsh. From the monster manual on orcs

[Gruumsh] Grasping his mighty spear, he laid waste to the mountains, set the forests aflame, and carved great furrows in the fields. Such was the role of the orcs, he proclaimed, to take and destroy all that the other races would deny them.

I know not everyone is going to take the same POV my characters would take, but orcs are not people. If you came across the monsters in the Aliens movies, would you have set fire to the eggs like Ripley did, or would you have let them be because they were just innocent babies?

As always this doesn't reflect real world ethos in any way, etc, etc, etc.

 

[Oofta]

I was thinking about this, sorry for the long post. TLDR: Finding orc babies is a train trolley dilemma, there is no good answer, just a choice of bad ones.

While I would never set up a scenario like this I do think it came up in a game long ago I played which in part explains my answer above. To me, this is a D&D variation of the trolley dilema (do you allow the trolley to kill 5 people or pull the lever and kill 1 person). It's a no-win situation.

You've been adventuring, hunting a band of orcs that has been attacking local villages. After a tough fight, you killed them all. You then find their lair, and some orc babies. What do you do?

You know a few things.

• There is no way anyone will adopt them. It's been tried in the past, the orcs killed the other children in the orphanage and their caretakers before escaping. Every time, no exceptions.
• If you leave them they will starve to death or be eaten by cave spiders. There's probably a one in a thousand chance of them surviving, the others will die suffering.
• If they do survive they will grow up to be evil monsters. There may be a one in a billion chance that they aren't evil, it hasn't happened yet that anyone is aware of but who knows?

So do you

• Try to take them back, knowing the villagers will kill them to protect their own children.
• Leave them to die, because there's a one in a trillion chance one of them could survive and be the first orc in the history of the world to not be evil. By a large order of magnitude, the result of any orc living would be to allow a monster to live that will slaughter as many innocents as possible.
• Kill them and pray for forgiveness.

To me, this is a no-win situation, the least cruel thing you could do would be to limit their suffering. I made my decision and decided to throw the metaphorical lever. The least evil option left to my character, the most merciful solution, was to kill them and pray for forgiveness.

Is that an "eww" situation? Yes, which is why I would never set up the scenario. But from the perspective of my PC, he was still killing monsters. Just not ones that were an immediate threat.

I understand that in some campaigns, orcs are really just misunderstood noble savages who just want to live peacefully in orc-town and only have evil tendencies because they're in a goth period. I'm assuming the monster manual is followed, and orcs are evil ravaging hordes.

It is a conceit of D&D that there are evil races, something that doesn't apply to the real world so no cheating by saying "I'd adopt them myself and we'd all be one big happy family".

Or let's take an alternate scenario from a sci-fi scenario. You're a specialist accompanying some space marines going to find out what happened to a colony. You suspect the colonists were all killed by xenomorphs, but for plot reasons you go with them. For further plot reasons, you don't nuke it from orbit like you should. After the xenomorphs have killed the marines, you come across the xenomorph queen who appears to be sentient (smart enough to understand an implied threat in any case) and some xenomorphs eggs on the verge of hatching.

Do you
Torch the eggs so they never have a chance to hatch.
Let the eggs hatch because maybe the xenomorphs are just misunderstood noble savages?

I think this latter scenario is closer to base D&D morality. Because the xenormorphs are not humanoid we don't sympathize with them or assume they maybe, might, just possibly be good.

 

[Adamant]

A few things. First, I don't think it makes sense to judge a world similar to most D&D campaigns based on modern day ethics and laws. In many campaigns the world is harsher, punishment is more brutal, people live with what we would consider low level warfare. So if people don't have a lot of hesitance about killing goblins that are known to steal children in the middle of the night for a midnight snack, it's kind of understandable.

Even if it's not a world of black and white, it's still not our world.

So I'm not sure I go quite as far as paladins not making sense in a world without clear cut black and white, but certainly there are a lot of assumptions in the base game of conviction granting supernatural powers.

I also think people get a little too serious about a game of fictional characters fighting fictional monsters. My PC's ethics certainly don't always reflect mine, but I think they make sense in the context of a world where good and evil are as real as electricity.

That reminds me of a battle with cultists, we were sent to find out what happened to a caravan, found the cult and took them out and I took their leader's head with us as proof, as well as a way to identify the other cultists infiltrating the temple, because the leader had a tattoo on his head that the lower ranked cultists had on their arm. One of the other players reacted by saying "I thought you were supposed to be good!" and I responded that this was the equivalent of medieval times. Same when I killed a wizard that was about to get away, just because she wasn't evil didn't mean that I should either let her go and complete a time spell that had caused the loop we were in, or risk letting her kill me to try to subdue her. I had just walked through a wall of fire spell and had 6 hp left. Neutral good means I do what I think is right, and even lawful good would possibly do the same thing to the wizard, because there were no laws against it. It was also possible she was just an echo, and not really the wizard herself.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

So disinfecting a beaker that held ebola is genocide? Orcs are not people, they were created by Gruumsh. From the monster manual on orcs

Ebola isn't sentient. Elves were created by Correlon. Dwarves by Moradin. Neither are people. And both of them screwed over the orcs in most campaigns and robbed them of their homeland. Should we kill the children of human terrorists/necromancers/cultists? They were raised evil too.

You're ascribing some kind of mindless, innate evil to orcs that doesn't jive with how they have been presented in most worlds. I'm just not a fan where of worlds where you can't reform or change evil, because murderhoboing is the only option.

 

[Oofta]

Ebola isn't sentient. Elves were created by Correlon. Dwarves by Moradin. Neither are people. And both of them screwed over the orcs in most campaigns and robbed them of their homeland. Should we kill the children of human terrorists/necromancers/cultists? They were raised evil too.

You're ascribing some kind of mindless, innate evil to orcs that doesn't jive with how they have been presented in most worlds. I'm just not a fan where of worlds where you can't reform or change evil, because murderhoboing is the only option.

Orcs aren't evil just because of the way they are raised. They are inherently evil, at least according to the monster manual. And again, we're talking fantasy game orcs, not human children.

Obviously if you're playing a campaign where the orcs are just humans with tusks and green skin, different rules may apply. But as I stated in the post above, in some cases there is not good solution, and I do get a bit tired of people forcing modern-day ethics on a world where they simply don't make any sense.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It absolutely has bearing. Because the DM can, and is encouraged, to punish the paladin for not being Lawful Good. This means that you have to play YOUR character how the DM thinks he should be played. If there is disconnect between what Lawful or Good means for two parties (and I think this is an undeniable fact at this point) this causes more issues for paladins than the Lawful Good fighter, who just gets a grumbling DM. And because the paladin's companions could lead to his fall, this led to the DM effectively enforcing his view on the entire table, with the paladin being the stick in the mud on many plans. Add in that people don't like being told that their beliefs are evil, or not good, and its perfect storm of suck for something that should be escapist fun. Sorry, cant use a knockout poison, that would be wrong. Ready the burning oil to roast people alive violently!

Alignment won't be useless when you can get 4 out of 5 people to agree what the alignment of someone like Batman is. Cue the 9 alignment Batman meme, but it proves the point.

I'm trying to steer this discussion away from the tired old "is alignment bad?" debate. Everything you're saying here is just rehashing that debate, and nothing actually pertains to the problem of "jerk paladins". You are describing a separate problem in which the paladin player is the victim of anti-fun behavior, not the perpetrator.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I'm trying to steer this discussion away from the tired old "is alignment bad?" debate. Everything you're saying here is just rehashing that debate, and nothing actually pertains to the problem of "jerk paladins". You are describing a separate problem in which the paladin player is the victim of anti-fun behavior, not the perpetrator.

Did you just not read my post? It details why alignment sucks extra hard in regards to the paladin. That, due to the loss of their class abilities, paladins would often suck the fun out of the game, because they're not just hosed for doing stuff that could be described as non-lawful (whatever that means), but merely being around when said stuff was done? This is why they're hated. Alignment is in the very title of the thread.

Alignment IS bad on its own, but paladins made it worse for everyone at the table. The oaths are much better IMO, as they tell you what to do. "Be Lawful" is useless.