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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elf Witch" data-source="post: 3311246" data-attributes="member: 9037">I was not defending Miko in this post I was talking about paladins in general. And in society's that allow paladins to dispence judgement. BTW not allowing paladins to dispence justice didn't stop Miko at all. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I have had great DMs and bad DMs and I have seen paladins played with both. With bad rigid DMs playing a paladin is not fun. You end up either falling or just pissing the rest of the party off because you are terrified of falling and you agonize over every decision.I use a modified medieval viewpoint. Other wise there would be a lot of things you could not do. When I say try not to be handicapped by 21 century morality this is what I mean. In our modern system we have a way of dealing with criminals we put them in jails. We have airplane and cars so if an evil doer does something in the wilderness miles from a city it is not impossible to get them to the city in a relative short time. We can even call the police to come and take them so we can back to our trek in the wildnerness. In a lot of settings there would not enough jails or resources to handle say a tribe of marauding kobolds. So a PCs often have to make a choice on to handle them. Let them go or kill them. With 21 century thinking killing those kobolds would be considered murder. In today world we have the Geneva convention to handle rules of warfare. We don't kill prisoners, soldiers can be arrested for plundering and looting.There is one medieval viewpoint that DnD players love and that is the right to plunder. The right to plunder was often considered part of the payment for soldiers. We today would be horrified if people went onto a battlefield and looted the clothes and belongings off the soldiers yet that was a common occurance in the medieval ages.And as for 21 century law lets take a look at that. You have a mafia don who has killed, blackmailed, bribed, and caused a lot of pain and suffering and death of innocents with his tainted herion his soul is as black as they come.He is on trial for a killing he did not commit. Our laws say that you can only judge him guilty  or not guilty for this crime. So by the law he is not guilty but he is still evil and will go on to commit more evil crimes. But you can't lock him up. In the medieval DnD world say you have the same type of situation. The clerics and the paladins find out that he did not commit this crime but his soul is black with evil taint. The clerics cast disern lie on him and question him and find out that he has killed before. The paladin prays and communes with his god on what to do is this man evil does he deserve punishment. So the man is executed.I don't want to play all the time in a historical correct game but I find being rigid about applying 21 century law and ethics to pCs in a fantasy setting tends to make it harder to play a good character. I also enjoy mature themed games where everything is not black and white. The elves human holy war is based on the crusades and got some of its inspiration from the movie Kingdom of Heaven. Neither side is evil. Using the limited code from the PHB it would be much harder to play a paladin in this setting.Besides there are a lot of weird rules that just don't make sense take the rule that a paladin can't use poison. So if a paladin coats his weapon with a poison that does strenth damage that is evil even though the person gets a fort save. And if he makes the fort save nothing happens. But he has to atone for this.But under the rules a wizard paladin could cast Ray Of Enfeeblement which also does strength damage and has no save. And under the RAW he would not lose his paladinhod for this. so in my games using poison is not an evil act in and of itself it is no more evil than a sword. It is a tool. It is what you do with it that makes it an evil act.</blockquote>

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