NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6687263" data-attributes="member: 42582">My own sense is that it takes quite a degree of enculturation to internalise notions of "rules" or "duty" in one's reasoning, which I think is what is at the heart of your (cogent) analysis in the first of the two passages I've quoted.A practical example from my work life: at my University there is a requirement that all appeals from a faculty's discipline decisions (eg to kick a student out for cheating) must be heard, in the first instance, by an academic from the Faculty of Law. And as one of those academics, it is a recurring shock to see how cavalierly other faculties approach the issue of acquiring and relying upon evidence, allowing the student to know the basis on which a decision is being reached, etc. They don't take rules seriously.To play a character who takes oaths and obligations seriously of course one doesn't have to have internalised those values, but one has to at least have thought about what it would be like to have done so.I've never RPGed with an American, so can't comment on that particular sociological observation. But I certainly agree that different social formations make it more or less easy to imagine oneself into the outlook of that sort of character.I think D&D, as traditionally presented and played, raises an additional problem for this: at one and the same time it wants to evoke the radically modernist fantasy of REH's Conan while also deploying and celebrating the tropes of Tolkien-esque romantic fantasy, of which the paladin is the paradigm. That's an unstable combination that, understandably, can be hard for individual tables and participants to pull off.</blockquote>

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