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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6687355" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Depends on what "lawful" means. If "lawful" means "supporting organized society," then you could argue yes; things done outside of the reach and observation of organized society, which appear to ensure the continuation of organized society, would be definitionally Lawful. If "lawful" means "adhering to the legislation of the sovereign territory you're currently in," it would depend on the legislation of the territory in question, which we don't know; one of your earlier posts touched on this a bit, but left some presumptions which don't necessarily hold true. That is, we do not know if this Paladin is vested with the authority to act as judge over criminal activity...but we also don't know that the local legislation assumes innocence instead of guilt (something that not all human societies IRL have assumed). In many feudal states, knights vested by the power of some body (such as the church or whatever else) were able to act as judge, jury, and executioner--they could do almost whatever they wanted to the serfs, and they could certainly do whatever they wanted to bandits. In many cases, no one would bat an eye at breaking a promise to a Moor, for instance; fewer still would argue that it was in any way morally or ethically wrong to fail to live up to your end of a deal when the thing you were promised by an outsider (like a Moor) failed to happen, even if it wasn't their fault.While I agree that Unitedstatesians (such as myself) tend to think more individualistically, I think it is a mistake to pin it just on the US. Europe is also pretty far on the individualist side, albeit not as far, and there are several nations which are much more collectivist (Japan, China, and South Korea, for example). I disagree that individualism or collectivism is necessarily lawful or chaotic. Remember that most Socialist revolutions start out extremely chaotic, and gradually shift toward law...while still retaining at least a degree of lip-service to the idea of being collectivized. Similarly, while the United States is almost notorious for its "I go my own way" spirit, we had one of the first democratic revolutions that did not re-create a monarchy and which did not fall back into anarchy afterward. The Constitution is enshrined almost to the point of being sacred, and citizens of the United States are far more likely to profess belief in an all-powerful God than citizens of basically every country in Europe, and religion in general is a highly collectivist endeavor (even Protestantism, for all its commitment to everyone reading the Bible for themselves etc., seeks a uniformity of doctrine and behavior!)Wait. So, you're saying that a code of nearly 200 words gives you no information whatsoever beyond what a two-letter acronym could have told you? Either I've profoundly failed in my mission, or we have a very different understanding of what "a code" means. Are you suggesting that a code should be a rigorous list of absolutely permissible, absolutely impermissible, and conditionally permissible behaviors? If so, that seems kind of...well, to be frank, hypocritical, since you chose (above) to avoid evaluating the permissibility of impermissibility of lying because it was a too-thorny ethical subject.The whole point of the code I listed was that it gives a system of priorities, and intentionally avoids making excessively specific pronouncements. It's structured to be a religious text--a litany, specifically--and not legal-technical jargon. Does it explicitly forbid telling lies? No. But it does tell you that you should value the truth. Does it explicitly forbid killing? No. But it does tell you that, if you think it's possible to redeem someone rather than killing them, you should try. Does it say how much you need to gift to the poor? No. But it does tell you that the poor need to be helped.Boiling that down to "be good, be lawful" would be like summarizing the moral code written into the New Testament as "be loving." Yes, love is supremely important in Christian theology, but what "love" means as a word all on its lonesome is not clear. 1 Corinthians 13 is a code of love; it is very similar in structure (though not in content, specifically) to the code I provided, in that it identifies priorities within the concept of "good" and various virtuous activities, without inflexibly specifying what behaviors are good or not good.I mean, sure, if you really want to you can replicate the Law of Moses with its dozens of pages of X is clean, Y is unclean, never do Z, the punishment for W is stoning, the punishment for Q is fifty lashes, etc., etc. Will that actually lead to much interesting gameplay? Will that produce meaningfully more circumspect behavior from the Paladin following this hyperspecific code instead of a 1 Cor 13-style code?</blockquote>

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