Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 5914433" data-attributes="member: 16726">I agree that paladins need to be the noble and chivalrous knights with whom we've become familiar in past editions, rather than a generic "pick a code and smite anybody who doesn't like it" class.  However, I'm not convinced that imposing an alignment requirement is the right way to accomplish this.When I look up chivalry in a dictionary, I find several definitions that revolve around courage against the strong, stalwart defense of the weak, good manners toward others, and proficiency with arms. Nowhere in the definition of chivalry do I find anything about respecting earthly authorities, following traditions, shunning creativity, judging others, or valuing order over freedom -- all staples of lawful goodness in editions past. If these aren't desired features of the paladin class, why make them so by imposing a lawful good alignment restriction?  Better to simply require them to embody chivalry and let the alignment chips fall where they may.A 3e example from the Realms: it never made sense to me that Helm, Chauntea, Selune, etc would grant special powers (paladinhood) to those who explicitly renounce the most treasured precepts of those deities and opt for lawful goodness instead.  Why not just say that those deities value chivalry even though they aren't LG and are willing to elevate followers who also revere chivalry?  To sum up, the dichotomy some people see between "requiring LG" and moving to a "pick a code, any code" paladin is a false choice, because it is also possible to bring back the traditional chivalric paladin archetype without a specific alignment straitjacket of any kind.  Maybe there's an LN guy like Helm who protects the weak and sees evil rather than chaos as the main threat to stability -- fine, let him be a paladin with the traditional set of abilities including smiting evil. Same for CG, NG, or maybe other alignments as well. None of these guys will be "normal" for their alignment, but hey, LG paladins aren't exactly "normal" for their alignment either.  Those are my two cents, anyway.</blockquote>

Verification