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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5918165" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't really think there is a modern ideal of chivalry. Like honour, I think it's an animating value that hasn't survived into modernity.Respect remains important in modernity, and also (at least according to international human rights instruments) a certain conception of dignity, but this is very different from the chivalric conception.For example, the reason the weak are to be treated kindly is because they are base. They are humble. They are meek. It's not a doctrine of equality - it's a doctrine of magnanimity. Conversely, when Lancelot kills the other knights for (what would for most moderns be) no good reason, he is not doing them a disservice. He is treating them as their station warrants, according them due respect.To bring this back to D&D. If a group wants to run a game in which the gap between chivalric and contemporary liberal moral norms is a focus of play, go for it! I've run that game (or a variation on it), and it's fun if sometimes challenging. But alignment will be no help, because the contrast between chivalry and modernity, which consists in differing conceptions of dignity, of station and the like, is not something that alignment provides any analysis of. Max Weber, Neitzsche, or just a sympathetic viewing of the movie Hero will be far more helpful.Conversely, if a group wants to run a game with chivlaric knights, but doesn't want to get into all that "shades of grey", "historically contextualised morality" stuff, then alignment won't help either! Because all it will do is tell you that the behaviour of your chivalric knight is perhaps not lawful good, because s/he's not always acting according the modern liberal ethos that Gygax set out as the tenets of LG in the AD&D rulebooks.It's a bit like classic superhero comics. Why are they fighting bankrobbers and Dr Doom rather than using their powers to actually transform the world in dramatic ways that would alleviate suffering? If you want to play a light superhero RPG, you have to just put those questions to one side, as having no place in the genre. And alignment definitions that bring those questions back into play won't help the game, they'll just muddy the waters and potentially lead to conflict among the participants.Likewise with a chivalric D&D game. If you want to challenge the paladin, don't put in goblin babies to slaughter. How does that help? Instead place a black knight on a bridge - the PCs can only get through the forest to fight the goblins if they cross the bridge, but fighting the black knight in a one-on-one joust will cause delay and needlessly injure the paladin. That's a test of chivalric standards that can be tackled from within the light heroic fantasy frame of reference, without having to worry about the many gaps between mediaeval and contemporary values. And it doesn't need the GM's heavy hand punishing the player of the paladin for choosing one way or the other, either. It can all be resolved ingame - joust the knight, the goblins maraud. Beat up on the black knight as a party, and tales of the paladin's lack of chivalry spread. Maybe the clever player strikes a deal with the knight - let my friends pass first (thus the rest of the PCs speed on to the goblin lair) and I'll joust you afterwards, making my head their ransom.Of course, this would require some rules for handling a split party, but that's another issue, but one that is likely to come up anytime there's a PC with disinctive and intimate ties into the fiction of the gameworld.</blockquote>

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