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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2730060" data-attributes="member: 2067">According to the knightly tradition that yeilded the paladin as an archetype, the only human being that wasn't a sinner was the Son of God (and perhaps his mom). Which means that an entire class of people being sinless is almost blasphemey in this light. Paladins are mortals, and they are only on a "high ground" because of their free will to choose to puruse it.The idea that Paladins aren't sinners is inconcievable to me. The idea that they are "better than your average person" simply by being Holier than Thou is full of pride, hubris, and dreamy idealism. Paladins cannot be better than your average person, I think, and still be relatively playable as characters. If they are held to a higher stnadard, they are going to meet that standard less -- their speciality lays in their free choice of that harder path, not in the fact that the gods love them more for some reason.I can't imagine a person who doesn't do wrong, constnatly and regretably. Paladins distinguish themselves not by doing the impossible (being perfect), but by trying for that imposible goal (rather than settling for their sin as others would). It's not the destination, it's not the perfection -- it's the constant striving to get there that makes them special. A Paragon of Virtue is, in many styles of campaign, unrealistic. This isn't true in every kind. Where Good and Evil are clearly defined and there aren't really hard ethical and moral questions it's easy to stay true to the path. However, in any campaign where the motives, personality, and justice of Law and Goodness could become an issue, a Paragon of Virtue is an impossibility. Thus the origin of many Paladin threads -- how does a Paragon of Virtue make these difficult choices?To be a sinless mortal is almost a contradiction in terms, and this is especially true the more complex and challenged the character's moral high ground is. In effect, you can only be a Paragon of Virtue if that Virtue isn't significantly challenged. When it is, when you are forced to choose between two evils, Paragon of Virtue is no longer a valid archetype. Which is where Repentant Sinner comes in. Note that I'm not trying to gainsay different ways to play the Paladin. I'm merely saying that there comes a point where you either have to just agree to not make Virtue that big of a deal ("It's okay to murder innocents if you were tricked into it"), or you have to accept that paladins, like all other people, sometimes do bad things. And a Paladin that does bad things is distinguished not by blemishless purity, but by constantly striving for that ideal, and thus living as an example to every other sinful mortal out there. That just to hold the Paladin to an extremely strict code doesn't mean that it's suddenly an unfair way to play.</blockquote>

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