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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7747043" data-attributes="member: 42582">If that's not an unusual situation, then it seems like there's a lot of awful RPGing going on. Because what you describe to me is awful - there's no other word for it.Within the fiction it seems bizarrely at odds with the archetype. Eg in Excalibur, when Uriens knights Arthur he declares "In the name of God, St Michael and St George I give you the right to bear arms and the power to mete justice." One of the level titles for an AD&D paladin is "justiciar". So the archtypical paladin does have the power to forgive wrongdoing, especially against himself and his friends who join in the forgiveness.The idea that D&D villages also have magistrates courts of the modern sort, with public prosecutors just sitting around waiting to hear these matters, is also bizarre. Not to mention that, if in real life a police officer or magistrate can bail someone on their own recognisance, why can the paladin not do the same in the example you give?But turning from the fiction to the play at the table, what does a GM think s/he is doing in the example you give? There's been some intra-party friction; the players - as I understand it - have resolved the matter between themselves, by way of in-character play; and now the GM is doing what? Deciding to punish one of the players for it? That's terrible GMing even if you don't have the broader objection that I do to GM-adjudication of alignment.Well, for me at least part of the point of playing a paladin is to engage situations that will test my (in-character) courage, resolve, moral sensibility, etc. But I'm not remotely interested in learning whether the GM thinks my answers to these questions are the right ones!This also goes back to a comment I've made repeatedly in this thread - I would have zero interest in playing a paladin with a GM who takes the view from the outset, and/or builds into the framework of the gameworld or system, the impossibility of a paladin's aspirations and convictions.I mean, the example you give - of the thief who is forgiven, which the GM then uses as a stick to beat the paladin with - doesn't seem to me like a "moral conundrum" at all, and certainly not a clever one. It's just awful GMing.</blockquote>

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