D&D 5E Player agency and Paladin oath.

[Mort]

It takes two to tango. If you’re going to play a character with a strict oath it’s on you to make sure that’s compatible with your friends style of play.

In fact I’d go so far as to say any character you want to play that requires other characters to behave a certain way should be checked in. I would include wizards that expect another player to stand in front of them. People shouldn’t assume that the party will curve around.

Sure, but the "required buy in" here was that the rest of the group not act like a bunch of lying murder hobos, little less sympathetic if you ask me.

 

[wizard71]

Having a paladin oath does not restrict player agency. The game can strive to be more than merely murder hobos slaughtering everything in sight

 

[Helldritch]

From my point of view, the paladin played well. The warlock did too. The CN, however, are way too much on the evil side but you as the DM lost an opportunity to help the Paladin drive his point through. It should not have been the same giant that would have ambushed the players. I would have played the giants to the utmost of my abilities and if it would have been a TPK, so be it. But the paladin and warlock would awake, safe and sound because the giant that has granted them mercy arrived just in the nick of time to prevent his friends from lending a "coup de grâce". This would have teach the other two players, that sometimes, mercy and respecting your word is worthwhile.

 

[Flamestrike]

The Antihero Doing Evil Things For Good Reasons is a fairly common protagonist archetype in modern stories.

Yeah. And such an anti-hero has an evil alignment.

 

[Lanefan]

Church leader talks to paladin in a Dream spell.
"How's it going with the quest?"
Paladin proceeds to tell church leader about all that the other members of the party have done.
"Woah, that's horrible. Tell them that their contract is void and that they should leave at once. We'll send out a new group to assist you."

And if the others refuse to leave, then what?

DM has CN party members leave and makes the players of said party members roll up new characters.

That's not really the DM's call to make: it's up to the players of the CN characters whether they leave or not.

The DM could take a stand of "I'm only going to run the ongoing story of the Paladin" but that risks accusations of favouritism from the other players, and more importantly hands a minority of one an unearned victory over the rest of the table.

Problem solved and keeps continuity with the story.

Continuity being kept is not really an issue here, in that odds are already extremely high this group of PCs is sooner or later going to throw the DM's story out the window anyway and just do their own thing. No problem there as long as the DM can hit the curveballs.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The Antihero Doing Evil Things For Good Reasons is a fairly common protagonist archetype in modern stories.

That's kind of the definition of Evil. Evil never thinks it's the villain.

 

[Lanefan]

Having a paladin oath does not restrict player agency. The game can strive to be more than merely murder hobos slaughtering everything in sight

Those two things aren't really related, and the first isn't even true.

A Paladin with an oath does restrict player agency (or tries very hard to) the moment said Paladin expects the rest of the party to live up to said oath and-or starts inflicting consequences if-when they don't.

My agency to play a murderhobo in that party, for example, largely goes out the window; along with my agency to play various other fairly-common character types: the anti-hero, the neutral-greedy, in some cases the prankster, and so on. All of these are characters I've played in the past and would again in a heartbeat.

 

[Flamestrike]

A Paladin with an oath does restrict player agency (or tries very hard to) the moment said Paladin expects the rest of the party to live up to said oath and-or starts inflicting consequences if-when they don't.

And how is that any different from a CE PC Murderhobo that starts engaging in murder and torture, and just expects the rest of the party to be totally cool with it?

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I am really having trouble with this because I think in real life those characters would just part ways - the Paladin can't accept such behavior and the others can't stand the goody-goody Paladin. Of course in the real world parting ways means an end to our game. If it wasn't for his oath I think he would just relent and basically look at alignment as a guideline or belief instead of a code to live by.

So rather than debating alignments (which is so obviously easy to quickly and conclusively resolve) or critiquing the decisions of you, your players, or their characters, it occurs to me that addressing your actual concern may be worthwhile. You're worried they wouldn't realistically stay together with these wild variations in behavior and modi operandi due to differing alignments. Here is what I would suggest:

1. Suspend your disbelief: Maybe it's not realistic, but if hard to explain codependence of random adventurers is what your going to get hung up on in a world of magic and monsters that is a strange line in the sand to draw. It is a conceit of the game that people are always operating in rag-tag teams of adventurers with complimentary skills and stick together. Consider just rolling with it.

2. Question your disbelief: Is it really so unrealistic? People stick together and do things they don't like all the time for the sake of income, survival, friendship, love, social pressure, one or another causes, fear of reprisal, or a simple lack of the will to upend their life by leaving their current situation. The lack of realism here to me seems less "why would people at conflict in this way stay together" and more "why would they do it when they only just met each other".

3. Give them reasons to stay together: Money and a cause brought mercenaries and a paladin together once, perhaps some combination of money and cause can do it again. Or perhaps they have gotten into mutual trouble and need each other to get out. It sounds like some sort of lord of giants would have plenty reason to put a bounty on all of their heads, or maybe just the Paladin, as "the leader" of their home-invading, murder expedition, in which case I suspect even the chaotic neutral characters might feel bad leaving him in the lurch. Maybe you can find something they all actually care about or maybe you can persuade them to care about each other. Maybe they'll find the friendship was the real treasure.

4. Make sure you don't have a metagaming problem: If one character wouldn't attack a fleeing giant who might warn other giants and other characters would, this isn't really something they would have a debate over. The characters wanting to attack would do so unless the other character immediately stopped them. I'm not clear how it ran at your table, but don't give them time to have an alignment debate if there isn't in game time for an alignment debate.

 

[Lanefan]

And how is that any different from a CE PC Murderhobo that starts engaging in murder and torture, and just expects the rest of the party to be totally cool with it?

Perception and expectation, mostly.

If I'm running a CE torturehobo in a party that generally doesn't go for such I would have every reasonable expectation that sooner or later there's gonna be consequences, anywhere from getting tossed from the party to being thrown in jail up to and including a knife in the back some night while we camp. It's part of the game, and a known and accepted risk of what I've chosen to do. Nobody's agency is impacted: I do what I do, they do what they do, and we see what happens next.

But if I'm running a LG Paladin in a party that generally doesn't go for such that I'm less likely to have that sort of expectation, instead relying on either the game (fiction) or the DM (real world) to impose consequences if I get knocked off or punted from the party and relying on my own roleplay (fiction) or social (real world) skills to impose my will on the agency of others.