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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5751499" data-attributes="member: 42582">A further complication is that the text [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] quoted seems to be written mostly in relation to Essentials paladins ("cavaliers") who must be either Unaligned, Good or Lawful Good (depending on virtue championed).My own view is that the most important anchor between fiction and mechanics in 4e is keywords. So the divine keyword means something in the fiction - namely, that this particular character has been bestowed with power by the gods - and I think that creates scope within the fiction for NPCs to distinguish between a rogue or a knight who is lofty but not divinely empowered, and a "paladin" who is a divinely empowered warrior. The distinction between STR cleric and STR paladin, though, is not going to be one that can easily be drawn within the fiction. (On this account, blackguards are a fictional as well as metagame category - they are the armed and armoured STR guys who use power that is both divine and shadow!)Of course, NPCs/monsters generally do not have power source keywords for their powers. Which makes identifying NPC "paladins" a bit trickier - some interpolation is required. Similar considerations arise in relation to paragon paths, which are often described in terms suggesting that there are orders of NPCs who follow the path, even though - mechanically - there is no obvious way to build such NPCs.I think the game expects the participants to paper over the cracks a bit here. Is there anything important at stake here? To put it another way, is there any GM in the world who is going to blanche at a PC who is not built using the paladin class, but who fights with armour and weapons, who uses divine powers to do so (or at least to help with doing so), and who, in the fiction, calls him-/herself a paladin? Is there any real life GM who is going to insist that the player of that PC is doing it wrong, because you can only truly call yourself a paladin in the fiction if you are built using the paladin class?EDIT: Having caught up with the rest of the thread, I see that the cavalier point was picked up.Is a cavalier's embodiment of a virtue part of the fiction or not? Perhaps, a bit like a warlock's pact.But this doesn't undermine my claim that, in the fiction, there is no inherent difference between a STR cleric and a STR paladin from the PHB. Neither has a class feature that singles them out as distinctively related to the metaphysics of the gameworld in the way that a cavlier's virtue or a warlock's pact does.I'm inclined to think that the same reasoning applies to the WIS cleric and Avenger. Invokers, on the other hand, do have an inherent difference (eg the impliments they use, and the reasons for that).Among the Arcane PCs there are clear differences: spellbooks for wizards, bloodlines for sorcerers, pacts for warlocks, and the absence of any of these things for bards.But the martial PCs in this respect are like the divine ones - there is no inherent fictional difference between a STR ranger, a warlord and a fighter, for example, or between a DEX ranger and a rogue. And given that it was fighters and rangers that were the main focus of the discussion upthread, I don't see that this discussion of paladins and blackguards undermines the points made in relation to them.</blockquote>

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