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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5799549" data-attributes="member: 42582">Interesting. I've never had this experience. When my players play paladins, they genrally expect me to throw situations there way that will give rise to interesting "paladin problems" and I expect them to do something interesting with those problems. But alignment restrictions or other personality mechanics aren't needed for that - if they didn't want to RP those sorts of situations, they wouldn't play a paladin.The most dramatic one I can remember happened many years ago in an RM game. A lot of combat in RM ends with fighters exhausted or maimed rather than dead, and so it wasn't until the paladin PC was 7th level or so that he first killed a fellow person (rolling 00 on the crit table with his two-handed sword). He went deep into remorse, and headed out into the wilderness to pray. I rolled for a random encounter, and - as it happened - got a low level demon. I had the demon come up to the meditating paladin and start taunting him for breaking his moral code. Now my expectation for the encounter was that the player would reason thus: Demons are creatuers of falsehood; so if the demon is saying I broke my code, than I didn't; I'll kill the demon, and return fortified and encouraged to my friends. But in fact what happened was this: the player (as his PC) assumed that the demon had been sent by his god as a punishment, and therefore offered no resistance as the demon proceeded to beat him senseless, before then wandering away to find something more interesting to do than deal with the boring paladin who wouldn't put up a fight.Certainly since that occasion, I've always taken for granted that if my players no I'm not going to play "alignment gotcha games" with them, then if they want to play paladins they will regardless of alignment rules, and if they don't then they won't regardless of alignment rules.And, conversely, in a game in which the pressures of expedience are so great that a player feels there is no room to play his/her paladin as such, then I'm not sure I even want the paladin as a class. There are no paladin PCs in Conan or Lankhamar, are there?</blockquote>

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