D&D 5E So what's the problem with restrictions, especially when it comes to the Paladin?

[jasper]

..If you are ok with such behavior from players, just not from paladins, your problem is that only paladin players do this......

I would tolerate some of behavior for EVIL PC barely. As in "StarFox is doing this and is my ride to the game". But the problem is when the PC is Lawful Good and all he needs is basic black outfit to meet the BlackGuard/Antipaladin job opening and is still insisting he is Good. Read the player gives me some BS excuse he is still good.
I only toss two players out due bad playing in over 30 years. One was viewpiont the pc always won and the dm must fudge to save him. The second was a player who I was arguing with 80%+ of the time over rule calls, or game play. Like the old Lucy show, 7 of gamers want hamburgers with their quest, he wanted an Chicago Style Hot Dog cook fresh in front of him and hate the quest idea.
I would toss more players out but they were my ride, only gamers in town, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Explain.[/QUOTE [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] mentioned quite a few examples.

Alignment is rife in spell descriptors and spell effects (including the generalisation of spells like Holy Word to all alignments); in monster descriptors, which determines how they interact with spell efffects; in item descriptions; and in weapon immunity rules (in 3.5).

Only problem there is when players ARE there to screw up the game or act out their teenage\college age fantasies.

There is no rule in Monopoly or chess that you can't tip over the board. The rules assume that people are there to play the game.

Likewise in an RPG. If a player is there to "screw up the game", just don't play with them. GM enforced alignment is not going to make them better people, is it? (Ie what [MENTION=2303]Starfox[/MENTION] said.)

I wonder how strong the correlation is between early bad experiences with players and a preference for games with stronger "DM force" assumed. Or the corollary of having early bad experiences with DMs leading to a preference for more narrative games that constrain the role of the DM.

In my own case I have GMed more than played for 30-odd years. And realised in the first two to three years that rampant GM force was not my friend if I wanted an enjoyable game.

 

[Manbearcat]

I wonder how strong the correlation is between early bad experiences with players and a preference for games with stronger "DM force" assumed. Or the corollary of having early bad experiences with DMs leading to a preference for more narrative games that constrain the role of the DM. It would be an interesting poll.

In my own case I have GMed more than played for 30-odd years. And realised in the first two to three years that rampant GM force was not my friend if I wanted an enjoyable game.

In another thread yesterday I put forth my reasoning on why I'm stridently against "fudging" and why I've always rolled out in the open. The same reasoning applies to why I'm against any other forms of GM force. I run games to "see what happens", not to "tell a story." The application of GM force is anathema to my own agenda for enjoyment as a GM because I already "know what happens."

 

[Starfox]

Oddly I am kind of the opposite from Manbearcathere - not in that I cheat, but in that I am very much a storyteller. And I still don't want this level of control. It is supposed to be a collaborative story, and that is hard if the player has a Sword of Damocles hanging over their powers by GM whim.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I'm with Starfox on this.

It's funny though. I've been repeatedly told, over and over again, that we don't need rules to save us from bad DM's. Not only that, but rules can never save a game from bad DM's.

Yet, apparently, rules can save the game from bad players.

No amount of rules are going to save the game from a player who wants to take a character and completely ignore the class and play what he wants. The only thing that will save that game is instructing players that what's on their character sheet must inform how they play that character.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

LOL, why is it such a horrible thing to be able to adapt the paladin class to being used for other slightly different things, like a blackguard? For that matter is it REALLY that unusual in fiction to have dark heroes or anti-heroes? Heck, even in ancient tales there were anti-heroes, just read the Illiad and you'll find plenty of that! I can trivially find a character who is riding lawful good and can use the 4e blackguard class, a Vice of Fury Blackguard who channels his rage against the evil forces who wiped out his family for instance. Will he find his revenge and rid the world of a great evil, or will it consume him first? He's not someone you want to invite into your house, but he's even worse news for the bad guys...

 

[Sunseeker]

As a side note, one of the issues I have with alignment restrictions, heck even alignment in general, is it allows for cheap duplication of powers, especially smite.

Smite Evil. Smite Good, Smite Law, Smite Chaos, etc... They're all the identical spell just with the alignment replaced. Why do we even need this? It's lazy design, it adds no flavor to the class. We should simply give all Paladins of all alignments "Smite", obviously they're going to use it to smite their foes who are 9/10 times, their alignment counterpart. Then we can move on to realize that each of these different Paladin variants needs something special to make them stand out from each other.

 

[jasper]

Getting rid of bad players was not problem unless they were my ride/brother/best friend/owner of the house etc. The problem is when get a player who wants the Paladin Class Abilities,and the pc does stupid evil right and left and wonders while he loses his abilities. Even stranger is when the same player would not do stupid evil if he was just playing a thief. Or is it, I had a lot power mad paladin players.
If so, to take the thread back to how to do in the rules, check boxes and code of conduct for each flavor of paladin.

 

[jasper]

LOL, why is it such a horrible thing to be able to adapt the paladin class to being used for other slightly different things, like a blackguard? .....

Never said anything against different flavor of paladins. Loved it when a player wanted one.

My problem is how by the rules if Paladins are only LG can he lose his" powers"? For example if Abbdul's paladin" Peter the Purple Polked dottedPalading of Pittsburg", and the npb Blackguard "Bob BlackHeart BlackCloak of Birmingham" are in the New York City lineup, how do the NPCs and other PCs tell them apart if they both been acting the same. Same crimes, same number of murders, same number of jaywalking arrests, etc.
How do you by the rules enforce Alignment restrictions if the class gets "powers" for that Alignment. And tossing out Alignmnet is not an option.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Never said anything against different flavor of paladins. Loved it when a player wanted one.

My problem is how by the rules if Paladins are only LG can he lose his" powers"? For example if Abbdul's paladin" Peter the Purple Polked dottedPalading of Pittsburg", and the npb Blackguard "Bob BlackHeart BlackCloak of Birmingham" are in the New York City lineup, how do the NPCs and other PCs tell them apart if they both been acting the same. Same crimes, same number of murders, same number of jaywalking arrests, etc.
How do you by the rules enforce Alignment restrictions if the class gets "powers" for that Alignment. And tossing out Alignmnet is not an option.

I'm not 100% sure I follow you here, but lets see. You have 2 characters, one is a Paladin, and one is a Blackguard. I would assume this means there is a difference between the two classes, blackguards have 'evil' powers and paladins have 'good' powers. I assume your complaint is now that both characters could be evil in alignment and you want to know what makes one a blackguard and one a paladin. Frankly there are a few things I find odd/wrong about this sort of setup. First of all, yes, I would get rid of alignment, clearly in the game in question players are clearly not interested in narrowly pigeonholing their characters so what is the point of using game mechanics that are designed to do what the players don't want to do? It would be like insisting on using magic points when everyone wants to play a Vancian wizard.

That aside the question is what are the players trying to do by playing these different classes of character and using them in ways that clearly don't match up with what the designers were thinking about when they wrote them. The Blackguard class, in 4e at least, exists for the very reason of providing a paladin option for 'dark' heroes, anti-heroes, and villains. The basic Paladin class is designed with dedicated do-gooders in mind, but naturally it can potentially accommodate various possibilities. Obviously we can get into semantic arguments about exactly which characters are paladins and what we call the rest. That's fine. My objections to alignment restrictions have far more to do with how that limits what players can do with their RP than it has to do with labels of things. I'll equally object to "all Blackguards must be evil".

So, my answer ultimately is its up to the players in a game to decide how they want to RP and it shouldn't be codified in rules how you do that. As for the whole "what if you have bad players, only the rules can ride herd on them" theory you've been developing, posh on it! Its impossibly to enforce good play with rules. Rules should exist in RPGs to adjudicate specific things in play, like combat. The rest of the game is just advice, at best prearranged procedures that can be used to help work out what happens in the game (like say a guideline for building castles or something).