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

[jasper]

No I have 1 pc who is LG paladin who is acting/roleplaying like a Black guard. As in Peter the Purple Polked dotted Paladin of Pittsburg", drowns kittens, burns down the farmers marker because he was short changed and One vendor was LE, kicks puppys, tortures prisoners, all in one night session.
And then Abbdul tells me since nothing in the rule book describes what is good action, and all his actions are for the greater good, he was just role playing and should not lose his Paladinhood.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No I have 1 pc who is LG paladin who is acting/roleplaying like a Black guard. As in Peter the Purple Polked dotted Paladin of Pittsburg", drowns kittens, burns down the farmers marker because he was short changed and One vendor was LE, kicks puppys, tortures prisoners, all in one night session.
And then Abbdul tells me since nothing in the rule book describes what is good action, and all his actions are for the greater good, he was just role playing and should not lose his Paladinhood.

No, that's not really what I'm saying. You're trying to simplify it down into something absurd but actual play has an excluded middle that you are ignoring. If the player is playing like that, then clearly his character is evil, right? Certainly he's something like an 'anti-hero', he does bad things for good causes, etc. That's cool, why do you have a problem with this! If you want to use something like 4e's Blackguard class for that, instead of the stock paladin class, that's probably a good thing, but you could use the stock paladin. Maybe you'd refluff some things about his appearance and powers, maybe. Of course all the outraged people that he's wronged might come after him or do for him. The church he supposedly represents (if any) might even come after him. Notice that 4e talks about all this stuff too. The DM is totally free to do all of these things. Heck, if the players will go along with it he can have the PC's powers stop working and he could rebuild his character as a fighter too, nothing LIMITS DM power, except the players.

The problem is, in your scenario with "loss of paladinhood" rules in place how does that work? The player says "wait a minute, my character works for the greatest good, if I didn't kill those evil merchants society would go to hell and everyone would burn." Is he wrong? What makes your view that he has to be nice to every kitten even if it leads to 1000 people's damnation better than his view that the greater good outweighs a few cruelties? YOUR solution doesn't even allow that debate to happen, the DM just drops his ban-hammer on the paladin's ass and the discussion is over. Its fine if you guys have more fun playing that way, I'm not trying to say its badwrongfun or anything, but just because there isn't a rule that says "the DM judges every action of the paladin and turns him into a fighter anytime he thinks he should" doesn't make paladins into something different. It just makes the interpretation of each specific situation less absolutist.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm curious. I know this won't map perfectly but we're so far apart from each other that perhaps we can get some kind of reasoning analog for better understanding. To those that feel that alignment is a mandatory nexus for D&D Paladin play, which of the following game adjudication dynamics is "most" (not perfect) fitting with respect to your position of hard-coded alignment and GM ethos arbitration:

1 - A professional sports organization's drug testing policy whereby positives yield fine > suspension without pay > ban.

2 - A soccer referee's yellow card/red card protocol for rules violations.

3- A coach's training camp and in-season evaluation that yields game-plans, starting lineups and overall playing time.

 

[jasper]

Abbdual I was being over the top, because other posters were basically saying I could not drop the ban hammer at all, it was up to players to decide what was good and evil. What I was trying to discuss was "when does the DM have the power to drop the ban hammer, and when will the players lose the right/power to griping about the ban hammer dropping."

Manbearcat "1 - A professional sports organization's drug testing policy whereby positives yield fine > suspension without pay > ban." That is just and good point.

I change it to "When does the DM (and what D&Dnext rules support him) give out an xp fine > spell taken away> suspension of abilities > ban hammer."
For us old guys thing of through a viewpoint of new dms and new players. With the facts that other new gamers will be rotating in and out.

 

[Sunseeker]

Abbdual I was being over the top, because other posters were basically saying I could not drop the ban hammer at all, it was up to players to decide what was good and evil. What I was trying to discuss was "when does the DM have the power to drop the ban hammer, and when will the players lose the right/power to griping about the ban hammer dropping."

It's a social contract issue. The books can NEVER say, 100% exactly when or where or why a DM should make a ruling, because as we discussed several pages before, each gameworld has it's own morality, each DM has their own morality, each player has their own morality, and each character has their own morality. It's a great big moral jumbled soup, and different characters in different settings with different DMs are going to run into different moral issues. Even if we only change ONE variable, such as the setting or the DM, then a moral issue you encountered with a previous setting or a previous DM might never even happen.

In one game, a DM might find it perfectly reasonable for a paladin to go around destroying the stores owned and operated by the evil merchant, seeing a "greater good", while a different DM in the same game might find that completely unacceptable. There is NO WAY the rules can ever account for this, because(as discussed before) the rules would be attempting to create a moral hierarchy more complete than any philosophized before. It gets worse that D&D is a pan-theistic universe wherein multiple gods have multiple definitions of right and wrong.

I think the best thing the rules can do is to simply flesh out a general idea of what each god/religion sees as "serving them and their cause" and "not serving". Then we don't need perfect moral codes, we only need to know what each god finds acceptable or not. By doing this, we remove the DM as moral arbiter, the DM simply says "no that's not what your god likes", he's not making a moral judgement, he's reading from a list of "to do" and "not do" of that player's god/religion.

 

[pemerton]

when does the DM have the power to drop the ban hammer, and when will the players lose the right/power to griping about the ban hammer dropping.

As I've said upthread, you're trying to treat a social issue as a rules issue. The guy who plays the antiheroic paladin which is at odds with the conception the other players, and the GM, have of a paladin, isn't a rules problem. It's a social problem, like the guy who annoys everyone else with the way he plays his kender, or his gnome with a faerie dragon familiar.

The rules can't help with this. Like the rules of chess can't help you with people who tip the board over when they're losing.

 

[Hussar]

I'm wondering where all those people who keep telling me that rules can't make good DM's are. Why can't rules make good DM's but apparently can make good players?

Seventy pages into the thread and we're STILL beating this horse. "If we take away the alignment fall, then players will rise up and start playing paladins BADLY!!! We must have rules to keep those pesky players in line!"

 

[Sunseeker]

I'm wondering where all those people who keep telling me that rules can't make good DM's are. Why can't rules make good DM's but apparently can make good players?

I would argue because it's one of those Enforcer vs Enforced situations. Players follow the rules, they largely have no say in their implementation, application or use. DMs however have authority to interpret, revise and outright ignore the rules. So rules mean nothing to the guy who gets to say if they even apply.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would argue because it's one of those Enforcer vs Enforced situations. Players follow the rules, they largely have no say in their implementation, application or use. DMs however have authority to interpret, revise and outright ignore the rules. So rules mean nothing to the guy who gets to say if they even apply.

Its a mismatch of playstyles. If you were running a simple character-challenge-oriented OD&D crawl then there'd be no reason for the players to have any authority. It was a very straight setup that was barely different from a wargame. The players were up against the dungeon environment, represented by the DM. There was no interpretation by the players, they were the enemy. The DM (because someone had to) had the job of playing the monsters and deciding what happened ENTIRELY. That might conflict with being the enemy, but that was the one and sole measure of a good DM, could he at least provide a good illusion of non-partisanship, all the while deciding whether or not the PCs lived or died in his giant cunning death-trap.

In this sort of game there's no point in having players with moral authority. They have NO authority of any sort. The whole game is ABOUT trying to wrest control out of an uncertain and unknown situation, by slaying the monsters, gathering the treasure, disarming the traps, and going up in levels. Whatever you do to accomplish that is just playing the game. Its PURELY a game, with some RP thrown in for hahas. OF COURSE the paladin player would lie, cheat, or steal if there wasn't a rule against it! Just like you're going to put the king in check in chess unless there's a rule against it. Its THAT SIMPLE.

Now, its rare to find people who play literally in that basic an old school mode anymore, and most never did 100%, not even Gygax. That WAS the essential mentality of the game though. It was always a game first, and it was about exploration and control, and RP was there as an element, but nobody was trying to create some fantastic story. There was no going on about meta-game or any of that stuff. The players just played their 'side' in the game, pure pawn stance. Thus thieves had to be non-good, and paladins had to be LG etc. Just a rule of the game. Even after it was largely outgrown it has lingered, and you have to acknowledge that there ARE people around that want to play just that game and want DDN to BE just that game and have no use for paladins without alignment restrictions.

 

[Sunseeker]

Its a mismatch of playstyles. If you were running a simple character-challenge-oriented OD&D crawl then there'd be no reason for the players to have any authority. It was a very straight setup that was barely different from a wargame. The players were up against the dungeon environment, represented by the DM. There was no interpretation by the players, they were the enemy. The DM (because someone had to) had the job of playing the monsters and deciding what happened ENTIRELY. That might conflict with being the enemy, but that was the one and sole measure of a good DM, could he at least provide a good illusion of non-partisanship, all the while deciding whether or not the PCs lived or died in his giant cunning death-trap.

In this sort of game there's no point in having players with moral authority. They have NO authority of any sort. The whole game is ABOUT trying to wrest control out of an uncertain and unknown situation, by slaying the monsters, gathering the treasure, disarming the traps, and going up in levels. Whatever you do to accomplish that is just playing the game. Its PURELY a game, with some RP thrown in for hahas. OF COURSE the paladin player would lie, cheat, or steal if there wasn't a rule against it! Just like you're going to put the king in check in chess unless there's a rule against it. Its THAT SIMPLE.

Now, its rare to find people who play literally in that basic an old school mode anymore, and most never did 100%, not even Gygax. That WAS the essential mentality of the game though. It was always a game first, and it was about exploration and control, and RP was there as an element, but nobody was trying to create some fantastic story. There was no going on about meta-game or any of that stuff. The players just played their 'side' in the game, pure pawn stance. Thus thieves had to be non-good, and paladins had to be LG etc. Just a rule of the game. Even after it was largely outgrown it has lingered, and you have to acknowledge that there ARE people around that want to play just that game and want DDN to BE just that game and have no use for paladins without alignment restrictions.

Then I'm glad that there's a game for those people(OD&D). And that by and large people don't want to play that way anymore.