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

[timASW]

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.

1. Easily.

To me the alignment restrictions on paladins LIMIT dm abuse. We all have different moral codes. Recent TV shows like the shield, 24 and walking dead bring this out publicly the way that gaming groups have done privately since 1e. People who all consider themselves "good" with good intentions approach conflict with evil in very different ways and with very different priorities.

Some people will accept varying degrees of evil to achieve their ends and some people see no evil at all in actions as long as they achieve a good result.

So long as we have magical powers that rely on good or evil someone must be the arbiter of what is or is not good and evil. Else they lose their flavour and dramatic weight.

Some games leave that up to the player to justify or use metagame resources to make his personal good into objective "good" that qualifies. Some games leave it totally up to the GM, and some games like traditional D&D give a strong guideline and then leave the fine details up to the GM.

To me the third way is better. None of the ways are without serious potential flaws but the 3rd way avoids the most out of game conflict and in game immersion breaking insanity.

 

[timASW]

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.

Yes but the rules CAN help when most of the time you play with this guy he's fine. You've been in 4 different campaigns together and in 3 of them he was just fine. So he's not a bad player or a bad person. He just has a character concept thats contradictory to the current campaign goals.

In those cases you can pull him aside and say "hey john, I know this depressed, anti-hero from a fallen culture is cool, i like him too but we're kind of rescuing virgins from the evil vampire cult here so going on about how the little sluts have it coming for going to the bar after dark and leaving with a perfect stranger and you wont save them without pay because the god of ruins-ville says to honour thy marriage and fornication is a grave sin isnt gonna fly right now as lawful good. Lets adjust it".

Rendered especially problematic when another good character would say something like " they are innocents who made a simple mistake and deserve to be rescued simply because they are endangered by evil undead, demanding a reward is selfish and evil".

Player/character conflict like this is not at all rare, even among people who are friends in real life. Some of my current characters are roommates who really like each other, in character they bicker like fishwives and have killed each others characters more then once over moralities neither character would back down on.

In many cases having solid rules about objective right and wrong can prevent more problems then it creates when it comes to party unity.

 

[Weather Report]

The only problem I have with alignment is limiting multi-classing (Bard/Monk, etc).

 

[pemerton]

Yes but the rules CAN help when most of the time you play with this guy he's fine. You've been in 4 different campaigns together and in 3 of them he was just fine. So he's not a bad player or a bad person. He just has a character concept thats contradictory to the current campaign goals.

In those cases you can pull him aside and say <conversation snipped>

This seems to me like you're agreeing it's a social issue, to be solved by out-of-game conversation. I don't see how the rules are doing anything in your suggested approach.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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

<snip>

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.

I'm going to call on [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] - if he's around, I'd be curious to know how much he agrees with this take on the old-school rationale for paladin alignment restrictions.

It makes sense to me, but I'm not an old-school player.

 

[timASW]

This seems to me like you're agreeing it's a social issue, to be solved by out-of-game conversation. I don't see how the rules are doing anything in your suggested approach.

Because the RULES say that lawful good doesnt leave village maidens to be eaten by vampires. No matter how objectionable you might find their dating choices.

Its not at all a social issue, its very, very much an in-game rules issue. And having it be an in-game rules issue allows you to smooth it between the two characters described in a way that encourages our well played and thought out but somewhat provincial "lawful good" character to re-think some of his characters actions and even have an incentive to roleplay character growth past his prejeducial upbringing in the god of ruins otherwise lawful good church into a more true and selfess version of lawful good.

Or to choose not to and choose to go with a personal view of how societies rights and wrongs despite the worlds objective good and evil and grow into a more chaotic good or even lawful neutral alignment.

All of those are in-game rules choices with strong out of game elements. The two should not be separated and doing so does not create a better game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Well, in all fairness that was the game that captured people's imaginations in 1974. Its long in my past, but me and all my buds in our Boy Scout troop thought it was great at the time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm going to call on @Libramarian - if he's around, I'd be curious to know how much he agrees with this take on the old-school rationale for paladin alignment restrictions.

It makes sense to me, but I'm not an old-school player.

Yeah, me either really, but I DID start playing somewhere around 1975, so I guess I have a pretty good feel for how at least some elements of common play style have evolved and where the starting point was, though I still find it pretty enlightening to talk to people who were in Gary's crowd back in day. I must say, OUR games had a lot less of a wargame feel to them than I get the impression Dave Arneson's early Blackmoor stuff did. They had more fixed scenarios, goals, etc.

Our early iteration of play was kind of the next after that, exploration focused. Nobody knew the rules -they were pretty ill-defined actually- so it was more about exploring. If you ran into Black Pudding it was a new experience and nobody was really sure what the DM was up to. Most stuff was just made up and it was VERY much "make a diabolical dungeon that will defeat the players". Character RP wasn't unknown, but it was pretty meta-game or else just amusing by-play. Sometimes PC rivalry became a focus of the game, but things like "orc babies" was definitely not something you wanted to have come up in a game. I'll also note that at this point in the history of the game paladin wasn't even a class, that only appeared with 1e.

The problem is, 1e is a game that doesn't really know WHAT it is about. Clearly Gary had moved on some from the original dungeon crawl by 1977, but I don't think he had some real road map of where he was going or what an RPG needed. There were only a handful of other RPGs out then, nobody really had any idea how to write one. The 1e paladin makes no sense in a dungeon crawling context "Meet Sir Galahad, the murder-hobo!"

 

[Sunseeker]

Well, in all fairness that was the game that captured people's imaginations in 1974. Its long in my past, but me and all my buds in our Boy Scout troop thought it was great at the time.

Sure, lots of things are great until we find something better.

 

[Imaro]

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.

Well first there is more than one game for "those people" just check out the numerous retro-clones being produced, sold and played. I love Dungeon Crawl Classics and it is exactly this type of game which in turn leads to my second point...

I'm not so sure you're correct in thinking that the majority or at least a substantial segment of roleplayers don't enjoy and/or still play in this style or with these types of games. IMO, the designer's of 4e made this same assumption and I think the game eventually suffered in appeal and popularity because of it. YMMV of course.