Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6113467" data-attributes="member: 42582">No.I don't mind a player of a paladin acting wrongly (by their own lights). But I want them to take it seriuosly, and I (as GM) would set up situations in which they have to take it seriously.But that's perhaps an indicator of the more general sort of game I run.If I had a player who wasn't interested in the game I was running, I woudn't faff around with codes and alignment to try and make them play seriously. I'd just boot them out!Or to put it a slightly different way - I don't want a player playing his/her PC any less seriously just because s/he's not playing a paladin!By a story consequence, I mean something like "All your friends now shun you, and your steed shies away when you try to approach it." The player can choose to have his/her PC live with those consequences, or not - and maybe if s/he doesn't want to some sort of quest is in order. But I want it to be for the player to make the choice.That it shifts the planar balance can't be the explanation for it being Evil, can it? - because it is only because it is Evil that it would shift the planar balance. Some other account of the evil of torture therefore seems to be needed.Likewise for Celestia, the Abyss etc. The reason we can tell that they are paragons of good, evil and the like is only because we already have a conception of good and evil.(This is the cause of my dislike of mechanical alignment. I don't particularly care to have to apply moral labels to my friends' PCs' behaviour as part of my GMing duties. I might have my own opinions, but I'd rather keep them to myself.)My players, at least, don't play to listen to my morality lectures!I also think the idea of mollycoddlng is misplaced. Many years ago now, a paladin PC in the game I was GMing killed his first person at 5th level (if that seems high, the system we were using involved crit rolls - so up until then this PC had never actually got a killing crit against another human - but this time he rolled really high and lopped off his enemy's head). Feeling remorseful, he went out into the wilderness to pray.I rolled on my random encounter chart to see what turned up, and low and behold it was a (low level) demon. The demon comes up to the praying paladin, and starts taunting him - "You've betrayed your values, you've failed in your vows", that sort of thing. Now, I was expecting the player to reason in the following way: this is a demon; and nothing a demon says can be true; therefore I'm not a failure or a traitor; therefore I can kill it and go back to the rest of the group. But instead the player interpreted the demon as having been sent by the PC's god as a punishment. And so as the demon started wailing on the paladin, the PC took no actions in defence. He simply endured his penance.Eventually, after beating the paladin into uncosnciousness the demon got bored, and realised there was no one here it could corrupt. So it went off. And the rest of the group went out looking for the paladin, found him and revived him.That's just an example of the sort of paladin play that I think is hard, if not impossible, to achieve if the play of the class is anchored to the GM's interpretation of alignment and code issues. And I don't think that that particular player was being "mollycoddled".</blockquote>

Verification