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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 6114978" data-attributes="member: 6674889">I don't care how the alignment restriction is put in place, whether directly&explicitly, or indirectly via his oath (to be customizable per god, or per paladin even). But the default, regardless, should be LG otherwise the flavour and purpose of the class is missing. He/She's not just a mercenary for his church, blindly following orders, and I think having to exercise his own judgment about how exactly to follow that code given the messy and conflicting nature of life + adventuring, his own foibles & even his church's, his lieges', and even his deity's shortcomings is precisely the point of playing the class.I'm thinking more styled of the Greek gods, where they have all too human-seeming vices, even the supposedly good ones, envy, avarice, jealousy, spite, etc. In that case, it could be up to the paladin himself to show the way by being stalwart in the face of church orders. So if you disobey the church, or the orders of a demon-posessed king who tells you to slaughter without mercy his political opponents, do you lose your paladinhood? This could be circumvented by DM fiat, or collaborative DMing with the player, but I'd prefer it was explicit in how the code functions mechanically, i.e. how the "falling" is triggered. If you violate your Oath, it's done. Regardless of how that oath is defined, that should be the trigger, there should be a real, mechanical consequence of violating it, even if your oath isn't directly tied to the alignment of your god (though IMO it should always be). I mean sure, it's super fun blasting undead and being the hero, but in social situations, your alignment has to matter otherwise your oath makes no sense. Every Oath contains within it, an implied or explicit code of conduct, so if you think being lawful is too restrictive, then why make an oath? You need to be "lawful" towards your oath, at the very least, to follow it. Chaotic people ...do they even make oaths? or even more importantly, do they stick to them? I'm sure some do...but regardless if they also fail to follow their oath, even if they're otherwise completely chaotic in every way, they should have some mechanical consequence triggered. If you're you're not using alignments at all, it still works, but the default Oaths should include alignment in their descriptor, because that's the classic archetype and I don't want D&D default to be this hard-to-understand, cerebral nonsense where your actions are fluff. I saw in too many 4e games the results of having no alignment : everyone is unrestricted to be lizards and rogues. Some might act decently, but e.g. we had a rogue who's make masks of the faces of our enemies, and as a paladin, it made my skin crawl, but what can you do? Police them? That's an issue about what's a "dealbreaker" to be in someone's company, fine, but because alignment was complete and utter fluff, there was never any consequence of my being allied to such an individual, nor was the DM even allowed to remove my powers, by RAW there is no way to do that, no mention of it at all. The end result of playing in an alignment-less ruleset, or one in which there are virtually no drawbacks for not following said alignment that's written on your sheet, is that nothing really matters. Nothing really matters, at all. Except combat. All you need is kill.</blockquote>

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