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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6117131" data-attributes="member: 42582">Excellent! By all means play that sort of game. But not everyone wants to. For instance, I have zero interest in exploring the morality of a GM-authored gameworld. I am much more interested in real values.It's perfectly possible to play out divine sanction and retribution without a mechanic for it - I've posted examples upthread. The mechanic that permits this is the GM's general power to frame scenes and present challenges to the players via their PCs.I assume by "mercenary" you don't really mean mercenary - if you do then the answer is crystal clear, namely, the paladin acts out of love and loyalty whereas the mercenary acts for pay.But assuming by "mercenary for a paricular religion" you mean something like "devoted servant of a particular religion", then the principal difference is that the paladin is imbued with divine power and the fighter is not.I play a paladin not becaues I want alignment challenges - I really don't like D&D's alignment mechanics, though I can tolerate the B/X & 4e approach for the reasons I posted upthread. I play one becaue I want to play an archetype of good (a la Lancelot, Galahad or Aragorn).As for "doing as they wish" - how is that even relevant? When I play a paladin, I play a character who is bound to resist temptation, remaining loyal and chaste. I think I described upthread how, in one game, this had the consequence that my PC could not marry the woman he loved. I also described another player's paladin (whom I GMed) who, having killed someone by lopping of their head in combat, went out in the wilderness to atone and let himself be beaten near to death by a demon. And I'm pretty sure I described the episode in my 4e game in which the less honourable PCs extracted a concession from an NPC by evoking the figure of the party's fighter/cleric, intending not to honour the commitment they made in his name - but then that PC learned what the others had done, giving a promise in his name, and thereby felt bound to honour it. Even though he hated it, and himself would never have made the promise; and even thought the player didn't like the outcome, and was remonstrating with the other players for letting things get to that point.If your question is "Why would a player choose to play his/her PC in this fashion, ie accepting story complications rather than pursuing the most expedient path at every opportunity?" the answer, for me at least but I think for the players I'm describing too, is that that is the character they want to play. If they didn't, they'd play an expedient character!In my own case I RPG with other people, so the conversation is not with myself, it's with them.100% this. What you say can be done either in character or out of character - at my table both approaches are used from time to time. It's part of roleplaying.If people want to play paladins on the basis of GM-adminstered codes and alignment go to town, but please don't assume that everyone wants that, or build it into the default of the game.Why? Given that I have run multiple successful games with interesting paladin episodes in them (some of which I've described above), why do I have to change my playstyle?If that's really your opinion of the episodes I've described above, we have pretty different notions of what it means to "smash monsters in the dungeon and take their stuff", and also of "modern relativistic morals sheen".</blockquote>

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