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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6121896" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's a long time (25 years?) since I read the books too, but going from memory as reinforced by the odd post that discusses Dragonlance, Sturm revitalised the Knights of Solamnia by realising that they had become too obsessed by the technicalities of their Rule and Measure, rather than getting to the heart of what justice requires. It's a fairly standard reformation story.My point in reply to [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] was that the more one emphasises that alignment refers to fictional values, or "the morality of the fantasy world", the less room their becomes for something like Sturm's story. His story depends upon their being space to assert the difference between the professed values and the reality of what the Knights are doing; but in a game in which the values are fictional ones, the morality of the fantasy world, where does the player get the leverage to do this? Because if they invoke realworld values and conceptions of justice and the like, they are already departing from the ostensible premise that we're engaging not with real world values but fictional ones.The alternative possibility I offered is that paladins end up being self-deluded; the same could be said for certain gods. For instance, suppose that in a given campaign world the god of mercy is LG (or NG, perhaps, depending on GM's preference). Now suppose that a player in the campaign is confronted with a situation in which s/he takes mercy to be called for, and acts on that. (I'll leave the details to our respective imaginations, in order to avoid violating board rules.) If the GM replies "No, that's not a LG/NG action, and it puts you in danger of alignment change", then the player can reasonably reply "That god isn't a god of mercy at all; or is a deluded one; because the god has commitements (in virtue of the LG/NG alignment as interpreted by the GM in the campaign world) that contradict the core value of mercy". Now of course the GM can say that, by "mercy", is meant not true mercy but fictional mercy, as it is understood in the campaign world; but given the number of ordinary English words that are value-laden to some or other degree, that isn't going to be a general solution - in articulating fantasy mercy the GM will have to use one of those other words, and the problem will recur.As I said to JC, there can be tolerable stuff on the margins - like my debt bondage example. But in a game where freeing the slaves becomes important (and I have GMed such a game) than that example will break down too, as notions like "justice" and "liberty" get deployed by the players in their true senses and escape the attempt at confing them to the ostensible fictional meaning.I have explained above why I think this can tend to lead to a view of the gods as self-deluded. That's fine, but I think it then puts limits on what you can do with a paladin in the game.I think I mentioned upthread the campaign I GMed in which a paladin turned upon the heavens in the pursuit of justice for earth. Part of what permitted that to work was that the paladin was a servant not of the heavens but of the Buddhas, and hence there was a "higher divinity" by reference to which his rectitude could be defined in game - though the gods were his enemies the Buddhas were not - and hence the game didn't become nihilistic or ironic in its tone. The paladin archetype still made sense - heaven and its gods become to this paladin like the Knights of Solamnia to Sturm Brightblade, namely, an institution that has fallen short of the ideals it professes and hence is in need of reform.But if there were no higher divinity - if all divinity were confined within the commitments of the fantasy morality, and hence the critical perspective of the players (and their PCs) had no divine sanction with the game - then I can't see how either nihilism, irony or (perhaps) pity towards the gods can be avoided as an outcome. Their moral dictates would have no genuine force; "good" would just be a label for the views of some gods, that tells us nothing about whether or not that view merits respect.And in that environment, I can't see how the paladin works. Why is it important to be LG? What non-arbitrary moral commitment does that represent? The REH Conan stories express the sort of approach to divinity and morality I see here (and that is part of what marks them as modernist fantasy, quite unlike Tolkien in my view), but precisely for that reason the idea of a paladin has no place in Conan.Sure. But the fact that they're idealised means they have to speak to, and express, ideals. The more those ideals aren't [true ideals but simply fantasy ideals stipulated by the GM for the purposes of making the alignment rules run smoothly, the less the paladin fulfills this very role that you have (correctly, in my view) stipulated for it.A caveat - if we're playing [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION]'s sort of game, in which the paladin is a mixture of colour/flavour plus a gameplay challenge of crawling through dungeons with one hand (morally) tied behind your back, then the problems I'm talking about probably won't come up. But I don't think either billd91 or JC is talking about that sort of game.</blockquote>

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