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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6122625" data-attributes="member: 82106">Ahhhhh, another 52 pages burned on the alignment debate, you all have added 0.0000001% to the page count on Enworld dedicated to this topic! I think its pretty safe to conclude that nobody will EVER agree, and certainly no half a dozen or so people at a table will every agree, as to what alignment means. Clearly the DM and the player of a paladin will only agree by the sheerest luck on the moral valence of any specific morally ambiguous situation. Thus to any player a DM's judgment on such a thing can never be anything but arbitrary. At best it could be arbitrary and consistent, but frankly after reading a smattering of posts on this topic by the major participants I couldn't even guess what any of you would rule on a given situation in an actual game. Its a highly opaque topic. IME its one that has very little to recommend it as a positive gaming experience. Frankly, the main point of playing a Paladin would be to actually PLAY a character who is an exemplar of moral virtue, not to argue about morals. I didn't see any problems at all with the way the 4e paladin played in any of my groups. The players clearly wanted to be virtuous and played their characters that way. If they ran into a gray area they considered the implications and did something. If the character did something that was deliberately antithetical to their chosen path then it might have implications later on. If they did something that OTHER CHARACTERS found objectionable, then that might have implications as well, but at that point the whole debate can be carried out IN GAME, which means by the characters, which makes it MUCH MUCH easier to deal with. In practice we had no serious issues. I think it would be far more productive for DDN to adopt the same sort of approach. If people feel it is an issue that needs to be addressed more, then there's nothing wrong with a sidebar explaining that both spiritual and physical harm can come to the paladin who 'falls', but that spiritual harm should be narrative, not ban-hammer silliness. If the DM feels like some greater issue needs to be made of it then he/she should do it via other characters in the game (IE put a price on the character's head or whatever, have them expelled from their order, tried, hunted, down, etc).</blockquote>

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