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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6123514" data-attributes="member: 42582">My problem with this is that saying it doesn't make it so. I mean, you can tell me that in the D&D fiction pi = (exactly) 22/7, or that Ioun can square circles with nothing but compass and ruler, but I'm not buying it.I mean, if the paladin kills the orc babies, which side of the bright line is that on? If the GM makes one call and the player makes another, where does that leave us? If the player goes along with the GM, s/he is no longer playing a PC who is a paragon of virtue - s/he is playing a PC who is a paragon of some fictional value that the GM is putting forward as the touchstone for the campaign. But such a character has been stripped of (what is for me, at least) the defining feature of a paladin.Sure, that's not hard. And if you want to play a bright line game, one way to do so is to set up the game so stuff like the orc babies never comes up. But in that case, you probably don't need falling rules either.The problem with these statements is that, for those players who don't agree with them as expressions of virtue, they undermine the most important feature of a paladin, namely, that s/he is a paragon of virtue!To put it another way, for some players any particular set of restrictions will be purely arbitrary. Whereas the whole point of the paladin's restrictions is that they're not arbitrary (and so are quite unlike many geases or taboos) - they are restrictions that exemplify the paladin's virtue, and his/her commitment to truth and to the good.</blockquote>

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