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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6123566" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand this. The yardstick replaces their own judgement - which is, precisely, depriving them of the opportunity to make their own moral judgements.But they are obliged to accept that those choices were at odds with what virtue requires. That is, someone else's judgement is substituted for their own. This is either the GM's judgement - ie GM as moral arbiter - or is some fictional determination of what virtue means in the gameworld - ie paladin is no longer an examplar of virtue, but rather some (in my personal view largely uninteresting) fictionally-characterised persona.Because rather than the system (as mediated via the GM) telling you what virtue requires, you can work this out for yourself.I don't understand these repeated references (by other posters also) to "getting away with stuff".I posted an example upthread - the paladin PC ends up bound by a promise given in his name by his agents without his approval, and hence has to spare the life of a prisoner that he believed deserved execution. This has nothing to do with "getting away with stuff". It is about the player expressing his own judgement about the priority of honour over justice, at least for that character in that context.As with all such judgements, if the code/alignment rules leave it open then they add nothing; if they foreclose the evaluative question, then they are an obstacle to the player making his/her own judgement.And as I (and others) said way upthread - if you want the code in your game because otherwise the players of paladins won't play their PCs as honourable warriors, you've got social contract problems that are probably better adressed out of game rather than via the alignment mechanics.EDIT: Maybe some people see the paladin's code as no different from any old geas or taboo - an essentially arbitrary suite of restrictions which cannot be violated less magical blessing be lost. Whereas I see them as clearly not arbitrary, and rather as necessary to living a life as an exemplar of valour and honour.</blockquote>

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