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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4005823" data-attributes="member: 42582">If that is true, then my whole defence of 4e in this thread falls over, because it is not doing what I am praising it for.But the strong impression I have received is that alignment no longer plays a mechanical role in the game, and therefore that demons and devils no longer have an Evil tag. Of course, the game designers can still describe them as evil in the flavour text, but with the mechanical tag stripped away (plus the removal of moral metaphors like the Blood War), a group of players can now interrogate or even dispute the designers' description without having the game (or the gameworld) try to stop them from doing so.The first sentence of this paragraph is is actually not true. It is not true of how the rules for alignment are written in 1st ed AD&D, in which alignment is described as a code to which a character is committed, and in which there are strong mechanical penalties for changing alignment.More broadly, it is not true of the way the game is actually played at the table (regardless of how the rule book is written). I have personally encountered, and have read about, endless numbers of GMs who "only GM non-evil PCs" or campaigns in which "evil PCs are forbidden". Even the 3E PHB, which as far as I know is the first time that D&D has embraced alignment as descriptive, not prescriptive, is written with an assumption that Evil characters are NPC enemies, not PCs. That generates an implied prescription.And there is an obvious reason for all this. If I am playing my PC in what I think is the proper way for someone in his/her situation to act (and that is how most, though not all, players play) I do not want someone - be it the game designer or the GM - telling me that I am Evil, and thus on a par with Satan, Stalin, Jack the Ripper or other paradigmatic villain of choice.Hence the endless number of threads trying to explain why all sorts of morally questionable behaviour is still Good (or at least Neutral): there is a tremendous imperative, if harmony is to be preserved in actual play, for no player to be labelled Evil unless s/he chooses the label him or herself. Anything else is just insulting to the player.As a result, whole dimensions of play are excluded, villains become pantomime (a complaint frequently levelled against both FR and BoVD by D&D players, and against the whole of D&D by players of other RPGs that don't have alignment rules of the D&D sort) and so on, all to avoid wandering into this territory which, if the rules as written are applied, might lead to the undoing of the gaming group.And watch the game fall apart when you tell the player of the Paladin (i) that s/he has an Evil moral sensibility and (ii) that s/he can't play the character s/he wants to play.This is a particularly unpleasant example of what I mean when I say that the game system and game world predetermines answers to questions that I would rather explore in actual play.Yep, that's what I'm talking about.Now maybe the player of the paladin doesn't really want to explore the meaning of good and evil, but only someone else's idea (be that the GM's, or the game designers's) about the meaning of good and evil. Fair enough - but that's certainly not the sort of play that I'm interested in. As I said ealrier, if I'm going to do that I'll read a good book.I don't know how your falling plays out, but I'm certainly not opposed to PC Paladin's falling. There are at least two ways I can think of to handle it off the top of my head, which are consistent with the approach to play that I favour. One is to allow the player to choose to lead their Paladin into a fall (I have enjoyed games where players, for various reasons, explore the moral collapse - and sometimes, but not always, redemption - of their PCs). This fits with my motto that "Adversity for the PC is fine as long as it is not adversity for the player of the game".Another way is for the Paladin to come into conflict with the code of his or her God/order (a la Sturm Brightblade) in which case the "fall" is really a moral realisation, on the part of the Paladin, that what s/he thought was good really is not. The Paladin in my current game is undergoing such a realisation at the moment.In either case I think it is would be an unreasonable nerf to take away the Paladin's powers unless either the player wants this (for whatever reason) or the player gets to substitute new powers in place of the old which let him/her keep playing the (mechanical) character s/he wants to play.</blockquote>

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