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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silveras" data-source="post: 1343259" data-attributes="member: 6271">I do not think the Paladin puts his/her personal honor above the needs of the people. S/he puts the purity of their souls, the quality of his/her faith and that of the people, above the need to live longer. The Paladin lives by the tough code to show the "lower born" masses how it is done. Much of this comes from a tenet of faith that Good will always triumph over Evil. Good does not cheat (including lies and deception) because Good does not have to; Evil only wins when Good people let their fear overcome them, and succumb to the temptation to hedge their bets by "cheating". Therefore, it is important to never fall to such temptations. As a literary reference, consider Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight enters Arthur's hall while the Knights of the Round Table are gathered. He agrees to let one of them try to take his head off if the other will, in turn, agree to let the Green Knight return the blow, assuming he survives. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge, and cuts off the head of the Green Knight. The Green Knight laughs, picks up his head from the floor, and says something like "A good blow, well struck." The Green Knight then tells Sir Gawain that must present himself in the Green Knight's hall for the promised return blow in 1 year. True to his word, and confident in his faith, Sir Gawain journeys to the hall of the Green Knight (the Chapel of Green Silences, IIRC). There, the Green Knight's wife offers Sir Gawain a token to protect him from the Green Knight's blow. Gawain lets his doubts overrule his faith, and accepts the small token, a garter. The next day, he kneels before the Green Knight, as agreed. The Green Knight raises his axe and lets it fall, stopping at the last second so that he only nicks the back of Sir Gawain's neck. He then tells Sir Gawain that the whole had been a test of faith, which Sir Gawain failed - marginally. Had Gawain simply trusted to his faith, as he knew he should, the Green Knight would have made a token tap with the axe and sent Gawain on his way. Because Gawain gave into the temptation to seek protection beyond his faith, the Green Knight gave him an actual cut proportionate to the token he accepted. I don't think I can touch that example without getting very specific to a real world religion, so I won't even try. I will say that part of the code is indeed very Lawful Neutral. That's why the Paladin is Lawful Good and not Neutral Good. The Paladin is a concept that upholds nearly equally the value of Lawfulness and Goodness. Good is slightly more important to the Paladin, obviously, as Chaotic actions can be atoned for while Evil ones cannot. "All Paladins are Knights" does not reverse to "All Knights are Paladins", any more than "All basketballs are spheres" reverses to "All spheres are basketballs". The medieval heroic knight archetype is certainly more Lawful than Good, is often Neutral and may even be Evil (in D&D terms). That does not mean that some of them are also shining examples of a more specific type. This is also why, by the way, at one point in 1st Edition the Paladin was changed from being a Sub-Class of Fighter to being a Sub-Class of Cavalier (1st edition Unearthed Arcana). The Cavalier was a specifically Good Knight type of class.</blockquote>

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