What is a Paladin?

[Drowbane]

This is a Paladin:

No pokemount... that, sir, is clearly a Fighter.

 

[S'mon]

One thing they're not, is general good guys. They're not pacifists, they're warriors. They fight for a good cause. They are Lawful. They're tough. They often battle supernatural evil. They're defenders of the race, religion or species. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a classic paladin.

One thing about the paladin archetype is that they're primarily defenders, not agents of change. This excludes Martin Luther King or Gandhi (though I don't think real world examples are appropriate anyway). They fundamentally seek to preserve, not destroy or create an entirely new paradigm. Restore the true king, yes. Institute enlightened socialist collectives, no.

 

[PrinceXaxor]

A miserable little pile of secrets.

What?

 

[Torm]

Since you have the chance to build your Paladin from the ground up:

I would LOVE to see the Paladin class reworked so that the Paladin gains his powers from inner determination to work toward certain causes that are the core of what makes humanity (or elvenkind, etc) worthwhile - True Love, Honor, Charity, Devotion, Redemption, and so forth. And if he serves a deity, it is because that deity happens to serve his causes, not the other way around - or because of his own dedication to a Devotion he has given to that deity.

And I agree with the article that FireLance brought forward that says that the key attribute of a Paladin is the ability to Sacrifice of himself to serve his causes.

And in answer to your other question: no, I don't believe in subjective morality. People know right and wrong, but they can become confused by all sorts of influences when they make their choices. Which is why there is room for Forgiveness - people are human, and they make mistakes, and it is Charitable to Forgive. And in turn, to hope for Forgiveness in your own inevitable blunders.

So speaks Torm, God of Paladins.

 

[S'mon]

To me it's important that a Paladin be a force of Law, not of 'pure' Good. I very much dislike moral discussions which look at paladins from a Neutral Good perspective and ignore their Lawful aspect. Paladins should be unwilling to break the Law (including the general moral law) for the utiliitarian Greater Good. Example from Buffy - LG Buffy fights evil, but won't kill human beings. It's against the Law - the Slayers' Law, not just the law of California. She sticks with this even when the likely consequences are very bad. So it's left to NG Giles to kill the human being, for the greater good.

I don't think Gygax had a strong understanding of 'lawfulness' when he wrote the 1e PHB Alignment definitions; his LG "greatest good of the greatest number" is straight from Benthamite Utilitarianism, in D&D terms that has to be a NG philosophy. LG is more Kantian, in accordance with the Categorical Imperative - acting in a manner that is consistent with your acts being in accordance with a universal law - although there are plenty of other non-Kantian philosophies that could reasonably be considered LG, but Benthamism, clearly not.
Chaos meanwhile is Crowleyan - "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law".

 

[S'mon]

I would LOVE to see the Paladin class reworked so that the Paladin gains his powers from inner determination to work toward certain causes that are the core of what makes humanity (or elvenkind, etc) worthwhile - True Love, Honor, Charity, Devotion, Redemption, and so forth. And if he serves a deity, it is because that deity happens to serve his causes, not the other way around - or because of his own dedication to a Devotion he has given to that deity.

I was going to say this seems new-agey post-modernist and wouldn't work in a monotheist setting (and Paladins of course were originally Christian knights) but thinking about it, from
what I know of Zoroastrianism it could work in a Zoroastrian type dualist setting. In this type of set up the Big Good Nice Guy deity is more of a team leader - fundamentally he asks "Will you stand beside me on the last day?" - Not so much for the good of your immortal soul, but because if you don't, if enough people don't, Good could lose. It's in-between the Norse "inevitable (if possibly temporary) triumph of Evil" and the Judeeo-Christian-Islamic "inevitable triumph of Good" approaches, and I think works particularly well in a D&D type set-up.

 

[Torm]

S'mon -

You do realize that anyone who ever gives their faith any thought (and no, this isn't an insult - I think you and most, if not all, of the people on this board would be among those) really ends up choosing their religion, or at least the way they practice it, based on compatibility their own priorities and sense of 'correctness'?

I hardly think there is anything 'new-agey' about what I said. If we go back to Joan D'Arc, for example - some would say she was touched by G_d, some would say she was just touched in the head, but few would argue that she was something special on the battlefield. My notion of how to do the mechanics would work for more ideas on why.

I especially like my idea for Eberron Paladins, since they don't really know their deities, anyway.

 

[Celebrim]

S'mon -

You do realize that anyone who ever gives their faith any thought (and no, this isn't an insult - I think you and most, if not all, of the people on this board would be among those) really ends up choosing their religion, or at least the way they practice it, based on compatibility their own priorities and sense of 'correctness'?

This is really not the place to go into this at any depth, but first, if you'll reread what you said you'll realize that the outlook of it puts the primacy of religion and religious feeling on individual choice and that perforce not everyone who is religious would agree with the statement. In D&D terms, what you just said was 'chaotic' (and you've implicitly insulted anyone that disagrees as being thoughtless). And secondly, don't you think that S'mon has demonstrated enough understanding of theology and philosophy that he's has probably thought about the implications of what he said. I think it would behoove you to not dismiss anyone that sounds like they might have studied the subject at hand.

I hardly think there is anything 'new-agey' about what I said. If we go back to Joan D'Arc, for example - some would say she was touched by G_d, some would say she was just touched in the head, but few would argue that she was something special on the battlefield. My notion of how to do the mechanics would work for more ideas on why.

I think that's a very reasonable goal, but its interesting that you'd bring up a figure like Joan, who most decidely would not feel that her religious beliefs and experiences were not something she had chosen. She would most decidedly feel that she had been chosen, and that her beliefs and feelings had been chosen for her and all she really could do was choose to accept or reject what had been chosen for her. This is I think you will see a decidedly more 'lawful' view of the world, because it reduces the primacy of the self, and is I think closer to how a Paladin would feel about things. It is also I would note a decidely less current, less modern, way of looking at the world, which was I think S'mon's point.

If the judeo-Christian ethics and theology that are necessarily on the border of any discussion of Paladins is a hang up, I suggest reading a books like Bujold's 'The Curse of Chalion' and 'The Paladin of Souls' in which Bujold somewhat successfully weds a 'new age' outlook with more traditional theology for her 'Five Gods' cosmology. (As an aside, I find Bujold's ethics extremely interesting even when I don't agree with them because they strike me as far more well thought out and far less merely reflexively following the crowd (any crowd whether tradional or new age post-modernist, left or right, or anything else) than so many people.) The Paladins and Saints of her cosmology don't live in a monotheistic universe and have some beliefs which would be decidely at odds with the beliefs a historical 'Paladin' defended, but nonetheless they very much have the perspective that they primacy does not lie with thier own priorities or sense of correctness and ultimately that they do not choose what they believe, or feel, or do.

I especially like my idea for Eberron Paladins, since they don't really know their deities, anyway.

Which is a very un-ancient way of looking at things, which might be reasonable for a very un-ancient feeling setting.

 

[Torm]

I won't debate all that you just said, except for to say four things:

1. I certainly meant no disrespect to S'mon - I was actually very careful NOT to be disrespectful to anyone on the board - and I really don't appreciate your assumptions about my intentions. And I should add here that I while I sniggled the one point, I appreciated S'mon's saying that he thought my Paladin concept would work well for D&D and his Zoroastrian example.

2. I really don't care whether everyone who is religious agrees with what I said - I was asked for my opinion, not to convince anyone else to believe it. Further, to get everyone who is religious to agree to anything is a complete impossibility. I stand by my assertion, but do not require that you or anyone else agree.

3. What Joan D'Arc personally believed isn't really relevant to the mechanical discussion, since that is a metagame issue that a character should not be aware of, themselves, anyway. Or, put another way, if she was just nuts, she didn't know she was.

4. I never said I thought my idea for redesigned Paladins should still have a Lawful requirement. I do, in fact, but I think it should be specified in the RAW that it indicates an internal code of behavior and NOT an adherence to laws of man or deity.

 

[Celebrim]

I won't debate all that you just said, except for to say four things:

1. I certainly meant no disrespect to S'mon - I was actually very careful NOT to be disrespectful to anyone on the board - and I really don't appreciate your assumptions about my intentions.

I have no assumptions about your intentions except that you intended to correct someone else. I was merely pointing out that the statement that began, "You do realize..." was not an objective statement, and that it implicitly insulted everyone that disagreed with it because the assumption of the statement was anyone who disagreed with hadn't given thier beliefs any thought. You said as much as, "This statement is not insulting because I assuming the listeners all agree with it, and therefore its only negatively characterizing people who aren't here."

2. I really don't care whether everyone who is religious agrees with what I said - I was asked for my opinion, not to convince anyone else to believe it.

Fine. But a statement that begins with, "You do in fact realize.." is one in which the speaker believes that he's not offering an opinion, but a fact.

Further, to get everyone who is religious to agree to anything is a complete impossibility. I stand by my assertion, but do not require that you or anyone else agree.

Fine. I wasn't asking you to agree either. I was asking you to reflect.

What Joan D'Arc personally believed isn't really relevant to the mechanical discussion, since that is a metagame issue that a character should not be aware of, themselves, anyway. Or, put another way, if she was just nuts, she didn't know she was.

I think before we can assert either of those things, we first have to assert whether or not we are creating a game universe where what you believe can have a powerful and tangible effect on something material. If you are creating a universe in which what you believe not only matters, but matters in a very tangible way, where faith is a literal thing with real material impact, then what someone believes is relevant to a mechanical discussion. In other words, how someone believes and how strongly they believe it might well determine if they are something special on the battlefield. And further, I thought Joan of Arc relevant to such a discussion, and here I admit to assuming that you did too since you brought her up.

I never said I thought my idea for redesigned Paladins should still have a Lawful requirement. I do, in fact, but I think it should be specified in the RAW that it indicates an internal code of behavior and NOT an adherence to laws of man or deity.

This is an area which people will debate, because there has never been a consistant definition of either lawfulness or chaoticness in the rules, but, if you are subject to an internal code of behavior and not some externally imposed duty, you are not lawful in D&D terms. I agree that you can be lawful without being subject to a particular set of laws of man or diety (a Paladin doesn't necessarily have to follow the laws of the land, and a mafia boss certainly doesn't), but if you aren't subject to some communally shared external code which an observer either within or without the community can judge and condemn you by then you are not lawful but rather chaotic (or at most nuetral). My distinction between law and chaos is pretty simple. If the philosophy assumes the primacy of the self, as any philosophy that assumes the primacy of internal belief would be, then its chaotic. And if the philosophy assumes the secondary status of the self, then its lawful. I suppose you can claim that that is merely my opinion, though I consider it a well considered and logically consistant opinion, but whether or not it is an opinion doesn't matter here. What matters is that since this is an area alot of people would debate, writing something into the RAW that alot of people would contend is flat out wrong and when followed to its conclusions is not logically consistant wouldn't help the description of a Paladin be of any more use.