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Message: <blockquote data-quote="italianranma" data-source="post: 3441299" data-attributes="member: 15788">Champions or Paladins?Once again, I'm going to pimp that article that Firelance brought up.  It's really amazing; the author provides the background on the OD&D paladin concept as well as making his own assertion on what's the core of a paladin: Sacrifice.Sacrifice lends itself to Papastebu's modern day examples.  I can really see that, especially when the historical and modern fantasy fiction examples of paladins all seem to share that common theme of sacrifice.  There's still something that's missing I think: and if I were to give an example of a modern day paladin, I'd go more along the lines of some of our military officers:  They have a code of conduct, are expected to make morally sound decisions (and are stripped of their powers if they fail), they're leaders, and they are professionals of arms.  Now I don't want to divert this thread into what a modern day paladin is, but I think what's missing from Papastebu's examples is that profession of arms.I also read through most of the thread on sound moral decisions for paladins.  I learned some new words like ahimsa.  Coupled with our discussion on morals I think two distinct views have emerged:  One is the idea that there is one set of moral standards that all paladins should be held to, and the other is that there isn't.If we believe like Aeon does, and that the paladin is based on the Christian chivalrous knight, then the set of moral standards for all paladins would be based off of medieval Christian thinking.  I'd need to find out how those Christians felt about killing (or at least how they justified it for the warrior class), and adapt that into my game.  That seems pretty reasonable.  If you go the other route and make a code of conduct based off of the deity worshipped then you have all sorts of different paladins.Now I know I used paladin and champion of the faith synonymously, but I think now there needs to be a difference: I want one type of paladin.  Anyone else is something different.  You can still have a righteous warrior who is his deity’s champion, has a code of conduct, and all sorts of other abilities, but they'd be called something different.Next I need to decide what kinds of abilities and restrictions I'm going to place on my paladin.  I'm planning on making the paladin a prestige class with high prerequisites, mostly ensuring that he's a capable warrior already.  Other than that, I'm pretty undecided.edit: I can't get the hypertext to work, so just scroll down to Firelance and Jhaelen's replies for the links.</blockquote>

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