"What's my motivation?" or weirdness in the Sunless Citadel...

[barsoomcore]

I had considered running an entire campaign where "adventurers" were not well thought of, and the party travelled disguised as a circus...

My party DOES act like a bunch of clowns sometimes, I will say that...

 

[Numion]

This sounds like a classic example of a paladin being a Lawful-Paladin and not just a kill-all-evil-paladin For many people, the fact that evil critters exists is motivation enough to go kill them, never mind the legality of it all or many ethical questions like the value of life in general, just kill all evil.

Remember though that a distinction has to be made between the law of the land (which the paladin doesn't have to follow necessarily) and the paladins own code. If the paladin entered an evil country where law required him to beat beggars just because, would he have to?

I had a simular situation where I held up a gaming session for almost 45 minutes because some NPC "claimed" that someone else had taken over thier property wrongly. I was intrested in following the LAW (checking records, ensuring the claims were acurate) which DnD moudules don't always consider and simularly many DM's dont know how to handle that kind of game device.

As a DM I probably wouldn't want this in my game, just because as a DM I feel responsible to all players that they enjoy the game. If one player enjoys playing a lawyer, but in doing so disrupts the enjoyment for the other, it's not going to fly in my games.

As a player I'm not too keen on dungeoneering. Death is always too near and it's just too unnerving. It's good I'm a player in the Banewarrens, which mixes city adventuring with devilish monte dungeon; I like it a lot. You can go dungeoneering during the day and do other stuff at evenings (like hitting the taverns, throwing a party, etc..).