The Tale of Mittens the Paladin
So it was an online campaign full of random people who didn't know each other. We played three sessions and were starting to gel when the future Mittens joined. Knowing full well that this was a party of Robin Hood style two rogues, sorcerer and a druid, he insists on rolling a Paladin.
That would be fine except this was 3e where Paladins had both a code to make sure they could be interpreted as being unable to work with normal adventurers and also had detect evil at will. None of the party was evil, but we regularly worked with scumbags in order to screw them over ala Leverage.
First ten minutes of the game, we meet our latest mark, Pally detects evil, and then in a room full of goons openly attacked the guy. This guy, who we knew had the local guards in his pocket and were slow-rolling to separate him from his powerbase. We got our butts kicked concave and then were run out of the city. The Pally spends the entire time as we flee for our lives lecturing us about associating with him despite knowing we were trying to take him down.
This continues for three sessions. Party reaches a town, tries to do basically anything, Pally detects evil, attacks on sight (which I started calling 'detect -thump'), party has to flee. By the end of this cycle, we were starving hermits in the woods because we never got a chance to buy food and the Paladin insisted on on going with us whenever we went into town to 'make sure we didn't associate with the wrong people'.
Out of character, we try to explain the kind of game it had been before he joined. He says he knows and that his character is there to 'set our characters straight' and that he will not be changing.
The DM finally took mercy on us and decided the next town we came to literally had no one evil in it so we could do some business and pick up some plot hooks in peace. Said plothooks were disappointing to the original crew though as they weren't 'loveable rogue' type quests, for which we'd been built, but Shining Violence Heroes quests to shut the Paladin up.
Enough was enough.
So after nearly dying on the first quest, the original crew pooled their money and I sent a private message to the DM, starting with 'So... have you ever seen Inu Yasha? We want a magic item designed...'
And thus, we fabricated a mission to the Frozen North area of the map. We all bought cold weather gear, including one very special mittens: the Mittens of Subjugation.
We trek up north, only to find that the town was NOT being eaten by Yetis, but instead being run by a mine owner and general scumbag who we wanted to bilk. We finagle a meeting with him.
Paladin ignores the man's pair of awakened polar bear guards and detects evil.
"Easy the big fella," I say.
The command word activates. The mittens lock together, preventing the drawing or use of weapons until I release them. They cannot be removed except by remove curse.
Out of Character, I explain what this is and why. How we didn't like being beholden to him. How we'd begged him not to turn every social encounter with the villains into a combat. How we were okay with him fighting when fighting was a good idea, but not against insurmountable odds inside the place of power of every crime lord on the planet. How we didn't want to be morally babysitted.
He went BALLISTIC. Telling us how not only weren't we playing D&D right, but how we were 'perverting' the game by not fighting evil at every turn. And how he was going to make sure his characters killed all of ours to make sure we couldn't go any further playing the way we wanted. The DM tried to step in, but it was at this moment we learned the Paladin player was his brother-in-law, who proceeded to browbeat him into backing off.
It was at this point, the sorcerer player, who never really argued anything spoke up. She's like 'this is definitely the last session of this campaign, everyone but Paladin is invited to a game she's running, oh and by the way... HEAT METAL.'
As his Paladin roasts in his plate, the player bellows in rage, claiming that we can't kill his character--starts to beg us not to do this because if we do--get this--he'll never be able to play a Paladin again. Because that's his understanding of the rules apparently. We agree that's a good thing as he demands the DM let him pray for his god to save him. DM asks him if he has any spells that let him do that.
Paladin casts augury.
DM, holding back sick joy, announces the answer comes back as Woe.
We played the sorcerer's game for about a year and it becomes a thing for us to refer to that incident as Mitten the Paladin -- and remarking on how he would have lived if he'd thought to cast lay on hands instead.
