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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6041744" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that that's a little harsh as a reading of "Politics as a Vocation", or even as a reading of "The Prince"!I think at the heart of "Politics as a Vocation" is a pessimistic atheism. (And Weber expresses the same outlook in "Science as a Vocation" also.) That is, Weber denies that there are any workings of providence that will ensure that, if only everyone (including leaders) does good, everything will turn out for the best. Hence the importance of the "ethic of responsibility".My own view is that a traditional D&D paladin is not really playable against that sort of background assumption. At the heart of the traditional D&D paladin is optimism - that a person who acts with honour, courtesy, charity etc will prevail, and bring the world along with him/her.Fair enough, but the question then becomes how is virtue to be preserved? And how is that to be reconciled with the demands of the game?In Plato we get the idea (from Socrates) that the good person cannot suffer harm, but that isn't viable for an RPG - Socrates may be correct that death is not harm, but it is pretty much the end of a PC as a vehicle for a player to engage the gameworld. In Kant an optimistic, providential view is maintained via the argument for the afterlife etc. Again, whether or not this is true, it doesn't seem a workable basis for an RPG.In the Socratic or Kantian framework, the solution to the "Catch-22" you describe above - "having to choose between falling to save innocents and allowing innocents to die to keep honor" - is to do what honour permits or requires, and if the paladin, or other innocents, die as a result, then that is not the paladin's fault, and providence will ensure that it all balances out (the innocent will go to heaven, the wrongdoers be punished in the afterlife, etc)."Lawful Stupid" isn't stupid, within that framework, because to die is not to suffer harm. In one version of the Arthurian romances (Chretien de Troyes, I think) Lancelot kills six (or so) of his fellow knights in escaping with Guinevere. There is no suggestion that he made a mistake in killing them, or that they made a mistake in fighting and dying - each has done the right thing, and that this happened to through them into conflict and lead to these killings is just part of the mysterious workings of the world.Given the importance of character survival to the viability of standard D&D play, I think there are two ways to handle these "Catch 22s" for a paladin PC: if everyone wants a reasonably straightforward game then the GM has to make sure not to force the paladin into situations in which death is the only honourable and proper optio; or if those at the table are happier for something a bit more modern and "gritty" in its moral flavour, the GM has to let the player of the paladin make decisions about what is permitted, and what not, and what counts as "falling".But if the GM, or the game system, just affirms that the paladin is doing what is permitted because it would be "Lawful Stupid" to do otherwise, then I don't think we're talking about a paladin at all. Because we're imposing a funadmentally modern moral perspective (particularly conceiving of death as a harm - and, more generally, your consequentialist reasoning about the good that will follow from a paladin's legend) that doesn't fit with the paladin, which is a fundamentally pre-modern, romantic archetype.I think, therefore, that to at least some extent I'm in agreement with [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION].</blockquote>

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