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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aurondarklord" data-source="post: 6042776" data-attributes="member: 6667464">define reliable, if Cedric does not meet your definition.  You say yourself, he's probably honest and would keep his word (though admittedly these contingencies have not been explicitly spelled out), his personal habits are extremely regular, he can always be counted on to do his duty...what more is required for reliability?What do you mean that when the head cleric tried to change things, "Cedric paid for it"?  I don't understand the phrasing, and nothing suggests Cedric was directly involved in those events.  Cedric is not responsible for what a deity decides to do on his behalf, if the head cleric even fell exclusively because he went against Cedric, which is not how I read it.  You seem to be acting as though Cedric himself did something to this guy or somehow was personally responsible for taking away his powers.Now, a huge amount of your arguments boil down to "Cedric lives the way he chooses, against the doctrines of his church, and tells off anyone who says otherwise", but this is just not true in the fiction as it's presented.  Look at the exchange between Father Shikuna and Magnus where they go over the tenets of the religion.  Cedric is living by those tenets, Magnus is simply assuming other behaviors to be required which are not, and reading his own assumptions and biases into the tenets where they aren't.  Cedric chooses to live by the tenets of his faith...as they are in fact, not as other people assume them to be, and he tells off people who ATTEMPT TO FORCE THOSE MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS ON HIM.  That's very very different.  If anything, Cedric is enforcing law, demanding other people acknowledge the actual truth of the High Lord's words, instead of making up their own version of it, and while we have no indication whether the high priest and Cedric directly interacted at all in the incident where the high priest lost his powers for trying to modify the tenets, I don't believe it's chaotic to defy an authority figure in defense of a HIGHER authority figure who your immediate superior is disobeying.  That is in fact very lawful behavior in my book, in effect, a paladin throwing a heretic out of his religion, and that high priest, objective fact, WAS A HERETIC.Cedric does not "try to make the code more flexible", he just knows how flexible the code really is.  Cedric does not live in an entirely new way against the teachings of his church, he just knows what those teachings actually are, and that they're not as strict as some people blindly assume, etc.As for the descriptions of the alignments, dealing with the one line about how good people are expected and required to act...what requirement has Cedric broken?  And "expected" can have two very different meanings.  "expected" can mean essentially "assumed", how good people are assumed to act, keeping up appearances and such, admittedly, Cedric does not do this.  but "expected" can also be said in the sense of "expectations placed upon a person by an outside authority", like a person trying to live up to their parents expectations is trying to do what their parents WANT them to do, not what their parents necessarily assume they will do.  Cedric definitely lives up to the High Lord's expectations.  And aside from that one line...you're right, any of those three descriptions for the different good alignments could describe Cedric...frankly, I would call that a problem with how the descriptions are written, but if all three work and fit the facts, it should be up to the player which one gets stuck on their character, I mean, the player knows their character best...it's just the DM's job to keep them honest about it.You say you don't understand my reasoning for saying Cedric is lawful...so think about this....what's Batman's alignment?  Batman is a gruff, often foul-tempered curmudgeon, he acts entirely outside the law, and he is arguably mentally ill...and yet the comics depict him as a force of order in stark conflict to the chaos embodied by The Joker.  How can someone so seemingly chaotic embody order?  Because if you look past the veneer, Batman isn't chaotic at all, his mind, however damaged it may be is rigidly structured and meticulous, almost compulsive in his behavior, and he lives by an internally imposed by nevertheless incredibly stringent code of behavior that he absolutely will not violate in any circumstance ever.Cedric I view as a less extreme but similar example of lawful behavior, a character who rejects superficial strictures and the trappings of order, instead living by a more deeply ingrained and personal, but no less valid set of strict behavioral rules, in service to a HIGHER authority.Now...the most serious point, what you said about the atonement spell...you can't seriously believe that this was the intention of the designers, to say the a paladin can be atoned for an evil act, but not for breaking the code?  Admittedly, the way it's written is oddly worded, but to draw the conclusion you've drawn would require a system of morals exists in the game world so backwards I can hardly fathom it, not to mention imposes absurd role playing restrictions.  Under such a system, a paladin who voluntarily committed cold blooded murder could be atoned...but a paladin who kicked an ogre in the groin has committed an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Gods/the universe/whatever and can never be atoned...which also renders the player's character forever and irrevocably all but useless mechanically.And not only does this not make sense, it is provably untrue.  I will directly quote Complete Scoundrel's grey guard prestige class:"Dishonorable acts still cause you to lose both grey guard and paladin class features until you atone".STILL CAUSE, UNTIL YOU ATONE.  A direct statement that a normal paladin who was not a grey guard could atone for dishonorable acts and get their abilities back."Thus, whenever you seek to atone for deeds that you willingly commit in the name of your faith but that break your code of conduct, a cleric casting an atonement spell on your behalf does not spend 500 XP as is normally required."Another direct statement that a paladin can receive an atonement spell to get back their class features after breaking the code of conduct.Absent that reading of the atonement spell, my point stands that "misdeeds" must be an umbrella term that includes violations of the code of conduct aside from evil acts, which means that the 500 XP penalty being dependent on whether the acts were willing or not applies to code of conduct violations, which means that "gross violation" must not mean "willing violation" and that the possibility of minor intentional violations that do not cause a paladin to fall must exist.  The chain of logic holds.</blockquote>

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