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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6042882" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not saying that the paladin is inherently unplayable. I've said it causes difficulties if the gameworld doesn't vindicate the paladin's faith. Because the gameworld is very much in the hands of the participants, it's not that hard to make it work. I've run three long campaigns over the past 30-odd years. Every one of them has featured paladin PCs. And not a lot of drifiting from basic D&D assumptions has been required to make them work - you just have to disregard the alignment rules as written (in particular, the idea that they confer power on the GM to judge the player's playing of his/her PC).I cetainly don't believe these difficulties were intended by the designers. I think the designers made mistakes. (Though things are also compounded by the fact that the class was designed in the mid-70s, whereas the Planescape cosmology into which you are trying to fit it was developed in the mid-90s.)In particular, I don't think Gygax was a very good moral philospher, nor a particularly strong social theorist. And this shows in his alignment rules.The class concept is present in the very name of the class: "paladin" ie "knightly or heroic champion". Central to the paladin class are such paradigms as Lancelot (before his fall), Galahad, Percival, Arthur, Aragorn etc. A player who is familiar with those characters, and who plays in accordance with their stories - chivalrous, gentle unless roused to anger, merciful, honest - should have not to think about the RAW content of the "code of honour" in order to comply with it, as the whole point of the code is to capture those characters.There is a design tension inherent in AD&D that puts pressure on the paladin class - namely, the use of thoroughly modern concepts (like equality and human rights) to define the content of the Good and Lawful Good alignments. A GM who wants to can use that to screw over the player of a paladin - for example, by creating a situation in which a paladin must choose between loyalty to superior authority (say, a king) and equality between ruler and subject (say, if because of the kings taxes the peasants can't afford to rethatch their rooves, and therefore have to live in cheerless, damp houses). Of course the literary paladins were never confronted by this dilemma - peasants barely figure in the Arthurian romances, and the only peasants we come to know in LotR are the Hobbits, and purely by authorial fiat these have the living standards of mid-nineteenth century English folk despite having the apparent productive power of their thirteenth-century analogues.The game has no inbuilt solution for reconciling the modernity of its definitions of its key moral concepts, with the romantic pre-modernity of the paladin archetype.This is why I said, upthread, that there are two solutions to running a paladin in a more-or-less traditional D&D game. Either the GM plays along, and doesn't confront the player of the paladin with these sorts of dilemmas, which means that the above sort of problem doesn't occur - the players never encounter oppressed peasants (as opposed to proud yeomen under threat from orcs!), the orcs never surrender (and hence the issue of mercy doesn't have to be adjudicated), the bad guys never threaten to kill 10 innocents unless tha paladin himself commits murder (so the puzzles of non-romantic consequentialist morality don't have to be dealt with), etc. Roughly speaking, this is the world of Dragonlance or, as best I have a general impression of it, the Forgotten Realms.In this sort of play, the paladin's loyalty and faith is vindicated by default, because nothing ever happen to challenge it. The threats that the paladin confronts, like marauding orcs or haunting undead, don't threaten his/her faith but confirm it. I think that, when the paladin was first introduced into the game, this was the default approach to play.For some, though, this approach is a bit saccharine or polyanna-ish. (Though in my view it need not be. There are flaws to LotR, but I think Moorcock is unfair when he labels it "Epic Pooh".) They want something more morally or socially gritty (eg the Seven Samurai, or Hero). In this case, I think some drifting is required - namely, the GM's adjudication of alignment has to be abandoned, and the the player has to be given latitude to decide what his/her PC's calling demans, and what counts as permissible or impermissible. Given the obvious tensions between modernity and romance that I've outlined above, it is trivial for the GM to raise dilemmas should s/he want to. But it strikes me as completely pointless to raise them and then expect the player of the paladin to guess what is (in the GM's view) the correct answer. It also strikes me as pointless to raise them, expect the moral answer to be clear, and have the real challenge be a procedural one of how to achieve that answer - it is very easy for the GM to generate procedural challenges for the players of an RPG without throwing in the danger of a paladin's fall from grace.If you're going to raise moral dilemmas, do it for real and let the player make the call! Let the player decide whether the gameworld vindicates the paladin's faith, or does not (in which case the paladin falls).Planescape complicates things, because inherent to Planescape is the throwing up of dilemmas that are at one-and-the-same-time both extremely stylised and even artificial (compare the moral problem of poverty with the moral "problem" of an angel and a devil drinking together at a tavern in Sigil) yet, because of Planescape's infusion of everything with alignment significance, bear extremely heavily on a paladin's code per the RAW (a paladin presumably can't joint the pair for a drink, because of the prohibition on fraternisig with the evil - but what is the point of that prohibition, if an angel is permitted to violate it?!). Planescape makes the paladin's code look like trainer wheels, or like a rule that applies to the unitiated ("berks") but that the wise can transcend in pursuit of higher, more mysterious ends.This is the cyncial, nihilistic attitude in Planescape that I mentioned earlier.I can see a couple of possible responses. One is a sort of gnostic response - the person of faith, upon being initiated into the true mysteries, transcends earlier limitations. This sort of approach doesn't really have room for a paladin class, however, because adherence to the code is a sign of failure (failure to transcend) rather than of success. It suits a certain approach to the monk class, however.The second sort of response is one that I've seen played out in my game, though in a slightly less relativistic context than Planescape - but it was still a cosmology in which gods and devils had entered into secret pacts to preserve hidden features of creation to which the ordinary people were not privy, and for which the interests of ordinary people, plus some heroic lesser divinities also, were being sacrificed. This is the response of the paladin standing on his/her virtue, re-affirming the values for which s/he stands, and therefore taking on the nihilism and cynicism of the heavens, and forcing them to recognise the proper demands of morality and virtue.But this also requires the GM to let go of the reins of alignment, and let the player take the lead in deciding what morality and the code requires.</blockquote>

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