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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aurondarklord" data-source="post: 6043809" data-attributes="member: 6667464">JamesonCourage, As for reliability...a certain degree of "my way or the highway" is inherently part of how paladins are.  If you refuse to do things his way, the code bars him from being able to help you.  Cedric is no different, he just has a different "my way" than perhaps the stereotypical paladin.  When I think of someone unreliable, I generally picture a person who promises to pay the rent every month and then half the time comes up short with an excuse how he'll get it to you friday...or next friday.  I picture a dad who promises he'll be there for his kid's birthday, then suddenly a business trip comes up at the last second...again.  I picture someone whose opinions and attitudes constantly change or who can't be counted on to keep his word or be there when he's needed.  Cedric can be relied upon...just not always to do what YOU might want him to do.See, you're reading between the lines with this high priest thing...you're ASSUMING that the high priest butted heads with Cedric, and that Cedric bucked his authority.  This was never discussed in the fiction.  The fiction merely says that he tried to change the tenets and lost his powers for it.  And trying to change the tenets is heresy and makes that high priest inherently an illegitimate authority figure Cedric need not obey.You call my use of the word heretic nonsensical, but it is correct.  First definition of "heresy" on the merriam-webster online dictionary:"adherence to a religious opinion contrary to church dogma"Wikipedia explanation of formal heresy in the Catholic Church:"willful and persistence adherence to an error in matters of faith and is a grave sin and produces excommunication."Church dogma for the faith of the High Lord is the tenets as currently written.  This high priest, who adheres to a religious opinion contrary to church dogma, namely a stricter idea of what the tenets should be, tried to change them, willfully and persistently adhering to his erroneous beliefs over existing dogma.  That is literally the definition of heresy, and makes him without any doubt a heretic.Now, the impression I get from what Shilsen presented in his fiction is that Cedric follows a fairly liberal religion that worships an equally liberal deity.  The tenets, the stated dogma of his faith, encourage moral behavior and moderation in personal indulgences, but nowhere forbid such indulgences outright, and wise and learned members of the faith, like Father Shikuna, are fully aware of this, while a relatively new, young member like Magnus is still a bit green around the gills, coming into his paladinhood with his own preconceptions of righteousness and what "ought to" be expected of one, and interprets the tenets through that filter.  And every religion has this to some degree, different members of the faith who interpret dogma slightly differently, reading into it through their own experiences and viewpoints.  More permissive faiths also tend to suffer from the occasional well intentioned moral extremist with a stick up his rear, who decides he's going to "reform" a faith he sees as being decadent or corrupted to make it live up to his much higher moral expectations, and the high priest who lost his powers seems to be an example of such a person.The game world as presented by Shilsen repeatedly and visibly vindicates Cedric's interpretation of his faith and what is expected of him.  In that light, it's not that Cedric resents being told what to do or bucks authority in general, so much as Cedric refuses to alter his faith to suit the opinions of people who are visibly and provably WRONG about what is expected of him.  All he has to do to make sure he's right, and thus following the legitimate authority of his deity and the correct dogma of his church, is open his bible and read the tenets.Of course, you don't believe that a God grants paladinhood, so you seem to believe that cuts the deity himself out of the authority power structure entirely.  That a paladin is answerable to the abstract nature of his alignment, and to the church...but not to a deity in the middle.  This doesn't make much sense to me, and I think to some degree you're trying to cut the High Lord out of the equation because he obviously supports Cedric and you don't want to give Cedric an excuse to buck the church and stay lawful.  Now, according to the SRD entry on divine spells "The divine forces of law and good power paladin spells.".  DIVINE forces, according to every online dictionary I can google, "divine" means relating to or proceeding from God or a God...of course the SRD also refers to "deities OR divine forces" when explaining where clerics get their powers, which seems to suggest they're something different, so I'm a little confused as to developer intention and I can kinda see where your idea that the paladin does not directly get his powers from his deity is coming from.  But there's enough room for interpretation that I figure individual players can choose and a paladin can get power from either a God or an ideal, however they and their DM choose to do it, and still be correct under the RAW, and the way the fiction is written, it very clearly seems to assume that Cedric follows a deity and gets his powers from that deity.As for what I define as flexibility....living by a code, even if you bend that code a bit, is inherently inflexible.  A character who values flexibility would not want to take a class that has a code to begin with, so he'd have the maximum flexibility of being able to do whatever he deems appropriate without having to follow a code at all.Now, RAW=/= "core 3", RAW is all the books, everything in 3.x published by wizards of the coast and not third party companies, and in a sense, later books CAN ACT AS errata for the core 3, because in many cases they attempt to clarify or expand on rules left ambiguous within the core 3, and in this case, the grey guard class does so by talking about the looser restrictions a grey guard has contrasted against what is "normal" for a paladin, by spelling out the difference and saying how atonement would normally work for a paladin vs how it works for a grey guard, and it specifically says that a paladin can normally atone for COC violations at 500xp penalty to the caster, whereas the advantage a grey guard has is not that they are able to atone, but that they don't have to worry about that penalty.As for the question of why Shilsen wouldn't just use the paladin of freedom or holy liberator or something if he wasn't exclusively talking about the core 3 books....because doing so would defeat the purpose of the intellectual exercise.  The entire point is to present Cedric specifically as a paladin and determine whether he works.  Putting him into a different class and archetype makes that meaningless.Pemerton....that's a very thought provoking post you lay out, and I think it lays out a few good points,First of all, I believe the paladin's code has to be interpreted through the lens of the setting, to reconcile the modern audience for which D&D is written with the romantic archetype.  Because you're right, the paladin can't exist to constantly rail against the system of monarchy and the inequality between ruler and ruled in a medieval fantasy setting, that's what the holy liberator is for.  You have to determine what the values and ideals of your setting are, how your cosmology works, and thus what the obligations of a paladin are based on that.  A paladin in a gritty realistic medieval simulation type game, a paladin in a heroic romance game, and a paladin in a modern people in renfaire costumes game are gonna stand for different things and behave differently.  And part of that is tied to the social contract between players and DMs, the duty of the DM to design a world that works for the kind of game the players want, and the duty of the players to discuss what's expected of their characters in the presented setting with the DM and make sure they fit.Of course a DM can be a jerk and present a paladin player an endless series of sadistic moral choices that either have no right answer or require the player to be able to read the DM's mind or just guess, and in so doing make the paladin class all but unplayable.  But I don't see that as a material point because it's always the case for anybody.  The fact that the DM can screw you over if he chooses to goes without saying, and applies no matter what class you're playing.  But I do believe that an experienced and skillful DM who has done a good job of conveying how the moral framework of his setting works to his players can present moral dilemmas to a paladin in an interesting way without simply letting the player decide whatever they want, by using the moral dilemma to create good role play opportunities, make the player get out of his head and into character and respond not as a modern 21st century American would think, but as his character would think and be conditioned to think by the framework of the setting.As for planescape...I definitely agree that to play a paladin in planescape, you have to sit down and talk to your DM about exactly what constitutes breaking the code by fraternizing with evil, because at some point, you're gonna have non-combat encounters with evil outsiders in Sigil and the like.  Now, I don't see planescape so much as cynical or nihilistic as...a bit old testamenty, sort of like the story of Job where God and the Devil make a bet on human nature, the battle between good and evil is very real, but it's more complicated, more subtle, more of a cold war than the knock-down drag-out brawl of forgotten realms or greyhawk, and as an inherent part of that, the paladin has to have more freedom to solve problems by means other than violence when he encounters evil beings.However, and I think this goes for any setting, unless you're playing at a pure hack-and-slash table, you have to interpret the prohibition against associating with evil to mean things more like "a paladin can't be in a party with evil characters", "a paladin can't have a succubus girlfriend", etc, not that the paladin will immediately fall if he so much as exchanges words with an evil character that aren't "repent or die".  A paladin has to be able to engage in diplomacy with evil beings, for example, to advocate for the interests of good at the cosmic bargaining table, and if treaties between the cosmic powers exist, following them is part of respecting legitimate authority.As for the degree to which the world has to vindicate the paladin's faith, I think what you're asking for to some degree defeats the purpose of D&D.  If the world is stacked from the outset in such a way that good will always ultimately triumph simply because it's good, then there's no tension, the actions of the player characters don't matter, players know how the story ends before it even begins, and it's impossible to present a moral dilemma anyway, because the answer is always obvious.  I see no problem with the paladin in a world which doesn't have an inbuilt guarantee like that, even a world, like the one Cedric lives in, where he's a speck in the overall cosmic scheme of things, and he knows it, but he's trying to do what he can in what relatively small ways he can.  I don't see this as a failure to vindicate the paladin's faith, I see it as requiring the paladin to HAVE faith, faith being defined as dedicated belief in the ABSENCE of certainty.  The paladin does the right thing because he knows it's right, not because he knows he'll win.  And he inspires others to do the same, in the hope, even if it's a slim hope, that if he can make enough good men stand up for what's right, and they in turn inspire others, eventually the tide CAN turn in good's favor, even if doing so requires constant work and constant vigilance because if good slips, it can fail in a world where evil has a real chance to win.Also, I never said Batman was a paladin, I said he can be interpreted as lawful.</blockquote>

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