Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6044164" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is very removed from how I like to GM and how I like to play, but it gives me a good idea of where you're coming from. I agree that it's a possibility that I did not allow for in my earlier posts.OK. My feeling is that, in that situation, a paladin can still look quite naive. But I think I can see ways of making it work. The paladin has to be "in on the joke" with the powers of good.But I don't agree on this one. The world can vindicate the paladin's faith without the paladin necessarily winning in a procedural sense. For example, the paladin might die and all s/he stood for fail (as Aragorn worries may happen in LotR), but that wouldn't mean that the world failed to vindicate the paladin's faith - the paladin him-/herself didn't come to harm, even in death, because s/he died fighting righteously!Contrast 1984 - where there is always a point at which you break, and your previous resistance becomes meaningless. This is a world that fails to vindicate faith. I don't think that sort of world has the conceptual room for paladins - they're deluded, the most foolish, not the best and wisest.My own preferred approach, which you've probably gathered by now, is to let the players debate over what the world is like by their own play of their PCs. Their choices, plus the action resolution mechanics as adjudicated by the GM, will provide the answer. The paladin I described upthread, who stood up to the cynical machinations of the gods in the name of humanity and decency, was prepared to undergo eternal suffering in order to do the right thing - but by doing so would have won, not lost. ("The good person can't be harmed!") Though the campaign itself would have come to an end. (As it happens, though, the PCs found a way to create a simulacrum of the paladin to undergo the suffering instead. So he was able to retire to his temple/monastery and train new generations of warrior-monks.)In a diffrent campaign the arc of one PC (a warlock, not a paladin) did take a grimmer direction. He became addicted to a magic-enhancing drug; spent all his money paying for the drug, and lost his house; when his summoner friend decided to change sides in the key battle of the campaign, the warlock swapped sides too in exchange for the promise of his home back and a magistracy in his hometown once it was conquered; and finally, having run out of the drug, he ended up in withdrawal-shakes on a mission while resting to regain spells.He was rescued by a valley elf enchanter, who became his girlfriend. He got off the drugs. Having been born into slavery himself and having bought his own freedom (that happened prior to play, as part of the PC backstory), he used his magistracy to campaign with some success for the end of slavery in the kingdom. Then his valley elf girlfried was killed on a mission, when the summoner lost control of one of his demons. The warlock fell back into addiction (to wine, this time) and died in a TPK before he had mustered the resource to get the elf resurrected.My reason for these actual play examples is to try to illustrate what I mean when I talk about "letting the players choose": the GM throws the situation in the path of the PC, but it is the play of the game that determines the moral character of the world (Is it really one in which the good person can't be harmed?), rather than the GM deciding before play starts on "the moral framework of his setting."</blockquote>

Verification