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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aurondarklord" data-source="post: 6053252" data-attributes="member: 6667464">It seems important to me to point out that for paladins, druids, clerics, and really any class subject to an alignment limitation or a behavioral code, these restrictions exist not only to try to enforce a class archetype for role playing purposes, but as mechanical limitations, often meant to be a trade off to a power advantage for balance purposes (whether paladins or any given class subject to such a limitation actually NEEDS it to avoid being overpowered is a separate issue outside the scope of this discussion), but that is the intended purpose, the code is a mechanically enforced drawback on the class.  Allowing the player to define their own morality effectively removes the code as a mechanical limitation, since, even ignoring the question of power gamers who would deliberately abuse this to justify any behavior they deem advantageous, most players who have even a basic interest in optimizing their combat play to play the "game" aspect of D&D, wherein their goal is to defeat the monsters in combat, will not intentionally take actions they believe will violate the code and gimp their character.So this is in fact as significant a mechanics change to the paladin class and the rules as written as if you were to add to the spell list, remove Smite Evil, or decide by DM fiat that paladins are allowed two extra feats.And for that matter, it is impossible to remove mechanical alignment and externally enforced objective morality without severely messing up the paladin class's balance anyway, I mean, what do you do with detect evil and smite evil then?  those are key class features, especially smite evil, which is the paladin's primary situational damage source.  If it is impossible to objectively determine from a mechanical perspective that a creature is or is not evil, you must rework these abilities for them to remain valid, either removing them entirely, limiting them in some other mechanical way (perhaps they only function on undead and evil outsiders?) or allowing the paladin to smite whomever HE considers evil, and all of those options considerably impact a paladin's combat effectiveness.</blockquote>

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