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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aurondarklord" data-source="post: 6056885" data-attributes="member: 6667464">The paladin would not take a slave who voluntarily sold himself?What about the vow of obedience feat?  A paladin would not take on an underling who had sworn a sacred and holy vow to serve him because it's immoral?Granted, money doesn't change hands, but it's still a form of voluntarily enslavement.The idea of D&D, the kind of society it presents as its default, we all know what that was like in real life, aristocrats and serfs were born into their social status, the one having as their birthright absolute power over the other, who were not regarded as having any basic human rights, most people lived in abject poverty and had to do backbreaking menial labor to avoid starvation...and frequently starved anyway because the nobles decided to overtax them.  Women were property, or at least an extra mouth to feed and a father had the right to marry his daughters off to whomever he pleased, even if that person was a violent drunk she wanted nothing to do with.To make a paladin work in that kind of setting requires either sanitizing it or allowing the paladin to ignore it.  But now you're telling me prostitution is so inherently bad it's IMPOSSIBLE to sanitize no matter how much authorial fiat is used, even though worse sexual practices can be cleaned up easily just by slapping the label of marriage on them?  I don't buy that, and I don't buy that as the writers intent.  They don't want to go into detail on these issues because they're sick of D&D being scapegoated by puritanical idiots, but if you look at the way the passage is written, it defines prostitution as evil in the context of it being exploitative and coercive, which I admit is probably what the writers considered the default, and it probably IS the default and most common form of prostitution.  But they never say it can't possibly be removed from that context, and I honestly don't believe they mean to suggest it, I think it's just a case of they didn't want to cover the issue in detail because of possible controversy, and they left the language open enough to be subject to interpretation.Reading the way it is written Pemerton, can you honestly tell me you believe there's NO POSSIBLE WAY that the way I'm looking at it is a valid one?  Because if we're talking rules as WRITTEN, then to say Cedric is barred by the RAW, it has to be absolutely clear, with zero room for interpretation, that there is only one valid way to read the rules and that way says no.  Otherwise it's still very much a question of rules as interpreted and DM fiat, and the rules as WRITTEN do not bar it.Am I being a giant rules lawyer to say that?  Absolutely, but this is a thread about the letter of the rules.</blockquote>

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