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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6056928" data-attributes="member: 42582">But such a person is not a slave. They do not become the property of the paladin.Today's world is full of religious who are bound by vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but they are not slaves. In particular, if they renounce their vows, they may be moral wrongdoers (at least in the eyes of some orders), but the head of their order has no power to compel them to return. They are free to go, even if that would be a betrayal. Slaves are in a fundamentally different, unfree situation.Agreed, and I posted much the same upthread when I said that the easiest way to make a paladin work is for the GM to not frame situations that raise moral quandries of the sort to which the OP gives rise.The other option I canvassed, of course, is to put the moral power in the player's hands, so s/he can decide what attitude to take towards the social institutions of the pseudo-medieval world.I didn't say that - I'm not violating board rules!I said there is a well-known argument to that effect - based on the idea that sex is not a commodity - and that I find it easy to belive that the author(s) of the BoED took that argument for granted.I don't think it's a very tenable reading of the passage from BoED, no. I think that passage absolutely takes for granted the coercive and/or exploitative character of prostitution.Is it viable for a fantasy RPG to depart from the BoED on that point? I'm sure it is - a certain sort of pulp-ish game, pseudo-Conanesque or pseudo-Western, might have prostitutes who aren't coerced and who provide their services purely voluntarily and even out of a love of sex (much as a blacksmith might love crafting).But my personal view is that such a game wouldn't really have room for paladins, not for alignment/moral reasons but for genre reasons: the genre connotations of that sort of fantasy, for me at least, just don't fit with the paladin archetype.This pretty much captures my view. [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] upthread made a good case for breaking from the archetype to the necessary degree, but (from other posts of Mallus's that I've read over several years) I'm pretty sure that I am much more conservative in my approach to fantasy tropes than Mallus is.</blockquote>

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