Moral Flexibility
Wait a minute… Paladin? Is that you? What’s with this night-blue cloak? You’ve always had that azure cloak, sure. But this new bonus robe is different and strange! There is change afoot. I DON’T LIKE CHANGE!
…
I wonder what his armor looks like? No doubt a certain someone will want a looksee too. But rather than focusing on whether this ship will ever sail, I propose we pause for a moment to contemplate the concept of a morally flexible paladin.
Different editions have different takes on the concept (up to and including replacing Lawful Good pallies entirely). But for my money, I’ve always been a fan of this little throw-away line in the Pathfinder 1e class description.
Associates: While she may adventure with good or neutral allies, a paladin avoids working with evil characters or with anyone who consistently offends her moral code. Under exceptional circumstances, a paladin can ally with evil associates, but only to defeat what she believes to be a greater evil. A paladin should seek an atonement spell periodically during such an unusual alliance, and should end the alliance immediately should she feel it is doing more harm than good.
And when it comes to deciding the tricky question of whether an evil ally is still serving your cause, you’re in the murky area known as “GM discretion.” That said, you guys all know Woolantula the Servile. You know that they are doing the bidding of Demon Queen. You know that they are opposed to BBEG. And you know that the little guy is cute as a button. Does working with this adorable arachnid constitute breach of Paladin Code?
What do you say we make that the question of the day? Use your favorite edition to justify your answer. And let’s decide whether our newly reformed Paladin is really still a paladin at all!
Based on 1e Pathfinder Paladin would be fine. BBEG is a bigger threat than Demon Queen at this point, and Woolantula the Servile seems like they could be redeemed, even if not easily. Paladins of Sarenrae of Shelyn have an easier time with this, but any LG or NG god should be fine with it.
Pathfinder 1e offers the archetype Grey Knight; a Paladin who can be LN or NG. Right now, Paladin appears more even-tempered, less hide-bound than before. More Neutral than Lawful Good. It’s no longer about the code; it’s about the mission. And really, any Paladin worth his or her salt should be willing to Fall – and rise up again – to see that the greatest possible Good is done.
Sidenote: Paladin’s looking sharp in his new threads!
I would say Paladin seems more about doing good than about a strict code. Neutral Good Redeemer would be my leaning. Or maybe PF2e’s exemplar.
I need to play PF2e so friggin’ bad….
It is a little unfair to say they “did away with Paladin.” They just made it a subclass of the larger concept that we’ve all been homebrewing for years.
Not quite a paladin, but close enough. In Warhammer Fantasy, Shallya is the goddess of healing and mercy. Her priests are required to be pacifist, ascetic, not carry weapons, and offer aid freely to anyone in need, and when the cultists of Nurgle, the chaos god of pestilence, come knocking, to forget all that rubbish and purge the unclean, because this is still Warhammer after all.
So the shallyans can hang out with just about anyone without getting in trouble, so long as they aren’t aligned with Nurgle.
I say Woolantula would make a fine Divine Herald for when Paladin achieves deity / semideity status. Or their first cleric they can grant spells to.
Huh, did Woolantula The Servile always have that blue collar and blue tufts of wool?
I believe those are shadows.
I would rule that BOTH of them could bend just enough to work together. Lemme explain.
As a DM, in one of my 3.5-ish campaigns, one player has a long-time PC who is fast approaching Epic-level content. Somewhere along the way, this NG warrior succeeded in taming a hellhound, since named “Goodboy.” I decided that as a low-intelligence but sentient species native to Hell (it’s in the name, even), the hellhound is incapable of changing its alignment. To justify how the NG hero could have a LE minion, I turned to Pathfinder (it’s compatible). The d20PFSRD says (I paraphrase slightly for the sake of the hellhound)
“Lawful Evil
The world is a dangerous and confusing place, filled with overwhelmingly powerful entities. Thankfully, sometimes those beings take lucky souls under their wings, offering protection, purpose, and perhaps permission to indulge aspects of oneself that society otherwise prohibits (chasing prey, setting fires).
The Lawful Evil minion knows that loyalty and perfect service are the best ways achieve comfort and security and take pride in it their total devotion. They:
• Seek powerful figures to serve and obey.
• Avoid anything that might raise questions about their loyalty.
• Live to please their master, regardless of the harm to themselves or anyone else.
Code: Be an obedient and useful servant, and your master will take care of you.”
The NG warrior/blacksmith periodically takes the hellhound hunting rabbits, lets the dog light his forge and sleep near the fireplace, and has a big farm where the hell-beast can burn haystacks all day long if he feels the need. The PC also sometimes takes the hellhound with him when he adventures, especially if he knows there will be irredeemable bad guys/critters that will satisfy the hellhound’s innate desire to chase down fleeing creatures that can scream.
I think Woolantula recognizes a powerful leader they can serve, and (with a little imagination and a sprinkle of cognitive dissonance) The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Paladin can bend enough to find suitable tasks for Woolantula that nevertheless serve the forces of Good.
“.. Woolantula recognizes a powerful leader..”
– not to mention the only person to talk to it and actually want to LISTEN..
Yeah that same or very close to it assosiates text is in 3.5 book too. In a way I liked the more oath based Paladins of 5th edition as it means your paladin can be for any god and not tied to Lawfull Good or what ever slaughter and tyranny had for alingment.
But on the other hand I still have a gripe with people who put good first and forget there is the Lawfull too. Reading lore about Tyr the Lawfull Good god of Law(as thanks to Baldurs gate one of us got hungry for old 3.5, I will be playing Paladin) should be mandatory reading for paladin players and their GMs. There was fun point that you can hand out “just but unfair” punishments, you just try to work in the system to fix them after ypu find out what it is and that breaking that law in protest can still be punished by the servants of the Lawfull Good God.
TLDR, even lawfull evil works with in system, so will your lawfull good. the latter does not over rule former.
When I play paladins, I typically place a greater emphasis on good than law… strict adherence to code is less important than serving the greater good. So while allying with a lesser evil might be an uneasy thing requiring constant vigilance, my paladins would have little doubt that it was the right thing to do if it helped them against a greater evil.
Nuden, an Aasimar paladin, would have listened intently and then immediately sought out his wizard friends to ask a simple question; “Can a demon be turned away from Evil?”
Either way, Nuden would begin to alert the authorities that there appears to be trouble in the Abyss and then seek to go there himself to ascertain the truth of the matter. This evil is small but the BBEG and Demon Queen are not. And if it is a trap, then he would do his best to do Right.
Yet if there was even a shred of a chance that Woolantula the Servile could be saved from the forces of the Abyss, he would make that his main goal with the Demon Queen vs BBEG side quest as the way in which he would try.
“What do you say we make that the question of the day? Use your favorite edition to justify your answer. And let’s decide whether our newly reformed Paladin is really still a paladin at all!”
Using 5E’s Oath of Devotion he’s absolutely fine. If he’s Redemption now, he’s absolutely fine.
Honestly, 5E is pretty good aboot giving clear identities to the Oaths.
Devotion: Truth, justice, and the Adbarian way. Captain America/Superman.
Ancients: Be a nice person, protect the things that make the world a nice place. Captain Planet.
Vengeance: Cross **every** line that would see your sworn enemies dead. The Punisher.
Oathbreaker: Renounce a previous oath to serve dark powers, be evil. Darth Vader.
Crown: Follow the rules. Judge Dredd.
Conquest: Be the best you can be, don’t take any shit, strike fear into the hearts of any foes you spare. Anything from Batman to Dr. Doom.
Redemption: Every **person** deserves a **second** chance. (“Person” excludes supernatural evils. Whether they deserve a third+ chance is a judgement call) Steven Universe.
Glory: Publicize your adventures, don’t forget leg-day. Booster Gold.
Watchers: Protect the world from supernatural threats. MiB/Ghostbusters.
D&D 4e had a rad take on paladins.
“Paladins are not granted their powers directly by their deity, but instead through various rites performed when they first become paladins. Most of these rites involve days of prayer, vigils, tests and trials, and ritual purification followed by a knighting ceremony, but each faith has its own methods. This ceremony of investiture gives a paladin the ability to wield divine powers. Once initiated, the paladin is a paladin forevermore. How justly, honorably, or compassionately the paladin wields those powers from that day forward is up to him, and paladins who stray too far from the tenets of their faith are punished by other members of the faithful.”
You had to prove yourself worthy enough, and then once consecrated, could choose to wield your new powers in whatever manner you saw fit.
You never had to worry about “falling” from random minor nonsense, but you sure did have to care about your one-time allies at the church sending a hit squad after you for truly tarnishing the name of their deity.
How did they treat Antipaladins? Same logic, but evil/profane rituals?
Technically there is no such thing as an antipaladin in 4e; all paladins are simply martially inclined devotees of their chosen deity, even the evil ones.
“Evil and chaotic evil paladins do exist in the world, but they are almost always villains, not player characters.”
Amusingly this means you can be a Lawful Good Paladin… who just so happened to have been originally invested by the church of Vecna. Whoops.
My third character ever was a 1e paladin. Still a rampant newbie, when I rolled super high stats across the board (in front of the DM and other players) I was TOLD that I was playing a paladin. She turned out to be one of my favorite characters ever.
Not being cognizant of the whole “stupid, stick up the butt” paladin meme, I did a deep dive into Bullfinches Mythology and came up with her “moral” code. Following a Norse god of Justice and War, you have a whole different set of “can” and “can’t” than a Paladin of the Roman goddess Athena. She also had a wicked sense of humor and was frequently atoning for laughing at things she really shouldn’t have.
When I developed my homebrew world that was something I always stressed to the players, if you have god you follow then you need to know what they stand for and what they want out of you. Paladins are still lawful good, but every god, including the evil ones, tend to have holy warriors that have special abilities and requirements they need to follow. And, since my gods are VERY invested in the mortal world, you are also micromanaged (just a bit). So if a holy warrior/paladin does some iffy things according to their god, they might get admonishing dreams, they might get visited by a minor power under their god and, if they’ve been bad but not enough to lose their abilities they just might end up with a quest to atone.
One of hubby’s favorite stories about my paladin was when the group was discussing what steps the group was going to take to get rid of a large bandit group that had been raiding the local tribes. She started to sketch out the basic plan to the tribal chieftan and he looked at her, asked her if she was a paladin (bright shiny armor, holy symbols all over the place, DUH) and when she answered in the affirmative, he turned away from her saying, “funny, you don’t look stupid.” That’s the closest I’ve ever been to having a SERIOUS alignment break.
“Does working with this adorable arachnid constitute breach of Paladin Code?
What do you say we make that the question of the day? Use your favorite edition to justify your answer.”
There is a lot to unpack here…
So it’s of course going to depend on system* //and// cosmology†. For my money, in a Strict Alignments version of the D&Ds‡, a Paladin MUST be Lawful, I don’t accept NG/C Pallys, but LG, LN, and LE roll with the Paladin name just fine.
That’s because I have a more traditional interpretation of the name Paladin, they are the King’s legendary peers, the knights who serve the ‘King’ directly and are empowered by the King’s Divine Right to uphold the laws of the land and King. They are the same as the Knights of the Round Table, and as we all know, while those lads weren’t always the “Good” guys, they were THE LAW (See also Judges of 2000 AD, ref Judge Dread).
However, if your interpretation is “Warrior on a mission from (the) God(s)”, then they could be of any alignment that matches their Divine Patron, or even a skewed one as in the case of the two Bards turned Holy Rockers, Jake and Elwood.
But if I’m going this course there would be different types of “Holy Mission” classes, from “knights”, aka Paladins, to Rogues, Bards, etc. Their power source would just be “Divine” rather than another type.
For my system, and my money, I go with the Holy Warriors from Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game Powered By GURPS, which means “it depends” on their “code”.
GURPS DFRPG Holy Warriors don’t have a singular code, it depends on the deities or ethics or whatevers they serve. Ostensibly they should be of the “Good” and “Law Following/Civilization” Gods/Powers, but if you want to break with the suggested theme and let the PCs be “the baddies”, as GM you can.
Also, not all the Holy Warriors abilities are based on a Divine connection, for instance they can be Higher Purpose based, in which case they are empowered through their own fanatic devotion to a cause, which usually includes stamping out some type of capital ‘e’ Evil, like Undead or Demons (or in my games Fay, Mages, Outsiders, etc). In this case they do kinda have a code (and some have an actual Code of Honor) which is pretty strict about “though shalt not suffer an EVIL [something] to live”, in which case, if the Holy Warrior has the Higher Purpose: Slay Demons, working with Woolanta would be verboten, unless they were doing so to slay more demons and then they slayed Woolanta last. But even then… work too long with a Foe, and they will fall from grace.
* Naturally, if the system has no rules for falling, or if your house rules modify them, you go by the rules. Or not.
† I feel that cosmoslogy shold be reflected in your rules, but you might be playing a fluffy rules lite or No Rules system, so… well… regardless of rules, at the end of the day the setting, world and cosmology, should rule the roost.
‡ Like OD&D 1964, BECM D&D, AD&D 1 and 2, 3rd-5th ed DNDs, Pathfinder, OSR, etc… they’re all D&D as far as I’m concerned.
You just made me want to play the Blues Brothers in a dnd game with someone and now I want to find a way to make it work XD Thanks
Ah, yes, that bit of fun in the original paladin’s code. Having to look out for your companions’ actions as well as your own is a big part of why paladins are stereotyped as Lawful Stupid judgemental jerks. In the words of Roy Greenhilt from The Order of the Stick: “What kind of stupid class relies on other people’s behaviour to keep its powers, anyway??”
Unfortunately, despite the nostalgia factor, D&D 3.5 doesn’t really have a solution – paladins don’t get to work with known evil characters at all, even if it’s to redeem them or as an alliance against a greater evil. Fortunately, as Gabe mentioned above most of 5e’s paladin oaths are more understanding – the only ones that require you to impose your code on others are the Crown (which is more lawful than good) and Conquest (which leans evil), while others aren’t specific, and Redemption straight-up encourages trying to help evildoers be better people. Meanwhile for Pathfinder 2e, most of the champion causes say nothing about how your companions may act as long as you yourself don’t do anything against the code, so a paladin could well work with a known criminal or a redeemer with a merciless avenger.
All that is required for Evil for triumph is for Good to not take the valuable intel being dropped into their lap.
Last time I played a Paladin, working with Evil companions was excluded. That would include enabling/accepting evil acts from party members.
In previous parties/games, D&D or others, I tend to enforce “good guys don’t torture or steal”.
The game itself is enforcing moral flexibility, that’s not helping. Looting defeated foes is part of the economics of many RPGs, so it has to be acceptable. But a Paladin has to put some line somewhere. I requested that the things the bad guys looted themselves should ideally go back to their legitimate owner, if they could be identified.
OTOH, “smite-on-sight” was also not a feature. At some point, we were plane-hoping in the Abyss, and my Paladin decided that trying to wipe out by himself the whole plane of evil outsiders would have been both the apex of arrogance, and useless suicide. Our mission was to stop incursions on the Material Plane. Getting a TPK would have been counter-productive.
Now, when we met that slave caravan, the gloves came off.
On a previous instance, my Paladin did something which in retrospect should have led to atonement, or at least some introspection. We had just emerged from a portal in the spiderweb pit and a patrol of Drows asked us our business. My Paladin replied truthfully in Undercommon “we are pilgrims.” He just did not precise for which god(s), and the Drows did not ask, concluding erroneously we came to visit Lolth.
The bad guys did all the work to fool themselves, but it was still a lie by omission from my Paladin. I justified it, again, as us being on a mission and trying to avoid to confrontations and raising alarm too early.
I would say that working with Woolantula *is* a violation of the Paladin’s Code for my Arthur Grace, because Arthur would assume that 1) as a demon, whatever Woolantula wants him to do will make the world a worse place in general, and 2) Woolantula is cleverer than he is, and as such Arthur is not going to be able to out-think Woolantula. Ergo, there is virtually no chance that allying with Woolantula will lead to the defeat of a greater evil.
Hum. In the game Paladin, the Charlemange cousin game to King Arthur Pendragon, you csn play one of the original Paladins, namely the paragons of Christian piety that were the companions ot Charles the Great (Charlemange). There are basically two ways this can play out:
1. The little deamon is overwhelmed with the aura of Christian virtue that the Paladin (Roland, Otho, Ogier, there were 12 of them, as I recall) excudes, and will convert to Chritianity immediatly.
2. The Paladin will work with the little deamon to thwarth the unholy plans of the enemy (Saracens of course) and it will then see the error of it’s ways and again either convert, or be sanctified as a holy animal.
In KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) it will depend on the time period. If it’s willing, able and capable of helping agains the Saxons, it will be welcomed, and it’s help will be appreciated, and either the pagan priests, or the christians, and probably both, will try and santify the little creature. Or it will be seen as a Fey creature and will be asked to return to the other side, lest it inadvertily does damage.
Or it will be seen as an unwanted creature that was send by the devil (or other malovent creature) to test the knightly, or religious, virtues of the knight. And will then be dealt with appropriatly.
I’m in the P1E camp so yeah Paladin here is fine to work with wooly but I also subscribe to ‘not every single individual of a so called evil species must be so’ and frankly, while our cute minion may serve a demonstrably evil boss , it may itself be more neutral. We haven’t seen woolantula do anything outright evil that i can recall. also this is why you want to max Sense Motive skill on pallys to make sure you aren’t being lied to.
on the flip side of that coin my hubby and i had a long conversation the other day about what flavors of evil can and cant work as a player character alongside good ones and how their goals can align. while we were working from the evil side of that perspective i feel the same thing goes from the other angle: it really depends on if you can have an aligned goal to work towards and if outside of that one is/isnt causing outward and obvious harm to ‘allies’ or their goals. he was playing a lawful evil monk for a oneshot i wanted to try and as we played and discussed agreed that, based on taken actions his character was probably lawful neutral instead. his internal reasoning aside his actions simply were not evil. not that such a meta thing as your alignment on your sheet ever actually came up in this case.
also I really liked in dnd3.5 the paladin of freedom variant for chaotic good, but also my main dm back then tended to waive alignment restrictions on classes anyway (controversial i know, non-neutral druids and non-lawful monks etc) so it never really….came up?
As a Zenith Case Solar, while the Azure Paladin has access to Holy Charms which would allow him to smite creatures of darkness, he is not subject to any specific code of conduct which would require him to do, nor does the Unconquered Sun demand he do so. If, somehow, a Virtue compulsion demanded the Exalt smite Woolantula, he could choose to suppress the Virtue. Even if his motivation was to smite demons, he could choose not to pursue it in a specific instance. As a member of the Exalted host, binding demons to his service is his prerogative and right, hard won in the Primordial War.
The question becomes somewhat more complex if the Azure Paladin has sworn an Eclipse Oath which would compel the Lawgiver to strike down Woolantula the Servile, Demon of the First Circle. However even in that case, oath-breaking would result in automatic botches, not the (direct) loss of his power as one of the Chosen.