Self-sacrificing in combat and serving the forces of Good. Probably less so for a paladin too lazy and short sighted to pack dinner.
(See, this is what I get for making jokes)
Imagining a new Paladin character with a celestial Hen Ostrich mount, to cover such situations
A Ring of Sustenance is only 2.5k
You could also pack goodberries.
And you could, theoretically, cut off your own ass cheek and roast the thing up after healing yourself. So doing it to something else, especially something you have a responsibility for, instead of yourself, would be evil.
While we’re waiting for the next installment…
I’ve enjoyed flipping through RPG rulebooks, but have only played the game once. And that was long ago.
Paladins always struck me as basically Adam West’s 1960s interpretation of Batman. Squaresville, baby.[sup]1[/sup] Playing them as camp, naive, or lawful stupid might be fun. Otherwise not. Are there any Paladin fans here? What am I missing? I understand that Rich used poor Miko to satirize the problems with playing Paladins poorly. But how are they played well?
[sup]1[/sup] Also, you are a law-guy in a feudal setting? And you consider yourself good? Really? :dubious: Neutral-good I can see.
O Chul
Like O-Chul?
Really, you’re just playing a chivalrous warrior type devoted to a good deity in a holy sense (i.e. to the point where you get miraculous benefits). So you play as noble, loyal, brave and unselfish but the trick is not to fall into the lazy trap of being stupid about it. Demanding that the level 2 party stand and fight three hill giants because “giants are evil” is just stupid. A half-intelligent player can rationalize that the sure chance of death there just means that there’s an infinite number of villagers he can’t help in other ways. Likewise, being “Lawful Good” doesn’t have to mean “being a dick”. For instance, the fact that you’re lawful good doesn’t necessarily mean (and probably doesn’t) that you’re an agent of the local government and need to smite the local beggar for great justice because he’s violating loitering laws. In fact, giving him a few silver for an inn or pointing him to a temple where he could spend the night (or using your connections to get him a job if you’d like) would be a better use of our energy than conducting a paladin’s arrest.
Another helpful guide may be to decide what “kind” of paladin you are. Way back in the day, Dragon Magazine ran an article with some suggestions such as a “Paladin of Justice”, “Paladin of War”, "Paladin of Glory"and “Paladin of Defense” which might help focus your efforts – A Paladin of War archetype may be more concerned with smiting goblins than helping villagers repair a well, for instance, which gives you motivation to not stop and dither over every minor event and bog down the campaign. A Paladin of Glory archetype may consider slaying a kingdom threatening dragon more important than fighting a town threatening orc horde – both are good deeds but any soldier could kill an orc while think of the tales they’ll tell of your god’s holy knight when Emberflame the Vile is slain. This doesn’t prohibit you from doing other good deeds but can help lend clarity to what you’re all about. After all, a questing knight sent to stop a demon wouldn’t get anywhere by stopping every thirty feet to paint a fence or get a cat out of a tree. It’s also worth noting that paladins have respective deities so the motivations of a paladin of a healing god might be well different than those following a war goddess (who thinks “Let the healing god’s clerics tend to these people while I use my Lay Hands during glorious combat against Evil”)
Paladins are probably the easiest class to play poorly but they shouldn’t be all that hard to play well, either. And you can even play a vainglorious or “overly enthusiastic” paladin to a point so long as you don’t hurt the campaign with “While the party sneaks into the castle via the tunnel, I charge the gate alone because I wouldn’t use sneakiness like that” nonsense.
I’m my experience thieves were the easiest for idiots to play to poorly. “Okay while the leader is talking to the king, I’m going to going to steal the imperial Jewels from the locked case in the middle of the audience hall”. Apparently many people think all rogues have record setting kleptomania and no concept of “the long game”.
Kender thieves :rolleyes:
Probably the hardest race/class combo to play correctly since everything about them appeals to the worst kind of player and they feel justified ruining the game by being stupid.
Being Lawful Good doesn’t mean that you blindly obey the law. It means that you’re devoted to the law as it should be.
And Rich has provided not just one but three very good examples of what a paladin should be, all different from each other, in Hinjo, O-Chul, and Lien. Heck, even Miko wasn’t actually all that bad, before Belkar set out to drive her crazy.
Oh, and the correct way to play kender thieves is not at all. Or anything kender, really.
Our last campaign had a wonderful paladin in it. She worshipped the sun (including sunbathing during downtime), was relentlessly kind to everyone, took her trusty golden retriever into battle with her, kicked all kinds of ass. She didn’t ride us hard over alignment issues, but suggested good courses of action. It was lots of fun.
From what I best elsewhere, paladins are fun to play as long as the dm doesn’t shoehorn a situation where you have to pick between lawful and good, and are doomed either way to have to do an atonement quest.
To me, lawful and good are different axes and shouldn’t come into conflict. Whats good is following the law if your good god, not doing what you think is good. And what’s lawful is following the law if your good god, and not those evil laws.
Let’s not forget that while not a fighter, Roy is also Lawful Good (and was judged in the afterlife as being fairly good at it except for the Belkar association), which is in some ways harder than being a paladin, because it’s a purely moral stance with no material benefits for sticking to the alignment. IMO, if I were playing a paladin, I’d much more likely play like Roy than even O Chul, as great a character as the latter is.
I would add Thanh to the list. He was apparently lower-level than the others, but behaved with honor and courage in the Resistance and it was his adherence to the paladin code that let him throw off Tsukiko’s mind control.
I mildly disagree about Miko, by the way. I think she actually was all that bad the whole time, but hadn’t yet been in the right circumstances to show how rigid her mindset was and how special she considered herself and her relationship to the Twelve Gods, thus she completely lacked humility.
Miko was a classical tragic figure, right down to the hubris. And the core of a classical tragic figure is that she’s mostly good, except for one fatal flaw, which circumstances bring to the forefront.
A real example of how not to play a paladin is in Origin of the PCs, though that one’s so cartoonishly bad that it doesn’t have much relevance. Though I’m sure that there are some players out there who really would play a paladin that way.
And I considered including Thanh, but I’m not sure we really see enough of him to use him as an example. Still, he’s certainly not a bad example.
So you feel that lack of humility is evil?
No, but it can lead to evil behavior.
There are no bad qualities, just bad actions.
Indeed. It’s not that lack of humility is evil so much as that if you aren’t humble, you won’t question yourself and your fundamental assumptions.
Miko considered herself anointed by the Twelve Gods to root out evil and so when she saw evil her assumption was that she had the full backing of the pantheon she served to root it out with extreme prejudice. She never needed to take a step back and question her take on things or be sure she wasn’t missing a step in her thinking or any information that would lead to a more nuanced conclusion because that would be questioning the gods themselves; by definition (her own), if she as the one special to the Twelve Gods saw evil, there was no other answer to it than to bathe her sword in the blood of the wicked. Slash! Slash! Slash!
Her rigid, hubristic certainty of her exceptional virtue led directly to her committing acts ranging from the irritating (and it’s worth noting that even other paladins considered her to be annoyingly inflexible) to the appalling. Chronos is absolutely right that she is a classical tragic figure who carried the seeds of her own downfall within her.
Part of the (bad) playing problem with PC’s is that, when your primary tools are a sword and an ability to Detect Evil, you assume that you have the right to stab anything that pings your radar. A well played paladin would nuance that considerably with a sense of justice – a ruffian just having a drink at the bar shouldn’t be killed just because you sense evil from him, he needs to be actively committing a deed. And, even if he IS actively committing an evil act, that doesn’t mean that capital punishment is the most just and appropriate reaction.
Granted, Miko arrested the Order when we saw her (because she was under orders to do so) but, in general, she seems the “Well, my evil-o-vision says you’re Evil so I guess you die” type that Shantih mentions.
I agree with all that was posted here (about Miko), with the caveat being that I don’t think hubris was the evil sin, just a symptom.
It might be harder to play, but I assume that one could play a paladin who is good, and still be arrogant/lack humility.