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VestigeArcanist
2009-09-17, 07:50 PM
We all know Miko, and she is the precise example how not to play a paladin. Paladins often end up being the morality police, because they're class features are dependent on their associates behavior. So who here has had a badly played paladin in their party? Due to them policing the group or any other reason?

Temet Nosce
2009-09-17, 07:59 PM
Oddly, I've never had this precise problem. The closest I came is one game where someone joined the game with their girlfriend. He decided to play a Paladin, but when the first session started his girlfriend threw an enormous fit over him being LG and how it would ruin the game. They both ended up quitting, leaving me and the DM sitting there thinking "Wait... what just happened?", in the end the DM just gave up and canceled the campaign since I was the only remaining player.

Other than that... well, I had one Paladin fail to show up repeatedly, so the DM told me OOC he was lifting his ban on intra party killing (my character was NE and had been hiding it from the party). I ended up using the Paladin as bait, then blowing him up along with the BBEG and many minions using their own cart of gunpowder.

FMArthur
2009-09-17, 08:53 PM
I've seen it only rarely in players, to be honest. Stiff paladin NPCs are more acceptable and I've seen (and hid from) a large number in my time playing D&D so far. The only time it comes up in normal play is when the CE fool stupidly or deliberately steals in front of the paladin - normally even my thief-type players work out an unspoken OoC gentleman's agreement with paladins not to cause grief.

Thrawn183
2009-09-17, 08:55 PM
I played with one that had no problem killing people in their sleep.

Diamondeye
2009-09-17, 08:57 PM
I've actually seen more problems with people who go out of their way to create problems with the paladin. In at least one, it was clearly the player imposing their personal issues with real life authority/issue figures on the game, and unable to see that the person playing the paladin actually liked the character. This player thought the paladin was just being played so the player could 'control people'.

Tavar
2009-09-17, 09:00 PM
I actually know someone who plays a very disruptive paladin. We're talking Miko levels of disruptiveness here, and when we talked to him about it, he said that he realized that he was being disruptive/jerky, but that it was how you were supposed to play Paladins.

I think I literally Faceplamed.

starwoof
2009-09-17, 09:01 PM
My worst experience with a paladin is taking it to level six.

Acero
2009-09-17, 09:06 PM
i play as a Paladin myself. let me defend my class

it is the person who is stiff/ stuck up, not the character.
don't go diss'in all Paladins because a few are jerks

i personally meet more uptight/ disruptive/ im too good for that
wizards and sorcerers more than anyone else

woodenbandman
2009-09-17, 09:10 PM
No. My friends can be immature but they're at least nice about it.

Although we've had several instances of people who fail utterly to understand the meaning of Lawful and Good.

Actually...

There was this one WoD game where this guy who was a rich turd in a zombieocalypse was trying to force everyone to conform to his unreasonable rules. I had rolled up my character, Jack Daniels, as a joke. He was a drunken boxer who lived on the streets of San Francisco. But I had a crystallizing moment when interacting with this guy. We went to this guy's safehouse. I was passed out drunk and I awoke to the sounds of 2 naked people being thrown out of the house. Into the zombieocalypse. I told him in no uncertain terms that nobody was being thrown into the zombieocalypse. The two were thrown out by a crazy kung-fu guy who was working for the player. I tried to stop them.

At this point we were introduced to 2 NPCs who were running from the zombies. I ran out to save them. The guy didn't want to let them in. He had thrown out the other two for having sex in his safehouse, but this was a small child and a caretaker we were talking about. I didn't tolerate that one bit. In they came. Even though I was unkempt and they feared me because I felt the need to kick some ass. Or maybe they were with us before. Anyway, he still didn't want them to stay.

To this day the player claims that he was playing "the paladin" and that his character was "lawful good." We don't hang anymore. The character I played turned out to join the police force in the city of Heaven, and when I found out that the rich billionaires of the city lived in luxury while the slumdogs had to scrounge in trash cans, ol' Jack Daniels quit drinking. And started raging. HE turned out to be the paladin of the group. He joined the police force, busted drug dealers, and sacrificed himself to protect people he barely even knew.

So yeah, I've had a mix of good and bad experiences with "paladins." I think that Paladins should be considered Chaotic rather than Lawful. The archetypal paladin is a guy who upholds the highest moral standards and protects the innocent at all costs. And sometimes, you have to be drunk off your ass to do that.

TheThan
2009-09-17, 09:23 PM
One of my friends has had a bad experience with one. Apparently its ok to rob starving (orc) infants. Sure what he took was a cloak of resistance, but it was freezing and the cloak was their only means of surviving in the harsh weather. The idea of helping the children never came to him. My friend, who was playing a ranger tried to stop this, it didn’t help.

This paladin also got anything he ever wanted from the DM, just by asking. While my friend totally got the shaft, you know that animal companion rangers are supposed to get at 4th level? Never got it, while the paladin got a gold dragon mount. Eventually my ranger friend tried to PK the paladin, but the Dm, wouldn’t allow it, despite the ranger having more than adequate reason and justification.

This all happened because the player running the paladin and the Dm were dating in real life.

Tyndmyr
2009-09-17, 09:36 PM
Yes. Oh, god yes. Classic LG pally, with stick firmly implanted, among a party that was mostly neutral-chaotic and neutral-evil. We hid things from him, of course, but he abused the leadership trait to get a reasonably large number of level 1 minions, making this quite a bit tougher. His insistence that he was always right, and his complete inability to compromise eventually led to his death, the party being hopelessly stranded, and the end of the campaign.

Lycan 01
2009-09-17, 09:38 PM
The Paladin in my party breaks innocent peoples' necks so he can steal their outfit and sneak into a hotel to kill clerics of a evil deity. He also throws (annoying) comrades at dragons to keep the monster distracted while he and his Halfling buddy makes a run for it. But he also tells the guy he's supposed to assassinate to get out of town and never come back so he can live, and he spares enemies who are too weak to fight him... even offering salvation through his faith.

His deity? The Flying Spaghetti Monster. :smallcool:

Xallace
2009-09-17, 09:40 PM
Only a couple times, but frankly that guy plays a stick-up-the-butt, archaically chivalrous "might-makes-right" "no mercy for the weak" kind of "paladin" no matter what his class is.

Bard. For real.

JadedDM
2009-09-18, 01:23 AM
I've never had a paladin in any of my games, and I've never played alongside with one. Everyone seems to hate them. My favorite alignment is LG, and it always seems whenever I make a LG character, everyone else gets upset (preferred alignment in most groups seem to be TN or CN).

I once rolled a LG halfling cleric for a game, and the DM later said he was really surprised by how I played him: kind, unjudging, fair, pleasant, and friendly. He apparently expected me to play a total jerk. Because he was LG.

rezplz
2009-09-18, 03:17 AM
One group I was in actually had the opposite problem with a paladin. Pretty much everyone in the group was new to DnD at the time, and one of them was playing a paladin. At first, things went well, but after a time a lot of the people were getting annoyed at the paladin. Not because he was being an ass to people, but because his turns were often very slow because he kept asking himself "Should I kill them? I don't know if they're evil, or if it's something a good paladin would do..." and so on. So the sorcerer, bored, tossed an acid splash at him. You know, just a little thing meant to be a "Hey, hurry up" kind of thing. The paladin didn't enjoy taking 3 damage (I wouldn't either. At low levels, even 3 damage hurts ;P) so the paladin attacked the sorcerer... and, well, things went downhill from there.

Sliver
2009-09-18, 03:52 AM
One of my friends has had a bad experience with one. Apparently its ok to rob starving (orc) infants. Sure what he took was a cloak of resistance, but it was freezing and the cloak was their only means of surviving in the harsh weather. The idea of helping the children never came to him. My friend, who was playing a ranger tried to stop this, it didn’t help.

This paladin also got anything he ever wanted from the DM, just by asking. While my friend totally got the shaft, you know that animal companion rangers are supposed to get at 4th level? Never got it, while the paladin got a gold dragon mount. Eventually my ranger friend tried to PK the paladin, but the Dm, wouldn’t allow it, despite the ranger having more than adequate reason and justification.

This all happened because the player running the paladin and the Dm were dating in real life.

Well really, that has little to do with the paladin class..

In one game I had a Paladin in the party that, in the first session, opted to spy on the people that requested help.. My cleric had to teach him what is a paladin..

Fitz
2009-09-18, 09:27 AM
ok well two things i always try and remember, first for the paladin to be a jerk they have to be played that way, second plenty of people object to paladins for being paladins and get wound up over things that they would ignore if the class was fighter
At the end of the day its a social activity, work as a team , out of character, and a lot more fun is had
Fitz

Saph
2009-09-18, 09:43 AM
Nah, never happened. Usually in our games the Paladin's the most positive influence on the group - he's the one who stops the other players from doing things like using prisoners as target practice.

The only time I can think of that it restricted the activities of the group was when the party was looking for a new job.

Adventurer's Guild Receptionist: "Ah, here's something you might be interested in. We just had a request for a combat-capable group. Short notice, starts tonight."
Sorcerer: "Sounds interesting, what's the job?"
Receptionist: "It's from High Priestess Velicia in the religious district. She's going on sabbatical and needs someone to take care of her temple while she's away."
Sorcerer: "That might be fun."
Ranger: "Which temple?"
Receptionist: "The Shrine to the Dark Mistress of Eternal Night."
Sorcerer: "That'd be- wait, what did you just say?"
Ranger: "Uh . . . and this priestess is going on sabbatical where, exactly?"
Receptionist: "Let's see, it says here . . . the 217th layer of the Abyss."
Paladin: "No."
Sorcerer: "But it might be-"
Paladin: "No."
Sorcerer: "What if we tried to-"
Paladin: "NO."
Sorcerer: "Oh, fine."
Ranger: "What else have you got?"

. . . and I wasn't really expecting them to say yes to that one, anyway. :P

- Saph

Vangor
2009-09-18, 10:21 AM
On the flip side of worst experiences, the only Paladin played as a Paladin, primarily because this was an RP heavy campaign, was by me as a Kender Paladin with Vow of Poverty and Cosmopolitan (Sleight of Hand) because as far as my character could tell this was a simple way to feed, cloth, and house orphans and similarly destitute people.

Many of my quests were caused by my eyes being bigger than my hands as I swiped an expensive necklace, ring, etc., to hand to poor children only to be discovered since...well the item is expensive and well-watched. After a cry of alarm I would sprint from the store claiming, "I am doing good! It is for the children! Leave me alone!"

When I reached a deserving soul I would smile wide, arms crossed, satisfied with myself with the authorities and store owner right behind. I of course never had anything but a simple club as I tossed my gold away freely. But, I convinced three different store owners to hold on to the item and let me find something of greater value in return as long as they would give a handful of money to the person I was attempting to help. I did this twice to one by taking back the crown I just returned, a crown which I had taken from the castle after being praised for helping free and return safely the princess.

I atoned for the crown, too. Everyone won. Children were able to eat immediately, merchants made money, the royal vaults got bigger, and I felt satisfied aimlessly juggling a clay pot I had swiped.

Starbuck_II
2009-09-18, 10:33 AM
One group I was in actually had the opposite problem with a paladin. Pretty much everyone in the group was new to DnD at the time, and one of them was playing a paladin. At first, things went well, but after a time a lot of the people were getting annoyed at the paladin. Not because he was being an ass to people, but because his turns were often very slow because he kept asking himself "Should I kill them? I don't know if they're evil, or if it's something a good paladin would do..." and so on. So the sorcerer, bored, tossed an acid splash at him. You know, just a little thing meant to be a "Hey, hurry up" kind of thing. The paladin didn't enjoy taking 3 damage (I wouldn't either. At low levels, even 3 damage hurts ;P) so the paladin attacked the sorcerer... and, well, things went downhill from there.

I think that Pally was playing correctly.

JeenLeen
2009-09-18, 10:48 AM
Not with a paladin but a LG Law Incarnate from Magic of Incarnum. The player was overall not a 'stick in the mud'. The hardest time was convincing him to break into a manor of someone we thought was an evil wizard.

One time, though, my CG Slayer of the Eladrins (refluffed Slayer of Domiel from BoED) and him got into an argument. The team had a sentient dagger McGuffin that increased in power as it was used to kill evil creatures, something about purifying the energies and thus reawakening. Seeing as we were in a big town, my character was going to go to the seedier section to try to defeat some criminals, corrupt businessmen, or try to locate any evil clerics hiding among the masses.
When the Law Incarnate found out, he insisted I not. I tried to sneak away, but got hit by the Incarnate's cleric friend's Command. I was in the end arrested, escaped, then arrested again by wizards. I ended up being imprisoned by what we knew to be an evil empire. The McGuffin almost fell into enemy hands during my arrest, but I passed it on to the Incarnate lest evil win.

I wasn't upset IRL, as I was kind of tired of the character and it made perfect sense in person. Also, the conversation somewhat forced his hand:

Me: Well, can I take the dagger? I'm going to do get some work done in the city tonight.
Incarnate: What? What do you mean?
Me: You know how it gets stronger? I figure I might as well charge it while I go work.
Incarnate: ...you can't just go killing people.
Me: Sure I can. I do so all the time. Don't worry; I can detect if they're evil or not beforehand.
Then the fight broke out.


In an earlier session, I killed a cleric of Vecna hiding in a pirate ally's crew. I ended up in the brig until we left and with a gp fine.

Nero24200
2009-09-18, 11:03 AM
I've never had an issue with paladins, mostly because

A) My main group knows one can be played without them being Lawful Anal

and

B) Because we have an unwritten rule that regardless of what you're character is like, they must get on with the rest of the party. This means if someone plays a paladin, don't play Chaotic Stupid (not that we'd play that anyway).

What few issues I've had with paladins generally comes from online play, mostly with the paladins acting the way they shouldn't and getting rewarded by DM's for it, meanwhile other paladins get the shaft (Not kidding, I've played a paladin once who fell because a corrupt watchmen assaulted him.)

My advice to anyway with paladin problems is to play with a good group. Bad ones give the interesting class a bad name.

Dragatus
2009-09-18, 11:05 AM
This all happened because the player running the paladin and the DM were dating in real life.

Argh! You just forced me to make a will save vs linking to TV tropes.

Anyway, that had nothing to do with paladins and everything to do with the DM being either a poor DM or helplessly at the mercy of his girlfriend (making assumptions here).

To get the thread back on track, I've had no problems with paladins myself. There was a paladin in two of my games, both times played by the same player. The first game was my introduction to D&D and only lasted for 3 sessions before exams took priority. Everybody except the DM was new at it and the pally kind of just hung in the background. The second time was in a game I DM-ed and the paladin was more of a Don Juan that stick-up-the-arse. But that was already 4e so I'm not even sure if he was LG.