Less strict paladins and anti-paladins: Why not?

[Xuldarinar]

As much as I love the concept of having classes that must be devoted to good or evil in their entirety, I have to ask why in terms of game balance. Is there any reason, as far as game balance goes, for a paladin or anti-paladin to be held to their code of conduct or be retrained to Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil respectively?

If you were to pull back their restrictions, what would you leave them with? Mitigate things slightly or even go so far as to freeing them of all code and alignment restrictions?

[NichG]

I think its important to ask 'what is the inclusion of Paladins/Anti-Paladins in the game intended to do?' before you can answer this.

Game mechanically, RP constraints are never a good balancing factor, because different players have different levels of tolerance for RP constraints, creativity in circumventing them, or willingness to bend their character concept into pretzels to make them less relevant (e.g. the example from another thread where a player in Curmudgeon's game had his paladin kick a puppy so he could qualify for Atonement and restore his alignment to LG when it had become NG).

So why else other than balance might you apply RP constraints? Well, what if you want to establish something in the world as being reliably true? For example, if the players encounter an NPC who claims to be a Paladin and a member of a holy order composed solely of Paladins, they can evaluate the truth of his story based on his actions because they know what the RP constraints on Paladins are. If the guy travels with an evil associate and still does his paladin-like things, the players can know because of the RP constraints that the guy probably isn't actually a Paladin but might be something else masquerading as a Paladin. And then they can ask 'why might that be?' and make other conclusions.

The more precisely the boundaries of things are defined, the more able players are to make inferences about the scenario based on their observations. If only Paladins get to Smite Evil, and Smiting Evil looks a certain way that can be detected with Knowledge(Religion), and Paladins have a code they have to abide by, then a player can go from 'that cloaked guy over there just Smote Evil when he attacked that goblin' to 'we can trust what the cloaked guy says because he's forbidden to lie to us or he loses his powers'.

The RP constraints don't have to be about game balance at all. They can be about establishing a particular internal consistency.

[hifidelity2]

I have always played (DM’d) that a Paladin is a holy warrior of his faith
Therefore ALL faiths / religions (with maybe the exception of a few pure healer faiths) can have Paladins – so all alignments from LG to CE
However the Paladin must follow the tenets of its faith...and an anti Paladin is just a “holy” Warrior of a faith you don’t like