Paladin Oath/Code

[ngilop]

Hey guys.

I know a lot of people think that the paladin code is too 'rigid'

I do not agree with that sentiment at all, as I feel that trying to loophole how to be the shinning beacon of good and righteous is kinda... missing the point.


But, that being said.

I have often thought about things i envision a Paladin to be and things from my past that fit that criteria.

For my own games, i use the Old Code from Dragonheart

A knight is sworn to valor,
His heart knows only virtue,
His blade defends the helpless,
His might upholds the weak,
His word speaks only truth,
His wrath undoes the wicked. As a addition

Similarliy there is the Grail Knight Oath from Warhammer

That which is sacrament, I shall preserve.
That which is sublime, I will protect.
That which threatens, I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds.
Honour is all. Chivalry is all.


Just food for thought to maybe have something that paladins can have that others do not find so restrictive and constraining?

[Saintheart]

There's always the Gunslinger's Litany which might as well be their creed (from The Dark Tower series of books, and the Gunslingers are basically the paladins of that world:

I do not aim with my hand; He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.
I do not shoot with my hand; He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind.
I do not kill with my gun; He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.

[Satinavian]

I do feel like the paladin's code is too restrictive. But that nearly exclusively concernes the "don't associate with evil" clause which regularly makes problems with well behaved and integrated evil, weak evil that is no threat to anyone and with evil that is on your side in some more greyish conflicts the group is involved in.

If the paladin always makes problems when the archetypical evil grand vizier wants to give the heroes of the kindom a task in the name of the king, that is a problem. It is also not actually fitting the fantasy of the paladin because suddenly he is the one who can't work well in civilized society.

------------

That said, your code examples... well, they are good for roleplaying. But they are a bit too vague as actionable rules.

Valor and truth is easy, but what means "virtue" in practice ? Chastity ? Modesty ? Temperance ? Charity ? Where exactly is the line paladins have to be aware of concerning their way of life when this was a rule ? Helpless, weak and wicked are similarly lose.
The second one is generally easier except for "sublime". That one doesn't work as part of an enforcible rule.

Those codes are good things for a paladin to have in game. But an out-of game rule should be less dependent on interpretation.

[Chronos]

I think that different paladins can have slightly different codes, but I agree that the rigidity of the code is part of the point. And a paladin player should definitely hash out the details of their code with the DM before the game starts, to make sure nobody's surprised.

[SpyOne]

I do feel like the paladin's code is too restrictive. But that nearly exclusively concernes the "don't associate with evil" clause which regularly makes problems with well behaved and integrated evil, weak evil that is no threat to anyone and with evil that is on your side in some more greyish conflicts the group is involved in.

If the paladin always makes problems when the archetypical evil grand vizier wants to give the heroes of the kindom a task in the name of the king, that is a problem. It is also not actually fitting the fantasy of the paladin because suddenly he is the one who can't work well in civilized society.

I suppose it really comes down to how one defines "associate".
Most of the people that I've played with don't cause trouble. If the town shoemaker happens to be Evil they aren't going to challenge him to combat, and they probably aren't going to mind if he drinks at the same tavern at the same time. But he won't be drinking at our table, and they are never going to be friends.
And the Paladin is probably waiting until the next town to buy new shoes.

If the King wants an Evil Vizier that's his business, if he keeps giving that Vizier messages to pass to me it becomes mine. But again, no need to challenge a government official to defend his life, just clearly and politely tell the King that he needs to use a different messenger.
Seriously, if all the party's orders are coming through someone Evil when the party has a Paladin in it, I think the problem is the DM.

And the Paladin Oath is supposed to be at least a little inconvenient. You don't get phenomenal cosmic power and all the kids looking up to you for free.


But I 100% agree that the oath needs to be clear about what it prohibits. "Room for interpretation" just leads to hurt feeling when the player and DM disagree about which side of the line what the character just did falls on.

[Thurbane]

UA has some decent sample codes of honour (Bushido, Code of the Knight Protector etc.): https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/honor.htm

[Zanos]

The problem with Paladin codes is really for people who aren't the Paladin, who didn't sign up to tiptoe around another players extremely restrictive moral code that is so inflexible that every moral argument with a Paladin is his way or the highway, whether the highway is the Paladin player making a new character or smiting the other PC. I've played plenty of LN characters that didn't get along with Paladins because they weren't really big on the whole forgiveness, redemption, and mercy bits. So every time there's an ethics debate over prisoners it basically has to end with the Paladin getting his way or making a new guy, effectively holding all of the parties decision making hostage. I guess the Paladin could hear an argument so convincing he gives up being a Paladin, but I've never seen that actually happen.


For Paladins themselves, the issue with the lack of tolerance for Evil is that it ignores that most evil humanoids are not insane cultists, merely amoral and selfish. Most Good parties are not going to deny help from the Evil wizard adventurer if both of them are fighting, say, a demonic invasion, because the demons are going to eat the Evil wizard along with everyone else. Evil is so often at odds with other Evil over basic things like not being killed that being unable to work together even temporarily is kind weird. While there can be a certain appeal to never compromising, even in the face of annihilation, the normal people who don't want to be eaten by demons are going to start to see you as deranged, not heroic, for refusing people who otherwise behave immoraly but in this instance are just fighting for their lives like everyone else.

Pathfinder patches that up by allowing Paladins to ally with Evil characters against greater Evils so long as the Evil character isn't consistently being awful.

[Telonius]

I handle them a bit differently games I DM. For me, Paladins and Clerics both get their spells from their deity or cause. But Paladins are the "action," and Clerics are the "contemplation." Each Paladin's oath is tailored to its deity or cause. A Paladin has to take the alignment of their deity.

As written, the whole "Associates" section is as silly as Vow of Poverty preventing use of a doorknob. It's simultaneously too narrow and too broad. It seems pretty clear to me what they were trying to do (require a Paladin to take action if his party starts down the murderhobo path), but they ended up creating a situation that was even worse: turning a Paladin's personal oath into a code of conduct they have to force onto others - players and PCs both.

[rel]

I generally ignore alignment, and my settings don't tend to have deities in the conventional sense, but when I'm running things close enough to baseline D&D that I have an in universe paladin class, I envisage it as bound and empowered by a specific supernatural oath, strictly lawful, but NOT strictly good.

And the oath is extremely specific:
- do not take a traders goods without offering payment.
- do not become caught in a deception
- do not kill those that pose you no threat

These rules are by design, extremely exploitable.
Good paladins follow the spirit of the rules, they do not kill, do not lie and do not cheat.
Evil paladins follow the letter of the rules, not quite doing whatever they want but generally managing to cause trouble as they see fit
Neutral paladins are generally somewhere in the middle.

This works pretty well for us:
Players that want to play a do gooding knight can still do so. Their characters are arguably even more noble, since nothing is forcing them to behave, they do so only because they think it is right.

Players that want to play a paladin but don't like the theming can much more easily ignore it, but still have a flavourful minigame where they have to justify their misdeeds.

And you can have interesting bits of background like good and evil groups telling different stories about the origins of the oath, people arguing about specific interpretations of the rules and so forth.

[icefractal]

Interesting rules, but they seems unusually commerce-focused for general "lawful" principles:

Like:
Paladin: So I looted the guy's house and burned it down (don't worry, I made sure everyone was evacuated) - that'll show him to have a stupid-looking hat! Then the guards showed showed up and told me to stop, so I beat them all unconscious and threw them in jail, giving the former prisoners their uniforms.
Universe: Ok, no problem.

Paladin: Also I pickpocketed a scone from a bakery.
Universe: YOU FALL!

[Chronos]

Quoth Zanos:

The problem with Paladin codes is really for people who aren't the Paladin, who didn't sign up to tiptoe around another players extremely restrictive moral code that is so inflexible that every moral argument with a Paladin is his way or the highway, whether the highway is the Paladin player making a new character or smiting the other PC.
That's not really a paladin problem, though. In the event that there's someone evil in the party, it's the paladin, not the other PC, who would hit the highway. And in the much more common event that there isn't anyone evil in the party, it's exactly the same situation as any other PCs who disagree about alignment. Attacking someone else just for not following the paladin code would itself be a violation of the paladin code. And if the paladin is just verbally scolding other party members for their less-than-honorable deeds, well, that can go both ways: The other party members can just as well scold the paladin for being blinded by their excessive rigidity. Or disagreements like that can happen between characters of other classes who differ in alignment. Or a paladin can just quietly shake their head whenever the rogue starts acting chaotic, and not make any more of a fuss than that.

[Zanos]

That's not really a paladin problem, though. In the event that there's someone evil in the party, it's the paladin, not the other PC, who would hit the highway.
It's a problem because every RP interaction is framed by the fact that the Paladin is the only character that is going to have to be removed by interparty alignment conflict. This creates OOC stress to defer to the Paladin, since everyone else doesn't need to get their way in order to continue to play the game.


And in the much more common event that there isn't anyone evil in the party, it's exactly the same situation as any other PCs who disagree about alignment.
It isn't always about being Evil, because even non-Evil characters can do Evil things sometimes. Killing someone defenseless in revenge is Evil, but is a completely dramatically appropriate response for a Neutral PC who has been grievously wronged by a villain they now hold captive. Or they could just do something non-Evil the Paladin doesn't agree with enough.


Attacking someone else just for not following the paladin code would itself be a violation of the paladin code.
Again, it's not always about physical violence, it's about what parties a Paladin is even allowed to exist in


And if the paladin is just verbally scolding other party members for their less-than-honorable deeds, well, that can go both ways: The other party members can just as well scold the paladin for being blinded by their excessive rigidity. Or disagreements like that can happen between characters of other classes who differ in alignment. Or a paladin can just quietly shake their head whenever the rogue starts acting chaotic, and not make any more of a fuss than that.
"A paladin will never knowingly associate with evil characters, nor will she continue an association with someone who consistently offends her moral code."

So no, the Paladin can't just shake his head because the LN Wizard believes in executing prisoners, or the CG Rogue consistently defies authority. This is not the same as differently aligned characters of other classes, who are perfectly able to understand that their allies might not have the same values they do and tolerate it. Again, the issue is that if someone wants to play a Paladin, it's going to require prior buy-in from the other party members, warp the party around the Paladin's inflexibility, or result in the Paladin getting the boot. Realistically though, players are pretty unlikely to tell another player that he can't play a Paladin anymore because it's interfering with their roleplay because they don't want to ruin other people's fun and are generally non-confrontational.

So yeah, change Paladin codes. The one in the book is bad.

[Aotrs Commander]

I have always summarily tossed out the by-the-book paladin code, and speaking as someone who ONLY holds the Paladin and Antipaladin to the alignment restrictions out of... 62 classes now?

The "not associating with Evil" clause is just rubbish, as it instantly rules out EVERY single redemption arc, and this coming from someone who doesn't even really like redemption arcs.

But it's such a stupid, stupid, counter-productive clause.



The paladin codes in Golarion are actually much better.

Looking at my rules, I have a generic sample code myself, actually:


Sample generic paladin code:
• I will be temperate in my actions and moderate in my behaviour.
• I am fair to others. I expect nothing for myself but that which I need to survive.
• I show respect to my elders, for they have done much. I show respect to the young, for they have much left to do. I show respect to my peers, for they carry the load. And I shall carry it with them.
• I will protect my allies with my life. They are my strength, as I am their strength.
• I lead by example, not with my blade. Where my blade passes, a life is cut short.
• I will respect legitimate authority and act with honour; I will not cheat, use poisons, and I will only lie to save others, not myself.
• I will help those in need and seek to stop those who harm or threaten innocents.
• When danger threatens, I am not a fool. I seek first to make sure the weak and innocent are safe, and then I quell the danger.
• I will not abide evil, and will combat it with steel when words are not enough. I do not flinch from my faith, and do not fear embarrassment. My soul cannot be bought for all the stars in the sky.
• I accept surrender if my opponent can be redeemed—and I never assume that they cannot be.
• If my enemies surrender, I am responsible for their lives.
• The best battle is a battle I win. If I die, I can no longer fight. I will fight fairly when the fight is fair, and I will strike quickly and without mercy when it is not.
• I will never abandon a companion, though I will honour sacrifice freely given.
• I will be mindful that my path is a difficult one. Though I may strive for it, my deity does not expect perfection and that I may stumble on the road. But I will always stand back up and carry on that path, and my allies and my deity will help me on my way, as I help them on theirs.


I think the bolded three are argaubly the most important, the last one definitely the most.

The rest is not by any means hard and fast "sample" after all - and when on Golarion, I just give the PCs the appropriate one, but it was, in my opinion, a darn-sight improvement on the 3.5 one. (I likely cribbed a lot of wording from the Golarion ones, actually.)



Now, that said, there are occasions when I do have gently wave the alignment card - I have pointed out to the PCs in my current party, for instance, when they accidently downed but didn't kill a giant, they couldn't exactly just kill him out of hand was he was asleep, now that there was a paladin in the group, which normally I wouldn't have bothered with even with a good party1. So they good-maturedly just sort of dumped him outside, fully expecting That's How You Get A Nemasis.

On the other, I have a policy of "everyone is Evil or no-one is" to generally keep the party on the same terms, BUT if someone was to come to me with a good reason, I'd allow it. (And more than "I want to play an Evil character" because, like, dude, I run loads of those...") "I want to do a redemption story" would be a perfectly good one. But, lets be fair, both my players and I are very much more in the "mechanics first, everything else second" school of character generation, so it's not terribly likely to come up.



The one area I AM very strict on is if anyone in the party wants to be Exalted (as in from the Book of Design Cheese) the stipulation thay have to be, like, better-than-paladin-good, like, Super-Man/Optimus Prime good. And the last time soneone asked, they said, "yeah, no, I can't do that in the party without the dwarf barbarian not being the dwarf barbarian." But I feel that is an appropriate genuine roleplaying restriction that which is TOTALLY reasonable, given, like, it's the Book of Exalted Cheese.

We HAVE had a party with both an Exalted character and a Paladin in it (in fairness it was a 3.5 conversion of Night Below, so it wasn't exactly hard given the opposition...), so it's not like it's genuinely a soft-ban,it's just, like, not with EVERY party!



1Once one party (no paladin) accidently captured some sort of and thing with a Save-or-Suck and, like, it was a dragon-thngy they couldn't actually, like, cart to a prison or something. So they (being fairly high level) summoned an angel to do the judgement and they angel did it and said "yeah, nope, no redemption there, folks. Fear not, I will take it upon myself to deliver the final judgement" *splotch* So it's not like I'm entirely against it (though, y'know, after judgement).

[icefractal]

It isn't always about being Evil, because even non-Evil characters can do Evil things sometimes. Killing someone defenseless in revenge is Evil, but is a completely dramatically appropriate response for a Neutral PC who has been grievously wronged by a villain they now hold captive. Or they could just do something non-Evil the Paladin doesn't agree with enough.See, I wouldn't even call that evil. Well, not any more evil than hunting down said villain and killing them while they're holding a sword would be.

Like, it's either ok to kill someone or it isn't. Kill the tyrant who's been flaying people for ****s and giggles? Not evil. Kill your basically unobjectionable neighbor because you're jealous of their yard? Evil. How you do it is secondary to that, with the caveat that intentionally torturous methods might push it from not evil to evil.

Now sure, self-defense is a thing. Killing your basically unobjectionable neighbor because they went crazy and suddenly came after you with an axe? Not evil, by most people's standards. But that doesn't apply when you instigated the situation. If you bust into someone's castle, shout "I'm coming for your head!" and then they come out with their axe, you fight, and they die, that's not morally different (IMO) from ambushing them on the road or assassinating them in their sleep. It was still a killing that was entirely initiated by you.

So basically the trope of "it was fine for us to slaughter dozens of guards that Baron von Evil hired (or even conscripted), but if we strike him down after he's dropped his sword then we'll be as bad as he is!" - that trope is total crap.

[Crake]

For Paladins themselves, the issue with the lack of tolerance for Evil is that it ignores that most evil humanoids are not insane cultists, merely amoral and selfish.

I kinda disagree with this statement. I dont think you get categorised as evil just for being amoral and selfish, you have to be willing and able to action such selfishness to the degree that it becomes evil, to actually qualify as evil. Just being a jerk doesnt count.

I think part of this problem stems from people wanting to segment the world into the 9 alignments equally, that they end up making their alignment chart so incredibly sensitive, that even the slightest whiff of an alignment leaning immediately makes you belong to that alignment. MOST people arent evil, and you have to actually do something EVIL to fall under that category.

So yes, I agree, most “evil” people are not insane cultists, but Id say thats because most “evil” people by some playgrounders standards aren’t actually evil at all.

[Mechalich]

"A paladin will never knowingly associate with evil characters, nor will she continue an association with someone who consistently offends her moral code."

This is somewhat overplayed, since most people, including evil people, won't willfully continue an association with someone who consistently offends their moral code. Ideological self-sorting is a very strong trait of sapient beings. A chaotic neutral character isn't going to freely stay in a party with basically any lawful character, because they'll find the experience miserable and choose to go off on their own. An evil character will only stay in a party with good characters if they are confident they can consistently conceal their evil status, because they know the good characters will, if they learn their true nature, confront and punish them accordingly.

The trick here is that single-author narratives often deploy 'parties' for heroic tales where people of widely varied ideological opinion are forced to work together due to circumstances entirely beyond their control. The creates useful intra-party dynamics for the purpose of generating conflict within the group, which certainly has storytelling utility, though this is generally bad and/or useless in TTRPG gameplay (because the character is never going to storm off and leave the party or join the bad guys or anything like that). As such, the fact that the paladin only really 'works' with LG, NG, or LN characters in the party isn't that much of a problem because any party with a paladin in it should only have characters of those alignments anyway. I mean, the trope of the paladin derives both from Authurian romance (generally) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (specifically), in which basically all the 'good guys' would fall rather specifically into that limited alignment space (in some interpretations, literally every single knight of the round table is LG, with the handful of paladins among them simply being the most extreme members).

Even in D&D fiction, alignment variance among heroic parties tends to be minimized. Drizzt is CG, and the various people he hangs out with mostly are too. Elminster and his posse/collection of girlfriends are also mostly CG or NG. The Heroes of the Lance, probably the most famous D&D party, were mostly NG or CG. The Paladin-esque Sturm Brightblade had real problems fitting in with the rest (and got around impending confrontation by an expedient heroic sacrifice) and the nominally Neutral Raistlin Majere famously betrayed them and the whole blasted cosmos.

Parties of wildly variant alignment are not supposed to be played, something that was well known very long ago, with AD&D 1e warning against it quite strongly. In a properly constructed party, the paladin association rule is mostly a quirk that comes up in occasional interactions with specific skeevy NPCs who offer compromising bargains.

[Zanos]

-snip-
Uh, no. The circumstances under which someone is killed often matters a great deal more than who they are. You don't defend yourself by knocking the guy attacking you out and then stomping on his head until he dies. Good characters are generally expected to show mercy to the defeated, and only exectue captives when strictly necessary. Paladins doubly so.


-snip-
Evil is a broad brush. Are you willing to harm others to advance yourself? Generally answering yes to that makes you Evil, but harming others can be very indirect and impersonal. So yes, there will be a large number of character who fall under the Evil banner who probably don't meet the typical definition of "evil."


-snip-
Just hard disagree here. There are plenty of parties with characters that are Good and Evil or Lawful and Chaotic. It's perfectly fine so long as the characters aren't deranged caricatures and instead have relatable motivations for behaving the way that they do. As long as everyone is on the same page that the success of the party comes first and there's no backstabbing, it hasn't been an issue for me.

[rel]

Interesting rules, but they seems unusually commerce-focused for general "lawful" principles:

Like:
Paladin: So I looted the guy's house and burned it down (don't worry, I made sure everyone was evacuated) - that'll show him to have a stupid-looking hat! Then the guards showed showed up and told me to stop, so I beat them all unconscious and threw them in jail, giving the former prisoners their uniforms.
Universe: Ok, no problem.

Paladin: Also I pickpocketed a scone from a bakery.
Universe: YOU FALL!

It's quite deliberate. My code is based off of 'don't kill, don't steal, don't cheat' which feels like rather traditional and historic morality.
It's also likely to be relevant in a game about killing people and taking their stuff.

Remember, most players choosing the class are looking to play a shiny do gooder so they're going to be behaving much better than the code requires.
An explicit and flexible code simply gives the paladin's player control over when they do and don't fall, removing the mechanical component from moral dilemmas and leaving them and alignment discussions in the realm of pure roleplay where I think they should be.

It also makes the good paladin character a much more unambiguously good person; They aren't being bribed or coerced into behaving well, they're making a free choice because they think it's the right thing to do.

[aglondier]

Our current party has a paladin, surrounded by a fairly chaos lol band who would be murder hobos...if it wasn't for the paladin.

I really don't get the "may not associate with evil" thing, because if the paladin can guide a bunch of murderous psychopaths and random nutjobs into performing acts with net good results, and mitigate or even negate their performing of evil acts...then isn't that much better than just running around with a bunch of good people doing good acts? Those people would do good on their own, even without the paladin. But those evil and chaotic types were never going to do good...

But, you know...depends on the play style of all involved...

[Darg]

This is somewhat overplayed, since most people, including evil people, won't willfully continue an association with someone who consistently offends their moral code. Ideological self-sorting is a very strong trait of sapient beings. A chaotic neutral character isn't going to freely stay in a party with basically any lawful character, because they'll find the experience miserable and choose to go off on their own. An evil character will only stay in a party with good characters if they are confident they can consistently conceal their evil status, because they know the good characters will, if they learn their true nature, confront and punish them accordingly.

The trick here is that single-author narratives often deploy 'parties' for heroic tales where people of widely varied ideological opinion are forced to work together due to circumstances entirely beyond their control. The creates useful intra-party dynamics for the purpose of generating conflict within the group, which certainly has storytelling utility, though this is generally bad and/or useless in TTRPG gameplay (because the character is never going to storm off and leave the party or join the bad guys or anything like that). As such, the fact that the paladin only really 'works' with LG, NG, or LN characters in the party isn't that much of a problem because any party with a paladin in it should only have characters of those alignments anyway. I mean, the trope of the paladin derives both from Authurian romance (generally) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (specifically), in which basically all the 'good guys' would fall rather specifically into that limited alignment space (in some interpretations, literally every single knight of the round table is LG, with the handful of paladins among them simply being the most extreme members).

Even in D&D fiction, alignment variance among heroic parties tends to be minimized. Drizzt is CG, and the various people he hangs out with mostly are too. Elminster and his posse/collection of girlfriends are also mostly CG or NG. The Heroes of the Lance, probably the most famous D&D party, were mostly NG or CG. The Paladin-esque Sturm Brightblade had real problems fitting in with the rest (and got around impending confrontation by an expedient heroic sacrifice) and the nominally Neutral Raistlin Majere famously betrayed them and the whole blasted cosmos.

Parties of wildly variant alignment are not supposed to be played, something that was well known very long ago, with AD&D 1e warning against it quite strongly. In a properly constructed party, the paladin association rule is mostly a quirk that comes up in occasional interactions with specific skeevy NPCs who offer compromising bargains.

Well said. I think a lot of people don't understand that an evil alignment means that character is cosmologically primed to commit evil acts by their very nature. If you have an evil vizier, you'd likely win the lottery jackpot before the vizier is a repentant soul on a quest to find a caster of the atonement spell and you just happened to catch them in the middle of that journey when priests are generally just a little walk away.

In D&D, being evil means being evil. If you are only sometimes evil, that's neutral. Paladins murdering evil on sight is a bad trope because good tries to redeem if given the chance. That said any good character, not just the paladin, would argue vehemently from executing prisoners. Being lawful good the paladin would argue for lawful punishment in addition to sparing life.

[hamishspence]

In D&D, being evil means being evil. If you are only sometimes evil, that's neutral.

Champions of Ruin:

"A character can be evil and yet not seem to be evil; he can be evil and yet consider himself the epitome of goodness; or his evil might only show itself under certain conditions. A character who has contracted lycanthropy, for example, might donate treasure to widows and orphans, build temples, slay dragons, and help old ladies across the street - but on the night of the full moon, he hunts down and slaughters those widows and orphans and feeds the same old ladies to the dragon. Most of the time he is good, but his curse outweighs all the good that he does."

An evil character can be "good most of the time" and have their evil "only show themselves under certain conditions" and still be Evil.

[Chronos]

Quoth Darg:

Well said. I think a lot of people don't understand that an evil alignment means that character is cosmologically primed to commit evil acts by their very nature.
People don't understand it because it's not true. OK, that's an accurate description of a fiend, or maybe even of a chromatic dragon, but it's not true of humans or other mortals. The human paladin has the same "very nature" as the human necromancer. Humans just aren't entirely bound by our natures, in the same way that some creatures are.

And a paladin won't absolutely refuse to associate with a neutral character who snaps and kills someone in revenge, once. They'll refuse to associate with people who consistently offend their morals. Once isn't consistently.

To be honest, I also think that the "no associating with evil beings" clause is too restrictive, because it rules out some things that paladins should do (like trying to redeem evildoers). Heck, read it too strictly, and paladins couldn't even be prison wardens. But it's also not as strict as some make it out to be, and there's no reason, by the Code, that a paladin couldn't team up with a Chaotic Neutral PC (they might still choose not to, because they find it very annoying, but they're allowed to).

[Mechalich]

And a paladin won't absolutely refuse to associate with a neutral character who snaps and kills someone in revenge, once. They'll refuse to associate with people who consistently offend their morals. Once isn't consistently.

How many convicted murderers do you regularly spend time with? The number is most likely zero, and even in pre-modern times, where murder tended to be a lot more common, most people and most societies made a very strong effort to remove murderers from their midst, whether through confinement, exile, or execution. In general, almost all human societies have an inherent moral zone of acceptability and people who cannot operate within that zone of behavior are cast out of that society, for Humans, that zone is roughly the upper left quadrant of the alignment pie chart representing LN, LG, and NG. Note that for other races this may be different, D&D Elves are significantly more accommodating of Chaotic Good characters in their societies.

Now, most evil, and some true neutral, characters are faking it. They live a life of deception that conceals their alignment from everyday observation. This is, in fact, an essential skill for evil individuals to master in order to survive, since if they cannot do this, they commit some horribly evil act, get caught, and are duly punished. Society identifies a lot of its psychopaths and sociopaths (NE and CE) at very young ages and disposes of them. Again, for other races the reverse may be true. The drow, as diagrammed very effectively in the Drizzt novel Homeland, have sorting mechanisms to identify everyone who is not evil and either bend them to darkness or crush them utterly, which is why Drizzt has to hide his viewpoints and then ultimately flee into the wilderness at a young age.

In general, basically everyone a Paladin will associate with has no interest in any real association with those the Paladin won't associate with. The difference is that non-paladins can make deals with the (metaphorical) devil, and Paladins cannot. Likewise, an adventuring party without a paladin can include a grim antihero who nobody likes because the story demands it for some reason (usually because the anti-hero has some knowledge, ability, or trait that is essential to success that no one else has). And this is an issue. Specifically, the metaphysical context in which it makes sense for paladins to exist at all is one where making a deal with the devil should never be a path to the greater good, but in D&D said context is very much absent. Similarly, a paladin, secure in their faith and virtue, should not need help from any morally questionable third party, because they have been literally anointed as a divine champion to solve whatever problem is pressing.

And that's the fundamental problem with Paladins: they are a concept that was imported from a monotheistic context into a polytheistic one where their very existence doesn't make sense. The 5e approach, which re-conceptualizes them as a somewhat more general 'divine champion' works much better.

[Darg]

Champions of Ruin:

"A character can be evil and yet not seem to be evil; he can be evil and yet consider himself the epitome of goodness; or his evil might only show itself under certain conditions. A character who has contracted lycanthropy, for example, might donate treasure to widows and orphans, build temples, slay dragons, and help old ladies across the street - but on the night of the full moon, he hunts down and slaughters those widows and orphans and feeds the same old ladies to the dragon. Most of the time he is good, but his curse outweighs all the good that he does."

An evil character can be "good most of the time" and have their evil "only show themselves under certain conditions" and still be Evil.

You just proved my point. They are committing evils because it's their nature regardless of their held beliefs or actions. Should we honestly believe that just because someone is good most of the time or paves the path to hell with good intentions that they are acceptable evils? I don't think so. Most people wouldn't want to hangout with someone who tortures and maims bunnies and squirrels in the woods even if they give food and shelter to the needy.


People don't understand it because it's not true. OK, that's an accurate description of a fiend, or maybe even of a chromatic dragon, but it's not true of humans or other mortals. The human paladin has the same "very nature" as the human necromancer. Humans just aren't entirely bound by our natures, in the same way that some creatures are.

And a paladin won't absolutely refuse to associate with a neutral character who snaps and kills someone in revenge, once. They'll refuse to associate with people who consistently offend their morals. Once isn't consistently.

To be honest, I also think that the "no associating with evil beings" clause is too restrictive, because it rules out some things that paladins should do (like trying to redeem evildoers). Heck, read it too strictly, and paladins couldn't even be prison wardens. But it's also not as strict as some make it out to be, and there's no reason, by the Code, that a paladin couldn't team up with a Chaotic Neutral PC (they might still choose not to, because they find it very annoying, but they're allowed to).

Good and evil are cosmological forces in D&D. Most people commit good and evil acts. Most people tend to be more neutral in alignment. Even the PHB says that good people can snap in anger and evil people can commit good.


In addition, few people are completely consistent. A lawful good character may have a greedy streak that occasionally tempts him to take something or hoard something he has even if that’s not lawful or good behavior. People are also not consistent from day to day. A good character can lose his temper, a neutral character can be inspired to perform a noble act, and so on.

An evil character is one that consistently commits evil. There's a reason why evil spells cause characters to fall into evil and good spells don't do the reverse. If they haven't committed an evil, it's only a matter of time.

[hamishspence]

Most people wouldn't want to hangout with someone who tortures and maims bunnies and squirrels in the woods even if they give food and shelter to the needy.



While the person who is "good most of the time" needs to commit pretty severe Evil acts for their Evil to outweigh their Good - there is also the person who consistently commits very minor Evil acts and doesn't commit Good ones.

Such a person can be Evil, yet fairly harmless, and not deserve to be attacked by adventurers.

The 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting book mentions this in its discussion of how alignment works and what this means for the setting.

"In a world where characters have access to magic such as detect evil, it's important to keep in mind that evil people are not always killers, criminals, or demon worshippers. They might be selfish and cruel, always putting their interests above those of others, but they don't necessarily deserve to be attacked by adventurers. The self-centered advocate is lawful evil, for example, and the cruel innkeeper is neutral evil."

A slightly later online article (on the WOTC site before everything 3.5 started getting taken down) mentions that 1 in 3 people being evil aligned in the average crowd, is normal.

"In a crowd of ten commoners, odds are good that three will be evil. But that doesn't mean they are monsters or even killers -- each is just a greedy, selfish person who willingly watches others suffer. The sword is no answer here; the paladin is charged to protect these people. Oratory, virtue, and inspiration are the weapons of the paladin -- though intimidation may have its place."

Keith Baker's own writings on the subject said the same thing:

https://keith-baker.com/dragonmarks-44-good-and-evil/

"People know these things. If a paladin walks into a tavern and scans ten people, he may find that three of them are evil. This doesn’t require any immediate action on his part, and while disappointing it isn’t a surprise."

[Zanos]

The life of the common adventurer is principally organized around finding acceptable targets to kill and loot. The idea that an Evil character can't have morality that lines up 95% of the time with a typical adventuring party is fallacious. Most adventurers are effectively mercenaries at the end of the day, and generally the King isn't going to interrogate you about whether or not the goblins you exterminate surrendered or not first. Society, especially pre-modern society, generally dismisses culpability for immoral actions when it's directed against its foes, and accepts its "champions" back into the fold with open arms. Evil is not punished when it benefits society, in most cases. In fact, society loves to use Evil, so long as it's directed at the correct targets. Your narrow conception of what an Evil character can be is clouding your perspective. You can only think of a serial killer, I think of a soldier who goes "too far", except "too far" is behavior that his commander had absolutely no issue endorsing. An Evil character can be a maniac, sure, but they can just as easily be someone who believes that there are no bad tactics, only bad targets. And frankly, D&D is deliberately full of absolute monsters who are so unilaterally Evil that having sympathy for them when they're victims of cruelty a tiny fraction of what they gladly inflict isn't something that groks for most people. He tortured mindflayers? Flayed surrendering demons to intimidate others? Poisoned the water supply of Drow? Killed Neogi children? Set fire to an Ogre encampment? These are not things you're going to be punished for when you return to a society menaced by said creatures. There's a long history of overlooking war crimes from "Good" and "Just" societies even when they were directed at other humans, because they were the enemy.

The Keith Baker article posted is a good one for recognizing this, and is a good summation of my own rejection of the idea that Good and Evil characters would unilaterally reject working with each other. The dynamic isn't a holy champion of justice and a deranged murderer. The dynamic is a man that believes that his enemies can be redeemed and deserve mercy, and a man who believes that his enemies deserve nothing but blood and ash. And the blood and ash perspective is pretty sympathetic considering what the average adventurer sees. Hell, one of the most popular companions in the last PF CRPG was a LE hellknight, because in the circumstances the game takes place in, his methodology is the only one that makes sense to people.

When you're torturing an Ogre that literally eats children for information on where the rest of it's tribe is camping, there's a good number of neutral or even nominally Good characters that will overlook it, because it's directed at the 'correct' target. In fact, having an Evil teammate who is willing to visit Evil onto the party's enemies when it becomes necessary to wrap up plot threads is also a common fantasy trope. After all, you can't sully the main characters hands with blood, but having the main villain survive into the next season would really complicate the plot!

[hamishspence]

The life of the common adventurer is principally organized around finding acceptable targets to kill and loot. The idea that an Evil character can't have morality that lines up 95% of the time with a typical adventuring party is fallacious.
Or, as the 3.5 splatbook Champions of Valor puts it:


This book is about valorous characters - those who might be good or in some cases merely neutral, but are great and heroic in facing down the greatest dangers of Faerun. Most valorous characters are good, but a significant fraction of them are indifferent to good and evil, and a rare few are evil but recognize that some evils must be challenged (even the mad Halaster has battled on Mystra's behalf).



Most adventurers would like to think of themselves as Valorous Heroes - yet it's possible to be an Evil Valorous Hero.

[Chronos]

That, I think, gets to what the "cannot associate with evil" restriction should be: The paladin can accept that one of their teammates enjoys killing a bit too much (though she'll probably still lecture them for it), but the paladin should still be the one that says "no" to torturing the drow prisoner.

[Mechalich]

A slightly later online article (on the WOTC site before everything 3.5 started getting taken down) mentions that 1 in 3 people being evil aligned in the average crowd, is normal.

"In a crowd of ten commoners, odds are good that three will be evil. But that doesn't mean they are monsters or even killers -- each is just a greedy, selfish person who willingly watches others suffer. The sword is no answer here; the paladin is charged to protect these people. Oratory, virtue, and inspiration are the weapons of the paladin -- though intimidation may have its place."

Keith Baker's own writings on the subject said the same thing:

https://keith-baker.com/dragonmarks-44-good-and-evil/

"People know these things. If a paladin walks into a tavern and scans ten people, he may find that three of them are evil. This doesn’t require any immediate action on his part, and while disappointing it isn’t a surprise."

The problem is that these statements are wrong, and simply do not match any reasonable attempt to match Human behavior onto the D&D alignment system.

The thing is, the threshold for an action to be 'evil' in D&D is extremely high. Many, probably most, of the cruelties and criminalities labeled as 'evil' in the real-world vernacular qualify as neutral in the D&D alignment system. A simple useful boundary is found via the Formians and Slaadi - the Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral paragons respectively. The Formians believe, fanatically, that everything else in the multiverse that does not conform to their absolutism must be killed or enslaved. Meanwhile the Slaadi commit murder purely as the mood strikes them. In an alternative formulation: 'I was just following orders' is a viable defense in D&D, capable of keeping functionally any action, no matter how heinous, within the LN section of the alignment chart.

Greedy and selfish people are almost always neutral. They may be in the lower half of the pie chart, but not the lower third, which is what it takes to cross over into evil. By contrast, roughly 1-2% of the human population qualifies as clinical level psychopaths, which is a decent proxy for the number of 'evil' individuals in a Human society (not all clinical psychopaths will qualify, of course, and some who are not will, but it gives a useful range).


The Keith Baker article posted is a good one for recognizing this, and is a good summation of my own rejection of the idea that Good and Evil characters would unilaterally reject working with each other. The dynamic isn't a holy champion of justice and a deranged murderer. The dynamic is a man that believes that his enemies can be redeemed and deserve mercy, and a man who believes that his enemies deserve nothing but blood and ash. And the blood and ash perspective is pretty sympathetic considering what the average adventurer sees. Hell, one of the most popular companions in the last PF CRPG was a LE hellknight, because in the circumstances the game takes place in, his methodology is the only one that makes sense to people.

When you're torturing an Ogre that literally eats children for information on where the rest of it's tribe is camping, there's a good number of neutral or even nominally Good characters that will overlook it, because it's directed at the 'correct' target. In fact, having an Evil teammate who is willing to visit Evil onto the party's enemies when it becomes necessary to wrap up plot threads is also a common fantasy trope. After all, you can't sully the main characters hands with blood, but having the main villain survive into the next season would really complicate the plot!

The thing is, again, the 'blood and ash' perspective is, for the most part, still a neutral one. Even torture, if the GM mistakenly allows it to work (in reality, torture does not work, making all need-based arguments supporting it fail, even though popular media often claims otherwise), can be a neutral act because the ends may justify the means in a given situation.

[Zanos]

The thing is, again, the 'blood and ash' perspective is, for the most part, still a neutral one.
Except it's not. A neutral character fights until the threat ends. An Evil character may keep fighting to stop possible, maybe future threats, even when it becomes cruel.


Even torture, if the GM mistakenly allows it to work (in reality, torture does not work, making all need-based arguments supporting it fail, even though popular media often claims otherwise)
D&D is primarily a game based on popular media, so torture being functional is accurate to the genre. Whether or not torture actually functions depends on the scenario in which it is performed. The primary problem is that a victim will say anything they can to make you stop, which may or may not be true. So you need to be able to have other sources of information to verify against or a reliable ability to detect falsehoods. Low level magic can supplement answers provided under torture through divination, or you could simply have a heroically high sense motive score allowing you to detect falsehood more reliably than any real world individual.

It's not as though Ogres are particularly clever or brave.


can be a neutral act because the ends may justify the means in a given situation.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of alignment. The ends can never justify the means. Evil actions are Evil actions, even if they serve Good ends. This is one of the most common ways that characters become Evil.

[icefractal]

The ends don't justify the means, but neither do the means justify the ends. By which I mean I've seen examples of "even though I know the outcome will be extremely bad, the most important thing is keeping my hands clean" treated as exemplifying "good", and I just can't agree. It's an understandable decision (usually), but it's at best a choice between two bad options.

I've even seen it for things like "If I don't kill this innocent person, the entire world (including that person) will be destroyed ... but that would be wrong, so I refuse!" Now seriously - WTF? That take on ethics is just alien to me.

[Anymage]

The problem is that these statements are wrong, and simply do not match any reasonable attempt to match Human behavior onto the D&D alignment system.

The thing is, the threshold for an action to be 'evil' in D&D is extremely high...Greedy and selfish people are almost always neutral. They may be in the lower half of the pie chart, but not the lower third, which is what it takes to cross over into evil. By contrast, roughly 1-2% of the human population qualifies as clinical level psychopaths, which is a decent proxy for the number of 'evil' individuals in a Human society (not all clinical psychopaths will qualify, of course, and some who are not will, but it gives a useful range).

Source on this? I mean, I personally happen to agree that alignment is most meaningful if you have to really invest in it, but little in the books agrees and most of what's published implies that human society is pretty evenly spread across the nine values. It would be nice if we could have better ways to communicate whether someone prefers alignment requiring commitment vs. alignment just dividing the top/middle/bottom thirds, but that's a separate topic.


The ends don't justify the means, but neither do the means justify the ends. By which I mean I've seen examples of "even though I know the outcome will be extremely bad, the most important thing is keeping my hands clean" treated as exemplifying "good", and I just can't agree. It's an understandable decision (usually), but it's at best a choice between two bad options.

I've even seen it for things like "If I don't kill this innocent person, the entire world (including that person) will be destroyed ... but that would be wrong, so I refuse!" Now seriously - WTF? That take on ethics is just alien to me.

All known moral system will include bizarre conclusions if carried out unerringly. Saturday morning cartoon morality can get wobbly earlier than some, but the characters can feel safe that the writers will never actually put them in a place where their codes would lead to the wrong conclusion. Similarly, most paladin players are looking to be knights in shining armor and good DMs recognize this instead of thinking that the player wants to defend moral philosophy theses or play through a downfall and redemption arc (that discards most of your powers for the duration of said arc). Agreeing on what the paladin's player wants to focus on and agreeing to not put them in impossible moral situations is the best way for the DM to let the player play what they want to.

[Mechalich]

Source on this? I mean, I personally happen to agree that alignment is most meaningful if you have to really invest in it, but little in the books agrees and most of what's published implies that human society is pretty evenly spread across the nine values. It would be nice if we could have better ways to communicate whether someone prefers alignment requiring commitment vs. alignment just dividing the top/middle/bottom thirds, but that's a separate topic.

Here's the thing, in 1e and 2e AD&D it was very clear that evil individuals were rare. The most relevant book would be the Planescape supplement Faces of Evil: the Fiends, which went into some detail describing that in order to be explicitly evil a being needed to not simply do things that basically everyone would label as awful, but to do them explicitly for the purpose of promoting suffering, noting, quite clearly, that a wide range of explicitly neutral beings did awful stuff more or less constantly without ever imperiling their alignment (I mean really, the source of all pain in the multiverse was an explicitly neutral being).

When 3e rolled around someone at WotC tried to realign the alignment chart such that instead of most Humans (and Dwarves, Gnomes, and Halflings), being Lawful Good, however weakly, most Humans were supposed to default to True Neutral as some kind of 'native state.' The problem with this is that all the other beings in the multiverse retained the alignments and behavioral patterns they'd had before, so this change is fundamentally BS. In 3e the Formians are still trying to murder/enslave literally the entire rest of the universe while being completely LN and the Slaadi will still murder people because it's a Tuesday while being CN and the Rilmani will still preemptively assassinate mortals of any strong alignment basis because they might 'threaten the scales of the balance' at some point in the future while being TN.

In order to believe that 30% of the people in a given crowd are evil, that requires believing that 30% of humans are more evil than the average Formian, Slaadi, or Rilmani, and I'm sorry but no, that simply is not the case.

[hamishspence]

4e writers noticed this, and moved Slaadi to CE, and got rid of Formians and Rilmani entirely.

Even in 3.5, plenty of slaadi are evil (death slaad, and the powerful black slaad).

[Zanos]

Using poorly updated 2e monsters as the basis for your interpretation of 3e alignment doesn't make a lot of sense to me when there's multiple entire books about how 3e alignment is constructed. Frankly I question putting the murdering expansionist slavers under neutral even in previous editions.

I mean, sure, if your only interpretation of Evil is that it's someone who is a clinical psychopath who murders for fun, I guess I agree they shouldn't be in the same party as a good character? But they probably shouldn't be any games at all unless the premise is to just to play serial killers.

[Aotrs Commander]

I mean, really, it's almost like D&D's attempts to shoehorn the entire breadth and variety of all sapience/sentience/sophonce into nine conveniant pidgeon-holes was fundamentally a flawed, if not outright daft idea. 3.x's idea of trying make it mechanically more important was what I think was a well-intentioned to rescue the concept, but ultimately, didn't really work. Frankly, just good and evil are plenty enough even fairly nedulously and technically, you can define it with just one of those as exclusionary (depending how cynical you are - I geninely lean towards "good" and "everyone else" these days, because [frack] apathy and "I want this to not be my problem.") I only bother to keep alignment at all because it has some limited usefulness as a mechanical basis for What Is Affected By What which out-weighs the effort of stripping out entirely and papering over twenty-plus years of unclusion; but in general I largely downplay the roleplaying side except in fairly broad strokes. (As it's easier to loook at a player suggesting something crazy and say "remind me, what alignment are you?" as shorthand for a longer explanation about "dude, that is defnitely not okay behavior in-character...")



The "Evil spells make you more Evil" guff was just always bovine excrement and I utterly reject it as the nonsense it is - especially if it's only [Evil]spells which are suppoded to work tha way.

It perhaps bears repeating - 3.5's alignment-based source books were really awful in a great number of ways, most of all philisphoically. And to prove the point, otu of the, what, four of them, they are baically only on the Evil/Good axis ANYWAY,



I do not blame 4E and later 5E (and I think PF2, yes?) dropping the whole concept. Hell, Rolemaster never needed alignments, and that worked perfectly fine. The closest it had was Evil Spell Lists as alternates for some spellcasters - that "define by excluysion" thing I mentioned, but there was no definition of exactly what an "evil" caster pertained. The impliction being they were tools for the DM to equip BBEGs with.

(And in Warhammer, alignment was more "unless you're good, which flavour of Evil are you?")

[Darg]

The ends don't justify the means, but neither do the means justify the ends. By which I mean I've seen examples of "even though I know the outcome will be extremely bad, the most important thing is keeping my hands clean" treated as exemplifying "good", and I just can't agree. It's an understandable decision (usually), but it's at best a choice between two bad options.

I've even seen it for things like "If I don't kill this innocent person, the entire world (including that person) will be destroyed ... but that would be wrong, so I refuse!" Now seriously - WTF? That take on ethics is just alien to me.

An innocent person is innocent. Many people in history would likely have remained innocent of crimes the future them would commit if never given the position to actually enact the actions they would be vilified for. Why go back in time to murder them when you could literally just get them to be at a different place during the critical juncture or cause an early failure where lottery winning luck caused them success. Killing someone isn't the only answer despite what science fiction authors would like us to believe. The world is filled with possibilities and a good aligned character would try to discover the possibilities that don't require murder first.

Killing on its own is not considered an evil act by D&D. BoED has a list of considerations for violence:
• just cause
• good intentions
• discriminate
• means
Are you justified in killing someone who currently has no intention or is incapable of murdering millions? No. If you had a vision one day of your significant other eventually mass murdering millions, would you really murder them today to keep that from happening? Are you really justified in the action when steps to mitigate that future could be taken in the meantime? That is what it means to be good in D&D. You take the the more difficult path if it can lead to protection of life and the minimization of suffering.

[SpyOne]

I was looking some stuff up in my 1st edition PHB and noticed that ... Rangers are not allowed to work with more than two other Rangers. You can't have more than three Rangers in the party.
The requirements to be a Paladin are strict enough that it's enormously unlikely to have two in a party.

And Assassins must be evil.

Is it possible that the rule about associating with evil was meant to prohibit Paladins and Assassins from being in the same party?

[icefractal]

An innocent person is innocent. Many people in history would likely have remained innocent of crimes the future them would commit if never given the position to actually enact the actions they would be vilified for. Why go back in time to murder them when you could literally just get them to be at a different place during the critical juncture or cause an early failure where lottery winning luck caused them success. Killing someone isn't the only answer despite what science fiction authors would like us to believe. The world is filled with possibilities and a good aligned character would try to discover the possibilities that don't require murder first.Sure, but that's a different situation. I'm not talking about a "pre-crime" deal, but rather a case where there's no uncertainty, like "this person is the vessel that's going to (involuntarily) summon a demon lord within the day". Although admittedly since I'm relating this second-hand (in terms of what other people said about scenarios created by different other people), I don't really have a specific one in mind.

There's also three different layers that these could be considered on, and I'm only talking about one of them:

1) It's inherently wrong to create a "bad action for the greater good" scenario in fiction you're creating, and it's also wrong to discuss them except in terms of "that scenario is obviously invalid and unfit for consideration". I don't personally agree, but I've seen this viewpoint advanced.

2) It's not inherently wrong, but in practice very few people want that **** in their RPGs, so as a GM you shouldn't create scenarios like that and "I refuse to engage" or "provide a Kobayashi Maru third option or I walk" are valid responses as a player. I don't know that I'd go so far as "or I walk", but personally speaking I mostly agree, not really what I'm looking for in an RPG session.

3) It's fine to have such scenarios, but when engaging with them the "Good" course of action is always to avoid doing anything personally bad, even if that means the entire world burns. This is the one I strongly disagree with.

Oh, and incidentally, this has 0% to do with Paladins falling. As a GM, I use the 4E version of divine powers (the deity can't revoke them once granted, all they can do is tell their other followers to smite you), and as a player I'd never play a Paladin unless I knew and trusted the GM. So that's not a factor for me, I just find it gross to have things that are IMO not good be declared as "the most good".

[Chronos]

Quoth Mechalich:

Here's the thing, in 1e and 2e AD&D it was very clear that evil individuals were rare.
I can't comment about 1e, but in 2e, it was clear that humans were about equally likely to be any alignment.

[hamishspence]

3e's "Humans tend toward no alignment, not even Neutral" line in the PHB makes it clear that it's not supposed to be interpreted as, say, "95% of humans are True Neutral".

[Faily]

In my groups, we have always made unique Paladin oaths and codes that depend on the Paladin's faith and culture, which has led to more suitable Codes that work better and also makes Paladins different from one another. An elf Paladin holds different values than a dwarven Paladin, for example (two examples from different campaigns):

A Paladin of Moradin:
- must always protect dwarves.
- care and charity must be given to mothers and children.
- should be able to craft their own weapons (need not be able to enchant it themselves though).
- must work in the forge once a month.
- never show mercy to orcs, giants, and goblinoids.

A Paladin of Corellon Larethian:
- will never bring or cause harm to any elves.
- any tactic, barring downright cruel and evil ones, is viable against the enemies of elves.
- must always appear clean and well-groomed.
- should always strive to create and cherish beauty in this world.

[Malphegor]

An innocent person is innocent. Many people in history would likely have remained innocent of crimes the future them would commit if never given the position to actually enact the actions they would be vilified for. Why go back in time to murder them when you could literally just get them to be at a different place during the critical juncture or cause an early failure where lottery winning luck caused them success. Killing someone isn't the only answer despite what science fiction authors would like us to believe. The world is filled with possibilities and a good aligned character would try to discover the possibilities that don't require murder first.

Killing on its own is not considered an evil act by D&D. BoED has a list of considerations for violence:
• just cause
• good intentions
• discriminate
• means
Are you justified in killing someone who currently has no intention or is incapable of murdering millions? No. If you had a vision one day of your significant other eventually mass murdering millions, would you really murder them today to keep that from happening? Are you really justified in the action when steps to mitigate that future could be taken in the meantime? That is what it means to be good in D&D. You take the the more difficult path if it can lead to protection of life and the minimization of suffering.


I’ve always ruled whenever I’m DM/DM-adjacent roles that the act of philosophy is itself what determines if it is good or bad. It is all well and good strangling Baby Vecna in the crib, arguably a good act in the future despite evil at that point of time, but the cost benefit evaluation and the consideration of being humane to those not yet evil and eradicating causations of evil rather than just the symptoms…
that’s what makes an exalted charater goodlier than a good character

Not a broader picture in terms of grey morality, but broader in terms of ‘okay, I want the net good to rise. To do this, I need analysts and general research done to figure out the best means of doing so without being manipulated by external parties and forces with their own agendas’

(keeping to the topic of the thread, my personal paladins tend to veer towards the Virtues from Ultima games but also with recognition that even Virtues that sound good on paper can be corrupted. A society dedicated to peace could well mind control its subjects so everyone is working in mindless harmony, after all. A society dedicated to truth could in a world based on mechanics could be obsessed with magical means of forcing the truth. There is no clear answer, no absolute metric of good.
There is a standard we try to achieve, and we work towards that, with as many checks and balances as we can raise to prevent us falling off the path.

at least when I don’t just crib the Green Lantern Oath)