Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
Clerics, Druids, Bards, Paladins, Barbarians, Monks - all have some kind of penalty for being "the wrong alignment" even if it's only "cannot take any more levels".
except these restrictions aren't equal are they? Clerics can be literally any alignment, the rest is just making up a god to match it. you could throw out every single canonical pantheon in DnD and just make up whatever god you want.

For bards and barbarians their "restriction" is "any nonlawful". You might as well have given them a free adventuring ticket with no repercussions

Monk is "any Lawful" which ignores all the chaotic martial artists in fiction who are arrogant about their power and don't play the rules, not emulating their tropes properly at all to restrict monks to very a vague label, not really specifying much beyond that. now you could say they're living an ascetic existence or whatnot, but paladins literally have a more restrictive code of behavior than them, when you'd think they'd at least be equal.

Druid is oddly, limited to the five "neutral" alignments. Pure good. Pure Lawful. Pure Chaos. Pure Evil or Pure Neutral. honestly this never made sense to me. Nature abhors purity. Life itself wouldn't exist without mixing things, everything being a mix is completely natural. If all five major forces of the universe can describe a druids morality, then all alignments can, because guess what? the other four are mixes of the pure four! if you can have a druid that believes in Chaos and one that believes in Good, its not hard to have one that believes in both. Yet, the Ranger who also has nature magic if less, gets the "any" alignment choice. Inconsistent. what is further inconsistent, is that The Beastlands and Arborea, these planes of infinite nature are explicitly CG, placing nature on the chaotic side of the spectrum, yet neither Ranger nor Druid get "any nonlawful" as their alignment choices? Yet a barbarian does?

Paladin on the other hand for some reason ONLY gets lawful good AND a highly specific code on top of that- which is inconsistent again with the ranger, who gets an "any" alignment choice despite having a similar class set up and being a more combat-focused counterpart to a divine class. The Paladins morality is the most restrictive while also giving him LESS power than a cleric. At least if you don't count the variant codes, but if you include those then you just have the Druid alignment problem in reverse: the paladin is bound to four extremes of moral/ethical mixes of behavior. Thing is, these almost make sense. Almost. Tyranny and Freedom hold water, but Slaughter is where alignment code restrictions goes laughably stark raving mad nutjob stupid and starts insisting that a Chaotic Evil person, an alignment defined by having zero moral or ethical restrictions .....has a code that gives them moral restrictions. cartoonish ones at that. go home alignment, your drunk!

Problem is, an adventurers life inherently skews towards the Chaotic alignment. Your traveling around meeting random people you don't know at first, to go on high risk ventures that may or may not be illegal, involving unsafe situations and violence, and probably taking things that belonged to other people no matter how selfless your reasons, and will probably run afoul of one authority figure or another no matter how good or evil they are. The entire lifestyle is basically a code death trap for default paladins. There basically no reason for a default paladin to become one and deal with a bunch of probably nonlawful yahoos they don't know who might have an evil person among them when they can join a legitimate military or knightly order instead. I've never heard of a bard or a barbarian having alignment problems, but a paladin having alignment problems because of a bad GM is pretty much a cliche at this point.