Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
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.
That depends on the campaign world. In some you can basically have yourself as your deity, or some ideal. In others you must pick a member of an existing pantheon.

For bards and barbarians their "restriction" is "any nonlawful". You might as well have given them a free adventuring ticket with no repercussions
Barbarians are all about unleashed fury and impulsive action. Lawful alignment includes self-discipline and restraint. That is why they are incompatible. Same issue with bards - wandering adventuring minstrels are supposed to be unpredictable and somewhat chaotic.

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.
Again, self-discipline and restraint are required to develop martial arts. Arrogance and playing by your own set of rules can be lawful evil if they are combined with discipline.

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?
Druids and Rangers had more logical alignment restrictions in earlier editions, where druids were limited to only True Neutral and Rangers had to be good-aligned. The argument is that druids must be at least partially neutral in order to maintain the emotional detachment that the natural world requires, where survival often comes at the expense of other animals and ugly things happen to baby animals and such. Rangers, on the other hand, were the protectors of the weak against the more savage parts of nature, and so had to be good-aligned.

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.
Again, earlier editions of D&D make more sense, because a paladin in those editions clearly was more powerful than the other character classes. Greater power came with greater responsibility, in effect. There are players who like having a strict code of conduct.

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.
It's a debatable point. What you're describing is a common style of play, but only one style of play, after all. Player groups often undertake missions on behalf of legal authorities, which is right up a paladin's alley, especially if they are also religious authorities. Games can be played where all the players are in fact an order of knights. And the type of alignment problems you describe can happen for clerics or druids just as easily as for paladins.

Barbarians also had very tough restrictions on their behavior when originally introduced in the original Unearthed Arcana, like not being able to associate with magic users or use magic items at low levels(!) The theory was that this helped to balance their extra class abilities.

Part of the perceived unfairness of alignment restrictions in later editions is because the designers kept some restrictions while dumping others. Usually if they loosened up restrictions they also reduced the power of the class, but it's been somewhat inconsistent, noticeably with the paladin.