Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
It is arbitrary when you pick an anchor point based on what you think it should be, and it is a problem when you judge later things based upon that arbitrary anchor point.
Oh no, I judged a thing! How awful!

It's normal for people to evaluate things based on their values. Establish an actual issue with my judgement first before complaining of me using it.

Quote Originally Posted by Peelee
If you dislike how paladins have moved away from being inextricably tied to religion, that's perfectly fine, and you're not wrong, but once you declare all later paladins to basically be playing a game of telephone based on your personal preference start point, then you should not be surprised to get some pushback, especially when you make statements involving said later paladins.
When I compare the evolution of game concepts to a game of Telephone, that's not a value judgement - it's an observation and comparison. The starting point and the end point have nothing to do with my preferences - we know for fact when Paladin was published for D&D, we can take any individual person and check if they can trace their understanding to the original. If not, we can trace where their understanding actually came from, then check if that source can trace it back to the original. So on and so forth. Exactly like a reversed game of Telephone.

Now, I am making a value judgement of both the original message and the current resulting message. I do think the original is more useful and consider the current result to be a perverse corruption of it. This isn't the same as saying it is bad by itself - in a game of Telephone, a weird end result doesn't prove the message itself is bad, it proves communication was bad. But for the sake of argument, lets say I think the resulting message is bad in itself. So what exactly is your gripe with or counter-argument to that? Do you prefer what the Paladin has become?

Consider: the comic OotS itself is making a point similar to mine. It is parodying how Paladins have come to be played at actual tables. In his various replies to arguments about how his Paladins aren't perfect Paladins, the Giant had more or less said "whatever the original idea was, this is what players got out of it, and I think it's bad".