@Peelee & Bilbo Baggins: the thing you are arguing about was already addressed, with pendell more or less making my point for me:

Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
The way the Sapphire Guard is rendered would have worked under AD&D though. They are an organization with lawful authority to inflict capital punishment on evildoers. Killing innocent children causes them to lose their powers, but no one bats an eye when they Smite Evil actual adult evil people. Many of them are indeed of noble birth with all the arrogance and feudal expectations that implies, as seen in HTPGHS. Miko was not of noble birth -- so far as we know -- but she was still a samurai within her culture , and acted as a samurai, a noble, within that framework.

The way Rich displays Paladins would have worked in any version of the game, in my view, not just 3.5.
KorvinStarmast's comment is equally relevant:

Quote Originally Posted by KorvinStarmast
That's not quite correct, though. Paladins in 3.5 did not arise ex nihilo. They were a 25 year old trope/archetype that was first fully fleshed out in AD&D 1e. (Greyhawk was an 80% solution that you can see went final in PHB AD&D 1e). How paladins are and were perceived was already well grounded in AD&D. (And OoTS wise, Haley's dad was a 1st edition thief, so at least Soon is an AD&D 1e paladin. And he founded the Sapphire Guard. )
Granted, WoTC did something novel: anyone could choose to play a Paladin in that edition, unlike AD&D where you had to qualify for it by a bunch of better than average die rolls ... so in that respect, 3.5 edition undid a crucial feature of paladins: their rarity.
How Paladins were played in actual games during 3.x era did not stem from just what 3.x edition said about Paladins. How they were played, as well as the whole 3.x edition itself, were influenced by earlier versions of Paladins.

I'm talking of 1st Edition AD&D, because that was (IIRC) the last major edition put together by Gygax, and people were talking about Gygax's opinions. I don't consider 1st edition an arbitrary stopping point for such discussions.

Now, if you want to follow my logic (instead of just making fun of it), you can discuss earlier inspirations for Paladins, including Charlemagne, King Arthur, Poulson and whatever I might be forgetting. You can, if you want to, make the argument that Gygax screwed something up when translating these concepts into a game. It's a valid line of critique.

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TL;DR: I'm not complaining about the comic mucking up Paladins; I was merely using the comic as common reference point. I'm complaining about actual D&D designers and players mucking up Paladins.