From: Rannou@info.polymtl.ca (Patrick Rannou)
Subject: Re: Paladins
Organization: Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada
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	<RANNOU.92Aug27025952@zuse.info.polymtl.ca>
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Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 00:03:22 GMT

In article <BtpC38.2Fx@news.cso.uiuc.edu> dv52151@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Axly) writes:

   Rannou@info.polymtl.ca (Patrick Rannou) writes:


   >   The LN character is actually the one more likely to take the thief in to
   >   the proper authorities. It's the paladin's good side that is more likely
   >                                              ^^^^
   >   to lead him to kill this larcenous bandit. If the paladin moves in
   >                  ^^^^
   >   alignment
   >   at all, it's going to be away from Law not towards it. Killing someone who
   >   steals without a trial is a good act, not a lawful one.  Lawful neutral
   >   characters are very strict about following the letter of the law.

   >I feel the "it's his good side which will make him kill the thief" is just
   >as twisted.

   Okay, think about this. Who is morely likely to kill a thief on the spot,
   a chaotic good character or a lawful good character? In most instances,
   the chaotic good character will take the law in his own hands ala Dirty
   Harry. 

The chaotic good character is far more likely to kill the thief because
killing is agaisnt the law. Your Dirty Harry example is very good, but why
do I get the feeling you're thikning that I was meaning that a LG PC is
more likely to kill the thief than a CG PC? I didn't. When I said that the
guy who said "it's his good side which will make him kill the thief" is
just as twisted, by "twisted" I meant: The guy who said that sure as
strange brain procedural configurations. 

   >A truly GOOD person won't try to kill. Quite on the contrary.
   >Your paladin is very obvisouly lawful neutral, and even borderline
   >NEUTRAL neutral at that. Some might say that it's even a temporary laspe in
   >neutral evil. Killing for theft. Maybe, but recheck your history books.

   That's your definition of good, wherein all killing is evil.

   Oh, because you know of any medieval society wherein killing -any
killing- isn't considered evil? From what planet do you come from?

   If all killing
   is evil, then why does the diety have paladins, who are just men and women
   who kill people for the right reasons? 

Huuuh, don't counfound D&D paladins with the D&D deity paladins. The
paladin class, as it is intended, is NOT "men and women who kill people for
the right reason". That's a very sick reason to be a paladin. The paladin
is the human embodiment of LG, striving to be a role model or lawdulness
and goodness, who help the widow and the orphan, and who will always fight
the forces of chaos and evil. NOTE that by "fighting" I didn't say
"killing". BUG difference. If you don't see it, fine. If you still think a
paladin is just a "virtuous assassin" then you've got straqnge brain
procedural patterns too. (I've got some, but not in this area of the
brain). ;-)

Sure, if you give the palaidn a diety OTHER than the "deity of absolute
LG", then of course he'll look and act very differently: his beliefs won't
be the same, and he won't be called a palafin anyway. A paladin of the god
of nature, for example, could be known in a given world/society as a
Holy Druid Warrior. Why not? It's more interesting than to say he's a
paladin, which gives a lot of meaning to the PC that is NOT descriptive of
the way he, as a holy warrior of the deity of NATURE, believes and think,
which is VERY different from the way a Holy Warrior of the deity of
LawfulGoodness, namely a Paladin, believes.

In short: Please decide what the thread is on, please. To me, the Paladin
isn't a character class The character class we actually see as a Paladin
should be named the "Holy Warrior" class, and the Paladin would then be a
Fighter Kit only available to Holy Warriors. Supposed the Holy Warriors of
a Nature god are named "Druid Warriors", then the Druid Warrior is a
fighter kit only avaliable to thr Holy Warrior Class, see? And maybe even
to Rangers... If the idea of a fighter kit reserved to only one class
doesn't suit you, then simply say that Paladin, Druid Warrior, Courtisanes
(Copyright Moebius, the ElseWhere Prince) and all these "fanatically
dedicated" to a god or cause guys are a subclass of the Holy Warrior class,
or of the fighter class if the dedication isn't to a god but to a
cause/country/whatever instead.

For the needs of this threead, let's assume that by the word "paladin", we
speak about the embodiment of lawfulgoodness in a human. The role model.
The savior of the widow and the orphan, the one who will always fight chaos
and evil. THAT'S a paladin. Maybe I shopuld check it up in a dictionnary
BEFORE saying that, tough, but I DOn'T have a dictionnaery available, and
I'm sure that if you've got one (dictionnary) and go look it up, the
definition you will read will have NOTHING to do with "killing".



Yeah, why don't we check it up? ANYBODY, yooo hooo, can you post the
definition (from a dictionnary, and say which) of the Word "Paladin"???



   The theft must also be considered in context. If a gnome will steal from
   his friends, he'll most likely steal from anyone. To protect those members
   of the community who he may prey upon, the paladin has to do something to
   keep him from stealing in the future. 

Yeah, like killing him on the spot, sure. NOT! OIf *COURSE* he has to do
something, but killing os always done as a last resort. Sheeesh, a paladin
who likes killing. ACK! And don't say he doesn't like it, he had PLENTY of
other choices.

You assume that just because a character lives on a medieval society, that
he's too stupid to be able to LEARN from his mistake, REPENT, and CHANGE
alignment (or at least his current course of actions).

You also assume that the leaders of a country are too stupid to know that
humans, are, basically, very impressionnable. With enough effort, you can
brainwash them and make the believe just abouyt anything. Medieval leaders
knew diplomacy, and believe me if the paladin isn't the leader of this
place he's got absolutely *NO* right to kill the thief, not unless the
thief's got a trial. And EVEN if he's the leader, what will happen if he
kills the thief without a trial, even an "arranged" trial?

"Let's kill him NOW" seems more CE to me than "Let's take him to trial.
THEN let's kill him". And the latter doesn't sound too LG to me neither.

And think about the simple effects of that action on society: people will
feel that because ONE guy can take the law into his own hand, that the
ruler is some sort of tyrant. Sure, the thief wasn't the exact role model,
and maybe sure he needed to be killed, but he didn't even got a trial!

"That means that anybody hating me or wnating to steal me simply has to
make me look like I'm a thief, and I'll get killed without having the
chance to get to a trial."

The enemies of the paladin will stringly use that kill as a weakness and
fault in his "perfection" of LG (and truly it is) to wear him down
politically. People will believe anything with enough good arguments to
give them, and you can bet that after a few kills like that SOME people -surely
not those who are perfectly innocent, but who is?- will start thinking a
lot of bad things about the paladin. some will say he's a tyrant, or a
murderer, some will firmly believe that the paladin is in fact the bad guy
and kileld the alleged "thief" because the thief -which of course was
innoncent- knew about all the evil thing the "paladin" had done. Soime will
even say the padadin is crazy. Of course, there will be those to approve of
the X number of killing the paladin did. But a society in which all those
that don't PERFECTLY fit in and adhere to all the rules get killed, and
thus all the others who DO are having a happy and secure life, isn't a
lawful good world at all. Check NirVana: Lawful NEUTRAL, with each and
every monodrome not acting perfectly LN getting very quickly back to the
energy pool (i.e. killed).


   The Muslim paladin is likely to
   cut off his hand,

What's a muslim paladin? ever heard of a word like that. It's like saying
that in the medieval era there were african ninjas. When you've got a term
which specifically describe a whole way of life and thought, then either
you are like that and get to be called by that word, or aren't and are NOT
called by that word but by ANOTHER word. I'm sure muslim 'holy' warriors,
if they existed, had a whole different view of life as the standard
european medieval holy warriors, and thus there is a diffrent word from
paladin to describe these muslim holy warrior while the medieval holy
warriors were calleld paladin. Both are warriors, but both are different.
It's like saying that because you know a lot of things about an apple, and
because an apple and an orange are both fruits, then you know everything
about oranges. Orf course not. Then WHATEVER conclusions you reach about
paladins, they apply only to the european medieval pal;adin, or more
precisely to the AD&D view of the paladin, which is very similar to the
MODERN current view of the paladin in general. You *CAN'T* draw any
conclusion on the muslim holy warrior, and say the muslim holy wariror is a
paladin, and thus by looking at what the muslim holy warrior do you have no
right to justify what a paladin would do in the same situations. After all,
the muslim holy warrior isn't a paladin, he's a... something else (I don't
know if that religion even HAS such thing has a holy warrior, but I'm
willing to bet they aren't called paladins).

The only thing you can do is draw conclusions on the paladin and the
(possible) mulsim holy warrior by looking at the general definition of the
holy warrior. So please try to differentiate the use of the two temrs: holy
warrior and paladin. The second is a subset of the first. And even I don't
quite like the word 'warrior' in the holy warrior term. It puts too much on
the warrior => fighter => fights => kills, which is of course not true for
the last term, depending on the type of holy warrior we look at. Truly, the
paladin is a mix of warrior and priest, nearer the warrior in skills, but
nearer the priest in mentality. Anyone who disagree with that last part can
e-mail me, I'll add their names to the stubborn list ;-) (which, by the way,
also have my own name in it ;-) ).


   and other responses will vary according to religion.

EXACTLY!

   Consider the Norse gods. Condemned criminals were used for blood sacrifices
   to their dieties.  

   Axly

Sure. The Norse were a gruesome bunch. But even THEM didn't kill criminals
on the spot. And surely they didn't sacrifice ALL criminals: there are just
too many of them. They most probably have limited themselves to SERIOUS
crimes. Like murder, thievery of BIG importance, etc. Even then, they
didn't let their own hate for a man kill the murderer on the spot.

Think about it: The paladins sister get killed by the thief just in front
of him. Now he hates the thief and feels perfectly justified to kill him,
even more so than before, right? WRONG!!! That shows how much you don't
know about killing. I never killed anyone, but I've seen many movies in
which the hero, after suffering for years or months at the hand of the
villain, finally gets the chance to fight him, he wons the fight, and has
the chance to kill him... and doesn't. Often we hear "I would have become
just like him, then. I would have acknowledged that thew only way to deal
with opposition is by killing." Well, guess what PC would be the most
likely to feel like that? The paladin!

Even if the ranger would have felt liek the thief should have been killed,
the paladin should have attemted to PREVENT it. Why do you think it's so
damn bloody hard to roleplay a paladin?

In conclusion: Dont' mistake "Holy Warrior or religion X and coming from
society Y" with "Paladin". THEY ARE NOT THE SAME (unless, of course, X =
pure lawfullgoodness and Y = european middle-age).

That doesn't mean you can't use the word paladin as you wish in your games.
You do what you want with your own campaign. Personnally, even a simple
fighter gets a special name in my campaign as soon as he join some kind of
idealogy, like the fighter's soldiers or the army of a city are called
FootKnights. They travel afoot instead of on horses (montainous region),
but apart from that they have adopted most of the Knightly code of honor,m
with of course some modifications to make them even more unique.

A Paladin is like that: a holy warrior with a set of unique beliefs and
powers. If you change the way he should act, then its EXACTLY like if you
took an apple, made it pink and square shaped, and still called it an apple
and used the way it looks to explain to others how all apple looks.


I agree that the original "paladin", if we treat him as a holy warrior of a
specific god which is LG but NOT the embodiment of LG, lioke say a SunGod,
vowing to destroy all things of darkness and always helping and providing
the others, could very well be LG, but his holy warriors still wouldn't be
paladins.

It's the old "If it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't move like a duck, and
doesn't quack like a duck, then it ISN'T a duck!!!" thing again.


I hope this will put the thread in perspective.

--
/---------------------------\
| Patrick "Paradak" Rannou. |
| Rannou@info.polymtl.ca    |
\---------------------------/