Dragon Slayers Gaming CIC

Paladins, “Orcs Are Evil,” and the Nature of Good in D&D The “orcs are evil” debate sometimes spurs the other debate about paladins, their oaths, and what Lawful Good actually demands. Is a paladin meant to destroy evil wherever it appears? And if so, “doesn’t that turn paladins into murder hobos [as was recently brought to me] or justify the slaughter of evil beings [orcs for instance]?” Or is the paladin defined by the limits they refuse to cross, even in the face of evil? The AD&D Paladin is not a figure who says, “they’re evil, so anything I do is justified.” That’s closer to Paladins extracted from The Song of Roland. It is holy war, moral certainty, violence pre-sanctioned. That’s Turpin and even to a lesser degree Roland. And I think it has little resemblance to the inspirations listed in Appendix N. D&D Paladins are defined by restraint. They follow a code. They avoid cruelty. They act with discipline. They can lose their powers for failing morally. These are later concepts of Chivalric Honor, not Carolingian, despite their class name. The key distinction is that a Paladin doesn’t fall for choosing the wrong enemy. He falls for choosing the wrong action. So even if orcs are truly evil, it does not justify slaughter without cause, killing noncombatants, cruelty or excess. In fact, those are the things that would cause a paladin to fall. This is where the literary roots are important. D&D borrows the word “paladin” from Charlemagne’s knights, but as I said before, not their ethics. In Roland, figures like Turpin sanctify violence and remove doubt. But D&D draws from later traditions of chivalry. Arthurian romance, Tennyson, Ivanhoe, and notably Tolkien. In these, being “good” means being bound by limits, not freed from them. I think, if your idea of a Paladin becomes “I can kill freely because my enemies are evil,” you’re not describing a D&D paladin. You’re describing something much older. As Rebecca puts it in Ivanhoe: “If thou readest the Scripture … only to justify thine own license and profligacy, thy crime is like that of him who extracts poison from the most healthful and necessary herbs.” In my way of thinking: to a Paladin, the presence of evil doesn’t relax the Paladin’s code, it intensifies it. The Paladin ideal is defined by restraint. Its opposite is not “fighting evil,” but abandoning that restraint.

Saw a Quora poll "Which D&D class annoys you the most and why?" I did not go to Quora to post a response: the place is bot responses and parts of it are becoming as bad as Reddit. That said, my response is: None. There is no D&D class that annoys me because there is nothing a group can do that I cannot throw enough huge, ancient red dragons at to solve. Pic unrelated.