Comments on: Troy’s Crock Pot: Reading List Checkup

By: Troy E. Taylor

Troy E. Taylor — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:36:17 +0000

Grahamd0: Thanks for spotting that. I will fix. To be honest, the one thing I hate -- as a professional copy editor -- is not having a copy editor see my posts before they go up. It's nearly impossible to catch your own boo-boos.

By: BryanB

BryanB — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:37:29 +0000

@grahamd0 - That was a good point about distinct Paladins. They need not be cookie cutter in their personalities just because they are Lawful.

By: BryanB

BryanB — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:32:53 +0000

@Scott Martin – Knight Class? There is a Knight Class!? PHB2 you say? I’m going to have to check that out. I knew I bought that book for a reason. Now if I can actually find the book…

By: grahamd0

grahamd0 — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:00:58 +0000

Sorry for being pedantic, but I believe appropriate word is "ascetics", not "aesthetics". Still, spot on assessment, those are my two biggest pet peeves with people trying to play paladins. I once played a campaign with a player who was trying his first attempt as a paladin. When the DM (and a couple of the players) informed him that it was un-paladin-like to steal the armor in the (temporarily) abandoned blacksmith's shop, he immediately turned to the thief and said, "Ah! But you can steal it for me!" It took a while, but we finally managed to explain that paladins don't look for loop holes in their moral code. Too few people realize that there's no problem playing an unfriendly paladin, but there's a big problem with playing an unlawful paladin.

By: Scott Martin

Scott Martin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:31:05 +0000

How about the Knight class in the [3.5] PHB2? It seems like it could be a good Black Knight kind of class and concentrates more on chivalry than alignment.

By: Troy E. Taylor

Troy E. Taylor — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:58:50 +0000

The abuses of knights was the primary reasons a code of chivalry was held up as a model of behavior, even if they were rarely adhered to. They were passionate young men with armor, sharp weapons and big horses. In our society we worry about giving teen boys the keys to the car. Why not send them out with a loaded gun and the certainty they are above the law? I think it's easy to see how bad things happened because of the martial classes. I agree ... there needs to be an NPC class that can serve as a counter to the paladin. Here's one trick I employ for NPCs: Apply prestige classes without respect to prerequisites. Therefore, throw a blackguard template on a warrior NPC, and you've got a bad apple anit-knight.

By: Patrick Benson

Patrick Benson — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:06:20 +0000

Historically knights weren't very concerned with justice at all. They were instruments of the government and/or church. When you read the history of knights there are plenty of stories about them killing uprising peasants to maintain order, sometimes without being ordered to do so but just acting as they saw fit. D&D's paladin class is the romanticized legend and not the historical truth, and I think that is actually why it works so well in the game. The only thing that is missing is the evil servants of gods. Antipaladins, remember those? Call them something else like Dark Disciples, or Devoted Destroyers, but I wish there were more classes for NPCs to be designed around that would be the complimentary bad guys to paladins.