I woke up from the worst best nap I’ve had in a while. Sleeping for three hours in the fetal position on a couch does wonders for your neck. I also learned not to fall asleep with Home and Garden TV playing in the background. The last few moments of my dream that I can remember involve the usual cast with two Indians attempting to sell a pallet of military equipment. Even now this hardly makes any sense to me.
Looking back on this marvelous Saturday, I can say that I feel it was a waste. I had planned on doing a cavalcade of geeky things ranging from working on my group’s Pathfinder campaign to my Japanese essay due on Tuesday. Alas it was not meant to be. The need for sleep overpowered me and I was soon on another world full of grotesque monsters and annoying projections. At the moment I’m writing this, I have another three hours before I need to lead myself to bed for another early Sunday morning. While I do not particularly like the early Sunday shift, it does leave me with Sunday evenings off for game night.
So yes. Nothing of interest happened today. Rather than ramble I’ll go ahead and call it a day. One last thing though, while browsing /tg/ a few minutes ago, I came across a paladin art thread. I generally don’t look at the “post class/game character art” threads as I just boot up DownThemAll and download all the pictures without looking at the thread. This one caught my eye though as the first picture was Seelah, the Iconic paladin from Pathfinder. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons since 3.x and never really cared about their iconic characters. I would be lying to you if I said that the art in the books didn’t have anything to do this. This is probably best left for another post later down the road. So I clicked on the thread and began to read some of the posts when some green text caught my eye. The hardest (and most controversial) thing about playing a paladin is the requirement to be of Lawful Good alignment. If you kill an innocent, tell a lie that knowingly will damn/kill/hurt an innocent, or do anything that can be considered evil, you lose all your powers
A joke in the table-top community is that gamemasters will go out of their way to make a paladin fall. I’ve never personally experienced this, but I know few people (Read “One person”) who have taken it upon themselves to play this class. I have, however, read countless tells of gamemaster dickery and general asshattery that ends in players stabbing players with miniatures. So in closing, the copy-pasta that follows is something that every fan of paladins, D&D, or role-playing should read.
“None of that, ‘Oh well if you’re truly sorry, there’s nothing I can do,’ horseshit. No, he coup de graces your ass because he’s a goddamn Paladin. His job is killing evil. You know what his job doesn’t entail? Being a sympathetic ear for every whiny NE or CN or LE douchebag who’s only being evil because the world is unfair to him or every punk that lets his own dislikes or laziness overcome his own personality.
You know what unfair is? Being able to know what kind of person everyone is before you even talk to them. Smelling evil so potent on a motherfucker that you want to sink your fingers in his chest and pull that tar out until the screaming stops. Having the psychotic urge to murder people that you’ve never even met, for the sole reason that your God decided that you ought to be his right hand without your choice in the matter, that’s unfair.
But unlike Evil McBlacknails over there, that Paladin puts on his helmet, sharpens his sword, and then continues walking through crowds of people day by day, resisting the urge. Seeing evidence of injustice so black it makes him sick. Seeing murderers and rapists walk the street, watching good men hang as evil ones pull the lever. Saving his righteous violence for when the situation exactly, specifically, precisely calls for it. Surgically removing that which is most evil.
Because he’s a Paladin. And if he gave in to the urge, what would he be?
Who will right the true wrongs if not he?
It’s not about not falling as a Paladin. It’s about falling so fucking hard you crash through the planet and stand up on the other side.”