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I'm in a game where my LE rogue is somewhat patterned after the way Jim Butcher presents he Sidhe (Prideful & not necessarily good or evil by human standards... but bound by the letter of their word & not subscribing to the human concept of "morality") In this game there is an amused GM and a paladin. he paladin voiced concern other the potential need for him to possibly go with a hellknight/antipaladin due to the he definately not-good CN/CG character's actions making him detect evil & realize the rogue was LE. the cross table discussion convinced the group that things would be fine for a paladin. I've so far embraced the letter of my word and bargains in ways that are both keeping with his alignment and convincing the Paladin the various ways he could do the most good... some examples:
- Paladin killed an evil gnome keeping people enslaved (who was being attacked by a lion) in a rage without knowing the gnome was pretty much helpless & wanted to go tell he authorities and turn himself in.>"There are no witnesses who would report this 'crime' and you gave him a quick merciful death rather than the slow torturous one of being eaten alive he was receiving"
-Paladin wanted to try reasoning with an angry mob of commoners the DM admitted we felt we could almost certainly kill them while the rogue considers the paladin a valuable resource capable of greatly enhancing his credibility.> "Tempers are flaring and doing so would only give them an outlet for their fear and panic to spill out into the death of many of those innocents, we should escape unseen instead"
-GM says we smell smoke in the direction away from the mob & paladin fails his perception check to smell it, Rogue/CN cleric do not , but the cleric has no particular interest in going either way and tries asking the party for advice.>Rogue still likes the potential usefulness of the paladin and points out the smoke to him while explaining that some innocent person could be hurt or in need of help at the source of the smoke (rogue doesn't care, but talks the talk & stirs the cool-aid for the useful paladin & intends to continue doing so as best he can), Paladin agrees and group heads towards he smoke but session ends after the group finds a burned down farm with slaughtered animals.

In thinking about it I was pretty sure that I could continue with cheliax(?) style improvements to society without offending the paladin /7 accomplish a heck of a lot of good without changing my alignment or making the paladin fall... But as the devious plans within plans letter of the agreement style character the Rogue is, I was looking into the possibility of Asmodean Paladins (I think the Gm will be peachy with the idea) just to be able to lay some potential groundwork ahead of time. I found an old thread scorning some official mention of the idea being described, but not the idea... and was wondering if anyone knew where the idea was put out by paizo or how well it was fleshed out there?

Wasn't sure where to stick this, general discussion seemed like a fit though

Introduction
The alignment system in both 3.5 & Pathfnder attempts to remove the subjective nature of things like good & evil, causing serious flaws in the process. It goes on to stumble further into a pit of failure due to how extreme and overly broad some of the alignments are and starts digging the hole deeper by making some of the neutral alignments into an extreme third pole rather than something between good/evil making them a poor choice for any kind of morally grey character that does not fit where they “should”.

While I think that using the word Law rather than Order is a flaw that causes many people to interpret it as following/ignoring a legal code of law even if that law is simply not the accepted code (a thief that follows guild rules and ignores the local legal code within the boundaries of the guild rules for simple example). Aside from that wording choice, I think law/chaos is not too bad overall because they do not represent things that are subjective by their very nature as good & evil.

The extreme and absolute nature of the alignment system causes many problems. Lawful a-Hole paladins, the enjoyment/game destroying Chaotic Evil alignment, or the fact that many GM’s refuse to allow evil alignments or players who simply dislike when they are allowed due to the past troubles they have seen it cause in games. The fact that the alignments as written are largely absolute and require quite a few insertions of wishy-washy words like “some”, “many”, or “for example” leads to needless debates between players and GM’s that should not be required any more than it is necessary to debate the realism of hitting someone four times with a big two handed greatsword in the time it takes them to hit you once with a dagger or something. The simple loosening of the absolutes belt would go a heck of a long way to fixing the problems in the system

My Example
In order to show just how deep some of these flaws run, I’ll be using Dexter Morgan from Showtime’s TV series Dexter. He is a serial killer who kills murderers for the catharsis it gives him. As a young child, Dexter witnessed his mother get killed with a chainsaw and was locked in the shipping container it happened in for days until a cop named Harry rescued and adopted him. To put it simply, he is “Damaged” (by his own admission).
His adopted parent Harry realized something was wrong with Dexter before he crossed too far over the line while he was still young, as a result of that realization there was a “Code of Harry“ that dexter follows to keep him safe from society by blending into it as the guy nobody would suspect and targeting victims who nobody will care too much about when they go missing (scumbag killers). He follows the Code of Harry even when doing so puts him at extreme risk of being discovered, not killing a cop he works with and attempting to save his life even though the cop in question discovered his secret, hates Dexter, and plans to arrest him for his crimes once he is able to for example.

Clearly Dexter should be Lawful ____. I think trying to peg him at Chaotic is so absurd that I (hopefully) won’t need to do a breakdown for Law/Chaos like good/evil will get.... But I’ll fill in the “____“ later when I get to that. I’ve been told that the Punisher from the comics is also a good example... but having only seen the movies, he’s bad for me. I’d be thrilled for another good example of the problems if anyone knows him better and cares to follow steps similar to mine below.

The Rules
Now adding rules seems silly at first glance, but they are designed to prevent illegal alignments like “not X” or “both X and Y”.Because the purpose is to expose the flaws in the wording of the alignment system, the alignment he “should” be is only acceptable if we can fit him into it using the exact wording of the alignment system. Clearly this would include the following

Alignment is a tool for developing your character’s identity—it is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two characters of the same alignment can still be quite different from eachother. In addition, few people are completely consistent.

It’s great to admit that the alignment system is not a straightjacket and that it is ok to be outside the lines sometimes, but lets add a condition... specifically any logic train used to fit the subject into an alignment, or reject them from being some other alignment can not also give rise to an illegal alignment like the earlier mentioned “both X and Y” unless you can find a rule that explicitly allows such a strange thing.

The Obvious Choice
Lts start with the obvious choice for his alignment. I’ll be using spoiler tags liberally to keep this post from reaching a gigantic length

Lawful Evil

Tyhe Results were inconclusive forcing us to fall back to the Good/Evil wording to see where poor Dex fits on the Good/Evil Axis because the extreme evil spelled out in the Lawful Evil description is too far over the cliff for a grey character like him.

Good/Evil
You would expect this to be a freaking slam dunk, so lets find out where the non-subjective troubles put Dexter! Spoiler tags again for length

Ok... well that was even worse, apparently Dex is Lawful Good.

Lawful Good?
uhh.....Surely the wording on LG will exclude him from lawful good like LE did right... that should be an illegal alignment of “Not X” right?

Apparently Dexter Really is Lawful good

The LN Straw
Well, lets grasp that last straw just in case

No clear win for LN, even if it did he would wind up with an illegal LN+LG alignment. It's a shame that the neutral alignments don't bill themselves as a middle ground between good & evil instead of the bizarre third pole of neutrality they aim for.
Final Rules
These are important because the goal is to show the alignment system is or is not flawed due to it’s extreme and overly broad nature and attempts to strip subjective concepts like Good * Evil of that subjective nature. If you don’t follow these rules, you will very likely give Dexter an illegal alignment.
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Arguing that Dexter is “Not X” without including the breakdown of an alignment you feel he us and why like I have on the alignments above is horrifically flawed. unless you can find some rule that allows an alignment of “Not X”. His alignment is not important, only that he does not properly fit into the system.

”Clearly he is X” is even worse than the last one because you have to show how he fits that alignment or your post is simply admitting the flaws in the alignment system.

Think I made a mistake? ok sure... back it up without that logic allowing him to qualify for an illegal “Xand Y” alignment using that logic.

The straightjacket bit... Any loophole you make in the straight jacket can not qualify Dexter fir multiple alignments due to no rule allowing it.

”It does not say...” it does not say a lot of things... People that look just like you, but have a goatee are evil twins is not mentioned anywhere either. Lets not debate what the alignment system does not say and focus on what it actually says.

He needs to be clearly excluded by the exact letter of the rules (use RAW) from LG in order to be included in any other alignment or you simply have put poor Dex in an illegal situation of being two alignments at the same time.

Be careful how you use that straightjacket or you could create a situation where almost everyone above level 1 is evil and almost every paladin level 2+ has fallen.

Yes the alignment system could definitely use some overhaul to trim back the extremes and/or a bunch more words like “some” and “many” than it already includes; along with some less extreme versions of the existing alignments

Think about the implications of anything you say before you say it. If you say that "killing is always evil", you have just included most of the people who have ever fought in a war alongside most level 2+ characters.

Ultimate Combat has an optional alternate rule for using armor as DR... "who cares there have been awful attempts before?" you say?... this one is a bit different than usual so I wanted to start a thread about it's good points that address problem in the standard 3.5/Pathfinder system and the things it would allow going forward into high & epic levels where D20 tends to start breaking down badly.

System in a nutshell
Traditionally AC represents both how difficult it is to hit you and how difficult it is t hit you in ways tat affect you through the armor, but this splits the avoidance part from the big sheet of metal blocks the attack part into different components (DS, DR, and Crit Defense).

DS
Basically this is touch AC+shield. It works exactly like AC in normal gameplay. Attackers have to overcome the defender's DS to physically hit them.
DR
Ok, ok... you've seen it before and it sucked, how is this any different you say?... read on! The AC (10+shield+base bonus+natural armor/etc)gets converted to "DR/Armor". "What the heck is that you say?" Basiclly the type of DR that /armor grants depends on the source -and- it stacks with existing DR. meaning a defender with DR5/slash using nothing but a 3 AC shield would have DR7/slash and dr3/armor
- Nonmagical armor: (plain/masterwork). Lets face it this is the stuff you replace as soon as possible and never look back, if your still wearing it, anything that counts as magical attacks is probably scary already in the core system. This kind of armor gives you DR/Magic for the /Armor component or attacks from large opponents (which are pretty scary at those levels usually)
-Magical Armor: something so minor as a +1 enhancement bonus changes the DR to /Adamantine or huge attackers. Lorewise, adamantine is supposed to be this awesome cut through anything ignore hardness metal.. in practice, you use it if you are going to face one of the handful of things with DR/Adamantine... plus, anything huge is usually scary anyways.
-Adamantine Armor: Dr/- and Gargantuan attackers. There aren't many things that big, but usually they aren't the sort of thing you go in unprepared for... No change, but spells that shrink big targets down (even a notch) go from kinda meh to really freaking useful under this system.
-Natural Armor: For the most part the natural armor component is good against one step up on the list above from your armor (the catch & attacker size). Natural armor is suddenly really nice.
- Other: There are also some modifiers that adjust your DR/Armor for unusual attackers (incorporeal/amorphous/swarm/etc), mostly in the form of hoe much of it they ignore... Suddenly a whole bunch of critters become more or less scary, some(like ghosts that ignore AC already) going from really frightening to just frightening, Swarms, potentially more scary
Critical Defense
When an attacker gets a critical threat, instead of another attack roll like normal to confirm, the defender gets to defend like so:
* Critical defense check bonus = creature’s DR + Dexterity
modifier + shield bonus to Defense + deflection bonus
* Critical defense DC = critical hit roll + 1/2 attacker’s base
attack bonus + 1 for each critical feat + 1 for each size
category larger attacker is than target
Seems good overall in the crit aspect

The Strange
The whole thing seems to be a bit odd in that it gives the size of the attacker to overcome DR but doesn't mention size difference until critical defense comes up. It seems kinda strange that two large attackers wearing nonmagical armor might as well be naked to each other, so on and so forth up the chart... It should probably be size differences the whole way I think.

The GoodThe system fixes and improves a few things over core.. Specifically:
- Sure, getting that first set of +1 armor at low levels is kinda nice in core. But it's not going to make any huge differences. Unter this system though +1 armor suddenly has a huge difference against the kind of threats you are starting to face now that angry housecats are no longer a real threat to your existence. In short... it's a real upgrade beyond just a 5% lower chance of being hit in most cases. Low level sells like magic weapon suddenly become a potentially significant contribution at low levels.
The Hmmm....
Lets say they adjust it to take into account size difference. This allows for some stuff that should be interesting:
- Dwarves: let them be treated as one size category larger, it only makes sense given their racial bonus'
- Gnomes: They get a tiny nearly meaningless bonus to AC vrs attacks from giants (or someone does) Let them treat giants as = size unless they are somehow larger
The cool
d20 falls apart as it progresses towards and into epic levels because minor differences between full Bab progression and partial/poor progression classes grow to such a huge difference that anything for full progressions to hit is basically impossible for the rest & anything hard for the rest is practically autohit for full progression. this leads to some really bad rocket tag-like encounters the further you progress even with 3.5's epic progression... just look at some of the silly critters & gear in the epic level handbook if you don't believe me.
Along that same vein of moving towards/into epic play, armor in core has some simple steps of improvement... but they abruptly stop pretty early on once you can afford plate. this sort of thing could allow for armors with higher base AC/dex caps (either/both) without breaking things as badly as it would with the normal core rules. Things like "Dwarf crafted" for a bonus to what it takes for larger sized critters to bypass your DR and/or dex cap or maybe adamantine threaded to make cloth/leather armor count as adamantine (dr/- and gargantuan)and or/ bump the base AC or maybe supremework as a mundane step up from masterwork that works... somehow.. like the above examples A whole new world of potential defensive spells and martial buffs opens up under the armor as DR system that would just freaking break standard core rules in half (big armor buffs or just or not apply at all.

The Rest
So did I miss anything or start babbling like a madman?... What do you think about it?

I was hoping to get some feedback on this from folks since a recent thread about sword canes made me think about actual canes as weapons. I recently had a cerebral hemorrhage (last year) & out of boredom one day in the hospital looking online for cool looking canes I found out they are rather frightening weapons with some training see here here and here for some quick example of things you probably never would have imagined in conjunction with canes! I tried to get a decent selection of videos showing trip/disarm and general lethal hurt

Fighting canes have some special adaptations sometimes made to them
- The rubber cap at the bottom can sometimes be hiding the tip's angled point with the rubber tip popping off when it's flipped up like demonstrated in the third video using the resistance from the ground to give the upward flick even more power before the angled tip is used to impale the target;).
-The handgrip can be pointed like in the first video or the J shape you often see.. that J shape is perfect for tearing out the throat of an attacker(look on youtube and you can find examples of how to as well)
- sometimes there are grooves along the stick part of the cane, the grooves can shred flesh if raked along it.

Canes should probably be an EWP with rogue types getting it free IMO, they should probably be finessable & give a +2 to disarm/trip/grapple(maybe) allowing dex instead of str to CMB/CMD involving the use of the cane

Given the spiffyness they already get, they probably shouldn't be amazing dps monster weapons, maybe something like:
2d4 bldg/pierce 18-20/x3 making them into a good option for dex/finesse based types and opening up trip/disarm/grapple for them without having to take agile maneuvers to do so.