Killing ticks is not an honor duel. They do not get to name champions to fight in their stead.I'm going to make my silly reply before I make my serious one.
Silly: Yes they can. They can summon their patron deity, The Tick of superhero parody fame! Spoooooon!
Serious: I'm impressed you're defending the Paladin at such length and detail. As someone with an interest in the Paladin class, you have my thanks.
Though this isn't your fault, I am kind of discouraged these sort of topics seem to keep coming up.
Paladins are a symbol of hope and virtue, but they remain mortal. I wouldn't hold actual Good Outsiders, embodiments of Good as a concept and philosophy, to some of the strict measures some people seem to apply to Paladins. The notion some seem to hold to of stripping Paladin class features over one or two modest violations of the code seems excessive, and... honestly Not Fun from a game design perspective.
Actually, one of the situations you cited about a Paladin breaking a law to save a healer's life has an interesting resemblance to an old video game, Final Fantasy IV (aka Final Fantasy II in earlier translations; long story). You actually start the game playing a Dark Knight who used to work under a Lawful Good king whose actions are becoming Lawful Evil. The Dark Knight initially obeys, but begins questioning these decisions. He eventually leaves the king's service, and 'atones' in spectacular fashion; after a lengthy quest to prove he truly wishes to set things right he emerges as a Paladin!
Granted, this was written by a Japanese staff back in the early 1990s and there may be little bits of culture dissonance on the finer points relative to what western audiences expect... but the basic story has some interesting parallels to points you're discussing.
Honestly, the redemption quest is an old staple of courtly romance and paladin fiction. The quintessential paladin story is the grail quest, and the only three paladins who succeeded were Sir Galahad, who was so pure as to be inhuman; Sir Percival, who raised innocence to the level of a special ed disability; and Sir Lancelot, who was trying to atone for having an affair with his best friend and liege lord Arthur's wife.
Thankfully Pathfinder did away with the twaddle from 3.5 about paladins who sin becoming to sullied to ever be paladins again. Now all it takes is an Atonement, and all an Atonement takes is sincere regret and that being accepted by the relevant god.
As for Atonement, I think that the 2500 GP of rare incenses and offerings for a willful violation should be looked at as an "average retail price" rather than a set value where forgiveness for murdering twelve virgins costs the same as it does for only one. Moreover, I think the confessor should set some penance for the transgression, making amends if possible, tithing some portion of worldly wealth or going on a quest if not. And the penance would also be appropriate to the god. One would expect that Abadar, for example, would be big on the tithing angle as well as doing an exact accounting on the number of GP required for amends for any particular sin, both to himself as god and to any parties injured by the fallen paladin's action. Shelyn, on the other hand, would probably just want flowers and artwork, though then again those cost money too.
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That's one of the things I'm pleased by, that we're seeing rules systems be incrementally more clear about their intent on Paladin behavior, requirements, and atonement.
Personally, I'd like to see the rules be more explicit about whether a single moderate transgression is a 'fall' inducer or not. I'd like to see the specific intent made obvious so we could cut down on how many of these threads we have. It is the only regular-PC class in the system I can think of that consistently causes so much trouble because interpretation of how Perfect a Paladin has to be varies so widely.
Whether that's a problem with the players or the game system (or both?) is hard for me to say, but... I would actually be happy if we saw Paizo just come out and say "We intend Atonement/loss-of-powers/etc. to be handled in Fashion X or Fashion Y. It can of course vary for your campaign as needed, but this is how we meant for it to work."
Ah, I think I've found some of the source of the confusion/contention. The 3.0 version of the Atonement spell has this line in it: "Restore Class: A paladin who has lost her class features due to unwillingly or unwittingly committing an evil act may have her paladinhood restored to her by this spell. Note: A paladin who willingly and deliberately commits an evil act can never regain her paladinhood."
The bolded "Note" was removed from 3.0 to 3.5, but no mention of this rather significant change is made in the free 3.5 D&D Accessory Update PDF, thus leading to a lot of these discussions.
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Never did like that clause, not even back in AD&D when I started playing table games. I always preferred the "no one is beyond redemption" motif, even if it doesn't appeal to the types who prefer a more vengeful sort of justice.
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That bit about "unwillingly" committing an evil act causing a loss of powers rankles me too. A heroic character is likely to be upset with themselves, deeply so, for being mentally controlled and their body used to do evil things.
However, I would expect they would be their own worst critic in this case. I cannot imagine a Good deity punishing the victim (the magic-controlled Paladin) for that.
Yeah... this is getting silly, in the discouraging sense.
Depends on the paladin in question. Not all paladins are the same. What would a rogue do in that situation? Too many possibilities to list? Exactly.
Some may well go with the ruling as it is the law of the land- Innocent or not, the rules are the rules and the person in question was found guilty. This would be a more lawful-centered paladin.
Some may want to appeal the case further.
Some may want to use force to break the "corrupt" institution and free the innocent.
There is no "correct" or "right" here.
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That bit about "unwillingly" committing an evil act causing a loss of powers rankles me too. A heroic character is likely to be upset with themselves, deeply so, for being mentally controlled and their body used to do evil things.
However, I would expect they would be their own worst critic in this case. I cannot imagine a Good deity punishing the victim (the magic-controlled Paladin) for that.
Yeah... this is getting silly, in the discouraging sense.
Yeah, that bit has gotten some downright horrific abuse over the years by paladin griefers. Right along with the supposedly good gods going the "blame the victim" route actually.
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In PF, you can still lose your paladinhood under coercion by having your alignment forcibly changed (say, by a cursed item) or being forced to violate the code of conduct. This seems unfair if you think of it as punishment, but note that when you atone there is no additional cost for penance in this specific situation.
Fluffwise, I like to think of the loss of paladinhood in such a situation as a divine circuit breaker. Your god is removing your powers so that they can't be abused by a third party. As soon as the threat is gone, you can use atonement to reset the circuit. Ergo, your god is protecting you and yours rather than punishing you.
More palatable but still problematic. Atonement requires you finding a minimum 9th level cleric of your religion with a hole in his schedule. If you're on a quest or anywhere where 9th+ level clerics aren't just hanging out on the streetcorners, ready to give you absolution at a moment's notice, you're a little screwed. And even if you do find a priest, quite honestly the Atonement spell is a scam waiting to happen. Get some penitent rube who can no longer Detect Evil willing to come in and blow 2500 for "offerings" and "rare incense" to get forgiveness for his sins? All it takes is a good Bluff and Knowledge Religion check to fake being a holy man of any particular faith. Tell him that before he can truly atone and be forgiven in the eyes of the Divine Whomever, he must do some reasonably difficult holy quest or pilgrimage, and by the time he gets back, you'll be long gone along with the 2500 GP he paid for the "rare incense."
Honestly, you think a paladin has enough skill to know the difference between rare incense and the cheap stuff?
Admittedly this would be a cruel trick to play, but then again it could be entertaining if the false priest managed to grant real absolution, since the atonement is actually up to the god, and if they hear fervent prayers mixed with proper theology?
Of course there are other ways to get around this. Previous campaign I did I had Pardoners running around like from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, selling assorted holy relics, including indulgences, which are basically scrolls of Atonement in a variant form. The paladin (and later grey guard) had really pleased the Pope, so was granted a fairly large stack of these for his quest. If there was any sin he needed to atone for, he just needed to go through the stack, find the indulgence in the right denomination, and sign his name to it.
I could see the Church of Abadar going wild for this sort of thing. Great moneymaker for the church, and a logical way for the god of merchants to deal with his paladins.
Of course, great until the inevitable counterfeiting ring started printing indulgences with Abadar's name on them.
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Indulgences-on-the-go sounds like a concept that could be right at home In grim-and-gritty Mendev actually...
Another approach could be to revisit the old ritul magic rules/incantations. Those rules not only had a knack for feeling more "magical" than standard magic, but it could be something you'd only need an adept for.
Then again, can't help but think it should be kept highly customizable to match the faith, paladin, and the nature of what she needs to atone for. Of course that's built into vanilla atonement to a degree already...
Wait, so what happened with the Paladin and the milkmaid's son?
The judicial system isn't perfect, but its better than guilt being decided by if a man can convince a few powerful people that he is innocent.
As opposed to convincing twelve rubes picked off the street at random?
At the end of the day, the Paladin is still going to have to face the fact that any system is imperfect-- and their choice is either to occasionally defy the system, or to occasionally tolerate its mistakes. The problem is that some people think that Paladins forced to make this choice should be punished for making the wrong choice... and some people think both choices are wrong.
HOLY WOW THIS THREAD CAME BACK FROM NOWHERE!
In PF, you can still lose your paladinhood under coercion by having your alignment forcibly changed (say, by a cursed item) or being forced to violate the code of conduct. This seems unfair if you think of it as punishment, but note that when you atone there is no additional cost for penance in this specific situation.
Fluffwise, I like to think of the loss of paladinhood in such a situation as a divine circuit breaker. Your god is removing your powers so that they can't be abused by a third party. As soon as the threat is gone, you can use atonement to reset the circuit. Ergo, your god is protecting you and yours rather than punishing you.
This... is actually a great way of looking at it. I really approve.
One other way that I always looked at it (though it's undermined by terms such as "unwillingly") is that when a Paladin (or anyone at all) fails their will save, they've done just that: fail. Their will was not strong enough, and thus they became corrupted through it. It's similar in some ways to being tempted into sin: if their will isn't strong enough, they are deceived and commit evil.
However, there is another side to this coin, very similar to blahpers'. It is a form of protection, but not just for you: it's a form of protection for the innocent as well, and guarding them from potential corruption.
While gods are super-powerful, it's been repeated often that even they (outside of Pharasma) don't necessarily know all the details of the future. That means good gods have got to nip bad things in the bud and do so hard... or else the consequences could be dire indeed. One reason they "punish" their paladins when the paladin's will has been broken, is because they need to establish boundaries.
If they are too permissive about that sort of thing (and, as lawful good gods, they aren't exactly the "permissive" type anyway), it could easily foster an improper sense that, "it doesn't matter" which in turn could foster an attitude of entitlement and could lead to more abuses with the excuse "I didn't realize it was wrong." or "It wasn't my fault." (or simply, "They did it and didn't get in trouble, why should I?") In short, it could cause moral myopia amongst paladins at large.
Soon many people, emboldened by the Paladin's immoral example (willing or not), may have their moral fiber weakened. The gods simply don't know whether people will follow the paladin or not (but they know mortal nature to follow the charismatic blessed-by-the-gods' guy's example), or how often the paladin will be susceptible to such effects (and he's already flubbed it up once pretty badly), and thus must establish a "baseline" of "this is wrong, you must do something to set it right".
And while it's a difficult something, Golarion seems to be a pretty high-level world, over-all (given the NPCs in the back of the GMG). I'd say that there's probably not too much difficulty finding that cleric.
Also, they actually do give some amount of leeway, especially if the paladin simply didn't know and/or couldn't do anything about it, at least if the modules can be believed. As an example, I recently finished playing through a module in which a Paladin had been part of a terrible injustice, but remained a paladin: in all likelihood, it was because he had been so both under mind control and deceived. Further, he couldn't have done anything about the situation himself after the fact and he never realized it was wrong. He believed that he had done the right, legal, and just thing the whole time. When it was proven that he was incorrect, you better believe he worked at making restitution (I managed to convince him not to sacrifice his life to make up for it... barely).
This also extends into the "blame the victim" question. Gods may or may not do so, but here's the trick: a failure of the will, unlike a failure of the body (in fortitude or reflexes) is a failure of the person's innate nature. And, unless I'm mistaken, there's few instances where a god simply says, "No, you may not enter heaven forever, 'cause you got dominated once." I'd like to know if such things occurred (and the Dragonlance gods don't really count, because that one's just... a weird setting issue where "balance" is some sort of strange (un)holy grail of necessity).
Also, for cognitive dissonance between what gods say are moral, and what they do, and how that can be explained, I made a post here: effectively, if you look at creator God(s) as computer programmers, they can instruct the programs in the way they should run (because they created them for a purpose), but are literally above running themselves in that same way, and any avatar-like elements they put in could, in fact, "cheat" (and act seemingly "out of character") and not be contravening the "good" Divine Will. This kind of view would go a long way to explaining the Grecian (and similar) myths and why gods behaved as they did toward mortals (Hera hated her hubby constantly doing what amounts to looking at internet porn all the time, Zeus really couldn't be bothered with treating reality too seriously, Athena wouldn't be able to punish Triton directly but making his "porn" - a faithful priestess/program of hers - into "squick" (Medusa) would work to punish him, and ascended gods could just be super-augmented "programs" rather than truly "ascended" as the other gods. Because ultimately, our reality isn't "real" to them. (It's not a perfect analogy, but it's something.)
Finally, I have to say, that Lawful doesn't inherently "respect 'the' system" regardless of the system. They respect a system, but it might be a very different one than "yours". That means that paladins on different sides of the border can clash strongly with each other about the "right" system and, if given the proper authority, can declare legalities in one system "illegal" in their own, and thus take action within their purview. Not all paladins will or should do this, but some will, and that is actually a perfectly justified lawful good behavior in those cases. A paladin who looks and sees the systematic abuses of humanoid rights in Geb isn't going to care one whit what the laws of Geb say: the entire country can bend over and get ready to take its smiting.
But Geb is an extreme example. Using Geb here is like using Hitler (Godwin!): it can skew perspective by being too "big".
So lets look at something a little more down-to-home.
Galt. Galt is a chaotic neutral country known for beheading nobility. They are not evil. They are chaotic neutral.
River Kingdoms. The River Kingdoms are also - as a whole - chaotic neutral, but mostly that's due to the fact that there are a slew of "micro-countries" that disagree with each other about all sorts of things at all different times. One of the River Kingdoms, is Liberthane, run by a Paladin and ex-noble of Galt. His goal? Overthrowing and abolishing not one, but two (or, if you count the Riverkingdoms individually, dozens) of governments and establishing himself as the new liege-lord of both the River Kingdoms and Galt. This will be done through occasionally-violent means, and he is taking steps toward those means every day, working at them, and occasionally engaging in them. Without losing his paladinhood. That... is not respecting the system.
Certainly paladins from Nirmathas don't respect the authority of Molthune, even though the latter country is, as a whole, lawful while the former is chaotic.
A paladin who comes from Cheliax, Nidal, and possibly even Ustalav who thinks the system works and is worth preserving are simply fooling themselves (and are likely very rare and not long to be paladins from the sheer amount of evil they must actively assist to uphold the "system").
That said, a Paladin is not likely to take any sign to be "Whelp! Time to break some laws!" That's the last thing a paladin will likely ever do. But it is on their potential-to-do-list.
A paladin from Sargava isn't likely to go around freeing slaves by way of revolution. But he will (and, in fact, the one there does, if I recall) step into the situation there to work hard and encourage slaves to be treated as equals. And he will stop any outright evils that he can.
Reference the OP: it's a poor question, and quite an unfair situation, over all. It's simply a bad set up. A paladin "must act" to save the innocent and punish the guilty, but they "must respect" legitimate authority. If a paladin truly believes a great evil is going to be done to an innocent, they must do what they can to stop it. The limits they can go to will vary from paladin to paladin, from code to code and from faith to faith.
I think when asked of anyone other than a paladin the answer becomes much easier...
A neutral on the first spectrum would be able to talk himself into breaking a law he saw as unfair.
A chaotic would not care about the law
A good would either rescue his friend or allow his friend to be arrested and do his best to clear his name
A neutral on the second spectrum would probably say 'better him than me' and then decide if it was in his best interest/worth the effort to free the character.
An evil would of course go rob the characters house while he's locked away safely and not bother to try and set him free.
A paladin on the other hand...
Clearly the big fault of paladin's version of lawful good is the question of 'is it my personal law that is above all else or is it the local laws are of primary importance' which one is beyond reproach is what needs to be decided at the table.
If the paladins personal code of law trumps local law then he's forfeiting he'd be forfeiting lawful in the interest of good.
If he then flees for canada he's also forfeiting his good by not trying to correct the situation.
So a real paladin would let the character be arrested and do his best to prove the character's innocence, a scenario that is 'less convenient for him personally' but is both lawful and good.
If he failed at proving the character's innocence and say, the character is going to be put to death... Well. then the paladin's going to have to choose between the law and the right and atone for it later.
If this is another 'poll and not an argument of semantics post' which i'm seeing a lot of lately then:
Having a character's life on the line and i knew for a fact they were innocent i'd say the law of truth trumps every other law and i'd free the character and in the interest of doing good attempt to prove his innocence.
I would agree with you except that the OP question is specifically about paladins and the semantics behind Lawful and Good and their mutual exclusivity...
The question becomes first: is a paladin even violating either of these to rescue the character from certain death...
If the paladin holds his own laws higher than the laws of the land then no. He does not violate his lawful. Most paladins are run this way and I think they should try a little harder to do both...
If the law of the land is more important than doing Good then a paladin should know the local law and follow it to the letter thus justifying the good they think being lawful to be.
If it comes down to a 6 second gut reaction do i stop the guillotine or let the law play out i'd like to think that every paladin would choose good over law and play out the drawback to paladin hypocrasy within the campaign which is much more fun and interesting. But thats only because i'm more of a good person than a law person so my perspective is tainted...
Then again the OP IS asking for a perspective so there ya go.
I like Funkybadgers way of doing it, because its very theatrical. putting your life on the line for the sake of good and truth seems like a nice way to go...
The same could be said for the paladin who just lets the character be executed then quietly resurrects him and puts him into the witness protection program...