Using poison takes the same line: Attacking someone with something that he has no chance at defending himself, instead of besting him due to superior skill. On top of that, said someone will likely die an agonizing death, eliminating the possibility of letting him live. (And don't claim that Fortitude-saves count as 'defending'.)
Thus, using poison willingly and knowingly is without doubt a dishonourable act.
That may describe some real-world poisons, but how many poisons in Pathfinder cause agonizing death?
You can defend yourself against poisoned weapons by not getting hit, or by killing the enemy first, just as you can when someone's trying to stab you. (And there are many other ways; antitoxins, magic, etc.)
That is, if we assume the poison is on your weapon. By one technical definition, poison is something you eat/drink, and venom is something that gets in your blood. I think most people would agree it was dishonourable to offer someone poisoned food.
What's really dishonourable is going against an agreed set of rules. If we decide that fighting with arrows is unfair, then is becomes dishonourable for us to use archery on one another. If we use the rule for long enough, we'll start to think anyone with a bow is a barbarian.
Then again, most historical codes of honour were very much in the interests of the ruling class. "It's not honourable for peasants to use crossbows, which can penetrate my armour. Swords, which my armour is highly effective against, are honourable. It's not honourable to use ambushes against knights like me, but it's fine to use them against any other enemies."
That's one of my main problems with Paladins, to be honest.
Honor was a set of rules used to oppress anyone who wasn't noble, especially peasants and women. And actions that need to be taken to "restore honor" tended to be extreme, to say the least; suicide or a deathmatch on the "field of honor" or just straight up killing a person because they didn't want to marry someone.
Why is honor presented as an inherently good thing, when so much evil came of it?
IT is fantasy genre and not non-fiction.
|
Knights in shining armor with a goody-goody code of honor who can do no wrong is an ancient trope that's basically ingrained in pop culture and that's what the code was referring to.
I think the flaws in this though are why people are looking to other sources, be it Steve Rogers or Superman, or perhaps making a chosen one paladin who resembles Cardcaptor Sakura in a lot of ways. Even Brieanne of Tarth is functionally a paladin in a lot of ways at the same time being a deconstruction of this troupe.
A knight in shining armor is only one Paladin.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Lazy lazy lazy me reposting the story from an old post!
I feel guilty. I have to confess. I caused a paladin to fall. At level 1. In his prelude.
This player had been wanting to play a paladin for some time and finally he could. The character had a background related to another recurring character from previous campaigns: he was looking for his sister who was also a paladin and had disappeared some years ago during a battle. Nobody knew where she had gone but the dryads who were the messengers and chosen ones of his goddess asking him to go on a long trip away from his home to search her, as they sensed she was in danger and she needed to be saved.
He traveled for years, carrying the word of the goddess everywhere he went and helping the poor, the hungry and everybody who needed help. He was the kind of paladin who'd rather get eaten by goblin babies than harming them.
This was all in the character background. Then we started the prelude with him finally finding out that his sister was actually the leader of a demon worshipping cult who had been ravaging the world for many years (she always wore a full plate so nobody knew what was under her armor. Many people thought she was not even human... and she wasn't, she was half elven).
So the poor broken man went back to his hometown to tell the dryads that he had failed and it was too late for his sister.
And here is where I messed up.
«We already knew. We sensed it through our bound with the goddess»
«Then, if you knew why didn't you tell me?»
I improvised too much on this conversation and I started to make it worse and worse instead of fixing it.
I don't remember the exact words, but the dryads ended telling him:
«We needed you. We only wanted your sister to be ours again»
Not «be with us», not «be one of us».«Be ours». The paladin was horrified. Had he been an slave for his goddess or for the dryads all those years? Why did they send him in a nonsense search for his sister? Was he only a pawn for a tyrannic goddess?
I could have just stopped and tell him I just had messed up and correct my words. But I went on.
Finally the paladin was so angry that he attacked the dryad, attempting to kill her.
What could I do? She was a messenger for his goddess. I made him fall. And he interpretated that he was being rejected by his goddess because he had realized her true colors.
He was told to go away and don't come back.
Tomorrow I will tell how this continued and how the paladin finally ended becoming a pretty cool antipaladin, who the player enjoyed playing but wasn't what he had intended to play anyway.
We left our poor fallen paladin exiled, without a cause and with nowhere to go. Here I was improvising everything as all I had planned for this character had been screwed up.
In this setting there were two separate worlds: the above level world, where rules and laws were very strict and deshumanizing; and the underground world, where the only rule was survival of the fittest. Most people from above never went underground as they wouldn't survive there. But the opposite was also true, as visitors from the underground were often caught in legal traps or punished for crimes they didn't even know.
There were some undead communities underground. Most undead were intelligent and not necessarily hostile even though they were of evil alignment. They mostly wanted to unlive in peace.
So our wandering paladin encountered an angry dark elf from the underground yelling to a police officer, telling him that his friend had been killed and asking him to do something about it. The paladin approached, wanting to help, and asked what was going on. The officer answered that he couldn't be of any help, as the man who had been killed was an undead, and undead didn't have legal rights.
The paladin was confused. All his life he had been told that undead were nothing but a mindless plague. But that elf actually cared for his undead friend. He was curious about it and asked many questions: «Was your friend intelligent?» «Why was he killed?»
The elf kindly answered all the questions and he ended thinking that undead were only different life forms that, for some reason, were oppressed an despised.
The worse part came when, trying to come to an aggreement, the officer said that he had found a way to punish the killer: as he had left the corpse in the street, he could sue him for throwing garbage illegally.
The paladin, who had always revered life, was completely mad at the officer. How could he be so disrespectful?
Realizing he actually he did know nothing about undead and life in the underground, he decided to go on a journey to understand this alternate life forms a bit better.
Long story short, he went underground on a self discovery trip, found an old shrine where a long lost zombie-god manifested to him, and he became his paladin, making a new oath to defend life in all its forms and to fight for equal rights for the undead.
He is now the leader of an army of undead, monsters and dark elves. But he still has a paladin's mind in a lot of ways. He is a great character, and his player loves him... But still it isn't exactly what he intended to play, I just messed everything up and I ended having to improvise the whole story for him.
|
Yeah, absolution looks super situational and largely pointless as far as Paladins falling. Breaking charms and compulsions is nice, making the spell a slightly less useful version of break enchantment, but unless someone is really Johnny on the spot it's not going to help the dominated Paladin from falling. Unless you just ignore the ludicrous rule in the first place.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Honor was a set of rules used to oppress anyone who wasn't noble, especially peasants and women. And actions that need to be taken to "restore honor" tended to be extreme, to say the least; suicide or a deathmatch on the "field of honor" or just straight up killing a person...
No, it wasn't.
The romanticized image of the knight in shining armour certainly is a product of poetry and often doesn't correspond with historical reality, but thinking that every noble was an oppressive scumbag and the chivalric code was geared towards oppressing women and peasants is even more wrong. As wrong as you can be, in fact.The chivalric code was not actually set in stone, it was not a codex like a law, it was a somewhat "floating" concept, comparable to how the meaning of "gentlemanly conduct" is not set in stone.
But it did consist of virtues that a knight was encouraged to obtain. Those virtues usually included:
Humility / Modesty
Dignity
Kindness
Courtly / Polite Conduct
Bravery
Self-Restraint / Discipline
Clemency / Generosity
Courtly Love
Loyalty
Steadfastness
Thus, it was actually meant as a guideline for a knight to become a better person and in extension a better ruler, if he happened to possess some territorial power.
And your part about "restoring honour" is complete nonsense. There was no ritual suicide or ritual killing amongst knights to "restore honour" - medieval Europe wasn't Japan.
There were no set rules how to "lose honour" and how to "regain honour". If a knight violated laws, or betrayed his liege lord, he was punished by him and if he sinned, it was up to the knight to go to confession or not and up to the priest to set a penance.
@Kileanna: This sounds like a happy little accident. If the fall of a paladin furthers a story in a meaningful way, then it was handled correctly.
Honor was a set of rules used to oppress anyone who wasn't noble, especially peasants and women. And actions that need to be taken to "restore honor" tended to be extreme, to say the least; suicide or a deathmatch on the "field of honor" or just straight up killing a person...No, it wasn't.
The romanticized image of the knight in shining armour certainly is a product of poetry and often doesn't correspond with historical reality, but thinking that every noble was an oppressive scumbag and the chivalric code was geared towards oppressing women and peasants is even more wrong. As wrong as you can be, in fact.The chivalric code was not actually set in stone, it was not a codex like a law, it was a somewhat "floating" concept, comparable to how the meaning of "gentlemanly conduct" is not set in stone.
But it did consist of virtues that a knight was encouraged to obtain. Those virtues usually included:
Humility / Modesty
Dignity
Kindness
Courtly / Polite Conduct
Bravery
Self-Restraint / Discipline
Clemency / Generosity
Courtly Love
Loyalty
SteadfastnessThus, it was actually meant as a guideline for a knight to become a better person and in extension a better ruler, if he happened to possess some territorial power.
And your part about "restoring honour" is complete nonsense. There was no ritual suicide or ritual killing amongst knights to "restore honour" - medieval Europe wasn't Japan.
There were no set rules how to "lose honour" and how to "regain honour". If a knight violated laws, or betrayed his liege lord, he was punished by him and if he sinned, it was up to the knight to go to confession or not and up to the priest to set a penance.
Or you could just be a scumbag and pay the pope or go off and murder a few folks who believed in a different religion and you were considered honorable again.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Or you could just be a scumbag and pay the pope or go off and murder a few folks who believed in a different religion and you were considered honorable again.
Well, I am sorry that I have to say it this directly, but I am afraid that you won't get it any other way: That sentence sufficiently proves that you are absolutely ignorant about history, have no desire to learn about history and refuse to acknowledge how warped your view of history is. In other words: A strong opinion, but no clue whatsoever.
Let me give you a friendly hint: History is a lot more complex, nuanced and grey than you can apparently even begin to fathom.Since trying to illuminate the topic at hand with a historical anecdote went this poorly, we should probably stay in the fictional world of Golarion in this thread.
Or you could just be a scumbag and pay the pope or go off and murder a few folks who believed in a different religion and you were considered honorable again.Well, I am sorry that I have to say it this directly, but I am afraid that you won't get it any other way: That sentence sufficiently proves that you are absolutely ignorant about history, have no desire to learn about history and refuse to acknowledge how warped your view of history is. In other words: A strong opinion, but no clue whatsoever.
Let me give you a friendly hint: History is a lot more complex, nuanced and grey than you can apparently even begin to fathom.Since trying to illuminate the topic at hand with a historical anecdote went this poorly, we should probably stay in the fictional world of Golarion in this thread.
At the end of the day, honor is a bunch of pretty words used to justify a few ruling over many.
All you have to do is look at the many wars, betrayals, massacres, and outright corruption of Europe’s medieval period to see how high regard those who supposedly lived by a company debit honor had for it.
Basically isonaroc is saying take it to another thread or drop it. Its related but still off-topic somewhat mostly it's taking away form the over all thread discussion
Yeah that is fair.
