Paladins are such stupid fucks

Paladins are such stupid fucks
>hurr how dare you not want to die?! Me smite you!

and their playerbase is cancerous too
>hurr muh deus vult altough cucksaders were killing christians too and crusades were failures

honestly undead are based and do nothing wrong

Truer words were never spoken.

Bad players can make any class or character concept look bad.

Paladins don't post images for ants though.

Paladin Thread?

Paladin Thread.


Veeky Forums, what was the last Paladin (or similarly LG and knightly character) you played as, what was he like and what conflicts/flaws did he have?

> >hurr how dare you not want to die?! Me smite you!
The problem with necormancy is not that you don't die. It's that you don't continue living.

This is why the subjects of necromancy are called "un-dead" instead of "re-living". They aren't alive, even though they aren't dead.
And anything that isn't dead, but is neither living - is nothing more than a robot. And while desecrating human bodies in order to make flesh automatons is a pretty shitty thing to do, this isn't the main problem.

The problem is, necromancy doesn't bring back the very essential part that makes you count as living - call it "soul", if you are so inclined to. In fact, it destroys the soul of the dead living being in order to turn it "un-dead".

This is why paladins don't like necromancers. You are destroying eternal souls of other people without their consent in order to turn them into flesh golems. You are denying people their chance at their judgement and eternal afterlife.
The only people who benefit from such an arrangement are those who are destined for a shitty afterlife that are worse than living out the rest of your existence as a rotting robot - and even eternal hell is better than the void of non-existence that happens when you destroy the undead body.

tl;dr paladins hating necromancy is very, very justified

>hurr how dare you not want to die?! Me smite you!
The problem isn't the immortality, the problem is usually the hundreds killed to obtain/maintain it or the thousands killed by their lack or morals.

Liches ain't reanimating entire graveyards to do house-chores, Vampires aren't ruling kingdoms so the commoners prosper, Cultists of War/Blood gods aren't exactly the most benevolent and Demonic incursions aren't going to solve themselves.

>hurr muh deus vult altough cucksaders were killing christians too and crusades were failures
True, pic related helps.

We were on a weekend campaign with an evil wizard to evict his eviler wizard brother from his wizard tower. I just played him like a modern hardcore missionary in a place like the Congo. Is never blind to the bad but believes in spreading the good. So a pretty worldly guy that has some strong convictions but knows when to let the little things slide instead of being lawful stupid. Especially in understanding that a bad person doing something good for a selfish reason does not negate the good done. It's the sort of outlook that let him travel in a mixed party without chaffing too much.

His flaw is that he gets real fucking preachy when he gets drunk, in that annoying Watchtower kind of way, and is still a sucker for sob stories even if he knows they're fake a lot of the time.

I always thought soul goes to afterlife anyway and the dead don't give a fuck about their corpses being used.

How do you think the corpses are animated without any sustenance?
It's not like the necromant spends his own energy or magic to animate them - he uses the energy derived from destroying the soul of the person he is reanimating instead.
If he used his own energy, he would be barely able to animate one or two skeletons that don't even have muscles to move around.

In Skyrim you can put someone's soul in the soul gem and still reanimate his body.

And you are probably animating it by pulling someone else's soul from the afterlife and destroying it.
Doesn't have to be his soul exclusively to animate his corpse - can be anyone's corpse. Still a shitty thing to do.

Soulgems use the memory of a person/animal for power. People/intelligent beings have very powerful souls, while say, rodents, have no real memory aside from "eat shit run." Also stealing a soul from a person sends them to an afterlife different from their normal one, full of gray, emotionless torture. When you animate a body you just pick their soul from the Dreamsleeve, jam it in the corpse and tell it to do your bidding. They eventually get released back into their afterlife. The "soul" animating the body also screams to be released constantly.

I hate campaigns where undead and demons are all love-and-hugs dindu-nuffins, but people still irrationally hate them without any in-universe explanation. It might have been a funny trope 80 years ago before the concept was beaten to death by millions of jackasses trying to be original

>n fact, it destroys the soul of the dead living being in order to turn it "un-dead".
Citation fucking needed, this is a minority of settings at best.

Shit, off the top of my head, I can't think of ANY setting where this is true. And if you start crying about D&D like a sad little bitch, no, they're empowered via the negative energy plane.

Agreed. Why does the guy who wants to play a paladin have more of a right to play the character he wants than the guy who wants to play a necromancer?

>crusades were failures

They did a hell of a lot more than the undead have.

I cant think of a single published setting where necromancy works like this.

Because we can smite your evil ass and that's our role

If you didn't want to get smitten, you shouldn't have been evil

>The crusades were failures
lol no

Before the first crusade began, the muslim dune coons conquered 2/3rds of Europe - then we kicked their asses back to their sandy hell hole, sounds like a win to me

There's only one I know of and that's Vagrant Story.

>we

lmao bet you're an americunt

He could be German.

>what was he like
Generally a nice guy, willing to help people for the sake of helping, co-leader of the party along with the other party paladin, he handled diplomacy more I tended to handle planning in combat and the like more. Tended to be more of a long term thinker, convinced the party to stop just selling off their more valuable magical items and instead giving them to military forces since the BBEG was trying to horde magical weapons and equipment.

and what conflicts/flaws did he have?
Complex backstory but pretty much if he was owed something or had something it was his. If you denied him payment he would gladly go out of his way to fuck you over. Take his stuff and get beaten. Talk shit, get hit. It was generally due to the principle more than anything else, he didn't care if you were stealing 10 gold or his magic glaive, it was the principle of taking his shit.

Because the party is good and necromancers tend to be evil. Just be a good or neutral character and don't be over the top about your necromancy and a reasonable player should come up with a reasonable reason not to smite your ass.

>tl;dr paladins hating necromancy is very, very justified
In your setting.

whats going on in this thread?

And then the Crusader States fell and literally all of it got taken back the cost of entire fortunes of kingdoms and an entire generation of men. Any historian or even layman history enthusiast could not argue in the slightest that as far as military exploits goes, the Crusades were absolute failures

Does not sound like a win to me.

>Before the first crusade began, the muslim dune coons conquered 2/3rds of Europe
Well most of Spain which they had already begun losing ground in. They had yet to gain any land in Europe outside of Southern Italy (which the Normans had already driven them out of by the time of the Crusades) and Spain.

>then we kicked their asses back to their sandy hell hole
Yes, you drove them out of Spain by attacking the Levant. Are you Irish American? This sounds a lot like the time Irish Americans tried to liberate Ireland from Britain by attacking Canada.

The typical Paladin. Big, Pious and stupid, although he always had the parties best interests at heart (Except the Tiefling, who could go die in a fire because they were demonspawn.)

That being said, he knew he was of more use to his god alive, unlike the last paladin in our party, who, at level 1, decided to charge the horde of 30 zombies and got himself, and everyone that tried to help him, dead.

I want NIDF to leave.

Awkward 18 year old Doomguide in Ravenloft. He can't get any gothic chick to like him within the first two encounters, so he just gives up and goes bash skellingtons.

He also has a hard-on for selfless sacrifice.. which has gotten him loot since it was a test by the local shapechanger.

The Fourth Crusade:

>Innocent III calls for another Crusade, not to the Balkans or Iberia this time, but a true Crusade to Jerusalem!
>Decides to attack Egypt because they think the Caliphates are a unified empire (they're not)
>Boniface wants to get 33,000 troops together in Venice for the Crusade, barely even gets 11,000 troops
>Expected all 33,000 to help pay for the ships Venice builds for them
>Can't pay
>Venice is mad and asks them to take Zara, an allied city, from the Hungarians to help pay the debt
>Also an exile from Constantinople (Alexius) shows up claiming that if Boniface gets him into the city, he'll be sworn in as King by the populace and he can aid the Crusade with Constantinople's resources
>Christians attack allied Zara, take it
>Innocent is furious, and he excommunicates Venice and the Crusaders
>After winter they go to Constantinople
>Constantinople's commoners don't give a shit about Alexius, literally who
>Crusaders attack Constantinople anyway >Eventually take it after losing to OP Varangian guards a few times
>Crusade ends with nobody attacking Jerusalem and 2 allied cities being attacked

Sounds like a fucking failure to me

Or the 5th Crusade?

>Attack Damietta in Egypt
>Amazingly they concede and offer Jerusalem because they are actually unified now
>Retards figure they can get a better deal despite not winning a single Crusade since the first
>Continue assaulting Damietta
>Gives Saladin time to arrive and fuck them

I could also mention Barbarossa who drowned

Or how Richard the Lionheart got captured on his way home from another failed Crusade earlier

Maybe you are thinking of the Reconquista?

She was brash and tomboyish - sure, she was a team player, but she was still going out of her way to try and prove herself. At the same time, she took laws and oaths really seriously and wasn't too flexible on them (as long as they were good morally), which was really her focus as a paladin. Vaguely Byzantine themed.

Biggest flaw is that she would pick fights fairly quickly over small insults, and wouldn't accept help from anyone even if it was easier or to her benefit.

Literally every crusade after the 1st was a failure. The only reason the 1st did so well is that the locals had never fought Europeans before and didn't know their tactics yet.

>Smiting undead
The thing with necromancers and undead is that in DnD negative energy is explicitly, objectively evil thing. In addition, undead have serious tendency to munch on brain-tissues of living, and people raising them tend to be massive cuntwaffles because of aforementioned energy.
Liches might have enough of a mind to not chew on cranium of his fellow men, but path to lichdom is path of the damned - explicitly evil.

But really, paladin uses his moral compass and dedication to lawful goodness, so usually undead-smiting is not because someone uses negative energy to brew coffee, but because it represents a serious threat to living.

Plus, paladins are not crusaders. They don't even have to worship god.

The point was never to be funny. The guys who made such works were trying to make a sociopolitical point through fantasy literature. Which is fairly daft, but a coon enough practice. See the idea is that the guys who hate the dindus represent racist white supremacists and or radical fundamental religious parties or something. Basically its there to hate on people the author doesn't like because in his opinion they aren't "enlightened" enough.

Not a published official setting, but necromancy in my homebrew works similarly, though doesn't destroy the soul.

Raising dead basically works by taking a soul you captured and binding it to a corpse. Though unless the soul is bound to obey you, it rises as a free-willed undead. Typically they also use whatever's left of their vocal chords to start screaming, as unless the corpse is fresh, the nerve endings are probably rotting and they're in a great deal of pain.

There's one location known as the Dead Isles that the biggest necromancy cult uses as a "home base," where these rules seemingly don't apply. Attempting to raise the dead there causes a soul to seemingly "appear" and fill the space. This is risky because these undead are more difficult to control and always hostile to both the living and other undead that were raised "properly." No one's sure why this is, and people have learned to stop asking, as the last person who used magic to try to find the answer shriveled into a decayed husk, the same way one would die by having their soul forcefully yanked out.

This is because the Dead Isles are where the barrier between reality and a place with a Eldritch Abomination formed from the souls of unborn, stillborn, any who died before they were "qualified" for any of the existing afterlifes. They have a strong hatred for the living, hence why any of it's raised dead kill on sight, and every time an undead is raised in this fashion, it weakens the barrier, making it easier for the soulbeast to try to destroy it.

>>hurr muh deus vult altough cucksaders were killing christians too and crusades were failures
This line gave you away as an edgy atheist with an axe to grind.

I don't need to be alive to know you're a faggot, OP.

Even death can't stop justice!

Most people would consider the Reconquista a crusade, especially since the Pope gave written consent early on.

Do undead paladins retain their powers?

Maybe, but the object of the crusades was specifically to conquer Jerusalem and the surrounding lands. The reconquista was to take back the Kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. Very different goals.

At that point i think that terminology is less important than intent and historical context and the crusades as we know them to be (efforts at conquering Jerusalem) were objective failures from the military perspective.

Epic post

In your setting maybe. In mine, skeletons are run on magical brains that act like computers, which is why they're only ever used for simple tasks that don't require creativity. You can make them better (part of becoming a lich is making yourself a high-functioning skeleton whilst slowly dissecting yourself hung over a ritual jar that anchors the simulcrum) but that takes shitloads of time. If you want creativity, get a well-preserved corpse and make a zombie. They can run on wetware instead of magic- some zombies can even talk to the living.Ghosts do effect souls, but they don't really scream in agony all that much.

Much of the necromancer hate comes from the use of corpses, which made them outcasts. Naturally, people started to hate the outcasts, and so they started to attack them. Necros fought back, lost, and now 90% of people who become necros are edgelords who just want to see society burn to fuel their edge, enforcing the stereotype. There are a few "goodly" necros, and even a decent lich or two, but on the whole they're just kind of assholes by dint of being a long-time outgroup.

I can't hear you over the sound of there not being a caliphate in Europe as there most assuredly would have been had the incursions of the muslims into Europe not been opposed by a united Christendom

>There isn't a caliphate in Europe

It's forming up again thanks to the boat people and (((Merkel)))

Still, we'll get to fight in the 8th crusade so that's pretty cool

Get the fuck out of here with your larpy crusader shit. United christendom is a fucking myth, there was NOTHING united about Europe. The Catholic church was barely holding on to them. Muslims invaded Europe yes and they got fucked up. That has nothing to do with the fact that the Crusades failed.
The Ottoman pushes into Europe were stopped hundreds of years after the Crusades and France contained the Umayyads in Spain.

Europe bled itself, and fought itself more than Islam ever did.

The wars of religion, the wars between the Carolingians and the HRE, the conquest of England, wars with scotland and ireland, squabbling Italian states and many many more.

Obviously there was some threat of Islam and it was repulsed but this heroic visage of the mighty and virtuous crusaders defending christendom is a fucking myth.

Europe has always fought itself, for its entire history the crusades are nothing unique in that regard - indeed the unique thing about the crusades is that for however brief a moment the nations of Europe stood side by side for an ideal higher than themselves

Crusaders killed Christians as well as Muslims in the crusades, they killed indiscriminately. Yes many crusaders were religiously motivated but the Church and the Kingdom's involved had much more to gain than a simple ideological war

There were incentives in addition to the ideological motivations, but to discount ideals entirely is foolishness

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the Crusades as right or wrong, the fact is that they failed. Thats pretty unarguable. Equating direct invasions of Europe with the crusades is not honest as they dont have nearly the same context.

Its not bait, its just true. The crusades failed. If they werent then why isnt Jerusalem a European state now? Why was there no Kingdom of Jerusalem now formed into a modern state? There isnt, because the crusades were not successful. There was only Palestinians and now Israel.

Failed to do what? Clear the muzzies out of Europe? They clearly succeeded in that

Failed in regard to seizing the middle east? Sure

You realize that any chance of an Islamic invasion of Europe basically stopped after Charles Martel at Tours, right?

The Crusades weren't some glorious fight against Muslims who would overwhelm Christendom if they didn't fight. Most Crusades didn't accomplish any tactical objectives of any note, or spent more time bickering with the locals of the crusader states on tactics than working together. The Byzantine Empire was taking most of the brunt of the fighting from the East anyway.

>Are you Irish American? This sounds a lot like the time Irish Americans tried to liberate Ireland from Britain by attacking Canada.

Don't forget the "Seljuk Turks are encroaching on Anatolia and accosting pilgrims! Lets go beat up the Saracens in the Levant!" motive for kicking the whole thing off.

Because obviously they are some sort of hivemind and taking a bunch of port cities in the holy land will do fuck all to dissuade or even annoy the Turks who have literally no connection to them

The object of the crusades was not to push any islamic armies out of europe. They were very clearly the attempts to conquer Jerusalem and parts of Syria. Claiming that any wars fought on home territory were "crusades" is just an attempt to make them look less like shitty failures for your pride.

The Crusade is called by the Pope, it had a VERY specific meaning and purpose. A crusade was not just any skrimish with muslims.

Some did, that's what I like

As to there not being a possibility of a new Islamic invasion, one can far more easily say that with the benefit of history to look back on than those living in the times and reeling from from

Yeah about that,

7th Crusade ended in 1254, pic related is the Ottomans controlling like a big old chuck of Europe 300 ears later.

Yes they eventually fell, but to economic stagnation and the then Great War (while fighting alongside Western European allies) instead of MUH DEUS VAULT

Read a book, you ignorant shit.

Clear what muslims out of Europe? The Moors weren't pushed out until the early 15th century, and the only time the crusades ever helped with that is when a crusading force helped retake a Portguese town - ironically, the only victory of that whole crusade. There were some Muslim holdouts in Sicily, but nothing serious after a few centuries. The Balkans only came mostly under Ottoman rule after the crusades stopped.

Don't care, pushed out the muzzies anything else is a side quest

>Waah why do people play fantasy roleplaying different than me waaaaahh

You are a man child.

Cool, so we repay the favor in the 8th

>Claiming that any wars fought on home territory were "crusades"
Well, there WAS a lot of crusade related battles in Europe, it's just that they were all crusaders attacking other Christians. Because the crusades really were a clusterfuck of monumental proportions.

And so the larpy crusader emerges

I'm skeptical of that, since for a lot of Europe the muslims weren't anywhere nearby. They had a lot more local things to consider anyway, like the wars they often had between kingdoms (aside from the 13th century, which was surprisingly peaceful). I doubt there was any real fear of a boogeyman Islam conquering them - main reason for the Crusades was for resources, prestige, and some religious fervour.

Go prep your bull

You're right, specifically defensive battles fought in Europe were not a part of the Crusades. Every Crusade was an offensive war if my knowledge is correct.

>wheredoyouthinkyouare.jpeg

Sometimes it was offensively defensive though - like, 'send a few armies over so we can bolster the Crusader States.'

Im on Veeky Forums
Not /pol/
Get back to your containment board

They pushed all the way to France, the common people might not have known about world affairs but anyone who did would consider them a looming threat

>Implying religiously motivated wars of eradication won't be condemned up and fucking down the entire international community

DO you not see how ISIL is getting gangbanged by the Iraqi Army and the Peshmurga (both muslims) while supported by an international coalition? The fuck makes you think the world will make an exception for a similar "cleanse the land of heretics and infidels" attempt by Euro Christians?

Its not the 12th century anymore

...

The Saracen menace was a common boogeyman in stories, particularly middle english bardic tales like Sir Gowther and partially Man of Law's tale. But generally the people of Europe had more to fear from neighboring feudal lords who would send chivalrous knights to fuck up their hamlets than the big bad Saracen. Not to say that Islamic invasion wasnt a threat, it was. But its the equivalent of a screenshot of European history compared to the bloody history they have with each other.

>ISIL is getting gangbanged

They're getting supported by major powers, not to mention the "international community" has no power - Russia and China might care, but Russia would probably join in

Well, the crusades against the slavs were pretty successful.

Veeky Forums You never hear faggots on /v/ or /pol/ telling people to go back to Veeky Forums
Its you cancerous faggots that pop up everywhere where you arent wanted.

Cool, but the thing is I don't care if you want me - in fact I rather enjoy that you don't

Succ my epeen grognard

Crusades are the basis of every heroic fantasy story ever written, though. Good underdogs working together and triumphing over evil overlord is the ideal they set, whether they worked like that in real life or not. We wouldn't have Lord of the Rings without them, for example.

Thanks for making the board worse. At least try to play a fucking tabletop game yeah?

>but Russia would probably join in

You do know the only reason Russia is taking such an interest in the region right now is because they are BFFs with Assad and have close relations with several other rulers in the region right? That gives them incentive to stamp down on an insurgent force in the region but obviously the same relationships would prevent them committing to something like a neo-crusade.

>China might care
Pakistan certainly will, and India will certainly try to take advantage of that. Since China is both at odds with India and super best friends with Pakistan as part of Indian containment/access to trade in the Arabian sea China will almost certainly start caring alot.

Yeah for sure. The idealistic view of the Crusades as adventures of virtue and heroics is great material for writing. Not so great when trying to have an actual discussion on it.

np

Cool, then maybe in addition to a crusade we can get China, india and pakistan to nuke eachother

Sounds suspiciously like a refugee wanting the benefits of a different board but refusing to assimilate into the culture

Sounds kind of familiar dont it

Yeah it's almost like unchecked immigration is a bad thing

...

Last LG character?
>LG Rogue associated with the church and his hometown's guards, as a member of the town guard

Former streetrat and general trouble maker stealing to get by in a medium sized merchant hub town.
Got caught by a paladin that was passing through and after a heart to heart and some time in a workhouse got adopted and a position of squire.

He's very much about the spirit of the law over RAW, but will enforce RAW as he believes that although it isn't perfect it's there for a reason.

Wanted to join the same order as his adopted father, but he's just not a paladin and devout as he tried to be nothing took.

Didn't particularly stop him though, so he sharpened his old streetrat skills into investigation tools instead.
He can be pretty cagey and manipulative, but he genuinely likes others and is just trying to help them find their own, better, path 9 times out of 10.

He's a real "true superiority lies in being better than your former self" type.

He will also shank you directly in the kidneys if you're trying to abuse the law with actively malicious intent or actively harm others.

Sounds like a pretty good character senpai

u mad bonehead?

Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

They pushed all the way to France once, and then they'd been continually pushed away for centuries.

I know modern politics and ideas are coloring things, and maybe perceptions of how the medieval world viewed others, but I'm fairly certain most people in Europe were far more concerned with their fellow Christians than the vague maybe threat of Muslims, if they happened to break through Spain or the Byzantine Empire or something.

>t. Demi Lichato

From my reading, southern Italy was quite bad around the turn of the millenium, what with muslim pirates taking slaves.
Of course, it wasn't helped by Amalfi helping them.

>undead
A.P.E.C.
Anti-Positive Energy Constructs.

Using updated shit like that. Get with the times Grampa, you are making us look bad.

>updated
outdated. Damn auto-correct on my smart phone. So hard to type in a crypt.

also in skyrim you can only take part of their soul, and pass as dead enough to walk though a place where souls are eaten like candy even though you still have most of your soul and are still walking around

isn't anti-positive energy, just negative energy?

>crusades
>failures

Keep sucking that muzzie cock, delusional roleplayers