Why Do Only Paladins Fall?

You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often. Why is that?

Alternatively, examples of non-paladins falling?

Because in OG D&D, Paladins had their magic tied to a code of conduct. They were the only one with mechanics behind "falling" and so that is where the meme took hold.

A paladin can be a Robin Hood type, paladins are defined by their faith and their rigid adherence to their beliefs.

Because there are rules for paladins falling but not for anyone else.

You mean, aside from Clerics, Druids, Monks, and Bard, right?

Just because idiot GM's don't treat the others as having fallibility rules doesn't mean they don't exist.

I mean even then, I feel like in media the paladin is always the one most at risk of having a revelation that turns him evil somehow.

Even though the Robin Hood is possibly already literally a criminal and one "Eh, fuck it I'm tired of this shit, just slit his throat" from being evil.

>You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often. Why is that?
Actually, you can find plenty of stories of various heroes and rogues going through crisis of ideals. Fuck, capeshit media are literally nothing but that.

That said, the difference is that "A hero losing faith in their ideals" is a general psychological setup - reflection of real-world human condition in fantastic fiction.
Meanwhile:
A "paladin falling" is an utterly arbitrary gameplay mechanic with no actual reference or rooting in reality that comes from equally abitrary rulesets that dungeons and dragons introduced in relation to their roleplaying and world-building needs.

>You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often. Why is that?
because there were no rule for that in DnD. Seriously nigger, just think for a second before posting...

Anti-Paladin/Blackguards fail when they start their path to redemption. Nobody is truly evil.

>A "paladin falling" is an utterly arbitrary gameplay mechanic with no actual reference or rooting in reality that comes from equally abitrary rulesets that dungeons and dragons introduced in relation to their roleplaying and world-building needs.
Actually it comes from the same place as Bards, the Mabinogi.

Actually I'm pretty sure it came from Poul Anderson who got it from the Mabinogi.

>Clerics, Druids, Monks, and Bard
I get the first three, but how does a bard fall?
Does he start doing politically charged slam poetry and lose all his powers because nobody wants to listen to him?

Those classes have alignment restrictions, so their magic is tied to a code of conduct. They just can't fall because they don't have a choice.

Bards and Monks can't fall. They just need to be of a certain alignments to gain more levels in that class.

Were all those classes in OG D&D?

Pretty sure Robin Hood is more of a mythical figure than an actual character at this point. The real-life equivalent(s) probably slit many throats and committed unarguably evil acts.

I got a thought on this. Kick me if you disagree, or help me elaborate if you don't.

Someone who is paladin-like adheres to a code, a code that is possibly not something they internally agree with 100%, as it came from someone else. They were told and instructed as to what was good, and may even be told an act is good when they believe it isn't (kill those orc babies, torture that heretic, smite that guy in the bar who pinged as evil, etc) and thus come to question everything they have been told or just be ignorant of how what they are doing might not actually be good.

Meanwhile someone who is Robin Hood-like (or chaotic good, I guess) decided what was good by themselves. If they have to question what they are doing, they ask themselves and get answers from themselves, do what they think is right, and probably move on unless they just completely lost faith in humanity. They run on pure gut and empathy.

There's a bit of room to do good without understanding by yourself what is good in the first example, and less in the second. Even if God told me to strangle my baby in the crib I'd tell him to fuck off, but if I took his word as law and as what good meant then how could I refuse?

barbarians in Pathfinder can fall if they become lawful

>Kick me if you disagree, or help me elaborate if you don't.
Can I kick you but also generally agree.
The idea behind a paladin-like character is their exercise of self-restraint and the willpower that you need in order to perform it. You indeed adhere to an external code - rules of your order. Often at great difficulties and pain: you have to restrain yourself, you have to overlook your needs, desires, instincts, wishes to conform to the rules of your order. You represent an embodiment of "acting according to a greater order".
So naturally, all the perks you gain from that are directly linked to your ability to abide the rules of your organization. And if you fail to abide them, it makes you lose those perks.

The same cannot obviously be said for people who just act on their own ideas of right and wrong, who act on their own intentions. Robin Hood does not have an external legitimization of his authority and his moral code: he does it because he figured out it's the right thing to do.
A paladin acts because his code tells him it's the right thing to do.

To be honest, if we really want to analyze this in terms of RPG classes, the only other class that logically could "fall" besides Paladins should be Monks. Or at least SOME kinds of monks. Monks were traditionally members of religious orders adhering to strict codes of conduct, much like fantasy paladins do. In fact, paladins SHOULD BE MONKS, really. And what we call "monks" should really be just "traveling martial artists".

That's generally it, yes. The paladin's code is an explicitly in-universe thing that they agree to follow, which is why there are respectively explicit rules for what happens when it's broken.

Compared to the alignment restrictions of other classes, which characters do not make an in-universe pledge to follow, and are all covered under universal rules concerning alignment.

Which I suppose might not be immediately obvious if you're one of those people who thinks that D&D rules are generic and don't imply a particular setting, or are one of those people who doesn't actually play games and just shitposts on Veeky Forums.

Not slam poetry. Metalcore.

I was talking more of the shift in the person themselves that causes them to fall, not just "you broke a rule so you lose powers". I thought I made that clear, sorry if it was not.

>You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often.
>Robin Hood
>Literally a faggot bandit who exploited peasant stupidity and made out the local ruler to be the bad guy when shit was bad anyway as he had to do his part whilst his brother DEUS VEULTED in the crusades
Take from the rich and give to the poor my ass- that fat cunt is a grade A example of one of the worst British figures to receive recognition, next to fuckign Churchill.

Rogues don't fall, they sell out and become part of the establishment.

To his credit, John was so particularly shit that no English king after him carried that name. If Robin Hood even existed at all, he was probably right to rebel against a total cunt abusing his power. Still doesn't make the legally attained wealth of his vassals fair game though.

>You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often. Why is that?
Because paladin are held to the highest standards of goodness. Robin Hood is just a kind of nice guy cunt who only robs rich people. If he becomes a douchebag cunt who robs indiscriminately, he still remains a cunt who robs people. An evil paladin stops being a paladin.

Aren't anti-paladins the same as paladins mechanically? If he just loses faith then he's not a paladin, but couldn't he pull a radical 180 and start worshipping an evil god instead?

>Druids, Monks, and Bard
>OG D&D
Try again, faggot

No, they werent. And clerics had spells granted by will of their gods. They can fall.

Also:
This is a b8 thread

I don't know what you define as "OG D&D", but the original classes published before the first Player's Handbook were Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric (Red Box), Thief, Paladin (Greyhawk), Monk, Assassin (Blackmoor), and the Druid (Eldritch Wizardry). The last also introduced psionics but didn't tie them into any specific class, instead each class got its own list of psionic powers. While not an official supplement, the Ranger also pre-dates the original PHB, published in the Strategic Review magazine.

The first Player's Handbook had the classes as Cleric (with Druid subclass), Fighter (with Ranger and Paladin subclass), Magic-User (with Illusionist subclass), Thief (with Assassin subclass), and Monk.

*Oh, I forgot, the original 1978 Player's Handbook also included psionics rules.

More reason why 5e Paladins are by far the best iteration of the class.

This! It's so great not having my class be put on a limited timeline just because the GM wants me to fall for the sin of existing in their edgy grimderp campaign.

What do they do better than 4e Paladins?

They aren't wizards

Huh, so they finally got rid of spells for paladins completely? Neat

Make me want to play one.

No, sorry to disappoint you but that's not what that means. I always forget to write as if I'm talking to the slowest, dumbest newfag.

Sorry again for your confusion.

Ah, so you're just retarded threeaboo.

It's so easy to scope out the 3aboo's by how much they use 4e as a scapegoat for all their problems.

And it's easy to spot the 4rries because they don't want to admit that their edition is the only edition of D&D that has ever been outsold by a competitor for any length of time.

For extra irony, that competitor was Pathfinder.

You faggots talk about 4e more than the people who actually play it. Since you brought up sales though, how about those 5e numbers?

I had a Druid that fell, once.

Pretty good, near as I can tell.

Cool, cool, now riddle me this, how many people are still playing 3.PF now that 5e has come out?

Mike Mearls is a habitual liar though.

>You never hear about Robin Hood-types losing faith in their ideals too often. Why is that?

Chaotic Good Rogues doesn't derive their class abilities from those ideals. If they fall out with them it's just pure roleplay.

Well, it's not literally true. But the pic is a cool response.

>mfw grognards bitch that 5e "ruined" Paladins by removing the alignment restriction
>"but user, now any evil knight can call himself a Paladin just because he has a code of conduct that tells him to be evil"

Whoops, meant for

For what it's worth, here's the breakdown on Roll20 from 2015...

Based on convention numbers, distribution chains, and roll20 numbers. 3.x is still very strong.

...and 2016. I can't say if Roll20 is a representative sampling of people who play RPGs but if it is, 5e looks like it's dominating.

Are they strong because of newblood pouring in or are they only strong because its community only bothers playing 3.PF exclusively?

You're not reading that correctly. Look at player numbers and realize to be a player you have to actually open a game during that quarter, but for a game to count it just has to have been created/opened on that quarter. So that guy who made 3 games and played in none? 3 games, 1 player. In reality, there are just people trying out making 5e games with few to zero players. Any other conclusions you find are on you.

The 2017 numbers are similar.

Old blood for 3.5, probably some new for 3.pf

>Those don't count, they could be idling!

>Robin Hood-types
Chaotic Good ranger if you go by the legends.
Neutral Evil rogue if you keep close to reality.

So like 98% grogs, 2% newbloods who don't know any better.

I'm going to surpass expectations and instead of giving you an emtpy You, try and educate you.

Look at the # of games to # of players ratio for 5e, now look for every other game, like 3.x

What do you see?

I see a butthurt 3aboo who can't face facts about his game stagnating before his eyes.

That's kinda what happens when you cultivate a community who only plays one game and drives away anyone who doesn't drink deep from the kool aid jar about 3.PF being "teh bezt game eva!"

>question about why paladins falling is the big meme and not other classes
>devolves into edition wars

When will they admit that they're just gay for each other?

Ok

Earlier versions of D&D did not concern themselves with power balance. Some classes were just more powerful than other classes.

The Paladin was one of those. Paladins were intended to be rare due to their heavy stat restrictions which were hard to hit for 3d6. They were further restricted by alignment considerations.

However, Paladins were 'balanced' by having a strict code of conduct which could heavily disadvantage them in play. Ignoring that code meant that the Paladin got all of the power, without any of the problems.

The answer to that is 'falling'.

Consider, when a Paladin 'falls' in older editions he becomes a normal fighter of the appropriate level. That should tell you something about the power level of the old Paladin and how restrictive the code was meant to be.

Today of course the Paladin is not really more powerful than other classes and alignment restrictions are pretty much a thing of the past. And thus, 'falling' is just a hold over mechanism.

Holy shit you're mad.

Certainly that would account for some of the numbers. It is to be expected for newer games, people trying things out and then dropping. Likely we are seeing a large player pool, lower number of DM's playing out. A player says 'I can do that' and discovers (as many of us did the first time) 'nope, I actually can not'.

Regardless, it is undeniable how popular 5e is. PF is certainly hanging in there (as it should, it is really a very different game). Poor 4e is languishing and all but forgotten (which is unfair I think, still I don't see how you would play it well on roll20 anyhow).

We should expect to see 5e continue to dominate, 3.PF hang in their as a different game system (though likely dropping), and can only hope that new genre rpg games come up and are popular.

>Tries to reason on Veeky Forums
>Ignores opportunity to shitpost back
Fucking cockblocking newfaggots

>but how does a bard fall?
Being short on inspiration, I suppose.

Goddamn does this thread remind me how much I love 5e sometimes. It fixed so many of my issues with previous editions. The alignment requirement removals was one of the things that immediately worked for me. I almost get it with Paladins, you know? Maybe them and Clerics should have to stay in one step either way with their deity. That makes sense. But half the classes having restrictions on alignment (Especially Barbarian, Jesus Christ that was stupid) was just untenable, stupid, and most importantly, strangled unique character stories and roleplay. And it led to so much bloat; we didn't need multiple ways to play a Neutral or Evil Paladin equivalent that was 90% the same because of a dumb alignment system.

Good fucking riddance. I love internal character structure but it has no place in class mechanics. Least of all with the many tales of hostile DMs and the like. I even recently witnessed my DM give a friend playing Paladin a great story of internal conflict and struggle, and it was stronger for it for not having any concern about that character getting gimped if they had an iota of character development.

...

Go away

The only thing falling was Darth Vador iconic status and any respect could anyone have for him due to abysmal acting and writing.

he asked for examples of "non paladins" falling. not just the shitty Skywalker saga but all of Star Wars is about resisting the dark side to not "fall" to it

>Non-paladins

user, the Jedi are about as close as you can get to Paladins in most fiction unless you want to call them Eldritch Knights or some shit. Especially with the dumb 3.Pf "Lawful Good only" restrictions. Sith and Dark Jedi are Anti-Paladins/Blackguards or whatever.

The issue with starwars is that you can't discuss it without acting like a five year old

>The issue with Sci-Fi is that you can't discuss it without acting like a five year old
FTFY

>The issue with tg is that you can't discuss anything without acting like a five year old

Let me help you with that

I think it's disingenuous to count PF and 3.5 as different games to allege that 5e is dominating when they're basically tied.

Although I hope that 5e replaces them eventually.

In a bunch of setting the gods aren't actually nesessary for a cleric's powers to work. Divine magic works on faith alone and it's a secret the gods keep from mortals to retain power over them. Paladins however derive their powers from a strict code of conduct usually laid down by the gods, so when they break it they lose their abilities.

Maybe if the barbarian would read a book or something.

>Were all those classes in OG D&D?

the only core classes in modern D&D that were not introduced during the OD&D era are the barbarian, sorcerer and warlock (the barbarian was introduced in 1st edition AD&D, and the sorcerer and warlock were introduced in 3e). all the others were introduced at some point, in some form, between the release of OD&D and 1st edition.

I imagine they count them as different games because they aren't trying to create data points for edition wars on Tibetan basket weaving forums but instead trying to convey information their users may find useful.

>Earlier versions of D&D did not concern themselves with power balance. Some classes were just more powerful than other classes.
>Consider, when a Paladin 'falls' in older editions he becomes a normal fighter of the appropriate level.
Never played D&D but just by how people explain stuff and how I've absorbed a very vague understanding of editions. It sounds like I would like the older ones a lot as Ideas like this peak my interest.

Pique*
>Inb4 doggy dog pasta

You just have to keep in mind how rare a legit Paladin would be. Rare enough that if someone managed to roll one up it would be reasonable for the DM to say 'I am going to rethink the campaign, this is now a Paladin journey campaign'.

For me, the one time I had a guy do it, I actually made him start as a fighter and then 'become' a a Paladin. Found an artifact to a (not exactly) forgotten God in an evil occupied land, new quest as the chosen one to free the lands. Good stuff.

...

Because it's one of like two or 3 classes that fucking shove a huge ass cherkov's gun into your hand.

In 3.5 you can't be a bard if you are "lawful".

If you become lawful you can no longer advance as a bard but you will keep your bardic abilities.

That legit sounds great and I don't mind having to roll for stats if it leads to moments like that (played mostly point buy systems since I got into the hobby)

Well I'm sure the pie tastes good and 2e pie sounds like something I'd eat.

This. One could mention that supposedly a paladin is on a strict pact with his god, but clerics and warlocks don't really "fall".

Fighting the taxman is Neutral Libertarian at worst.

>how does a bard fall
plagiarism

and autotune

This is kind of how it should be, in my opinion. Always kind of felt like paladin should be a prestige class you go into from cleric or fighter. Level 1 paladin seems weird to me, like they should require more money and training than that.

Then again I've always questioned why clerics use armor and weapons with full casting. They already seem like paladins to me, especially if they are a war cleric. In a party with a paladin while playing a war cleric right now and we have the same equipment but he gets smite and I get more spells, that's about it.

Haven't been on Veeky Forums in years. Is the whole paladin falling thing still being discussed?

>triple the numbers of previous year
fuck man, I hope whatever industry I end up in does that well...

>how does a bard fall?
Becomes a propagandist?

>The last also introduced psionics but didn't tie them into any specific class, instead each class got its own list of psionic powers.
Note that it also became the norm that any significantly powerful being was psionic, at a minimum for the defensive powers.

This has helped me realize two things.

Obviously 2e sounds the best, and that I could really go for a slice of pie.

Man, I forgot that old 2e rule that let an orc barbarian be his own granpa.

Am I supposed to feel like the 2e one is way too much information for an encounter that is literally just an orc with a pie? I think I prefer the 5e one. Maybe give me the introduction after I ask him why the fuck he has a pie, assuming anyone can even understand him. I also find it weird that he has a longsword in one hand and the pie in the other in the 2e one while just standing in a room waiting, and I really hope he isn't planning on cutting it with that dirty thing. The extra information just makes it weird but not in the good way that just "There is an orc with a pie here" is.

All the other ones are shit though. Like you're trying to have fun with some weird fun random encounter but need to remind everyone that the rules exist.

I'm a sucker for rhubarb, guess I gotta play 2e now.

Gimme 2E any day.