Bit too arbitrary?

It can't be as simple as that, right? Paladins just having a license to kill whatever their magic sensors register as bad.

So, how do you guys handle alignment detection?

>So, how do you guys handle alignment detection?
By the rules as written, which isn't in any way related to the Veeky Forums meme version where it works just like detecting scorpions with a UV flashlight.

Detect Evil does in fact just work, and the paladin should know the vizier is evil as soon as he sees him. The challenge is that "paladin" is not an in-universe thing, so like fuck is the king going to believe you unless you've proven you're good and trustworthy already.

I'm pretty sure it only works on vampires, monsters and clerics that have strong evil auras.

>The challenge is that "paladin" is not an in-universe thing
Nigga what?

Paladins do not exist. They are one-off heroes personally blessed by fate/god/etc. Even if there was a legendary hero in your setting whose powers included the ability to detect evil, which is the only way someone would know about their class features without metagaming, you would expect anyone who showed up claiming that ability to be a charlatan.

I mean, it's an ability that literally every single spellcaster can do right from level 1. I'm also wondering which setting you are talking about, as that's...not really how it's handled in D&D at all.

I mean, that's a bad example there.

A large part of that Paladin's story arc is devoted to the fact that her black and white beliefs on good and evil ultimately doom her to disgrace and death.

So her over reliance on detect evil isn't actually a good thing.

First off, Detect Alignment and Zone of Truth are low level spells that most casters have access to as low level mages.

Second off, nobody's talking about your OC setting where martials can defeat gods by tipping their +5 fedoras, we're talking about D&D and in D&D, Paladins arguably have just as much moral authority as the people who rule the country, especially if we're talking about classical LG shining knight Paladins.

Consider the following: If they ping as evil, you should probably keep an eye on them, but it comes nowhere close to meaning that they deserve to die for being, as you perceive it, misguided, unless they're like a cleric of a god of child eating, or a fiend, or something.

The point where you kill them is the point where you basically caught them red-handed AND came to conclusion they are irredeemable, redeeming them is not worth the trouble and time you could spend doing a lot good elsewhere, or killing them now averts imminent disaster. It is the point where having Detect Evil is also pointless because you can also kill a neutral or even good person on this basis, and it could still happen to be an overall good, if extremely questionable act.

Miko's whole character is pretty much an exploration of what it means and doesn't mean to be a Paladin, alongside O'Chul serving a similar role.

Later in the story, Durkon forces himself to take a similar stance to Miko about somebody in particular, but is much more justified in doing so. These two moments can be contrasted pretty well. I think what's extremely telling is that Belkar takes this as an opportunity to fuck with Miko(suggesting he is much more mischievous than malicious, much more chaotic than he is evil), wheras Malack takes it as a signal that he has to kill Durkon before Durkon kills him, when Durkon wasn't even saying that, necessarily.

Paladins *don't* have a license to kill. Order of the Stick runs on 3rd Edition rules; the 3e Paladin Code is:

>Code of Conduct
>A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class abilities if she ever willingly commits an evil act.
>Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth), help those in need (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those who harm or threaten innocents.

>Associates
>While she may adventure with characters of any good or neutral alignment, a paladin will never knowingly associate with evil characters, nor will she continue an association with someone who consistently offends her moral code. A paladin may accept only henchmen, followers, or cohorts who are lawful good.

Nowhere does it say that the paladins are allowed to kill people simply for being Evil, only that the paladin can't associate with those of Evil alignment, and must punish those who harm or threaten innocents.

If you want to set your campaign in Metagamistan that's your prerogative, but your advice is shit and your world is flavorless.

Paladins do actually exist in-universe in many official settings, however.

How is it metagaming?

You wrote the world to reflect the PHB, rather than using the PHB to interact with the world.

Yeah, because in a setting where the gods actively empower followers to uphold their ideals the people ackowledging that if someone empowered is empowered by the God of Good is saying that this guy is evil he may be a reliable source is metagaming.

I'm not making any setting though, I'm referencing how Paladins are generally treated within the settings that D&D wrote themselves.

Also, why wouldn't you write a setting to reflect the PHB when the PHB determines what a character can and cannot do? There's a reason why you never see Martial villains in D&D for example, and that's any decently leveled mage (Level 6+) can generally take them out easily while the same cannot be said about the reverse.

If your setting don't reflect the system you are using you are using the wrong system you idiot.

Yeah, you're describing the "...and the kingdom was saved and the people lived Happily Ever After, The End" portion of a paladin's career, where he's John Calvin ruling over Geneva but even better because he's unambiguously correct.

Because I'm a fan of fantasy fiction, not a fan of instantiating DnD rulebooks?

Why would you make a setting based on fantasy fiction but use D&D, which carries its own unique conventions on how fantasy shit works?

You're doing yourself a disservice trying to emulate a fantasy novel using the busted rules that D&D uses.

>words words words words words words words

As a hot patch I do:
Egoist/Altruist not Evil/Good
Deontologist/Consequentialist not Lawful/Chaotic

Paladins are still paladins even at level 1 thought. For every one the get to the happy ending there are thousands that get slaughtered by evil while trying to do good. The fact that you seem to think that you need to be an epic hero that saves kingdoms in order to be a paladins shows clearly that Dnd is not appropriate for running your vision and that what you think is a paladin is fundamentally different from what the system present.

Reminder that originally alignments were nothing more than gangs you belonged to for the purpose of killing those in the opposite gangs.

>For every one the get to the happy ending there are thousands that get slaughtered by evil while trying to do good.

No, Paladins have insanely high stat requirements for a reason. Player characters are already exceptional people, and paladins are exceptionally rare within player characters!

The way the class is presented, by the books, they are explicitly a Chosen One class, not just another muckabout adventurer. You should expect there to only be a couple paladins on all of Oerth at a time, but for many of them to succeed in fulfilling their destinies. The shit you're describing is, I don't even know, the antiheroic Planescape hells where they breed paladins by the millions to go smash against the infinite supply of demons in the heavenly equivalent of WWI.

>Player characters are already exceptional people

Oh, and before you bitch about this, remember that the average person on a dungeon crawl in-universe doesn't have the stats of a PC Fighter, they're just a human hireling.

Again, detect evil is a level 1 spell. That every cleric can cast. Are you trying to argue that level 1 clerics are a couple in the entire setting?

You also realize that level 1 paladins still carry the risk of getting killed by orcs. So either you go by plot hax in making that every paladin has a gigantic plot shield or for every actual successful paladins there must be many that died before defeating the dark lord.

It sounds like you're talking about 1st or 2nd edition.

In 5e they have the same kind of requirements as everyone else.

You say that as like your first level chosen one destined for greatness couldn't be killed by some bandit just by making some bad roll.

What you are speaking about is lvl 3 paladin, how many of them die before? I think paladin should have no magic powers before lvl 3, since he has no oath

Detect evil should only work half the time or occasionally get false positives, not to mention if you are in a country that isn't a theocratic, detect evil won't fly has an excuse for murder.

Wow, I was expecting weak trolling, and this was actually pretty damn clever.

yeah, AD&D is where you'll find evidence of how the class flavor was intended to work in DnD.

cue table joking "guess he wasn't a paladin after all"

Thank you for your insight, user. Seriously.

Yeah. Miko Miyazaki was Rich Burlew's big example of "This is NOT how you play a paladin, you idiots.", and as user said, her rigid black-and-white view led her to murder her lord and thus her Falling so hard the gods themselves popped up into the material plane and stripped her of her powers personally. If you want his example of an actual well-played paladin, look at his comics with O-Chul.

I really hope he starts selling digital copies of "How The Paladin Got His Scar" soon. It's one of the best comics he's done so far, and does pretty much codify the spirit of a paladin. More people need to read it, if only so they can get a good idea how a paladin should be played.

AD&D flavour of the class is literally
"A good and noble warrior with a strict code of condoct".

Fine.

Thank you thog

It should be noted that a lot of people disagree with riches analysis.

Miko was a product of her environment and didn't deserve her shitty fate, like most paladins rail roaded into falling by the GM so he can act smug.

Literally everyone is a product of their environment, that doesn't absolve them of being shitty people. Also consider that there were plenty of Paladins around her that didn't become zealous smite happy maniacs.

>Literally everyone is a product of their environment, that doesn't absolve them of being shitty people.

She wasn't a shitty person.
She was a child soldier trained to smite evil and then ostracized by her companions, they openly mention how often they sent her on long solo missions.

It's like being mad at mace windu for taking a hard line stance on not training the chosen one.

There were plenty of paladins half-assing their jobs.

In a world where evil is a sentient force trying to wipe out existence or enslave it the actions of a smite first ask questions later paladin are natural.
Rich unintentionally shows us this when miko mercs those two bandits who were left tied up, the first thing they did upon freeing themselves was attempt to enslave a new servant.

>So, how do you guys handle alignment detection?

I generally avoid any mechanisms that deal with alignment because it's kinda bullshitty. But when someone wanted to play a paladin, I explained:

Good-evil aren't really morality gauges, they're just signs of divine or demonic influence. You can have shit-bag angels registering as good and altruistic demons registering as bad. But by and far everything you've never heard of that happening. Demons aren't weedling their way into this plane and lending power to help run orphanages, they're corrupting people and giving power to anti-social forces trying to tear it all down. There's a divine war and you've got a built in IFF sensor, the things fighter jets have to tell friends from foes. Neither side can FOOL the sensor, but remember that frienemies are a thing.

Petty thieves and hard-luck desperadoes don't register. But in this setting, that random schitzo/sociopath gene is a result of demonic meddling, and angels occasionally instill people with minor a geas to go do good so it DOES pop up in the general populous here and there. It ALSO goes off for the tiefling whose just trying to get by and be a good person.

To be fair, there's like a hundred Greek myths where a dude who is literally capable of and proven to have been able to see the future gets ignored because everyone thinks he's playing politics. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch for someone to believe that about a Paladin, especially an unproven one. Especially especially if it's an outsider paladin talking about the King who hasn't really done anything evil lately and is pretty good as far as kings go.

>yeah, AD&D is where you'll find evidence of how the class flavor was intended to work in DnD.

Even in AD&D, a 1st level spellcaster could go and detect evil without being a paladin. It's not a rare ability until 4e where they mostly scrapped alignment.

>So, how do you guys handle alignment detection?
It's considered an act of hostility, and every meeting place in the region will throw you out if you start using it because only someone looking to start a fight would do so. The local "holy city" ironically has the most strict laws regarding alignment detection.

Back in the day there were things called "alignment languages".
If you were lawful good, you could speak lawful good.
Needless to say, it was seen as somewhat of a dick move to talk in a literally holier-than-thou language to test them.

Really bugs me that the later editions fail to mention that. Badgering someone about their alignment was seen the same as badgering people about their income, religion, or how they voted in modern times.

>using alignment detection

Way to misunderstand the entire conversation user.