I sometimes wonder, if the Paladin class had never been invented to so specifically test the limits of Law and Good, by "Falling" and losing their abilities, whether people might have a more favorable impression of alignment as a concept in general?
Curious aside from etymonline
"paladin (n.) 1590s, in reference to the medieval romance cycle, "one of the twelve knightly champions in attendance on Charlemagne and accompanying him to war," from French paladin "a warrior" (16c.), from Italian paladino, from Latin palatinus "palace official;" noun use of palatinus "of the palace" (see palace).
The Old French form of the word was palaisin (which gave Middle English palasin, c. 1400); the Italian form prevailed because, though the matter was French, most of the poets who wrote the romances were Italians. Extended sense of "a heroic champion" is by 1788."
How we get from those latter day pretorians, to these D&D cops with a religious zealotry bent via Greyhawk is a bit awkward. Not least because they were such a crazy OP high roll character type, with such obnoxious world views and built-in charlatanisms and hypocrisies, that you had to maintain.
My college roomate once gave me grief for playing as a Druid in D&D, saying something along the lines of "wouldn't you rather play something cool, like a Paladin?" and my response was basically nope, and also fuck that, cause I find everything about Paladins inherently pretty lame lol. Seelah might be the first Paladin ever in a crpg that I haven't immediately ditched or dispatched just for comic relief. So I guess that might say something, though I'm not sure what exactly, mostly in jest. But yeah, I blame the Paladin for kinda tanking an otherwise interesting attempt to bring philosophy and ethics into the game system.
Also before the Paladins start piling on me here, I mainly poke fun at them because there were only 2 classes in AD&D that had a specific Alignment requirement on both Axes, Paladin's and Druids, and of the two I think Lawful Good Paladins taxed the overall alignment conception way harder. Whereas True Neutral was more amorphous and abstract (butting up as it does against every other alignment, right in the middle), Lawful Good represented an extreme in the far corner. All the other Alignment restricted Classes had a bit of flexibility along one dimension or the other. The Paladin strikes me as the archetypally judgmental and self righteously conformist individual, whereas the Druid was basically the antithesis of that (even moreso than say a Lawful Evil Blackguard, or Chaotic Evil thief might be). The one is judge and jury, totally blessed while still hacking everything apart like a contradiction waiting to happen, the other reserves judgement and likes nature and animals, so that tells me everything I need to know heheh. It always annoyed me that in earlier editions they both had Wisdom as a principle attribute. I think Paladins should have had a Wisdom malus instead, since they just don't seem to be very wise to me at all lol.
I've played a couple Paladins in my day, and whenever I did I'd usually take the heavy hit on INT, just to justify it in my head. I tended to favor Law as the dominant concept there - unwavering loyalty to whichever deity or princeps they served. I think Paladins should have been designed like 2e Rangers. Rangers could be any Alignment that included Good. Paladins should have been the inverse Axis version of that, so Paladins being any Alignment that included Law. I think that would have been a much more consistent and adaptive concept, and could have serviced more deities or basic types, while giving more distinction between them and the other martial classes. Contrast also with the Barbarian class, which was like that too, any alignment that included Chaotic. I suppose people who prefer Paladins like to indulge the idea of playing a Charlemagne or Arthur, Solomon or Muad'dib, like a Warrior-Priest King exuding Charisma and dripping with Divine Grace from every pore, but the way they were usually written and played in D&D always struck me as something a bit more banal and rather less sophisticated than those exemplars. So I harp on them generally, just out of habit hehe. All in good fun of course. But Seelah I kind of genuinely enjoy, so go figure! What I do know right
