Velisario the Paladin: Yay of Nay?

[ID10Tango]

Sounds like a great opportunity for some rp to me. I dont follow Vel and his actions, but it would seem that a fall and rebound would be interesting to watch. I'd love to see him in the taverns super drunk all the time, being tempted by evil to come to the dark side. I just got goosebumps thinking about it

[StabbingNirvana]

Well Vel is heavily inspired by Gabriel Belmont so there always is that chance, tango. And if that day does come chances are high that there will be blood!

Though I was mostly looking to see what actions Vel has done that may have driven people OOCly to think Vel is not fit for paladinhood since it has been somewhat of a recurring theme I've been hearing about for a long while now. Again, thanks to everyone that's participated. I don't necessarily agree with the stuff that's been said, but I could understand how to certain folk that aspect could be seen.

Edit: Also if my posts in here came off as snarky, it was meant to be more light hearted than otherwise. Sorry for any sense of confusion.

[lowstorm]

He's a horrible paladin. *nodnod* He doesn't kill all the evil guys that stand around Great Gaunt on a whim. And he doesn't uhhhh.... Go on murdering rampages. uhhh, and he doesn't...

well, most of the issues being brought up in this thread and other recent ones point to the fact that a lot of the 'good guys' hands are tied when bad things happen. Either they don't happen in front of them and the other characters blame them for not taking action, or they cannot just kill evil in towns all hero-style. And that's how it should be. The game was made to be fun for everyone, and if a paladin or other good guy just starts to slaughter everyone that does anything wrong-we'd have no player-driven good vs evil plots.

And trust me. That's a good, and major part of the server. Good and Evil and them clashing, even subtly, produces a massive amount of RP. And just killing off the bad guys (or good guys) will destroy a major part of this server. Once, long ago, Roar (then known as redmist) was known as bad-guy central. It caused a LOT of RP to occur. It was fun! The good guys couldn't just go there and take out all the bad guys. The bad guys didn't just go and destroy all the good guys either. It took a lot of time and rp to resolve the issues that were caused by that rp line.

[bentusi16]

Being a paladin means throwing out the practical in favor of the right.

The church of sune is one of the most prominent temples in Cormyr. The temple structure itself is very richly built and decorated, large, and luxurious, suggesting it's got no issue getting money. Through DM and PC work it's also just a prominent church that's popular and well known.

When Velisario pressed the church of Sune, he was being practical and intelligent. What he was not being was right. Practically, getting the church of sune under the heel would've secured that section of the city and gotten spill over from its large base. This is a sound political and practical move.

But it's wrong. A paladin doesn't do whats practical, he does whats right. The church of Lliira is small, like a two story thing building. It's not elegant or big or stacked with marble statues. It doesn't have much to offer eitehr the church of Tyr or Torm or Ilmater. But it needs help.

That's what it means to be a paladin, and from where I sit why I think Velisario fails as a paladin. He doesn't do whats right, he does whats practical. Doing right means self-sacrifice, of saying 'Ok, this is going to hurt me personally, but the benefit to society is great, so it's worth it'.

For an example of this, Velisario accompanied Edthin into the abyss, so you know about that event. WHat you don't know is that it may ahve actually harmed Edthins political chances more then helped him, and he did it fully aware of the situation.

To set it up: Henry Sleiff was a warlock (a demon worshiping magic user) who was also an alderman ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alderman ) in valkurs roar, as in, one of the people who was a voting member of the council. Edthin discovered Henry Sleiff had been using his position as the keeper of the rents, the guy in charge of the city rents, basically, to force women to pay in other ways, vulgar ways.

Now we come ot the practical vs. the right. From a political standpoint, it would have been much wiser to wait with this information. If Edthin had waited until the election, he would have not only gotten Sleiff right there, he would've also added discredit to the candidate Sleiff had just voted for, securing Edthin in the mind of the other alderman. This is a good, practical, political decision, one based on reason and calculation of payoff.

But Ed said "Screw that I'm a paladin' And went as fast as he could to get the guy out of the picture, since IF Edthin had known about this and didn't act, he would've been allowing a heinous crime to be committed.

Do yo understand the difference between the practical vs. the right better? That is why I think Velisario needs work as a paladin and why he feels more LN then LG. He seems to disregard doing whats right in favor of doing whats practical, and that's not how a paladin works.

And not every paladin failure is 'immediatly fall' state. There's a reason the system is based on 'points' and not 'pass/fail'. Ed earned a few chaotic points the other day, in my mind, and I even asked a DM to throw a few chaotic points on his sheet. He didn't do it for some reason, but in my head Ed had earned himself a couple of chaotic points.

Does that make Edthin chaotic? No. He's still very much lawful and very much good, but he did something chaotic. It's balanced out by how utterly lawful he is.

[StabbingNirvana]

The Sunite situation had the ooc element of there actually being a Sunite player base on the server. There were 2 Sunite players I knew who were shortly joined by another 2, which would have made it much more fun in game. They were the only other categorically "good" aligned faith with a temple in Suzail which I could think of which had a player base at the time. The only other good aligned temple that I know off the top of my head is the Lliran one and the one player I know exists was just met at the marsember event.

So while I could understand where you're coming from Bentusi, I view both as being "good". Could a Debt on the Lliran temple have been done. Sure. But it would have been just us with a DM as opposed to us with DM approval to legitimize the stance of us in the temple and along with other players to be with.

[Razgriz]

In all fairness, we should have used an NPC only faith as practice before attempting anything with the Sunites haha. I think Vel did had good intentions for the Sunite temple, but we all know that things just went wrong, due to different reasons.

[bentusi16]

OOC shoudl never determine an IC action. it can guide it, like, oocly you know there's another player behind the evil character who wants to have fun too. But unless it's absolutely a case of rule breaking or someone asking you not to do something because it makes them OOCly uncomfortable, you should not allow your characters decisions to be based on OOC knowledge. (edited for clarification)

Also, by heling the Lliirans you could have caused someone to roll a Lliiran, or before you even started you could've asked if anyone had been interested in playing a Lliiran but weren't sure what to. And it didn't have to be Lliira. It could have been Oghma, or the Red Knight, or any of the other dozen small religions. Of course most religions only have 1-2 clerics in theme tops, we have a maximum server limit of just over 50.

Guiding neutral temples towards good (which is an option) is also within the perview of the tormish crusades. Hoar in 3.5 is torn between bane and tyr because both want the god to learn away from his LN to either LG or LE. The red knight is LN and could easily be led to good or evil, if she employs 'good' strategies, or 'evil' strategies.

There is no excuse for using an OOC argument to justify an IC action. Your character did something IC and had options to do elsewise.

You have a worshipper of Bahamut in your ranks, sortof. Another good god, one I acutally OOCly favor over Tyr, with a tiny non existent church. There are many worshipperso f many gods on the server, any one of which sitting in the neutral or good range could have been used to make RP, which is especially important for smaller religions that aren't as well known. Everyone knows who Sune is. Kiki is active and popular IC. But a newish character, or a less known one, of a good god would have been a BETTER choice to help, to put them in the spot light, because that's ultimately what the debt is about.

It's about getting people to notice this god and its clerics and go "Hey, that's a good god to worship, I think I'll throw some prayers their way"

[Ivarcles]

I kind of agree with Bentusi's earlier post. Alignment is supposed to be what you really are as a person, not how you appear to be or ought to be. And in some of his actions, Vel has come across to me as being not quite so lawful good at his core. Of course, I'll admit, you also PMed me OOC as to why you were doing some of those things, and those tells are probably coloring my point of view. Which they probably shouldn't. XD

[Razgriz]

Feb 16, 2014 10:03:50 GMT -5 @sharauvyn said:

Btw, not to derail the thread to general paladinhood on the server, but I wouldn't mind seeing the DM's take light actions to nudge people in the direction of appropriate role play of a given class or alignment or what ever. Even saying to a player in tells, "Your deity disapproves of this action. They stop giving you the ability to lay hands until you repent and atone. Please don't use lay on hands until this issue is settled." That would be gentle and even voluntary on the part of the player to cooperate, but it would at least be *something*. "Consequences" don't have to be crushing. They just have to get the idea across that the game world *does* in fact have *an* appropriate response to what a player character does, even chosen from a range of options. Deities, however, are sentient NPC's whose responses to things should be represented just as much as cityguards and townsfolk. If PVP in town draws a response from the guards, then corresponding actions should draw a merited response from the gods. As powerful and remote as they are, they are NPC's to be represented just like anyone or anything else. Not having the deities have such responses doesn't just mean "no consequences" for PC actions. It also inaccurately represents some very highly influential canon characters of the setting.

EDIT: I say all that in the knowledge that I don't know everything that does and does not go on between players and DM's. The DM team probably does more than I am aware of, and most people do a good job of role playing their classes and alignments. I'm speaking more on general principle and theoretically than anything else.

You know, I think this could work. The Dm would be the OOC mean to know that your paladin did something wrong, but you would still have to do the effort IC to ask around, apologise and right whatever the wrong doing was.

If the player is careless, not doing the right thing after several mistakes were made, the NWN alignment system alone can lock the paladin class for the next level up. At this point Dms would already have taken some of the special paladin abilities, like LoH, remove disease, detect evil, spells, feats and so on... If a paladin reaches this stage, they would be about to fall after a series of smaller wrongdoings that were not corrected. (Something similar could could apply for clerics, monks, balckguards, divine champions and druids as well).

The possibility to fall right after something very evil or chaotic was made would still stay for paladins of course.

(I am not sure how DMs "know" who is doing it right and who is not, but maybe there is a good reason of why they do not share it with the paladin players).

[StabbingNirvana]

I don't think being practical and right are mutually exclusive. Vel's generally a well calculated individual. He aims for success because success is the only way that goodness can flourish for extended periods. Being practical is orderly and to me, paladins are orderly. Aura of Courage lets a paladin remain practical and calculated even against the most terrifying situations. To me, being impractical is reckless, and that should be reserved for the most forced situations. The Debt of Persecution to any faith faith didn't need to be impractical for the sake of being impractical in an IC or OOC sense of hoping players would flock to the faith we chose.

[Andros]

I think that alignments should be a guide and not a mandate, otherwise characters will always be two dimensional, real people are hard to predict and sometimes act "out of character" because we are complex, and characters should be so as well, what is most important (and I think that thankfully all the paladins on FRC right now do this including Velisario) is to do your best to uphold the lore of your class, as long as the player is trying hard to stay true to it in his own way and is not ignoring it or making exceptions because it is inconvenient, then I think he is doing as good job.

[lowstorm]

I know nothing really about the Sunite stuff. I stayed out of it mostly ic and ooc. So I cannot comment about some of the stuff above. (And I skimmed over some of it, because I don't want to know oocly either)

But honestly, ooc DOES guide a LOT of play. If I made a paladin today, and made her into a 'rawr, I eat ebils' kinda person... EVERYONE would hate her. IIIII would hate her. I would get tired of playing her, make hateful posts about other paladins not joining me and doing it wrong compared to how I do it...

[bentusi16]

Subtle, but I've never tried to get other paladins to join Edthin. I and he knows he's an extremist.

Which by natures paladins sort of are, being fanatical zealots and all that.

And while it can guide the decisions somewhat, it should not determine completely. It's like, for example, OOCly I know it's not fun for a player to get the crap beaten out of them by a high level paladin, even if that's what Edthin WOULD do IC, so I tweak it to verbal sparring or preaching. There has to be some IC consideration, but there's a difference between "Ed bashing in an evil dudes head" and "Ed ignoring someone committing evil" and "Ed talking at some dude for being evil" based on that OOC knowledge and decision making.

[lowstorm]

So you too use ooc consideration for your character.

And I was being serious about making a paladin like that. I don't think she'd last long.

[Razgriz]

I think this thread is about Velisario, not about what and how other paladins do compared to him.

[StabbingNirvana]

Feb 18, 2014 13:03:33 GMT -5 Razgriz said:

I think this thread is about Velisario, not about what and how other paladins do compared to him.

I don't mind. No one else is adding more to the original intent so, might as well let the thread branch off into something new.

[minsafedistance]

I could add that if people have to OOC try to stop you, then you might be just doing something right IC.

There is a big difference between contructive criticism, suggestions and tearing someone down.

Reflect on what you are getting, change if and as required, play on!

[malleus]

keep up the good work. people will always hate.. trust me I know better then most.

[DM Hawk]

I think this thread has run its course. I don't want to see it reignited or redirected.