Paladin and me

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Last night, I ran Paladin for a group of six people at our local Seattle Monday Indie Game Night. Paladin's got an interesting history for me: I wrote it while writing Donjon as a bit of a release. I find myself in this pattern pretty often - in the middle of one game, I'll write another short game to get some ideas off my mind. In this case, writing my gamist heaven, Donjon, made me crave some narrativism, so I kicked out a short (25 page) game with heavy narrative themes. Because of the method by which I wrote it, I playtested it all of about three times, and had another group playtest it, with good comments. In all honesty, this seems like enough to me, but I still have never felt like I was comfortable with the game.

Running it again was my attempt to resolve all discomfort I had with the game, and get good notes for a revision of it, which I've grown to think it needs. The actual run was eye-opening and definitely gave me good feedback.

The adventure
Ok - I did something really strange here. With six players, one adventure made little sense. I ran two related adventures simultaneously, cutting back and forth between the two groups, and creating parallel scenes between them. (I.e., one group runs into a group of Unliving skeletal wolves, and the second group runs into a squad of infantrymen raised from the dead as zombie soldiers.) The adventure revolves around a Witch, Carlos, who was using two powerful free-willed Unliving, Fatima, Scion of Lust, and Mantos, Scion of War, to assist him in destroying Castillia, the country in the default Paladin setting, The Sword of Heaven. Fatima was enthralling a town, Cordova, causing strife and anger among the men there as they competed for her favor, and Mantos was posing as the general of Lord Aron's armies, and had counseled him to attack Castillia and take it for his own.

What happened
The characters made up were absolutely fantastic. I let people make their own characters, but gave each of them a long list of example descriptors to use in their attributes, so this went quickly. An example, and one of my favorite characters from last night:

Brother Torquemada
Flesh: Passion 2, Awareness 3, Moxie 4
Light: Self-Control 1, Zeal 2, Cleverness 3
Dark: Guile 1, Cruelty 2, Indifference 0
Abilities: Arms, Interrogation, Intimidate

Play was a bit disrupted: we played in a loud game store, and I had to yell the entire game, plus I had a lot of scene-cutting and the volume made it near-impossible for one group to hear what the other was doing. Still, we progressed at a good rate, and the first, morally simple, combats went well, with the group action system - my favorite mechanic in the game - being highlighted.

After that, though, the game went in a direction I never expected.

Group A, the group that went to Cordova to investigate unrest, summoned the entire town into the local church for questioning. Brother Torquemada from above pretty much demanded confessions from everyone, and asked everyone to confess their neighbors' sins as well. Squire Carlos, another member of the group, left the church to investigate a group of men that were about to stone a woman. She'd been accused of sleeping with all of them, and her husband wanted to put her to the death. This was the only morally uplifting scene in the game, as Carlos not only stopped him, but then convinced him it would be wrong not to take the woman back into his home, especially since there was no evidence she'd actually slept with anyone but him. (The others just told the man his wife had slept with them over beer.)

Meanwhile, another character - the only one I don't have the sheet for, so I'll call him Alan, after his player - went to investigate a man whose farm had the only access to the nearby creek. He'd always let other farmers cross his land to bring their cows to water, but he now refused, as Fatima had led him to believe all these other farmers profited off his good fortune. Alan tried to reason with him, to no avail, and then hauled off and punched him in the mouth, making him let these farmers use his land. This was decidedly self-righteous and not uplifting. Leaving, Alan saw a ghostly beautiful woman in the local lord's manse, and began climbing a cliffside to get to her.

Torquemada and Carlos had found out the local lord had been slain, and a paladin sent earlier to investigate was gone. In questioning the priest, Torquemada found out that he was the earlier paladin, Vincent, disguised, and that he'd killed Lord Silus as they'd both slept with Fatima, and it had driven him into lust and murder. Torquemada and Carlos drove him to the ground and tied him up, making him repent his sins before burning him at the stake. At the same time, Alan confronted the ghostly woman - Fatima - and nearly succumbed to her charms before resisting and attacking her, the Unliving that she was. She threw him out a window, and he clung to the ledge of the cliff for dear life. She offered her hand, saying "Take my hand and live forever with me, or die." At this point, I saw the first thematically-interesting suicide ever in an RPG as Alan let go of the rock, tumbling down and dying.

Group B entered the town of San Pimon, where Lord Aron's armies had occupied the village, using it as their command base. Cutting straight to the action, they confronted Aron, demanding that this army be stopped, and war be ended. General Mantos finally stepped in, arguing with them, and they, well, attacked him, as a paladin would do, as he was obviously Unliving masquerading as a man. This fight was rad, as Mantos used his double-ended axe to nearly kill one character, Ty, with one blow, then hooked, killed, and threw an infantryman at another paladin, Ramon, who flew through the air, leaping off the flying infantryman's body, and landing on the axe, knocking it up into Mantos' chin. The third paladin, Delores del Mundo ("Pain of the World," which was a great name), tried to reason with Aron, who was enthralled and nonresponsive. The three finally managed to slay Mantos, who collapsed into dust, and Aron was freed.

The following was the best scene in the game, as Aron pleaded for his life and the life of his men, saying that he was in the thrall of evil. As he'd killed no one himself, and thus was not a Witch, Aron was merely given a harsh speech, which was eyebrow-raising. He was basically told that he'd opened his heart to evil by questioning the righteous rule of the King, and that his questioning and non-obediance was the cause of this downfall. (Donald Rumsfeld could have given this speech. It was a great role-playing moment, and a thoroughly uncomfortable real one.) Then, all the men who had killed in the town were put to the sword - a good hundred men slain for their sins.

That's some dramatic paladin role-playing.

What I learned

Paladin is a crazy game. I never meant to write something that would create such monsters, to be honest. The actions these characters took were heinous, self-righteous, and thoroughly evil in any world with moral relativism. In their world, of course, moral absolutism ruled, and made their actions heroic and holy. In discussion after the game, we decided part of this was the setting. With the Code of The Sword of Heaven, the default setting, only moral absolutism can exist. With a different Code - especially one that contradicts itself - more moral relativism can come in.

We also discovered a good adventure is one in which a character has to break his Code to succeed. Last night, that wasn't quite the case.

Still, this morning, thinking about it, the game was - forgive my hubris - a narrativist masterpiece. It set out to have specific moral themes, and hit them over and over throughout the game, providing scenes like I haven't had in a RPG before. The real problem is that those themes were ones I wasn't comfortable seeing.

In an earlier session with my normal group, we played kill puppies for satan and in the Actual Play post, we noted how it made us feel like better people afterwards. Watching these self-righteous assholes in Paladin made me feel like a worse person for having any tolerance for absolutism. (This, of course, made me feel worse, because I sounded like a damn dirty hippie.)

Anyway, there's no questions here, but just my observations, and hopefully a bit of advice for anyone that would play Paladin.

[jburneko]

Clinton,

Your post illustrates why I fell in love with Paladin the minute I read it.  I've always been facinated with the good old fashioned D&D Paladin for this reason: The mandatory Lawful Good alightment.  That character class has always facinated me because I personally believe that Lawful Good is an impossible alignment to play.

It is impossible to be both Lawful (adhere to an absolute, even if highly personal, moral code) AND to achieve Good, 100% of the time.  You can please some of the people all of the time, and all that.  Something's got to give somewhere and Paladin throws that into sharp relief.

It seems to me that Paladin forces you to choose between being a self-righteous bastard, or a semi-subversive hero.  I like that.  I like that, A LOT.

I'm glad to see that the game yeilds the kind of results I assumed it would.  I haven't gotten a chance to play it myself yet.

Jesse

[lumpley]

Wow.  Fascinating.

Good people will put a town to the sword for their sins.  It's kinda why I prefer evil.

-Vincent, a damn dirty hippie

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I forgot to mention one other thing: the use of Dark Animus. Very little was used in the game, but one scene stuck out. Brother Torquemada was trying to convince Vincent, the fallen paladin, to come with him, and said, "It's not too late for you to be saved." The player then looked at me and said, "I'm lying, you know." Bam! Dark Animus.

The insidiousness of this inquisitor was great.

[Bob McNamee]

Wow, what a cool game!
In a way its a shame at least one of them didn't end up feeling more of the Dark-side's temptation... its so easy...give in...

[Jonathan Walton]

Awesome.

I'm going to be running an Engel game at an upcoming con in the area, but was planning to use the original German card-based rules instead of the d20 stuff that White Wolf included in the English translation.  However, after having just read this (and after having trouble finding information about the original German system), I'm thinking that Paladin would be a PERFECT system to use for this game.  Engel's background features self-righteous pseudo-angels doing horrible things for the good of the Church and Paladin could handle this perfectly.

You'll have my $ coming your way soon, Clinton.

Later.
Jonathan

[DaR]

As one of the players, I can definitely say it was a very enlightening experience.  For all that it's only around 25 pages, Paladin is a hard game.  I walked away at the going just sort of mumbling "damn" to myself.  It was a frightening look into the mind of a zealot.  I was actually the one who demanded the townspeople be put to the sword, and at the time, it seemed like the utterly logical and correct thing to do.  Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live, and anyone who murders is automatically a Witch, so anyone who had assisted in the taking of the town and killed in the process just had to die.  The code of the Sword of Heaven allowed nothing else.

I think that having a Code which contradicts itself isn't so much necessary as building adventures which rely on two of the tenants being put in opposition.  I'd actually recommend that to anyone who is planning to run a Paladin game, especially a one shot.  Pick two of the laws, and then devise a scenario where the players will have to choose one of the two to break.  It doesn't have to be a matter of success or failure, just that in order to progress one of the two has to be violated.  To use last night's adventure, if Lord Aron, an innocent in the eyes of the Sword of Heaven's code, had inisisted on protecting General Mantos with his life, the quandry would have been between the Major Law 'Kill no innocents' and the Unbreakable Law 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'.

-DaR

[jdagna]

Clinton, I think a lot of the moral absolutism has to do with the specific setting and laws used as the book's default.  If anyone who kills someone automatically becomes an evil witch, it gives you a very clear-cut way to determine bad and good people.  If the unbreakable tenet were "Never kill an innocent" then we'd have had some questionable moments - can someone be innocent and mislead into doing wrong for the right reasons?  And if the law were something even more relative like "Always serve the public good" you could really get people squirming.  Of course, the system does require the GM to rule absolutely on each particular action, so there's always an absolutist element there.

This is part of why we merely admonished and imprisoned Lord Aron - he hadn't killed anyone (thus wasn't a witch) and seemed to have legimate complaints (if evil means) so I wasn't sure if we could kill him or not.  From my perspective (as a moral absolutist in real life), it was quite the morally relative moment!

In any event, I enjoyed the game immensely and really liked some of the mechanics.

[Alan]

Alan = Gerrard.  I liked the way we got to choose our primary characteristics, and the Light and Dark versions which allowed rerolls.   My favorite combination was Flesh:Wits 3 backed up by Light:Insight 4 because the setup gave me one set of near-automatic rerolls.

As I think back, I, the player, remember being a little ashamed when I had Gerrard hit the farmer.  Still, I also felt a certain sense of righteous power.   It was like unleashing my dark, secret tyrant.

Clinton, I think one of the main sources of evil in the world is moral absolutism, especially those who believe they have it right and everyone else is wrong.  The sad thing is that black and white morality does have an atavistic apeal and an elegant simplicity.  Evil always knows what it's doing.  Good isn't so sure.

I'd like to try Paladin again with a set of moral laws that are contradictory, or which set up moral conflicts.

[Bob McNamee]

I keep meaning to set up a play date for  the Babylon 5 "Psi Cops" Paladin game...
They may be right in what's good for the Teeps, but boy...a bunch of Evil Bastards at heart, maybe

[Robert Leal]

Clinton--

I know this is a late post, but I recently purchased a copy of Paladin and am trying to get a small group to try out at Star Wa- Knights of the Void game.

One of the things the players (and I) are having trouble with are coming up with descriptors.  We find people repeating them and coming up with the same ones, sticking with ordinary ones like "rage" and not coming up with interesting ones.  I would never have thought of "moxie" (though I should have from my Paranoia days).

Any chance you could post or provide that long list of descriptors you mentioned?  You mentioned once a 2nd Edition/edit or Paladin, and that seems like something that would be useful to include as a sidebar.

Rob

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Sho' thing. I agree with you that coming up with descriptors is hard work for this game. I'll be reducing the descriptors to 4 in the edit (Active, Reactive, Light, and Dark.)

Here's the list I gave out:

Flesh/Active and Reactive
Quickness
Speed
Skill
Strength
Virility
Toughness
Force
Ardor
Dexterity
Moxie
Bulk
Wherewithal

Flesh/Social
Charm
Beauty
Seriousness
Strength
Force
Tenacity
Vehemence
Grit
Resolve
Wit
Intelligence

Light/Active and Reactive
Instinct
Balance
Belief
Piety
Discipline
Foresight
Zeal
Cleverness
Valor
Courage

Light/Social
Honesty
Compassion
Self-Control
Insight
Candor
Audacity
Wisdom
Charity
Benevolence
Pathos
Humor

Dark/Active and Reactive
Brutality
Cunning
Cruelty
Rage
Succor
Fury
Violence
Anger
Ruthlessness
Craftiness
Rabidity
Mania

Dark/Social
Seduction
Lust
Fabrication
Insidiousness
Guile
Trickery
Artifice
Indifference
Disregard
Cruelty
Animosity
Malice
Mania

[dunlaing]

I'll be reducing the descriptors to 4 in the edit (Active, Reactive, Light, and Dark.)

Two big questions:

When do you expect the new edition to be released? weeks? months? years?

If I buy Paladin now, will I have to buy the new edition again? Or will it be free to people that bought the first edition?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Two big questions:

When do you expect the new edition to be released? weeks? months? years?

If I buy Paladin now, will I have to buy the new edition again? Or will it be free to people that bought the first edition?

Months.

Free.

Best,
Clinton