Dungeons & Dragons, Small Towns & Zealots

Tabletop gamers of my generation never had to deal with the mass hysteria surrounding role playing games in the 80s. Some of us, including myself, did have people in our lives who believed RPGs were evil. I still have strong feelings about my experiences, and I’m sure others with similar stories do as well. But what we experienced was an aftershock of a much more widespread phenomenon. Most people I’ve spoken with view tabletop games as an interesting past time. Occasionally they deride it as childish, or ‘nerdy,’ but it’s not very common these days to come across someone who honestly believes it is evil. None the less there was a time when role playing games were the target of religious zealots all across North America.

I bring this up because I was recently sent a link to a series of forum posts and images, uploaded by a fellow called Walkerp. When he was young, his hometown was swept up in this ‘controversy.’ His mother (who is clearly the coolest mother ever) saved a lot of local newspaper clippings on the subject, and eventually presented them to him as a gift. He was kind enough to scan and share them, and I’ve reproduced them below. Some of them are a little blurry near the edges, but I was able to decipher everything just fine. Reading these clippings was enlightening for me. It’s one thing to know a controversy existed, to read about it, and even encounter an odd individual or so who still believes D&D is evil. It’s quite another to see these issues seriously discussed in a newspaper.

You’ll note that in many of the clippings, a man named Clifford Olson is referenced. The anti-D&D crusaders repeatedly say they fear the children are being influenced by the game, and that they don’t want a repeat of the Clifford Olson incident. I had never heard of Clifford Olson before, but I assumed he was somehow involved in role playing games. Perhaps he was the kid who committed suicide over it which I’ve heard so much about. Curious, I decided to look into who he was. As it turns out he was not even slightly related to D&D or role playing games of any kind. He was simply a pedophile who raped and murdered young girls.

I am honestly floored by that casual and despicable accusation. How can any adult seriously claim a group of young teenagers are going to become monsters? It’s hard to believe a newspaper would print that kind of vile attack against children, much less that anyone would ever take it seriously. I understand that fear can be powerful, and that emotions run high after a tragedy, but there is no excuse for that kind of depraved behavior.

As I read this, I repeatedly thought of the men and women who worked on D&D in those days, Gary Gygax in particular. He (and no doubt many others at TSR) was a devout Christian. I can’t imagine what it is like to have your life’s work literally demonized by your own religious community. He probably found great comfort in his religious beliefs, but petty fools chose to take his source of comfort and use it as a weapon against him. Even decades after this nonsense had mostly blown over, after Gary died, a donation in his name was refused by his favorite Christian charity. I can’t even comment on that, it’s simply depressing.

Cicero said: “Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child.” So without further comment, here is what happened in our hobby before many of us were born.

What I Want

I like Pathfinder, which is why I’ve always been a vocal critic of it. It has a lot of problems; in many ways it falls short of my ideal game. I’ve often tried to improve upon the flaws with house rules, and I’ve been open in discussing the flaws which can’t be fixed. Over the past few months I’ve read through a number of other RPGs as well. Aside from my well documented perusal of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide, I’ve been looking at various retro clones created by the OSR community, some modern Pathfinder alternatives, and some games in completely different genres. More and more I think that I won’t be happy until I produce my own sourcebook.

It’s not something I think I’ll be doing anytime too soon. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of massive and involved project yet. But thinking about how I would design a game has got me thinking about what I want in a game. So I’ve compiled a list. And, since this list undoubtedly says a lot about this blog’s perspective, it seems useful to share.

I want rules which can be memorized. This doesn’t mean they need to be short enough that I can learn them by rote, it just means that they need to be logical enough that I can quickly deduce any I forget. If I need to spend a few sessions looking things up after we play, that’s okay.

I want rules which don’t try to establish mechanics for every possible action players might take. Instead, I want rules which guide me in coming up with my own mechanics for those situations, and which help me make those rulings without unbalancing my game.

I want more rules directed towards the GM than the players. There should certainly be rules that players can learn, but none or very few which they feel forced to learn. Nothing dissolves a budding player’s enthusiasm faster than telling them they need to buy a $60 rulebook, and read 300 pages of it before they’ll know how to play.

I want more supplements geared towards GMs than players. I understand why this hasn’t been the case in recent years: for every GM, there are probably three or more players. And since GMs will buy books anyway, it’s obvious which type of book has more potential customers. But never forget that the GM is your best salesperson. I can think of eleven people off of the top of my head who would probably have never picked up a tabletop RPG if I hadn’t invited them to my games. None of them bought supplements, but a lot of them bought core books and dice.

I want characters that can be created quickly. I don’t want to feel as though I’m sentencing players to waste eons every time I kill their characters. And I don’t want to force new players to sit through a bunch of obtuse character creation nonsense before I have a chance to show them how fun the game can be.

I want characters that can be customized and specialized endlessly. Character class is a fine starting point, but if my players want to make choices then I want to be able to offer them. If a player sets a goal for something they would like their character to be capable of, I want that goal to be achievable.

I want deep, tactical combat which forces players to think beyond a mundane exchange of blows. Combat where making a plan and knowing how to work together can mean the difference between life and death. Combat which none the less encourages players to take risks. Combat where being clever about your environment can turn the tide of a losing fight. Combat which is fun every time.

I want combat that doesn’t need to take an hour.

I want mechanics that engage players beyond a die roll. Rolling dice is a great way to resolve some types of action–but not ALL types of action. If every problem is solved with a die roll, then we might as be playing around a craps table.

I want mechanics unburdened by vestigial adherence to tradition. Just because past games have always done things a certain way doesn’t mean modern games should. The past exists for us to learn from, not to mindlessly emulate.

I want a game which doesn’t ignore history. If Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson figured out how to handle a situation amazingly, there’s no reason modern games should simply handle the same situation passably.

I want a game that equally supports many modes of play. A game which is just as engaging in tasks such as exploration or political intrigue, as it is in combat.

I want a game which explains not just the rules of the system, but the spirit which those rules support. One which explains why rules exist, and how certain mechanics improve play. I want a game which helps Game Masters make the leap from learning rules, to running a campaign.

I want a game which is supported by online tools, but which recognizes that if a game relies on online tools, it is a weak game.

I want rules that don’t need to be bypassed because they pointlessly add unnecessary work.

I want a game where the rules are designed to support me, not a game where the rules waste my time and frustrate my players.

I want a game without ‘traps,’ intended to impede a character’s build. Honestly, I want a game which doesn’t support even the concept of a ‘build,’ but instead promotes mechanical customization.

Dissection of Pathfinder's Monster Entries

One of the frequent criticisms of Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 is that it made monsters too complicated. It’s a criticism which D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder both inherited, and its one that I’ve offered some defense against in the past. However, having created several monsters of my own by now, I find that my resolve in this matter is weakening. When I’m preparing for a game, and I need unique monsters, I don’t employ an elaborate series of rules for constructing the statblock. I take my concept, write down any information which I think will be relevant to play, and that’s that. The whole process takes 5 minutes. Maybe 15 if the monster is particularly complicated, or I’m being fiddly with the mechanics.

The only time I’ve ever actually followed the rules for creating monsters is when I was preparing that monster to be posted on Papers & Pencils. That’s a total of four times in my entire GMing career: The Corpse Sewn Hekatonkheires, the Bloody Avenger, the Draugr, and the three spiders I ganked from Telecanter. Every time it was a pain in the ass which lasted at least an hour, more often two. And what, precisely do I have to show for it? Do those monsters I created according to the official rules function more elegantly? Are they balanced better? Would players even notice a difference between a creature created in 15 minutes, and one created in two hours using the official rules?

No.

If the answer to any of the above questions was ‘yes,’ would it justify the extra time investment?

No.

Functionally, there’s very little difference between a monster I quickly jot down, and a monster I laboriously construct using the rules. Aside from the “statistics” block of information, all the same stuff is there. What else could you even conceivably remove? In combat you need to know a creature’s defenses and offenses. Ecology might not be strictly necessary, but it has a lot of value to GMs, and takes no real time to create. The reason the official monster creation method wastes so much time is not because of the volume of information it creates, it’s because of the ridiculously precise methodology it calls for. Every monster needs to have a certain amount of HD, and based on that can have a certain number of feats and skills.The monster’s statistics, HP, AC, saving throws, attack and damage rolls, all of it needs to be cross referenced with the desired CR of the creature, and anything that is raised requires something else to be lowered in response.

Ostensibly, the hope is that all of this will help GMs predict the how challenging a monster will be. Once the process is complete, you should theoretically be able to calculate a monster’s Challenge Rating, and know what level of adventurer it is appropriate for. Following the rules will ensure you don’t create a monster so overpowered that your players get murdered, and you won’t create a monster so underpowered that your players get bored.

For the moment, I’m going to set aside the question of whether or not a GM should even try to create “appropriate” challenges. For myself, I prefer that my players learn to run away now and again. If they never face a battle which is beyond them, then they’ll never be forced to look beyond combat for solutions. However, I can understand and appreciate the desire to have some kind of measuring stick for the level of challenge an encounter will present.

The problem is that after all the work this system puts us through to ‘calculate’ a monster’s challenge rating, it doesn’t even work. It doesn’t work because there’s no meaningful way to take a monster’s Special Abilities and Qualities into account when you’re trying to calculate CR. There’s not even a quarter of a page in the “Monster Creation” section of the bestiary devoted to the topic, and it’s the most important one. Pick up your bestiary, flip to any monster in the book. If that monster has a CR higher than 1, a guarantee you that the most important part of the statblock is the special abilities. Of course it is! If not for special abilities, then a monster is nothing more than a pile of calculations about how hard the monster hits, and how hard it is to kill. If monsters didn’t have special abilities, then there would hardly be any point to having a Bestiary at all.

I am not making the argument that Pathfinder needs a better system for determining how special abilities influence a monster’s CR. Special abilities often bend the rules, or create entirely new mechanics. They are far too varied for any system to properly take them into account, and any system which tried would be even more complicated than the one Pathfinder already uses. The argument I am making is that the official monster creation rules don’t even succeed at the one task they’re supposedly good for: accurately estimating a monster’s CR. And even if they were, it still wouldn’t be worth the time.

Then there’s the “statistics” block. Here you’ll find information on the monster’s six base abilities, it’s base attack bonus, it’s CMB and CMD, the feats it has, the skills it has along with any racial modifiers, and the languages it speaks. I confess that I find most of this to be at least marginally useful. Certainly it is essential to know the combat maneuver scores of anything the players might fight. And even if I don’t need to know the bonus that a Couatl has to its survival check, I can accept that others do. But what is gained by meticulously calculating how many skill points each of these creatures receives per hit die? Is it imperative that each monster can be reverse engineered, just so others can have the satisfaction of discovering that there was indeed an internal logic at play? I remember that after I had finished with the Corpse Sewn Hekatonkheires, I realized that I had forgotten to add feats. I then felt forced to search for ways to empower a monster which I knew was already powerful enough to suit my needs.

So what’s the solution? To be frank, I don’t have one right now. As I mentioned above, I see the value in challenge rating. It provides a measuring stick, and its never bad for a GM to have a fuller understanding of how something will impact their game. But I don’t think that measuring stick is worth the eternity required to achieve even the most uncertain result. For now, I’ll resign myself to making estimates about a creature’s abilities. Perhaps at some point in the future I’ll come up with and post a new system. But, for now, I think it’s simply important to acknowledge that the current system is bad. It is broken, and should not be used.

The Fun of Character Death

“Obvious” is a tricky concept, because most of the time it’s not actually obvious. Some facts which are obvious to one person may only seem that way because that person is surrounded by people who take that fact for granted. And that obvious fact may not even be true! For many subjects, it’s not too difficult to find two people who hold mutually exclusive viewpoints to be obviously true. We really shouldn’t be so hasty to name something “obvious.”

Due to this, it is often helpful to state that which may seem obvious in a clear and descriptive manner. Maybe I’m wasting time, but I have a feeling that this is not as well understood as it ought to be. So here we go:

The more time a player has invested in their character, the less fun it will be if that character dies.

There are some rare exceptions to this rule, but it remains largely true for any manner of time investment. We Pathfinder GMs are at something of a disadvantage. At my best, I can help a first time player through the process of creating a level 1 character in about 40 minutes. And, generally speaking, the task is viewed by a new player as something of a chore. They may come to find it much more entertaining once they begin to understand the system better, but that comes later, if at all.

The result is that, in a game like Pathfinder, there’s no way for a GM to handle character death in the first session without significant frustration on the player’s part. After spending 40 minutes or more on a character, players are not going to want to trudge through the creation process a second time just because they failed to check for pit traps. And if you’re playing with first-timers, then they’re probably going to fail to check for pit traps more than once.

When I’m running a Pathfinder game, I handle this in two ways. First, I try never to run a game composed entirely of new people. I try to find at least one veteran of my game table to sit in and provide an example of skillful play. Second, during a new player’s first few sessions, I bend the rules, and give them advice in an attempt to show them how they can best survive. But that can’t last forever. It can’t even last very long, lest players start to think they can rely on the GM for advice. And even before I do stop giving advice, it’s important to allow the players to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.

The game is no fun if there is no danger of character death.

That’s slightly more controversial, but I hold it to be no less true than the statement above. If a player’s decisions lead to their demise, then a good GM will not protect them from their fate. The fact that a player has invested enough time in a character for that character’s death to be upsetting is not a justification for allowing PCs to cheat death. In doing so, we rob the game of its danger, and without the chance of failure, it ceases to be a game.

Games with shorter character creation methods are not immune to this problem. If it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to create a character, then players won’t be too upset if their character dies in the first session of play. They probably won’t be too upset if their character dies in the second session of play, or the third. Once they reach level 2, though, they’re going to be a little more upset if they die. And as they progress through the levels, it will become more and more disheartening to lose a character. It doesn’t matter if the GM allows them to come back into the game with a new character of equal level. Losing a character you care about is never going to be fun.

I don’t bring this up because I think it’s a problem which needs to be solved. I don’t even think it really can be solved. On the one hand you have you player’s desire for their character to survive the game, on the other hand you have the entertainment value your players get from surviving a world which is legitimately deadly. You can play with the balance all you like by making characters more resilient, increasing or decreasing the availability of resurrections, or whatever. But in my experience, players are the most interested in the game when they’re coming face to face with their character’s own mortality.

I guess I don’t really have a point to make with this post, so much as I wanted to put those thoughts down somewhere.

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

The trees bent aside like twigs to make way for the creature that stepped out of the darkness. It’s appearance was grotesque and alien. It wasn’t until it opened its colossal jaws to choke out a guttural roar that the adventurers even realized where its mouth was. Yaril drew his blades and stepped forward.

“Alright kids, we do this by the book. I’ll try and sneak behind the bastard.” His apparent confidence was belied by the tremor in his voice. Graft none the less nodded silently and began pulling an arrow from his quiver. Behind them, Vortican was already mumbling the beginnings of a spell, arcs of magical energy gathering around his fingertips.

“I’m going to seduce it.” Tassandra said. The rest of the party’s jaws dropped in unison. It was Vortican who spoke first.

“How do you intend to do that?”

“Well…ya know. I look at him with lusty eyes, and open my mouth just a little. Then I turn so he can get a really good view of my ass, with a little sideboob for good measure. Then I take this big stick thingie I have and hold it like its his penis, just to make sure he gets it.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not a valid strategy.” Yaril managed, still dumbstruck by his companion’s foolishness. “I’m not even sure that thing is a ‘he.'”

“Shut up, it will totally work!” were the last words Tassandra spoke, before the entire party was devoured by The Beast Who Hates Sexist Fantasy Art.

SOPA/PIPA Strike

If you visited my blog within the last 24 hours, you know that on January 18th, 2012, I joined the rest of the Internet in protesting SOPA and PIPA, two bills presently being considered by legislators in the United States. And though it falls outside the purview of this blog, I think it’s relevant for me to take a moment to explain how important this is to me, and why it should be important to you. And to help you understand that, let me explain just how important this blog is to me.

Before I started Comma, Blank_, I was not very happy with my life. If you go back to the first post on this blog, entitled “Worthlessness,” you’ll get an idea of just how unhappy I was. I was struggling through the depths of severe depression. The woman I love, who I had been with since I was a teenager, had left me. I had been forced to drop out of college, and was working a dead-end job that I hated. And all of those things are still true. But Comma, Blank_ gives me hope. Comma, Blank_ makes me feel like I’m improving myself every day by forcing myself to become a better and more consistent writer. The opportunities it has granted me in the few months I’ve been writing it give me hope for even greater opportunities to come. Comma, Blank_ is my life preserver, and I cling to it tightly.

And today I shut it down. I turned away potential new hits. I prevented anyone new from discovering my work. Because stopping SOPA and PIPA is that important.

This legislation will smother the Internet to death. Blogs like my Traipsing Through the Timmverse will be shut down without trial or due process by media corporations. Let me reiterate that last part in bold: by media corporations. Not agents of the government, not duly elected officials, not judges or any part of the judicial system. That’s the kind of power Big Media is attempting to take for itself. And the United States Government is considering giving it to them.

We’re gamers, so lets put this into our own terminology. The Internet is, among many other things, a producer for entertainment. The media industry is, also, a producer of entertainment. Allowing media corporations the right to shut down sites on the Internet is like giving Wizards of the Coast the right to shut down production of any RPG don’t like. Do you trust Wizards of the Coast with the fate of your favorite indie RPG?

The Internet stands among the greatest accomplishments of our species. The very idea that someone would try to harm it should enrage you. This is a book burning for the modern age.

At this point, I’d like to direct you to something written by my friend Rilgon. He’s much more involved in the industry, and more educated on the topic, than I am. He’s written something eloquent and informative. Something everyone should read.

Whatever else you do: contact your representative. You’ve got a congressperson and two senators. That’s three phone calls.

You can do it.

Hey Atheist Gamers: Stop It

Is it just me, or do Atheists comprise a larger portion of the tabletop gamer population than they do of the general population? Maybe I only notice it because I actually pay attention to the gaming community, but it certainly seems that we gamers are disproportionately atheistic. Enough so that at least one tabletop forum I frequent has an in-joke of starting posts with “I’m an Atheist.” as a non-sequitur. I won’t venture a guess as to why, but perhaps Jack Chick was on to something.

Personally, this is really cool for me. I, myself, am an Atheist. And I’m not exactly passive about it. At least two people credit me with helping them on their road towards Atheism, and believers usually find my brash and uncompromising outspokenness on the subject of religion to be unpleasant. I can certainly get along just fine with believers, but if I can game with like-minded folk, so much the better! I think everyone can agree that it’s nice to feel you are with people you don’t need to worry about offending with your opinions. Not that our opinions on religion should be coming up around the game table.

I say “shouldn’t,” because, unfortunately, they do. And I’m not talking about religious zealouts who try to demonize Role Playing. I’m talking about you, my fellow Atheists.

More and more often I’m hearing tales of Atheist players and GMs who go on an in-game crusade against religion. Players who refuse to group with clerics, distrust all in-game religious institutions, or even engaging in diplomancy to convince NPCs that there are no deities. And the GM stories…oh the GM stories. I’ve heard of GMs who refused to allow any deities in their games. GMs who cause paladins to lose their powers over questioning their god’s will, and explain it by stating that all gods demand unquestioning faith. Even of GMs who have gods strike players down for minor sins, because they apparently take their deific role playing cues from the old testament.

And it needs to stop.

There’s a line most atheists are familiar with, a common rebuttal to the assertion of a deity. It can be phrased various ways, but stated simply, it goes “I don’t believe in God for the same reason I don’t believe in unicorns. There’s simply no evidence that they exist.” Well guess what motherfuckers? Pathfinder Bestiary, page 269: Unicorns.

Religion within the game world should be no more offensive to an atheist than the magic, or the monsters, or the dungeons which don’t make a lick of logical sense. (“Mad wizards” can’t explain everything, Mr. Gygax). Nearly every fantastic element in the games we love can be traced back through history to some primitive human’s attempt to understand the divine. What about devils!? Surely there are few imaginary creatures more religious than devils! Yet I’ve never heard of a fanatically atheistic GM bastardizing that concept.

I understand that you don’t like religion. I get that it hurt you. I don’t like it either, and it hurt me too. I don’t like that I spent hours of my childhood each week listening to someone tell me about what a bad person I am. But you know what? I’m betting your parents didn’t take you to the temple of Kord every Godsday. And neither did mine. Fantasy gods never hurt anybody.

So get the fuck over it.

No More Overzealous Paladins

Life isn’t straightforward. It isn’t black and white. The stories of vile villains and righteous crusades that we were weaned on are fairy tales. But heroes? Heroes are very real. They’re not perfect, and there’s no army of them, but they exist. They are the naive idealists without any grasp of how the world works. They are the battle hard cynics who fight on to keep the darkness from encroaching for another day. They are the unknown soldiers who die alone in the dark, with nothing to comfort them other than the knowledge that they have done what is right. Heroes fight losing battles, they are manipulated, and too often receive nothing–not even success–for their trouble. Yet heroes fight on, because some battles need to be fought.
These are the incorruptible, the charitable, the fearless. These are the paladins.
-Anonymous /tg/ contributor

I am tired of seeing paladins consistently portrayed in an un-paladin like manner. In recent years, I don’t think I have seen a single paladin–either in a game or in some other media–who didn’t suffer from a painful overzealousness. Paladins are played as assholes who object to the very concept of tolerance. They look down on anyone who doesn’t adhere to their strict (often arbitrary) moral codes. And even a slight suggestion that laws are being broken or evil acts committed will cause such a paladin to react with force. A sizable portion of the time, the paladin is so over zealous that he or she serves as an antagonist to good characters. In other cases, paladins grow so overzealous as to be actively evil according to any rational definition of the alignment.

It’s not that I don’t get it. We’ve all dealt with this kind of paladin in real life. The door to door religion salespeople, the condescendingly self-righteous believers, the snarling fundamentalists demanding that one group or another be denied civil liberties on the basis of a religion. In the real world, people with an absolute sense of right and wrong based on their religious beliefs are often brutish and unkind. Those willing to go out into the world and ‘fight’ for their religion often choose to do so by trying to bring everyone who doesn’t agree with them down. I am an Atheist, I have no reason to defend religion whatsoever. But the needless association of in-game religion to real-world religion needs to stop.

Pathfinder and D&D are games of magic and monsters. Games where gods actually exist, and frequently interact with the material world in obvious ways. In real life, a woman who kills 10 people and claims god told her to do it is crazy. In Pathfinder, the authorites would find out which god the woman is talking about, find a cleric of that god, and have that cleric ask their god why those 10 people deserved to die. If the woman were, in fact, crazy, then the cleric could use the powers granted them by their god to simply raise the dead. Whether you are religious or not, I think we can all agree that religion in a fantasy world is fantastical. Not only does it grant magical powers, but the gods who head fantasy religions are beings which can be reached and spoken to with even low level clerical spells.

Like the religions they serve, paladins are fantastical. With the rare exception of those who have fallen, paladins are paragons of virtue. They never walk past a person who is hungry without stopping to feed them, nor could they walk past a person who was cold without giving away their cloak. This is not a matter of duty–though a paladin might disagree. Paladins act always to help those in need because they want to soothe every iota of suffering possible. And when a paladin stands to fight, it is not simply to defend their honor or that of their god. Paladins do not fight for kings or queens, nor do they fight for money or prestige. When a paladin draws steel, it is because they believe they stand between innocents, and evil. It is because the only way to soothe suffering is to defeat that which causes it–be it man or beast.

I think the best way to demonstrate this point would be to relate a story of a paladin played correctly. This story has been floating around the 4chan sub forum /tg/ (for Traditional Games) for a number of years now. It is one among many such stories, though for the life of me I cannot find any others which I want to share. I’ve edited the story to work in a non-image board format. I believe it demonstrates the paladin archetype with actions better than I can demonstrate it with words.

My Warforged paladin was alone with the villain atop his tower. The villain had wings, and could fly away at any time, but since I was alone he chose to taunt me.
“Have you ever stopped to think about why you protect others?”
“On occasion, why?” I replied.
“It’s all programmed in, you know. You care about humans because you were built by humans and programmed to care about humans. You believe in everything you do because they chose for you to believe it. Look at yourself! They made you so that you like being helpful and protective, and it’s all a lie! Join me, and I can free you from it all. From the shackles they put on you. You can be a pure and perfect being, immortal and superior, with all the power you’ve ever wanted.”
“Yes, but isn’t that desire programmed in, as well? Even if none of my emotions are true, they feel true. Even if my cause isn’t really mine, it feels just. All you can do is exchange one lie for another. I’ll keep the one that makes everyone else, the ones with real emotions, happiest.”
With that, my character leaped forward and grappled the villain. I knocked him from the tower and rode him down to the rocks below, using my weight to prevent him from flying.
Just thought I’d share my characters last moments with you.
-Anonymous /tg/ contributor

Paladins are not self righteous. They are not over zealous. They are not eager to spill blood for their gods. They aren’t perfect, but nor do they suffer from the weaknesses which often characterize the “forcefully religious” in the real world.

What paladins are is goodly and just. They are heroes, and I would like to see them portrayed as such.