MATT: When I ask for persuasion or deception on your end, when someone's rolling insight on you, that's an opportunity for you to be honest and choose persuasion. That way, when the opportunity does arrive that you are deceiving somebody, the person that's rolling insight doesn't know whether you are or not.
AABRIA: I've taken that from you, by the way. I love that. I was like, persuasion or deception, don't say which.
MATT: Yeah, the player chooses, they just say a number, and then whether you're deceiving or you're not, if you succeed over them, then you get to give the information you want.
BRENNAN: That's slick as hell. And that's what I do now too. Stealing that right away.
MATT: We all steal from each other. Make us all better.
— Adventuring Party: All About The Ravening War S12E04: "The Mystic River Episode"
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That said, the D&D 3.5 Paladin was bad. It was badly designed, it had bad rules, and in conjunction with the other notoriously bad rule, alignment, it could cause havoc.
Now personally, I never had ANY problems with it in my tabletop games. I played paladins and loved it, and I loved it when other people played paladins, and it was great. But that's because, collectively as a group, we took ONE look at that terrible rule where the paladin's code of conduct prevents them from associating with Evil characters or "someone who consistently offends her moral code", and immediately went, "that's stupid, we ain't doing that, it would ruin the game".
We also didn't love the concept of alignment as a cosmic force, and didn't care for Usually Evil Goblins and Always Evil anything. And when a class's signature ability fully depends on whether creatures are capital E Evil, well that affects storytelling, doesn't it? But we all saw it the same way, and we were happily able to change it without any disagreements. In the end we had a Paladin… similar to 5e now that I think of it: completely ignore the Code's association clause, tailor the Code to personal stance or a specific Order, Detect only fiends and undead and the like, Smite anything you want, Fall only if you really fuck up, and never presume that just because you haven't Fallen yet everything you've ever done is justified and correct and anyone who disagrees with you is objectively wrong.
Basically, there were 2 options in 3.5. You either houseruled and/or handwaved things, and in matters of alignment interpretations erred on the side of "what makes the game go",
OR, you played with Rules As Written, and filled the forums with questions like "should the paladin fall?" (one such thread per week, conservatively), "we got into a fight over the Paladin, what to do?", "is it Evil to pick pockets? because we have a Paladin in the party", "the Assassin uses poison, shouldn't that offend my moral code?", and shit like that. Just... pointless strife, all the time. Again, never happened to me, but I was appalled to read about it, over and over and over.
People got intense with 3.5 Paladins (both pro and against) because it was BADLY DESIGNED and had BAD RULES. Its mechanics forced narrative choices on the entire table, and the only way to make it frictionless was having a party where no one wishes to explore a character's bad side ever, no one does things that aren't bad but WotC branded Evil™ in this or that splatbook, and everyone magically agrees all the time on "what is right and what is wrong" and "what is Lawful and what is Chaotic", which is simply impossible. The most subjective thing in the world (ethics!) was presented as an objective cosmic force, and how you interpreted it would determine how much damage the Paladin deals in combat, and whether the Paladin could keep associating with the party, and if the Paladin is still a Paladin. And all that in a game, let's not forget, whose basic, fundamental premise is "kill things and take their stuff". I'm sorry, this is tremendously stupid. It's the WORST design.
I know that for some people it worked as written, and good for them, but for the many many people it didn't work, well it's obvious why.
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hope you've got a fire extinguisher handy, it's YOUR kitchen on fire.
sketch page drawn for one of my favorite artists and a good friend, @officercrunchcontrol.
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