"You were always smiling, real friendly like, but the way you smiled was so empty it hurt to watch you."
Here we are at the end of our Paladin Journey, the final step on our holy pilgrimage to the land of not-acting-like-assholes. While the first issue with Paladins is...more or less...shared between the player and the GM, this one lies squarely on the GM's shoulders. Today we discuss a subplot infamous all over the internet, one that's sparked more hatred, debate and nasty stories than any other aspect of the Paladin. I've even met people that feel this is a required part of paladin, something the GM must include in his game due to the Paladin's oath.
Very often in games, the GM will craft personal subplots. I don't think this is necessarily a required part of GMing, since it can get really tedious to do a personal plot for every person in a 6-man party, but they can add a lot of flavor to a game. Some systems like 5E even standardize coming up with a background so the GM has an easier time of it. However, often GMs will look at the Paladin and decide his personal plot should be a moral struggle. Yes, today we're talking about The Fall.
It starts innocent enough. The Paladin's class is all about morals and ethics, so making him question his through hard choices or grey areas sounds like a good fit. It might even sound fun to tempt him toward Evil. Basically, to a GM this could all sound really awesome and frequently they forget to consider the player.
First, let me say, it's pretty shitty to design a subplot where you threaten to take something mechanical away from the player. What're you gonna do next, you sick asshole, make the Fighter deal with Muscular Dystrophy? Is the rogue going to find out he has Parkinsons Disease? What's your next trick, is the Cleric gonna to find out his God is fucking dead? Pardon my fucking French but I can't believe this is 2016 and people still think that a Fall subplot is an acceptable thing to run. Even just based on this fact I can't recommend you ever run this shit.
Ahem. I feel better getting that out of my system. I feel I've properly expressed that negative reinforcement is a stupid thing to bring into a subplot, but there's more than one problem with this. Fallen paladins are a very compelling subject, but there are so many issues with getting there that this is best left to NPCs , Villains, and subplots requested by the player himself.
First, by its very nature, a Fall subplot requires hard moral choices and moral grey areas. These kinds of things work best in games as a 'spice'. Use them sparingly and they create good memories, but use them very often and it turns into a bad thing. People experience something I call Grey Fatigue with this kind of thing, where constantly being faced with hard choices slowly erodes a player's drive to think fairly about them. Some more than others(obviously) will start to hate that every decision is hard, feel that everything will come back and bite them on the ass later, and simply want to move on. They WILL start to pine for a situation where the decision is refreshingly obvious. They might even start to make the "tough" decisions randomly and without thought just to get them over with.
The next problem is related a little. Remember our pal Agency? The problem is that you, as the GM, can take it away at any moment. You absolutely can present him with a situation where every response is interpreted as the wrong one. This is as easy as giving the player a conundrum similar to The Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem is a philosophical question with no intended "right" answer, it's meant to provoke discussion. However, the GM can easily turn a subjective discussion of morality into an objective scenario, and reason that every outcome leads to a violation of either the Paladin's Oath or Alignment. He is, of course, the final arbiter. Moral ambiguity can absolutely be thrown away at the last second to create an unwinnable situation.
This isn't even hard to do. It's loathsome and despicable, and even if you're an amazing GM who starkly refuses to do this, the Paladin's player will be thinking of it the entire time, I promise you. The moment he makes the 'wrong' decision, he'll be wondering if there even was a right answer at all. This can even lead to some pretty negative philosophical debate in real life as the Paladin(or others) defend what they felt really was the right decision. They'll have their own opinions on the moral grey area you created, and suddenly it's not good enough to simply declare one decision 'good' and one 'evil', if you did that at all. They might even find out you created an unwinnable state, a riddle with no answer, and get angry. I'm assuming philosophical debate is definitely not what most of the group showed up for.
And that's kind of the problem here, isn't it? The GM is metaphorically holding a gun to the Paladin's head, and at some point the Paladin's player will grow fatigued and say "Shoot me or don't, just get it over with." and "just get it over with" is definitely not a sentiment you EVER want someone thinking about your subplots.
This is all because the subplot began with negativity. It started with antagonism and the threat that a player's build can be changed or ruined unless they make the "right" choices, and a vague feeling that there aren't going to be any "right" choices. A lot of the time, a player chooses Paladin because they want something refreshing. Blunt. Obvious. He's a true champion of good, and an assault of grey areas and moral philosophy is very often the last thing he wants. He's a fighting class, and despite the fact that he has moral and ethical restrictions, a whole subplot dedicated to questioning them is about as welcome as offering the same to a Barbarian or Monk.
Sometimes, going for the obvious in a subplot is nice. That's not what makes something boring. Give the Paladin an evil demon to thwart and destroy, a sister to save, a cause to champion. Do something that makes him really feel like the Crusader he is, not something that tears down the very idea of one.
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