this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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My favorite character I've played was a Paladin, but I went in not wanting to RP the typical purely good Paladin. He was a bit of a narcissist, but he helped people to maintain his image and status. It was an interesting spin on the lawful good architype. He did good, it just happened to be for selfish reasons usually.
Homelander?
Lol. I guess he was somewhat similar. He didn't kill people though. He was the only survivor of what should have been a TPK. One member of the party did something stupid and summoned a hoard of enemies to us. We were totally surrounded with no hope of winning the fight, so he summons a steed and fled. He tried to grab people but failed, so he ended up as the only survivor. I felt bad for that.
Per the rules that sounds more like lawful neutral as intentions and ethical understandings of the world as well as actions matter for alignment but these discussions always take up more time than they're worth and is a great example of why characters shouldn't have alignments.
Yeah, I always like to play loose with alignment. It doesn't really make sense. Treating them as hard rules just ends up with worse role play. No one in the real world is always good, or lawful, or whatever. Also, "evil" people often think they're doing good. It's more of just guidelines in my opinion than actual rules.
In philosophy there's an argument about if doing good just to gain something is actually good. Someone who donates to charity to rehabilitate their image, for example. There are arguments for either side, whether the effect or the intent is more important. If there's that discussion in philosophy than the strict alignment has to be flawed.