This is the first post in our series on the details of moral codes as class features in Pathfinder. It both revisits and gives an in-depth treatment of many of the issues addressed in this Reddit thread, where response to a comment of mine was so positive and enthusiastic that it inspired me to finally put the work in and actually start this blog. My thanks to Reddit’s /r/mramisuzuki in particular and the entire community over at /r/Pathfinder_RPG in general for past and continued support and feedback as this project of mine goes on.

Many of the most common and iconic classes in Pathfinder are fundamentally and inescapably normative, if not downright moral. By this, I don’t mean that they are all do-gooders and hall monitors and teachers’ pets – after all, pound for pound, few creatures could be more destructive or evil than a high-level antipaladin or cleric of Rovagug. Rather, I mean that questions of value and standards of behaviour lie at the very heart of what it means to play many popular classes.

The most obvious examples are the straight-up god-worshiping divine classes, what I will call the “priestly classes” – clerics, paladins, inquisitors, and warpriests. But a case can be made (more or less) for druids, oracles, hunters, rangers, shamans, and even witches (among possible others) sharing this normativity, though many in that latter group are not so obviously moral.

For the priestly classes, though, this moral focus is so central that it tends to be at the heart of not only characters’ (not to mention players’) motivations, but also the thinking of GMs running games with those classes in them. And quite a bit of that thought comes down to official wording like the “Code of Conduct” (for paladins) and the language on “Ex-Clerics.” That is, classes like these have to follow codes of behaviour, explicitly moral codes of behaviour (i.e., codes of behaviour which relate to moral actions, not necessarily “morally good” codes of behaviour) or they lose almost all of their class features. So players who play priestly classes will often exhibit a tendency to tiptoe through the tulips, making sure they don’t inadvertently step on any moral landmines that might cause them to lose all their powers…while GMs running campaigns for such characters will often go out of their way to plant such landmines.

The problem is that morality is rarely, if ever, so simple as this approach would suggest, for all kinds of reasons that vary depending on the class we’re talking about and the role those characters are supposed to play in a given god’s priesthood. Ignoring this complexity often leads to morally unsatisfying stories and encounters which have, in many cases, sadly turned some players off of the fascinating and engrossing elements of the priestly classes entirely.

For this reason, and because talking about these moral complexities will help shed light on wider, more interesting, and more important moral issues in both Pathfinder and the real world, this series of posts will be concerned with how we should think about codes of behaviour for the priestly classes, specifically what it should (and shouldn’t) take for these characters to lose their powers due to moral violations and how this should make us think differently about both Pathfinder and our own moral lives.

Now, without giving too much away, I plan to have entirely separate posts about separate classes, because (and I’d get used to hearing this kind of thing from me if I were you) the answers to these kinds of questions are not one-size-fits-all, and looking for simple answers to complex moral issues is a sure path to falsehood and error. In fact, not only will separate priestly classes be getting their own posts, but I actually think that in order for this project to be useful, the distinctions will have to be more fine-grained than that. Clerics of good deities will have to think about these things differently than clerics of evil deities, for instance, so they’ll be getting separate treatment. Indeed, at least one archetype will even addressed individually; that’s right, gear yourselves up for a whole post on my favourite archetype of all time (here’s where my metaethicist’s bias comes through), the grey paladin! And yes, being Canadian, that is how I’m going to spell it.

For the first substantial post in this series, though, we’re going to jump right into what might be the most straightforward and (ironically) controversial moral class of all: the paladin. If you’re as tired as I am of the idea of “paladin traps,” or have ideas of your own about how both players and GMs should deal with paladins and a world containing them, keep your eyes peeled for the next installment of Detect Alignment!