To Be Lawful Or Good / Tabletop Games

Examples of characters forced to break from "lawful", or whose status as such is called into question.

• d20 Modern addresses the issue with a ranked "allegiance" system. Someone whose allegiances are "Good, Lawful" will normally choose "Good" in this dilemma, while someone who is "Lawful, Good" will choose Lawful, and one whose allegiances are "My Kingdom, Lawful, Good" will be neither if it's necessary to serve their kingdom.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In general (up until the 4th Edition) this has been a common case of player misinterpretation of the alignment system due to the mistaken assumption that any Lawful character will consider all laws to be equally valid. Under this logic, Lawful Good characters would be unable to oppose Lawful Evil ones so long as there was some kind of legal system involved. Interestingly, players rarely seemed to believe that the inverse principle was true. The idea that Lawful Evil characters might actively try to subvert a lawful society, or flat out try to overthrow its government entirely, was taken as a given in matters of Lawful Evil villainy. Properly played, a Lawful Good character will oppose any law that they do not believe benefits the cause of Good, a Lawful Neutral character will uphold law for its own sake (and may oppose attempts to change laws, especially with Good or Evil intent) and a Lawful Evil character will usually try to apply or impose laws that work to their advantage.
    • The Archons of Mount Celestia (Lawful Good) work together in perfect harmony to create an idealized heaven.
    • The Modrons of Mechanus (Lawful Neutral) work within a rigid hierarchy whose entire purpose is to maintain the orderly functioning of their plane.
    • The Devils of the Nine Hells (Lawful Evil) have a hierarchy as well, but it is expected that every devil will try to advance themselves at the expense of their peers, subordinates, and superiors.
  • In the Greyhawk campaign setting there were multiple cases of Lawful deities and their followers acting in direct opposition to each other.
    • The two war gods, Heironeous (Lawful Good) and his brother Hextor (Lawful Evil) are outright enemies, and their worshipers follow suit. The kingdoms of Furyondy and Nyrond were essentially governed by leaders who favored Heironeous and seceded from the Great Kingdom of Aerdy when the government of the latter became increasingly dominated by Hextor worshipers who pulled the whole empire towards Lawful Evil.
    • The gods Pholtus and Saint Cuthbert, who alternate between Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral depending on what edition you are playing, extremely dislike each other because both believe that they have the best notion of law. This results in their stiff-necked, legalistic worshipers getting into vicious arguments. Some Pholtus worshipers are so extreme in their conviction of their god's absolute rightness that they effectively become monotheists, either ignoring other gods or flat out denying that they exist (despite reams of evidence to the contrary). This even became a problem within Pholtus's faith, as Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral worshipers (along with some who had even slipped as far as Lawful Evil) dubbed each other "heretics" over their differing views.
  • In the Forgotten Realms setting:
    • Tyr was one of the most staunchly Lawful Good deities. However, it is stated that his clerics "never enforce a law that can be shown to be unjust." Since Tyr's clerics could be either Lawful Good or Neutral Good without losing their powers, good generally won out. Tyr was specifically the god of Justice, not law and order. If the conflict exists, his followers would conclude the problem is with the law.
    • Also of note is the god Bane, who is Lawful Evil yet utterly heedless of any law other than his own. His worshipers are expected to conquer or otherwise seize all nations and bring them under Bane's control.
  • The Knights of Solamnia suffer from this in the Dragonlance setting, being more concerned with the rules and procedures of the Measure rather than actually upholding their Oath to defend the innocent and fight for justice. It takes Sturm Brightblade's Heroic Sacrifice for them to realize this, and then they rally to begin taking the offensive against the Dragonarmies. A later book also notes that the Knights begin going through the Measure and updating it so it allows them to better follow the Oath. However, all of this served as a plot device to emphasize the importance of the saga's primary heroes as they had to overcome the enemy with little or no help from the Lawful Stupid people who should have been doing the job.
  • Book of Exalted Deeds gives an official solution to paladins trapped in this dilemma: always err on the side of Good.
  • Oh, so common in the case of GMs that hate Paladins, that jokingly put the paladin, in the first seconds of the game, with the prospect: "Hey, they king is evil. What do you do? Protecting the weak is against the law and would make you Chaotic Good". In the old times of 2E it was awfully common!
  • Complete Scoundrel gives them an entire Prestige Class based around this concept, the Grey Guard. Although they are still forbidden from doing evil, they can play things a little looser when it comes to their vows than most paladins. Eventually they are released from their vows entirely, and can use their own judgement as to what is right.
  • One didn't even need to look at the Book of Exalted Deeds: the Paladin's Code of Conduct in Third Edition implied the answer by the simple fact that doing Chaotic deeds doesn't make you fall on their own (whereas Evil deeds does), you have to do it enough to cease to be Lawful Good — so long as it isn't against the (short) list of things banned by the Code of Conduct, Paladins are entirely capable of breaking the law and remaining Paladins. They just can't make a habit of it.
  • Camber of Culdi in the Deryni series demonstrated what the paladins should be doing of course. Find a legitimate non-evil heir of the previous dynasty and install him instead. Oppose evil the lawful way, duh.
  • 4th Edition clearly draws a line between the two: a Lawful Good character tends to act according to the Law, while a Good character leans towards the Good. However, the game also stresses (more than any edition before it) that alignment is a guide and not a restriction.
  • Planescape had the Mercykillers faction, formed long ago from two lesser factions forced together by circumstance. The Mercykillers had grown so obsessively Lawful in their pursuit of justice and punishment that when the Faction War came at the end of the setting line, the Good members broke away and took up the name of the original Sons of Mercy faction they once were.
• From the Iron Kingdoms, we have High Paladin Dartan Vilmon, who was ordered to Purge a town of "heretics" by the power-mad Heirarch Voyle. Vilmon turned on the Menite army and told them "You're going to have to get past me," defying the law (the Heirarch orders someone burnt as a heretic, you bloody well do it or you're one too) and upholding good. The kicker? They were more scared of Vilmon than Voyle.
• This situation comes up frequently in Legend of the Five Rings, as Rokugan's laws are far from just. Most famously, when the Emperor is possessed by the Big Bad Fu Leng, the entire empire is faced with the fact that the focus of their entire legal system is now basically Satan. Matsu Tsuko, leader of the Lion Clan, takes a much more tragic third option.
• Warhammer 40,000 actually has this happen regularly. When you have all of Humanity under a Fanatical Church Militant with absolute power facing dire threats to its survival in a Grimdark universe where EVERYTHING is trying to kill you (or worse), harsh, inhumane, and downright Nightmare Fuel Laws that trample any concept of decency, mercy or understanding is par the course.

Examples of characters who Take A Third Option

• Dungeons & Dragons: As a classic Lawful Good alignment debate; a very common problem for all Lawful Good characters, especially paladins, is solving such moral dilemmas. If roleplay is good (not "Me smash evil. Me bring justice") and the adventure is not a plain hack-n-slash. Interestingly enough, this rarely, if ever, comes up for Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good characters — perhaps because, by their nature, Chaos and Evil do not require characters to follow any specific moral or ethical code like Law and Good do — in essence, no conflict between two rival codes of conduct arises because, for these characters, only one exists. A Lawful Good person, by contrast, needs to hew to two separate codes — two which may or may not be in agreement over any given issue.
  • This is often a problem caused by malicious or lazy DMs laying paladin traps who forget that in most campaign settings paladins (like clerics) follow and derive their special class powers from worshiping deities. Smart players could legitimately point out that a god outranks a mere mortal king and that if a paladin has to choose between following the commandments of the deity who grants them their paladin status in the first place or the decrees of some mortal ruler who is acting totally out of line with the god's theology, then the paladin can and should feel free to ignore the mortal ruler. There are quite a few canon examples, especially in the Greyhawk and Dragonlance settings, where characters are solidly Lawful Good while directly defying mortal leaders operating at cross purposes with their gods. It is the reverse situation that players have more trouble justifying.
    
    Even for paladins not following a specific god, the fact that gods are actual physical beings who regularly pop in to have a beer and chat makes these "traps" somewhat less than compelling for most players. Paladins aren't really the "divination" kind of priest themselves, but they are effectively still priests, and gaining access to a priest of the cleric class makes these moral dilemmas utterly meaningless. A cleric has access to a spell that allows them to ask a being that literally cannot be morally wrong for practical purposes whether a course of action violates the paladin code or not, with perfect accuracy and no chance of failure... at level one.
  • The above probably accounts for why, in 4th Edition, they did away with Chaotic Good completely: you're either Lawful Good, and thus "bound" to honor both the tenets of good and the rules of law, or else you're Good, and you get to say "Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right". Somewhat annoyingly, the system also cut out Lawful Neutral, leaving a void where those who want to say "Screw What's Right, I'm Following the Rules" would belong (beyond being "Unaligned" and declaring that's the character's behavior).
  • Classic example: A paladin under the control of an Evil Overlord is asked to bring back the head of the good-aligned enemy king. He does... except, after all, the terms did not specifically rule out that head being still attached to a living and very angry king with an army behind him. Guess no one can accuse that paladin of being Lawful Stupid...
  • The splatbooks specifically encourage this behavior from paladins, noting the loophole in their code about legitimate authority. Failing that, the Book of Exalted Deeds says that paladins being true to their ethos should always choose good over the law — the Atonement spell is there to be used for such occasions.
  • The option between Chaotic or Good IS possible, to note. For example, a character who has to decide between sacrificing freedoms to do the right thing or doing something morally ambiguous for self serving reasons is example how it can be done.
  • And then there's the third option within the third option: establish that the Lawful Good character's "law" as a strict personal code of ethics, regardless of external law.
  • In the fifth edition of the game, the paladin class as a whole takes a third option: their powers no longer derive from an unhelpful, trolling deity giving them a vague absolute command to respect "law" without specifying which law or what authority is rightful etc. Instead, the paladins are independent orders of knights-errant who draw their powers from an order-specific set of oaths explicitly defining what they have to do to remain a paladin. A paladin's alignment no longer has to be lawful or good, and in fact some oaths (such as those of Conquest) seem to lend themselves to the exact opposite of that.
• Pathfinder 2nd Edition tries to fix this up by giving the Paladin a number of tenets, some of which can be broken if they will serve a higher tenet (for example, lying to protect the innocent).

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