I feel that a character needs to have abilities that are consistent. Mounted combat won't be viable always - in fact, in my campaigns, characters have hardly bothered to explore it at all since you can't bring a horse 50% of the places you go. Also, by letting abilities depend on alignment, you make the game a whole lot less interesting when evil can be distinguished so easily from good as in previous editions. There should be no detect evil since such an ability means that I as a DM will...
View full commentI feel that a character needs to have abilities that are consistent. Mounted combat won't be viable always - in fact, in my campaigns, characters have hardly bothered to explore it at all since you can't bring a horse 50% of the places you go.
Also, by letting abilities depend on alignment, you make the game a whole lot less interesting when evil can be distinguished so easily from good as in previous editions. There should be no detect evil since such an ability means that I as a DM will always have to trick or fudge the rules when I want someone's alignment to be a surprise. With the traditional paladins, it never is, and it has always bothered me. Moreover, it cements alignments so much more firmly. I've rarely had a player paladin who has believed in turning evil instead of destroying it, yet of course this should be possible. It's just that when someone flares up as evil, they think they MUST kill him.
It would be awesome if a paladin had martial dice to use but instead of straight damage they could be used to provide effects based on deity choice. For example: I follow the edicts of a god of healing and as an option I can spend a martial die on a hit allowing the party member with the lowest HP to gain HP equal to a given modifier.
