I can vouch on some niggers hating wizards. I had a GM in 5e that would be a step away from chimping out whenever I did something so simple as cast Wall of Force or Psychic Lance. Imagine being so autistic that you start shitting yourself when the stick with a magic book starts doing his job, just have your demon rip him to shreds.
I prefer martials for the simplicity and I hate how ridiculous casters get in terms of combat capability.
This reminds me of the Paladin who had protected my deliberately obnoxious GM foil character whose whole purpose was to make it a quest task NOT to kill me, no matter how much of a jerk I was. And the reason was I knew where the MacGuffin was. Every other player wanted to torture the knowledge out of me but the Paladin refused. That was simply not lawful good behavior. And the Paladin was the party leader.
I'm late and admittedly distracted, but to add my own 2c from the other side of the good/evil spectrum, evil doesn't mean you twirl your moustache and plot about killing. An executioner working for a Lawful Good lord could easily be Lawful Evil simply by virtue of him enjoying the brutal aspects of his job a little too much. Yeah, he may live on the hill away from everyone else, yeah he may be a little too quick about chopping up feral dogs whenever they show up, but damn, is the town's crime rate low because everyone knows he won't hesitate in the slightest to enact your lawful and just punishment upon you.
Wizards are extremely powerful in D&D from 3e onward, to the point of being potentially game breaking if not moderated by the DM or the player. It can be extremely hard to challenge a well prepared wizard, and attacking their spell book is one of the few ways to consistently screw with them. The noted ability of modern wizards to break games and render most other classes ineffective just by virtue of being able to do everything they can, better, has made them the target of many DMs.
I think the changes to concentration helped reign full casters in a bit, but yeah wizards especially have been insane for a long time. My friend who played a ton of 3.5 explained it to me like this: If a wizard can survive to level 2 or 3 they basically just start to become unstoppable.
Wait, that’s not how that works.
An executioner may be evil, but as long as he's only carrying out executions, what he's doing is legal and perfectly fine. The Paladin has no reason to outright oppose working with him on that front.
Most towns and cities only had one executioner. It wasn't exactly a popular job and executioners aren't exactly popular people. If you bring a criminal back to the lord whose demesne it was for punishment, he's getting executed by that Lord's chosen executioner, and the paladin has no say in that.
Enjoying the act of killing helpless people puts you pretty squarely in evil territory. For most executioners, its their job, or duty, to do what they do. You aren't supposed to enjoy it or get off on it.
I don't know about Paladins specifically, but some GMs have a stick up their arse about Lawful Good in general, claiming it's boring. There's also the many internet stories of the Lawful Good Prick or the Lawful Good is Dumb.
Not killer DMs per say, but monks get a lot of shit from the internet RPG fanbase. Especially in 5e.
I generally had a very few rules that paladins absolutely could not break. No torture for information, no slavery, no murder (in a legal sense), no piracy, no desecration of (good) temples. Pretty much anything else could be atoned for. Summary execution in the absence of a judicial alternative was also generally good, but out of anger, not allowed but forgivable.
It seems like a general trope in RPGs in general that wizard-types start out incredibly fragile but end up virtually godlike. It sometimes takes some balancing. Even starting wizards have something like magic missile that can wreck some enemies, so long as you keep them protected, though.
That's a very good list.
Ok, that’s a different story. I’ve been on an OSR kick, so I was working under the assumption that the paladin was the local lord. If the paladin was handing him off to the local lord, and the lord’s executioner was evil, it would be out of the paladin’s hands.
You’re confusing “nongood” with “evil”. Enjoying killing people isn’t good in the slightest, sure. But these aren’t swaggering assassins killing innocents for money and thrills. These are people paid by the crown to execute people that are too dangerous to keep in a functioning society, and that keeps them squarely in the neutral section of the alignment chart.
The act itself is (in game ethics) fundamentally neutral, but that doesn't mean the person doing it is.
I actually played with this in my game recently by having an evil outsider try to get into the Paladin's headspace by intentionally going fully helpless after he was tripped during a duel with him by another player and going on about letting the hate flow through him. Trying to goad him into rage and being a prick.
It's because of two factors.
From what I've seen, DnD and its derivatives take a largely deontological viewpoint. Now, some actions are inherently evil in some conditions (Torture in Pathfinder) but most evil is derived from intent. It's not that you killed the orphans, it's that you did it because you wanted to, not because you had to. And, given that it's a world with absolute Good and Evil, you can be morally incorrect, not just evil. So you can believe your intentions are aligned with good and then have the things you thought made your intentions good be inherently evil acts. A sort of natural law on the matter. I imagine the older editions played more into the natural law aspect of it, sidestepping the consequentialist and deontological ideas entirely, although I'm not sure since I wasn't born yet for those. "If you and your actions align with the will of evil beings, they/you are evil and the same for good."
My current Paladin is a literal shell-shocked war criminal he and the mercenary band he was a part of massacred a village after my character murdered a buddy over a village woman, and then lied about it. The whole point of him becoming a Paladin is to repent for that action.
Some examples from various genres and settings: