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**POSSIBLE SPOILERS**

Does anyone else think this is odd?

I decided upon reaching 2nd level to have my group try the drinking contest. I suspected that hit points and con/fortitude would be important. Although he had the most hit points I figured it would be bad for a Paladin to try to drink someone under the table. I chose someone with 1 less hit point, but a better CON score (18) figuring a stronger fortitude save would be best as well. Well at the end of the contest I see a little shield pop up on my paladin and lo and behold he has fallen! Someone else did the contest and he still gets swacked?! I could almost live with that since I had him in the first (assume leader) slot and leaders are responsible for the people. I say almost because of the encounter with the two "traders" after discovering their true allegience. My group basically (going by the text in the conversation box anyhow) accepted a bribe from them. Yes, they intimidated them, but still taking their (option of money or a sword) from them didn't cause a problem. Yet, the simple participation of someone else in his group (not even himself) in a drinking contest causes him to fall. To me, that just did NOT seem right.

Profuse consumption of substances such as alcohol is concerned non-lawful for ethical alignment purposes. You might as well say your the party "danced on the wild side" and ol' Pally got punished for it. Overall, your paladin would/should be against such behavior since it really violates their Lawful Good alignment.

Don't forget that (especially if you're not using the level un-capper) you'll reach the highest of the game without the drinking contest.

I Concur However...

I agree with you Galuf about the paladin being the one to set the example and if you check my previous post my problem really was not with his being punished for the/"his" group's debauchery. I really could have accepted that if other encounters followed that line of consistency. What was the real sticking point for me was that nothing happened when the party took a bribe or payoff from one of the traders. "To me", bribery is far more unlawful and wrong than overdoing it on the ale. That gave me the impression (falsely albeit) that one party member acting according to their own alignment/class/etc. wouldn't impact negatively on another. I also choose a party alignment of NG.

So it was the inconsistency of being able to take a payoff and not be punished, then getting hit for over indulgence that struck me as odd. That's all I meant.

There is certainly a wiff of inconsistency in the air about this, I agree. It is, however, possible to look upon accepting a magic item from the traders as more akin to extortion than bribery, though that may not seem much better. You are extorting from evil people, though. If you're not in a position to do much about them, because the authorities, once told of them, do nothing, twisting their arm a bit to make their lives harder may be somewhat lawful. I mean, killing them outright is okay, so why not leaning on them first? Typically, we think of extortion as bad because it is visited upon the innocent or helpless by people seeking only to help themselves, but in this case you could view it as pressuring the evil and far-from-helpless for the purpose of curtailing them somewhat and advancing your party's ability to battle evil. It is a stretch, I admit, but I'm trying to soften the blow more than explain anything away; and note that you can say nothing along these lines in the case of the drinking game. Hopefully that'll make you feel a BIT better about all this.

In general, though, paladins are hard to figure in this game. You can't even do any quests for the temple, even if the quest is to kill the cleric you were going to go kill anyway, and then you turn around and kill the evil cleric you just did the quest for. I mean, it's not like a Paladin can never be a double-agent, right? They couldn't drink to make themselves look evil, but they can smite baddies, right?

Extortion

I do "kind of" see your line of thinking about the extortion thing. But yeah, that is a little bit of stretch. "To Me", for a Lawful Good (especially a Paladin) I would think extortion, even from an evil guy, would still be wrong. Now to a Chaotic Good or a Neutral Good, no problem. In fact, I believe a NG might say that extortion is the best thing to do because it is making the bad guy "pay" for his crimes.

In the start I chose a party alignment of NG for the reason I feel it allows the most room for a good party to do what's best. I included a paladin because I have always liked the class (not my favorite, but fun) and the practicality of having the class features like healing, smite, detect evil, etc. is great.

You're right about using a paladin. Even in my live D&D paladins were always hard to play or DM for. It is probably almost impossible for the game developers to try an keep a coherent story line going and be able to account for every class/alignment/personality choice a gamer might want or expect. Paladins having a narrower field of choices no doubt compounds this.

I tried to treat each character individually and use the one for each specific encounter that I thought would be best. Thus, I played the Paladin as I thought a Paladin should act. Used a NG character who also had high charisma and good bluff/intimidation to confront the two traders, and so forth. Up until the contest it seemed that the game responded in suit to this approach. I experimented in a couple of encounters with different characters just to see if there were differences and the game really does seem more individually vice party oriented in choices and results. So, based on this experience I was just mostly surprised by my paladin getting swacked, especially since I had deliberately NOT used him for the contest and no other encounter demonstrated that one character's actions adversely effected another.

You are right that extortion probably should have caused the paladins to fall, too. Our main decision on the drinking contest was that your party gets a reputation if you win...I forget what we called it...but it was something I just didn't feel a paladin would have. So you can enter the contest with a different character, but if you win, the whole party gets the reputation tag, and that's why I left that in there. I also figured it wasn't too hard for a paladin to go to Terjon to pay and have the fallen tag removed.

The morality of the fallen paladin certainly represents a difficult problem as any alignment shifting game would. How can we tell what the motives are of the player...? People can do bad things for very good reasons, but it's very difficult to detect such. In any case, we tried to keep things fairly straightforward, but we obviously missed some additional places where paladins should fall...it's VERY simple to add it in, so we just needed more time to test and find all these cases.

We had also intended to put in a prestige class from the book of vile darkness for fallen paladins, and we needed a way to make them easily fall. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get our prestige classes into the game in time.

Thanks

Thanks Rook, for the explanation. It definitely makes more sense now. A public drinking contest would definitely affect the party's reputation (including the Paladin) far more than a private conversation with the merchants. But I am glad though that feel the same in that extortion should have caused a fall too.
It sent a mixed message to me. I deliberately avoided using my Paladin as the protagonist for encounters that I suspected might put him in an ethical jam and used other PCs. I normally would not have made the choice of taking the sword but since I had my NG fighter/rogue doing the talking I thought I might be in character for him to do it so I took a chance. There was no negative fallout so, it "seemed" as though the game was set more towards individual rather than party effect of choices made.
But all in all extortion really should cause a Paladin to fall IMHO.
Thanks again for explaining.

What if u dump the paladin before the drinking contest?

I was just curious. If I use the hostel register to dump my paladin before I engage in the drinking contest, can I re-add the paladin to my group with all of his accumulated items, treasure, and leveled-up abilities/stats intact??

I was thinking that this might be one way of completing the Drinking Contest quest without having the paladin fall.

Unfortunately, when you add a character from the register, it'll be his un-used level 1 version. That's all that gets saved outside of the save game file. Sorry.