How bad/abusable is this variant Paladin's Code of Conduct?

[oslecamo]

D&D alignment is quite simple actually.

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Altough people just looovvveee to complicate it.

And before you ask it, the rules a lawful person's plays can be anyone's rules, as long as they aren't calvinball, aka they're well defined rules that you don't change when they stop being convenient to you. Some lawful people follow personal codes, other lawful people follow other people's codes.
 
And then, alignment isn't permanent. A nice person can become a prick over time, and vice-versa. A person may abandon their codes, or they may take up a specific set of rules.

[MeanFightingGuy]

Another chunk of stuff that's basically off-topic.

Note that it does just define away the dilemma:  Good > Law.  So, there's no dilemma.  Problem solved.  It'd be like in Antigone's case if we just declared familial obligations > civic obligations.  That'd make Antigone's life easier, but now Sophocles' masterpiece is like 8 pages long. 

I would argue that if there's a chaotic side in this conflict, it would be the insane king with his personal set of, like Oslecamo put it, Calvinball rules ("my champion is... fire!! Wooohoooo!!! ...by the way, tie that guy there up so that he strangles himself if he moves") and his woman-stealing son. Usually, part of an oath of fealty was that you're liegelord also had obligations towards you, so it wasn't an entirely one-sided relation. And the thing is - the Tagaeryens broke that obligation. Of course now we don't know how exactly fealty looks like in Westeros, but it's save to assume that it probably worked more or less like the one in medieval Europe.
But for Antigone, it's less Good > Law, but rather Law (tradition) > Law (ruler).
(though not every law or tradition is necessarily "lawful", more on that below)

I don't doubt that you can cash out Lawful X or Chaotic Y in interesting ways.  But, at that point, I'm pretty sure it's the cashing out that's the helpful part.  Or, at the very least, I'd rather not have to solve one of the main debates of legal philosophy just to be able to play D&D ...

Which may be the reason why they did away with the alignment matrix in D&D4

D&D alignment is quite simple actually. Altough people just looovvveee to complicate it.

Guilty as charged 

And before you ask it, the rules a lawful person's plays can be anyone's rules, as long as they aren't calvinball, aka they're well defined rules that you don't change when they stop being convenient to you. Some lawful people follow personal codes, other lawful people follow other people's codes.

There's another beef. Is following a specific code "lawful" under any circumstances? I am not just refering to a chaotic person following a "code of what I was doing anyway" (since I totally agree with the "following the code even if it's inconvenient" part), but to a code that is inherently destructive (best example: The Sith code, where the obligation to be chaotic is pretty much the essence of its letters)?

So, if two families belong to a culture with the concept of a blood feud get into conflict, while the country they're living in prohibits violence and reserves it to the state. Is carrying out the blood feud and killing the son of the rival family's patriarch a lawful act?
Or mafia mobsters, who may be utterly loyal to "la familia" but otherwise break any law of the land and terrorize the community his clan is feeding on, are they lawful? Would Luca Brasi be (for anyone who hasn't read or watched The Godfather, the guy has a Wikipedia entry)? Well, they are probably "more lawful" than a street thug, but is it enough to qualify for the alignment?

It starts getting weird when a "generic NPC citizen" who simply does his day job (without much passion), pays his taxes (but isn't above some small-scale fiscal fraud), generally obeys the law (out of habit, not out of loyalty to the state), and has a reasonably stable family (but would be tempted to cheat on his wife if there was an attractive opportunity) is labeled as "true neutral" by virtue of being a generic NPC guy, but the utter loyal mafia goon above is seen at "lawful evil" (or perhaps even "lawful neutral" if he is a more non-violent type) because he is more invested into the machinations of his family, but discounts the country he lives in as a legitimate source of authority.

To get back into D&D and paladin territory, where the weakness of this concept of "lawful" gets into full force. Assuming you play a law-bound class that can dish out additional punishment against chaotic characters. And now you're meeting someone with a code that violates pretty much everything your code stands for - but you can't use your abilities on him because technically, he's lawful. But you can against a chaotic guy, who might be rebellious and carefree, but perhaps has never acted against your code for whatever reason.

[Unbeliever]

I like Oscelamo's simplification, mostly b/c it's workable.  Although, again, why have alignment at all again?  "Follows a personal code defined as such and such" or "tries to be generally nice to people" seems a lot more helpful and intuitive than Lawful Neutral and Neutral Good, doesn't it? 

Good point re:  fealty, although GRRM hasn't delved into it.  And, you'd kind of expect it to have come up at some point in the thousands of pages at this point.  No character has brought it up, and there has been some substantial discussion of conflicting dynastic loyalties as the series has slowed to a crawl. 

It does define away the conflict.  I mean, it's sort of Augustine again, just more legalistically.  If you think you can ignore an oath b/c the one the oath is given to is behaving wrongly or inappropriately, cashed out however you like, then cool, no dilemma.  That's not intended to be dismissive, there's a lot of reason to believe that it's right.  Although then you kind of stray into territory about the nature of law and rules that may be intensely uninteresting to most. 

I also don't know what work the oaths are doing there, then.  "Follow this guy for as long as I want to and as long as his morality and goals sync up with mine" isn't much of an oath.  Or, "do what he says if it inconveniences me, but no more."  Compare that to Thomas Moore, who got executed over this kind of thing. 

All this does inspire an interesting read on a Paladin-like figure.  He's associated with the temporal authorities, so long as they are upholding the proper ideals.  When they stray, though ...  That's kind of a cool set-up for RP purposes.  I know it'd work fine in my groups, but we don't use alignment anyway.  I think the Gold Dragon I played had something of that flavor, partly driven by his reasonable belief that he had a better idea of right and wrong than the mere mortals underfoot. 

Query whether somebody would be telling me I was "doing it wrong" in that instance, though.  Which sort of underscores the problem in D&D's notion of "lawfulness" as a thing, as noted by MeanFightingGuy above. 

So, if two families belong to a culture with the concept of a blood feud get into conflict, while the country they're living in prohibits violence and reserves it to the state. Is carrying out the blood feud and killing the son of the rival family's patriarch a lawful act?

Or mafia mobsters, who may be utterly loyal to "la familia" but otherwise break any law of the land and terrorize the community his clan is feeding on, are they lawful? Would Luca Brasi be (for anyone who hasn't read or watched The Godfather, the guy has a Wikipedia entry)? Well, they are probably "more lawful" than a street thug, but is it enough to qualify for the alignment?

Yeah, exactly.  I don't think anyone will look at me crazy if I describe Luca Brasi as "lawful."  Though he uses deceit in order to murder, so ymmv.  It'd be rough if my class abilities can be turned on and off based on conflicting views about it.

And, that doesn't even get into the territory of conflicting obligations, either law v. good, or even just law v. law, and so on.  That's the stuff of great drama, and ideally the alignment system should facilitate it rather than throwing up roadblocks. 

[Libertad]

Given that on various message boards the most discussion involved problems with the anarchist code of conduct, I think I'll just stick with the standard one for the time being.