Quote Originally Posted by noparlpf View Post
Personally I've thought about different ramifications of Lawful and Chaotic so much that different points started matching up and the whole thing lost meaning to me. (I really need to take shorter showers.)
But the reason I mentioned it in the first place is that:
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The first time I played a Paladin, the DM ruled that when the party decided to work against the local government (my Paladin's former employers) when we discovered they were personally directing kidnapping of and experimentation on small children, and that they were trying to revive some kind of god of death and pain, he had to multiclass to Paladin of Freedom to keep some of his powers. I disagreed that was enough to make him lose his powers, because he wasn't committing an evil act, but the line about "respecting legitimate authority" was probably the bit he was reading.

Fluff: Paladins must be lawful good, and they lose their divine powers if they deviate from that alignment. (Which implies that if you change from Lawful you also fall, which the class doesn't say anything about later.)
Class mechanics: A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class abilities if she ever willingly commits an evil act. Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth), help those in need (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those who harm or threaten innocents.

And so the whole Law-Chaos thing was thrown into disarray in my mind because apparently some see refusing to sway from one's beliefs as counting as chaotic if it means rebelling against one's leaders.
Also, the descriptions of Law and Chaos in the 3.X PHB (that's the one I remember best) are kind of vague and in places are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason somebody with no respect for authority should have to be unreliable or dishonorable. There's no reason somebody with a strict personal code has to be trustworthy or obey authority.

Further, the alignment scale in general is a little too black-and-white for me. I saw a simple fix that I like the idea of: Add "Exalted", "Vile", "Anarchic", and "Axiomatic", and the variations that come with them, and you get a still-fairly-simple scale that allows for more variation. A Paladin could be Exalted-Lawful and clearly place more emphasis on Good than on Law, or could be Axiomatic-Good and clearly place more emphasis on Law than on Good.
I'm not 100% percent buddy buddy with the alignment system, but it's not horrible. You can't let a bad experience with it ruin it forever. If your DM changed your alignment for opposing a clearly evil government, they shouldn't be allowed to DM paladins. That was a horrible decision on their part. Under normal situations, if a Paladin wants change with legitimate authority, I'd say they have to work within the system as best they can, but in that case the government was clearly evil and needs to be put down.

An important thing of note is that Lawful doesn't mean "follows the law wherever they are" (though a lawful character is more likely to follow and obey a law they don't like), it means that whatever laws or codes they do choose to follow the follow to the letter. Paladins are purposed to destroy evil, and they will tolerate no evil in their quest to do so. While it is true being a paladin will limit your options in taking down evil McGovernment(kidnapping, terrorism, torture, ect are all a no go), they can still fight it. As long as they stick to the code, fighting evil and doing no evil themselves, they are very lawful. Heck, a paladin would be super good at raising public support or getting other countries to help. Their do no evil approach is great for winning the common mans favor.

Once gain, keep in mind that an alignment is a general trend of how a character acts, and unless a characters alignment was wrongly stated in the first place, it should be very rare for a change in the law-chaos axis to happen.