Changing Alignment

This heading can be found on page 25 of the original DMG.  I suggest reading it closely.  The entire passage is anathema to player agency, the right of the player to control his or her own character.  It speaks of the player being in service to some deity and equating alignment with that deity.  It encourages punishments like a loss of level, expectations of atonement, sacrificing large piles of treasure and an assurance that the DM will make the player "acts accordingly."  It is poisonous, abusive and worthless to the spirit of any game that's about advancement, learning from mistakes and the players choosing their own path.

When a player starts a cleric or a paladin in my game, I ask the player to select a religion.  I don't ask the player to adhere to a behaviour towards that religion; nor do religions in my game presuppose a specific outlook.  It should be plain to anyone that in any religion, there are those who — religious leaders included — practice the tenets of the religion and those that don't.  Leaders and followers alike cherry-pick which parts of the holy writings they want to obey, and judging by the results, Gawd, Jeebus and Abbah don't give a good goddamn one way or the other.  My religions obey the teachings of history: it is  perfectly okay for a player cleric to argue that those not born in the religion are heathens and can't be saved (Presbyterianism), that anyone arbitrarily selected can be named demon-possessed, that demon-possessed people can be burned freely, so long as political power approves, that genocide is legitimate so long as the murdered people are "on our land," that rape of heathens isn't really rape, that theft is good so long as it's done in the name of the invoked deity, that those of the same religion can be first cast out and then killed, that torture is a sanctioned means of forcing a blasphemer to confess ... and that doing all this and CALLING oneself good, righteous, holy, saintly, heaven-bound and full of grace is proof positive that the speaker is honest and truthful.

As such, I don't excommunicate player characters for doing any of these things ... because every religion has done every one of these things, and most of the worst practitioners of these crimes are viewed today as virtuous, godly, pious, infallible and spotless.  My religions will excommunicate a player cleric or paladin for one crime, and one crime only:  betrayal.  Not betrayal of their codes, not betrayal of humanity, not betrayal of decency or morality.  No, betrayal of the other religious thieves, pirates, tyrants, autocrats, etcetera, who arbitrarily get to decide the loyalty of those who belong to their club.

So, as a cleric, as long as you don't fuck over your brothers and sisters, you're free to FUCK OVER everyone else.

Welcome to religion.

Now, this isn't a version of religion that we teach little children.  Little children are, and were, taught this version.  And this version.  And this version and this version.  All of them top ten hits in their time.  When we sell religion publicly, we sweep all that nasty truth under the carpet; we pretend that all those people got their comeuppance, or that they were somehow "just bad apples" ... while continuing to live in cities named after them, celebrating holy names in their name and being "thankful" that they cleaned out dem heathens from de good ol' New World.  Most every horror perpetrated in the world has been done in the name of some religion (and, yes, the Eastern ones too!) ... and then justified.

So no, the company obviously has to pretend that clerics are goody-goody people, except those occasional baddies ... and pretend that clerics calling themselves good actually ARE good, because obviously they are.  They said they were!

Then why, the Gentle Reader might ask, would I let player characters behave in this obviously horrendous way.  It should be pretty clear to the reader, from my tone, that I don't approve of religions hypocrisy.  Then why approve of it in my game world?

Because I won't morally judge of my fellow over their choice to commit a fictitious action.

I am not the almighty telling my liberated, agency-starved players what is right and what is wrong.  I believe that humans, specifically the sort of humans whose company I'm willing to keep, are sensible enough to recognize that the pursuit of extreme vice makes a dull life.

As teenagers, I remember, we took much glee in slaughtering hosts of creatures, committing crime, engaging in debauchery, bathing in the blood of our victims and so on.  I remember doing much, much worse things with my peers at 16 then I read about online.  There was no "online," so we had no overarching community to curb our indulgences.  We were a small group making our own fun, laughing at the suffering of imaginary beings, completely unrestrained in our cruelties.

That word there is the key to why.  "Unrestrained."  Like all teenagers, every day was a nuanced form of restraint against everything we dreamed of, hoped for, thought of ourselves and considered important.  Every day we were told to fit ourselves to a standard, obey, behave, work hard for things we didn't want, enslave ourselves to a clock, take shit from authority and eat that shit with a smile.  Our music was violent, our sports were violent and our gaming was violent.  The expression of violence was the expression of freedom, since the constant restraint on our emotions made us inconsolable.  I wish I could explain what it was to be in a world that looked every bit as much like it was burning down as it does now, only without the shallow but visceral support of social media, without the constant presence of choosable programming, without being able to tap a button and hear someone say the things we were feeling inside.  We were alone.  Except for those few moments when we, um, got off the chain.

Getting out of high school, getting into university, getting out from under our parent's thumbs, having the freedom to publicly pursue sex, drink, whatever we liked ... changed everything.  We had other ways to handle stress; and less stress to handle, to be honest, though I've often heard people claim that university was far more stressful than being an imprisoned child.  That's a delusion speaking.  In any case, our gaming shifted away from vice, because our access to the real thing made gaming about it ... silly.  Education made our gaming very different.  Learning gave us choices.  A sense of personal responsibility pushed us towards self-respect and mindfulness.  Players who still wanted to "burn down the bar" got pushed out of our circle.

I can tell players in my game that they can "do anything they want" with confidence that they will do things of which they want to be proud.  That's been the case for 35 years.  So while I say that a cleric doesn't have to adhere to a code, because clerics throughout history didn't, that doesn't matter.  The clerics in my game WANT to adhere to a code.  Their code.  Not mine.

And the idea that I should punish them somehow because their code doesn't perfectly reconcile with mine?

Holy fuck.  What kind of a shithead treats people that way?