Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The Larian way to handle paladins?

I saw a suggestion somewhere that they implement a value/scale, let's call it an oath-'o'meter, like 'attitude' - that represents how well you are keeping to your oath - and if you violate the tenets of your oath, each violation removes some of this quantity , the size being dependent on the scale of transgression. So you might have one really terrible act that breaks it, or a series of smaller ones that eventyually break it. Rather than the current (often small seeming) infractions with mean you get visted by a death knight...

I like this idea.

The way breaking your oath is described in the phb, it's not something that is supposed to be that rare. If you break your oath, you are supposed to seek absolution for it (from a cleric of the same faith or another paladin technically) to wash the "sin" away. You can only go "oathbreaker" if you aren't repentant for what you did.

The Oathbreaker Knight offers to listen to your confessions and offers absolution via a money exchange. It does emulate what a real life GM would do, but without any deity selection and not alignments.

I think the problem is, If we had oathbreaker in bg2 and broke our oath we would have gone to a temple or local paladin order, maybe given a quest, it would have made us feel like the world and our paladin had to react within it.

In bg3 a lich paladin turns up whos the first ever oathbreaker, the second we oath break teleports in then follows our camp around?

All this needs to happen in this way because, the world is a set of battle grounds, it has no towns it does not have hidden villages with living npcs or little towns to explore, everything is jammed in to one area, the first act does not feel vast, like how have the goblins not found the grove?
its 30 seconds away from the hideout, the world design completely sucks and it leads to problems like this, npcs gotta teleport in for important quest lines because the world just does not exist.

The Oathbreaker undead lich knight thingy really doesn't need to hang out at the camp like hired help.

With very little effort, there could be an item, an altar, a dream.. anything to contact him in some dreamscape / off world / anywhere but the freaking camp.

I really hope him and Withers having nothing better to do is just some haphazardly put together Early Access thing and it won't be anything like that in the final game. Either it's that, or Larian just really know how to destroy any feeling of mystery and awe in their game and thought the camp "works great" for those interactions.

Fallen Paladin is a thing in BG2 (happen if the party reputation falls to 8 or less, status is permanent). You can't switch to Blackguard thought (the Oathbreaker equivalent) and getting out of Fallen Paladin status requires:
- your paladin to be the main protagonist of the party
- completed a quest a certain way so you get to join the Order of the Radiant Heart (I think you can't join if you are Fallen already).
- do the 3rd quest of the order in a specific way (requires Detect Evil which you don't have if you are Fallen, so tricky)
The way the stronghold quest progression works, you may have to play most of BG2 with a Fallen Paladin (the status means all Paladin features are disabled). Also, there is no conversation about you being fallen, the status just gets removed after you successfully completed that quest.
There is no way in BG1 to redeem a Fallen Paladin.

And I know all that because I've been looking into replaying BG1/BG2 with an evil party and I was looking at playing a Paladin or Fighter/Cleric...

Anyway. Where the early access happens is in a region called the Fields of the Dead. There aren't that much civilization near the Chionthar in the area. The nearest village should be on the other side of the Moonrise Tower. So there shouldn't be anything to make you atone in the early access areas. Going Oathbreaker usually involve a "dark higher power" (say hello to Mr. Knight). You should continue on without the channel abilities until the city of BG is reached which means completing act 1. That might be what happens in the full game, Mr. Knight being mostly a convenience for testing purpose. You can even tell him you will find another way to atone.

The goblins aren't finding the Grove because the scouts are not making it back to their HQ and in term of in-game time, it's longer than 30 seconds (if we had night and day cycles people would see...).

I think it's fine that Oathbreaker Knight shows up to tell the player they broke their oath, in a pnp session the GM would do it by impersonating something/someone. Also, he's basically there to temp you into becoming an Oathbreaker.

The Oathbreaker just screams 'inappropriate ' for someone to seek absolution from for the type of Paladin we have playable right now. The fellow straight up offers to convert you into an Oathbreaker...this guy is going to cast atonement and intercede on our behalf for us to get back in the good graces of our deity? It seems absurd that the same individual who offers to lead us further from the 'light' can just smooth things over with every god our paladin might be a follower of-ridiculous.

It also reduces the process of falling and redeeming a paladin to a purely transactional one-honestly If all you need to do is pay a fee and you are off scott-free then it robs the all the gravity of the situation. A paladin falling is suddenly just a momentary monetary inconvenience from smoothing over murder w/e.

Redeeming ourselves should be something that actually requires effort and sacrifice on our part beyond the equivalent of paying a parking ticket. A quest to prove ourselves, etc. And it shouldn't be available right at the start of the game before we even reach the druid grove. And it shouldn't be given by the same npc who makes you an oathbreaker! The whole atonement/oathbreaker thing is just so ridiculously instant gratification it's ridiculous.

And now we have *another* conspicuous high-level undead hanging around our camp serving particularly transparent gameplay conveniences.

The fact this region actually has a name and I don't believe it ever comes up in EA gravely annoys me.

Well, Fields of the Dead (FotD) is a bit to the northwest. The Chionthar is where all the mid-land cities are and trade routes pretty much go around the FotD.

I noticed in current playthrough that the mountain pass route has a sign saying 'Closed due to inclement weather', with Flaming Fist nearby to enforce it. Seems like Baldur's Gate has been putting serious effort into keeping Moonrise's death curse a well kept secret.

****

I get a major Skull Knight vibe (Berserk manga) from the undead oath-breaker guardian. If he's anything like that character, he's hanging around for his own agenda, not for any great love of the MC.

- I agree that it is really bad that the same NPC can make you an oathbreaker and bring you back on the old path for some money.
suggestion: The idea of an "oath-meter" sounds not bad. Some actions change it a little while some extreme actions make you become an oathbreaker at once (an extrem example would be sacrificing a child to a demon lord to gain power). When you become an oathbreaker the oath-meter is at the minimum. When you can bring the oath-meter to a very high value again by your actions you can get a quest to redeem yourself, such as contacting another cleric, paladin or your god or performing a ritual at a specific place.
Redeeming yourself should become harder after every time you broke your oath, so maybe every broken oath halves the "positive karma gain" for your oath-meter while the "negative karma gain" stays the same.

- I think in BG1/2 you became a fighter of the same level when you were a paladin or ranger and your reputation got too bad.
I only read the in the manual, it never happened to me. I played the original game without mods, not the EE.
I think in NWN 1/2 and Pathfinder you would lose your paladin powers and you cannot progress in this class when you stop being lawful good.
You keep profiencies, BAB and saving throws (without cha bonus).
Once again, I just read it. It did not happen to me.

Sorry, I want to be clear about the original topic here.

OP is concerned that we're being too over-the-top in D&D? Seriously? In Forgotten Realms especially?

Hilarious.