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...
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.
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.
