Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Disapointed with Paladin

What has me scratching my head is dataminers have shown there are god-specific paladin lines.

This discussion made me think...Does Larian even have the rights to Forgotten Realm? They have D&D system, Baldurs gate name, some of the characters (all?) Yet anything Forgotten Realm lore or history related seems super toned down or just non existent. We just have the names; towns, deities, monsters...But Larian probably can't use more detailed historical Faerun content?

I did not go though the entire EA so someone could comment on that. WOTC can be incredibly picky and isn't known to be a bastion of good will. I would as far as to say Larian made a deal with the devil. I hope everything turns out ok.

This kind of reminds of that Rings of Power mess of a show (history and lore part).

Bit of an aside, but all this talk of faithless and the Wall and Myrkul + NWN2....I really hope that comes up in BG III at some point. The Wall was tied up in a contingency plan to keep Myrkul 'alive' in the case of his death (the other seems to have involved his Crown, though I'm not as familiar with the events surrounding that plot and Laerel Silverhand) It would be neat-almost unavoidable, I think-to address the events of that game in some form. We know how Bhaal came back, we know how Bane came back, Myrkul has yet to be addressed.

Would love to see an update on characters like Kaelyn the Dove, One-of-Many, -etc.


Larian may be playing fast and loose with the lore in BG III -> the stuff with drow eyes, how mithral is made, now this with the Paladins-but 5e is a notably very lore-adverse edition. I doubt WoTC care too much about the 'details' as long as Larian hits the right bullet points. Bullet points that sometimes contradict major parts of established realmslore anyways.

The whole oatbreaking system needs work. They would just need to use evil and good action tags on npcs and if you kill someone doing good you would get the oathbreaker. Currently it's a weird and funny at times and can lead to unwanted game loading. The whole sytem can be cheated as well. You have cases where it should break and it doesn't and vice versa.

He was brought back along a lots of other dead gods at the same time when the 5e timeline started. I don't think WoTC has any interest in explaining how, they just wanted to reset things to pre-Time of Troubles with the pantheon.


The Paladin stuff has WoTC all over it to me, there are plenty of indication since moving to the 5e timeline that WoTC don't want the gods anywhere near the players. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Lolth and Tyr interactions were removed for release.

And the change in the early access is recent. There are still dialogue tags for Paladins in the game files and the deity selection is only hidden in the UI in patch 9. The Paladin dialogues sometimes default to a deity one too:
- with Anders you're a paladin of Tyr
- with the Druid you follow Sylvanus
- with Wyll you refer to a "she" as your goddess

The Paladin in BG3 is currently a charlatan, it should stick to Oathbreaker.

I wouldn’t say that I’m disappointed so much as feeling that the EA paladin is even more unpolished and incomplete than the other classes we have. But given that it’s in some ways a trickier one to implement, I don’t mind this as long as what we have here is the early draft for feedback that it seems to be.

Specifically:

• I don’t mind the Oathbreaker Knight guy and would be fine with handwaving the implausibilities. I do appreciate the attempt to bring more life to oathbreaking than just having dry narration, but while I’d be happy if Larian did something more realistic in the full release, I also wouldn’t expect them to put disproportionate resources into content only a subset of the players who pick one class would see.
• It took me a while to understand what was going on with the various smites, but once I got my head around it I enjoyed the combat mechanics of the class.
• I guess it would be good to get at least one basic heavy armour set at CC or earlier in the game, but this didn’t really bother me and I’m generally okay with the pacing of finding better armour in EA. As long as there’s more cool heavy armour in the full game, of course.
• Definitely agree that a paladin should (optionally) be able to pick a deity and this impact dialogue choices/actions similarly to a cleric of the same deity, as well as their oath.
• I like that the game will monitor adherence to your oath and hand out consequences if it’s broken, but agree with everyone who has pointed out that the way the game currently does this is nowhere near good enough. This absolutely needs to be sorted if playing a paladin is going to be at all fulfilling, and the fact that the oaths weren’t (a) clearly stated and (b) sensibly implemented meant that I probably enjoyed the RP aspects of the paladin least of all my playthroughs.

Oh, and it’s not specific to the paladin, but I did like the implementation of reactions (and other conditional effects like smiting). Clearly it’s early days and there’s currently a confusing mishmash of old and new, but definitely moving in the right direction in my view.

The Forgotten Realms setting is the default setting for D&D 5e.

Nice 20 Wisdom check...we still might see Monk at launch though.



Quote: Every other class also has an option to be devoted to a deity. Should they hardcode that option for every class? No, they shouldn't.

Its about RP immersion... so I would say why not?

For Paladin...absolutely (and this could happen).

Clerics are members of the "military" arm of a church like Inquisitor, Witch Hunter etc... and no ordinary clergyman, monk or nun.
They are unwavering from a roleplay aspect so they have no Oathbreaker mechanic.

A paladin is more worldly, has maybe influence in the church but no position because the have Paladin orders.
The Paladin can waver in a roleplay aspect and loose the support of his deity.

From a deity perspective Paladins are maybe "cheaper". Why channel divine Power in Clerics when you can have a warrior with a sword who fight for the same?

To be honest I don't see a real big difference between the Paladin and the Oathbreaker.

Ah, fair enough - I was trying to make sure those interested understood the clear distinction between Faithless (capital 'f'), and simply not having a patron deity or one you directly served/followed. Important distinction.

I believe (I'll admit I'm slightly fuzzy here) that what you're describing was most rife at the time more or less synonymous to 3.5 edition times for us. Post second-sundering this seems to happen a lot less, if at all. Those souls who aren't destined for the divine realms of particular deities spend only a very brief time in transition before moving on to the outer plane that best correlates to the nature of their soul. Other powers still attempt to interfere with souls in this brief stretch of vulnerability, but they're forced to do so by temptation, bargaining, deception and other means of that nature - tricking potential souls, rather than taking them by force. (Though devils stealing souls from the wall itself is still a thing that happens, I believe)

I'm not sure what you were asking with the last bit - I'm certainly not against paladins being able to select a deity and follow one actively, I'm just making the note that it's not necessary, in any realm, FR included - so it should very much be an option, but amongst the various deity options, 'no specific deity' must remain available as well. I touched on the mechanics of how paladins gain and use their power without an intermediary deity before, if that's what you were meaning? I can try to go into a bit more detail on that, but we begin to run out of material for the specifics once you get that close in. I can talk about the intention of the philosophy, but I won't have any documents to point at or reference to back that up.

I didn't actually play Paladin, but seen enough from others.

I will say that Oathbreaker should either be chosen at creation for lore purposes. Someone intending to be an Oathbreaker has to pick something else and intentionally mess things up at the beginning of the game, which may also affect party members.

OR

Oathbreaker options should have tags in dialogue leading you GRADUALLY to this transition but letting it be known this is going down an Oathbreaker path.

Larian swung for the fences trying to do too much and missed...as usual...

A lot of their shortcomings really come because they can't just keep it simple and do what is required only.

In the end, what matters is what folks whose favorite class is Paladin actually think of it. This is a lot of development resources for a single class, and I think it's interesting what they're trying to do, various bugs and bumps aside. So, disappointment I think is a kind of an ungrateful response. I'm not saying the OP is ungrateful, as they simply wanted deity selection added.


Look at the classes that launched with EA. They feel a little hollow compared to the later additions, in my opinion.

Going Oathbreaker is 100% optional. There is nothing that stop you role-playing a slow descent to "evil" in the EA. The tools are there. The Oathbreaker is filling in the role for the confessional that a GM controlled cleric/paladin of the same order would fill in a table-top session to keep your oath. The game doesn't force you to pick Oathbreaker after breaking your oath, it's a choice done via dialogue. You can also choose to atone and it comes with a cutscene where you say your oath(again).

People act as if breaking your oath is the end of the world, it's not, the PHB suggest ways to cause Paladin to oath break by accident. Managing your oaths is part of playing the class like learning spells are for Wizard. It's supposed to happen and your supposed to feel repentant about it unless you want to change (sub)class.

Oh no need. I was merely curious about where you fell on the issue of paladins having the option of a patron deity. To me this is very basic to a D&D RPG, and Larian not including this in BG3 is just one more way in which this game has been a gigantic disappointment as a Baldur's Gate/Forgotten Realms RPG.

That's kind of a strange thing to say since none of the previous BG games had deity selection for paladins. They only had deity selection for clerics and even then the choice was optional since the deities were just class kits (you could be a basic cleric without any deity).

Totally Agree, and people are losing their minds after having committed what we would consider "actual war-crimes" realizing that they broke their oath. I just did a single player complete playthrough with a Paladin and a Multiplayer playthrough with a Paladin and didn't once break my Oath in either game by sticking to my Oath and simply turning on Non-Lethal Damage for safety.

Paladin is a hella powerful class both in terms of Offensive, Tanking and Healing capabilities. That power comes at a cost and there is no "friendly" DM to look the other way while you violate your Oath. This is why we have all these people complaining about Oaths all of a sudden. Yet it's funny that when everyone was begging for Paladin to be implemented no one ONCE mentioned the challenge of maintaining your Oath.

I'll admit, I actually didn't complete my Paladin playthrough. I got stressed out about potentially breaking my oath. I was playing an oath of ancients paladin but since it wasn't clear if each oath has different oathbreaking conditions or if they were both just lumped together, I was always kinda worried that potentially lying would lead to me breaking my oath and it made the experience really hard to enjoy. Has anyone found lying to be a consistent thing that breaks our oaths?

I can understand that having a game of your beloved franchise being a disappointment is a big deal, but then again, in the original game i still couldn't follow a god as a paladin, and i had to be a cleric of a god i didn't want to follow or it was just kitless cleric.

So the original games were not super heavy with options, and there were like 2 ways tops to solve a quest with some exceptions.

One could argue of course that it's 2023 now and not 2000, and they would be right, but again, i think people like BG because they had tons of fun back then with it, it was something new, sort of.

Myself included in this. But the game was, while extremely solid with memorable characters, not the masterpiece technically that i originally thought it was(as heretical as this opinion might sound like). I mostly find that although some fantastic games out there exist, I can't find the original enjoyment i had back then.

Anyway to each their own, of course.

As I told in another thread I'm only an Oathbreaker because of a bug. Normally I would still be a regular Paladin.