The belief itself does not grant you powers. If I understood it correctly, an oath needs to be sworn in a special place, or near specific entities.
Paladins then get their powers the same roundabout way druids do -- in theory! In practice, people have argued here that a paladin not worshipping a specific deity is a white raven. They /exist/, but who thinks of a white raven before black?
I completely disagree with your stance on the implementation. I've played paladin to test the boundaries of oath breaking. Unless you do literally the opposite of what you've sworn to do (ancients raising the dead, devotion killing random civilians for the hell of it), you're fine.
Also, once you understand how oath breaking works, avoiding it is a non issue. it's ridiculously easy to not break your oath. It's not easy when you don't know what you're doing.
In combat oath breaking is counterintuitive and not based on logic. It's bugs, gaps in coding and limitations of the game making our paladin's life hard. Hence, you REALLY need to know what you're doing. If you don't have the theory of oathbreaking down, bothering with the class in early access is a bad experience.
Outside of combat oathbreaking, you are free too take any alignment from chaotic neutral to lawful good. I'm not kidding. I've made a scharlatan paladin and a rather default devotion for playtesting. I've deceived, stolen and killed somewhat needlessly -- with both!
Adhere to the rules of roleplay and the game just lets you. For example, if you trick and isolate priestess gut with devotion, you get the line "die for asking me to abandon my god/oath(?)!". (Not verbatim). You get the same line with the fake paladin. "Die for abandoning my god"! (verbatim)
Unfortunately, THIS is proof the in-game customization is a mess currently as, a devotion paladin... Seems to be a default paladin of Tyr, but no one told you!
Maybe, we can weasel out of it by having the option to kill multiple people for this and that god later. However, Paladin dialogue was seemingly written with religion in mind.
Another incident... I think, in the crypt, we get another snippet -- our devotion paladin must remember the teachings of their order and make a WISDOM throw (another coding error). This is not a lone warrior who made an oath.
It's been a bit, but I felt like the game kept hitting me in the face with a crusader/holy warrior stereotype. When you're not "the bullwark of nature", anyway. Ancients paladin gets a free pass from the mind reading mushrooms.
Result: if you're trying to play your paladin as a loner at the moment, you must skip class dialogue options. It's probably convincing with Ancients (need no more than say, a unicorn to make an oath before). It'd feel weird to skip certain class dialogue with devotion.
Like you're not really more than a glorified, random warrior who emerged one day from the earth. I guess you CAN be, but the game isn't helping.
