I just came across a video by Pointy Hat on youtube with the same title. It also sums up the problems with Paladin in BG3 surprisingly well.
TLDW:
The alignment lock to LG for paladins makes all roleplay predictable and tedious. A lot of TT veterans don't play Paladin because of this. But 5e removed this restriction on purpose. What remains is just the Oath, so in essence if you believe in something hard enough, the belief itself grants you powers.
The way Paladin is implemented in BG3, we are going back in dnd-editions to the goody-two-shoes with no creative freedom on what the player might want for the Paladin to matter. So while the oath breaking after doing something "evil" is a creative, surprising way to discover that subclass, it takes the fun away from any non-Oathbreaker Paladin. On a side note here, I hope the 2000g to regain your powers is a placeholder for some minor quest. Otherwise that's a complete joke.
Someone even wrote on this forum they found it impossible to complete the EA without breaking their oath at least once. If you are in multiplayer and one of the players wants to roleplay a bit of evil or chaos into his character, the Paladin loses any chance he had to retain his oath because the party as a whole committed the act. Admittedly I have no immediate solution to this without oath breaker either becoming a regular subclass or an Easter egg most players will not find. But I am really hoping for some changes here, because I do not want every single Paladin me or my friends play to be an oath breaker.
Well, Pointy Hat is flat-out wrong.
The problem is not that the Paladin is limited. The problem is that you want to play a limited class in an unlimited way. So the problem is the player wanting the Paladin to be something that the Paladin isn't. The whole point of playing a paladin is to adhere to moral/spiritual principles no matter the cost. Yes that makes the Paladin predictable. It absolutely does NOT make it tedious, because adhering to your principles is pretty damn hard (both IRL and sometimes even in video games).
If you want to play a morally flexible character, literally play anything else, it's fine.
Some people think that a Paladin is a Paladin because he has a weapon but also has divine powers, but that is also a perfect description of the Cleric, the Ranger and the Druid as well.
So what I came to think about is this: What sets the Paladin apart from all other classes? And you must NOT think in terms of game mechanics, you have to go deeper, you must understand what a Paladin is as a concept. And a Paladin is a knight or warrior who serves a deity or a cause, and is proactively looking to enforce the principles of his deity or cause upon reality.
Now this presents game developers with a challange: There are hundreds of gods in D&D, and they all have different principles and outlooks. So the "solution" to that is the Oath system that allows broader categories of Paladins to exist without having to take all those deities into account. The problem with that is that in BG3 it totally kills the class for some people (me included).
I simply am not going to play an atheist Paladin or a Paladin that can't even select a deity at character creation. Nor am I going to be satisfied with a Paladin that has no dialogue options reflecting his choice of deity.
I think the solution would be to limit paladins to a select few deities and give them a lot of detail in terms of roleplay.
Of course this will NOT happen, because the Oath System is an integral part of 5E, but it totally kills the roleplay aspect of the class, UNLESS you are into atheistic paladins.
