Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The Problem with Paladins in D&D

Very well put. ++

I haven't read the thread, but I've been looking into the DnD Paladin in general a bit myself lately. In my opinion, he's a bit immersion-breaking to begin with. The ambivalence and ambiguity is simply due to the fact that in the video game world, the Paladin has always been a warrior of an holy order. Attempts have been made to tone this down or do away with it altogether with the DnD Pala, but IMHO they have failed to rename the paraphrases of his skills and abilities accordingly.

Terms like Divine Sense / Smite / Health , Sacred Oath, Blessed Warrior always inevitably bring to mind gods and religion. Opposing or at least more neutral terms are hardly present. Of course, this dissolves a bit as soon as, for example, a righteous Paladin Oath of Devotion becomes an Oathbreaker. Nevertheless, ambivalences and ambiguities remain, e.g. the Blessed Warrior fighting style. A blessing comes from a deity and usually has a positive connotation. Now, however, the description reads: "An Oathbreaker is a Paladin who breaks his sacred oaths to pursue a dark goal or to serve an evil power. The light that burned in the Paladin's heart is extinguished. Only the darkness remains." But what if he was already in the service of an evil deity like Auril and then breaks his oath. Except for other abilities, there is no real gain, I think.

For example, when redesigning the DnD Paladin, it would have been better to stick to the old Japanese Bushidô code around honor, pride, etc. or any other "Lifestyle", to free the Paladin from the tight corset of the divine and religious. For example, "Divine Sense" could have been renamed to "Focus." The term "Pride Warrior" instead of "Blessed Warrior" can be both positive (fatherhood) and negative (arrogance), which fits all other alignments (Devotion, Vengeance, Crown, etc.), except perhaps the Oath of Redemption. Of course, these were only first basic considerations...

By "freeing" the paladin from the tight corset of the divine and the religious, you kill the Paladin.
A paladin is defined by his limitations.

It doesn't help that the name Paladin is inherently Religious to begin with, even before it's use in DnD, at least of it that was used for inspiration (Going REALLY early with it's origin and root name is basically means Palace Guard.......which doesn't fit this at all and thus isn't relevant.).

It's kinda goofy to try and change that, I think it's too little too late to try and change that, it's already what people think of in fantasy when you use the name.

Just that we do not misunderstand. I have made observations, not demands.... I assume that you are also an advocate who wants to be able to choose a deity for the Pala? If so, I can understand that very well. Exactly that is my statement with 5e one said goodbye to it, but left other class-specific attributions so. It does not kill the Paladin. My point here was just about framing certain terminology, which in the end fits the individual subclasses better. By the way, the fact that the Paladin is defined by his limitations does not exclude this at all, nor did I in any way imply to change this to his disadvantage. As I said, I was only interested in reducing or eliminating certain attributive ambivalences and ambiguities.

Short example: We surely agree that the term "holy war" is an absolute contradiction in terms, since nothing about a war is holy, as it only results in suffering, cruelty, etc.

I feel the same way about "Blessed Warrior Oathbreaker" etc., only that there are a few more of these contradictory attributions...


That it is too late for that was also clear to me. Yes, the mini-adjustment from 4 to 5e Pala failed in its implementation in terms of selectivity. As far as I can see, the only elemental change was that you can no longer select a deity. This was an attempt to free the Paladin as a predefined god warrior (you can still become one if you want to), at least that's how I understand it. I hope a future DnD version can define this better. But indeed for the current version, that ship has already sailed....

You absolutely can choose a deity though, it just isn't required mechanically. That is a very big difference. The assumption in D&D character creation is that every character will choose a patron deity, I believe. The same still goes for paladins, so naturally that deity will be who you made your oath to. My guess is that the lack of requirement to choose a deity is part of the effort to make D&D a "generic" ruleset. If you want to create your own setting, which is low key what they seem to want by default, then maybe you don't want paladins to work the same. Plus I think having paladins differ by oath helps make them distinct flavor-wise from clerics.

On another note something occurred to me which has me worried. Minthara is apparently a vengeance paladin, or at least she used a vengeance paladin ability. I really hope Larian don't just make that oath the "evil" oath.

It already is a LN oath, if not LE.

I disliked detaching Paladins from Gods a lot until I realized it allows for religious strife within a church or amongst believers in the same god. An oath of vengeance paladin of Tyr would have quite a different view on things compared to a oath of devotion paladin of Tyr. And it might clash with the clergy of Tyr as well. However, the Paladin undoubtedly has divine power, presumably granted by Tyr. Finally I have a way as DM to portray a more complex religious belief within a single church.

However, not being able to select a deity for all characters and Paladins especially is grating on me. There are very few faithless in Forgotten Realms, and I imagince close to zero faithless Paladins. A vengeance paladin of Asmodeus or Jergal is quite different from a Ancient Paladin of Eldath. If the game can't account for the variety of the gods and faiths, it also should mechanically enforce breaking an oath it doesn't even attempt at understanding or portraying.

You make a very good observation about paladins. However with regard to not being able to choose a deity for everyone, I see I not as the characters being faithless and just as the characters not really being especially religious. Like a lot of Christians won't bring it up because they don't really think it matters day to day, but they still express faith in various small ways. But those ways can't really be shown well when we're in constant control of the character and skip over most small moments. Picking a deity for paladins makes sense as an option though, but I feel like there are certain options that really seem to imply worship of a deity without stating it outright.

IMO Paladin's piety is above the average ... otherwise no spells. Unless these happen Because Science!

Since she doesn't have a tadpole Minthara seems to voluntarily serve the Absolute, maybe she is an outcast Drow and wants to get revenge on Lolth that way? Hence Paladin Oath of Vengeance?

On the other hand, I rediscovered another older thread https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=835054#Post835054 with a reply of mine that I had already forgotten about:


Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters... Are Warlock Patrons automatically all evil? The Raven Queen is rather neutral. Even Jahreira is neutral, but is often classified as a force for good especially in connection with the Harpers, if I look at the classification of the companions in other threads. This paladin deity & alignment story is quite complicated.

I am not very familiar with 5th rules, but a paladin normally could not form party with evils, nor thief. That made the paladin you created hardly survive in bg3 because most npcs were E or N. For example, shadowheart worship Shar a which is evil, so she is likely LN or NE. A paladin must not party with such npc but game go on...

This dilemma is spoken of by the Hound in GoT and ASIF and is one of the reasons he refuses to be a knight. It's also involved in Jaime Lannister getting the 'king slayer' epithet.

The Greeks had something similar. Orestes was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. Orestes is duty-bound to avenge his father yet also duty-bound to never harm his mother.

I'll be honest, Pointy Hat lost me by saying the old-school LG Paladins made role-playing predictable and tedious. As someone who started playing paladins forty years ago, I can say that they have never been necessarily predictable or tedious. They're like the role-playing equivalent of a sonnet; they're a chance to express creativity through the focus of limitations.

It will be interesting to see how they implement 5E paladins in the full game as the tabletop version turned me almost completely off what had been my favorite class. I think part of the problem for me is that while more player choice is a great thing, the increased freedom changes the nature of the game. Some of the changes work really well, others remove some of my favorite aspects of a character type.

I dunno, in 2e, it felt like cheating at cards would get you kicked out of your order.

I like the idea that you can bind yourself to different oaths with different restrictions. e.g. An oath of vengeance pally may be willing to burn down a small forest to flush out a group of bugbears, while and oath of the ancients pally would see that same act as an atrocity.

To be honest, I never really played much of 2e, I was much more a 1e player so my experience may be different.

Divorcing the Paladins from their respective deities in DnD seems to be an interesting case insofar as it presents us with a situation where the loosening of rules with the explicit goal of creating more player freedom to explore niche character concepts (white ravens as you called it) paradoxically creates a ripple effect where we now have fewer roleplay choices and the exception effectively becomes the new rule. There's a lesson to be learned here, I guess.

A lesson that will NOT be learned.