Apparently this is leftover dialogue from the datamined stuff when Paladins had Tags for all of the same gods clerics did. Supposedly you can get references to paladin's serving a 'goddess' under certain circumstances-Lolth IIRC-I think it's if you choose Lolthsworn since they have a default religious option? IDK. It's pretty clear from its current implementation that at the very least *player* paladins are divorced from the concept of religion, and that this is an about face from the initial plans.
Anyways, all of this stuff about 'making an oath without being religious but a god notices anyways and chooses to be your patron without revealing themselves in any way' seems incredibly niche and unlikely. Certainly more appropriately an outlier rather than the norm?
It seems as likely to me that the evidence of religion tags for paladins means that this is a planned feature that wasn’t ready for release with patch 9, as that it was initially planned then abandoned. I’m going to continue to believe my preferred interpretation until definitively proved wrong
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I’m also not aware of anyone arguing that a paladin without a relationship to a specific deity is the norm rather than an outlier, particularly in the FR settings. Is that an extrapolation from the fact that we can’t (yet?) specify in-game the particular deity to whom our paladins are sworn to the conclusion that most of them aren’t actually sworn to deities at all? That’s not a leap I’d make, and given that it wouldn’t fit well with the setting - as you’ve argued - I don’t think we have reason to believe that’s what Larian intended anyone to infer from that lack of functionality either.
I do very much agree that it would be great to meet paladin orders in the game, and have the opportunity to roleplay our paladins as a member of, eg, the Order of the Radiant Heart. Hopefully that’s something we’ll see once we, presumably, encounter more paladins as the adventure proceeds.
And I certainly wouldn’t see it as a bad thing if the game included more context on paladins in Faerun to help newcomers generate a lore-friendly background for their paladins that will be fulfilling to play in BG3, though this doesn’t seem to be a gap specific to this class. For any custom Tav, it feels as though Larian expect us to do our offline homework on the setting rather than holding our hands through the process of developing our character. Perhaps they figure that people not already familiar with the setting will choose origin characters, but still …
