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

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.

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.

I really doubt that they're going to include a minor quest simply because of the way the game is structured. It would have to be available in some form at every point in an act, and each act would have to have a different one. I don't see them devoting those kinds of resources to it.

As far as ways to fix it, I think one way to at least improve it would be to make the oath and the things that would break it clearer. I'm pretty certain that every player who doesn't know about oathbreaker ahead of time will break their oath the first time they play a paladin, for one specific reason above any other - they don't even know what the oath is ahead of time. The fact the game doesn't lay out the oath when you pick paladin and you only find it if you read the description on the paladin armor set immediately tells players that the oath isn't important. So they won't take keeping it as seriously as they're meant to.

As a related aside, in Pathfinder 2e they rework paladins quite a bit. Paladins become a subclass of what's called a Champion. Champions are just that, champions of their god, and they're broken down into different subclasses for each alignment besides true neutral. Paladins are the lawful good variety, redeemers are neutral good, liberators for chaotic good, and you can pick any alignment that your god allows in their worshippers, and the advanced players guide introduces the Champions for evil deities. Each variety has some unique abilities, as well as different tenets they have to keep to.

This is another topic that keeps cropping up that I might collate into a megathread.

I’d echo what Silver/ says, and that my experience with my Oath of Devotion paladin was actually a lack of meaningful oath breaking opportunities and I think I already listed in another thread a variety of stuff my paladin did that I felt should have affected his oath but didn’t. True, there are some cases where specific actions (such as executing murderous goblins or opening a prison cage door to inspect the body of a goblin raider) break the oath incorrectly in my view. I hope Larian will have more sophisticated treatment of killing “neutrals” and “thieving” in the full release that will manage this better. In the meantime, oathbreaking can easily be avoided by having a party member do anything vaguely dodgy, and this will not affect the paladin’s oath.

Regarding other subclasses, I confess I did wonder whether Larian didn’t implement the PHB Oath of Vengeance paladin for players in EA partly in order to test player demand for it when the Oathbreaker is already available (as well as, no doubt, to get more folk testing oathbreaking). My view is that we do need that option for more morally grey, or downright evil, paladins as well, and I hope it will be there in full release.

I also hope that the full release will be more explicit about the nature of the oaths our paladins swear, and at least set out the basic tenets of each in game, even if they also say (as I think the rules do) that the actual oaths paladins swear may vary.

And with respect to mending a broken oath, I agree that high expectations for custom content are probably not reasonable. According to the rules, I think atoning for a broken oath might include something like a vigil so I generally just headcanon that this is what my paladin is doing. Though that might actually be a nice and relatively easy addition to the game: we hand over our gold but nothing happens until the next long rest, when rather than seeing our paladin sleeping we see them kneeling with head bowed in contemplation then surrounded by light to signify the mended oath, or something like that.

A slightly more complicated version that still seems doable, might have the Oathbreaker Knight come to our camp the first time we break our oath, but for subsequent occasions (once world map travel is available) tell us of a specific location we need to go to in order to find him and become an oathbreaker proper, or redeem our oath. And perhaps also give us the option of approaching priests at some temples and handing over our gold to them rather than the Oathbreaker Knight. I also think each broken oath should become more expensive.

The Oathbreaker System needs fine tuning, that's true.

-The EA is more of a Frankenstein monster composed of different parts of the actual game stitched together. The fact that it works as well as it does, and in fact runs better than some fully released games from other AAA studios is a testament to the QC and skill of the devs at Larian.

The Oathbreaker system is ambitious and risky - not everyone will like it and that is fine.

I am very interested in how Larian implements Oath of Vengeance. I am thinking it may be like Ranger where they get to dictate a "sworn enemy" monster type which allows them to attack that type without risk of breaking their oath. Also additional sworn enemies can be added through RP dialogue - which would clear certain tags for not requiring dialogue before engaging - provided they are not already hostile.

BUT - that still means if a non-sworn enemy asks for mercy then you have to grant it.

I have not seen something like this since Ultima IV and frankly I am very excited about it.

Finally, everyone acts like Oathbreaker is this terrible thing but it's an awesome class to play because you can be as morally grey as you want and you are still wicked powerful. I think because the way it's presented feels like a type of failure. Also because there are some glitchy bits with certain encounters - although switching to non-lethal damage negates all that. It's an easy work-around.

Also, If we were going back to "old editions" of how paladin is played you would have just become a Fighter until you atoned.

I think the reason they left out oath of vengeance is that they wanted to go with the two oaths that feel thematically similar so that iftheir wires got crossed due to oathbreaking, it wouldn't be too incongrous. Otherwise if they'd included vengeance paladins, you might get a situation where you can break an oath for being merciful as a devotion paladin, or break an oath for being rutheless as a vengeance paladin.

As for people being upset about Oathbreaker, I think the problem comes down to the oathbreaking mechanics kind of disconnecting them from their character. They do things that they, with their understanding, feel should be well within the boundaries of their oath, but suddenly it's not and they have to deal with it. I think that in a tabletop setting, that would be equally unsatisfying. It feels like losing control of the fate of your character. Whether that's accurate or not, that's the feeling and it's something beyond how mechanically good Oathbreaker is. I think the people complaining want to be morally upstanding paladins, but their idea of what that means clashes with the game, and now they have to interpret what the game will want from them. I ran a paladin after patch 9 but I stopped because it was genuinely stressful wondering what might or might not break my oath. And I never even became an oathbreaker. I sincerely advocate that things, especially choices that would break your oath should be marked as such because I think that outside of extraordinary circumstances, our character would know most things that would be against our oath, and that's knowledge we as players should also be privvy to.

In my opinion, oathbreaking mechanics at the moment are half unfinished. If this doesn't get fixed in the full release...

Well. Seriously. How hard is it to add a warning symbol in dialogue? Or, to fix the nonsensical combat function? Just ditch the yellow dot/red dot converting system and flag some enemy types as killable, others not. Still got issues, but better by miles.

For example: take quest to slay the goblin leaders in the grove -- all goblins are flagged as true enemies.

Example issue: without fine-tuning, this means you can kill inherent non combatants (children).

However, I think players would be happier not getting their oath broken when they should (false negative), than getting oathbroken for in character solutions (false positive). Fine tuning rounds it off.

I also believe, the groundwork for this system may exist because of entities like the owlbear. I could be wrong, though.

Personally, I don’t see becoming an Oathbreaker as a terrible thing, and like you I’m really excited by it. With a reasonable investment of time and effort from Larian (and some reasonable expectations on the part of players), I think this mechanic has the ability to add some fantastic depth to the experience of playing a paladin.

For me, it’s definitely the glitchiness that’s the problem rather than oath-breaking feeling like a failure. I actually think it feels quite cool, and the Oathbreaker Knight has a decently compelling presentation of its possible philosophical underpinning, making the Oathbreaker sound potentially like a principled independent thinker rather than an oblivious lackey of the status quo. In fact, as I might now be alluding to too much, my biggest problem with its implementation is not the times when we break our oaths when I think we shouldn’t (which I agree can be worked around relatively easily once you know what’s what) but the fact that the game either doesn’t give, or misses, opportunities to roleplay engaging oath-breaking stories like his.

So from what I read here it seems much less of an issue if you already did sufficient research on the oaths, what they stand for, and what they stand against. Possibly even to an extend where breaking oath via dialogue can be completely avoided and even shifting to the opposite. So you have situations you could break your oath in an interesting way in but the game does not give you the option to. The only question you are asking here is why an inexperienced player isn't given clues on this, since the paladin would obviously know about their oath. Although the power comes still from the oath itself, which in my opinion can still take almost any form since it's almost literally just a pretty word for commitment. After all reasons for taking an oath can vary as much as ones for breaking it.

What really remains is weird ruling for combat, especially in multiplayer when others roleplay conflicting alignments. Let me give you an example some of you might have experienced already:
The Warlock runs ahead into the Blighted Village. The ambush triggers - but he successfully intimidates the goblin and avoids combat. So far the paladin player had no influence on any of this. Now another player or even the paladin themselves might decide it would still be best to kill the goblins. After all from what you gathered so far, they destroyed a village and now lay ambush on every traveler to visit the place. What an honorable deed it would be to prevent this from happening ever again. Wouldn't it be?

The game rules no: Your oath is now broken. That is frustrating if you were planning on staying on the right path, even more so when you had no influence on either the dialogue or the initiation of combat. The EA puts you in more, very similar situations and almost every time the game rules villains into the same category as innocent civilians if the party chose the non-violent option on first contact.

If you just don't bring a paladin, you can murderhobo your way through most places without being shunned by other factions with moral codes, which makes this circumstance even more artificial for me. And if you choose violence right away, it might be more conform with your oath than reasoning first. But you never know that for sure until you try.

Unfortunately it’s not anywhere near that sophisticated. Basically, as long as your paladin doesn’t personally interact with a red object (ie one tagged as belonging to someone else) or strike the killing blow against an enemy that didn’t attack them first, you should be okay.

Other party members can be as criminal and murderous as you like, and your paladin can even join in with murderhoboing as long as they don’t strike a lethal blow with a physical attack. You can toggle on non-lethal blows for your paladin if you’re in any doubt, and have other party members deliver the coup de grace. There are some additional niggles and complexities, but that’s pretty much it as far as I can tell when it comes to potentially unexpected oathbreaking.

I agree with your point that it shouldn’t be like this. It feels like what we got in patch 9 was an initial proof of concept, one that, as far as I’m concerned, is a fantastic idea but needs more investment to actually work acceptably and live up to its potential.

Echoing others' thoughts:

- It'd be really useful to know why the oath was broken. I've broken it 3-4 times in three play throughs, however I'm not sure about 2 of them, I think one was a bug, other indiscriminate AoE? Paladins should clearly know why.

- Other party members can ambush, steal and deceive (in some dialogues, other dialogues seem to hold MC accountable), and paladin oath is fine. Paladin can't land killing blows however, need to toggle nonlethal.

- Related note, playing a paladin I've learnt to use companions more in dialogues revealing some interesting lines and making the game feel different. Was this intended outcome, have Tav speak less and pertinent companions speak more?

- Paladin and Oath dialogue tags don't always seem appropriate for MC I'm playing. This is not a complaint, the archetypical FR paladin has strong viewpoint and carries certain authority. What this highlighted for me is that I don't always need to pick those lines, they're simply an extra dialogue option. Also, I recall one dialogue allowing pick between either tag, so had to choose.

- In an honourable non-completionist play through, 2k gold is about 1/3 of total wealth found. That's a lot. If I buy scale+1 or similar, I'll feel it. It harkens back to 1E & 2E where paladins tithe treasure, so it scratches my grognard itch.

- Removal of LG alignment? Kind of, not really. D&D paladins share a baseline code of conduct of chivaly. Sure there's nuance between Avenger, Ancients and Devotion, but they're variants of the same. Before figuring out I could use companions to lead, I took oath-breaking as opportunity to steal like crazy or do naughty things like invite Minthara to attack the grove (love gate battle).

Being an Oath Breaker does not necessarily mean evil alignment. It basically means you have turned away from your oath as you understood it. It also can mean you have turned evil. The 3rd(?) edition Blackguard would only fit here if you took some levels of rogue; however, an oath breaker can fit the role of the traditional “anti-Paladin”. Originally those two classes were pegged for use outside of the LG restrictions. In fact Queen Vlackath(sp) had many of her knights as Anti-Paladins.

But back to my original comment. Not all OBs are traditionally evil. My oath breaker (that started out as an old fallen paladin to Blackguard (talk about OP), broke his “oath” at the time by an alignment change to TN. He became dissatisfied with how the gods use ppl as pawns in their eternal wars and, risking being forced into the blood wars or the wall, he decided to fight the overwhelming influence of these gods in the lives of men. He knew the powers he received were from corrupted sources, but he didn’t worship this source. He would do all he could to break the powers of the Druids/clerics and set the ppl free to grow and prosper.

In this game he will not joine the goblins, will resist the Absolute, save the tieflings by feeding the grove idol to Gale. In his mind the tieflings are innocent and the followers of the Absolute and the Druids are doing exactly what he despises about the gods. In his mind, he is a hero to the ppl, yet those that represent big religious movements hate him… And since most government organizations are theocratic in nature, the bounties on his head are many. His preferred form of governance are republic or democracy. A just secular king is also fine in his eyes.

Blackguards, Anti-paladins, etc. 'evil paladins' have had a place a long time in D&D and the Forgotten Realms. Heck, you could even fight some gith anti-paladins in BG II. That really doesn't bother me. However, as I see it, Paladins are a very RP-heavy class, and like with the Druid IMO, BG III just doesn't quite deliver there. For one, removing the datamined paladin deities in favor of ill-defined oaths is a pretty major letdown. It's removing so much of what you define your character with by just boiling down 'paladin' to 'this guy just swore an oath with so much conviction that it manifests as divine power'

And then you can just pay some cash and get off consequence-free. Revolving door paladin powers-just pay a small fee afterward and you can murder as many tiefling children as you want! Just pay off your local hellknight and he'll flip the switch to your paladin juice back on!

And then the oathbreaker class itself. Which goes out of its way to explain that it's even less of a commitment than a normal paladin oath, that you can be good or evil or whatever and it doesn't matter.

BG III desperately needs better player-facing information when you are going to break an oath. It needs the cut paladin religions back in. It needs 'evil' paladin oaths and not just 'noncommittal edgy paladin' that is the Oathbreaker, and it needs some proper questlines and lasting consequences around paladin's falling and redemption. The npc appearing immediately and giving you the option to reverse your power loss right then and there should go, redemption should be a quest, not a monetary transaction, ditto for the oathbreaker class. That should be something you earn.

I agree with many here that they need to bring back the link to divinity. In our modern world, morality has become very subjective because everyone disagrees with how to define "good". Good has become subjective. But in the BG world, deities actually exist and have their own views of what is "good". They give the paladin power as long as the paladin adheres to that definition. So there is nothing logic breaking having an "evil" paladin following the teachings of an "evil" god - they are just following the god's wishes. There is no logical or moral ambiguity.

However, I think the game should warn the player when they are about to make a oathbreaking act. The paladin should know when an action is against their god, so the game should inform the player and let them take it back. In other words, the paladin would be a greater authority on the topic than the player, so the player should be given the information.

In summary, two small changes make paladins work: align them to the teachings of a deity; and provide in game warnings of oathbreaking.

Agreed

Well, Euthyphro’s dilemma appeared in the Platonic dialogues, long predating any modern moral relativism, and was originally raised in the context of a polytheistic pantheon somewhat like FR’s, so I think there are some definite question marks over your moral philosophy there, but I’ll not take us further off topic into that arena!

I do agree with the key point I think you’re getting at, though, ie that the existing oaths we have (Devotion and Ancients) both have tenets that align closely with good (in the FR sense), so the only way to play an evil paladin is to be an oathbreaker, whereas it should be possible to play a paladin who makes, and keeps, their oaths to an evil god.

Given I don’t believe it’s the place of BG3 to overhaul the 5e approach to paladins, for me that means introducing an oath or oaths whose tenets are more compatible with an evil god, and I assume we’re going to get Oath of Vengeance (as it’s PHB and I think Minthara already has some of its abilities) which would at least give us one option there.

I actually don’t want the game to warn me if I’m about to break my oath, though, as I’d feel that would cheapen and gamify my paladin’s decision making. But I would like (a) the basic tenets of each oath to be clear in the game, (b) oathbreaking to make sense in light of those tenets, (c) the ability somehow to argue after the event if I don’t agree that the action broke my oath.

With respect to deities, I definitely agree that we should (optionally) be able to specify a deity for paladins, and it would be great if the game could respond to that on top of responding to the basic tenets of the oaths we select. But I do recognise that there will be practical limitations on how far that could be done, given the number of deities.

No matter how clearly laid out you think your tenets are, there will always be ambiguity and oathbreaking will always seem arbitrary. In the "old days" of D&D there wouldn't have been any question as to whether or not killing goblins was "good". No paladin would lose his god's favour for killing them, irrespective of who attacked first. I am very sure that you couldn't come up with a list for any of the gods that wasn't plagued by subjective interpretation. And I bet that interpretation even changes depending on the age, background and political orientation of the player. If you wanted some post-hoc justification system, Larian would have to anticipate every one of these interpretations and make a judgement on them, which will then just piss off players more. The only clear system is one that tells you of each oathbreaking action in advance.

Oh yes, I agree there are going to be limitations. Not so much because I think oathbreaking is subjective, but because intention matters, as do all sorts of other factors that it’s unreasonable to expect the game to accommodate.

I’m glad Larian have attempted the oathbreaking system, but without a human DM (or, as per that other active thread, a very good AI!) it’s never going to be close to perfect.

But I do think there are some obvious candidates for reassessment, eg killing slavers and goblins who are clearly preying on travellers for oath of devotion, that if changed would reduce frustration. And for the grey areas, when I said I want the option to argue whether I agree the oath was broken, I don’t expect the game to let me explain my reasoning let alone have the sophistication to assess whether my rationale is good. (So perhaps I should have said “indicate” rather than “argue”.)

It could just give me a pop-up after the “oathbreaking” action that lets me say whether or not I agree the action is against my oath, or an additional dialogue option with the oathbreaker knight. And I don’t care that some players might abuse that system and say they have a justification for their action when they don’t. Though I’d be okay with still having to pay the fine and be told to reflect carefully on my actions, even if I disagreed I’d broken my oath, to discourage too much of that. Or even to need to pass a persuasion check with the oathbreaker knight to avoid a fine. The important thing for me is to be able to register my view. (I do think it would be feasible to do more than that, eg to generate some standard defences for different action types, and to distinguish actions that are always going to break an oath vs ones about which there could be some argument), but for me that would be a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.

I feel forewarning of oathbreaking would undermine my roleplay, and steamroller over ambiguity in a way I think I’d find frustrating. Eg, say I’m playing a devotion paladin who would execute a murderous goblin to protect innocent travellers, but get some sort of message that says “this action breaks your oath, are you sure you want to proceed?”. I’d still disagree it actually broke my oath, but now I either need to decide not to kill the goblin after all (which would be contra the roleplaying decision I’d made for my character) or would need to go ahead anyway and do what I think is in line with the oath. Doing the former would be really unsatisfying for me, whereas the latter leaves me no better off than now, and possibly worse as I don’t even now have the “excuse” that I didn’t think the action broke my oath.

I suppose an acceptable middle ground would be to prompt before the “oathbreaking” but give the option at that point to say that I disagreed the action broke my oath and would go on and do it anyway. Given whether the game thinks an action is against my oath is irrelevant to my decision-making, personally I’d find that needlessly intrusive and flow-breaking, but if other folk would act differently if they knew how the game was programmed to view the action then I’d see it as a fair compromise.

(And of course none of this addresses actions that are against oaths but the game doesn’t recognise as such, which was a bigger problem for me in my playthrough than accidental oathbreaking!)

@Red Queen - a simple persuasion check when speaking to the fallen knight “convincingly explaining your reason for your actions and categorically insisting that your oath is still strong” should be enough. It’s at an appropriate time (at camp) and will not break the flow of the game. Depending on what you did could determine the save you would need. IE stealing the Idol or killing a Tiefling 25. Letting Astrrion live maybe a 5 depending on sub class…

@The Red Queen

That's really interesting because I see your point, but my opinion is the opposite. I wouldn't want a pop up after picking the choice, but I'd want it as a tag on a choice like for racial or class choices, telling you even before you make a choice what choice would be oathbreaking. I want this because to me I think that better facilitates roleplay. The game can't account for the reasons why a character might do something that would break their oath and telling us the player ahead of time what actions would break an oath is simply the game accounting for the fact that our character knows their oath far better than we the player would. They've studied and meditated on it for years. It's the same way other crpgs in the past five or 10 years have taken to letting you mouse over certain in-universe terminology in order to communicate things that would be common knowledge within the world, or important context. Our character would know when something would break their oath even though we the player might not.