Opinion on 5e Paladins

[Karam]

This discussion is both about BG3 and DnD 5e, I just want to hear some opinions.

I used to play dnd since I was a child and not long ago I started my first 5e campaign after not playing for about 5 years or so, and I discovered via the PHB (and Baldur's gate) that a Paladin does not require a patron deity, and now paladins get their divine power through their strong conviction in the oath itself, Which sounds like a lame excuse to me, but that's just my opinion.

So I want to hear some opinions on the matter, when you play a paladin in your table do you prefer keeping him godless or roleplay as a servant to a Deity?

And in BG3, do you think they made the right decision removing the option to choose a Deity as a Paladin and keeping it a cleric exclusive thing? Because honestly I'd be happy to play as a Paladin of Bahamut without taking a dip into a cleric for that.

[Detective Costeau]

I don't have a problem with the idea that you can have a Paladin that's not a servant of a god in D&D generally- if you can do magic by being real good with a flute, or by reading old books that teach you how to shoot fire from your hands by saying funny words, I don't see why complete devotion to an oath isn't a reasonable source of magic.

It really doesn't make much sense in the Forgotten Realms generally or BG3 specifically, though. Unless there's been a change to the FR lore since I knew it well years ago, divine powers *only* come from gods there. Even Druids used to need a patron god like Sylvanus.
For that matter, you meet some Paladins of Tyr in the game, so I really don't get why that option isn't there for the player.

There are several mods that let paladins pick a god, and I pretty much always use one in BG3.

[Mike Garrison]

Paladins and Monks and Rangers and Bards and Druids are all classes that were grafted into D&D for people who wanted to role-play them. They all suffer in ways from trying to make them distinct classes, balanced with other classes, and to fit into the structure of a game that wasn't really designed for them.

Paladins in particular were always supposed to be balanced by their role-play -- you were a fighter-type who had these extra divine powers, but you were supposed to role play limitations on what you could do. However, gamers being gamers, a whole lot of people simply looked at the mechanics and said "I want that", then just played them like fighters.

The game has never figured out how to balance paladins against other classes because it doesn't want to enforce role-play, but that's essential for paladins. The "oath" system is an attempt to try to lead players toward actually role-playing paladins without overly specifying that paladins can only be lawful good (which was what the original rules said).

[seeker1]

Paladins CAN still have deities in 5E. You run into some paladins of Tyr in the game, right? or so they CLAIM at least . But they don't have to, just follow an Oath. Larian incidentally did plan on having paladins as well as clerics select a deity in character creation, but eventually removed that feature before release. JMHO, but druids should have a choice also, it's obvious for example that Halsin keeps evoking Silvanus, and that's his deity. Druids tend to serve the nature deities like Silvanus or Mielikki.

[Raz]

Messaggio originale di seeker1:

Paladins CAN still have deities in 5E. You run into some paladins of Tyr in the game, right? or so they CLAIM at least . But they don't have to, just follow an Oath. Larian incidentally did plan on having paladins as well as clerics select a deity in character creation, but eventually removed that feature before release.

Piggy backing off of this; Larian removed Paladins having Deities due to how much work would have needed to be put into what would cause you to break your Oaths. There is already a lot that can cause a player to break their Oath without Deities being in the mix. Accounting for the principles of 20 different Gods would have required WAY too many resources in developing just this one mechanic to be reasonable for a video game.

I prefer the Oath system for a Paladin getting their abilities over the Deity because it gives a less restrictive scope of the kind of character you can be for roleplay purposes. There is a reason why the dogged perception of a Paladin is an annoying zealot no one wants at their table despite it being over 20 years since that was the norm.

Not to mention, it's only Paladins out of the two classes that needed a God for their powers that got heavily punished for doing something against their God. All a Cleric has to do is pray for forgiveness and usually were forgiven or it was understood why they had to take the actions they did. A Paladin? Nope, loses their abilities, has to spend a crap heaps of gold to get it back, wait a week, or else they become an Oathbreaker who is deemed an evil existence off rip by everyone and everything. To be hunted for the rest of their days even if what caused their Oath to be broken was objectively a good thing but something their God would have disagreed with because of how their dogma plays out.

[Minnzy]

I honestly thought the change was just so people would play them. In my 2e and 3e lifetime the amount of times people would refuse to play them, I kid you not because "I'm an atheist" was more than the 0 it should have been. The few others that weren't that dumb seemed to always believe Paladins were lawful stupid so not much better honestly.

The few times I've played one in 5e I still attach myself to a deity. I do think removing it was silly but I am happy to see people actually playing Paladins now since they were almost never seen at my table before then.

[jonnin]

Deity for sure. My group allows any deity and "alignment" / behavior but they must pick a deity and follow reasonably well the expected behaviors associated with it. That means that like shar's justicars would be holy warriors of shar, and so on. Its been a while since we wend down that road, and I think we may have had a 'not chaotic' restriction on the deity as well.

[Mike Garrison]

T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) has a really good series of books about berserker paladins whose god suddenly died. So now they are all pretty broken people trying to deal with a life where they used to be the conduits of a god and now they are just people with swords who are prone to go into a rage where they might kill anything around them.

It's not D&D, and certainly not Forgotten Realms, but personally I would recommend reading them for anybody who wanted ideas on how to role-play a paladin. Or, of course, you could just role-play Sir Gareth or one of the other similar knights from medieval stories.

[Minnzy]

Messaggio originale di Mike Garrison:

T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) has a really good series of books about berserker paladins whose god suddenly died. So now they are all pretty broken people trying to deal with a life where they used to be the conduit of a god and now they are just people with swords who are prone to go into a rage where they might kill anything around them.

It's not D&D, and certainly not Forgotten Realms, but personally I would recommend reading them for anybody who wanted ideas on how to role-play a paladin. Or, of course, you could just role-play Sir Gareth or one of the other similar knights from medieval stories.

That actually sounds pretty interesting. One of my favourite time periods in D&D was the Time Of Troubles and the impact it had on the world so that sounds like it would give a similar feel.

[Sentient_Toaster]

I'm fine with the oath system in tabletop, where the DM and player can cooperate so as to be sure that they're on the same page as to how to interpret them.

Mechanically, it makes sense to tie it to abstract oaths with edicts and anathemas rather than to deities, because pantheons are setting-specific and not everybody even sets their campaigns in official settings, never mind the Forgotten Realms.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

5e does not prevent your Paladin from taking an Oath to a god - in fact, Devotion Paladins are described this way in the PHB.

The Oath is about mechanics, it's meant to be broad enough so that the class can fit into any setting, even those without deities.

Their main attack is still called Divine Smite...

My biggest issue with Paladins is that most of their abilities are tied to spell slots in order to make them homogenuous with the rules, making them just another gish class...

I think Divine Smite should have worked like Ranger's Favored Enemy (against specific monster types).

[Mike Garrison]

Messaggio originale di Minnzy:

In my 2e and 3e lifetime the amount of times people would refuse to play them, I kid you not because "I'm an atheist" was more than the 0 it should have been.

What's wrong with that?

D&D is kind of like going to a Halloween party. If someone wants to be a Sexy Nurse or an Atheist Warlock, that's what they want to be. Forcing someone to play a character who believes in a god (or gods) is just as constraining as forcing them to play a character who doesn't.

I could easily see playing, for example, a wizard who believes all magic is a physical property of the universe, and that clerics who think they are receiving their magic from "gods" are only fooling themselves. Might make for some interesting dynamics with a cleric in the party.

[[TG] zac]

Generally speaking 5e tried to stay away from a lot of things concerning dieties, what commandments they have for their followers etc...

The oaths also have quite a bit of vagueness to them.

It leads to a lot of grey areas and I don't care for it honestly.

I prefer the way pathfinder 2e handled it with their "champions" where they are considered part of the church the same way clerics are, are bound by the same edicts & anathema but as the militant arm of the church are given some lee way in very specific conditions.
(battle harbingers are given even more as they are basically the religious shock troops. Like how a space marine is called in when the guard fail)

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Messaggio originale di Mike Garrison:

Messaggio originale di Minnzy:

In my 2e and 3e lifetime the amount of times people would refuse to play them, I kid you not because "I'm an atheist" was more than the 0 it should have been.

What's wrong with that?

D&D is kind of like going to a Halloween party. If someone wants to be a Sexy Nurse or an Atheist Warlock, that's what they want to be. Forcing someone to play a character who believes in a god (or gods) is just as constraining as forcing them to play a character who doesn't.

I could easily see playing, for example, a wizard who believes all magic is a physical property of the universe, and that clerics who think they are receiving their magic from "gods" are only fooling themselves. Might make for some interesting dynamics with a cleric in the party.

That's ok up to a certain point...

Not believing that gods exist in Faerün, for example, borders on the ridiculous because they literally meddle in the affairs of mortals and physically manifest themselves.

Atheism would be a kind of neurosis in that setting.

[Mike Garrison]

Messaggio originale di Pan Darius Cassandra:

Messaggio originale di Mike Garrison:

What's wrong with that?

D&D is kind of like going to a Halloween party. If someone wants to be a Sexy Nurse or an Atheist Warlock, that's what they want to be. Forcing someone to play a character who believes in a god (or gods) is just as constraining as forcing them to play a character who doesn't.

I could easily see playing, for example, a wizard who believes all magic is a physical property of the universe, and that clerics who think they are receiving their magic from "gods" are only fooling themselves. Might make for some interesting dynamics with a cleric in the party.

That's ok up to a certain point...

Not believing that gods exist in Faerün, for example, borders on the ridiculous because they literally meddle in the affairs of mortals and physically manifest themselves.

Atheism would be a kind of neurosis in that setting.

Not all D&D is set in the Forgotten Realms, for one thing.

And I'm pretty sure I could play a character even in the Forgotten Realms who is skeptical of gods. Just like the Githyanki consider Vlaa'kith to be a god, but she's actually just a very powerful lich, maybe the other gods are just on a spectrum of power and not somehow distinct from non-gods. If someone like Mizora or Raphael can be the patrons of a warlock and provide them with magical power, does that make them gods?

Many of the gods in FR are known to have been mortals at one point, so are they really "gods" or just very powerful non-divine beings?

[[TG] zac]

Messaggio originale di Pan Darius Cassandra:

Messaggio originale di Mike Garrison:

What's wrong with that?

D&D is kind of like going to a Halloween party. If someone wants to be a Sexy Nurse or an Atheist Warlock, that's what they want to be. Forcing someone to play a character who believes in a god (or gods) is just as constraining as forcing them to play a character who doesn't.

I could easily see playing, for example, a wizard who believes all magic is a physical property of the universe, and that clerics who think they are receiving their magic from "gods" are only fooling themselves. Might make for some interesting dynamics with a cleric in the party.

That's ok up to a certain point...

Not believing that gods exist in Faerün, for example, borders on the ridiculous because they literally meddle in the affairs of mortals and physically manifest themselves.

Atheism would be a kind of neurosis in that setting.

Atheism in DND (as well as pathfinder and some other systems) works a bit differently.

They believe the gods exist (due to obvious acts by said gods) but refuse to worship them.

According to the lore pre 5e retcon they also all ended up in the domain of Asmodias after death because he slipped a stipulation into an agreement made with the other gods that let him claim the souls of people who had not pledged themselves to any deities.
Pathfinder kept this bit of lore while changing others to make Asmodias one of the deities that existed at the start of the universe. (makes sense for a being that is so powerful to be one of the original deities.)