The Paladin was always an interesting class for me. On one hand, I understand what they were going with, as the Wiki entry for Paladin shows. They are the holiest and most chivalrous of knights and because of that, certain powers are bestowed upon them.
Now, in the real world, these knights mostly came from Christianity, and, because of that, they represented a relatively Good and Lawful god, because Christianity is monotheistic and they have no Chaotic or Evil gods.
However, in most D&D worlds, those gods exist, and worshipers of them are generally tolerated throughout the land. Worshiping or paying homage to a Chaotic god doesn't mean you're instantly evil and ostracized. So, the question is, why do the Lawful Good gods have Paladins, but the neutral and chaotic (and also evil if said alignment is used) do not?
Now, in our earlier Deminar project we turned Paladins into "Holy Knights," bestowing a variety of powers that were offshoots of the classic paladins based on what god the Holy Knight followed.
The question is, do we want to do that in this LL/AEC version of Deminar? If we do, the idea is to keep things as simple as possible, classes should be easy to follow, as they are in all AEC, so we can't make so many options based on each individual god or something like that. Someone who wants to play a Thief and someone who wants to play a "revised" version of a Paladin (or Holy Knight if we stick to that name) should be able to make it through character creation at roughly the same time.
So, if we do make the class more mutable to allow for the worship of different gods (or, to boil it down, different alignments) then we may need to tweak some abilities. For this post, I'm just going to list them, and after reading some discussion and making my own ideals, I'll post a follow up a few days later.
The abilities/features of a Paladin:
Should a paladin knowingly act in a chaotic way, only confession and paying penance to a cleric of 7th level or higher will remove the mark of the sin. However, committing an evil act is unforgivable, and a paladin immediately loses all special class abilities and becomes an ordinary fighter of equal level, with the lowest possible experience points.
Paladins may only have (1) magical suit of armor, (1) magical shield, (4) magical weapons (not counting magical arrows or quarrels), and (4) miscellaneous magical items. Paladins may only keep small amounts of money, and pay 10% of all earnings to a church. Any excess items or money found must be donated to the paladin's church or another worthy church of similar alignment and moral code.
Note that paladins may only ever hire lawful henchman.
Paladins will adventure with chaotic characters, but they will cease to do so with characters who commit evil acts.
They may "Lay on Hands" once per day to heal 2 hp per level to a wounded being.
They may cure disease 1 time per day, per every 5 levels.
Paladins are immune to disease.
They may detect evil to 60', as the spell, when concentrating.
They radiate protection from evil in a 10' radius at all times.
Paladins receive +2 to all saving throws.
At 3rd level paladins are able to turn undead as a cleric 2 levels lower.
A paladin may summon a special war horse, but only one time each 10 years. The horse has AC 5, HD 5+5, and movement of 180' (60').
Paladins gain the ability to cast clerical spells. However, they may not use cleric spell scrolls. Paladins do not attract followers.
Here's an idea:
ReplyDeleteThe LL/Basic characters had a lot more restrictions than the more modern editions. What if we leave the Paladin alone? We can make an Anti-Paladin (or whatever) to fill in the Chaotic Paladin role, and perhaps a Neutral one as well. They don't have to be mirrors of the Paladin, just a similarly functioning class.
One Paladin, One Slaaneshi, shaken, not stirred.
Whole new classes is interesting, certainly not an approach I'd think of. I was thinking more of giving a few options, like we were going to do with clerics and their spell lists and weapons.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, it would be easy to have the Detect Evil switch to Detect Good if you're a chaotic or evil paladin (still don't know what I want to do about alignments in Deminar yet, another post for another time.)
If you were to generate whole different classes, what were you thinking? Offshoots of fighters (in terms of Saves and Attack Rolls) with different abilities? How different would you make them to make them not just tweaks to a Paladin?
Well, lets take the idea of a Supreme Knight, but with an Evil aspect instead of a Good aspect.
ReplyDeleteStrip off lay on hands. We probably could remove turn undead, too, after all Clerics are the undead banes. Probably can get rid of a few other things, too.
To add onto it...what makes an evil knight evil?
I'll think
Hmmmm, two points on that.
ReplyDeleteOne, kill the Paladin off as a "godly fueled" class, making them, as you say, Supreme Knights, then they fit for any alignment. That could be interesting.
Two, if we keep the Paladin (and it's other nonLG compatriots) as "godly fueled" I would keep even an Evil/Chaotic Paladin type as having Turn Undead, again, since all gods (good, evil, indifferent) are against Undead.
If you go with the second option, you only need to tweak the Detect Evil and Protection from Evil and adjust some of the talk about doing "bad" things. At that point, you could keep the Paladin as is, with a few notes on conversion for non-Good gods.
Though I really like the idea of taking the concept of a Paladin, but making him more of a straight knight with a few "powers" up his sleeve. After all, we're cutting/changing some races (species!), so why not classes? (On that note, no Monk, stop putting inaccurate Asia flavor in my European based fantasy!)
As I think is heavily implied here, the paladin's powers come from their extreme devotion to their god, and by extension, their alignment. I don't know if they're more or less devoted than clerics, but it'll be fun for them to argue about it.
ReplyDeleteJust flip alignment for chaos, and maybe neutrality can resist neutrality because I think it's amusing. I don't have much justification for that, really. It seems the most natural to me. Regardless of alignment, they'd still need to adhere to strict moral codes, though since they're following more selfish alignments there'd be plenty of leeway. As long as you're looking out for number one (or ensuring the balance of the world), you're probably doing it right. I dunno.
I suppose I'm behind you on the "holy knight" thing, though the lawful flavor is more or less the same as a standard paladin.
Also, I am obligated to provide you with this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don't_abbreviate_Wikipedia_as_Wiki
Hittin' up Ye Olde Wiki (see what I did there?), the original Paladins were the premier knights of Charlemagne's, and prior to that Roland's, court. I suspect that the D&D Paladin was an extension of this - take everything that makes a Knight great, and turn it up to 11. Chivalry, piety, protecting others, etc. D&D antipaladins are more inverse Paladins, rather than the pinnacle of a Knightly Order of Evil. I'd like to see them less as a fallen paladin, and more as the ideal evil knight, cranked up to 11.
ReplyDeleteWe'd probably have to define the ideal evil. LL uses Chaotic, rather than evil, so I guess we probably should define that rather than evil.
LL defines it as untrustworthy, tending to act in evil ways, and selfish. They also believe in chance, and don't believe in an innate order of life.
How can we twist that into a Dark Supreme Knight?
One thing that the revised Basic Red Book does, that I found interesting, is state that a cleric (no Paladins at this point, remember), served a great/noble cause and never mentioned deity (though the first edition Red Book and LL does). Basically, the idea of Law and Chaos are stances that are almost revered and fuel clerics, there were no gods yet.
ReplyDeleteNow, I very much want our clerics being the gods' undead hunters through and through, but what if we took the stripped down version of the cleric for the paladin?
I.E. The Paladins doesn't worship a certain god/goddess but are knights on the path of either Law or Chaos (and possibly neutrality, plus I like not having Good and Evil as alignments).
So, eschew the Paladin as a "Holy Knight" but instead several Orders dedicated to a way of living.
Now the question becomes, do we need to make changes to the Paladin's powers before we even go about making a Chaotic version of him?
@Sean:
ReplyDelete"Hittin' up Ye Olde Wiki (see what I did there?), the original Paladins were the premier knights of Charlemagne's,"
I did see what you did there, also, I provided said link on this blog post, so I'm assuming you meant you looked at it from there, you did read the actual post, right? ;)
I did read it. I was more referring to the fact that I called it Wiki.
ReplyDeleteWe've twisted Druids around, I don't see why we couldn't do it to Paladins. I can't remember, who pulls from the Positive and Negative domains? If they haven't been tagged, Paladins could become champions of those. Positive Paladins could still be pretty close to traditional paladins.
We seem to be agreed on pulling the Holy Knight idea and replacing it with Supreme Knight idea.
Yeah, I think the Supreme Knight wins the day!
ReplyDeleteI don't remember if Wizards, or MUs for this version, are accessing those planes or are just using raw Creation to fuel their magic. Will check my book when I get home from work! However, if free, that could work, assuming you're okay with linking the Positive Plane to Law and the Negative Plane to Chaos.
Other ideas include not linking to any planes at all, and rewriting some of their abilities to be more "training" based in nature, rather then magical (Lay on Hands doing so few hit point recovery is actual crude field surgery, the "Call upon a horse" is actually a horse assigned to the Knight by the Order, etc.) Or, there are hither unknown until know planes of Law and Chaos swirling about with the other "fundamental energy" planes like Fire, Positive, Earth, etc. that surrounds Deminar as well, and they access those.
I wouldn't be opposed to adding Law and Chaos planes. Gives us a nice even 8 - Law, Chaos, Positive, Negative, Fire, Earth, Air, Water.
ReplyDeleteTweak the Pally so he gets some cool law based powers (just modify them a bit), and create a counter that gives some cool chaos based powers. We also could create a Neutrality Paladin that has some crazy nullification powers or something...that could be fun.
I smell a brainstorm session coming up to hammer these guys out, we need real time!
As a side note, are we adding "good and evil" to the LL whatever?
@Sean:
ReplyDelete"I smell a brainstorm session coming up to hammer these guys out, we need real time!"
Yeah, this is merging into something epic, might need more then this comments section to think it out between us.
"As a side note, are we adding "good and evil" to the LL whatever? "
My current thought is no, I like the concept of no Good/Evil as inherent traits, but I don't know how that may affect our cosmology, something else to discuss!
That was my thought on the good/evil thing...but it certainly does wreck the Godly Planes somethin' fierce. I suppose we could ditch the idea of "Good" and "Evil" Pantheons, and rather just enhance the "Aspect" idea, with the Godly Realms being defined by groups of similar aspects, as opposed to similar places on the Good/Evil slider.
ReplyDelete