Do you think paladins should only serve the gods?
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PALADIN.
Do you think paladins should only serve the gods?
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The term "paladin" is inextricably linked to Christian Middle Ages.
Unless you call them zealots they'll always be the Christian expy.
They should serve the King.
*emperor
it's customary to refer to someone by their highest title and charlemagne was crowned as emperor in rome by the pope
All you need to recruit Paladins is a palace. You don't need to play all the way until you get the "Emperor" achievement title.
that's true for the twelve paladins, later the term was used for well basicly elector counts in the HRE who also been knights
so i can have the king scream "summon the elector counts!" and have 12 paladins bust into the room with jojo music?
Not only can you, you should.
And earlier it was used for the Roman Emperor's palace officials (the pal in palatine/paladin is the same pal in palace), which is why the knights got the name in the first place. If Charlemagne gets to be emperor, then his best boys get to be "emperor's best boys: the title". But in pop culture, these knight paladins were much more visible and heroic and interesting, so of course it stuck with them and their knightlyness.
The counts who called themselves count-palatines were basically just trying to flex on poorer nobles who had titles, but no real land or power. If you called yourself a palatine in that scenario, it implies power to go with your title.
oh shit I didn't know that one
Is that before the HRE? So pagan Rome?
Yeah. They were called Palatines/Palatinus, after the Palatine Hill where a lot of imperial palaces (Palaces on the Palatine, staffed by Palatines, eh?) were built. Sometimes the emperor's palace guards were called Scholae Palatinae, and the title got spread around post-Rome because everyone in Europe wanted to be Rome. Some Vatican officials had titles like Judices Palatini, and of course there's the Count Palatines, who depending on time period and culture, could be a special title for certain kinds of responsibilities or just a self-styling of some of the more politically powerful ones. Paladin is just the French translation of that word, but it's also by far the most relevant to pop culture, and since they used it for especially chivalrous knights who also happened to be an Emperor's top guys, that became the association for the word.
>Scholae Palatinae
Scholae, in the sense of those trained for the standing army, also went on to be a term to refer to the military upper crust in the Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire, to differentiate the noble native military from the peasant levies and the much more heavily relied upon foreign mercenaries like the Hetaireia ('Companions', mercenary cavalry)/ Varangoi ('Hired Men', the viking elite guard).
The King and God were the same thing in France at the time of the paladins. The king was the king because he was chosen by god, and he carried out his will. If you're doing some fantasy setting there's no reason for a paladin to serve a king that's not related to the paladin's god. This is especially true in DnD because there's a gazillion gods.
I guess it could be an interesting source of conflict. What if the throne is usurped by a follower of a different religion, or what if the paladin has reasons to believe his god has forsaken the king
But then again you have no reason to follow historical rules
you mean the King of kings
I think that Paladins should be powered by the cosmological forces the gods organize themselves around, rather than being tied to any one god. Partly to contrast with god-powered Clerics and partly so the gods occasionally being dicks doesn't rub off on them.
This is interesting.
The concept of Justice is absolute even beyond the Gods that attempt to represent it. Very good. I will use this idea.
That's how 3rd edition paladins work, they're directly empowered by the alignments. Lawful Good is Lawful Good is Lawfull Good no matter which, if any, god they also dedicate their work to.
Broadly, it goes like this
>original paladins
The earliest D&D paladins were Fighter+. They had to follow an idealistic form of chivalry, and got a small number of powers (although some of those powers were uniquely strong). They had to tithe to churches (note, any suitable church that does good work, not one specific one. Also explicitly not one run by a PC cleric, this is supposed to drain money from the party, no grabass allowed) and wanted to associate with nobles and lords. They could not knowingly associate with thieves or chaotic individuals. They had to maintain courtesy and honor. If they broke their code, they lost their powers and became a fighter. Depending on exact ruleset a cleric (of any suitably lawful god) who thinks they deserve it could cast the Atonement spell to get their powers back. This may involve taking on a suitably chivalrous quest first.
2nd edition mostly just expanded on this idea with variations on the chivalry.
The setting Faerun makes paladins follow a god because their magic is classified as divine and all divine magic has to come from a god in that setting. Druids and all clerics must also have a god, no clerics of ideals, and no druids of just nature itself.
3rd edition makes paladins follow their alignment's ideals.
4th edition actually does require a paladin to be a member of a church, because the only way to become a paladin in that edition is to have the powers bestowed upon you by a church ritual. Stupidly, there is no way for a paladin to lose their powers in this system, they could get powers from the goodiest good god in the game and then immediately use those powers to slaughter everyone around them and go on a rape spree. No taksies backsies.
5th edition goes with a variety of codes, including a version of chivalry.
>th edition goes with a variety of codes, including a version of chivalry.
I genuinely like all the default Oaths in 5e; the Paladin Paladin, the Judge Dredd Paladin, and the Jedi Paladin.
I really don't want to see more insertion of real-world or current-year ideologies into the hobby, but I've always liked the idea of a an oath of Enlightenment or Knowledge or the like. But if you do that, next you'll get a Paladin of Communism or a Paladin of Intersectionality.
Paladin of Agnosticism would be hilarious as would...
>Paladin of Racism
>Paladin of Fine Tastes
>Paladin of Conspiracy
>Paladin of Contrarianism
>Paladin of Contrarianism
That's just Mordenkainen
>the Atonement spell
>not one run by a PC cleric
You're right that paladins were fighter+ but those last two points make it clear you're not talking about the earliest paladins. The line about not tithing to a PC cleric is right out of AD&D 1st edition and there was no atonement spell when paladins were introduced which was in OD&D Greyhawk Supplement.
OD&D paladins didn't have to tithe to churches. They had to pay everything they didn't need for their upkeep which is more than a tithe. They didn't have to pay to a church, they could pay to the poor. OD&D paladins didn't have some chivalric code, they just had to be lawful.
>could not knowingly associate with thieves or chaotic individuals.
The earliest D&D paladins could associate only with lawfuls. That meant no neutrals and no chaotics. Thieves were not mentioned by name but could only be neutral or chaotic so they were implicitly forbidden.
For most of AD&D 1st edition they still didn't have a code either, that came in 1985 when they stopped being fighters and started being cavaliers. They had to both tithe and get rid of all money they didn't need for their upkeep. I can't think of why they needed to do both except for those times when they treasure they found was less than they needed for their upkeep but they still had to give away 10% of it.
There is no mention in 1st edition PHB of atonement needing to be cast on a paladin. If they knowingly perform a chaotic they confess and do penance. If they do an evil act knowingly they're out for good.
Because the rules say knowingly perform a chaotic act the atonement spell wouldn't be any use anyway because that spell doesn't work when a character deliberately performs an act.
2nd edition mentions that if he makes an evil act while controlled by magic he can atone and this would allow an atonement spell to be work but it's not mentioned as necessary, no cleric is mentioned at all as needed in PHB. Besides this, 2nd edition isn't earliest.
This is the best way to do it imo, and it aligns nicely to the oath system 5e uses as a bonus.
I once had a loose cosmology where the universe was created by the voluntary self-sacrifice of the original singular existing omnipotent being. Echoes of this first act of selflessness and love still echo throughout the universe, and Paladins are able to tap into and embody this power by aligning to these divine principles, while faltering can weaken the connection.
Conviction is powerful, and allowing that metaphorical strength to manifest physically is a very cool approach.
Agreed, paladins need no gods, only their oath to Justice
That's idiotic. So you could take an Oath of McDonald's if you were loyal enough to it, Divine Smite with 1000 island dressing, pray to Ronald for spells, lay on hands to raise cholesterol... of course not. That's stupid.
Is an oath to Ronald an oath to Justice? I think not.
But an oath to a concept is meaningless. It doesn't matter how hard you believe in it. If some idiot swears an oath to Justice, or Gravity, or Flatulence, he's not going to start Divine Smiting fools
Justice is not beholden to the false and fickle gods, but stands above their reach and may come for them in time as it does for mortals. A god may offer the power to carry out "justice" according to their will, but Justice is a fundamental force of reality, offering a harder yet more rewarding path to those who serve it than any mere deity.
>Maccas is not beholden to the false and fickle gods, but stands above their reach and may come for them in time as it does for mortals. A god may offer the power to carry "take-out" according to their will, but Maccas is a fundamental force of reality, offering a harder yet more rewarding path to those who serve it than any mere deity.
So, ok. I play an oath of devotion paladin, but he was definitely raised and trained by a church. I can look in the PHB and see what powers he gains as he levels up and how that translates into game mechanics. How would a paladin of McDonald's operate? It's an interesting concept. Our DM is cool, maybe he'd let my next paladin take the oath of McDonald's?
I wrote that post explicitly to point out that oath-based Paladins are dumb dude do your homework yourself.
Upon reaching level 3, the paladin may commit himself to the Oath of McDonald's. The tenets of McDonald's are...
Will nobody help develop the tenets and powers of a McDonald's paladin??
>Tenet 1- Eat the Greater Value: when eating a meal, whether in a tavern, home, or in the wild, the paladin must eat the largest, most fattening option available
Then the McDonalds Cultivator comes along and wrecks their family down to the ninth degree.
It would be some sort of Oath of Capitalism or maybe Wealth. This Paladin actually believes that a strong free market benefits everyone, and this is influenced by them having grown up in a McOrphanage. He became a junior assistant regional manager before having his epiphany and taking up the sword.
Ok, so help develop his oath tenets and powers! What alignment are McDonald's oath takers, usually? Etc
Also how did the McDonald's Oath get to the settings of Dnd?
Elminster brought back a bible from one of his trip to earth
That doesn't really explain it...
>slopper is also moronic and a homosexual
Many such cases!
Their main competitor is the similar KFC Paladin Order, The two sides have been competing for power and influence for eons, only uniting occasionally to combat the Primal Kitchen Druidic forces that are sworn to destroy both Orders.
Comparing the lesser creations of mortals to universal truths just demonstrates that you don't understand the concepts the same way as the adults in the room. That or you're a contrarian troll making bad faith arguments. Maybe we can build you an oath around that?
Wendy's had that Feast of Legends rpg, maybe you can lift some ideas from there?
In reality sure (we think) but there's no reason that can't be true in whatever setting anon wants to make. Our universe has a baked in tendency towards chaos and dissolution and embracing that tendency does tend to make you more materially powerful.
In the classical case this is the Alignment forces of Law and Good as they exist in the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia that are a major function of the political breakdown among deities, but you can use the same logic for tapping pantheon-independent conceptions of "Justice" or whatever other backend gets shared by several gods.
Not arbitrary in the slightest in-setting, merely dependent on rather common factors of the cosmology. You are not stopping my misotheistic Paladin on a crusade against Ao over the massive problems caused by pointless dick-waving because the gods aren't ALLOWED to peacefully share influence on the individual level like functional adults, the tide of Varakhuts are.
Same thing. If you are powered by the domains of war and zeal or nature and animals, it are still gods fueling that power, same as with druids.
The gods submit themselves to a domain to define their power. The domains and alignments remain no matter how many gods live or die. They can literally leave vacancies without impacting anything related to the domain itself. Nature is there whether there's a Nature god or ten Nature gods or no Nature gods.
No god with that domain in portfolio, domain doesnt connect, everyone following it loses power, be it in GH or FR.
Nope, that's only in FR, where all magic comes from gods. In other settings people can get power from other things and it's pretty much only clerics, certain specific warlocks who didn't get the memo about what their class is supposed to be, and sometimes druids who get it from gods.
Nope, its right there in the AD&D kits section that it works the same way in GH. Hell even in eberron it is divine power from Balinor and Arawai that supply 99% of the druids and rangers with power.
There's a fundamental logical problem here of why the frick Hextor and Heironious have identical War domains/spheres. That only happens when "War domain" is a separate thing from the deities in question. To say nothing of our old fiend Sertrous, or all those Celestials who have nothing to do with gods and can even get higher up the cosmic totem pole than them.
Pretty sure GH doesnt have the FR lock of "no two gods with same domain/same "ideas" from a sphere limit (could be wrong, was years since i last brushed up on cosmic rules of GH), but even FR has the "foreign pantheons dont count" exception.
But if i do remember right its a smart move from the cosmic balance side to make sure good deeds dont end up as worship of a evil deity (or vice versa) through legalese.
Or more likely as its a meta reason, the roman-retcon-of-greeks happened and siblings got the share a theme.
And then there's Mystara, where the "gods" who empower clerics are literally just mortals who reached the level cap and there are a shitload of them overlapping each other in all sorts of ways, including singular gods going by multiple names and mutually exclusive concepts in multiple pantheons just to keep themselves as relevant as possible. A good elf sun god could have his followers attack an evil dwarf moon goddesses followers, but they're both actually some amoral proto-ape that killed every other member of its entire species to get enough XP to hit level 36 back in the ancient past and doesn't give a single crap about mortals beyond the fact that they are aware of at least one of the names it goes by.
No. No edition of D&D has required them to be servants of the gods or even religious. From from 1st edition it was possible to roll up an outright agnostic Paladin if you want.
Why should I change a formula that’s worked for so long?
I mean, being the paladin of McDonald's doesn't have the same ring to it
They have been fighting against the KFC Death Knights of for milenia!
not to mention Wendy's barbarians attacking from the north.
>implying the Paladins aren't of Chickfila
To be honest I like the change from serving a patron god to upholding an oath or ideal. A heavy armor-wearing person who is granted divine powers through direct prayers to their patron deity describes a cleric, the differences between them was that paladins were more focused on melee combat while the clerics were capable of greater spells and not as effective in melee, the change helped differentiate them from one another.
I think that settings where the gods are tangibly real and powerful should have martial orders serving them, and I think settings where religion is based primarily on faith should ALSO have martial orders dedicated to fighting enemies of the faith. Paladins of "ideals" are less sensible: no one goes to war just for philosophy.
Paladins don't often go to war, on balance.
>on balance
And what does “balance” have to do with paladins?
I'll settle for a broad power like Warcraft's "The Light", The Force in Star Wars, or even just Law. But I think there needs to be an element of serving a higher power to really work.
I think the issue is the "gods" plural when the archetype, to your point, is clearly based on serving the one christian God. So it is kinda cringe having paladins serving the lesser god of courteous waiter tipping, simply because they are lawful good; when they are meant to be servants of the Big Law/Good, transcending petty differences, and preparing themselves for the final struggle against the big bad/chaos. This is especially the case when the lawful good deities have personalities and petty disputes etc.
This is a good point. Cringe as modern wow is, they manage to link paladins to the metaphysical concept that stands above all personalities and lesser nonsense.
Yeah, I think it would be fine also for them to serve a pantheon of generally good gods also but aside from Eberron D&D doesn't really do that. Instead it's this weird shit where there's a bunch of different gods that everyone believes in but everyone just chooses one to devote themselves to completely for some reason.
This is what turned me off of most modern settings.
You can have more than one God worthy of worship. Either as pantheon of heroes, like you, but of a greater scale who are not themselves worshipped (like primarchs or similar). Or even outright worshipped if they are the embodiement of a concept - like PoE Eothas as light and hope manifest are fair enough. You are committed to good, this God anthropomorphisizes the concept into something usable for those who wish to advance the concept.
But when the Gods are just people who somehow managed to get a hold of a portfolio. And are not subsumed by that portfolio but retain the flaws and eccentricities of a mortal - then worshipping them is absurd. It is closer to dedicating your life to a celeberty than a God. And it makes worship into a meme and clerics into warlocks or losers attracted to personality cults. How are you supposed to rp a religous character, much less a paldin, when "faith" is non-existant and replaced with a meme/reality tv?
This bizzare lapse really needs to be addressed.
>devote themselves to completely for some reason
That's how real life religions worked though. Certain regions or cults would be focused almost entirely on one god.
>then worshipping them is absurd.
Not if they still have power. Even if he was once just a guy, it makes sense to pray to the person who decides whether or not you get enough rain to grow crops, or the person who has domain over the concept of justice.
Not to mention not all the gods are ex-mortals. If a human raises himself to the level of a divine being you have exactly two options. Either call ALL divine beings frauds, potentially blaspheming against your gods who have been gods since time immemorial, or accept this random dude is also one of the gods. You could declare just that dude a fraud, but if he objectively wields the same degree of power and portfolio control as actual gods you're implicitly insulting them.
the way paladins work in Warcraft has been kinda soft retconned ever since they decided to bend the entire franchise entirely around their MTG-style color wheel cosmology
paladins used to work kind of like green lanterns with their power coming from their unyielding will to protect others, it wasnt exactly important what their specific faith was but the strength of their convictions. now they are just channelers of a light flavored magic and mechanically no different from a warcraft arcane mage or a warlock really. the setting has been really adamant on homogenizing and demystifying everything for years now, in addition to just horrible, aimless story telling and melting down the different races' cultures to resemble bland, safe, marketing friendly generic real world urbanites
Well, it's more of a horseshoe development. Initially Paladins only worshiped the light, which was fundamentally a force of good. That was it. Priests had a lot more variation in their access to holy power, but not Paladins. It was TBC and Cata that changed this up by providing alternate ways for Horde Paladins to access their powers. So the MTG style rework does bring Paladins back into line, albeit at the cost of all the other flavour since now there's nothing inherently good or holy about light worship. Although now that I think about it the Scarlet Crusade had all sorts of Paladins and weren't exactly good, so maybe it's more of a WoW issue in general.
Depends on the setting
Completely setting dependent. Paladins are knights that follow their moral code absolutely, and receive divine miracles for doing so. That's their defining feature that separates them from clerics who manifest through a variety of means, like blind faith.
The power of a paladin comes from his own genuine belief in the righteousness of his actions. Whether they're based on a god or not is entirely up to the story.
You only have to go back to Arthurian legend (and the stuff inspired by it) to get a clear answer.
Arthur had a personal relationship with Christ and the Virgin Mary (Lady of the Lake), to whom his oaths were sacred and absolute. However, it was not an oath to one interpretation of faith nor to the church itself. It was to the highest ideal, and specifically his own experiences with that ideal.
A paladin could have 100% conviction in his faith because he, unlike so many, has truly seen that truth (supped from the grail). There is zero blind faith in a true paladin, because to even be a paladin it requires not just a moral calling but a transformatory revelation that separates a mere knight from those who have drank from the grail.
And yes, Bretonnians do this pretty well. Grail knights are set apart from their knightly peers and are often hermits who disdain normal lives in favor of living quiet, pious existences in solitude.
>unlike so many, has truly seen that truth (supped from the grail)
To be fair, most of King Arthur's Knights are operating solely on faith. Traditionally only Percival and Galahad obtain the Grail (and usually not in the same story/cycle, eg Malory only has Galahad obtain it). Hell few of the Knights even see it.
>Grail knights are set apart from their knightly peers
Returning to the literature, I suppose this also makes sense for Galahad and Percival. As much as the Brets can be a Monty Python parody of the stories and culture of time, I think they're done quite well over all.
Arthurian romances are nothing but 13th century cuckold porn commissioned by nobles. Arthur was a pagan.
You realize search for the grail (or the path to the "fey" gates/afterlife) is older than the french OC donutsteel and his cuck shit.
I mean, Arthurs wife was cucked as he took at least 6 girls if we follow the legendary conquests, but was fine with it in the originals as she was still the queen.
Arthur really was a bastard, not only to his wife, but to his friends as well.
He promised the women that if they gave birth to a girl, that girl would marry one of their friends from the round table.
>although it would be fun to imagine Arthur arriving at one of his friends' house with a baby and explaining why you have to marry that baby.
Nope, Arthur was a Christian Sub-Roman Welshman who battled against pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders
>After the Roman legions withdrew in the 5th century Anglo-Saxon invaders gradually conquered eastern and southern Britain but were unable to make inroads into Wales, cutting off Wales from the Celts in Scotland, Cornwall and Cumbria. The writer Gildas drew sharp contrasts between the Christian Welsh at this time and the pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders.
bro read avalon and thought it was the original
I thought the Lady of the Lake was some sort of fairy?
Yes, but it's also true the story has been reinvented or reinterpreted a number of times
Can't say I've heard a version where she was the Mother of God.
I didn't mean to imply I was literally agreeing with that other anon, just that it has been reinterpreted through a Christian lense
Paladins are super cool but them being their own class instead of a Fighter/Cleric multiclass is dumb and sets bad precedent for whatever system you're running.
>Fighter/Cleric multiclass i
No, this is by far the dumbest. Paladin being it's own class is good since you can tailor make skills and features to provide unique flavour and mechanics. Alternatively, it works as a prestige/sub-class for Fighter, since that's what it is mostly based off. A Cleric is already meant to be a mix of the Fighting Man and Magic User classes, and is based more on the traveling priest/warrior monk archetype than it is the chivalric and "ideal man" archetype of the Paladin. Simply giving the Fighter a bunch of Divine Magic by mixing it with a Cleric fails to deliver the themes and flavour of a Paladin.
>Paladin being it's own class is good since you can tailor make skills and features to provide unique flavour and mechanics.
Every class being its own separate construct that doesn't play within the core class ecosystem is the problem, though. It becomes bloated and stretches the consistency of the setting - now I have to account for Paladin's or anybody else's ability set and flavor when running games? That's not a good can of worms to go down.
>Cleric is based
On a fiction that has no basis in anything. Removing some of Cleric's fighter-man-ness and moving it over to Paladin as a multiclass option fixes this without sacrificing.
>Every class being its own separate construct that doesn't play within the core class ecosystem is the problem, though. It becomes bloated and stretches the consistency of the setting - now I have to account for Paladin's or anybody else's ability set and flavor when running games?
>On a fiction that has no basis in anything.
Brother, by your logic we should just remove Cleric as fell since it's essentially just a fighter/magic-user with some flavour.
>Removing some of Cleric's fighter-man-ness and moving it over to Paladin as a multiclass option fixes this without sacrificing.
Why change the Cleric when you could just introduce a Paladin.
It's only dumb if they have no unique mechanics. May as well say every class outside of the wizard/warrior/thief triad dumb because they can all be described as some variation of the above.
>Clerics serve a specific God
>Paladins serve a fundamental force/alignment
I kind of like this idea, especially since it gives Paladins some drama as they are essentially pursuing apotheosis, but I feel it could make for difficult roleplay and weird conversations for players.
I think that paladins that serve an element the same way others serve gods could be interesting if done well.
I like the concept but Idunno man, seems more like a sorcerer thing to me. Embody X element in your veins or something. What could the embodiment of fire or wind possibly want without crossing over to druid territory?
Yes. The Paladin Code makes no sense. I would prefer Paladins to be solely holy warriors, for whom all is justified if it's within the god's commands.
If your God really, really hates orcs, is he genuinely going to slap your wrist for burning an orc village alive? Of course not. If you're a Paladin of Heironeous, of course your job is to kill those punk-ass followers of Hextor.
The significantly more powerful Cleric doesn't have a code of conduct, no-one ever cares about that. The Paladin should simply be held to the same standard i.e. "Your God's rules are the only ones that matter."
I've noticed that paladins are more often than not based on the knights templars of the crusades era rather than the knights of the round table of arthurian myth.
You do realize that the templars were a society of international bankers?
>You do realize that the templars were a society of international bankers?
Yes, but what military force moved by faith is not?
And they were put to death because some important people wanted to skip out on paying what they were owed.
I think the gods in Forgotten Realms aren't worth serving and any noble paladin of the realm should be devoting himself to their death
Growing up is accepting that the Wall of the Faithless is necessary for the preservation of the gods and the universe they shoulder.
Even Atheists get to do their part.
I think they should serve God (singular) and the Holy Roman Emperor.
They should only serve the court of Charlemagne.
They should have enough land to flaunt their power in front of the other, poorer electors who have little more than their names.
maybe
No, they should serve Big Carl. If that individual is a god or not is up to debate (war) and for now the Big Carl's twelves are winning.
Paladins in my setting are knights of the Free Cities of Man who pledged themselves in service to the Empire (essentially Aasimar). The magic they wield is theoretically usable by anyone, but magic in general is not taught scholastically in the lands of Man so it's effectively a blessing from God's chosen to the individual by way of the church, rather than a superpower the Paladin has from believing really hard.
They go on crusades against eastern Elves and Orcs, and the foul Djinn of the southern desert.
I think lady Paladins are nice
Paladins need to follow some religious or at the very least philosphical code otherwise it's just a knight with magic.
I suppose you could do something like a Dishonored overseer where you're essentially a radical antitheist
I like the crusader vibe for paladins
Why does this knight have longs hairs??????????????????????
Faith in God is my armor and anger my weapon.
They already only do.
They have no power without gods and no matter if they perform sacred rites or pray, their deeds are already worship enough.
>They have no power without gods
In Faerun, where nobody has any power without gods, including wizards who rely on the weave created by Mystra or whatever she goes by now.
Everywhere else has more varied power sources.
Paladins that serve the cosmic forces of Law/Order and Chaos could be cool, though besides toppling the occasional dictatorship I’m a loss at coming up with ways that Chaos paladins can be depicted positively and not just be the kind of murderhobos Chaos forces in Warhammer tend to be.
Not sure if I can help anon, but I'd imagine a good-aligned chaos paladin would probably be all about freedom as a concept, and changing the status quo. So actions such as removing dictatorships as you suggested, and uplifting the masses in such a way that your average peasant could lead to many paradigm shifts would probably be their shtick. If your world has the fey, that could be an easy avenue for chaotic paladins as archfey could send out their paladins to influence the status quo of the material world.
Maybe have the order and chaos paladins operate in a cycle where order is trying to maintain stability of the status quo to offer comfort and certainty for the world, at the cost of a rigid corporate-like existence where everyone is a cog to their system(s) of order, where every minute detail is accounted for and planned out. While the fey paladins are trying to either throw a wrench in such orders and machinations, and if circumstances allow for it once every couple millennia, tear the whole thing down.
Wow, I didn't expect this to cause so much discussion, good thing I decided to wait a bit to reply.
Anyway, the archfey idea has some potential, though I should probably have ways that Order paladins can be good or evil as well instead of just painting them with one brush, tying into the fact that different nations have different laws if nothing else.
I've never actually heard of the Antipaladin idea before, but I'll take a deeper look at it, though the corruption angle sounds a bit negative. And how would you display a corruption of some domains?
Yeah, what you said, though again, the idea of corrupted domains is intriguing, even if I don't use it in that concept.
So Order Paladins would essentially be cops then?
Thanks for this, but where exactly did Gygax say that bit about Law being basically Christianity and Chaos paganism? And what other influences did he have?
A Lawful Paladin of X God/Domain supports the expansion or perfection of that domain.
A Chaotic Antipaladin (or call it a Scourge or Oathbreaker or something) uses the power of that God's domain towards their own end, corrupting it.
So in the classic Antipaladin example, Ganondorf as an Antipaladin of Hylia uses the power of the Triforce given to him by the Goddess to corrupt and control Hyrule, turning the land into a wasteland.
Or Darth Vader, antiPaladin of the Force, uses the Force to bend the universe to the will of his master The Emperor.
>A Chaotic Antipaladin (or call it a Scourge or Oathbreaker or something) uses the power of that God's domain towards their own end, corrupting it.
I feel like the idea here is to have a Chaos Paladin exists as something separate from an Anti-Paladin. They embody the nobleness and selfless nature of the Paladin, but serve Chaos (or maybe Chaotic-Good) as opposed to selfish, corrupting nature of the Anti-Paladin.
You don't need thirty five different variants of any given player class, that's just bad design. Are you going to have Anti-Fighters as distinct from Chaos-aligned Fighters, too?
Having some distinct terminology for flavor is enough - Antipaladin is just a popular meta term.
>You don't need thirty five different variants of any given player class
Don't tell Paizo...
Videogamification is a huge part of why Paizo isn't penetrating DnD's market, yeah.
>I’m a loss at coming up with ways that Chaos paladins can be depicted positively
Chaos Paladins have got to step in and deal with society (civilisation being a natural manifestation of order) when order become too dominant.
At a small scale level, just think Chaotic God. Lone rangers protecting personal freedoms from corrupt law officials.
Chaos and Law have nothing to do with Libertarianism vs Authoritarianism, that's a modern misappropriation of Gygax's and his influences' ideas.
>Lawful Evil: Creatures of this alignment are great respecters of laws and strict order
>Lawful Good: While as strict [as Lawful Evil characters] in their prosecution of law and order
>Lawful Neutral: Those of this alignment view regulation as all-important ... sole hope rest upon law and order. Evil or good are immaterial beside the determined purpose of bringing all to predictability and regulation.
While I'd like to have more of an argument this anon and say he's wrong, all those quotes from 1st edition PHB just say that Lawful characters uphold law and order. None of them say anything about the source of those laws.
The commonsense assumption is that the laws would be from a country's/city's governing body. But the game doesn't specify if that government is a freely elected representative democracy, a direct democracy, a dictatorship, an absolute monarchy, etc. and in that sense Lawful has nothing to do with Authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is pretty much defined as a political system that does not have an actual way to change the governing party. D&D Lawfulness doesn't say anything about how the ruling party becomes and stays the ruling party or if the ruling party can change.
But it is too much of a stretch to say that Chaotic and Lawful have nothing to do with Libertarianism vs Authoritarianism, both of them very much have something to do with Lawfulness. The distinction would be that Authoritarianism relies solely upon Lawfulness and Libertarianism can run the gamut from highly regulated to anarchist. A problem I can see there is that a Lawful to Chaotic spectrum doesn't really mesh with a regulated to anarchic spectrum. A powerful Chaotic Evil could very happily be an archon in that he expects his orders obeyed, which is a Lawful attitude. You get into problem with defining what anarchy is.
Read "Three Hearts, Three Lions" that's where Gygax took the idea of Chaos and Law.
Gygax himself has said explicitly that Chaos and Law are metaphysically opposed forces wherein Law is essentially Christianity and Chaos essentially Paganism. That's why they have their own languages in old DnD, because the cultures of each race are downstream from the higher influence of Law and Chaos practice in the same way medieval European languages took heavily from Church Latin and medieval Arabic/Turkic languages took heavily from Persian and Islamic tongues.
TL;DR Law and Chaos are meant to reductively represent irreconcilable metaphysical worldviews and not political structures inherent to the modern paradigm that haven't existed long enough to feature in any historic or literary work that influenced DnD. Gygax would say that virtually everyone alive today is Lawful Good or at least Neutral Good.
>Law is essentially Christianity
>Gygax would say that virtually everyone alive today is Lawful Good
Therefore Gygax would say everyone is essentially Christian.
It would be interesting to read this reported interview because what you are saying he said is at odds with the ways Chaos is presented in the game. The game presents Chaos as evil, plain and simple. OD&D evil priests may only be Chaotic. Goblins, gnolls, trolls, wights, and a host of what were later evil monsters are all chaotic. Notably, orcs and ogres which are Evil in later editions may be Neutral or Chaotic. Archetypically good creatures like unicorns are Lawful.
It's even more explicit by the time of Basic where
>Chaotic behavior is usually the same as behavior that could be called "evil".
>Lawful behavior is usually the same as behavior that could be called "good".
this doesn't sound anything like Christian vs Pagan.
>Read "Three Hearts, Three Lions" that's where Gygax took the idea of Chaos and Law.
The viewpoint you have presented that Law is Christianity and Chaos is Paganism is too simplistic.
>This business of Chaos versus Law, for example, turned out to be more than religious dogma.
>p66
It ignores that he's forever ramming Law Good and peaceful, Chaos Evil and violent into your face, and he's comparing Chaos to back to nature and Nazism. Faerie are Chaotic presumably just for living in the wilderness away from the domain of Men. The only real pagan association is that modern wiccans call themselves pagan and aren't Christian. In the book he associates Law with Judaism and Islam, or as it was called in those days, Mohammedanism and both of those are pagan. The neo-pagan revival only really started after this book was rewritten.
The part of all that which was brought into D&D was more Law = Good and Chaos = Evil than anything else.
Not a fan of his work at the best of times and this book is far from the best of times. He was much better at SF than fantasy.
The Paladin, the Knight, the Cavalier, are all Christian interpretations of Islamic cavalry culture mixed with the Frankish system of land governance. Meaning that every knight to ever exist has been a monotheist. My answer to this is to simply have them be monotheists even in polytheistic settings. I usually go with either something based on Christianity, or on Sol Invictus or Mithras, as these kind of occupied a similar role at different times before they eventually settled on Christianity.
Of course every god has something similar. Blood God has Berserkers, Beast God has Druids, but the term Paladin is restricted to that religion's specific lexicon. Each of them also views the others differently--Paladin God says the others are all basically demon worshippers, the Blood God is essentially a communist whose position is that there is a finite amount of blood in the universe and the reason your crops are failing and your cattle are sick is that those fat fricks in [Insert historic grievance country here] are hoarding all the blood. Easy way to solve that. They see Paladins as guardians of inequity, the Paladins view them as serial killers, and so on.
Paladins should be the type of person who would naturally gravitate towards devotion to king, country, and church, but should not be required to be devoted to a specific king, country, or church, and willing to backhand all three if he thinks they're acting out of line.
>Do you think paladins should only serve the gods?
Yeah. Same with clerics. This new-ass homosexual idea of "clerics can serve a concept" just reduces them to a different flavor of edgy loner spellcaster beholden to no one who can act however he wants. It's incredibly cringy to see people want to "go twilight domain cleric" in 5e without the slightest care to the worship of those deities. It's incredibly cringy that 5e paladins (a class named after the knights of the men who kept Europe from being overrun by the Umayyads entirely) just became "lol you swear an oath to some edgy shit" and got mixed with warlock and sorcerer and other cringy loner edgelord classes, usually some freakshit race like dragonborn or tiefling as well. Paladins don't even have to be lawful good anymore. "Paladin of freedom" in 3.5 was already pozzed bullshit, but at least it was in a splatbook of very very optional rules. No one expected to be able to play one, except for extremely entitled turboautists. However, that now composes around 50% of the D&D 5e playerbase, with half being trannies and half of them boring normalgays (with plenty of overlap). Paladins were LAWFUL GOOD and that was based, unfortunately they were made undesirable to play by obnoxious DMs who want to "trap" the paladin into violating his oath, or take away his powers at the slightest thing. Those jackass DMs are the reason why the atonement spell existed, but now it is gone because it doesn't matter. No one cares about the paladin code because it's subjective. Which is what they want. They pozzed the absolute frick out of paladins and clerics and it is just another symptom of the eternal decay of D&D.
24 years ago in the PHB isn't new, moron.
True but also Clerics haven't had to serve a specific power since the early 80s. So it's more like 44 years.
Yeah and whoever came up with that idea should be shot.
If anything, Paladins should serve a concept while Clerics directly serve a God. Paladins and Clerics both serving a God creates class redundancy that doesn't make a lot of sense, like what actually separates a Paladin from a Cleric in-universe?
Of course this is all solved by just making Paladin a multiclass option for Fighters taking levels in Cleric and vice-versa, but if you're going to keep Paladin as a basic class it makes more sense that they'd be questing on with a moral code based on some higher metaphysical morality which affords them some divine protection rather than being in direct literal communion with a God.
I think the DnD concept of a Paladin does itself a disservice by using terms like Divine Sense, Holy Symbol, Blessed Warrior. If they're going for agnostic or atheistic Paladins being possible and not connected to Gods they really should cut out that kind of language.
Agnostic/Atheist Paladins just shouldn't be possible, it's an inherently moronic concept. Even if you want to say Paladins are just magically adept swordsmen (which is not the fantasy the class is designed around) that magic has to come from somewhere and it doesn't fricking come from within the Paladin themself regardless of CHA casting.
Paladins don't get their powers from deities and never have. Except for 4E.
>Divine Smite
>Doesn't come from a deity
This is bad worldbuilding/design.
No it's not.
In any pantheonic setting, "divine" is not tied to a specific god, but a characteristic that becomes shared by all gods, and thus becomes something someone can draw upon through faith without being tied to a specific god. You can make your argument in a monotheistic setting like real world Christianity that paladins came from, but D&D has never been a monotheistic setting, therefore you have to accept contrivances like this, or you're basically arguing that paladins shouldn't exist in D&D at all ever. It doesn't matter if you like it or agree with it, this has been the case in D&D since paladins and clerics were first introduced, and thus predate your own life.
>divine is a characteristic of the gods
>therefore you can draw upon the divine without having anything to do with gods
this definitionally does not make any sense my guy. I get what you're trying to say - Domain or Alignment Paladins over or alongside Paladins of any specific God - but then the Paladin must still be drawing their supernatural power from the Domain or the metaphysical nature of an Alignment, which are both ruled over by GODS. Atheist/Antitheistic Paladin is just logically self-defeating, their power has to come from someTHING which embodies/controls a Domain or metaphysical concept. Abstracting this out to having conceptual Paladins just dumpsters the entire fantasy the class is trying to bring to life, and doesn't achieve anything but allowing lolsorandumbness.
>where exactly did Gygax say that bit about Law being basically Christianity and Chaos paganism?
It's in an interview from an old DnD mag(iirc) where somebody asked him about Chaos and Law languages and he explained the concept, frick if I can find the original source but Three Hearts and Three Lions is very explicit on it and the idea is lifted very directly from there. As for his and his group's other influences, Jack Vance is oft-cited in particular as the source for DnD's magic system, and it's also well known that none of them particularly liked Tolkien.
You can use Shinto as an example, since that's the biggest pantheistic religion with a unified series of rituals and customs and associated with a noble warrior class who ostensibly had a code of honour. Individual shrines are dedicated to specific gods, but the rituals, exorcisms, and the like have been unified since pretty much the 8th century, because of the belief that they were tied with an innate divine nature of existence, of which gods are part of but which is not reliant on individual gods.
>since that's the biggest yada yada
Should've specified, "that I can think of off the top of my head," I'm sure there are others that are/were bigger.
Shinto has literally nothing to do with the fantasy of the Paladin class, though. The fantasy of the Paladin class is monotheistic, "I am going and killing things in the name of MY God." What you get when you have unlimited anything Paladins is a class with no distinct premise or idea. That's just Rune Knight with extra steps and shitty, limited roleplay because you have no impetus to act a certain way.
Also, tangentially, Shinto got entirely subsumed by Buddhism almost as soon as Buddhism came into contact with Shintoism, almost like Monotheistic personal relationships with one God inspire people more than having myriad theriomorphic and impersonal Gods.
>The fantasy of the Paladin class is monotheistic, "I am going and killing things in the name of MY God."
It literally never has been in its entire existence in D&D.
The single key phrase of the Paladin playerbase is LITERALLY "Deus Vult"
I don't care what some homosexual wannabes claim the class is.
>class is taken directly from knights who defended Europe from Arabic incursion in the name of the Christian God and HOLY Roman Emperor (himself crowned by the POPE), with a bit of Arthurian grail-chasing thrown in for good measure.
>"nah it's not based on worshipping a God"
I hate this board more with each passing day
The sole requirement related to religion in the AD&D 1E Paladin is having to tithe 10% to an LG charitable religious institution of the Paladin's choosing. Here's what 2E has to say about it.
Okay, if you're going for the Gygaxian purist angle that's fine. Your Paladin must also be Lawful Good and must logically draw his powers of Faith from a Lawful Good source, not literally "whatever I pull out of my ass." I consider this a valid, if limited, compromise.
No, moron, it's not a purist angle. It's calling you out on your dumbfrick autism and appeals to tradition. Paladins have only needed to worship a deity exactly once and it was in 4E.
It's not an appeal to tradition, I'm not saying Paladins should be required to worship a deity because of Gygax, I'm saying the entire CONCEPT is predicated on monotheistic warrior champions and diluting that down to the point that everything narrative about the concept is unimportant cheapens the gameplay value of the concept.
No. Get the frick out of here with this goalpost moving.
>Your Paladin must also be Lawful Good and must logically draw his powers of Faith from a Lawful Good source
Correct (until 4e), if you accept that "Lawful Good source" can be philosophical and ideological in and of itself instead of tied to a specific god. You can go ahead and look up all the myriad D&D gods that are listed as lawful good; paladins can themselves have faith in a broader "lawful good" philosophy that is not limited to one of those individual gods or their religions. This has been the case since the very beginning.
Nobody mentioned numbers until you did, nogamesgay.
>I'm saying the entire CONCEPT is predicated on monotheistic warrior champions
You are factually, objectively, literally "this has never appeared in the game ever" incorrect. You might as well be saying D&D rangers are just park wardens or clerics are just paper-pushers.
>can be philosophical and ideological in and of itself instead of tied to a specific god
Show me primary source examples of these, and those and only those can apply to Paladins outside of 4e. Show me a non-personified metaphysical force within DnD, or a philosophy of such, that is explicitly given a Lawful Good alignment.
The alignment of Lawful Good itself. The gods fit themselves into alignments, they do not bend the alignments. They move into alignment related planes, without creating them. The alignments are a primal force that overpowers everything else. If a god says something Evil is actually good, then that god is simply aligned with Evil. They have no power to move a concept from aligned Evil to aligned Good. Morality is derived from objective and immutable alignments, rather than alignments being influenced by morals.
Okay, that's perfectly valid. So Paladins can coherently draw their power from a God, Domain or Alignment in line with their own Alignment.
This doesn't allow for Paladins of McDonalds which is what this entire argument has been predicated on. You can't (with logical coherence) have a Paladin of Fedoras that disbelieves in gods exist and draw power from a source which is self-evidently a metaphysical moral arbiter.
I'm glad we agree that Paladins must draw their power from concrete, limited sources of supernatural or divine power RAW.
>The sole requirement related to religion in the AD&D 1E Paladin is having to tithe 10%
Tithe = 10% already. The word literally means "one-tenth".
About religious elements, you've forgotten the part where paladins have to confess to a LG cleric if they perform a chaotic act and want to regain their abilities.
Paladins also get clerical spells and that requires prayer to a god.
>Clerical spells, including the druidic, are bestowed by the gods,
The very next clause is
>so that the cleric need but pray for a few hours
While that paragraph says cleric and magic-user it'd be silly to say that they rules about praying and memorising spells don't apply equally to paladins and rangers simply because they don't waste the verbiage to write
>Clerical spells, including the druidic, are bestowed by the gods, so that the cleric and druid and paladin and ranger
Thankfully, I've never met the player, including DM, who did anything but require paladins, rangers and bards to follow the rules for gaining spells that corresponded to cleric or magic-user as appropriate.
moronic tertiaries who should've been gatekept are irrelevant to what the class actually is and has always been within the primary source material, that being THE FRICKING GAME.
>Everything Gary Gygax says is law
>Unless and until WOTC wants to change things, then their changes are retroactively supreme over Gygax canon
At least pick one.
Point to one (1) primary source that backs up your claims, I'll wait.
https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/roland_crosland.pdf
READ Black person, READ
Irrelevant.
Hi nogamesgay, I know you're used to talking about capeshit and animu on /tg/, but the primary sources when talking about a class in a game is the officially published sourcebooks from that game. You're exactly the kind of tertiary moron I was talking about earlier. Go deus vault yourself off a cliff.
>the important thing in tabletop roleplaying is the numbers in the PHB and not how storytelling tropes are used and manipulated to allow collaborative stories to be told
Yeah ok.
>The fantasy of the Paladin class is monotheistic, "I am going and killing things in the name of MY God."
No it's not you fricking moron.
>That's just Rune Knight with extra steps
Part of me wonders if a better idea would be to have a generic magic fightingman be the base template and have Paladin be a sub-class.
Spellsword should be a multiclass between fighter and wizard just as Paladin should be a multiclass between Fighter and Cleric.
>which are both ruled over by GODS
No.
>which are both ruled over by GODS
No, the Alignment forces are the field the Gods exist within. Even Primus falls far short of ruling over Law itself, kinda why the Pact Primeval has three signatory parties resulting in three copies existing. And again, the Domains granting the EXACT same powers between divisions in source at very highest level of cosmological function gives very good ground for the deities to be using them as a "lens" rather than being the sources of them as you insist.
>The fantasy of the Paladin class is monotheistic, "I am going and killing things in the name of MY God."
No, it's "I am going and killing things in the name of Law/Heaven", not a specific deity.
>What you get when you have unlimited anything Paladins
We're not saying that. We're saying that the peg is to non-deity matters of Alignment, which can be stretched slightly to the Domains as they exist independently of gods in accordance with being shared by multiple gods.
All Paladins should be LG by definition. Anything outside of that shouldn't be called a Paladin. Even a fallen Paladin made as a mockery of the concept by the forces of Evil should still be called something else.
Gygax was intending to write splat for Chaotic Good paladins as well around the time modules like Temple of Elemental Evil were coming out but didn't get around to it for whatever reason. Given that Gygaxian Chaos is just paganism, the real defining element of Paladins classically would have been their service to Good, which I think is even worse mechanically than restraining them to Law.
Mechanically I don't see any reason to stop players from making Evil Paladins or using them as villains for a campaign, but I agree they should be called something else (and not Antipaladin). Oathbreaker is good for a Paladin who fell, but that should probably be its own further derivation on Paladins since conceptually you can have an Evil Paladin who didn't fall but was just always motivated to do evil.
Smite wrath
D&D settings have greco-roman gods, not Yahweh. In greco-roman style pantheons, Divinity is strongly abstracted and gods are only one class of divine being, and not ones with absolute control over the concept. Things can be divine in nature without the blessing of any god. In fact, they can even oppose the gods as a basic fact of their existence. Mortals can gain divine power without being related to the gods, although there are also a lot of demigods because the gods are horny idiots. Heroes and adopted or usurper emperors had divine power without divine relations.
In a greco-roman style world where the gods aren't the be all end all of Divinity, paladins can get divine powers from elsewhere.
>Divinity is strongly abstracted and gods are only one class of divine being
Non-God supernatural forces in at least Greek myth (I know shit about roman myth it's fricking fetaboo copy/paste anyways) are not considered "Divine," they're just other supernatural beings that also exist. The very word Divine comes from the Latin deus, having the same origin as Zeus. So at absolute best you could argue the other Olympians are also considered 'Divine' because of their direct familial relationship with Zeus, but nobody was arguing against that in the first place.
The Greeks had figures like the Moirai who were mostly above and separate from the gods since destiny itself was also above the gods. They also had things like hero cults, where they just kinda decided by themselves that certain people get to be gods just because of how badass they were rather than any connection they had to existing gods. The Greek gods were not the arbiters of who got the same kind of above-mortal power that the gods have, despite the common English term for that kind of power being derived from the specific descent of a specific singular god.
This is why I drew the distinction with Olympians. The Olympians were the universally recognized and deified Hellenic pantheon, with Zeus as the King of Olympus being the supreme divine being. Every other Olympian was divine in concrete sense because they were directly blood related to Zeus and lived on Olympus. Point being that even though pagan religions of course include large numbers of anthropomorphic or theriomorphic spirits and powers, there is (usually) a very clean delineation between the chief pantheon which would be considered actual divinity and the lesser beings and spirits.
It's the same way in DnD.
But those other spirits and beings (some of which are actually greater than the gods) have the same sort of power. Divinity might be named after Zeus, but the actual concept of god-like power is not limited to the actual gods. With all that power out there, it's not that wild of an idea that someone could grab some of it without licking it off a god's foot.
>But those other spirits and beings (some of which are actually greater than the gods) have the same sort of power
... no they don't. That's just extreme abstraction. Ancient Greeks would not have grouped every one of their mythological beings, many of which were just names for real life animals or real life things like rivers, together with Zeus or the other Olympians and said "yep same-same but different." That's millennia of reductionism at work.
Do you know why the Greeks obsessively gave offerings and prayers to specific Olympian gods whenever they did something like travel across the sea, or before a harvest, etc? Because they very specifically in fact did not believe any random schmuck could get divine power from nowhere and do whatever he wanted with it. See also: the Odyssey, Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound".
On the scale of Arcane to Divine, nearly everything in mythology lands squarely on the divine side. The idea of a wizard pulling magic from the ether just by knowing some things about the an abstract universe is basically a modern construct. A ton of figures that we'd call wizards end up being demigods or learning directly from divine figures to do what they do, or at least directing all of their chanting and ritual towards angels and demons to actually do the thing for them. Biblical Satan teaches magic to a frickton of magical figures throughout medieval European myth.
>On the scale of Arcane to Divine
Oh there's a uniform cross-cultural scale now
Yes, and on top of that, it's a hard binary. Your magical abilities are either arcane or divine and that's it.
What if I multiclass Cleric and Wizard to create the ultimate gish, smart guy?
Then your magic is either arcane or divine depending on how you're feeling that cast.
What if it's a god of magic?
Schizo god. Or you're in Faerun and it's all a lie.
No, the should serve *their* god, their liege, their nation, state, and country, and uphold their oaths and vows.
In that precise order, if necessary.
Also, any Paladin that does not hold to the base concept and aesthetic of the human, civilizational, religious, chivalric, and fundamentally Lawful Good type of paladin is not a real paladin, and should be disregarded. "Paladin" is intentionally narrow in scope, and while there is nothing wrong with ideas of "warrior of nature" or "templar of the shadow god" or "oathbound soldier", these are not and will never be paladins by any reasonable definition or colloquial sense, much less cultural expression.
>In that precise order
No, oaths and vows are always first. Their liege is mortal and fallible and can stray from the righteous path. Their country is a land of mortals who likewise can stray. Even the clergy can be misguided. Their oaths and vows should always be to a higher cause beyond that of mortals, and it is the role of the paladin to guide mortals to that purpose, instead of being guided away from it.
>Therefore Gygax would say everyone is essentially Christian.
No, he would say virtually everyone today is monotheistic. Which is true of every Abrahamic faith as well as Buddhism, more or less. It's important to remember that Gygax KNOWS Law vs Chaos is a historical simplification and abstraction, its not his personal living philosophy. The Christian knights who fought off Muslims and crusaded for the Pope saw Muslims as godless pagan savages, and that filtered down into fantasy works based on or from the time period such the Song of Roland and Three Hearts and Three Lions. That conflicts with the reality that medieval Muslims were definitely monotheistic, but DnD isn't meant to represent reality.
>It would be interesting to read this reported interview because what you are saying he said is at odds with the ways Chaos is presented in the game. The game presents Chaos as evil, plain and simple.
Yeah, because Gygax didn't get much Chaotic Good stuff into the game for whatever reason. For example, he was intending to write splat for Chaotic Good characters including CG Paladins, which would have been based on Celts apparently (source for that is Tim Caine's videos on working on the vidya Temple of Elemental Evil adaptation, where he consulted with Gygax directly and asked him about Chaotic Good paladins)
>he's comparing Chaos to back to nature and Nazism.
Nazism and primitivism both have anti-Christian undercurrents. Nazism explicitly was involved in a LARPtastic return to germanic paganism. So while there is a political angle to things, its because those political ideologies are couched in a specific relationship with monotheism.
Gygax would say everyone is essentially Christian.
>No, he would say virtually everyone today is monotheistic
I was using a proof by contradiction to show the two statements taken together led to a bad conclusion.
>Gygax didn't get much Chaotic Good stuff into the game for whatever reason
That's taking us out of the single axis Law/Chaos of early D&D and the Anderson book. It really looks like Gygax chose those words both because the words were divorced from Good/Evil, which is what made it into the early game, as well as the order/disorder angle. Anderson didn't have any characters in that book that were Chaotic and good. At least if he did portray any that way I don't remember.
>Nazism and primitivism both have anti-Christian undercurrents. Nazism explicitly was involved in a LARPtastic return to germanic paganism
Nazism removed the core of Christiantiy and used the shell for its own purposes so I'd agree it was anti-Christian. However, Arks of the Covenant, Spears of Destiny, Holy Grails and summoning devil babies aside, Hitler was anti-neo-paganism and it was only a couple of his lieutenants that thought they could do magic.
The stupidest thing about trying to insist on paladins being deus vult crusading holy warriors of god is that pre-4e D&D already had deus vult crusading holy warriors of god, they were called "LG clerics."
AD&D paladins were required to be lawful good
Basic D&D paladins (an option for high level fighters) were required to be lawful (there was no good/evil axis)
Orginal D&D only had crucifixs wooden and silver not vague "holy symbols"
Everything in the early editions points to them being "deus vult crusading holy warriors of god" also this
Godless paladins are a relatively new and big gay addendum.
>lawful good
Apart from the Anti-Paladin in The Dragon 39 who was of course Chaotic Evil not LE...
>a fallen Paladin made as a mockery of the concept by the forces of Evil should still be called something else.
...and the Myrikhan, Garath, Lyan, Paramander, Fantra, Illrigger, and Arrikhan
which are mockeries of Neutral, Chaotic and Evil in the other 7 combinations
>Anti-Paladin
>Anti
Also it's presented as an NPC
The title of the article is literally "Try this for Evil: The Anti-Paladin NPC"
Or you could try reading the whole of the post since there's an "and" in there and it lists eight paladins none of which are LG
>the article makes "paladin" a generic term for any holy warrior who promotes the causes of his or her alignment
The title of the article is literally "A plethora of paladins"
>A plethora of paladins"
Also NPCs and all "Holy Fighters"
None of the magazine articles you're posting are core rules. They're magazine articles.
Issue 106 Feb 1986, 12 years since D&D hit the scene, 10 years into Dragon Magazine. 2nd edition is a couple years around the corner and some random stats out alternatively aligned NPC paladins and specifically calls all of them "Holy Fighters"
Wow. It's nothing.
My orginal point still stands
>No one said before they had to be PCs, now I'm moving the goalposts
>They're not core rules even though that was never specified either so moving the goalposts even more
They are official publications by TSR, stop moving the goal posts.
You would have done better to quote the editor
>>they may be treated as separate from true paladins
but the editor was still happy to publish them as evil versions of paladins knowing players would play them or DMs include them in AD&D campaigns.
>Within the lifespan of AD&D but from the end of first edition AD&D so they don't count as AD&D
That makes sense how?
>It's okay for me to quote the title but not you
>I'll reject that they are called paladins because they use the term holy fighter generically to explain so I'll pretend like that means something by putting it in quotes
They also use the term holy warrior. The article explicitly says
--holy fighters--can be any
alignment
>>"paladin" now takes on more than one meaning. The first denotes the lawful good human player character as described in the rules; the second denotes a holy fighter of any alignment (including those characters who might be called anti-paladins).
>specifically calls all of them "Holy Fighters"
It's like you deliberately cherry picked part of one line to try to make it mean something it doesn't. It specifically, as I quoted, calls them all paladins, including the anti you fixated on before.
Elsewhere in official TSR AD&D
>Githyanki knights have all of the powers and abilities of a human paladin except these are turned toward evil (e.g. detect good instead of detect evil, command undead instead of turning undead, etc.).
They have the powers of paladins but not called "paladins" so you'll reject them too.
>Note: A githyanki knight is an evil "anti" paladin.
Hmm, that didn't just say a githyanki knight is an evil paladin did it?
It did?!?
2e is AD&D despite you trying to move the goal posts to "only early first edition counts".
I'm not moving any goal posts.
My orginal point still stands.
>Everything in the early editions points to them being "deus vult crusading holy warriors of god" also this
>the early EDITIONS
Magazine articles are not core rules.
Anti-Paladins are not Paladins.
Chaotic Paladins from a magazine article are not core rules.
At some point someone was going to unrestrict paladin requirements but that doesn't mean that the authors orginal intentions are changed.
>I'm not moving any goal posts.
Bullshit.
>Magazine articles are not core rules.
"Late AD&D 1e" is still "early edition".
>Anti-Paladins are not Paladins.
Defined explicitly in relation, and Kits are a thing.
>My orginal point still stands.
No it doesn't, this moronic nitpicking is quite far from your original point. "Lawful" does not entail following a deity, and deities aren't even a THING in Basic's Mystara. Heaven has many gods within it, and non-god things ABOVE the gods.
>Bullshit
Refute my orginal point without magazine articles and 2nd edition.
>Late AD&D 1e" is still "early edition
Magazine articles are not core rules of the edition.
>Defined explicitly in relation, and Kits are a thing.
In relation to the paladin. The anti-paladin is described as everything the paladin is not in your article. He has no church or clergy to follow. Kits are 2nd edition.
>Lawful" does not entail following a deity
AD&D and Basic paladins both serve clerical orders or must confess their sins to them. Which leans heavily into my point "Everything in the early editions points to them being "deus vult crusading holy warriors of god"
>deities aren't even a THING in Basic's Mystara
They just call them Immortals. They still have churches, worship and clergy.
>without magazine articles and 2nd edition.
You mentioned no such thing in what you called your original point,
. You have in fact altered your point by adding qualifiers to valid evidence that throw out the sizable body of contrary evidence
>In relation to the paladin
In similar manner to how the Paladin was introduced in relation to the Fighting Man.
>The anti-paladin is described as everything the paladin is not in your article.
One, different anon. Two, that's what the full flip from LG to CE does. Three, the intensity of symmetry makes the absence of LE and CG counterparts noticeably conspicuous. Four, defining their rules as variants of the Paladin does not make sense in these early implementations where the Paladin is already a variant of Fighter.
>He has no church or clergy to follow.
>AD&D and Basic paladins both serve clerical orders or must confess their sins to them.
Sources are annoying to confirm, but there's no required service in any of the AD&D versions to what I see beyond a tithe to a Lawful Good cheritable organization. The only confession I see is Atonement for Chaotic deeds, not a continuous association with a church.
>Kits are 2nd edition.
Maybe explicitly standardizing them that way, but I fail to locate anything defining the AD&D 1e Paladin in terms that differ from them in any practical sense. It is literally a sub-heading of Fighter in the index of all the PDFs I can find.
>They just call them Immortals. They still have churches, worship and clergy.
Their nature as EXCLUSIVELY ascended mortals and the operation of the Spheres they're organized by makes for quite the trivial explanation of Paladins tapping the same potential the Immortals proper realized.
>You mentioned no such thing in what you called your original point
I mentioned the three early editions, fricktard.
>One, different anon. Two, that's what the full flip from LG to CE does
Anti paladins don't serve or have any relation to a church, clergy or God.
>but there's no required service in any of the AD&D versions to what I see
Who do the confess their sins to?
>Immortals
They function like gods. They have churches, clergy and worship. They're essentially God's.
>I'm not moving any goal posts.
You exactly did move the goal posts by saying
>>Also it's presented as an NPC
and
>>Also NPC
in an attempt to negate their legitimacy. PC or NPC or both was not part of the original claim.
You also went into great detail about their age
>>12 years since D&D hit the scene, 10 years into Dragon Magazine. 2nd edition is a couple years around the corner
which is only relevant if you're trying to show how the article is invalid due to age which was not part of the original claim. Now you're introducing author's original intentions. which is also irrelevant to the point I argued against. That point was that they had to be LG in AD&D. There was no mention in that statement of "in AD&D as first published in the first printing of first edition PHB". You're just introducing new things to prove me wrong by making the argument into something other than the simple claim it was. Moving goalposts.
Changing tack for a moment, not moving goal posts, moving to a new subject about a recent thread about paladins having to be human. They didn't have to be human in AD&D. Not through any fancy logic like
>They had to be human but then they could change race because it doesn't say they have to stay human
or whatever the argument was. Not because UA allowed elf and half-elf cavaliers. Very simply because AD&D let at least six non elf/human races be paladins, not even counting different breeds of dwarf in that number, more six if you do.
Now back on track, hopefully you could have told
wasn't me but it doesn't seem like you did from your reply.
>Refute my orginal point without magazine articles and 2nd edition.
Moving goalposts again. I cared about the AD&D LG claim, not the "warriors of god" angle you're so fond of repeating and you're again saying 2nd ed doesn't count:
me wrong only don't use the evidence that proves me wrong from the places it exists even though its AD&D because I don't like that
Magazine articles with alternative alignment paladins for BBEG purposes are not part of the core rules for the advanced edition of the game.
>Now you're introducing author's original intentions.
That's implied in my orginal point.
"Everything in the early editions points to them being "deus vult crusading holy warriors of god"
>the "warriors of god" angle you're so fond of
Paladins serve clerical orders, which serve the church/their God or Immortal. What do you call that?
>again saying 2nd ed doesn't count
Correct 2nd edition is not orginal, basic or advanced 1st edition (THE EARLY EDITIONS OF THE GAME)
The first paladins in the early editions (mentioned above) served God's or immortals through the clerics church. They serve God's bro. Sorry that wrinkles your fedora.
You can do whatever the frick you want with your make believe elf game but the fact remains that everything in the early editions (mentioned above) point towards paladins serving churches/clergy and by extention gods (not shifting goal post BTW I'm expounding on my point)
>Magazine articles with alternative alignment paladins for BBEG purposes are not part of the core rules for the advanced edition of the game.
I see no "core rules" in
, only "AD&D, Basic, and Original".
>"Everything in the early editions points to them being "deus vult crusading holy warriors of god"
No, that's Cleric:
>This class of character bears a certain resemblance to religious orders of knighthood of medieval times.
>I mentioned the three early editions, fricktard.
I see no "three" nor "1e" in
, only "AD&D, Basic, and Original".
>Anti paladins don't serve or have any relation to a church, clergy or God.
And neither does the AD&D Paladin have to serve, the only ongoing tie is the tithe.
>Who do the confess their sins to?
They don't HAVE to confess their sins if they keep away from Chaotic acts, and the only qualifier on the cleric is Lawful Good in a game that had already started touching on god-specific functions.
>They function like gods. They have churches, clergy and worship. They're essentially God's.
But their origins are largely mortal. Again, perfectly sound for the Paladin's divine power to be a touch of Immortal bootstrapping.
>I see no "core rules
Funny that you only see "early editions" and not magazine articles.
>No, that's Cleric:
And by extension the Paladin. I will consneed that clerics have a more direct connection with God's than paladins but the paladins connection is still there.
>I see no "three"
Now your just getting cute. AD&D means 1st edition. 2e means 2nd edition. You new here or just digging for debate team points?
>And neither does the AD&D Paladin have to serve, the only ongoing tie is the tithe.
AD&D paladins tithe, confess their sins and perform penance per the clerics orders. They serve a church and by extension God.
>They don't HAVE to confess their sins if they keep away from Chaotic acts, and the only qualifier on the cleric is Lawful Good in a game that had already started touching on god-specific functions.
And what does "Cleric" mean? Their religious leaders. They have churches back up by God's. Paladins are serving God.
>But their origins are largely mortal
After they ascend into immortality they function as God's. Mystara just calls them Immortals. All other outside deities and God's are banned from Mystara.
Again this really isn't something to wrinkle your fedora over. Do whatever you want but you can't rewrite history.
Everything in the early editions points to paladins serving God.
Cry about it.
>Funny that you only see "early editions" and not magazine articles.
I see no "magazine articles" in
, either. That is your original point, there is nothing stating the still-AD&D "2e" is disallowed nor any rejection of supplemental material. Only in
did "core rules" come up, simultaneously discarding the edition basis for pure dating
You're moving the goalposts, anon. Accept that it is you who is the butthurt moron
>And by extension the Paladin
No, Paladins are a subset of Fighter, the Cleric's description impinging on them must be overt to hold any certainty. The cross is not enough, "Lawful Good" is not enough, cite me the text
>Now your just getting cute. AD&D means 1st edition. 2e means 2nd edition. You new here or just digging for debate team points?
There are fewer changes between AD&D editions than between 3e and 3.5. It is such a fine line of functional differences, especially given the clusterfrick of compatibility issues responsible for its creation, that this is a moronic hair-splitting grognardism
And with how much "AD&D" posting I see that turns out to be 2e to the point it took me deliberate searching to figure out what the frick "2e" was with how rarely it got mentioned, I'd say you're talking shit with that assumption
>They serve a church
>And what does "Cleric" mean? Their religious leaders.
There is no lock here. There is no specification of exact deity. There is nothing expressing that they stick to one charitable organization, there is nothing expressing that they remain under one group throughout their career, there is nothing to back you obsessively shoehorning Christianity into the Paladin by the text of the material you have moved the goalposts to
There is only you neurotically insisting that aesthetic choice means inheriting the pileup of theology despite that EXACT comparison being made for an entirely different Class
No, it's the "literally all the mechanics are just Alignment" Paladin
>You're moving the goalposts, anon.
No I'm not.
I sincerely meant AD&D 1st edition paladins and Basic edition paladins when I said early editions and not magazine articles written a decade later.
Accept that you just want debate points and you have nothing.
>cite me the text
AD&D
>If they ever
knowingly perform an act which is chaotic in nature, they must seek a high
level (7th or above) cleric of lawful good alignment, confess their sin, and do penance as prescribed by the cleric.
>Companion (Basic)
A fighter must swear fealty (an oath of
service) to a Lawful church to gain Paladin status.
>Thereafter, the Paladin may be summoned by the church's leaders (the Theocracy) at any time, and must do as
they command, as long as the service aids
the powers of Good.
>The Paladin learns how to meditate and cast spells from the clerics of the church.
Both have a connection to the clergy, big think time.
>this is a moronic hair-splitting grognardism
I sincerely did not mean 2nd edition when I said early editions. Debate points for you I guess but I'm talking about the EARLY paladins (1st edition and Basic)
>There is no specification of exact deity.
To keep fedoras like (You) from sperging the frick out when someone points out the obvious interpretation of the first paladins (again, the ones from 1st edition and Basic) it leaves you free do whatever you want with your paladins in your make believe elf game.
>obsessively shoehorning Christianity into the Paladin by the text of the material you have moved the goalposts to
I said that the everything (text of the material fricking mentioned) points towards this in my orginal point fampiedesudesu.
Gygax was literally a Jahovas Witness.
>that EXACT comparison being made for an entirely different Class
I already consneeding that clerics have a more direct connection with God's but the paladin is literally confessing his sins to clerics to get his DIVINE powers back or he's swearing service to the clerics church.
an anti-paladin? But wouldn't this turn the normal paladin into an anti-anti-paladin?
paladin should just a title that you can get in a game of make believe where you just roll d6s and say you win if you get high or low.
What precisely is the line between a paladin and a cleric for you? I think of it as just a matter of specialization, the former focusing more on physical combat and going out and smiting enemies of their divine patron while clerics focus more on holy magic and dealing with matters within the church itself, do you have a different opinion?
Clerics serve a God or organize religion, Paladins have been directly ordained or appointed by that God or religion to go out and kill shit. Yes this is a little ludicrous for Paladins to be a basic Level 1 class. Paladins shouldn't be a basic, Level 1 class.
Clerics were inspired by the warrior-monk orders and fighting priests. Because "fighter who prays and has religious brothers wearing the same costume" would just be a fighter with role-play notes there was no point making a class like that.
Instead Cleric mixed Fighting-Men and Magic-Users. The advantages of using magic and armour at the same time had to be offset so their fighting started about a step below FM, like MU, then progressed a little slower than FM, a little faster than MU, and they had arbitrary weapons limitations because Gary had read a story, Song of Roland, and seen a picture, Bayeaux Tapestry, where the priest didn't use swords. Many cleric spells were even described as "same as the magic-user spell but..." Dave and his players also found a need for healing spells which went to the priest class. For more distinction between cleric and MU, cleric spells avoided being battlefield artillery.
Paladins came later when they, forgetting or ignoring that Tulpin, from Roland and other stories, was sometimes listed as one of the Twelve Peers, they thought about having another type of holy warrior who was more fighty and knightly and also very exclusive.
And that is the difference for me. The paladin is supposed to be the very rare man who is amongst the most perfect of knights and gains some holy powers to stand out.
I don't think that all clerics as a role within their game world focus on holy magic, that's just something mechanically that happens for the game. As DM for cleric or as cleric PC dealing with matters in the church is not something we have ever felt was interesting, not my idea of an adventure. The bureaucracy can be left to the NPCs as adventure hooks or just be assumed to take place in the background like farming and tax laws. While a lot of clerics will be just stay at home priests I like the simplicity of the warrior-monk aspect for the adventuring aspect. There shouldn't be that many paladins that they can do enough smiting.
A Cleric is a deity aligned Van Helsing in armor and a war-priest with a direct hotline to his deity, through which he asks for miracles/spells/holy magic.
Paladin is King Arthur afforded a measure of passive protection by higher forces and capable of some minor miracles.
Something like that.
I blame weebs and fedora tippers for all this. Fedora tippers so they can have le atheist cleric, weebs because they see "holy magic user" and think of a robed healbawd instead of a medium armoured motherfricker who brains heathens and keeps his allies alive so they can brain more heathens. The mental image of "cleric" has been tainted by these morons enough that equally moronic morons think paladins are supposed to be what clerics always were.
Explain without buzzwords what you think the substantial differences between DnD Clerics and DnD Paladins are or should be.
Clerics should be the only ones explicitly tied to a specific god. Paladins have a sense of honour strong enough that empowers them through divine strength, but like any sane person in a pantheistic society, they give reverence to any number of gods within what's appropriate for their alignment, depending on the circumstances. They will strive to remain in good standing with NG, LN and especially LG churches of all gods, without being tied to any single one.
What they "are" in TSR and 3.x backs this up, even though they've both been muddied by subsequent editions.
That makes sense, why do you think that they changed things?
Only Gods, is reductivist to the concept.
They should serve a duty, a passion, cause, or conviction.
This may be a God. May be an ideal. May be a philosophy or concept.
This makes them able to be distinct from battle-clerics, as well as gives the player far more flexibility in Character generation, as playing a Paladin is already probably the most restricting class to play (strong moral or ethical standards, major convictions, little flexibility, and a tendency of DM's to decide 'character development' means 'needle until they fall and lose their power and get normal').
>Only Gods, is reductivist to the concept
That depends on which paladin concept you subscribe to. Judging by the rest of your post it sounds like the 5th edition paladin.
I ascribe to the broadest and most abstract concept of a Paladin. What you have, where removing any more means they cease to be a Paladin recognizably.
In that they're; a warrior, highly motivated to a cause, concept, belief or oath of some form, and their motivation/devotion to such an extent has through some means granted them powers beyond reasonable human expectation.
The le historical depiction of a Paladin is rooted in Christendom, given that the original "Palatine" was a French Knight-Retainer, and were heavily religious by nature of being Frankish.
However our more modern, developed interpretation allows for much more than this.
We can have English speaking Paladins, Shonen-esque Samurai Paladins, Blackguard/Antipaladins/Paladins that embody selective aspects of the traditional Palatine, taken to different directions.
Even the much-wanked Gary Gygax himself, heralded as the be-all-end-all of DnD, is not truly faithful to the original concept.
Either break all the ideas down into their basics and go from there, or draw an arbitrary line in the sand at whatever point you were introduced to them at, and pretend your line is the decider.
You ascribe to the nuskool reddit concept of a paladin.
Not the orginal paladin.
And thats fine but the other homosexuals are trying to rewrite the Gygaxian Paladin with their reddit shit.
>a warrior, highly motivated to a cause, concept, belief or oath of some form, and their motivation/devotion to such an extent has through some means granted them powers beyond reasonable human expectation.
That's the nuskool paladin.
>Even the much-wanked Gary Gygax himself, heralded as the be-all-end-all of DnD, is not truly faithful to the original concept.
You don't have a clear picture of the original concept.
>Either break all the ideas down into their basics and go from there, or draw an arbitrary line in the sand at whatever point you were introduced to them at, and pretend your line is the decider.
Frick off
>has divine powers
>swears fealty to a church
>confesses sins to church leaders
>pays tithe to his church
Gee wiz, sure sounds like a holy warrior of God to me, batman.
>swears fealty to [insert church, lord, nation, order, or self here]
>confesses sins to literally any cleric of similar alignment, can and probably will be different every time
>pays tithes to the most convenient and alignment friendly church available, can and probably will be different every time
Your paladin's gonna tithe to the church of the halfling goddess of third breakfast today. Yesterday it was some random sun god, but not the same sun god as last week since the nearest church of that one is too far to travel to before we head out.
>swears fealty to [insert church, lord, nation, order, or self here]
The text doesn't say that. It says church.
>confesses sins to literally any cleric of similar alignment, can and probably will be different every time
>pays tithes to the most convenient and alignment friendly church available, can and probably will be different every time
You could run a game that way but you would have to be clueless if you believe that's a strong argument. The Paladin in this case is always serving churches of lawful good alignment. He's serving the same over all cause regardless of which specific church it is.
The basic paladin serves one specific church and take orders from one specific church.
Are you done now or was there something else you wanted to seethe about?
Nah, you're just wrong.
>Nah, you're just wrong because...
>BECAUSE YOU JUST ARE OKAY?!?!!1
What, no closing argument?
You're going to lose all those debate points you worked so hard for.
Is this
weak ass reductio ad absurdum all you've got left?
>cite me the text
*crumbles after the text is cited*
Wow, that's a lot of words to be wrong with.
Basic's Paladin was written by a different person entirely. It has no business being cited on intent.
Even with just Gygax AD&D 1st edition cited paladins still
>confess their SINS to high level clergy and perform PENNANCE in order to regain their powers
>TITHE to "charitable RELIGIOUS institutions"
>HOLY swords are amplified to +5 HOLY Avengers in the hands of paladins with additional auras and bonus damage against chaotic evil opponents.
You clowns can not convince me that paladins are not holy warriors that serve God.
Do whatever you want with your nuskool "paladins" but the orginal paladins were holy warriors and you can't change that.
>institutions
>plural
Hmm...
Actual that was my mistake. Pic related.
It's not plural.
No points for you, debate bro. Not that they would have won you the argument.
Why don't read some AD&D 1st edition, homosexual?
One they select, not one they serve.
And "immediate" tells me they don't get to wait until they can go home to do it. They have to pick from what's available where they are.
Halfling third breakfast goddess it is!
But they still have to select it, moron.
Read
Hmm...
>We shouldn't have to. Unfortunately you're bereft of the ability to read.
Hmm.. perhaps you should read this
(You) lose
Good day sirs!
>You clowns can not convince me that paladins are not holy warriors that serve God.
We shouldn't have to. Unfortunately you're bereft of the ability to read.
Fedora gays on suicide watch
>A paladin is supposed to be the architype of the Christian knight. that means focusing on doing right, spreading the word about the faith (in the deity the paladin serves)
T. Literally Gygax
>2003
By the standard set in
and the general ass-covering of ignoring AD&D 2nd Edition and magazines, this is invalid.
Oh frick off debate bro.
That's literally Gygax, the author of AD&D clarifying a point on paladins not some random in a magazine trying to rewrite things.
The ultimate authority was already set here
And the ultimate authority says paladins are
>devoutly religious
>the architype of the Christian knight
>serves a deity
You fricking lost, b***h.
>Oh frick off debate bro.
No, you will continue having your goalpost shifts shoved in your face until you admit to being a disingenuous moron.
>That's literally Gygax, the author of AD&D clarifying a point on paladins not some random in a magazine trying to rewrite things.
It's still not core rules, and it's still even later than that magazine. You're still moving your standards the moment people show otherwise. And the sentiment as it appeared in the core rules was stated for Cleric, not Paladin.
>The ultimate authority was already set here
Which invalidates the entire block about Companion that's the source stating fealty you used in
.
>You fricking lost, b***h.
When you have to debunk your own point and reject your own standards several times, it's not you who's winning.
>Gygax didn't write 2nd Edition
When has anyone used 2nd Edition as a backing here? It only came up in the context of the grid-filling not!Paladins being "too close" to it.
>Gygax didn't write those magazines articles
But they were rejected for not being "core rules" and "too late", which applies just as well to Gygax's words on a 2003 forum post.
>Gygax wrote the ORGINAL paladin and settled this whole "debate" in a forum post 20 years ago.
Pretty sure the Companion set Paladin reached print first, and that's the only one that has "serve the church" rules text.
>You homosexual ass debate bros backed me into a corner where only Gygax would be accepted as the authority on paladins.
No, I'm trying to hold to the initial standards instead of letting you change them however happens to give you a "win".
>Be a fricking man and accept when you are wrong.
This entire shitshow started with insisting that "everything" in the early editions points to holy warriors "of god", in the explicitly Jesus fashion, followed by screeching that every hint towards the archetype carries the full body of Knights Templar baggage despite the Cleric being the one mentioning that.
Gygax wrote the orginal core rules on paladin. He's the authority on this.
Gygax clarified his version of the paladin in a later Q&A thread
You lose
The orginal concept for paladins are both the architype of the Christian knight and serve a deity.
>The orginal concept for paladins are both the architype of the Christian knight and serve a deity.
The idea that anyone even argues this is beyond bumfrick stupid.
Notice how Maccas Paladins enjoyers don't ever argue that their conception of Paladin is actually BETTER, they just appeal to authority and then twist or subvert what that authority said or meant to suit their argument. They don't even believe their own ideas are good.
>Gygax wrote the orginal core rules on paladin. He's the authority on this.
Not over a decade after the fact he isn't. Not when he put such a description in the book for AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE CLASS.
>The orginal concept for paladins are both the architype of the Christian knight and serve a deity.
The "archetype" they are drawn from is not the game rules, and serving deities appears nowhere in AD&D 1e's Paladin. Given that the Cleric is the one that makes the statement, the Paladin is much more "knight who insists on being pious" which already has the Outer Planes and polytheism in the publication history to conjecture the Heaven-regardless-of-god implementation.
>Notice how Maccas Paladins enjoyers don't ever argue that their conception of Paladin is actually BETTER
Who's suggesting "Maccas" Paladins? I personally go with Paladins being Heaven powered entirely separately from the gods who live there, and push this because it trivially extends to stop ignoring Law/Chaos ambiguity with martial champions for the other Outer Planes without the Blackguard hangup of needing to meet a Demon to swear yourself to.
>The "archetype" they are drawn from is not the game rules, and serving deities appears nowhere in AD&D 1e's Paladin. Given that the Cleric is the one that makes the statement, the Paladin is much more "knight who insists on being pious"
We've been over this
Clerics have a more direct connection to the deities or God's in the game world but the Paladin is tithing and confessing his sins to high level NPC clerics IN THE RULES.
So it sounds like Gygax's Paladins are religious to me just by reading the rules. They points towards that conclusion.
And I have Gygax's own words corroborating my theory.
Paladins are religious
Paladins serve a diety/God
>Paladins are religious
>Paladins serve a diety/God
Apples are sweet
Apples are candy
The AD&D 1st edition paladin is practicing a religion. It's in the fricking rules. If you don't you're no longer a paladin.
Gygax said they "serve a deity" in a later Q&A thread where he clarifies what a paladin is "supposed to be"
Read the OP again homosexual.
>Do you think paladins should only serve the gods?
Gygax seems to think so.
The early paladin appears to be so.
Which was my entire point.
>practicing a religion
All characters were practicing a religion. Every single rogue had a god. Every fighter had a god. That's not special or unique. That doesn't make them servants of their religion.
>That's not special or unique
Paladins must confess their sins and perform penance as well as tithe.
Their religious practices are unique
Or they just become fighters. They are not compelled to do so, and also are not compelled to maintain a singular connection to a singular church. They can tithe to any church that's convenient and confess to any priest that's available. They don't have to follow the same god, only the same alignment.
>They don't have to follow the same god, only the same alignment.
non sequitur
The game world is polytheistic and in the game world all the lawful good gods are all on the same "side" (lawful good, SHOCKER)
The paladins religious practices are unique within the game world in comparison to other classes.
Uniquely polytheistic and based entirely on alignment and not pantheon or alliance.
An elf might pray to every elf god (except for the evil and maybe chaotic neutral ones), and a dwarf might pray to every dwarf god, but only a paladin prays to every Lawful Good god, but only when their churches are within a convenient geographical area local to the paladin themselves. Nobody else prays or even pays lip service to a selection of gods based on alignment alone. The racial gods aren't friends with each other based on alignment, but on shared investment in their races. The conceptual gods of things like nature are allied or enemies based on their concepts and actions, not alignment.
Paladins alone care about alignment, because they do not care about individualized portfolios of concepts or races. They don't care that this temple is to a sun god, they care that the god in question is of the right alignment, and that's all they care about. This could be a moon god or a harvest god or an elf god or a fish god, doesn't matter as long as the alignment is right.
Read the topic of discussion in the OP again debate bro.
You lost the script somewhere
>Do you think paladins should only serve the gods?
This polytheistic stuff isn't harming my argument at all.
Never did I claim that paladins must only serve ONE God.
Paladins are uniquely religious and serve God(s) of lawful good alignment.
And fighters. Kinda kills your argument. The knights of the round table answered to Arthur, not some bishop.
>And fighters. Kinda kills your argument.
Where does it say that normal fighters must confess sins, perform penance and tithe?
>They are not compelled to do so
If they want to remain paladins they are required to tithe, confess sin and perform penance.
The religious practices of paladins is unique within the game.
>The AD&D 1st edition paladin is practicing a religion. It's in the fricking rules. If you don't you're no longer a paladin.
The religious terminology has nothing denoting any fealty to an organized church nor any deities. Again, the Cleric makes every single one of these specifications explicitly, the Paladin makes none of them explicitly.
>Gygax said they "serve a deity" in a later Q&A thread where he clarifies what a paladin is "supposed to be"
I do not accept this bullshit from Paizo, I'm not accepting it from Gygax. He assigned such descriptors to the Cleric when he wrote the book, therefor it is the Cleric who is that archetype.
With the only specification of the Cleric being Lawful Good. And only if they commit a Chaotic act.
As was the rule of nearly everyone in the remotest position of influence in the time period the game is a pastiche of. Kinda why we have the word "tithe" in the first place. And the phrasing is imprecise about duration of the choice, could well be whichever is most easily reached to be less awkward with the mandated immediacy.
>That mechanic is to satisfy the Arthurian inspiration for paladins. Knights of the round table and what not.
Knights of the Round Table were high-ranking noblemen with social influence of almost exclusively secular nature. The writings regarding whom often revolved around the pursuit of an allegory for sainthood with rather little involvement of "because God said so" or clergy for what one would expect of the subject.
This is an excellent thing to base them on to frick right off from that "serving god" business in favor of actually having a clear line separating them from the Cleric that explicitly has every single one of the properties you ascribe to Paladins. "Knight who is saintly" rather than "knight who serves god", which conveniently ties into "Saintly" appearing on the page 119 Alignment chart.
>I'm just gonna ignore Gygax explaining his inspiration and what paladins should be
>except when he mentions the Arthurian Legend because it fits my argument
Nice cognitive dissonance
Paladins are required to perform religious practices. They're religious. However loose that may be in a game world with multiple lawful good gods the paladin is still religious.
Everyone is religious. Nobody puts "god: none" on their character sheet in those editions (and even most people playing modern editions don't do that). That's not special.
REQUIRED
paladins are REQUIRED to perform religious practices.
Gygax describes them as "devoutly religious"
>Nice cognitive dissonance
It's because I was literally about to cite Galahad as a "holy warrior" who has jack shit to do with the Church as an institution.
>Most capable and perfect Knight
>Discoverer of the Holy Grail
>Banishes demons and heals the sick
>Not a single clergyman to be found
Sure, there's plenty of overt Christianity here, and Galahad is no atheist. But Galahad doesn't have the involvement with "the faith" you demand, he's "a knight who is godly" rather than "a knight who serves god" as you insist upon.
>Paladins are required to perform religious practices. They're religious.
Point me to where the point of contention was them being religious. The original point in contention was "serving god". Quit the compulsive goalpost juggling.
>DIRECT CLARIFICATION FROM GYGAX HIMSELF
He put that shit in the book, but not for the Paladin. Virtually everything stated of Paladins there is MORE cleanly attachable to the text of the Cleric. Applying this to the Cleric creates a giant fricking headache.
No, they're plenty ALLOWED to be religious as the requirements rarely conflict with LG deities' doctrine, and rules for mixing Cleric and Fighter(Paladin) in various ways exist. If insisting upon this, I'd put it as a matter of Outer Plane dynamics making it entirely sensible to describe as a secular political position independent of the minutia that separates all the various gods who live in the Seven (Mounting) Heavens (of Celestia).
>Point me to where the point of contention was them being religious. The original point in contention was "serving god". Quit the compulsive goalpost juggling
So you consneed that the paladin is religious?
So if the paladin is religious and performs his practices and penance with lawful good clerics would he not be serving the God of that cleric and his goals?
No?
Atonement isn't a service contract, and the cleric can be from a different god every time the paladin fricks up. He just goes to the geographically closest cleric of the correct alignment. Could be a wild man mountain hermit with no flock and no church building, as long as that guy is lawful good and a cleric.
Pimp daddy Goldnar makes paladins turn tricks for pennance now? Are you sure those are the right clerics to go to for that?
>the Paladin is tithing and confessing his sins to high level NPC clerics IN THE RULES.
Back with Cleric on page 20, we have this:
>The cleric is dedicated to a deity, or dailies, and at the same time a skilled combatant at arms.
There is no such line for Paladins. They have lines like this:
>A paladin character is a fighter sub-class, but unlike normal fighters, all paladins must begin as lawful good in alignment (q.v.) and always remain lawful good or absolutely lose all of the special powers which are given to them.
>Law and good deeds ore the meal and drink of paladins.
>Paladins will have henchmen of lawful good alignment and none other
>If possible, paladins will take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status).
Lawful Good, over and over again. The book does not shy away in the slightest from specifying Clerical service to deities, despite what
says, yet with nearly an entire page of text dedicated to the Paladin's restrictions there is no mention of "god" or "deity" or "church".
The absence is not merely conspicuous, it's essential to separating the Cleric and Paladin at all. The Cleric's the one inspired by historic orders, the Cleric's the one in service to a deity, the Cleric's the one entangled in churches, while the Paladin is Lawful Good and donates to charity.
>while the Paladin is Lawful Good and donates to charity.
And "confesses his sins" to clerics.
>>If possible, paladins will take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status).
This line alone kills it. Take service with lawful good fighters (of noble status). They don't even have to be Paladins themselves, just fighters who are lawful good and of a noble rank.
Now, paladins *can* take service with a lawful good cleric. But they don't have to.
>This line alone kills it
No it fricking doesn't.
That mechanic is to satisfy the Arthurian inspiration for paladins. Knights of the round table and what not.
The Paladin is still clearly religious in the rules for remaining a paladin.
Gygax says they're religious and serve a deity in the Q&A.
You can do whatever you want in your make believe elf games but you can't graft your reddit secular paladins onto the TRVE Gygaxian Paladins of Old.
Gygax said outside of the rules twenty years later?
That's neither trve nor old.
>Gygax said outside of the rules twenty years later?
In a Q&A session where he describes what the TRVE paladins of old were "supposed to be"
Well too bad he didn't actvally write them that way then, hvh?
Clerics are the religious leaders
Paladins have a unique relationship with the churches and clergy of lawful good alignment IN THE RULES.
Paladins are religious knights in service of a God(s)
>Paladins have a unique relationship with the churches and clergy of lawful good alignment IN THE RULES.
Also to fighters who are lawful good. It's in the same sentence.
>It's in the same sentence.
Where?
Confession, penance and tithing are all under the Paladin headline.
If he fails to do these things he become a normal fighter.
>If possible, paladins will take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status).
This is the line that says who they work for. Fighters of noble status basically means any fighter of a high enough level to have a domain and be a noble.
Yeah that's their knights of the round table thing they have going on.
Gygax took inspiration from Arthurian Legend, the paladins of charlemagne and christian knights in general.
Paladins are still uniquely religious among character classes.
They're religious knights. They serve their order, their king and above all God(s)
If the paladins allegiance to his group of lawful Fighters forces him to do something knowingly chaotic where does he go?
He goes to the church to seek a high-level cleric to confess his sins and perform penance to make it right.
Where does 10% of all the paladins gold go?
To a charitable religious institution.
The paladin is uniquely religious.
He's a religious knights.
He serves God(s)
>to the church
To a church. Could be to a god he's never even heard of before. He doesn't care what kind of god it is, only the alignment of its clerics.
It could also be one church.
It's whatever the paladin selects.
Clerics have a closer relationship with God(s)
Paladins are religious knights that serve the church(es) of lawful good alignment and therefore the God(s) of lawful good alignment.
This isn't difficult to understand my fampiedesudesu.
It could only be one church if he never goes anywhere, since he must tithe "immediately". There's an obvious exception when he can't get to a relevant charitable religious organization (incidentally, that covers things like a Worshipful Company of [insert trade here], not just churches), but when he chooses to bypass one because it's not "the right one"? That's a willful violation of his oath right there.
The point is the paladin must tithe, confess sins and perform penance.
These are religious practices that the paladin must perform or else he ceases to be a paladin.
The paladin class is unique in these religious requirements.
The paladin is religious.
>The paladin is religious.
Which does not entail "serves god(s)". Their strictures are extremes of virtue as described in OUR religious history, but in the D&D world these behaviors are definitive of the Lawful Good Alignment rather than any specific deity or church.
Everyone is religious. The argument is whether the paladin has to serve a church. Dropping off a bag of gold to the first religious organization you find that checks the right boxes (note: specific god is not one of those boxes) and going to the first priest you find that checks the right boxes (note: second verse same as the first) does not make you a servant of the church. It makes you a church bawd, who puts out to any religion you can find that doesn't have STDs.
And hell, even if you do make a paladin who chooses to work for a church, you still don't get to withhold your tithes while you wait to go back to your actual church. You still have to give it immediately, and you can still atone anywhere. Presumably for having given your tithe to the wrong church.
>Everyone is religious
But the paladin is REQUIRED to perform religious practices.
Tithing
Confession
Penance
Which are not specific practices of a specific religion. Some lawful good gods specifically don't want you to do those things, or they want their followers to be more extreme than that basic level. Those aren't the practices of a religion, but of an alignment.
>Which are not specific practices of a specific religion
Because it's a make believe polytheistic elf game, you colossal homosexual. It doesn't go into specifics on that.
The Paladin is required to tithe, confess sin and perform penance. This is unique to other classes. They may be religious but they aren't required to perform any of the practices that the clearly religious paladin must perform in order to remain a paladin.
Religious to what? Many of the gods do in fact have their practices laid out. If you aren't following the practices of any god, then what is your religion? What do you worship when you wander into a church of specific alignment, but non-specific purpose? It's not a god. There is no such god that demands those practices.
>Many of the gods do in fact have their practices laid out.
And they're laid out elsewhere instead printing it twice under the paladin header.
>There is no such god that demands those practices.
Well it's required of paladins and they're religious practices.
It's polytheistic make believe elf game, bro...
Yeah, because printing them there would be pointless. If the paladin was supposed to follow religious practices, they'd connect the class to religious practices of religions in the game.
They don't do that. The paladin's code is not a mandate from a god. It doesn't fit any of the gods. It doesn't demand loyalty to any god. In fact, it's the opposite, it demands you be flexible and give your time and money to multiple different religions regardless of their wishes or demands. A church can literally tell a paladin to stop doing that and the paladin will fall if he obeys them.
>It doesn't demand loyalty to any god.
The Paladin is free to choose but it must be a Lawful good church/God.
The Paladin is clearly religious. It's loose because it's a polytheistic elf game.
The Paladin serves the churches/gods of lawful good alignment. He's required to perform special religious practices in order to remain a paladin.
Paladins are religious.
This is all you have left? "It's just a game, lol"?
Pathetic.
And all you have left is harping on the fact that Gygax didn't go into autistic detail regarding paladins relationship with every single God in his polytheistic game world. Does he do the same under the Cleric header?
The fact remains that paladins must perform specific religious practices with lawful good church organizations and clergy.
The Paladin is religious. Religion in a polytheistic game world is different from our world (BIG surprise). Paladins are serving the pantheon of lawful good or a singular church/God it's up to the player and DM.
If the paladin does not perform these religious practices he ceases to be a paladin this is a FACT in the fricking rules for paladins.
>Does he do the same under the Cleric header?
He specifically says the clerics do have to follow a religion and its rules.
Funny how he doesn't do that for paladins.
The clerics relationship with the gods is closer.
Funny how paladins have required religious practices and religious interactions with high level NPC clerics. I wonder what that's about???
Gygax later describes paladins as "devoutly religious" and the "architype of the Christian knight"
Gygax's intentions have been clarified in his own fricking words.
Knights aren't a position in the church hierarchy.
>Knights aren't a position in the church hierarchy
Cool story bro but that's one of the inspirations for paladins. Paladins are the "architype" of the Christian knight not a clone copy of them.
Paladins in Gygax's elf game are required to perform religious practices with church leaders (high level NPC clerics)
They're fricking religious. Gygax has told us this.
Cry into your fedora and get over it.
>church leaders (high level NPC clerics)
Now you're just adding new things that Gygax himself didn't even add 20 years later.
Lawful Good clerics, not high level clerics.
>They must seek a high
level (7th or above) cleric of lawful good alignment, confess their sin
The tithe is specifically an NPC not a player.
And that implies service? They have to work for the guy?
Depends on the penance the cleric prescribes.
Are you implying that paladins aren't religious when they're literally performing religious practices to maintain their status as paladin?
DIRECT CLARIFICATION FROM GYGAX HIMSELF
>devoutly religious
>the architype of the Christian knight
>spreading word about the faith (in the deity the paladin SERVES)
>they're literally performing religious practices to maintain their status as paladin?
Not the practices of the religion in question.
>gygax
Things not in the book. Basically fan fiction.
>Not the practices of the religion in question.
They're required to perform religious practices that no other class is required to perform.
They're religious. It's in the fricking rules.
>Basically fan fiction.
The author clarifying what paladins are "supposed to be" is not fan fiction, dipshit. He's the fricking author not a fan and it's not made up. He's clarifying.
Writing it 20 years later on a forum and not in a rule book makes it fan fiction. Was gygax even a majority stakeholder in D&D at that time? Not even his game.
>Writing it 20 years later on a forum and not in a rule book makes it fan fiction.
>Was gygax even a majority stakeholder in D&D at that time? Not even his game.
Holy shit. Cope harder.
He's the orginal author answering a question about his orginal intentions regarding the paladin subclass.
Performing religious practices in order to maintain paladin status is RULES AS WRITTEN. Paladins are religious RAW.
You don't have a leg to stand on, homosexual.
He didn't write paladins originally.
And their practices don't align with any religion in-game. They can't be religious.
>They can't be religious
Then what the frick do you call literal RULES for performing religious practices?
You could argue that paladins are less religious than clerics but you CAN NOT claim that paladins are outright non-religious when they have to take part in religious practices to maintain paladin status.
Unless their god is Goldnar the Greedy, who demands cold hard cash, throwing cash at the first religious group they come across isn't a religious ritual.
And if you have atone, that's a skill issue. Also something the cleric does according to their religion, not the paladin. The paladin doesn't need to know or do anything for that religion, since they aren't the ones doing the atonement ritual.
>And if you have atone, that's a skill issue
Cool story. However it's still a mechanic of the paladin.
IF he doesn't atone why are his powers lost?
He needs to go to a high level religious leader, confess his "sins" and perform "penance" ?
Sounds awfully religious to me
For the 10,000th time.
Clerics are MORE religious than paladins but paladins are clearly still religious.
But not one he works for. He doesn't become employed by the cleric. Atonement is not an oath of fealty. He can, and probably will, go see a different cleric of a different god he also doesn't work for every time. Because the god is only relevant in that the cleric wouldn't be able to do that without one. The paladin doesn't need a specific god.
>The paladin doesn't need a specific god.
Point me to where the point of contention was them serving a specific God.
There's a couple dozen posts of you saying that they serve god with no s at the end.
They also don't serve "The Gods" by default, because I know that's where you're going next. A paladin can be doing entirely secular things as long as they're alignment appropriate. They don't need a church to tell them to go fight orcs or stop the demons, and they don't need a cleric's permission to do anything at all. The clergy do not have a veto power over their activities unless that one specific paladin has a specific role in that specific campaign. It is not baked into the class.
>There's a couple dozen posts of you saying that they serve god with no s at the end.
OH NOES
MY ENTIRE ARGUMENT HAS FALLEN APART I FORGOT MUH PLUUURAL
D&D is polytheistic. Everyone knows this.
Being religious is half a step away from serving God(sssss PLURAL)
He gives money to religious institutions, he confesses to clerics who are agents of the God(ssssss PLURAL)
Why are his powers removed if he doesn't confess something chaotic or does something evil???
Could it be that the God(sssss PLURAL) have taken his powers away?????
Curious
Very curious
And to sum it all up we have GYGAX HIMSELF saying paladins SERVE GOD(SSSSS PLURAL)
>Why are his powers removed if he doesn't confess something chaotic or does something evil???
His powers are removed for having done the thing, not from having failed to file the paperwork about it.
You're trying to say that this chivalrous knight class is actually the hyper-polytheist class, but only for gods of a specific alignment... instead of just being a class based on a code of honor that fits that alignment, purely because the code of honor was based on a fictional one that also includes interacting with religious figures.
Frankly, paladins having christian tones when nothing else in the game does, including the religions, is a failure, not a strength.
Also the only sentence that actually says who they might work for explicitly includes people who are not members of any clergy.
>His powers are removed for having done the thing, not from having failed to file the paperwork about it.
Chaotic actions beg to differ.
With confession he loses his powers.
Really gets the noggin joggin
Without*
>Being religious is half a step away from serving God(sssss PLURAL)
Theism is a component of religion, not a requirement.
And the point of the parenthesized is because the obsessive autist who started the current spiral insisted on explicitly-Christian framing with capital-G God singular over the approximation of a few Christian practices.
>Why are his powers removed if he doesn't confess something chaotic or does something evil???
Because he's powered by Law and Good, which exist independently of the gods.
>And to sum it all up we have GYGAX HIMSELF saying paladins SERVE GOD(SSSSS PLURAL)
He wrote that under Cleric, not Paladin, he does not get to change this nearly 30 years after the fact.
>he does not get to change this nearly 30 years after the fact.
Why is he not allowed to clarify?
Because it BTFOs your Godless interpretation of the paladin?
Now you're just arguing in bad faith see what I did there?
>Religious to what?
Lawful good gods
Which ones? None of the ones there demand that from anyone. The paladin just rolls up and dumps his filth encrusted blood money in the box or on the floor and then wanders out.
>Which ones?
It's not specified because it's a make believe polytheistic elf game.
Paladins are religious.
>while the Paladin is Lawful Good and donates to charity.
TITHES TO A CHARITABLE RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION
>Paladins are religious
is not the same as
>Paladins derive their power from a deity
Now look who wants ignore facts that don't fit his arguments.
Gygax didn't write 2nd Edition
Gygax didn't write those magazines articles
Gygax wrote the ORGINAL paladin and settled this whole "debate" in a forum post 20 years ago.
You homosexual ass debate bros backed me into a corner where only Gygax would be accepted as the authority on paladins.
I accepted and fricking blew your dumb ass out of the water.
Be a fricking man and accept when you are wrong.
Paladins should serve the chivalric ideal, they have divine spell casting powers because piety is part of chivalry. The class concept is pretty narrow since it's based on a pseudo-historical code of ethics, I feel like they should have remained a sub-class of fighters. Also, crusaders aren't necessarily paladins, mostly they are fighters and clerics (see the templars and the hospitalllers)
Now do this entire thread again but about Clerics and how they aren't based on anything and eat Paladins' lunch for no real reason.
Clerics are based on Van Helsing because the original D&D cleric was an antagonist for a vampire PC.
I like the idea os secularized paladin orders becoming battlemages
Atheist inquisitors are a cool ideia tho
cringe
Redditors can't cope with the fact that both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians.
Paladins are fundies and derive their power through their faith in god
Paladins are henotheists as a rule