Paladin have no reason to exist

[Kaeso]

Hey there Playground.

I know what you're thinking but no, this thread isn't about how paladin suck and how crusaders and clerics do it better. In this thread, we'll actually assume all classes are somewhat balanced for the sake of argument.

In the way the PHB presents matters to us, clerics are supposed to be the priests and (occidental styled) monks of the DnD world, the ones who pray and aid their companions with divine magic. The paladin, on the other hand, are supposed to be crusaders for good that fight of the darkness while upholding knightly virtues like honor, loyalty, humility and so on.

However, in complete divine all clerical orders of each deity are given a description and the orders of St. Cuthbert and Heironeous are described as very military orders, where low leveled clerics start out as pages or squires and become knights later on. This is almost the exact same flavour as that of a paladin. The clerics of Hextor are the same but evil (basically paladin of tyranny).

Is it me, or are paladin completely redundant, even in their flavour?

[McStabbington]

Fluffwise? No, because paladins are not reducible to very militant clerics. Just for the sake of clarity, I am assuming that the 4e rules about paladins being any alignment is exactly what it is: a total crock that I'm pretending doesn't exist.

Basically, paladins and clerics serve very different functions. Clerics heal and represent the gods to their respective societies. Paladins represent the best of their respective races, endeavoring to build up and protect communities, law and justice. When a commoner looks at a cleric, he's seeing what that god stands for. When a commoner looks at a paladin, he's seeing pure righteous goodness. It's (one of) the difference(s) between the Pope and Superman.

Now, there can be overlap between the two, since paladins gravitate towards certain gods like Lathander, Ilmater and Helm. And which god they gravitate towards in some sense reflects how they interpret their mandate: a paladin of Torm is likely to be a lot more martial than a Paladin of Mystra. But that doesn't change the basic fact that the mandate between the two is very seperate and distinct: one does what their god says. One does what justice demands.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Actually, the way you describe it, since Complete Divine came after the release of the Player's Handbook, the militant clerics are redundant, not the paladins, because they cover ground that the paladins already do.

[Lord Loss]

I agree with McStabbington. The clerics represent the gods, the paladins represent good. In one of the novels (I forget which one) a paladin goes against his god's orders because he believes them to be evil or neutral actions, without losing his powers/falling.

[ClothedInVelvet]

I agree with McStabbington. The clerics represent the gods, the paladins represent good. In one of the novels (I forget which one) a paladin goes against his god's orders because he believes them to be evil or neutral actions, without losing his powers/falling.

Who grants his powers? "Divine power protects the paladin and gives her special powers" (SRD) I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering if Plato's Form of the Good found a home in the D&D universe.

[mootoall]

I agree with McStabbington. The clerics represent the gods, the paladins represent good. In one of the novels (I forget which one) a paladin goes against his god's orders because he believes them to be evil or neutral actions, without losing his powers/falling.

That ... makes no sense. Paladins are still granted their powers from their gods.

Edit: And the mentality that Paladins get their power from their convictions (i.e. being sources of pure good) supports UA variant paladins even more then. If being an exemplar of good makes you hit evil people harder, why doesn't the opposite work?

[ClothedInVelvet]

That ... makes no sense. Paladins are still granted their powers from their gods.

Not necessarily. As I quoted, they are granted their special powers from an amorphous "Divine power." However, SRD makes it clear that a Paladin does not need to choose a deity. "Devotion to righteousness is enough." (SRD)

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Hey there Playground.

I know what you're thinking but no, this thread isn't about how paladin suck and how crusaders and clerics do it better. In this thread, we'll actually assume all classes are somewhat balanced for the sake of argument.

In the way the PHB presents matters to us, clerics are supposed to be the priests and (occidental styled) monks of the DnD world, the ones who pray and aid their companions with divine magic. The paladin, on the other hand, are supposed to be crusaders for good that fight of the darkness while upholding knightly virtues like honor, loyalty, humility and so on.

However, in complete divine all clerical orders of each deity are given a description and the orders of St. Cuthbert and Heironeous are described as very military orders, where low leveled clerics start out as pages or squires and become knights later on. This is almost the exact same flavour as that of a paladin. The clerics of Hextor are the same but evil (basically paladin of tyranny).

Is it me, or are paladin completely redundant, even in their flavour?

To use gangland terminology...

The deity in question is the Don... da Man...

A Cleric is his 'mouthpiece'. He talks for the Don, knows what he wants, often has explicit orders directly from the Don to go do something. If the Don tells his mouthpiece to go whack someone, he does. No questions asked.

A Paladin is a high-level enforcer. Not a street-level thug (although he may have started off there), but a commander. He's also probably in charge of people, a lieutenant, so to speak. He has authority, and he's 'made his bones' plenty of times.

A Cleric, particularly one of a martial deity, probably can and does go out to war. And he can help in that to great effect.

A Paladin, on the other hand, not only goes to war, but takes leadership positions, utilizing tactics and strategies, issuing commands, and directing his people to victory. Leading from the front when necessary.

Two different, although admittedly related, archetypes.

[wayfare]

Back in the day, Paladins did not serve deities -- they served good. Around the same time, clerics did not serve a specific god, but "the gods"

[ffone]

Fluffwise? No, because paladins are not reducible to very militant clerics. Just for the sake of clarity, I am assuming that the 4e rules about paladins being any alignment is exactly what it is: a total crock that I'm pretending doesn't exist.

Basically, paladins and clerics serve very different functions. Clerics heal and represent the gods to their respective societies. Paladins represent the best of their respective races, endeavoring to build up and protect communities, law and justice. When a commoner looks at a cleric, he's seeing what that god stands for. When a commoner looks at a paladin, he's seeing pure righteous goodness. It's (one of) the difference(s) between the Pope and Superman.

Now, there can be overlap between the two, since paladins gravitate towards certain gods like Lathander, Ilmater and Helm. And which god they gravitate towards in some sense reflects how they interpret their mandate: a paladin of Torm is likely to be a lot more martial than a Paladin of Mystra. But that doesn't change the basic fact that the mandate between the two is very seperate and distinct: one does what their god says. One does what justice demands.

I like this!

[Godskook]

Paladins are Oathbound warriors who's duty it is to uphold peace and justice.

Clerics are religious leaders who're supposed to further their deity's interests.

By fluff, Paladins actively put themselves into harm's way, while Clerics don't. Clerics, otoh, are quite capable of "cutting their losses", ensuring that at least someone lives to fight another day.

[T.G. Oskar]

This (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePaladin)* is a good place to start.

Flavor-wise, the problem lies on how the Paladin and the Cleric were imagined. The Paladin was imagined as the archetypal "knight in shining armor", and its purpose was to be a force for Good. The Cleric, on the other hand, was akin to the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller or Teutonic Knights which were part warrior and part priest, or effectively warrior-priests. When the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons came forth, the Cleric and the Paladin dragged quite a lot of the same flavor as with the 1st Edition counterparts, but the divide was pretty evident: on AD&D 2nd Edition, the notion of clerics of different deities was cemented on the choice of Spheres, but the core construct was still focused on the "warrior-priest" with the odd restriction of "bludgeoning weapons or you lose your powers" (actually, the prohibition of Clerics of using weapons that caused bloodletting, which happens with every weapon but bludgeoning weapons caused less instances of it). The Paladin, on the other hand (and barring the variant introduced when the Cavalier class was formed) remained pretty similar in all regards to its 1st Edition counterpart: always Lawful Good, very stringent Code of Conduct, minor spellcasting abilities, healing skills and other stuff.

By the moment 3rd Edition was around, spellcasters were given a pretty serious boost, and Clerics finally were equalized with arcane spellcasters regarding their maximum spellcasting amount. Since they still held the notion of a "warrior-priest" (even with Clerics of a god of healing, which may be actual pacifists), they retained their heavy armor and their weapon choices (left with simple weapons). Meanwhile, Paladins remained pretty similar except they lost their special weapon as a class feature (the Holy Avenger still exists, but it was now officially a magic item). It wasn't until the half-life of D&D 3.5 (when Eberron was officially underway and they started to make the second batch of completes) when the Cleric and the Paladin had a revision of their work. Complete Divine is still on the early side of D&D, and draws a lot from Defenders of the Faith where they still held somewhat to the old ideas of AD&D 1st & 2nd.

Paladins, at least archetype-wise, have several reasons to exist. For starters, Clerics are meant to be missionaries of sorts: they do cover everything from the lowly deacon to the High Priest of the faith, but adventurer clerics are usually keen on the missionary work: either by proselytizing to foreign nations or following missions for their faith. The Cloistered Cleric works very well detailing the usual Western-type monk (the friar, the one cooped up at a monastery on the mountain usually working as a scribe), but it's most of the spell choices and innate traits that cause the Cleric to step on the Paladin's toes real bad (Divine Power canceling the arguable benefit of full BAB, plus they still wear heavy armor and shields without troubles). Later on you can see the Cleric is slowly evolving from its original Knight Templar archetype and into a missionary/chaplain kind of figure. Meanwhile, the "knight in shining armor" image of the Paladin was crushed when the Fighter could be explained as one form of knight (the one with a tarnished armor), then the Knight was meant to represent the actual knight archetype (thus driving the Paladin into the archetype of the "warrior of the faith"), then the Crusader basically taking the "warrior of the faith" archetype and running with it, leaving the Paladin as a sort of redundant class that blurs the image between one class (Cleric) and another (Crusader).

However, one thing is for certain: the main archetype of the Paladin, beyond being a "warrior of the faith" as the old archetype of the Cleric and the Crusader do, or a "knight in shining armor" as the Knight would eventually exemplify, is the "long arm of Good". Notice that, while there are several classes that shoehorn you into being Lawful or Chaotic, none shoehorn you exclusively into Lawful Good (no exceptions, unless you consider the UA variants of which two-thirds don't exemplify the latter archetype) and give you tools to actually combat Evil. "Warrior of the Faith" and "Knight in Shining Armor" thus become secondary archetypes to "Long Arm of Good", whereas with the Crusader it's basically the opposite (the Crusader is first the arm of his faith, and maybe afterwards the force of good; the Paladin is a force of good first and foremost, his own faith be damned, although they usually choose Good deities).

So yeah, the archetype of a Paladin DOES have a reason to exist, but it's important to consider that the main purpose of the class has changed. How you deal with that archetype (nuking the class and use another class for it, using the class as-is, using the Prestige Paladin variant, using homebrew or mostly using the class with some fixes) is what differs, but you can't expect a Cleric to have a defined purpose of doing Good above anything, since he's trapped by his faith. The Crusader does likewise, except they are even LESS inclined towards doing good specifically.

*:Enter at your own risk. Remember that TV Tropes can Ruin your Life (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife), but TV Tropes can also Improve it (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillEnhanceYourLife).

[hamishspence]

I agree with McStabbington. The clerics represent the gods, the paladins represent good. In one of the novels (I forget which one) a paladin goes against his god's orders because he believes them to be evil or neutral actions, without losing his powers/falling.

Tymora's Luck (FR novel by Kate Novak & Jeff Grubb) might be a candidate.

When the paladin's deity (Lathlander) says "How dare you disobey me and risk falling from my grace?" her response was to say that it would be evil to do what he was doing (joining Tymora & Beshaba back together against their will).

This was why she disobeyed her order to hand over the item that would finalize the transformation.

[Ashtagon]

I agree that the overlap between cleric and paladin is too great. It's why I plan on revising both classes.

"Priest" is a less martial, more community-oriented cleric. "Templar" is a paladin who is dedicated to serving the ideals of a specific deity in a martial capacity, as opposed to priests who serve that deity in a community capacity. IN effect, priests are all about building up support for the deity, while templars are all about taking down opposition for the deity. 3e style multiclassing means you can choose exactly how focused you are toward one or the other goal.

[danzibr]

Just to throw in my two cents... special mounts! C'mon, way cool.

[Prime32]

And here's a paladin rework I did which has no overlap with cleric at all.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=11792

[super dark33]

Your right in some way.
But your also wrong,
i will take the hospitalers order as an exmple.moral issues aside, they are based on what we call "paladins", warriors who knew a little of Theology and etc, but not like the bishops or the priests. so paladin is a priest that been sleeping in Theology class but practice alot in fighting. its like the diffrence between a wizard and a sorceror, but instead of the speed of advancing spell levels Vs. amount of spells a day, its fighting skill Vs. spell power.

[Telonius]

FWIW: when I DM, I have a couple of houserules to address the overlap issue.

Personally I see Paladins as people totally devoted to a deity or cause, the epitome of that deity or cause's goals and aspirations. They're the prime example of what a follower of their god should be. So to represent that, the Code and Alignment requirements are altered so that the Code reflects that deity's (or cause's) wishes, and the Paladin must take the alignment of the deity. (DM rules on what the Cause's alignment is).

Clerics (in my opinion) are the deity's direct agents on earth. They're the administration and bureaucrats, the leaders of the temples and the ones who perform the ceremonies. They're the ones who get the flashy miraculous stuff that inspires and sustains the faithful. To prevent them from stepping too much on Paladins' toes (and also limit their power generally), Divine Power is removed from the general Cleric list, though it's still on the War Domain's list.

To put it another way:
Cleric = Reverend Lovejoy
Paladin = Ned Flanders