What could be a punishment, if this person doesn't follow their oath? [Flaw]

[killem2]

I'm trying to help a fellow DM, come up with what happens if the oath isn't followed.

INCONVENIENT OATH
[ Secondary Flaw: Personality Conflict ]
Your character has sworn an oath by the gods, for as long as he lives, to avoid doing something extremely useful to himself or to do something that makes him stick out like a sore thumb. This oath might have been sworn for any religious or cultural reason appropriate to the character’s background.

Drawback: The character would sooner die than violate this oath; failure to uphold it may result in social or divine punishment as the DM sees fit. Some possibilities include but are not limited to:

•The character has sworn never to wield a weapon
that can kill a foe from a distance;
•The character has sworn to always dress in mourning
colors/clothes and to wear no others, even for
diplomatic and religious events, even when adventuring
in the wilderness, even when wearing a disguise
could be necessary for saving his life;
•The character has sworn never to wield any weapon
or wear any set of armor save those that he crafts himself;
•The character has sworn to donate ten percent of his
income to a religious institution, without failure and
without hesitation;
•The character has sworn never to let any healing
potion or draught pass his lips, even if his life is slipping
away.

This character in particular, is a dragonborn of bahamut. His flaw, is that any dragonblooded character he is forced into conflict with, causes him to offer complete and utter immunity to that person, if they willingly given themselves up, to be captured, and brought to a local temple to convert and to undergo the dragonborn of bahamut transformation, to which this character pays the 100g fee.

[OldTrees1]

One option is to say the Flaw is Bahamut holding this Dragonborn to a higher standard than most. Bahamut already has a punishment for fallen Dragonborn (cease to be dragonborn and lose the flaw&feat)

[EugeneVoid]

Is this just one of those roleplay things, because I think the flaw itself is as much of a punishment already.
10% of gold donated and isn't any weapon possible to kill at a range, since you can just throw them?

[OldTrees1]

Is this just one of those roleplay things, because I think the flaw itself is as much of a punishment already.
10% of gold donated and isn't any weapon possible to kill at a range, since you can just throw them?

Huh?

Flaws (Unearthed Arcana rules variant) are meant to be costs in exchange for the Bonus Feat they give.
This Flaw is an Oath where the cost is following the Oath.
It is possible for the Player to decide to break their Oath.
The Flaw cannot be a cost if the Oath can be broken without penalty.
The Flaw is an insufficient cost if breaking the Oath is normally preferable to keeping the Oath.
So the DM is asking for a penalty that would discourage breaking the Oath.
(as the rules for this particular flaw recommends)

[HaikenEdge]

Huh?

Flaws (Unearthed Arcana rules variant) are meant to be costs in exchange for the Bonus Feat they give.
This Flaw is an Oath where the cost is following the Oath.
It is possible for the Player to decide to break their Oath.
The Flaw cannot be a cost if the Oath can be broken without penalty.
The Flaw is an insufficient cost if breaking the Oath is normally preferable to keeping the Oath.
So the DM is asking for a penalty that would discourage breaking the Oath.
(as the rules for this particular flaw recommends)

I think the previous poster read it as, all those things at the same time, as opposed to just one of those things.

Even if the player takes only one of those oaths, some of them can be pretty hurtful, to a point where just gaining a feat isn't going to be nearly enough to cover it. For example, the 10% income isn't much at lower levels, by higher levels, you could probably actually buy an item (or a slotless custom item) that provides feat for the amount of gold they've given up.

As for the player's oath in, that's not really a flaw, but more like roleplay flavor. Flaws need to have actual, tangible negative effects on the character's statistics that outweighs a feat that gives a benefit reversing the flaw, whereas the flaw that's in question doesn't necessarily have much of an effect on any statistic at all; for example, Shaky and Noncombatant both give -2 penalties to one kind of combat, which far outweighs what you'd get from a feat (say Point Blank Shot, or Weapon Focus).

Leaving something up to DM fiat doesn't really make a flaw better; it just makes the flaw prone to vacillating in terms of how detrimental it is.

Back to the original topic, the easiest way to balance the flaw for breaking it is to make the offending character lose access to the feat forever, and be unable to ever take it again.

[Heliomance]

Flaws need to have actual, tangible negative effects on the character's statistics that outweighs a feat that gives a benefit reversing the flaw

I disagree. Flaws having negative effects on statistics relegates them to a game mechanics thing, and almost always (I'll grant that this is an exception) results in players just grabbing two flaws that don't affect their playstyle at all (Noncombatant for ranged characters and Shaky for melee being favourites). This, IMO, is pretty unbalanced and is essentially just two free feats.

Legend of the Five Rings has Disadvantages, which can be taken for more points in character creation. The big difference is, all of them are roleplaying penalties. Some of them grant mechanical disadvantages, some of them don't. But all of them are meaningful from a character point of view. This results in people making much more interesting characters, because they're flawed in some explicit way. They give characters a weakness that can be exploited. They run the gamut from having heterochromia or a similar condition that makes superstitious people (i.e. all peasants) afraid of you, through being allergic to some common foodstuff, through having a sworn enemy out there that's coming to get you, through going mad every full moon and waking up the next morning with no recollection of what happened, to missing a limb. It's a far better system, and one that results in less tendency for mechanical exploitation.

Hell, only the first 10 points of Disadvantages grant you chargen points, and I've played characters that had more Disadvantages than that because I wanted them for the flavour. Some day I want to get to play a character that has both Dark Fate (no matter what you do, no matter how you try, history will remember you as a villain) and Yogo's Curse (you are cursed to somehow irrevocably betray the one you love most, at some point in your life). It would be such a tragic character, but such a fun one.

[OldTrees1]

Flaws are meant to be flavorful costs in exchange for additional benefits in order to enable finer customization of characters.

The impact of Flaws ought to impact the characters that select them. So Shaky is not a reasonable option for a melee character.

It is harder to check if a non mechanical Flaw will impact a character than it is to check if a mechanical Flaw will impact a character. However I think they both have a place provided the impact is REAL.

My first impression of the Oath in the OP is that the Dragonborn will not be too inconvenienced by the Oath. However I have seen interparty conflicts where the Good cleric preached killing the captives and the LN cleric preached taking them to be redeemed. (facepalm) So it is possible that the Idealist Dragonborn will be inconvenienced by the Oath if surrounded by Realists.

[Particle_Man]

You could always send in the inevitables. They hate oathbreakers. And if you kill the one sent after you, another one comes after you. Forever.

Maybe an Aleax would also suffice?

[Sir Chuckles]

Mae them temporarily lose the effects of the bonus Feat, and possibly anything that used it as a prerequisite.

That'd be a nice and simple, non-roleplay, punishment.

[Shining Wrath]

Bahamut is a LG major deity. As such he is going to try to bring the PC back into the fold. If the PC appears at a temple and seeks to atone a geas shall be laid proportionate to ECL and magnitude of transgression. If the PC does not voluntarily atone Bahamut will send someone(s) after him - and being a major deity, he knows where the PC is, what his party is capable of doing, and has access to overwhelming force period. Humility will be taught. The resulting geas will be far worse than that given to a volunteer.