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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 7489563" data-attributes="member: 6799649">At its most basic, player agency is that players choose what their PCs do and what their personalities are like, the DM chooses what all the NPCs do and what they are like.Of course, the player can only choose the things the PC is actually able to do! The declared action, "I fly 60 feet up to the top of the tower" is only valid if the PC can fly! But, within the realm of the possible, it's the player who chooses, not the DM.Imagine this:-Player: I cast sleep at the...DM: No, you draw your dagger and move to melee.Player: What? Have I failed some save against something?DM: No, I just think it's what you'd do.No! The player makes those choices!Similarly, the player chooses the PC's personality, how they interact with their god/patron/Oath from their end of the deal. And just like the player can only choose from the possible, they should also choose things that make sense in context. So saving these orphans instead of those orphans is a legitimate player choice, while murdering any orphans is not a legitimate player choice for any Ancients paladin to make IF he intends to keep to his Oath. Of course, he can choose to break his Oath if he wants.With power comes responsibility. The player is responsible for making choices that make sense in context.With great power comes great responsibility. The DM is responsible for making choices that make sense in context.Sure, the orphan-murdering Ancients paladin must be reasonably judged to have broken his Oath. But saving these orphans instead of those cannot reasonably be judged to have broken that Oath.My problem is DMs who make unreasonable judgements and take away powers based on that. The legitimate role-play of the god/patron/etc. is instead replaced by what the DM would have done if they were playing an Ancients paladin (or whatever god/patron) and ANY deviation from the DM's choice results in the player being punished. It's not really the god who's punishing, it's the DM using the god as an excuse to punish the player for playing his own PC as he sees fit.It's a problem that exists when the PC conceptually receives powers from an intelligent source. It is not a problem for classes that gain their abilities through their own efforts. No-one takes away the rogue's class abilities for daring to steal this necklace instead of that necklace!But the 5e devs don't discriminate between classes in that way. They don't want some classes to be vulnerable to power-stripping while others are not. It's not fair, they recognise, to penalise players for having the temerity to choose to play paladins/clerics/warlocks but not fighters/rogues/wizards. That's why any such mechanics have been deliberately written out of the game! In fact, the only thing left that even resembles that is the Oathbreaker paladin, and even then it doesn't strip you of all your class abilities leaving you a powerless husk with too many hit points for a commoner, it replaces the abilities of your original Oath with an equally powerful set of abilities and a new Oath.The game itself doesn't want DMs to strip class abilities away! If the god/patron/whatever has a problem with the PC's behaviour then the entity should do something that makes sense in the game world to address it, not punish the metagame by erasing portions of his character sheet!</blockquote>

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