NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9469815" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here is the text on Breaking Your Oath from <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes/4-paladin" target="_blank">that same page</a> on D&D Beyond:A paladin tries to hold to the highest standards of conduct, but even the most virtuous paladin is fallible. Sometimes the right path proves too demanding, sometimes a situation calls for the lesser of two evils, and sometimes the heat of emotion causes a paladin to transgress his or her oath. A paladin who has broken a vow typically seeks absolution from a cleric who shares his or her faith or from another paladin of the same order. The paladin might spend an all-night vigil in prayer as a sign of penitence, or undertake a fast or similar act of self-denial. After a rite of confession and forgiveness, the paladin starts fresh. If a paladin willfully violates his or her oath and shows no sign of repentance, the consequences can be more serious. At the DM’s discretion, an impenitent paladin might be forced to abandon this class and adopt another, or perhaps to take the Oathbreaker paladin option that appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.There is nothing there that makes 3rd level of any significance for a paladin's conduct, standards, virtue, or breaking of vows.And the preceding text, which I've already quoted, tells us that what happens at 3rd level is that the paladin's oath-related abilities come online. Prior to that, all paladin PCs are mechanically the same (as far as class is concerned) regardless of oath. But the player and GM - together, or one of them unilaterally if the table's understanding of authority over the fiction runs that way - can already take the oath to have been committed to, just as the text that I have quoted sets out.The text for 3rd level itself says the following, under the heading Sacred Oath:you swear the oath that binds you as a paladin forever. Up to this time you have been in a preparatory stage, committed to the path but not yet sworn to it.What does the preparatory stage look like, in the fiction? What oaths and vows does it involve? The preceding text gives us some ideas, and I'm sure creative FRPGers can think of more. The oath that is sworn at 3rd level is the one that binds forever - a type of taking irrevocable holy orders. This implies that a 1st or 2nd level paladin can back out; it certainly does not imply that they can "betray the oath [of devotion, or the ancients, or whatever] daily and not lose their abilities". Quite the opposite - it implies that if they withdraw from the order, and foreswear their abilities, they can lose them without further repercussion - "no harm, no foul". Not that they can withdraw and yet retain them!</blockquote>

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