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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 1793174" data-attributes="member: 537">I'm perfectly aware of who Galahad, Lancelot, Gareth, St George, Roland, Oliver and Ogier are, not to mention Mandorallen, Imrahil of Dol Amroth and Paksne Paxenar Paksenna that chyk from Elizabeth Moon's books, if you feel the need to bring up more examples. My contention is that (with the possible exception of Georgie boy, depending on how literally you take the "saint" bit) none of these are characters you couldn't represent with the fighter class. In fact, if you wanted to be a s*mulationist, and think in terms of reproducing the actual abilities these people have in the source material, the fighter class is probably a better fit: none of them casts spells, can turn undead, or has a mount that appears and disappears with great convenience. What they do have in common is that they all swing a sword."Schtick" means "schtick" obviously, or I would have used another word. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />The archetype of the heroic ideal is something that certainly has a place in a lot of D&D games. Heck, most of the characters I play fit that ideal to a greater or lesser extent; or at least that's what I intend them to be.My point is that you need more than just an archetype if you want to build 20 levels of class progression. "Peasant hero" is also an archetype (and one that overlaps to some degree with the heroic ideal), but in terms of what you're actually going to build into a class, it offers precious little guidance. Being a peasant hero defines in narrative terms what role a character will play in a campaign. It doesn't define in _operational_ terms what that character will do from session to session. At most you could say that most peasant heroes swing a sword, but then most protagonists in fantasy stories tend to swing swords. You can have a barbarian peasant hero, a ranger peasant hero, a rogue peasant hero, and so on.It's a similar story with the heroic ideal. The concept is one that you can certainly use to define a character's ethical or moral attitude, as well as what foes he or she will likely face. If you wanted to restrict the ideal only to knightly types like you mention, that might even allow you to say something about _how_ they might fight those foes (with a sword). Even so, like with the peasant hero, it's not really a specific enough concept that you can create an entire class with, not when you already have a class (several, in fact) dedicated to swinging a sword. Furthermore, if you were to take a broader viewpoint, there's nothing about the heroic ideal that explicitly says it must be limited to knightly types. As such, there's similarly nothing stopping someone of most any class from taking on that ideal. They would just use spells or whatever to do their job, as opposed to a sword.Not to mention that the mere mention of the word "paladin" tends to bring out extremist views of alignment in everyone....I would say that if you wanted to build a class that could be used as a representation of the "knight in shining armour" archetype, then the _knight_ business is probably a better starting point. You have a more concrete base to work with, in terms of class abilities; it's also more flexible, in terms of what you could use it for. While a knight _could_ be used to represent a paladin type, it could also be used for more morally ambiguous characters. There are plenty of noble/knightly warriors in fantasy fiction who, while not being as squeaky-clean as the stereotypical paladin, are still excellent source material for a character. You still have the problem of overlapping with the fighter's niche as the premier sword-swinger, but it's not an insurmountable thing.</blockquote>

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