The Paladin
aspires to be "a paragon of virtue, justice, and truth." This is what makes them great: both great heroes and great pains in the keister.
I realized a long time ago what one of the fundamental problems with the Paladin, as a class, is. Believe it or not, it
isn't the fact that they have to be Lawful Good, and thus invite alignment-bait arguments. (That still isn't great, mind, but it's not the real reason.) There's a key component that kept being left totally implicit at least up through 3e. (I can't recall if 4e addressed it directly in the PHB; 5e didn't.) A component that, because it wasn't understood, directly led to all the problems of Moral Policemen, Smite-the-jaywalkers types, and nearly all the "I'm a Paladin so you must listen to me or you're EVIL" stuff.
The writeup never tells you that respect must be
earned.
And that shapes everything else. When you think you simply
deserve respect because you Already Are A Paladin, you treat your judgments as sacrosanct. If you were some
lesser class, perhaps you might be questionable--but you are a PALADIN, you are by definition righteous! When you think you're
entitled to respect from your party members, a lack of respect is an insult and an outright refutation of respect is a threat. When the game tells you, "you are a champion of all that is good," and you think you already
have the moral high ground as a result, you aren't just giving advice or helping with decisions, you're preaching the Pure Truth and making the Only Right Choice.
All those stuffy, pig-headed, idiotic, frustrating, dogmatic, irrational, sanctimonious
gluteal chapeaus are rooted in that fundamental error. When a Paladin instead approaches each and every person as a new opportunity to
earn the respect of others, rather than a new opportunity to
capitalize on that respect, the entire situation changes.
A big part of what led me to this revelation was the actually quite decent
Paladins with Class article from WotC. Some of the
build advice is shaky, but the roleplay advice is solid. These lines in particular stood out to me, with the bold part especially impactful:
Great paladins are more concerned with justice and charity than with meting out punishments and preaching about other people's moral failings. [...] One appropriate way to achieve that effect is to be consistently honest and unselfish, and to place the welfare and safety of others before your own.
[...] some of the party scout's actions are likely to earn your disapproval. When they do, don't nag or become self-righteous. Instead, register your dissatisfaction without rancor and keep an eye on the scout in the future. If you've done a good job of making your paladin admirable, your quiet displeasure should prove most compelling.
I've gotten the chance to play that paladin before. The one who inspires his hard-hearted CN fighter friend to try to make the world a better place--because my paladin
showed that that is what true strength is. The one who earns the mutual trust and respect of his grabby-hands thief friend, such that he's comfortable with her doing some rules-bending because he trusts her judgment, and she in turn knows that if he DOES raise a concern, she needs to take it seriously. The one whose passing leaves the world a better, brighter, nobler place than it had been before.
And that stuff is gorram
addictive, I swear, once you get some of that sweet Paladin juice you never want to stop. Because it feels
good to be good, it feels
good to know others trust you implicitly, that your word carries weight.
As with a great many things, the Paladin goes wrong when it
presumes what it needed to
prove.