Supernatural defenses against fear and disease are certainly a starting point. I think the basic asumption is a strong resilience agsinst forces of corruption and Evil, which could also be expanded to resistance against effects that drain their life force in some way.
With that, paladins are able to get close to beings whose mere presence is a danger and tollerate areas of imense corruption. However, since it's a party based game, you can't really have a lot of situations in which everyone stays behind while the paladin goes on alone with his magical hazmat suit. When a fighter has his big sword and a rogue his knives, they want to get close to the beast and stab it. Also, in a currupted dungeon, the party can only go where its weakest member can survive.
If a paladin is immune to horrors and corruptions, that's nice for him, but the DM has to set up situations in which the whole party can keep going deeper. If it's too dangerous for the party to stay and fight, the paladin has few options than turn around as well and follow them outside. Sharing these resistances with allies is vital. And of course, the paladin himself would need to be the most resilient, because when he is out, the rest of the party is unprotected.
"Stay close to the paladin and you can walk into the mouth of hell. His powers will shield you." would make one interesting starting point for a class. Yes, it invades the territory of bards and warlords, but in the case of bards, there's still enough major differences to make them add very different abilities to the party. After all, you can also have cleric and druid classes, or barbarians and fighter.
However, passive abilities are not fun. "I hit it with my longsword once per round while keeping up my protective shield around you" is not fun to play. A paladin certainly needs to have some active powers as well.
- Smiting is a start, but instead of "I hit it" you have the ability to "I hit it really hard" is not that much of a difference.
- Detect Evil is interesting in a narrated story, but full of complications in a game with the other players participating. From older articles, we've been told that alignment in 5th Edition will be handled slightly differently with mechanical impacts of alignment being restricted to supernatural beings. After all, you don't want to hunt a spy and the first response is to use detect evil on the whole court. Also it creates all those pesky alignment debates, that appear so obvious when applied to outsiders, but never get any agreement when it comes to mortals.
A paladin is not one of the nine boxes in a tic tac toe game that needs to be filled.
Not going to argue about this with you, but in this particular situation, that's probably exactly what's the case: It's foregone conclusion that 5th Edition will have a paladin class and that's probably not negotiable. So this now leaves the unfortunate tast that we have a box labled paladin that needs to be filled.
And ideally, it should be something that would be able to stand on its own legs. Something that is a good class even outside the context that there needs to be a class called paladin. And the first step to do that is to define what the word "Paladin" means and after that you get to start thinking how that can be made in an interesting set of class abilities.
I haven't been to direct about this, and contradicted myself in later posts, but "A warrior in armor on a horse with devive powers of good" is not enough to define paladins.
Only this fluff as the
whole basis of paladins is bad. But what is actually needed, and the intent behind the thread, is to expand that fluff. To define what a paladin is supposed to do. Then we can start thinking about how he does it.
That's the reason behind the title. Whe know what a paladin
is, but what does he
do?
And for the record, a Blackguard of Sloth would be pretty cool to roleplay. You yourself would have to give up being able to indulge in your sin in order to spread that sin to others. Convincing them that inactivity or "wait and see" would be a better course of action than actually doing something. Talking someone into non-involvement or staying complacent. Same with a Blackguard of Greed convincing others that their own needs and wants are more important than others. That would be much more fun to me than a Blackguard of Wrath or Pride.
I like what Dragon Age does. Demons not only embody the vice they represent, they also feed on it and exploit it in their victims. Sloth isn't just comfort and lazyness, it's decay and depression. A Blackguard of Sloth would fight using delaying tactics and exhausting their enemies resources, while sapping away their morale.
They can become more hated than Blackguards of Wrath or Pride. ^^
