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.
Of course, not all "corruption effects" are completely incapacitating, the fighter and rogue can still participate, but the paladin really shines in such situations.
"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.
We have to grant some leeway to classes being very simmilar in their abilities effect on the game, otherwhise we don't need to look further than the core four to see classes stepping all over each others feet.
We can have multiple classes buffing. Just as we can have multiple classes fighting in melee, attacking from range, debuffing, healing, being mobile, etc. But each class has to do it differently and no class should be so good in one area so it marginalizes the others. This is why I'm not a fan of ranger and paladin spellcasting. It does things other classes can do, in exactly the same way and so weak, it's marginal when a "real" spellcaster is a around.
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.
Smiting is an awesome ability, that's far to often mechanically bland. That's why I don't think smiting should be extra damage (at least not just extra damage), but rather take the road of weapon delivered debuffs. When a Paladin strikes an opponent, that opponent is cowed with fear, disheartened with shame or stunned by awe. With a simply swipe a Paladin shatters illusions, strips spellcasters of their protections or opens vulnerabilities in the otherwhise inpenetrabel defense of a demon or dragon. I don't feel any other class has or deserves a melee ability like that.
- 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.
To me, keeping some kind of detect evil doesn't necessarily mean keeping that particular, rather problematic, ability. Some minor divinatory abilities that help a paladin discern friend and enemy, deception and truth, would not just be flavorful. It also helps the paladin in an area we haven't talked about yet, like every class, he should have noncombat abilities.
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 think most would agree that a class shouldn't be designed as an afterthought, ever. Yet, it's been done over and over, in corebooks and splats, and one of my greatest concerns for DDN. However, saying "They won't get it right, so they better don't even try" isn't exactly a solution. Hopefully all classes they put into the core books had sufficient playtesting and a strong foundation to stand on by the time of release.
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?
I hope you don't my quote-cutting your post up, to add some commentary where I wanted to put it. I may find it imperative to see the "niche classes" (even the ones I dislike, like the warlord and warlock) in the game, but you raise some very valid concerns about their design, that I agree with.
