Well, the last time I played a paladin, I went with dragonborn Vengence paladin, simply because I liked fluffing all the fear powers as Dragonfear.
That reminds me of a character idea I got looking through this huge homebrew supplement full of playable versions of monster types; mummy conquest paladin.
"I use my fear AoE." "They're not scared of you." "I use my OTHER fear AoE."
Honestly, I like refluffing Ancients quite a bit. A guardian of the world (or material plane) is an interesting concept. I'm not fond of tying things off to deities or other beings (Which is why I tend to avoid clerics and warlocks), so going in a "guardian of the natural world" tends to be more up my alley when I roll up for a paladin.
Oathbreaker doesn't always have to be evil. It could just be a failure to adhere to certain aspects of your tenants, and your god took you out of the chair you chose and sits you down into the edgy one until you get sorted out. Like maybe you were a redemption paladin who lost patience and killed the bad guy instead of trying to help them be better.
I chose Oathbreaker because I like evil. It's kind of sad that you can't be an evil paladin without breaking your oath though.
Don't limit yourself. You can vow an oath to an evil deity. Working with your DM to develop your view and background and what you perceive as 'good' can justify you feeling the way you do.
The best part of paladin is their conviction. I've feel that oathbreaker is a character option for a defeated character(by stronger beings or otherworldly entities etc. Arthas is a great example.) I've seen (and played) a Paladin that has changed the mind of an entire party just because he was unwilling to bend from their convictions. I see this as a very difficult class to play for someone who wants to be helpful and coincide with their party. If you enjoy the flaws of a character and the struggle of inter-party conflict, this is the character for you. many people feel that specific classes can't break certain alignments, but that is definitely not the case. A Paladin is a born leader, (if you put your highest attribute in anything other than charisma in 5e shame on you.) If you have to deliberate and see what the rest of the party wants to do, you've already lost. Persuade them to follow your beliefs. your DM will thank you for the investment you have in your character.
That being said. I enjoy my time playing and writing a Oath of Vengeance paladin. Very much an anti-hero archetype. Character flaws and all, they've accepted that the one thing that scorned them(or their people) must be vanquished at all costs. With the release of Xanthar's, I have interest in playing Conquest, but for the sake of the argument Vengeance is most attractive to my play style.
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Current campaigns - DM - Tomb of Annihilation home game
theory crafter and character builder.
Past campaigns -DM- modern post-apocalypse custom home game.
- Human Paladin, Brazelton - multiple games
- lv 12 Human Ranger, Mattias Shaw - 3.5e Homebrew
Oathbreaker has hate? Hm? I know that most people don't really use the Oathbreaker because the aura and control undead features are unreliable (need either PC or DM support) and might backfire (demon antagonists getting a boost is counter intuitive), but I don't know of anyone that hates it.
Why so many vengeance pallies? They aren't the coolest (oathbreaker), nor the most metal (ancients), nor the nicest (devotion), nor the most powerful (oathbreaker)?
I don't get it.
Oath of Vengeance is;
Cooler than oathbreaker, because breaking and oath for a paladin isn't a cool thing even tho he/she broke the oath with a cool move/action/move/decision it's breaking and oath still.
Stronger than oathbreaker, because both systematically and rp'ingly, vengeance Paladins has balls to step up and seek for the trouble to face it, where oathbreakers are falling on and on to make his life.
Huh. So, I guess there is an Oathbreaker hate thing going on. I mean, I do think that Vengence and Conquest are stronger since I think that Oathbreaker's undead/fiend abilities are unreliable, but yeah. If hanging out with a necromancer or fiend* is your thing, why not?
* I always wondered if a tiefling fiend'lock should benefit from the Aura of Hate effect.
Huh. So, I guess there is an Oathbreaker hate thing going on. I mean, I do think that Vengence and Conquest are stronger since I think that Oathbreaker's undead/fiend abilities are unreliable, but yeah. If hanging out with a necromancer or fiend* is your thing, why not?
Conquest actually is plain decent. Most of the cool abilities go to Ancients and Oathbreakers.
I was originally going for devotion tank, but because the rest of my party simply could not for the life of them (quite literally) understand what a tank was supposed to do and LEEROY'd every single enemy, I went with vengeance instead. Only had PHB available, so didn't know of the oaths outside of it, plus the lvl 1-2 sessions gave me a nice reason for why my character would go vengeance.
I only just started playing D&D two years ago, and only just earlier this year created my first Paladin, Andrus a Tiefling, who has sworn his life into the service of the Raven Queen. I originally wanted to build him to become Oath of Vengeance, but I was a little unsure when it was revealed there'd be a vampire in our party, so I had to talk with my DM to created new Paladin Oath. Which actually works well for followers of the Raven Queen as the spells, and features are built to give a paladin a greater advantage against undead opponents.
Because I’m an absolute knob, Oath of Conquest all day. Something about making all those who oppose you quiver in fear and subjugating them to your will just, seems extremely appealing to me. I think I need to become an African warlord.
The downside is I never played one. Evil has never been allowed so I instead opted for an Oath of Ancients paladin (who died, god bless her soul), and a Vengeance paladin (who is an absolute monster with all her magical items and how I built her). What sucks a lot isn’t the fact that an evil campaign I’m participating in already had a paladin, and I really hate class overlap. So I went with the same character concept (subjugation, fear, etc) and just made a warlock. But it just isn’t the same! I want the saucy Aura of Conquest, and the ability to smite a frozen opponent! I’m upset, quite upset.
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"There is no such thing as good or evil. There is only power and ambition. The end is everything." -Cao Cao
I like Oathbreaker mechanically, but nothing about its actual mechanics reflect the fluff of a treacherous and self-interested breaker of oaths. Mechanically, it's more of an outright anti-paladin, selflessly dedicated to evil the way a typical paladin is dedicated to good. Unearthed Arcana's Oath of Treachery was a much, much better mechanical implementation of the Oathbreaker's fluff, so I'm kind of sad that it seems to have been dropped, presumably for stepping on the Oathbreaker's thematic toes. I mean, its original form was noticeably overtuned, but that could have been easily fixed while keeping the brilliant bits - the illusion, shadow duplicates, various escape mechanisms, confusion effects to trick your enemies into hitting each other, all these great mechanics truly evocative of a classic dastardly villain. I mean, the Oathbreaker as printed can certainly be villainous, but they aren't, well, treacherous.
Personally, my favorite Oath is Conquest. I can absolutely understand those who don't like the dark knight sort of fluff on a paladin subclass, but I like it, and no other paladin has a better mechanical implementation of its narrative themes, with the 'domination through fear' concept weaving through and unifying the various class and subclass features in a way that creates a unique and rewarding game play experience. Vengeance and Devotion paladins have distinct thematic tones, but mechanically they're not that meaningfully distinct, and several of their features could be traded without meaningfully affecting other features or changing the way they evoke or fail to evoke the character archetypes they represent. If you played one as the other, no one would notice. Conquest paladins, though? Especially after level 7, you'd never confuse them with anyone else. They have a unique play style that perfectly and unmistakably evokes their narrative concept. Again, that narrative concept might not be every player's cup of tea, or a good fit for every campaign, but no other paladin oath, arguably no other printed subclass in the game, does as good a job of bringing its themes to life on the table.
Treachery was the same way. Such a shame the inferior (in terms of ability to evoke the same fluff) oathbreaker's existence seems to have kept the treachery paladin from making it to print.
................
On the topic of alignment, though, while a Conquest Paladin is necessarily darker in tone and will not be a good fit for every campaign on those grounds, they absolutely do not have to be evil. Several versions of Batman, for instance, could be argued as good fits for a conquest paladin, at least in philosophy and ethos. People are not inherently good, most just follow the path of least resistance. A well structured society ensures that the path of least resistance for most people is to behave themselves, but there will always be those who think they can benefit from harming others. The heroes role is to knock these individuals back in line, scare them into staying in line ("criminals are a superstitious and dowardly lot"), use there example to scare others into staying in line. Even something like the 'all transgressions must be punished' tenet can be run by a good player. It doesn't say those punishments need to be excessively cruel our out of scale with the offense. And insisting that /every/ transgression be punished also means rooting out corruption and making sure the rich and powerful can't leverage their privilege to get out of paying the price for abusing others. There's a lack of trust in other people inherent to the ethos, an assumption that people will only be good if they are coerced into doing so, and that social order can only be maintained by a strong man type figure. It's not healthy, it wouldn't be good in real life (then again, most actions of most D&D characters wouldn't pass for good in real life), but it can pass for 'good enough' in a D&D game.
I'm partial to the Oathbreaker, mainly because the idea of going, "Hey no, screw you" to your god and doing your own thing is 100% up my alley. My group plays morality and alignment as relative, though, which I've found makes 'evil' classes much more playable and enjoyable for everyone. Also, I think limiting things like Oathbreaker and Death Domain to only evil characters is really missing out on some potentially fun storylines. A paladin who was, say, captured and tortured by his enemies until he broke lost faith in his god, for instance, doesn't have to come out of that experience with a new pair of dog-kickin' boots on. He can just be jaded. I'm currently playing on and off as an aasimar Oathbreaker who fell very young when her family was sold into slavery, escaped and swore an Oath of Vengeance, and then broke that Oath when time and time again the power her god provided failed to be enough to dismantle the social structures that allowed such terrible things to happen to innocent people.
I guess what I'm saying is, flip your god off, be ~evil~, and go help people anyway. You might scare the living daylights out of them, but it doesn't matter if they fear you as long as you're doing what's best for them.
Crown/Conquest. Don't know (or care) how they stack mechanically, but they're by far my favorite to play as. It's not that I don't like paladins sworn to particular deities, I also like that quite a bit, it's just that the opportunity for something different feels more fresh after so long. More along the lines of historical paladins of Charlemagne, but like with those paladins the more secular oath does not preclude a religious fervor. Particularly so if it is a tutelary deity.
A Paladin of the Crown was my first attempt at a lawful good character representing the law of civilization, though a better attempt was made as a Rogue Inquisitive. This paladin was purely secular, his oath was to the law itself.
A Dragonborn Paladin of Conquest was one of my favorite characters to play. He was like a scout in foreign lands, seeking weaknesses of any kind that he could report back or take advantage of himself. Not simply a soldier on a conquering war path, but someone looking for any potential means of domination, including economical, cultural and societal. His people played the long game, wars of conquest only began when the battle was already won. This paladin was oathed to a god, but that god was the king. Or rather, the king was worshiped as if a god.
"They're not scared of you."
"I use my OTHER fear AoE."
Honestly, I like refluffing Ancients quite a bit. A guardian of the world (or material plane) is an interesting concept. I'm not fond of tying things off to deities or other beings (Which is why I tend to avoid clerics and warlocks), so going in a "guardian of the natural world" tends to be more up my alley when I roll up for a paladin.
Oathbreaker is good both mechanically and lore-wise.
It doesn't deserve the hate.
IT FEELS GOOD TO BE EVIL OKAY
Just an average metalhead who plays DnD in his spare time.
PbP Character: Roberta Thalan, Void Beyond the Stars Otherside
PbP Character: Primus Eidolon, Eotha 2
PbP Character: Usmor Illiqai, Tomb of Corrosion
PbP Character: "Templar" Danver, You're the Villains
Homebrew stuff
Oathbreaker doesn't always have to be evil. It could just be a failure to adhere to certain aspects of your tenants, and your god took you out of the chair you chose and sits you down into the edgy one until you get sorted out. Like maybe you were a redemption paladin who lost patience and killed the bad guy instead of trying to help them be better.
Don't limit yourself. You can vow an oath to an evil deity. Working with your DM to develop your view and background and what you perceive as 'good' can justify you feeling the way you do.
The best part of paladin is their conviction. I've feel that oathbreaker is a character option for a defeated character(by stronger beings or otherworldly entities etc. Arthas is a great example.) I've seen (and played) a Paladin that has changed the mind of an entire party just because he was unwilling to bend from their convictions. I see this as a very difficult class to play for someone who wants to be helpful and coincide with their party. If you enjoy the flaws of a character and the struggle of inter-party conflict, this is the character for you. many people feel that specific classes can't break certain alignments, but that is definitely not the case. A Paladin is a born leader, (if you put your highest attribute in anything other than charisma in 5e shame on you.) If you have to deliberate and see what the rest of the party wants to do, you've already lost. Persuade them to follow your beliefs. your DM will thank you for the investment you have in your character.
That being said. I enjoy my time playing and writing a Oath of Vengeance paladin. Very much an anti-hero archetype. Character flaws and all, they've accepted that the one thing that scorned them(or their people) must be vanquished at all costs. With the release of Xanthar's, I have interest in playing Conquest, but for the sake of the argument Vengeance is most attractive to my play style.
Current campaigns - DM - Tomb of Annihilation home game
theory crafter and character builder.
Past campaigns -DM- modern post-apocalypse custom home game.
- Human Paladin, Brazelton - multiple games
- lv 12 Human Ranger, Mattias Shaw - 3.5e Homebrew
Oathbreaker has hate? Hm? I know that most people don't really use the Oathbreaker because the aura and control undead features are unreliable (need either PC or DM support) and might backfire (demon antagonists getting a boost is counter intuitive), but I don't know of anyone that hates it.
Just an average metalhead who plays DnD in his spare time.
PbP Character: Roberta Thalan, Void Beyond the Stars Otherside
PbP Character: Primus Eidolon, Eotha 2
PbP Character: Usmor Illiqai, Tomb of Corrosion
PbP Character: "Templar" Danver, You're the Villains
Homebrew stuff
Just an average metalhead who plays DnD in his spare time.
PbP Character: Roberta Thalan, Void Beyond the Stars Otherside
PbP Character: Primus Eidolon, Eotha 2
PbP Character: Usmor Illiqai, Tomb of Corrosion
PbP Character: "Templar" Danver, You're the Villains
Homebrew stuff
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
Vengence FTW
I was originally going for devotion tank, but because the rest of my party simply could not for the life of them (quite literally) understand what a tank was supposed to do and LEEROY'd every single enemy, I went with vengeance instead. Only had PHB available, so didn't know of the oaths outside of it, plus the lvl 1-2 sessions gave me a nice reason for why my character would go vengeance.
I only just started playing D&D two years ago, and only just earlier this year created my first Paladin, Andrus a Tiefling, who has sworn his life into the service of the Raven Queen. I originally wanted to build him to become Oath of Vengeance, but I was a little unsure when it was revealed there'd be a vampire in our party, so I had to talk with my DM to created new Paladin Oath. Which actually works well for followers of the Raven Queen as the spells, and features are built to give a paladin a greater advantage against undead opponents.
Oathbreaker is a great Oath to take for a Death-based god.
Because I’m an absolute knob, Oath of Conquest all day. Something about making all those who oppose you quiver in fear and subjugating them to your will just, seems extremely appealing to me. I think I need to become an African warlord.
The downside is I never played one. Evil has never been allowed so I instead opted for an Oath of Ancients paladin (who died, god bless her soul), and a Vengeance paladin (who is an absolute monster with all her magical items and how I built her). What sucks a lot isn’t the fact that an evil campaign I’m participating in already had a paladin, and I really hate class overlap. So I went with the same character concept (subjugation, fear, etc) and just made a warlock. But it just isn’t the same! I want the saucy Aura of Conquest, and the ability to smite a frozen opponent! I’m upset, quite upset.
"There is no such thing as good or evil. There is only power and ambition. The end is everything." -Cao Cao
I like Oathbreaker mechanically, but nothing about its actual mechanics reflect the fluff of a treacherous and self-interested breaker of oaths. Mechanically, it's more of an outright anti-paladin, selflessly dedicated to evil the way a typical paladin is dedicated to good. Unearthed Arcana's Oath of Treachery was a much, much better mechanical implementation of the Oathbreaker's fluff, so I'm kind of sad that it seems to have been dropped, presumably for stepping on the Oathbreaker's thematic toes. I mean, its original form was noticeably overtuned, but that could have been easily fixed while keeping the brilliant bits - the illusion, shadow duplicates, various escape mechanisms, confusion effects to trick your enemies into hitting each other, all these great mechanics truly evocative of a classic dastardly villain. I mean, the Oathbreaker as printed can certainly be villainous, but they aren't, well, treacherous.
Personally, my favorite Oath is Conquest. I can absolutely understand those who don't like the dark knight sort of fluff on a paladin subclass, but I like it, and no other paladin has a better mechanical implementation of its narrative themes, with the 'domination through fear' concept weaving through and unifying the various class and subclass features in a way that creates a unique and rewarding game play experience. Vengeance and Devotion paladins have distinct thematic tones, but mechanically they're not that meaningfully distinct, and several of their features could be traded without meaningfully affecting other features or changing the way they evoke or fail to evoke the character archetypes they represent. If you played one as the other, no one would notice. Conquest paladins, though? Especially after level 7, you'd never confuse them with anyone else. They have a unique play style that perfectly and unmistakably evokes their narrative concept. Again, that narrative concept might not be every player's cup of tea, or a good fit for every campaign, but no other paladin oath, arguably no other printed subclass in the game, does as good a job of bringing its themes to life on the table.
Treachery was the same way. Such a shame the inferior (in terms of ability to evoke the same fluff) oathbreaker's existence seems to have kept the treachery paladin from making it to print.
................
On the topic of alignment, though, while a Conquest Paladin is necessarily darker in tone and will not be a good fit for every campaign on those grounds, they absolutely do not have to be evil. Several versions of Batman, for instance, could be argued as good fits for a conquest paladin, at least in philosophy and ethos. People are not inherently good, most just follow the path of least resistance. A well structured society ensures that the path of least resistance for most people is to behave themselves, but there will always be those who think they can benefit from harming others. The heroes role is to knock these individuals back in line, scare them into staying in line ("criminals are a superstitious and dowardly lot"), use there example to scare others into staying in line. Even something like the 'all transgressions must be punished' tenet can be run by a good player. It doesn't say those punishments need to be excessively cruel our out of scale with the offense. And insisting that /every/ transgression be punished also means rooting out corruption and making sure the rich and powerful can't leverage their privilege to get out of paying the price for abusing others. There's a lack of trust in other people inherent to the ethos, an assumption that people will only be good if they are coerced into doing so, and that social order can only be maintained by a strong man type figure. It's not healthy, it wouldn't be good in real life (then again, most actions of most D&D characters wouldn't pass for good in real life), but it can pass for 'good enough' in a D&D game.
I am currently working on a somewhere betweeen "Dirty Harry" and "Judge Dredd" style Paladin. Favoring Murlynd and maybe going artificer some levels.
Will be either oath of vengence or conquest and maybe take a ton of prisoners :)
Like the law is law unless it comes to me - of course with enough hooks and code of honour to not go nuts ;)
I'm partial to the Oathbreaker, mainly because the idea of going, "Hey no, screw you" to your god and doing your own thing is 100% up my alley. My group plays morality and alignment as relative, though, which I've found makes 'evil' classes much more playable and enjoyable for everyone. Also, I think limiting things like Oathbreaker and Death Domain to only evil characters is really missing out on some potentially fun storylines. A paladin who was, say, captured and tortured by his enemies until he broke lost faith in his god, for instance, doesn't have to come out of that experience with a new pair of dog-kickin' boots on. He can just be jaded. I'm currently playing on and off as an aasimar Oathbreaker who fell very young when her family was sold into slavery, escaped and swore an Oath of Vengeance, and then broke that Oath when time and time again the power her god provided failed to be enough to dismantle the social structures that allowed such terrible things to happen to innocent people.
I guess what I'm saying is, flip your god off, be ~evil~, and go help people anyway. You might scare the living daylights out of them, but it doesn't matter if they fear you as long as you're doing what's best for them.
"Can we please stop debating philosophy with the dapper crab?"
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ModeratorCrown/Conquest. Don't know (or care) how they stack mechanically, but they're by far my favorite to play as. It's not that I don't like paladins sworn to particular deities, I also like that quite a bit, it's just that the opportunity for something different feels more fresh after so long. More along the lines of historical paladins of Charlemagne, but like with those paladins the more secular oath does not preclude a religious fervor. Particularly so if it is a tutelary deity.
A Paladin of the Crown was my first attempt at a lawful good character representing the law of civilization, though a better attempt was made as a Rogue Inquisitive. This paladin was purely secular, his oath was to the law itself.
A Dragonborn Paladin of Conquest was one of my favorite characters to play. He was like a scout in foreign lands, seeking weaknesses of any kind that he could report back or take advantage of himself. Not simply a soldier on a conquering war path, but someone looking for any potential means of domination, including economical, cultural and societal. His people played the long game, wars of conquest only began when the battle was already won. This paladin was oathed to a god, but that god was the king. Or rather, the king was worshiped as if a god.
I’m a fan of the crown oath too, I always saw it as the non- peaceful redemption. An “I’d die for my allies!” Kind of guy.