The fiend sneered and taunted the paladin of conquest. “Tell me, when you pray to your war goddess, does she ever answer?” The paladin replied with grim determination as he advanced on his foe. “Not even once. No god has ever spoken to me.” The fiend laughed a cruel hiss at the paladin’s apparent crisis of faith. “Then how do you know she favors you? How do you know she exists at all?” Without missing a step, the paladin continued to close the distance on the fiend, boxing it into a corner within the dungeon’s stone walls. “I realized long ago that it doesn’t matter what I believe. The goddess doesn’t speak to me because when I lift my shield and drive my blade through my enemies, she speaks to the whole world and I am her voice. And you and I are about to worship her together.” With his last words, the paladin swung his sword at the fiend as its claws lashed out at his face.
I guess a paladin really can serve a god he's not convinced he even believes in.
I'm still debating the idea of a paladin that can make an oath to himself/philosophy so long as the player acknowledged that it came from a God. But isn't the whole deal of warlocks and clerics, is that they get their powers from higher deities. The cleric even gets the feature of divine intervention where they ask their God for help. Wouldn't that mean that having a God is needed to play cleric?
A patron or god is not mechanically required at all. It is an easy story element to function as the source of power, but a universe of magic could easily exist without them. A Cleric could be a Priest of "Love", "Fate", or "Death" - just serving those universal and divine concepts rather than any specific god, and with power flowing from "the heavens". A Warlock could be bound to "the Flames", "the Feywild", "the Void", or whatever - again no entity required. The mechanics work either way. You don't even need to understand the philosophy behind the link to power yet - let that understanding develop during the game. Watch and listen as the paladin describes their Oath and how the power feels as it flows through them. Maybe eventually a god could claim to be the source. Maybe the source is purely internal. Enjoy the ride.
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The fiend sneered and taunted the paladin of conquest. “Tell me, when you pray to your war goddess, does she ever answer?” The paladin replied with grim determination as he advanced on his foe. “Not even once. No god has ever spoken to me.” The fiend laughed a cruel hiss at the paladin’s apparent crisis of faith. “Then how do you know she favors you? How do you know she exists at all?” Without missing a step, the paladin continued to close the distance on the fiend, boxing it into a corner within the dungeon’s stone walls. “I realized long ago that it doesn’t matter what I believe. The goddess doesn’t speak to me because when I lift my shield and drive my blade through my enemies, she speaks to the whole world and I am her voice. And you and I are about to worship her together.” With his last words, the paladin swung his sword at the fiend as its claws lashed out at his face.
I guess a paladin really can serve a god he's not convinced he even believes in.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
A patron or god is not mechanically required at all. It is an easy story element to function as the source of power, but a universe of magic could easily exist without them. A Cleric could be a Priest of "Love", "Fate", or "Death" - just serving those universal and divine concepts rather than any specific god, and with power flowing from "the heavens". A Warlock could be bound to "the Flames", "the Feywild", "the Void", or whatever - again no entity required. The mechanics work either way. You don't even need to understand the philosophy behind the link to power yet - let that understanding develop during the game. Watch and listen as the paladin describes their Oath and how the power feels as it flows through them. Maybe eventually a god could claim to be the source. Maybe the source is purely internal. Enjoy the ride.