| iamtheDMgetovait |
To start with I will admit that paladins as a class annoy me and I do have an instant dislike of them, I guess its my nature.
But for the game I have decided to run (initially as 4th ed till I read it and found out how much it sucked, so we decided to try out pathfinder) I created a whole new world from scratch. Lot of this world is still under construction but for paladins we have had a few interesting conversations which could as far as I'm concerned take them to a new level.
For starters I don't like that palidins are ment to be lawful good. As far as I'm concerned this makes paladins more or less the same. They should have a set of goals codes something that defines them and their personality and alignment be it lawful good, chaotic evil or any other. One way of doing this was to tie paladins in to domains in one way or another. (Similar to the champions from arcana unearthed) this could lead to one person playing a paladin that was chaotic neutral and a beacon of destruction. While another could be the lawful good paladin of protection.
the choice of domain could lead to many different abilities and varieties of paladin like what you did with the sorceror. To top it off you would not even need to tie the paladin in with any god, but if they chose to worship they could quickly find themselves a god that shared smilar tenents to themselves.
The other idea was to completly take paladins away for the gods and tie them and their powerd into the different planes. For example a lawful evil paladin would draw power from the nine hells and a chaotic evil paladin would draw power from the abyss. These two paladins would have a similar set of morals but a completly differwnt way of approaching it and much like their devil and demon allies they would probably find themselves at conflict and may even be part of the blood war. This would be similar for lawful good, and chaotic good paladins and each group would have access to different abilities and powers. We also talked about keeping the restriction to those four alignments as they are the four extremes and much like within the plaines the cretures from these alignments are more active within the minds of the populace as they are the creatures and beings you hear about, while the creatures and beings from the other alignment keep a low profile and prefer to get the job done away from the lime light. This could help the DM make some very interesting paladins that players don't get to play and may be hard for the pary to understand.
Sorry that it is so long but I felt that as someone who dislike paladins, the discusions we had one the two aformentioned ideas had me keen to play a paladin in one of these forms. Cheers for reading and if you like the idea let me know