Hey Folks!
I know the paladin is far from OP (especially with casters in play), but I've always thought it would do better as a prestige class than a base one; I quite like the narrative of someone who starts mundane but gains great power for their faith.
So I've been wondering, has anybody ever tried to do this? I was thinking of making it similar to the sentinel (another divine prestige class) and the Mantis warrior (who has 4-level casting). What do you guys think? I might post up a write-up if nobody has tried before.
I know the paladin is far from OP (especially with casters in play), but I've always thought it would do better as a prestige class than a base one; I quite like the narrative of someone who starts mundane but gains great power for their faith.
The Chosen One archetype is a good fit for that narrative if you want to pull it off with a Paladin, by the way.
There was a 3.5 paladin prestige class. You can probably find it online. You needed divine casting, martial weapon proficiency, and some bab to qualify. In the class, you got a spell casting level every other level. In the end, you'd probably have more than 4 spell levels by miss out on a couple of paladin things. It was a reasonable alternative.
Here is the prestige class Ciaran Barnes is talking about.
There's also versions of the bard and ranger.
The 5e paladin works like this. You're not really a true paladin until 3rd level. Until then, you're just a martial slowly being influenced by a deity until you finally become that deity's champion. You can even start as an evil paladin and become a good paladin at 3rd level. An interesting concept, but I really did not like how they did it.
In PF, I think a better idea is making it a fighter archetype where they eventually get paladin spells.