LogFAQs > #896666683

Also, continuing on the subject of RP (mostly because I don't think there's a D&D/general RPG thread going on the board at the moment), here's another question for Shadow/anyone who has a pretty good grasp of rules mechanics in 5e:


Generally speaking, when someone plays a Paladin (either in D&D or another D&D-inspired game), we always tend to visualize that character as being a massive, armored tank (it's even classified as one of the Defender roles in 4e, where characters were divided into categories based on their role on the battlefield, whether Tank/DPS/crowd control/etc). Even in games that have a "Paladin-by-a-different-name" class, they still tend to go with this assumption (like in Diablo III, where the Crusader class is built like a house at the start and is wearing 437 tons of metal once the upper-tier armors become available). They also tend to wield massive weapons, like two-handed greatswords or giant battleaxes). In spite of the fact that actual, real world "Paladins" (ie, the honor guard of Charlemagne) - if they were ever real at all - would have been wearing armor closer to Roman legions than medieval knights. We're just too memetically wedded to the idea of "Paladin = massive holy knight in Quadruple Plate Armor".

But is it possible to make a "lighter" Paladin build in 5e D&D that is anything other than completely suboptimal? Paladins technically have all Armor Proficiencies after all, which should make them as effective with light armor as they are the heaviest plate. Could someone make a Dex-build Paladin relying more on dodging rather than tanking, wearing light armor, and using a Dex-based finesse weapon like a fencing blade or scimitar, rather than wearing a schoolbus and wielding a three-handed doomclub? Maybe using something like a buckler or targe as an off-hand AC booster, or even a main-gauche type of secondary weapon that can alternatively boost AC or allow for bonus attacks?

Could someone build a functional Paladin along those lines (with or without feats or a bit of DM fudging in certain aspects), or would it inevitably be a gimped build with no real combat viability and generally a liability to the team as a whole? ARE light armor and Dex-build weapons actually viable for significant damage in normal melee classes, or are the rules as written basically a "Go as big as your class allows or go home" sort of scenario?

Because it seems like a cool mental image to have a "Warrior of God" sort of character who doesn't show up looking like a medieval knight as much as in a more swashbuckle-y sort of overcoat and "normal" clothes (sort of like the Three Musketeers or Will Turner in the later Pirates of the Caribbean movies), who is still calling down holy power and smiting you with their blade and calling upon their god to heal the innocent or curse the wicked. Or something like the modern stereotype of "Dervish-as-holy-warrior" (which is blatantly inaccurate, but still), with robes and blades and prayers to Allah (or insert-god-here).


As a tangential side-note while talking about builds and Armor Proficiencies, if "going as big as possible is always the best choice" IS how the rules tend to work, wouldn't it be a good idea for every magic user class to take a single level of Fighter or Paladin to get the heavy armor proficiency, and thus become a spellcasting tank with an insane AC rather than a glass cannon? The rules-as-written seem to suggest that would be a completely valid thing to do, even if it is sort of power-gamer-y (meaning some groups and DMs would shit on a player for doing it). Why wear robes with an AC of like 12 (if you're lucky) when you can be wearing full plate and have an AC of 18?


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family