The Paladin Guessing Game
The Trolley Problem's second cousin
Paladin is a contentious class. There are many reasons for this, but most boil down to how paladins fall. I’ve written before about my thoughts on paladins and how their deontological nature is difficult for modern audiences, who generally take Moral Relativism as their default world-view, however, when the game was created most people would have believed morality was objective, and that it was Christian Morality (as an aside, this is primarily why “only christians can play Dungeons and Dragons” rings true). But now I want to expand on that, and do some complaining about Baldur’s Gate 3 (and computer referees in general).
In Baldur’s Gate 3, becoming an Oathbreaker is treated as a diegetic subclass choice. You do something to break your Oath and then are inducted into the Oathbreakers by a clearly evil being. Oathbreakers being completely stupid aside, as that’s 5e’s fault not BG3’s, breaking your oath is a very strange affair. I am about 20 hours into my play through with my wife and sister-in-law and have not broken my oath, despite making at least two choices that should have. Those being my party sparing the Hag, and me refusing to give up the vampire to the monster hunter. The first I was not the lead character, so it sort of makes sense. The game allows that if you are not the player making decisions, there’ nothing you can do to influence them. So you really shouldn’t be punished if your party face is doing evil. This is a concession that comes from the limitations of the video game medium. At the table, a paladin can easily interrupt conversations such as that and attack the Hag, but here you are trapped in a cut-scene if you want to hear the conversation. The second case is a little more concerning. Vampires are evil, and I actively chose to keep one alive after seeing him attack a party member in a previous cut-scene and being told said vampire had attacked a caravan of refugees. Maybe I am missing 5e lore and vampire spawn are not evil, and this is another instance of the tired “see the monster hunter was actually bad tee-hee” trope. I’ve not seen the end of the quest line so I don’t know for sure. Either way, these things rubbed me the wrong way, so I went digging into the mechanics of Oathbreaking.
What I found shocked me. Well not really, I had kind of suspected this system was in place. As far as I can tell, only certain events interact with your Oath at all. Though certain actions will cause you to fall at all times, such as backstabbing a non-hostile enemy without talking them first (this is good, such behavior is no befitting a paladin). The actions I generally understand, they are not things I would do while playing a paladin, so I am under no risk of falling there. It’s the events that are screwy. There’s no clear consensus on which ones affect which Oaths. But not every choice has a chance of making you fall, but the ones that do are not easily guessed at. This is again, a limitation of the medium. There are a metric tonne of dialog scenes in BG3, making sure that every single one of them has a chance of affecting a paladin would be a ludicrous task. But it does feel weird that most choices are empty and don’t actually matter, when I should really feel as though most choices have me, and by extension my character, choosing between doing what is right and what he might want to do. But instead, I get to hang out with the Trolley Problem’s cousin, and guess at what choices even matter.
“But you should treat every choice as though it matters” I hear the chorus chime. Yes, that’s true, and I do. But once you’ve had to redo the same dialog tree several times because 4 goblins made mince-meat of your party each time, the mind wanders and options are tried. It’s the nature of a video game with the constraint of saving at all. There is no agency because the choices don’t actually matter, and I know they don’t matter because I’ve had to do the same conversation three times and chose the bad options the last time just to see if anything was different. This does not happen at the table, because a TPK does not end the game the way it does in a video game. That party might end but that’s all. There’s not loading to right before the conversation that starts the fight no matter what you say. There’s just the conversation and maybe the fight.
I’m rambling and ranting so let’s stop here. There’s no lesson, except that I believe this is further proof that computer referee’s will never be a thing, even with advances in A.I. There is simply too much variation and nuance to sitting down to role-play that a computer can never match. So play with your friends, play with strangers, play a solo game if you have to. It’s all better than a video game.
Sail On,
-ShockTohp