Opustus wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 10:47 pm
Paladins and blackguards have to go through a lot of piety often due to using their divine feats. This can make things especially painful to non-war paladins/blackguards or lead to a chore of spamming Yarrow leaves if Hearth and home paladin/blackguards etc.
A way for paladins/blackguards to raise piety could be a mini-game that has them doing good and bad deeds for which they're rewarded in divine juice. This is a thread for thinking of features to this game! This is of course purely fictional if the devs aren't looking to make this kind of a change, but I thought it'd be fun to see what we could come up with. The mini-game would have the classes questing for good and evil deeds with other players on their journeys.
I'll start:
Smiter: For paladin, every smitten evil target grants piety. For blackguard, any smitten target grants piety, regardless of alignment.
Redeemer/Punisher: For paladin, using lay on hands on a wounded ally or against an undead grants piety. For blackguard, using inflict pain against an enemy or on your summon grants piety.
Cure/Poison: For paladin, recovering ability point loss from an ally grants piety. For blackguard, applying poison to a blade grants piety.
Whilst this is an interesting idea, I think one of my main concerns would be how to balence it?
The problem is that (in general terms!) Evil is Active, Agressive and Inclusive, but good is Passive, Reactive, and Exclusive.
In short Evil is 'Do what you want and start things.' But good is 'Thou Shalt Not.'
This is only of course a very rough guideline, there's lots of counter examples I'm sure, and I'm certainly not claiming that anyone not following the above modles is Doing it Wrong- but I'm speaking in
very rough, steryotypical strokes here.
To use some of the examples you put down.
Smiter: The problem with this is what you're saying is that Paladins have a 50(ish?)% chance of getting peity from smiting something. Blackguards always have a 100% chance. To put it another way - whilst it's entirely reasonable that a Paladin would get Peity for smiting devils, why should a blackguard? If Devils are evil, and killing devils is good, then isn't a Blackguard commiting a Good act by killing them?
So let's say 'Blackguards only get peity if smiting good. But that's not fair either - as whilst there are 'good' npc monsters in the module, they're pretty rare and not always very obvious. That leaves the Blackguard at a huge disadvantage.
This touches on the 'exclusive/inclusiveness'. Evil characters are free to do evil things, yes. But they're also generally free to do 'good' things. I can't remember off hand a time where people have gone 'I don't think that Blackguard is evil enough'. But lots of times when Paladins have been scrutinised.
Now this isn't some sort of RP comment - I'm mostly looking at this from a mechanics perspective. Which is to say- if this were balenced we need to find things that are not only definatly 'good' actions for a Paladin, but also definatly 'evil' for a Blackguard.
Redeemer/Punisher: Ok - this is actually fairly good and balenced. People getting injured is roughly as common as monsters needing to be hurt. Especialy if the 'redeemer' aspect works on yourself. I think it still has some of the flaws of the other two points, but in a much milder fashion, so it's probably basicaly workable.
Cure/Poison: This touches on the whole Active/Reactive issue. Again Paladins are at a disadvantage, because they can only get their peity dependent on if someone has lowered ability points. So unless they themselves are somehow doing this, they've absolutly no control over how much peity they get. But the Blackguard can go and buy as much poison as he/she likes, and then just apply it on their blade over and over again for peity (price nonewithstanding). A blackguard has a lot more control over their ability to -do- something than a Paladin has over their ability to -react- to something, as a general rule.
Again, these comments are not to be taken as 'this is how you do alignment right!' far from it! Indeed the other concern I have about this suggestion is it would lead to just these sort of judgements.
This comment is more a concern of the mechanical aspects of the matter, to make sure that they (at least roughly) fit the alignment scale, whilst also being relitivly fair.
This too shall pass.
(I now have a DM Discord (I hope) It's DM GrumpyCat#7185 but please keep in mind I'm very busy IRL so I can't promise how quick I'll get back to you.)