[Poll] Blackguard: base class or prestiege class?

[Maiyannah]

One thing I'm considering changing:

Right now Blackguard is a prestiege class in keeping with tabletop, but this is .. weird to me. It really feels like its being a prestiege class is unneccesary, and its basically an evil-coded paladin type.

Please let me know your thoughts.

[Ouroboros]

So, Blackguard. As it's written in 3.x and NWN, the class is heavily incentivized to be built upon the concept of the Fallen Paladin. Mechanically it imparts additional benefits and narratively it's a well worn storyline of the oathbreaker Paladin. What this means in practice is that disproportionately people only ever engage with the class in the narrow context of it being a Fallen Paladin.

Personally I would rather Blackguard be recontextualised narratively to just be a catch-all class for the role of malevolent martial; the Hellknight orders from Pathfinder are generally a model I like for this kind of thing, being exclusively interested in the pursuit of law to the exclusion of morality which means you get a lot of evil behaviour as a result. Making the above change, I'd be fine with it also becoming a Base Class. The sole thing I'd change mechanically is rejigging Summon Fiend, since in Ravenloft any Planar creature is a radically powerful being due to Reality Wrinkles, etc, to say nothing of the idea of being able to forcibly abduct Fiends into Ravenloft at-will, but that's an optional measure.

TL;DR, make Blackguard a base class, recontextualise it to be the Evil/Lawful opposite to the Paladin instead of being largely tied to Fallen Paladins.

[Maiyannah]

A fundamental problem I find expressed here is that we're starting at level 2, essentially, 5 is the goal by the time the "tutorializing" is done, so it is very conceivable that a character of that kind of power has already fallen. Moreover, evil knights are going to have orders too - are they all just fighters? Does Bane/the Lawgiver not give his knights divine power? I find it a bit credulous, especially in Ravenloft, that only the forces of good get special treatment in the form of the kind of powers that Paladins get, to me personally.

[Ouroboros]

My immediate thought is to entirely unentangle Paladin from Blackguard; Fallen Paladins receiving different advancement features etc if they take BG levels could instead just be done by awarding a series of feats to specific Fallen Paladin PCs, instead of requiring them to take BG levels. That in turn frees up Blackguard to become the evil counterpart to Paladin.

The historical measure for anyone wanting to do Paladin, But Evil™ was to just be a Cleric instead. That is also flawed however and largely is used as a stopgap. Other ways I've seen this approached is to de-classify Paladin and Blackguard, make them instead be classes that are contextualised by the given alignment and awarded relevant class features/advancement based on that alignment. Some places do this by just calling them Divine Champions instead. However this cuts out an important niche for Ravenloft native Paladins, whom are the exceptional amongst the exceptional.

There's no true perfect solution to this dilemma but my initial impulse is as above, making Fallen Paladins be functional entirely within the Paladin class instead of relying on taking other classes after the fact. This would however necessitate extra work in figuring out how exactly to achieve that outcome and then implementing it.

[Talis]

Old thread I know. I like Blackguard as a separate class. I'm biased, as it is probably my favourite class after Cleric.

Personally I also like the CG/LE/CE Paladin options from 3.5. They fit things like Baneite Paladins well.

[Maiyannah]

Yeah, I think we'll have Blackguard as a seperate base class.

Paladin can be any non-evil. Blackguard can be any non-good. They will be different flavours, but I'll flesh out a more different blackguard after we get past some present development milestones.