<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=98195.msg4281357#msg4281357">Quote from: Black Howling on 20-02-2011, 02:48:48</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">I understand how those classic ideas came about, but I'm often surprised at how honesty inflexible many people perceive and enforce them to be. Even on 3.5 the paladin was one of my favorite classes, and no matter what, I always heard from everyone they were so restrictive that after two or more tries you ended up making nothing but bob the second. What I found was that it was just an extremely advanced class tailored more toward roleplaying. The only true archetype of the paladin is the knight. Honor, Courage, Valor, and justice. No matter what these are present, and even still they remain true in the 4E version. </blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>It's mostly an old stigma carried over from older, more restrictive versions of the paladin (AD&D 2nd, mostly) who regularly and sometimes seemingly arbitrarily lost their powers (forever) for very minor things.  There's no longer a reason for people to pigeon-hole paladins into those same categories, but for people who<em>like</em>the "classic" paladin ideal they are somewhat preserved.  That's the way I like it, personally: remember the way they used to be but don't force it on people unnecessarily.<br/><br/>A 4E paladin doesn't have to fit into any discrete archetypes, really.  The number of options for one, like for most good classes, is "rapidly approaching infinity" or "effectively unlimited".  I was just listing the "classic" archetypes as a starting off point to see if there's anything there he liked the sound of, since trying to list all the possible "contemporary" archetypes is almost impossible.