How to Play an Oath of Vengeance Paladin in Dungeons & Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the grim hollow players guide which is now available on kickstarter grim hollow offers a handbook for creating gritty characters in a dark fantasy setting completely 5th edition compatible the book is packed with new character building options including rules for blood magic spells and all new subclasses for every single 5e class best of all we are contributing to the book by creating several of the stretch goals subclasses so the better the campaign does the more we get to contribute we've got some really amazing ideas that we've been working on that we can't wait to share with you we've got the madness domain cleric an insane devotee of the eldritch old gods to check out grim hollow and more of the work that we're doing for the book follow the links in the description below to find the campaign on kickstarter and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for dungeon masters and guides for players we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are talking about a class and subclass near and dear to both of our hearts as we have both played one to high levels in each other's campaigns and that is the oath of vengeance paladin the relentless and somewhat dark soul tainted knight that is willing to do anything to battle the forces of evil we're gonna take a look at feet spells and other character options that will allow you to make the most of bringing justice to your enemies as you can imagine we've got a lot to say about this class so let's get rolling so monday and i both played an oath of vengeance paladin to pretty high levels in each other's campaigns and we both had a great time doing it monty what were your favorite things about playing oath of vengeance paladin well my oath of vengeance paladin lance silverwheel was cocky arrogant always thought he was right and was willing to do anything in the name of justice and i loved playing a character that could lay the smackdown in battle but also be an awesome character to roleplay the combination of heavy armor weapons mastery spell casting and the charisma to be able to be a party face and engage successfully as a leader in your party was really really satisfying i felt playing my other vengeance paladin that i was a man of action glory is there vengeance is there we're going to get it and it was great i had a couple trixie elements to that character and what was fun about them was that i was willing to lie and do some shady things in order to do the right thing and i really enjoyed that element of the character that it was kind of like what am i willing to do to win and i liked playing with that from a role-playing perspective what did you enjoy about your oath of vengeance paladin so my oath of vengeance paladin dragged in the half orc vengeance paladin uh i really enjoyed kind of tapping into this idea of a character who was tormented and didn't necessarily choose the paladin life the paladin life chose him he was left i think what was it a demonic cult ravaged his home village and kidnapped his daughter and so he ended up going to jail once he escaped that town because he was going around trying to find this cult and beating people up looking for answers an angel visited him in prison and was like you're a paladin now go kill demons and he was like yes please and it was really bringing that that sort of element of not really a holy man on a holy quest but a guy that was just looking to slaughter his way through demons to find his family it was very much like um like the taken movie series i got to play that guy i have a set of skills and i'm gonna come and find my daughter and kill everybody who stands between me and them there were some moments in that campaign where i'm pretty sure we were pitted up against a large cr rating demon and somebody cast haste on dragdon somebody else uh buffed me in another way and then somebody debuffed the enemy and i used my top level spell and did like 200 damage in one turn to this to this demon and it was moments like that that really made the vengeance paladin stand out i also specifically remember missy stepping all over the place there was just so much utility and fun to have with a paladin that was just a force to be reckoned with i think another thing that i enjoy about the oath of vengeance paladin is it's pretty tanky you're pretty tough between lay on hands and the paladin's ain't aura abilities getting heavy armor so you can take the punishment that you meet out and just like all paladins the fact that you can go overboard that you can dump all your spells and abilities into a few rounds of attack and do the damage that you can you get that the defensive capabilities of the paladin the healing and utility powers of their other spells plus the leadership and everything so if you really want to play that character that gets to really play in all arenas of the game the oath of vengeance paladin has it there really isn't anything you cannot do in an interesting way with the oath of vengeance paladin i think let's talk about some of the abilities that you get at third level when you swear your oath of vengeance you're going to get two new channel divinity powers that um your both of vengeance paladin can use absurd enemy and vow of enmity objur enemy allows you to frighten an enemy actually almost paralyzing them with fear because their speed becomes zero well frightened in this way but i think vow of enmity is the one that both kelly and i used a lot more why is that vow of enmity allows you to pick a target that's within 10 feet of you and gain advantage on attacks against it for the next minute which basically means when you step into a combat encounter you can call out your vow towards the biggest threat on the board and then just go to town on it at third level you're also going to gain the oath spells and this is one of the best spell lists that a paladin gets it is the best spell list i would say that a paladin what is even happening with these spells because we have bane and hunter's mark we have misty step we have haste we have banishment and dimension door and then at the top of it all we have hold monster and scrying so you have spells on your spell list that if you want to you can set yourself up for your next turn by paralyzing your target with hold monster and then dropping a bunch of crits on them in the next turn you can banff around teleporting because you get both misty step and dimension door and to top all of this off as if it wasn't enough you get haste and an oath of vengeance paladin hasted using all of their attacks now with smites is insane it's it's combat ending if you decide to nuke an enemy towards the end of the campaign like watch out if you're in a demon campaign and you have a high-level oath of vengeance paladin who just decides to cast haste on themselves run in swear their vow of enmity and then unleash for a few rounds with using all the rest of their spell slots on smites uh good luck trying to hold a line against that force uh this this spell list not only gives you better combat capabilities battlefield control but also when you pepper something in like scrying you're giving the paladin utility yeah beyond a lot of what other paladins get this makes the vengeance paladin such a powerhouse not only in combat but in all aspects yeah dimension door is incredible utility misty step is incredible utility both in and out of combat at seventh level you gain relentless avenger which means that if you hit a creature with an opportunity attack you can now move up to half your movement uh pretty useful for tracking enemies down and stopping them where they run this came up a lot in both of our campaigns as our characters because i took polar master and you took sentinel with your paladin this gives a lot of crazy battlefield control and mobility to the oath of engines paladin at 15th level you gain soul of vengeance meaning that the enemy that you targeted with your vow of enmity if they make an attack you get to now target them with your reaction to also make an attack against them just piling on more of the amazing attacks that your paladin gets to make if you can't tell already the oath of vengeance paladin is really good at bringing down a single hard target if you do happen to make it to 20th level and get the avenging angel option uh you're now going to be able to fly and you have an aura around you that frightens targets that enter it so now you're just even crazier you're now a flying house of destruction just moving around the battlefield terrifying and murdering everything in your path now this is a 20th level ability and admittedly neither kelly nor is campaigns got that far before the campaign ended still awesome ability to think about so with all that on the table let's talk about actually putting together a build for an oath of vengeance paladin both kelly and i have created the vengeance paladins and we've included links to our character sheets for our characters in the description below so you can check out lance and dragdon if you want to follow along but uh for both kelly and i i think the the first port of call really was what to do with ability scores and what ancestry that we selected i went with the half orc because first of all it can get up if it's reduced to zero hit points and the half orc also does extra damage on a crit i wanted to really double down on the powerhouse that was the vengeance paladin so i went with the half orc because it just made me more resilient and more punchy in combat now i on the other hand played a variant human with my oath of vengeance paladin because i wanted to take polar master right away at level one and i don't regret that choice for a moment there's a compelling case to be made for dwarves of any stripe as well as half elves um but with the increased flexibility that we have now with ability scores i think there's a lot of open-ended ideas that we could go with with the uh vengeance paladin in general when it comes to ability scores it is a little bit of a tough choice it's an obvious choice but it's still a tough one first of all you are a damage dealing monster meaning that you probably want to put strength as your top choice you are going to be dishing out a few spells which rely on your charisma so that's going to be a top choice you also are going to be a front line combative both in your spell casting which might have a few concentration spells and your ability to stand up on the front line you're going to want constitution so you do have three ability scores that you do have to worry about in my personal opinion i would actually take less in charisma and rely more on my abilities in combat because things like misty step or dimension door and some of the other really utility sort of spells don't rely on a saving throw from the enemy and i actually made it through the entire campaign without using a lot of the hold monsters and things like that and still had a great time so for me i focused very heavily on strength and constitution with my third highest ability score being in charisma if you were doing point by i would probably put a 15 in my strength and a 14 in my constitution and my charisma both the vengeance paladins wearing heavy armor don't gain a lot from having a good dexterity score and don't gain a lot from having a good wisdom or intelligence and you also have to remember that your aura of protection is going to compensate for the bad wisdom intelligence and dexterity that you have as far as saving throws go so again it from a straight like maximized point of view make sure that you have that good charisma score the problem with the ability scores is also that paladins really want to take feats and where you want to put your ability score increases and when you want to take feats is actually an agonizing problem for a paladin so right away when i was able to take my first feat i took great weapon master because i really wanted to double down on the power he had by swinging his sword that was his big thing was swinging his sword and smashing it into enemies so the plus 10 to damage right off the bat the next option i took was to up my strength as high as it could go and then after that i took sentinel to kind of finish it off and then from there i think i if we got any higher i think towards the end of the campaign i might have added a bit more to either my constitution or charisma um but then that was about it yeah so for me i played a variant human so i kicked things off right away with polar master then i took great weapon master then i ended up i actually ended up getting a belt of giant strength so i ended up maxing my charisma because i had the belt of giant strength compensating for my strength so i didn't end up increasing that um if i hadn't have gotten that belt i probably would have increased my strength or i might have considered multi-classing to hex blade warlock [Laughter] um which is a very tempting thing to do with another vengeance paladin uh so that you can actually just dump everything into charisma and have the really good spell casting and their really good attacks as well you're not that by default proficient in constitution saving throws and you do love concentrating on spells like haste and so you may want to consider taking warcaster or resilient constitution you wouldn't be remiss for selecting these i just don't think i would ever choose them over a great weapon master and polar master with the limited amount of options the vengeance paladin again is very much a combat oriented paladin so it does kind of lean itself towards those combat oriented feats rather than the spell casting feats again there are some amazing spells on the spell list and some amazing paladin spells but i can tell you my spell slots were best used for smites during that whole campaign i only cast i think i cast misty step a few times and i cast i i think i took fine steed and cast that a few times but really beyond that the spell casting was great but i had much more fun running in and dealing hundreds of points of damage we also had the benefit of having other spell casters in the party who had things like haste and other such things and they learned very quickly to cast that on the paladin and step back and let the wrecking ball do its job yeah and that is one of the valid things with the oath of vengeance paladin is that a lot of the things that gains like advantage on attack roles and its own spell list can be somewhat superseded if you do have someone in your party who can cast these spells that said we shouldn't sleep on the paladin spells because there are really good spells on there and i know several times in the campaign even though we had a cleric we had six people in the party and so often times myself and the cleric would both cast bless so everybody was on the under the effects of bless because getting blessed as a d4 bonus to my attack roles on top of the great weapon master penalty but then the bonus from oath of entity totally swung the accuracy equation in the other direction between the fact that i took polar master i had misty step and i was always using my vow of entity when i could there really wasn't any room for me to use my bonus action for the paladin smite spells so i very rarely prepared those i did much like you did kelly i would set up bless i would use misty step and find steed when i needed to and then otherwise i would use my spell slots to smite enemies and that is actually one of the hindrances i would say of the vengeance paladin is that if you do build them with things like polar master and other such things that are adding to the amount of things they can do with their reaction or their bonus action you actually have to weigh those options quite a bit however there's nothing wrong with having a lot of options because i was always able to look at my list of options and pick what was going to be best in the moment there wasn't a single combat encounter that went by that i didn't feel like the big damn hero one of the things with the oath of vengeance paladin though is that you can spend a lot of time setting yourself up for a big turn but that setup actually doesn't pay off that's actually really difficult to determine and you have to look at every combat encounter and decide am i going to charge up and use all my resources or is it better for me to just get in there and start dealing some damage it's true that when i was playing an oath of vengeance paladin there were several instances where i would lay down a bunch of stuff on my first turn pick the target i was gonna go for set it all up so that i could unleash massive attacks against them by the time i got back around to my turn the battlefield had changed the situation had changed and i had lost my chance there were a lot of times that it did pay off but there were also a number of times that it didn't i will say that at the end of the day like i was never really disappointed with my oath of vengeance paladin but there were moments taken from my personal experience the oath of vengeance paladin might be one of the most fun characters you can play in dungeons and dragons 5th edition you feel like a hero you feel like there is nothing you can't do no length you won't go to you can deal tons of damage it is so satisfying to pick up a giant fistful of dice and roll all that damage and just end a fiend this is a fun class and it is actually pretty simple for new players to grasp it despite what seems like a lot of complexities the oath of vengeance paladin was a surprise for me because i had just come off playing a wizard i had so much fun playing an oath of vengeance paladin and i specifically remember when i was playing the wizards saying i want to roll a bunch of dice and we decided that the wizard was a good option for me because of all the spells like fireball to my surprise i got to roll almost just as many dice playing an oath of vengeance paladin i remember being afraid of the religious aspect of the paladin i wasn't sure how to roleplay it properly i wasn't sure what my oath was going to be about and then when you and i started discussing it and i realized that the paladin didn't need to fit into this box not in 5th edition it was able to branch out from within that box to to many different things so the amount of fun that you can have dishing out the insane damage using your smites role playing the heck out of a paladin and even casting a few spells when necessary it's just kind of one of those all-encompassing subclasses and classes that really offers you every bit of detail you need for dungeons and dragons all the aspects of the game that you love are here in this package so this has been a look at the oath of vengeance paladin in dungeons and dragons 5th edition if you've played one and have great stories of your paladins tell us about it in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the generosity of our patreon supporters a big thank you from both of us to all of you out there on patreon if you enjoy the work that we create here on youtube please consider checking us out on our patreon page by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6 p.m eastern at twitch.tv slash dungeon underscore dudes you can find all the previous episodes of that campaign right up over here and we've got plenty more guides to the classes and subclasses of dnd 5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 220,863

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: dQNRToPBrA4

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020