Why Isn't Every Bride A Paladin?

26 May, 2025

In Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games, paladins are empowered by their oaths. It's tempting to say that the very force of that promise is what magically shapes the world (I'm sure we've all seen the reddit or tumblr posts to that effect), but I'm not sure that can be true. At least, that can't be the whole explanation. People make binding promises all the time. Some of these are small, like a commitment to repay a loan or to meet a friend somewhere. Others, however, are weighty and life-altering: conspirators swear each other to secrecy; godparents promise to raise their godchildren in the faith; and betrothed make wedding vows. If making an oath, seriously and earnestly, was enough to make a person a paladin, every bride would be one, and so would every groom. But not every bride is a paladin, nor is every groom, so an oath, by itself, is not enough. What else, then, makes a paladin?

Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash (cropped)

Any answer to this question will have to account for a number of facts. By facts I do not so much mean things that are always or necessarily canonical, or things that are published in the Player's Handbook or anything like that.¹ What I mean by facts is those ideas which I understand to be held in common by most ttrpgs with paladins and which to me seem indispensable to the trope and how it fits into high fantasy game settings, or which give players options to explore interesting characters within that conceptual space. In other words, by facts I mean ideas about paladins that I do not want to do without. Your list may therefore be a little different, but the facts I need to explain are as follows.

1. Paladin orders reliably produce paladins. In various high fantasy settings, there are chivalric orders whose initiates, after catechism and training, swear oaths and duly receive the usual suite of paladin abilities. Although some orders might discriminate based on background, race kinship, or gender, in principle these oaths should be effective regardless of who makes them. (These orders do not need to be chivalric, of course; a crime family's oaths of loyalty and secrecy could also fit in this mould.)

2. Any oath can produce a paladin. Even if many paladins have taken an oath as part of a chivalric order, some made a vow spontaneously and still became a paladin. The classic example is a vow of vengeance made by the heat of a great injustice, but I would also want to create space for wedding vows or other oaths of interpersonal devotion to become a paladin's covenant. Some brides might be paladins. This is important to me because I would not want to limit the kind of promise a player builds a paladin around, so long as it fits either the letter or the spirit of a paladin subclass allowed at the table. The form of the oath cannot truly be what matters.

3. Most oaths do not produce paladins, regardless of how strongly they are made or how carefully they are kept. Any kind of oath could make a person a paladin, but most people who make them do not become paladins. Most people make wedding vows, and most of those people truly mean those vows, and keep them, too. There's a kind of cynic who says only one in a hundred wedding vows are true, in some sense, but that's obviously a false romanticism. Most people make and keep promises, and most people are not paladins.

4. A person who makes an oath can become a paladin unwittingly. I want to preserve the opportunity for a player to make a character who did not mean to become a paladin, or who maybe even doesn't know they are one. Not every person who swears vengeance while his village burns hopes to thereby be empowered; not every knight who pledges fealty to her queen expects her sword to flash with light as a result. Nonetheless, sometimes he is empowered anyway, and sometimes her sword shines in the dark. The only intention that matters here is the intention to keep the promise. One need not intend to become a paladin.

5. Dull people can become paladins, and people with strong personalities can make and keep oaths without becoming paladins. Some game systems require that paladins have a high Charisma (or Wisdom) ability score, or similar. Others, like 5th edition, do not. They might encourage it, but they do not require it. More importantly, plenty of charismatic characters make and keep promises without becoming paladins. Charisma can be neither necessary nor sufficient for an oath-making person to become a paladin, though in some systems it affects how well a paladin can use their powers.

6. Similar oaths result in similar abilities. Although all paladins might heal or might stir courage in their allies, some of a paladin's powers differ based on what they're sworn to do.

7. Failing to keep an oath can cause a paladin to fall. A paladin who strays far enough from the strictures of their oath will lose access to at least some of their abilities. Those abilities are not lost forever, though; penance and redemption will bring them back.

8. In some cases, a broken oath can still empower a paladin. Not all paladins fall the same. Those (generally evil) paladins who are called oathbreakers do not lose their magic, though some of their abilities change. Breaking an oath in a particular way seems to give the paladin a particular kind of power.

Any answer that accounts for all of these facts is a good enough answer, though I prefer some over others. There isn't a right answer, of course, though there are wrong ones for my purposes, in that some answers do not account for all of the facts laid out above. I do not pretend to have thought of every possible explanation for all of these facts; the ones I have come up with appear below.

Explanation 1: Only some people have the capacity to become paladins, by some indiscernible quality. Sorcerers are born with potential, or acquire it accidentally; by tapping their potential, they can cast spells that others might only be able to learn through long study or true devotion. Most people do not have this potential because they have no dragon ancestor and have mishandled no fractured orbs. Similarly, maybe paladins have all been born with some latent magic that they access by binding themselves to a promise, much like a monk can control their own life force through their ascetic disciplines. This power is not simply charisma, though it often gives the paladin's personality force and vibrance, as people unconsciously react to that power. In another life, they might have become a sorcerer, but instead they access their power through the oath that made them a paladin. People without this latent magic, of course, have nothing to access, and cannot become paladins regardless of how much they bind themselves by word and deed. By the same token, a paladin who stops binding themselves to their powers loses them, regardless of how great their potential might be.

One trouble with this explanation is that it's hard to square it with the first fact in the list above: anyone who joins a paladin order can become a paladin. Strict determinism can resolve this problem: only those with the potential to become a paladin will actually choose to join such an order. For some reason, those without that potential will never even try. I am fine with strict determinism, but I suspect most people will not be.² Even so, I don't like this explanation, on mostly aesthetic grounds: first, I think it is more interesting if anyone can become a paladin, though most do not; and second, I am more interested in stories that acknowledge how all of our abilities ultimately come from others than I am in stories that suggest our power comes from ourselves. (Now, I know you still can tell a story about gifts with this explanation, because that potential still had to come from somewhere, but I worry that this version too easily obscures this truth.)

Explanation 2: All paladins' powers are continually sustained by external forces. Despite the way some people play them, warlocks' powers are not continually sustained by their patrons (at least, not in 5th edition); instead, patrons teach their warlocks magical secrets in exchange for various tasks and errands. Maybe, though, paladins are what some people imagine warlocks to be, and their powers are continually sustained by an external force, so long as the paladin keeps their promises. This makes sense of paladins' common association with gods or with powerful forces of nature, and it also explains why a paladin who falls loses her abilities. In that case, an oathbreaker must have her abilities sustained by a new guarantor, perhaps a fiend or an evil god or an undead spirit. It would also explain why every bride is not a paladin: whether a bride is a paladin or not would depend on whether or not a god decided to back her wedding vows. Meanwhile, those reliable paladin orders would have patron deities who honour their covenant with that order, always empowering each new initiate who pledges their oath.

I like this explanation better, and it can adequately account for each of the facts I listed. There are some people who will dislike it because it seems important to them that paladins empower themselves, often unknowingly, through their oaths. No such thing is important to me, however, as I've already discussed, and I think any explanation that relies on paladins empowering themselves will struggle to account for all the facts I listed above (like how my previous explanation struggles to account for the first fact, about paladin orders). Still, this explanation, that powerful beings continually sustain a paladin's abilities, is not quite my favourite.

Explanation 3: All paladins receive a gift of power upon making an oath, which that oath keeps bound to them. Whether a paladin knows it or not, their oath is backed by a guarantor. It will vary from oath to oath whether that guarantor is a god or a force of nature or an arcane society's expert spell. Rather than continually sustaining the paladin's magical abilities, however, the guarantor invests the paladin with a reservoir of power, bound to their oath. Because this reservoir, which we can call the guarantee, is bound to them through the oath, the paladin both accesses it and replenishes it through the keeping of their covenant. In this way, the details of that covenant subtly shape the power granted by the guarantee. Force of personality therefore also helps a paladin use their abilities, because it helps them keep the covenant, but charimsa is not the source of their abilities, nor strictly necessary for using them. Some deities (or fiends, forces of nature, etc.) will always grant such a guarantee to initiates of their orders; other deities (or etc.) grant a guarantee unasked to any person who swears an oath that will advance their cause, whether that be vengeance, secrecy, or wedlock. A paladin who significantly breaks their vow loses access to the guarantee, even as it is still bound to them, but a paladin who changes their oath finds their magic changes as well. This is what happens to an oathbreaker. They break their initial oath in such a way that they have, in some sense, warped it into an anti-oath: a binding commitment not to keep the initial covenant. The guarantee still empowers them, but now through the original oath's inversion, reflected in the abominable nature of some of their new abilities.

I like this explanation best. Not only can it account for all of the facts above, but it can explain how people in a setting could come to believe either of the other two accounts are true. Arcanists who study paladins, on the one hand, will find reservoirs of magic power residing within paladins, and could come to the conclusion that paladins empower themselves through their oaths; of these, perhaps a few will think that paladins must be born with such latent power, like sorcerers often are. On the other hand, to clergy and prophets especially attuned to their gods, the moment those deities empower a holy knight will be palpable, and druids attuned to the wilds will perceive the same thing when a green knight makes his oath beneath the yew. There can be no question, to those with such experiences, that paladins receive their power from something greater. Another strength of this explanation is that it frees up the kind of beings that can guarantee a paladin's power; it's not hard to imagine a goddess continually sustaining a holy knight's power, but a single guarantee seems more within the capabilities of an especially advanced wizard's guild, for example. This would allow me to put in my game an arcane society that has created a great ritual to empower their sworn knights of discovery. It makes more sense to me that this would be a one-time investment, so that the archmages are not repeatedly casting their own spells in order to enable the paladins'.

Another advantage to this explanation is narrative: when a paladin turns oathbreaker, the powerful entity that guaranteed their sacred magic might be especially keen to get that gift back, whether by the paladin's death or by their redemption. That strikes me as an excellent plot hook.

This is my contribution for "On my word - Making and breaking promises, vows and oaths for RPG Blog Carnival," Panic Pillow's post at Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet for the 2025 Carnival.

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