If you have oath of sloth,(which, btw, has to have slow on it's spell list) you have to complete the set with greed, gluttony, pride, lust, envy, wrath
Wrath is easy, you have vengeance.
Lust is easy, you have devotion.
Pride is easy, you have conquest, glory, and crown.
Greed is mildly trickier, but conquest fits.
Envy is easy you have ranger
Gluttony is…
Look I’ll be real. Making an actual homebrew class for many of these is… Kinda silly. Like I’m sure it’ll be a fun exercise for someone and it’ll give some seratonin to see that they exist.
However, the joke is with Sloth specifically. How would you make an oath, a sworn promise to uphold an ideal, of *sloth,* and still be an adventurer. The whole point of sloth is in antithesis of this.
The solution, the real use of these sin paladin concepts are not as playable options.
They should be thwarts to the player. These, are bad guys. Antagonists. If we are gonna play in the space that these seven deadly sins are in fact representations of sin, then the thought of “why are they sins” should always follow.
What makes Pride good or evil? You ask your oath of glory paladin.
What makes lust unhealthy? You as the devotion paladin
At what point is wrath wrong? You ask your vengeance paladin.
I’m sure you can play this evil or chaotic paladin in a campaign and have fun with it. But if we are playing in the mind space that the sins are evil, I think that this is the best use of them.
So sloth. What fits there. What oath speaks most closely to passivism and inaction?
Redemption. Not perfectly, it’s a specific type of redemption pally. But remember that your character isn’t going to start with a perfect understanding of their oath. Make them face the consequences of mercy. Not brutally, but make them earn “rebuke the violent.”
But actually, sloth is the real anti-paladin for ALL the oaths. Why act at all? Why make a pointless oath if you know it will come to nothing?
@wearepaladin @weareantipaladin @probablygoodrpgideas
(The real hero of this story)
Hmm. A sloth paladin, a slothadin if you will, might be what an avatar of of the Silence looks like, an antagonistic force I’m making for my own little dream RPG splat (Release Date Pending) Where those empowered by it want everything to stop.
Have you ever just wanted to turn off? Not even sleep without dreaming, just not exist so you don’t have to deal with the travails of existence. Resting, after all, implies spending that energy later. Why do that to yourself? Why subject everyone else to this world? Truly, you don’t want to even have others existing, because there’s the off chance they might make you care about existing, or perform the utterly cruel act of keeping the lights on.
As you can see, easier to make an antagonist, since you can’t stop others from making their choices, so if you really believe in inaction, you have to still commit the action of stopping them.
That sounds more like despair than sloth, but then again vices don’t fit neatly into tidy littke boxes. Often, they are interconnected.
They also are truly not very good descriptions of what makes a sin. They’re too broad to be helpful for much else than a, albeit very engaging mental exercise.
“Sloth” is a translation of “acedia,” which can be translated variously. As a deadly sin (meaning you go to Hell if you haven’t done penance reconciliation for it before dying), it has…problems:
Laziness: fits with pre-industrial societies (maybe) if you’re not pulling your weight to help make ends meet, but… that’s a stretch.
Apathy and/or despair: bleeds into depression, which the current Catholic Church has said isn’t what the sin is (since that’s a mental illness), but quite possible as an earlier interpretation.
And there are others, but they also kinda bleed into depression when not meaning “not fulfilling your obligations (labor, attention to god, etc.).” All in all, I think it’s a poor choice for a list of bad things which, if done without repenting, will land you in eternal punishment, but that’s me.
I mean, I think the list is problematic in general. But that’s getting into theology and church history, which I could do (trained as I am) but don’t want to (as a pagan running a D&D blog). The point is, sloth has indeed at times included despair.
I don't know all that much about actual Catholic Lore ™️ but I've always seen the 7 Sins as the extremes of what they represent. Most of them that's easy, but Sloth is so open to interpretation I think it gets muddled.
Like it's not a sin to be a doctor use your PTO because work is long and stressful. However, seeing someone actively suffering and choosing apathy when you could have helped is sinful. Building a bridge people will cross, but knowingly cutting corners, then within the year it fails with people on it. Sloth is laziness and apathy inflated to "Big Evil" proportions, but most importantly I think it's a consciously made choice.
Back to fantasy, for Paladins it's a conscious choice to take an Oath. It doesn't just reflect personality but action and conviction.
And when a Paladin Falls it's a conscious choice, it's a sin against their Oath and it was likely some obviously Evil action. 5e's Oathbreaker is kinda already reflective of a Slothful Paladin, abandoning their original goals and ambitions for something clearly darker. They're so far gone from their original path they don't even care to strike a new Oath; now just full of hate and gloom and darkness.
In the end though I think wearestormcaller is right, the 7 Sins are just an interesting mental exercise. Especially when used in fantasy, since their so flexible of concepts. You can break them into something meta like what wearepaladin did or just take them at face value and make a very obviously Evil villain.
