Paladin Sacred Oath: Oath of the Crown 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

An Arthurian knight embodies courage, loyalty, and chivalry. Oath of the Crown can fall into this camp, empowering a character to take up the tenants of courage and law. Alternatively, it works great as a zealous warrior blindly following the rule of a tyrant and carrying out their evil without question. This leaves it open to work on a wide spectrum of characters centered around law and order, which I’m a huge fan of thematically.

Beyond flavor, Oath of the Crown takes the paladin's typical protector archetype and narrows it down to be as chivalrous as possible. It's like a hybrid version of Vengeance and Redemption, but lacks a lot of big reasons to compel me towards it instead of those two.

3rd Level: Oath Spells and Channel Divinities

Command starts the Oath Spells off with a reasonable utility feature that fits beautifully into the crown attendant fantasy shouting orders. It is a bit tricky to get the most use out of, but can be a solid option in the hands of a creative player working with a pliable DM who loves saying yes to wacky ideas.
Compelled Duel feels a bit unnecessary as a spell to me, but with its cheap cost and moderate effect in niche encounters where a single threatening enemy needs to stay off of your wizard or cleric buddy, it can be a valuable Oath Spell. Once again it’s a perfect fit flavorfully for the archetype. It's a codified challenge to goad enemies into striking you instead of whoever you’re protecting.

Champion Challenge and Turn the Tide are Crown’s two Channel Divinity options. Both are bonus actions, making them incredibly easy to fit into your turn alongside attacks.

Champion Challenge mirrors Compelled Duel’s fantasy but en mass, and without imposing disadvantage on any attack rolls. In practice, it will feel more like a tool to prevent enemies from fleeing which can be challenging to make particularly effective in most fights. Many encounters will have monsters slam into players, after which movement isn’t happening all that much. 30 feet is a pretty massive area as well, making its intended job of keeping things off your friends and on you fail should you be forced to play near your allies and actually use your area-based features like Aura of Protection and Divine Allegiance.
Turn the Tide at least offers a useful tool as a short rest rechargeable Mass Healing Word that excels at getting two or more allies off of zero. This will shine brightest in groups lacking a full-caster, but even with a druid or cleric in the group with Mass Healing Word, getting a 3rd level option that doesn’t cost a spell slot is a great addition to your sheet.

5th Level: 2nd Level Oath Spells

Warding Bond and Zone of Truth are Crown’s two 2nd Level Oath Spells, and while neither has a ton of raw power, I’m a huge fan of both.

Warding Bond sets up your role as an individual protector further than even Compelled Duel does. Mechanically it will typically actually open up a backline ally to damage share with you to leverage extra hit points not always being taxed. Paladin hit points tend to matter more on average than backline party members as their the first things getting attacked. You can find it works as a fine defensive spell to set up should you want to prevent an ambush from instantly nuking your squishy warlock or druid friend. +1 AC is a great bonus on top of that, and all of this doesn’t even cost you concentration. Complicated and messy, for sure, but an interesting Oath Spell to play with.
Zone of Truth doesn’t have the same depth of complexity in terms of making it great, as its basically a giant save-based lie detector. I personally adore this feature for its flavor and social implications, but mechanically it isn’t the best at actually meaningfully affecting an interrogation or diplomatic conversation.

7th Level: Divine Allegiance

Oath of Redemption’s 7th-level feature is called Aura of the Guardian, and it does exactly what this does with a better range, which is a major bummer. Needing an ally to be literally next to you to protect them instead of 10 feet does majorly constrict movement. It’s still a reasonable way to support a less tanky ranger, monk, warlock, or melee bard ally, but it is certainly disappointing given how Aura of the Guardian is strictly better than it.

9th Level: 3rd Level Oath Spells

Aura of Vitality and Spirit Guardians are freely obtained as the Crown’s 3rd-level Oath Spells.

Aura of Vitality is trash, especially seeing as your best Channel Divinity is an area of effect bonus action heal. Needing to sink multiple actions and waste your concentration for the opportunity to heal creatures one at a time, 2d6 at a time isn’t ever going to be worth it over all of the other available healing options you have.
Spirit Guardians, on the other hand, is a reasonable concentration effect that thrives on a full-melee character. You can set it up just prior to combat and jump into a swarm of enemies to get your two attacks a turn on top of 3d8 damage to anything you’d like to damage within 15 feet of you. Concentration is a bit of a bummer on any character intending to get hit, but with a solid AC normally of 20 or higher, you can likely consistently keep this up for two to three turns which absolutely will justify the cast. If you have to spend an action on it in combat it is substantially worse, but with a 10-minute cast time you’re often going to get an opportunity to prep it prior.

13th Level: 4th Level Oath Spells

Banishment breaks some encounters in half by potentially entirely removing a threatening force of any size from the fight. Half-casters like Paladins really want their upper-level spells to have big effects at all tiers of the game, and Banishment absolutely fits the bill. Concentration once again is a bit of an issue, but often the two or three rounds you can keep this up will be enough of an action imbalance that you’re still getting a major advantage in fights against small groups of lethal enemies.
Guardian of Faith has some issues, namely that by this tier the damage it deals will feel quite a bit worse than it felt back at 7th level when clerics got access to it. 60 damage in a fixed space can have a decent impact on a fight. When set up, it will improve your damage more than a single 5d8 damage smite will assuming all the damage is dealt. Getting it set up to consistently get the damage out is harder than it looks, and as you’re getting into the upper tiers, it’ll just get harder and harder to get all the value you want out of this it.

15th Level: Unyielding Spirit

Unyielding Spirit follows in the line of boring defensive features with a reasonable, but niche, defensive feature. Advantage on saves against stuns and paralysis is great in that they’re the most debilitating conditions in the game, but they aren’t that common because of how debilitating they are. Immunity to them wouldn’t even excite me that much, but at least this would always have a high impact when those conditions showed up. You’ll be lucky if this defends you against more than a handful of stuns or paralysis effects for the remainder of the game, and even when they do pop up, advantage isn’t a guarantee you’ll still pass.

17th Level: 5th Level Oath Spells

Circle of Power and Geas are the 5th-level Oath Spells.

Circle of Power is a concentration-based area of advantage on saves tied to magical evasion. As a protector top-end fantasy, this is pretty reasonable. It is a paladin exclusive already, and your other 5th-level options aren’t great, which devalues this being an Oath Spell over a non-paladin spell, but at least it's something you’ll likely find uses for as the protector in upper-tier fights.
Geas, the other option, has no such benefit. By 17th level, a command or suffer 5d10 damage isn’t anywhere close to good enough. It is flavorfully rich, but seeing as bards, clerics, druids, and wizards have been able to do this since 9th level, I’m wildly unimpressed with it here.

20th Level: Exalted Champion

Exalted Champion closes out Oath of the Crown with an hour-long resistance to non-magical weapon damage, an aura granting allies advantage on death saves, and an aura granting you and allies advantage on Wisdom saves. Compared to most of the other paladin capstones, this is a joke.

Circle of Power grants advantage on all magical saving throws, not just wisdom, to everyone near you. Non-magical damage resistance as a 20th-level feature isn’t remotely exciting. Barbarians get this at 1st level, and Stoneskin is a 4th level spell that gives you the same benefit. Advantage on death saves is horrendous when you’ve got a built-in Mass Healing Word at your disposal as just a bonus action.

All Together

Oath of the Crown starts off okay, and only gets worse and worse. Through 13th level I’d be reasonably happy with most of my features at least, but not over the moon. Crown is majorly worsened by the existence of Oath of Redemption which has a far more interesting and better scaling suite of tools to play with.

If you want to play the Redemption duelist hybrid challenging enemies and striking first, this can be a consideration for the early tiers. If you want an Oath that delivers on a splashy top end fantasy, this isn’t it, as Unyielding Saint and Exalted Champion majorly let the option down while Divine Allegiance is a bit too tough to use consistently.

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