D&D 5E is very easy to hack. Here’s one example.

When I started my Divine Council campaign, we were using the pathfinder system which I liked a little better than D&D 3.5 (which is to say, not very much). We did about 20 sessions and the PCs have reached 7th level. And then we switched to 5E, not without some tinkering.

Long story short, Guillaume’s character in pathfinder, Bertone the Inquisitor, had a weird thing going on after he’d killed a NPC semi-villain, a blind Shadow Sorcerer.

This led to his converted « shadow paladin » in 5E. Here’s how we did it:

• Paladin: oath of vengeance
• Remove lay on hands class feature
• Remove all of the paladin’s auras class features
• Remove all healing spells from spells list
• Gain Monk’s Ki class feature
• Gain Shadow Arts from Monk’s Way of Shadow subclass features

As a result of these choices, we had this character who was pretty much shadowjump-smiting everything that posed any kind of threat, to the seemingly great delight of Guillaume. If that sounds powerful, that’s because it was. But keep in mind that he couldn’t buff or heal his allies like a normal paladin would have, so I never saw it as unbalanced. Of course, the fact that the party had a second « true » paladin in its rank meant that it was a win-win situation…