How do you make a lawful good Paladin interesting or unique?

How do you make a lawful good Paladin interesting or unique?

Context.

Easy, have a personality beyond writing LG on your character sheet and calling it a day.

By making them a good character, with interesting elements to their personality beyond their profession and morality?

It really isn't that hard, and it's such a broad question it's impossible to give a more meaningful answer than that.

Be Lawful good, not lawful autistic.

Be a lawful neutral instead and be extremely zealous and call people heretics. Try to convert your team and anyone else you encounter and call them brothers

This.
Lawful good doesn't mean you must mindlessly obey all the rules all of the time.

Just play him as a normal character who has a strong Moral compass. Don't make him an autistic asshat.

Give your character a mother fuckin life man. Or be a faggot and do something retarded like be a dex paladin gnome.

>Having to type lawful good Paladin instead of just Paladin
I hate this

There's some advice I like to follow when I'm making a LG Paladin

>Find what makes him different from a LG Human Fighter
>Flesh out his interests outside of JUSTICE, DEUS VULT and the GREATER GOOD
>He should be the moral compass, not the helicopter mom or ethics teacher. If the Rogue steal, that's not his problem... and I need to come up with a reason why.

The biggest issue with paladins is when their partners' behavior is judged as if the paladin himself had done the deed. If your DM is willing to avoid that pitfall, may I suggest...

A paladin who does not expect non-believers to obey the laws of his faith. He hopes that through his shining example his teammates will come to see the value of his code, but believes that doing Good under threat of punishment doesn't count. He guides the party to consider mercy, but does not expect them to follow oaths they did not swear. Perhaps his own past is not lily-white and he recognizes that true Faith takes time; he is patient with the party.

It's important to recognize that the values of D&D are not our modern values. Justice is often swift and brutal when you don't have the luxury of modern civilization. Think wild west justice or battlefield trials. As a paladin, you might have the authority to conduct hasty trials; ask your DM to consider this1. Remember there are methods of punishment that fall between letting criminals go unpunished and killing them: from taking their stuff, to branding or even cutting off a finger or a hand2, there are a spectrum of options.

Just as you are considering the enjoyment of your friends at the table, the DM and other players should be willing to meet you half-way. The player characters should do the same for their friend the paladin. This is a mutual storytelling challenge: a group of friends (or at least comrades-in-arms) with different moral attitudes is pretty common in real life and in storytelling. How do they function without coming to blows? That's a cool story for your group to tell.

Not possible, really. Paladins are probably the singularly most awful character archetype to exist in the whole of the RPG community.

That's good enough that I'm adding it to my paladin collection.

Have him play tabletop games in his spare time

Depends on the tone of the game. Is it stupid and silly? Just be a more different The Tick. Is it serious? That's a bit more difficult, but just remember a paladin follows the Law of Good. Not just law and not just good. If the Law is evil, then the paladin isn't beholden to it. If there is good without order, he must create order, least evil take advantage of the chaos

Well said, user.

How do you not?

Really, I'd like to see some not interesting and not unique paladin, just once.

I never ever see the ludicrously Lawful Good juggernaut of justice against all common sense and practicality, the extreme devote of devotion and always-right of righteousness, that we all complain about, outside of NPCs.

It's always some special-snowflake paladin with a nuanced backstory and religion open to or self-containing some odd ruleset of some odd god, or someone constantly trying to meta his way out of his alignment issues... I don't think I've seen a straight up Paladin for over 30 years, and the last time I saw one, I was playing it.

Seriously, are there any REAL paladins left in the multiverse? I see nothing but heretics, heretics and weeaboos everywhere!

1 There can be some confusion about the paladin's requirement to "respect legitimate authority," and whether one's class dictates in-game social duty or privilege. As I understand it, 'Paladin,' 'Cleric,' and all other class titles are meta-mechanical terms rather than in-game titles/distinctions unless you're in a setting that makes it explicit. Thus no character (player or non-player) has legitimate authority by virtue of their class alone (there are some rare PrC exceptions to this, whose explicit nature supports my general claim). Authority is conferred based on merit, heritage, experience (and possibly bribery). My suggestion that your paladin might have some legitimate authority is explicitly at the whim of the DM. It could just as easily be bestowed on a bard or a fighter, should social circumstances warrant it, and serve the same purpose --perhaps even better.
2Perhaps I should clarify that branding and mutilation in these contexts are not about sadism: they are about preventing future crime without killing the criminal, in a land without good jails. Brands alert future targets that they are dealing with a particular kind of criminal, and cutting off a gun-happy outlaw's trigger finger makes it harder for him to kill.

As a Paladin, you're a religious warrior. Your beholden to your god first, and the law second.

So, whenever your Lawful conflicts with your Good or visa versa, a Paladin only needs to ask himself this simple question: "What Would Torm Do?" (Or, you know, whatever deity you're stuck with.)

Make him fun loving. He likes to party, joke, and laugh. He lives his life and enjoys it, all the while being a righteous warrior of Good and Law.

Speaking of Torm. Where would I go to read up on the gods in 5e?

make him a war veteran who questions his own morality all the time.