The Paladin faces a very different challenge to win than Sheriff, its Unseen counterpart. The Sheriff is interested in finding the Unseen and outing them. After all, the Unseen convert slowly and kill fast, which makes Unseen games fast. If the Sheriff finds the Mastermind, he can be sure his work will not come back to bite him as he will stay BD forever. Converting a Sheriff is also risky, because an outed Sheriff can be scouted by another.
The same is not true for the Paladin. As long as there is 1 Cult left, the Cult can always spread. Games are much slower. So finding a Cult member has a much lower value than an Unseen. More often than not, I find that if a Paladin does really well and finds a lot of cult members, he just gets converted on the long run and his plays end up being his demise.
This completely changes the win condition for the Paladin. If you want to win, you don’t want to out yourself by exposing the Cult (nor whispering the results to the king, which is too obvious). Instead, your best shot at winning is to keep quiet about your results. In that manner, you can win in 1 of 4 ways:
- Get jailed by prince, and pass the intel
- Get killed, and pass the intel by having it in your will
- Get randomly converted. Delete your intel and move on
- Get linked by psy, and risk passing the intel (not as good as the others)
My problem with this is that this gives Cult has an enormous advantage over Unseen, whenever there is a Paladin that understands this concept. Even worse, I don’t think this is how Paladin was envisioned to be played, but it provides a much higher chance of winning than being aggressive with your results.