A Knight of Druenor never lies but can they make mistakes?

[jmisno1]

I've had A Thught. What are your thoughts on my thought?

Several of The Books make it clear that A True Knight of Druenor will never tell a lie

But then I had A Thought. The Knights of Druenor never tell lies but their still human and all humans, even A True Knight of Druenor, are capable of making mistakes, so what happens if 1 says something that isn't true but he believes it to be true?

A example I thought of is that theirs 2 almost identical brothers, 1's guilty of a crime and the others completely innocent, 1 of the witness's was A Knight of Druenor and he truly but wrongly believes that the innocent brother is the guilty 1 and testifies to that in court

When people learn about the mistake is The Knight of Druenor in trouble? or even no longer A True Knight of Druenor?, after all even though he truly believed he was telling the truth but he unknowingly lied in a court of law

[fdrwanderer]

Typically, most such oaths aren't quite as simple as "never tells a lie", and you've put your finger on one of the key elements of that. Is something one believes true a lie? How would one judge that objectively?

This tended to bind up a lot of players (and their DMs/GMs) of paladins, back in the day. There was often tension between what a character knew was a lie told (thus breaking an oath of unquestioned honesty), what a player knew was a lie but the character didn't (which gets to that question I posed about who and how judges the lie objectively), and what both player and character believe is not a lie but there may be (or not be) evidence to the contrary. Personally, I think a lot of these "conflicts" were far more overblown than was justified, but this all was part of the "heritage" of playing paladins in D&D/AD&D and other RPGs, at least once upon a time.

Personally, I think the most credible way of answering your question comes from Ganon in Fire on the Water (https://www.projectaon.org/en/xhtml/lw/02fotw/sect168.htm). In that section, Ganon states that he would testify to the death of the driver being an accident. We are also given this short exposition pertaining to your question: "It is true that in Durenor, a true knight will speak only the truth whether for his own good or ill."

Lone Wolf may know, or suspect, that the driver's death was accidental. Though accident is certainly a possibility for the other passengers who did not see what happened, it's not conclusive that what happens to the driver was an accident. For instance, Lone Wolf was there too, so Lone Wolf may have caused the driver's death, at least so far as the other passengers may know. And yet, Ganon states that he will testify that the driver's death was an accident and his word will be accepted, as indicated above. So it is fairly clear that the oath to only speak the truth is based in the subjective understanding of a knight on what is true, rather than an objective fact of truth or falsehood.