D&D 5E Warlock/Cleric Best of all Worlds

One of the concerns I have with the original post is that the text suggests recovering the warlock spell slots each hour of rest to help heal a party prior to additional adventuring. The short rest mechanic indicates it is a minimum of one hour, however the length of a short rest can be longer than one hour. Although I would receive negative feedback from my players, I would limit them to recovery of the spell slots after a short rest rather than every hour of rest.

I think this character would be played from behind the front line of PCs, assuming there is a line. Is the heavy armor needed?

cooperjer said:

One of the concerns I have with the original post is that the text suggests recovering the warlock spell slots each hour of rest to help heal a party prior to additional adventuring. The short rest mechanic indicates it is a minimum of one hour, however the length of a short rest can be longer than one hour.

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Things like casting spells ends a short rest, iirc.

I personally don't think it's as awful as some may find it. The Paladin in one of my games had warlock with the Infernal pact. Which made him a lawful good icon who secretly once F@#%d up and had one day to pay the piper. It wasn't unbalancing game wise and creating the 'character' in the role play sense is very much the responsibility of the player. You could reverse the time progression and take a high level cleric and take the last few levels of Warlock. This would make you the deity's faithful servant who has begun to learn 'dark powers'. He still uses them for the good, but it gets hard and harder to not offend the god's ethos enough to draw (negative) divine intervention. The other way it could thematically work that comes to mind is if you were a warlock of an entity that was allied to your deity or shared his cause.

Michael Morris said:

One major problem. clerics receive spells from gods who do want their cleric's patronage. Warlocks receive their powers from entities who likewise want their patronage. Thematically it does not work. Trying to make it work requires proceeding in defiance of the very flavor of both the classes. It reeks, and I do mean reeks of base munchkinism of the highest order.

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Not true, it easily makes sense with a good backstory.

Clerics are GRANTED their power. Warlocks LEARN them. So, depending on the deity, I can certainly see them not just answering prayers, but teaching their cleric how to access ancient power the rest of the world doesn’t understand.

Like an elf cleric who worships Corellan, and has a close relationship with his patron, who beseeches his patron to learn ancient Fey Magic’s. So the Deity teaches it, with certain stipulations. Boom. Warlock cleric.

Or an evil Cleric of Asmodeus. That’s pretty easy. An ambitious cleric of the Demon Lord being granted forbidden knowledge on his hunt for more power.

You can make it fit.

Michael Morris said:

But the default assumptions of the game make it pretty clear that this particular combination isn't going to go very far at many tables.

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Please don't presume to speak for me or for "most tables". Your personal prejudices are not those of the community as a whole.

At most tables I’ve played, people are more I interested in their own character, and couldn’t care less what other people have done.

Caliban said:

Please don't presume to speak for me or for "most tables". Your personal prejudices are not those of the community as a whole.

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That was 3 years ago, I don't think anyone would still care today.

Just had a thought about this from a fluff perspective, let me know if this is batshit:

I make a character and make them a warlock, pledged to a patron only to find out that patron is a trickster god. If I try to spread the good word of the trickster god, can I multiclass into cleric? Or am I a warlock acting like a cleric? The end goal here is to change how I level up:
If I roleplay as a person spreading the good word of my friendly neighbourhood trickster god, I level up into cleric.
Inversely, I could just ask for power directly from my 'patron' and they could choose to have me level up as warlock.

So I roleplay according to which class I want to level up in. It doesn't mean I ignore that I'm a warlock for that level, but just emphasise my clerical duties for that level.

Lots of people treat gods in a D&D setting like they're the heads of coexisting monotheistic religions, where the idea of working with another god or other powerful entity is clearly anathema and each god is clearly morally right on a fundamental level. But historical European and north African polytheistic religions, particularly the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian traditions that D&D draws from, viewed the gods really differently, they were more of just 'really powerful dudes who sometimes mess you up'. Worship and sacrifice wasn't done because it was fundamentally morally good, it was to gain advantage or avoid punishment, and was seen more as a bargain with a powerful patron or appeasement of a supernatural enemy than following correct commandments. People also didn't generally believe 'this pantheon is real, this one is just myths', they believed 'we have our gods, and they have their gods' and didn't think it odd that someone traveling in another land might make offerings to the local gods.

Also, in D&D most divine powers don't come directly from gods. Paladins and druids explicitly don't follow a specific god in 5e, and clerics can even worship an ideal instead of a deity. In older D&D (I definitely remember it in 1st edition), low level spells came from the cleric's own belief, mid-level spells from some kind of intermediary, and only high level spells directly involved the deity's power (I think the split was 1-3, 4-5, and 6-7). Within the background material, Ogmha's church (and I believe others) in the Forgotten Realms went through a great schism and split, which in the 'automatically lose powers' interpretation should have meant that one or both sides should have lost their powers, but neither did. It's not clear that a deity would actually even be able to remove powers from clerics (especially low-level clerics) in the default rules/setting, much less that it's automatic.

So while many people will run D&D deities as highly jealous and basically 'monotheistic gods that hang with other gods', I don't think that interpretation is supported by the rules, historical sources, or the description of the default setting for the game.