From a past blog post, Mearls mentioned that their cleric is supposed to reflect the gods. Since the gods as are different as they are many, that's leaves room for a lot of different clerics. You can be a cleric of the sun god, the goddess of winter or the god of death and slaughter. So far, we've heard that backgrounds and themes are going to be a good way of customizing your cleric to fit into the view that you think a follower of a certain god should act like, such as a cleric of Apollo being a good scout and archer.
But what about spells? 2nd Edition had spheres for each god that granted access to different spells. 3rd edition had domains that granted bonus spells depending on what domain you took. For me at least, this sort of resulted in a bloat of spells and it could become pretty difficult to keep track of what spells a cleric had access to. It was a bit jumbled.
Is there really a need for different spell lists for different clerics? What I have in mind is that while different clerics would cast the same spells, these spells would be very different. If you follow the sun god, all of your prayer and blessing spells would grant your allies a resistance bonus to necrotic effects based on the level of the spell, but if you followed the winter goddess you'd get a resistance bonus to fire or frost damage. If you cast a blessing upon your weapon or the weapon of an ally, the thunder god would grant electrical damage while the evil god might grant necrotic damage.
Basically, each spell would have a base effect, like range and an area of effect damage and then a varying descriptor based on your god, like type of energy damage. There wouldn't be a "flame strike" but there might be a "divine strike" that was very different for a follower of Pelor or a follower of Vecna.
I think that this would be a great way to give clerics strong flavor based on the gods they follow without making them overly complicated with a bloated spell list.
But what about spells? 2nd Edition had spheres for each god that granted access to different spells. 3rd edition had domains that granted bonus spells depending on what domain you took. For me at least, this sort of resulted in a bloat of spells and it could become pretty difficult to keep track of what spells a cleric had access to. It was a bit jumbled.
Is there really a need for different spell lists for different clerics? What I have in mind is that while different clerics would cast the same spells, these spells would be very different. If you follow the sun god, all of your prayer and blessing spells would grant your allies a resistance bonus to necrotic effects based on the level of the spell, but if you followed the winter goddess you'd get a resistance bonus to fire or frost damage. If you cast a blessing upon your weapon or the weapon of an ally, the thunder god would grant electrical damage while the evil god might grant necrotic damage.
Basically, each spell would have a base effect, like range and an area of effect damage and then a varying descriptor based on your god, like type of energy damage. There wouldn't be a "flame strike" but there might be a "divine strike" that was very different for a follower of Pelor or a follower of Vecna.
I think that this would be a great way to give clerics strong flavor based on the gods they follow without making them overly complicated with a bloated spell list.