D&D General What Happens if a Cleric/Warlock/etc PC Gravely Offends Their Supernatural Patron?

[Hexmage-EN]

The thread title and poll question are fairly self-explanatory, so I'll go ahead and state my own position.

Personally, as a DM I am very much against taking away a spellcasting PC's powers. The way I run things, a PC who offends their supernatural patron retains their powers, but at a price. Their patron may send other agents to confront the PC, either to turn them back into service or to slay them, and in some cases a completely different being may take advantage of the supernatural conduit a PC already has established, becoming their new patron.

In contrast, in Campaign 2 of Critical Role a certain character at one point temporarily loses their powers completely after defying their patron. They later gain a new patron and take levels in another class, but also regain their previously-removed powers from their first class. The explanation given is that, despite the first patron having taken away the character's supernatural abilities, they left a sort of dormant supernatural link that would cause those powers to return, even when a patron of a very different nature was funneling power to the character (which is essentially what I do).

 

[Oofta]

The PC is effectively an employee of some higher power. Even if you have a campaign world where gods are not real or don't care, if the PC believes they violated the will of the patron.

How to handle it is something that should be discussed with the player. Any loss of patronage could lead to a retired and replaced PC, the PC seeking a different patron. The other option is that the PC needs to seek atonement for their deeds and the loss of powers is lessened for a period of time.

In all my years of DMing this only happened once. My wife's paladin mistakenly committed an evil act and her powers were taken away for a period of time. I think the thing that hurt most was when her bonded mount rejected her. But I didn't draw out the loss of power for too long, only a couple of sessions. I do warn people that want to run warlocks that at a certain point the bill may come due for their powers and it may be something they would not want to do.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't take people's powers unless the player wants me to. If they want that subplot, sure, annoying that I have to rebalance the encounters around their PC being worthless but okay fine. And obviously Wizards and so on can play too that way - "I lost my mojo...".

With Warlocks and Clerics, I feel the bargain has been struck, and whilst the PC might be in violation of contract, that doesn't mean they lose what they got, it means that they other side has to attempt um... bring them to court over the issue. So with a Patron, that's likely to mean people coming to kill or kidnap the PC, or some sort of renegotiation to the disadvantage of the PC (i.e. "I won't kill you and take the power back, but I will drain 30 years of your life, ok?" "Ummmm, I guess..."). Maybe I see it this way partly because I used to work in shipping law, and the sheer number of people who took a ship and drove off with it, or decided to do stuff against contract with it, is absolutely staggering.

With Clerics I felt like 4E was the only edition which gave a coherent and workable idea as to how Clerical power worked, which was that the god in question gave the PC a tiny divine spark, which is within their soul. As that's been given, it can't just be easily recalled. However, it's extremely likely that if the offence is truly grave, the god, depending on their personality and portfolio, may well want the PC to "come back to the fold" or simply to be eliminated so their divine spark can be regained.

I think there would probably be basically professionals specialized in tracking down errant Warlocks and Clerics, note. A large enough church would have its own, but Warlock patrons might well send another Warlock (or send the PC after another Warlock!).

 

[Jer]

I marked "Other" because ... it depends. If a player is choosing to do this I'd want to know why and what they want to get out of it - and in fact the player and I probably would have spoken about this narrative possibility in advance. If they're defying their patron it's probably because I've had their patron ask them to do something that the character doesn't want to do, and if that's happening it's very likely that my player has chosen a patron specifically to defy them at some point and have been looking for a reason to do so - I'm unlikely to push a narrative like that onto a player without having their buy-in in the first place. There's no accidental "whoops you fell into an alignment trap with no good options and now you've lost your paladin status" stuff going on at our table because that's not the kind of game we want.

So having said that up front, my choice in general would be as yours - they'd keep their abilities but they'd be suffering under the "displeasure" of their patron. Narratively speaking they'd either need to fix the relationship or find a new patron to lose the "displeasure", which would manifest in different ways depending on the character. Mostly minor out of combat penalties, combined with narrating their combat failures differently (any roll of 1, for example, automatically becomes fodder for explaining their failure as a manifestation of their patron's disfavor rather than just a miss).

 

[Yaarel]

The empowerments by a patron are permanent, either teaching the character how to do some feature or transforming the character to exhibit some feature.

The nature of the bargain is enticements: "theres more where this comes from".

The patron may or may not gain returns on the investment in the character.



A disloyal character can provoke the patron to send emissaries to re-employ the character. It is a teachable moment for these loyal emissaries, who will try persuade the character, either by carrot or stick, or by a reminder of the greater purpose why the character made the bargain in the first place.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The PC is effectively an employee of some higher power. Even if you have a campaign world where gods are not real or don't care, if the PC believes they violated the will of the patron.

Whilst I agree with this, I think there's a case to be made that at least in certain scenarios the power cannot necessarily take back what was given, or not trivially. I think you get more interesting situations, in the end, especially with NPCs, if people can take what they got, and run off with it, just like people constantly do in real life. So many contracts IRL are violated because there were specific rules and the person or company violated them and kept violating them, and there's a lot to be done with stories of tracking down the people who broke those contracts, I think.

I mean, it's a bit like a cop - they've got their badge and their gun, but if a cop decides to go rogue, those don't stop working. Instead loads of other cops come looking for them.

I also feel like, if you're not getting player buy-in, because neither Cleric or Warlock is "OP" but vulnerable to this, you'd be being unfair, unless you equally do things like steal the Wizard's spellbook, curse the Sorcerer so he loses his powers sometimes, and so on. It's a bit different with your wife's Paladin, presuming that was 1E or 2E, because in those editions, Paladins were slightly OP to compensate for the restrictions.

 

[Wolfram stout]

As a player of Paladins in 1st edition, I hate the notion of taking away a character's power. Staying with 1st ed as an example, a Thief cheeses off the Thieves guild and the guild may or may not send people after the thief, but a Paladin mis-steps and BAM! powers gone.
--As an aside if gods took away powers from clerics/paladins then how did we get so many abbeys and churches with evil hiding as the high priest type--

So sought out by NPCs....or maybe the Patron trades his patronship to another. That idea just struck me, having patrons trading warlocks like MTG cards (I would NEVER do that before a sit down with the player).

 

[Cadence]

I think it depends on what "gravely" means.

If the patron gives a clear ultimatum for something and they disobey for a petty reason; if they are willingly and uncoercedly working against the patron on something big; if they renounce the patron; or if they racked up a bunch of lesser punishments to no effect and aren't furthering the patrons cause along the way, then at the least the powers that come through the patronage* are toast. In some cases others may come to inflict additional.punisent. In some cases some other power may be eager to offer a new patronage.

Below that level it depends on to the patron and the offense.

Letting the player know the ropes at character creation seems important.

* Iirc some Warlock powers clearly say the patron grants something. Others sound like they're a skill the warlock picked up.


Edit: Post 15 and 18 below have some reconsideration on my part for Warlocks. Maybe they don't take back much, but there are things they can certainly decide not to give.

 

[Oofta]

Whilst I agree with this, I think there's a case to be made that at least in certain scenarios the power cannot necessarily take back what was given, or not trivially. I think you get more interesting situations, in the end, especially with NPCs, if people can take what they got, and run off with it, just like people constantly do in real life. So many contracts IRL are violated because there were specific rules and the person or company violated them and kept violating them, and there's a lot to be done with stories of tracking down the people who broke those contracts, I think.

I mean, it's a bit like a cop - they've got their badge and their gun, but if a cop decides to go rogue, those don't stop working. Instead loads of other cops come looking for them.

I also feel like, if you're not getting player buy-in, because neither Cleric or Warlock is "OP" but vulnerable to this, you'd be being unfair, unless you equally do things like steal the Wizard's spellbook, curse the Sorcerer so he loses his powers sometimes, and so on. It's a bit different with your wife's Paladin, presuming that was 1E or 2E, because in those editions, Paladins were slightly OP to compensate for the restrictions.

It's not like it comes up on a regular basis, as I said it's happened once in all my years of DMing*. Other than the one time, I can't think of a time it ever came up. If you're running a paladin, don't violate your oath. Losing abilities would require pretty extreme acts by the PC or direct rejection of a deity by a cleric. If you make a deal with the devil the bill will come due someday, it's part of the package. You don't get to play "I was just kidding about selling my soul in exchange for power". Don't want to risk losing your powers, don't run a warlock.

If a cop goes rogue in my game, they are no longer a cop. They lose the badge and all the authority that went with it, they become just another criminal that used to be a cop.

*It was my wife's PC. It was a great role playing opportunity for her and she genuinely enjoyed the story arc.

 

[Willie the Duck]

As a general rule, I consider warlock patrons to have given their warlocks 'company tools' -- if the PCs then use them in a manor not to the patron's liking, they can get mad about it and possibly retaliate in some way (up to curses and sending other warlocks after them I guess), but can't just 'turn off' the abilities. Paladins are powered by adherence to an oath, not a deity in particular. Clerics... I don't have a good answer. Their spells were always coded as given each day by the deity, so withholding them makes a lot of sense. My usual take is that D&D deities are very much humanlike mindsets, and often will have very human responses (up to and including trying to negotiate with their clerics, rather than just taking things away for actions which technically violate their ethos). Kinda the whole "joe is my nephewcleric and I love him despite him not really living up to my ideals. Now only if I could stop him from slaying the innocent. It really doesn't help my reputation as a god of peace."