D&D (2024) I have the DMG. AMA!

[pukunui]

Eberron back in 3e had clerics who didn't match the alignment of their Gods, and Keith Baker explained that's just how things are. They're keeping things in line with how they've been in Eberron, and it makes things interesting at least with NPCs in that a Cleric of a Good aligned God might be the secret villain.

Precisely this! I am happy for this to be the default approach. To go back to the older approach thus requires the DM and their players to agree. It makes sense in a world like Theros, for instance, where the gods are visible and active, to make it so a cleric could lose their power if they deviate too much from their god's tenets / directives. That's the setting logic that @Micah Sweet refers to - and I think it's important for everyone at the table to agree to that kind of thing in advance.

But I think the Eberron approach is a good one as a baseline.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Do you think every GM does that?

Probably not. But it is a good idea nevertheless. Perhaps the DMG should instruct them to do so?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Precisely this! I am happy for this to be the default approach. To go back to the older approach thus requires the DM and their players to agree. It makes sense in a world like Theros, for instance, where the gods are visible and active, to make it so a cleric could lose their power if they deviate too much from their god's tenets / directives. That's the setting logic that @Micah Sweet refers to - and I think it's important for everyone at the table to agree to that kind of thing in advance.

But I think the Eberron approach is a good one as a baseline.

So you don't think DM and players should have to agree to 5.5's approach in advance?

 

[Remathilis]

What are you talking about? This post just seems like a blatant attack on those who disagree with this passage, which incidentally is a new thing to take an official stand on in the book.

Can we cut down in the schadenfreude please?

Nope. I'm ecstatic that WotC has taken a stance on rule abuses like bag of rats, peasant railgun, coffeelocks and friendly fistfights to regain resources. They are against the spirit of the game and only foster abusive play and metagaming.

 

[Demetrios1453]

3e also had clerics that didn't need gods at all.

And in 5e. From the 2024 DMG "Gods" section:

"Impersonal forces and philosophies can also fill the role of gods in a campaign."

 

[pukunui]

So you don't think DM and players should have to agree to 5.5's approach in advance?

I think I see what you're getting at. Let me see if I can clarify.

On the one hand, you could argue that players agree to a set of rules when they agree to play any particular version of any particular game, be it Monopoly, Munchkin, or Mutants and Masterminds.

However, not every player is going to be intimately familiar with every rule in a more complex game like D&D.

By having the baseline rule in D&D be that the DM can't take away a PC's abilities without the buy-in from that PC's player is a good thing, IMO. There's a difference between passively agreeing to play by a set of rules in general and actively agreeing to play by a specific rule.

By making it so a cleric can potentially lose their power if they anger their god enough something that the DM has to introduce as a house rule, it makes it so the players have to actively and consciously agree to abide by that rule - rather than have it be something that is not even explicitly spelled out in the rules anywhere. (Do the OG 5e rules say anything about taking a cleric's powers away? I can't remember.)

 

[tetrasodium]

Does this mean that all house rules you want to use in a game have to be "official" ones in the DMG or some other WOTC-published source that you know all your players will have? Separate house rule docs seemed pretty common back in the 2e days (though some were horrifyingly large)

No and that's an absurd expectation I don't think that anyone is asking for. They are however asking for a reasonable level of support from variant and optional rules to tweak the game's feel and tone in order to use those for establishing a baseline for a shared ruleset rather than a totally new game.

A few people have lamented not having the gritty realism rules in the new dmg. While I think that 2014 rule was an awful half measure that did little other than create new problems to live with or house rule taking the place of something better offering better results, it's at least a thing I can understand their desire to see without feeling the need to shout them down saying that they should just houserule it themselves.

 

[Remathilis]

(Do the OG 5e rules say anything about taking a cleric's powers away? I can't remember.)

Not in the cleric section. 3e was the last edition that had clerics lose their powers RAW. There is nothing in 4e about it either, but I think you had to retrain your channel divinity feat if you switched deities...

 

[Kobold Avenger]

3e also had clerics that didn't need gods at all.

Planescape starting from 2e has factions like the Athar where Clerics don't need gods at all.

 

[mamba]

Or, they can do what they just did and make it so that the DM can't decide if a character loses their class because they don't like how they are being role-played...

I never punished a cleric / paladin, and if I ever did there would probably be a long string of warnings that were ignored. I am mostly talking about the fiction as I see it, I am not arguing for a tool to yank the players around with