The attractiveness of vancian magic is debatable but for all its flaws, it has the advantage of being logical (at least internally) and it's mechanics is somewhat explainable (in-game and out of game), which is what I believe @Mind of tempest is seeking.
some ground to work from helps makes what I am doing make some sense easy to figure out what I need to do, not necessarily any particular type of magic system.
So, would you tell someone who wanted to play a cleric of a belief system similar to Buddism that they have to play a Monk instead?
no, I would suggest it is a poorly built tool to enable that fantasy, also which vehicle of Buddhism followed by what school so I can just the best option.
Why not just let the player decide what their character is?
if you have a concept you want to do it well, I never said I would stop them just that what they want is difficult to get to work in a satisfactory way, no likes a character which feels worthless and up staged.
Clerics are a pretty solid character class. As primary casters, its fairly hard for them to get to a point where they feel worthless and upstaged.
not the error in question it is a bad tool for the goal, I never said it was bad as a class but bad for the task a the fantasy is first followed by making it effective.
Why would them playing a Buddhist cleric have any impact on how useful they are?
the fantasy and the structure of the class do not mesh well thus the more effective they would try to be the more it would work against the cleric classes inbuilt ideas.
