Greg Benage
Legend
As Sacrosanct's link notes, the class originally was called the "priest," then later became the "cleric," then with 2e became the "priest" again.
D&D 5E Cleric vs Paladin: Concepts and Mechanical realisation
- Thread starter Illithidbix
- Start date
As Sacrosanct's link notes, the class originally was called the "priest," then later became the "cleric," then with 2e became the "priest" again.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I hear what both you and Hemlock are saying, and I don't actually disagree with it. I personally really like the "Oath of the Crown" Paladin subclass as presented in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and can really wrap my head around that, and I like that it seems WoTC might be moving that direction with the Paladin; which is getting back to what I was saying earlier: make the Paladin more of a traditional chivalrous Knight. Drop the faith-based magic, keep the smites and such, re-flavored as something less religion-centric, and there you go.
All of that to say, In Other Words, give me back my Knights of Solamnia
While I am 100% cool with Knights of Solamnia as Paladins, allow me to clarify my argument:
I am not arguing that Paladins are not pious. Piety is a chivalric virtue and I believe it is 100% in character for a paladin to be deeply respectful of religion.
However, there's a huge gap between being a virtuous disciple, and being an ordained representative of a religion. It's the difference between being Nelson Mandela or Gandhi, vs. Brigham Young or the Pope. Paladins are more like Nelson Mandela/Gandhi, in my view. No official religious standing, just personal virtue.
krakistophales
First Post
The way I see it, the whole concept is approached the wrong way.
The whole idea of making an entire class concept in the paladin as some holy warrior that has to be held to some moral high standard is rubbish. I know this is a fantasy game, but even in fantasy characters shouldn't be so one dimensional as how the typical paladin concept forces people to think of it as. More often, paladins are flawed, unique human beings who, despite all logic dictating that its hopeless, pointless, and even stupid to champion a cause like vanquishing evil or upholding fluff and stuff law and goodness, go against their baser instincts and best interests to rise to the occasion. To think that paladins can't be drinkers, smokers, gamblers, womanizers, jokers, liars, etc. just because they have command over a small portion of divine magic is childish and keeps the class concepts for d and d in the dark ages. If my job was going toe to toe with evil and having their vile deeds and shameless indifference smeared in my face all the time, I definitely wouldn't be captain america telling kids to eat their broccoli and salute the flag. Sure, you can most definitely play a paladin like this, but the fact that a moral roleplay requirement is hardwired into the class is pure, unadulterated hogwash.
As for clerics, I believe they're a superfluous class. I think that the entire division of arcane vs. divine magic is foolish, since magic is magic. The source and type is important, but for you to tell me that a 500 year old high elf wizard can't heal a scraped knee because it doesn't fall under the purview of his magical type is laughable. This, however, approaches a larger issue I have with d and d in general.
I feel that differentiating between wizard, sorcerer, warlock, and cleric is also nonsense. They should decide on one name for it, which wizard is fine, eliminate this nonsense of preparing spells, augment the spell slots system to become a more flexible resource management MP system, and simply create, say, 3 wizard archetypes like the fighter has:
1. An archmage, who is a dedicated caster who can literally master any spell or magic type, so healing/banishing/turning undead is totally within his purview just like blasting, buffing, and debuffing are.
2. A magus/eldritch knight half half class that finds the perfect balance between casting and fighting. No 90/10, 80/20 bologna, just a straight up 50/50 mix of spellcasting and fighting.
3. A "sorcerer" or whatever you want to call it that becomes a specialist of a certain magic type. While he might not have the utility and options that his archmage countertype has, he's the best at what he does, and what he does ain't nice...meaning whatever he casts is stronger, happens faster, costs less, can be metamagic'd, etc. and is overall better than anyone else casting magic of this type.
This would also require dividing magic not by schools, but of broader categories, such as light/elemental/dark or divine/arcane/elemental or something like that in order to facilitate the above changes. This will eliminate the need for separate classes that require morally non-existent entities like paladins, redundant casters like clerics, and will allow for someone who wants to be an elemental/arcane or divine fighter will simply take the "mage" or wizard class and choose the second option mentioned above, and could choose to focus on divine/light magic like a paladin/cleric, elemental like an eldritch knight, arcane like a warlock, or pick and choose from all three.
This way, someone can play a paladin that doesn't have to tell the truth when lying is easier/better, or recognize the authority of a clearly corrupt official in his sphere of influence, or do god-awfully stupid things like sparing troll babies because they're babies, fully knowing that they will one day grow up to be adult trolls and do everything in their power to get vengeance on captain morality, all without being crushed under the baggage of hardwired roleplay or fear of losing their powers cuz they asked their friend what the answer to question 23 was.
The whole idea of making an entire class concept in the paladin as some holy warrior that has to be held to some moral high standard is rubbish. I know this is a fantasy game, but even in fantasy characters shouldn't be so one dimensional as how the typical paladin concept forces people to think of it as. More often, paladins are flawed, unique human beings who, despite all logic dictating that its hopeless, pointless, and even stupid to champion a cause like vanquishing evil or upholding fluff and stuff law and goodness, go against their baser instincts and best interests to rise to the occasion. To think that paladins can't be drinkers, smokers, gamblers, womanizers, jokers, liars, etc. just because they have command over a small portion of divine magic is childish and keeps the class concepts for d and d in the dark ages. If my job was going toe to toe with evil and having their vile deeds and shameless indifference smeared in my face all the time, I definitely wouldn't be captain america telling kids to eat their broccoli and salute the flag. Sure, you can most definitely play a paladin like this, but the fact that a moral roleplay requirement is hardwired into the class is pure, unadulterated hogwash.
As for clerics, I believe they're a superfluous class. I think that the entire division of arcane vs. divine magic is foolish, since magic is magic. The source and type is important, but for you to tell me that a 500 year old high elf wizard can't heal a scraped knee because it doesn't fall under the purview of his magical type is laughable. This, however, approaches a larger issue I have with d and d in general.
I feel that differentiating between wizard, sorcerer, warlock, and cleric is also nonsense. They should decide on one name for it, which wizard is fine, eliminate this nonsense of preparing spells, augment the spell slots system to become a more flexible resource management MP system, and simply create, say, 3 wizard archetypes like the fighter has:
1. An archmage, who is a dedicated caster who can literally master any spell or magic type, so healing/banishing/turning undead is totally within his purview just like blasting, buffing, and debuffing are.
2. A magus/eldritch knight half half class that finds the perfect balance between casting and fighting. No 90/10, 80/20 bologna, just a straight up 50/50 mix of spellcasting and fighting.
3. A "sorcerer" or whatever you want to call it that becomes a specialist of a certain magic type. While he might not have the utility and options that his archmage countertype has, he's the best at what he does, and what he does ain't nice...meaning whatever he casts is stronger, happens faster, costs less, can be metamagic'd, etc. and is overall better than anyone else casting magic of this type.
This would also require dividing magic not by schools, but of broader categories, such as light/elemental/dark or divine/arcane/elemental or something like that in order to facilitate the above changes. This will eliminate the need for separate classes that require morally non-existent entities like paladins, redundant casters like clerics, and will allow for someone who wants to be an elemental/arcane or divine fighter will simply take the "mage" or wizard class and choose the second option mentioned above, and could choose to focus on divine/light magic like a paladin/cleric, elemental like an eldritch knight, arcane like a warlock, or pick and choose from all three.
This way, someone can play a paladin that doesn't have to tell the truth when lying is easier/better, or recognize the authority of a clearly corrupt official in his sphere of influence, or do god-awfully stupid things like sparing troll babies because they're babies, fully knowing that they will one day grow up to be adult trolls and do everything in their power to get vengeance on captain morality, all without being crushed under the baggage of hardwired roleplay or fear of losing their powers cuz they asked their friend what the answer to question 23 was.
Li Shenron
Legend
I have pretty much this same basic concepts as yours for the two classes. But this to me does not make them "seem very similar" as you say. They've always felt very distinct.
Mostly I see the Paladin as a derivation of the Fighter, and not of the Cleric. Something like a Fighter with a special dedication to an unearthly ideal and with a bunch of supernatural powers.
I don't fully buy the Cleric as a pious warrior. Just because she's better in melee than the Wizards-types doesn't make her fully a warrior. She's always been worse than the Fighter-types in terms of bare combat skills. If you go beyond the bare and start factoring spells into how good you are at combat, in many editions you could have your Cleric end up better than a Fighter in combat, but then in those same editions you may be able to make the Wizard even better... so for me the comparison is more sensible in terms of bare abilities.
For me the key idea of the Cleric is religion, that's her main definiting feature. Other characters can be religious, but none has major powers directly built upon the tenets and concepts of the religion of choice. And I never really followed some setting's approach at "Paladins of <each deity>" (or even worse Rangers) pretty much because it messes them up with Clerics. For me Paladins are just Paladins, not more tied to a deity as a Rogue or Fighter or Wizard might be.
G
Guest 6801718
Guest
I've always thought of it in more broad terms. To me, the cleric is the shield and the paladin is the sword. I've played both though I play far more paladins. Paladin is my favorite class. Pretty much when a campaign starts up my group just says "so you're playing a paladin, how about the rest of us?".
I haven't tried the 5e cleric yet, so I can't comment on how it plays. The paladin feels very warrior to me though. Even though they get a pretty good list of spells. The oaths and the spell selection really give me that feeling of being a slayer of evil. That whole "sword" thing I mentioned. I am curious about the cleric. Though we already have on in my party. So if something happens to my paladin, I'd probably wait to try the cleric out, so I don't step on any toes.
I haven't tried the 5e cleric yet, so I can't comment on how it plays. The paladin feels very warrior to me though. Even though they get a pretty good list of spells. The oaths and the spell selection really give me that feeling of being a slayer of evil. That whole "sword" thing I mentioned. I am curious about the cleric. Though we already have on in my party. So if something happens to my paladin, I'd probably wait to try the cleric out, so I don't step on any toes.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
I'm not sure why you feel that clerics are primarily warriors. Would you call the bladesinger an "arcane warrior" rather than a "warrior mage" just because he has proficiency in a martial weapon and armor?
I think people are getting hung up on the heavy armor proficiency. Armor "proficiency" really only appeared in 3e. In prior editions, they just said what armors someone could or couldn't wear. If you look at the way allowed armors actually were assigned, it was basically that you could wear whatever armor didn't interfere with your class abilities (even though sometimes that was retroactive justification).
-Wizards couldn't wear armor at all because it messed with spellcasting.
-Thieves had to stick to lighter armor because heavier armor interfered with being sneaky, acrobatic, and exercising fine manual dexterity.
-Clerics couldn't...oh wait. Armor doesn't really get in the way of any cleric abilities. So they were allowed to wear full armor.
After enough years of people saying, "but what happens if they do put on armor..."* 3e just said, "Okay, look, they aren't trained, so they suffer these penalties. Now that you know that, you're never going to wear armor that you aren't supposed to anyway, just like before we made up rules for it. You're welcome."
Other than some contradictory (and contradicted) fluff, clerics have never primarily been warriors. They have been casters. Holy Magic-Users, if you want to define them in terms of other classes.
So why do I keep bringing up this "primarily" crap, someone is probably thinking. Well, because that's how nouns and adjectives work in English. A holy warrior is a warrior who is holy. A warrior priest is a priest who fights. These are significantly different. (Again, if you need mechanics to back it up, it's the difference between d10 and d8 hit points, and more favorable vs. less favorable attack bonus, as well as the vast difference in spell-casting.)
If someone wants to make the argument that clerics were traditionally warrior priests, then I won't argue with it. But they have always been shown as primarily priests, with warrior tacked on in some editions in some situations.
In 2e the relevant class groupings were:
Warrior
-Fighter
-Paladin
-Ranger
Priest
-Cleric
-Priest of a specific mythos (druid is an example)
Cleric is explicitly not primarily a warrior, while paladin explicitly is. 2e went further by making those specific mythos very broad so that some clerics are warrior priests, while others have nothing to do with that archetype at all.
And again, if you actually look at any adventure or campaign sourcebook from at least 2e (and plenty of 1e too) through 3e, pretty much every single NPC priest or acolyte has been a member of the cleric class.**
And I would submit that we've primarily had that problem because of people not understanding or being familiar with the information I presented in the last few paragraphs. 2e is not an edition to be skipped if you want good understanding of the evolution of classes in D&D. I've never heard of this issue from anyone with solid 2e exposure, because, notwithstanding the contradictory relic text in the PHB "Cleric" entry, 2e otherwise consistently and unambiguously presents the cleric as priest, paladin as warrior assumption with clarity throughout the edition. (In fact, perhaps this is the reason for my odd intolerance, since I consider 2e to be the high point of D&D lore and fluff.)
This is actually a perfectly reasonable way to reconcile the current mechanics if you want to go that way. It's not how I'd do it for a couple of reasons, but it works as well as can be expected.
Thanks for the clarification on Eberron. I've never had the Eberron books so I had to look up some information online. From what I can tell though, Eberron seems to have been the origin of the idea of clerics being a minority with religious hierarchies rather than the standard. Before Eberron (and outside of Eberron, even in 3e) it simply wasn't the case. Pick up any non-Eberron adventure or campaign supplement published by TSR or WotC prior to 4e, find an NPC priest, and you'll see "X-level cleric" at the start of their stats. This isn't just for the villains and major players, this is for every village priest and acolyte in every dinky little temple or shrine.
And 2e made no apologies for it in its class divisions (and from what others have said, apparently the class was originally named Priest rather than cleric anyway--though this isn't directly relevant to this specific point).
But it is a valid question as to why everyone in the priestly profession gets to be a full-blown X-level character, while most people were just 0-level NPCs, or "normal man" etc. The same concern can apply to criminals. How come every member of a thieves' guild actually gets to be an X-level thief (or rogue)?
The answer is that, messy as it is, they decided that those classes represented those character archetypes in the world, period.
Now, one can handle this a variety of ways. You can say, "forget that" and just make most people commoners with classes entirely reserved for PCs, important NPCs, etc. Or you can take 5e's approach and use NPC monster entries for priests and acolytes and assassins and such that more or less represent and do similar things to PC classes, just simplified and prepackaged for quicker microwave preparation. Or you can go more old-school, and make every priest and pick pocket a full-fledged X-level cleric or rogue.
Anyone can find whatever method works best for them. But in D&D tradition, clerics have been primarily priests (and casters) since the beginning. "Warrior priest" has been sometimes assumed, sometimes optional, but never primary. Paladins by contrast have always been warriors first and foremost, with some form of holy power always there. They've never been represented as priests, warrior or otherwise.
I'm not seeing any problem with how it fits into actual use in a campaign, other than by, for some reason, objecting to the way they've actually been presented. Priests of some deities are warrior priests. When they aren't running the church, they go out and stab things and scream battle cries in Thor's name. That doesn't step on the toes of the paladin as a knight in shining armor***, unless you are trying to look at things from purely mechanical standpoint of "hit monster with weapon, do damage". And yet, that doesn't even work, because clerics have lots of spellcasting, and paladins have always been highly limited compared to clerics. (And as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, wielding a weapon and wearing armor does not a (D&D) "warrior" make.)
* To be clear, I do think this was a perfectly reasonable question.
** Eberron being a noted exception.
*** There isn't even a problem with more recent presentations of paladins, including 5e, because they just take the idea of holy warrior and expand it beyond the knight in shining armor.
Illithidbix
Explorer
Lots of good thoughts here. Interesting to read.
This one particularly interested me, because if you're going for vaguely Arthurian ideal and kinda chivalrous knights, in a generic, vaguely western European medieval fantasy setting, then the Paladins and Clerics do end up looking kinda Christian unless effort has been put into the religion.
- But perhaps it's far easier to think of a Cleric of THOR! or KORD! (if you want to scratch some serial numbers off) or similar to thrown it off this track, than to think of a Paladin of Thor.
This one particularly interested me, because if you're going for vaguely Arthurian ideal and kinda chivalrous knights, in a generic, vaguely western European medieval fantasy setting, then the Paladins and Clerics do end up looking kinda Christian unless effort has been put into the religion.
- But perhaps it's far easier to think of a Cleric of THOR! or KORD! (if you want to scratch some serial numbers off) or similar to thrown it off this track, than to think of a Paladin of Thor.
frons79
Villager
In the 1st edition, or BECMI, at a certain level Clerics could choose to remain such or to become Druids (Neutral alignment) while Fighters could choose between Paladins (Legal alignment), Knights (Neutral alignment) or Avengers (Chaotic alignment) .
Clearly Paladins were more familiar with Fighter rather than with Clerics.
Now it seems that they have been brought far closer, at least on a role-playing level.
Clearly Paladins were more familiar with Fighter rather than with Clerics.
Now it seems that they have been brought far closer, at least on a role-playing level.
the Jester
Legend
I can summarize the difference, at least in my campaign, in one sentence.
Clerics talk to God, but paladins listen to God.
Which isn't to say that the reverse isn't true for each, as well- but I'm very clear on where the emphasis is. Clerics seek direction from their gods, but paladins receive direction from their gods.
Yes and yes. I love characters who connect with the divine.
Honestly I do think the archetypes are very muddied in 5e. To me, a cleric is a vessel for divine power, the Paladin...a sword honed by divine will.
The biggest "issue" to me are domains like the War Cleric. Realistically, those archetypes to me are really paladins, big armor and weapons, with holy power channeling through awesome attacks and impenetrable defenses. Whereas I think clerics are exemplified by spells like spiritual weapon and spirit guardians....clerics are not warriors, but they can wield the powers of great war gods.
I think the big armor cleric should just be a paladin, with the cleric being turned more into the "priest" concept...a person who doesn't need the big armor and weapons...because god is literally on his side.
The biggest "issue" to me are domains like the War Cleric. Realistically, those archetypes to me are really paladins, big armor and weapons, with holy power channeling through awesome attacks and impenetrable defenses. Whereas I think clerics are exemplified by spells like spiritual weapon and spirit guardians....clerics are not warriors, but they can wield the powers of great war gods.
I think the big armor cleric should just be a paladin, with the cleric being turned more into the "priest" concept...a person who doesn't need the big armor and weapons...because god is literally on his side.
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