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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6829240" data-attributes="member: 6790260">My point was that you were drawing a hard line--"Cleric" IS NOT "Priest," ever, end of discussion--and I was saying that hard line doesn't really exist. Clerics can be Priests, and Priests can be Clerics, and as you yourself noted, many games effectively make the priesthood of any given deity almost exclusively Clerics. When people think of "Priests" in D&D-style class terms, they generally think of something like the Final Fantasy "White Mage" class, and in general the Cleric is the closest you can get to that in any edition of D&D you might care to name--even the oldest of them. The fact that the Cleric includes some fighting capacity doesn't diminish the fact that "Priest" is also lurking in there, somewhere, as a "White Mage" class archetype--whereas the Paladin has no trace of it.Are, or can be Holy Warriors? Because from where I'm looking at it, Clerics can be pushed in that direction if that's what you want, but Paladins essentially cannot choose not to be holy warriors--which is an important distinction. Just like how Fighters can be pushed in the direction of woodland lore and tracking skill, but Rangers cannot choose not to have those things.And *do* Clerics always fulfill exactly the same functions as Paladins in all campaign worlds? I disagree--that is, they don't have to fulfill the same function, and the Cleric includes some things that the Paladin does not.Besides, Sorcerers and Wizards "fulfill the same function" even more than Paladins and Clerics do. It's not like this is a new thing.Which is a fair request to make--and probably satisfied by the Oath of the Crown, if the KoS have any spell-like abilities. I've never actually read anything specific about them (my only exposure to them was via the Planar Sphere quests in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn), so I don't know how close it is. Believe it or not, I'm perfectly okay with dropping magic specifically in the form of spells, though I think Paladins definitely need to be "magical" in some sense to explain stuff like Lay on Hands and smiting and such. The big issue, at this point, is that Paladins have had several of their core class features offloaded into spells; the old Paladin's Mount feature has been turned into the Find Steed spell, and doing something other than/in addition to Radiant damage requires spells too. Creating a spell-less Paladin in 5e would be a much trickier balancing act than the spell-less Ranger was, because of all that. Not impossible, mind, but you'd have to account for significant loss of resources AND change the resource mechanic for Smiting so that it remains balanced (because without spell slots, you ain't doin' no Smiting!)Ah, I had focused on the "never," but if you really meant "originally" then much of my argument disappears. Fair enough.</blockquote>

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