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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwoSix" data-source="post: 6223735" data-attributes="member: 205">This is spot on, and what I was (poorly) trying to say when I said I preferred a mechanical skeleton over a narrative one.  That is to say, I prefer the specialty priest as a variant mage, because of commonality of effect; rather than variant cleric because of commonality of backstory, as reflected in the poorly defined "power sources".It's a main reason I've been advocating that in a back-to-basics approach to D&D tropes, Next should emphasize the cosmological differences between arcane and divine, and use that as a rationale to divide classes between power sources.  Spell out in the core that divine magic is only capable of effects like X, and that arcane can only do effects like Y.  That way, you have fidelity to the classic D&D narrative, while still retaining a meaningful mechanical difference between classes.  Of course, this doesn't quite paper over the central tension of D&D pantheons, which goes roughly like this:1) There are gods for pretty much everything.2) Priests worship these gods, and gain powers related to their particular god's interests.3) Priests powers are represented using divine magic, which has a limited set of historical effects available to it.4) To represent the breadth of their divine powers, priests need reskinning or many different granted abilities.You see this tension in 2e specialty priests and the 3e, 4e, 5e domain systems.  4e took a narrative crack at explaining the similarity of divine powers by saying that divine power originates from the Astral Sea, and the gods are on a team and merely expedite its use, rather than granting it directly.  I think that sort of idea works well to represent clerics in their current 5e state.If you want clerics who are channels of their god, and gain powers flavored to match their god, I'd much rather see clerics who gain 3e warlock type invocations related to their god's domains.  A priest of a fire god should do fire stuff, not heal and bless and turn undead.</blockquote>

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