Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sadrik" data-source="post: 3800907" data-attributes="member: 14506">I would like the divine characters made to fill roles of a religion rather than the current schema which is sort of- every religion has clerics- period.This is a fundamental question, how different should each cleric be from one another should every deity have different and separate class? Or should each class be a toolkit and the DM or campaign setting tell you which options are available to you. I think all of the roles are not being covered and I would hope that in 4E we get a much better spread of divine character possibilities. Lets look at the current list of divine power source classes from 3rd edition. Cleric: the catchall divine class made to attempt to cover every deity and their worshipers, so powerful that their are few real choices outside of this class. Always argued to be a "knights templar", which does not make any sense for many deities.Druid: shapechanger with nature spells, generally regarded as a powerful class.Paladin: LG fighter with a smattering of spells,Ranger: fighter-rogue, that should not get divine spells imho, and hopefully they wont in 4e- take a few levels in druid...Shugenja: divine sorcerer, worships elemental spirits and gets elemental-like powers. Tied to an OA theme.Favored Soul: divine sorcerer, that eventually becomes angelic.Spirit Shaman: an alternative to the shapechanging druid and tied to a nature based spirit theme.Archivist: a scholar of the divine, one who studies divinity and draws powers from that study.There may be others that I am unaware of but those are the main ones.A class is made up of three so far as I can tell: power source, role and profession. So, the question is what power source: divine, role (defender, striker, leader, control) and most importantly which profession should the classes encompass. These should be based off of the deities role in the game world. Ok, so here are some of my suggestions:Paladin (defender): The paladin should take on the role of "knights templar" and holy warrior. Become a little more divine and allow most war gods, gods of justice, gods of the beast, and gods of personal skill and strength to devote themselves to this class of characters.Priest (leader): The priest should take on the profession of divine scholar and scribe. Scribing is one of the most important roles in the ancient world for religions. The priest could be representative of a scholar of all things divine, a church scribe, and adherent to a more magical or less militant deity.Mystic(controller or leader???): The mystic is the class that would take the religion to the extreme and not necessarily fit into a church like setting, could be seen as cultists, divine prophets, ascetics, and disciple of some little known or understood deity. Many deities could fit into this class. In fact, at least half of the deities would fit into this type of class.Cleric(leader): This should represent the main line church based divine leader. With a little more bent toward militarism than the priest but less than the paladin. The cleric would likely still be the most present class among the deities.Divine Assassin(striker): Not every deity is a good guy and not every deity holds good and righteous values. This is sort of the rogue/cleric that a paladin being a fighter/cleric. There are some examples of this in the real world.Archivist(controller or leader???): A true scholar of divinity almost arcane in their understanding of the gods and the powers that they grant, not tied to a single divinity, they study and tap the power of the gods through their formulaic understanding of the deities. Where the cleric is master of one deity the archivist is master of none, but knows the concepts that make up all divinity.Outside of those that are more organized: their are the druids shugenja and spirit shamans. What do you do with the characters that worship the elements, spirits or natural world? Do you make them part of the classes above and just make them part of their traditions or do you go a different route and make them based completely on a new power source. Personally, I like the idea of making them based on a different power source a nature power source or "feywild" power source to coin their new plane. Leave the divine power source to beings worshiped in the outer planes. But the natural power source could have its own classes that are represented as those above for the divine power source.</blockquote>

Verification