I never "got" the Cleric

[JoesephBear]

I've done some re-fluffing of clerics, paladins, and priests that applies to all my home-brewed stuff. It makes for what I feel is a bit more consistency.


Churches are not nice little buildings you go to on Sunday. Churches are large, organized religions and are just as much a political force as they are a spiritual force.

Priests are the guys who give the weekly sermons, do the baptisms, and listen to confessions. Typical real-life priestly stuff. They are essentially no different than commoners except they are reasonably well-educated.

Clerics are just priests who have been called to travel by their deity. They are missionaries to hostile lands, they recover sacred religious relics from dangerous dungeons, and they investigate reports of undead infestation. Because their job is both dangerous and vitally under-manned, clerics are given quick-and-dirty combat training. They are taught to use heavy armor for its protection, and they are only taught blunt weapons due to the speed at which they are mastered. With their spells to fill in the gaps, clerics are hurriedly sent on their way.

Paladins are the military force of the church. They fight the crusades and defend the holy cities. While they can perform priestly duties, that is not their primary function. They are soldiers of the faith first and foremost, and woe to those who make war against their church.

 

[Yora]

just isn't found outside D&D and D&D derived media.

And not even there: In Record of Lodoss War and Rune Soldier, there is only one warpriest-cleric and lots of robe-clerics. And most priests are even of the God of War, and they don't wear armor and shields either.

 

[Corathon]

Why is the parish priest at the local temple trained to wear heavy armor?

He probably isn't. Depending on what kind of world and what version of D&D you're running he's probably a cloistered cleric, and adept, or even an expert, rather than a cleric.

Why are evil Clerics so concerned about not spilling blood?

Perhaps for the same reason that blood sacrifice is important to many such religions? Maybe blood that is spilled outside of the prescribed rituals is a waste of spiritual energy or some kind of spiritual pollution that would weaken a cleric's tie with his god.

Why would a Chaotic Evil cleric of a Chaotic Evil Gods of War and Slaughter follow the same combat ethos as a medieval Catholic priest (i.e. Lawful Good ethos).

He wouldn't. He'd slaughter the innocent, poison wells, cut down orchards, refuse to honor treaties or truces as soon as it suited him. There's a lot more to "combat ethos" than using blunt weapons.

Why could a Cleric lose his spellcasting if he picked up a sword and swung it at a foe. . .but in the same fight a Paladin of the same faith wearing the same armor, praying to the same deity, casting some of the same spells he's probably expected to use big swords?

Certain religious orders in the real world are celibate or don't eat meat, but not because they believe that it is immoral to have sex or eat meat. These added privations are a sign of religious devotion. In a D&D world, that added devotion brings extra powers (in the form of better spell casting). Maybe the weapon restrictions represent something like that.

The source for it was obviously Crusade-era clergy (the Knights Templar influenced both the Paladin and Cleric). . .but why should almost every fantasy priest (i.e. all except Druids) be modeled on a medieval Christian religious order? The AD&D 2e PHB even cited Archbishop Turpin from the 11th Century work The Song of Roland as a main source for the class.

In my mind, an evil Cleric nemesis should be more like Thulsa Doom than Archbishop Turpin.

This idea is not a new one. There have been several "evil priest" type classes over the years. I have used some of them, and also invidualized priesthoods by granting access to different spell lists for different sects.

 

[TKDB]

That's nice. But completely irrelevant. Mike Mornard, on the origins of the cleric:



The origin point of the D&D cleric is literally the character of Van Helsing.

Like pretty much everything in D&D, the class was transformed as it moved from its pulp origins to game mechanics. But the closer you stick to the pulpy origins of the character (holy warrior who gets a little "help from above"), the more sense the class makes sense. The more you try to think of them as ordained priests, the less sense the class makes.

Huh, interesting. I was not aware of that origin story.

Though I do stand by my point that Stoker's character of Van Helsing bears little resemblance to the D&D cleric, whether or not you consider a position in the heirarchy of the church to be an important part of the class. But then again, given that a lot of elements of Stoker's Dracula get changed in later adaptations, that the most common change to the character of Van Helsing is to play up his role as a monster hunter (whereas in Stoker's novel he was simply a very knowledgeable guy who happened to know a lot about vampires and wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty applying that knowledge when asked for help in one isolated incident), and the cleric class was based on one such adaptation of Van Helsing, I suppose it makes more sense.