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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 3753880" data-attributes="member: 19857">You're right that there aren't any clerics in Lord of the Rings - but then there aren't really any wizards either, at least not how D&D players envision the wizard.  The cleric comes from history -- the militant Knights Templar are the historical base for the cleric, with a dash of fantasy from the miracles-as-spells system that D&D has.  (Honestly, the worst thing to happen to the cleric was the creation of the paladin back in the day -- once people saw paladins as holy warriors, the cleric's role was reduced from militant church warrior to healer guy).There aren't any clerics in Dragonlance 4th age because of a specific plot point of that setting - the removal of the gods from the world.  And Dragonlance from the beginning was very much a "clerics must have gods" setting.  Other versions of Dragonlance kind of depend on there being clerics around, or at least on there having once been clerics around.I think the cleric will stick around in many games.  I suspect that the Warlord-as-leader will have some bennies that the Cleric doesn't, but I suspect that the reverse will also be true.  Also, while the cleric may not be prevalent in generic fantasy, the militant cleric is very much used in "influenced-by-Dungeons-and-Dragons" fantasy, so there's a certain amount of "D&D"-ness involved in having a cleric in the party.  I do hope that the "we NEED to have a cleric" aspect goes away, and I also hope that the "you stand in the back and heal people" aspect of the cleric diminishes (Bias note:  I've almost always played the cleric in almost every game I've ever been in.  Part of that is because I like clerics, but MOST of it is because I tend to play with people who hate playing clerics).Now, what I'd REALLY like to happen is for the assumption that "priest == cleric" would go away.  All priests in a campaign world should not have to be clerics, though the D&D rules have never been good about this.  The vast majority of priests should be something like the adept NPC class, but with a more interesting spell list.  Back in my "Rules Cyclopedia" D&D days, I even went so far as to create a "church priest" class for NPCs - wizard attack progression, d4 HD, spell list made up of mostly healing, protection and divination spells.  I even had a player want to play one though we had to tweak the spell list to make it worthwhile as a PC adventuring class.  I suppose that in the new game I could see tweaking the spell list and making something like that to fill the role of a "divine controller"-type class.</blockquote>

Verification