Mike Mearls "Invented The Baked Potato" in Xanathar's Guide With The Cleric Forge Domain

Making a change from all those lovely pictures of Jeremy Crawford on EN World's front page, this time it's Mike Mearls who speaks to D&D Beyond about the Cleric Forge Domain in Xanathar's Guide, along with some interesting observations about baked potatoes.

Making a change from all those lovely pictures of Jeremy Crawford on EN World's front page, this time it's Mike Mearls who speaks to D&D Beyond about the Cleric Forge Domain in Xanathar's Guide, along with some interesting observations about baked potatoes.


[video=youtube;nZznOH4-njM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZznOH4-njM[/video]​


"... one of those ones where it's like "Why wasn't this in the Player's Handbook?", right like it's the dwarf clerics have become so iconic to the game and it's funny because they weren't technically really like 2nd Edition let you play a dwarf cleric, but I think that people just naturally always, I don't know what it is about dwarves? Dwarves and clerics just goes together and I think part of it is because you have the story of Moradin forging the dwarves, he literally makes them, right, and I think that's mythically very interesting, this idea that you have a craftsman who's a God who basically challenges himself -- "Can I make a folk, , the dwarves, my children. I'm gonna [something] amount of iron and metal and ingots whatever it is , and that to me is really interesting and I think that would have such profound implications of that society where like your God physically made you out of iron, out of metal and breathed life into you, and so then you have that association of dwarves, of crafting things. Of course creation would be hopefully sacred to dwarves because that's what their deity does, that's what their deity did to create them.

And again this is what I think is interesting in D&D when you have the divine, the divine is knowable. Like Moradin's day to day desires might be unknowable or cryptic but Morden is a person that is like what happened, like people know, there's there's not a question of faith, it's a question of which team do you pick? And so the idea of the dwarf cleric is essentially to my mind when we were working on it, what I was thinking 100% was the dwarf cleric who decides "I am going to emulate Moradin, I want to be a great Smith, that the deity who created me was a great smith and I will follow those footsteps because creation is sacred to our folk".

And then since it's a cleric you have to ask yourself how do you use creation to beat down orcs and goblins? And then it's just like - make magic weapons. That's it, you get to imbue a weapon and make it magical and that just felt very sensible, very obvious; and the great thing is in there our system it's not game breaking; it's powerful but it's not over-the-top.

This is one of the subclasses I think really encapsulates when we're doing things really right the initial playtest feedback was through the roof positive. I think we had to tweak a few things here and there but it hit that note I think of ... I was joking when I said this should have been the Players Handbook but really it should've been in the Players Handbook because it's so iconic. As soon as we showed it to people they were just like "Yes this makes sense. This fits, the mechanics make sense, the mechanics are easy, there's nothing in those mechanics that's tricky or strange or clever. It's just obvious. I make things magical, I make my armor better and make my weapons better. I make things, that's it."

But it just hits such a resonant tone and that's always what we're shooting for we do these new subclasses - we want to hit that resonant tone. You can go for the thing that's very experimental that people haven't seen before, and that's part of the approach, you need to do some of that. But when you're doing things where people just look out and go "Oh yeah that's D&D", yes do you feel really you feeling good about yourself as a designer because I fill the gap that everyone wanted to play but they couldn't play. Maybe they didn't know the gap was empty until you gave them this, and then suddenly everyones playing it.

And I think that's how we are really truly growing the game when we do that, when you could imagine "Oh if you could go back in time and give Xanathar's to the Players Handbook team, this is one of the domains, one of the options, they would just be "Oh, yes, of course let's put this right in the Players Handbook."

That always feels good as a designer when you do that. To me it's it's not the exotic new wacky thing it's the thing that's just like, "You've invented baked potatoes. Now that you've invented it everyone will have these with their steak forever", I just feel like, "Wow, that's kind of cool!"

Because it fits, and that's when we know as designers, as creators, we're connecting with the audience, we're hitting on things that people want, we're hitting on things that just make sense to people, and I love that feeling as a designer on a game like Dungeons & Dragons, that has a history, that has a big active user base, it means we as designers are in touch with players, that work on the same page. I love that feeling."



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Sacrosanct

Legend
One of the things I like about making your own magic items is that it addresses the problem of "I really like this archetype of a flail wielding warrior, but there are never any magical flails you find anywhere." Back in the day in 1e, we as DMs would often change the weapon type of whatever you rolled to match what the PCs were wanting to use, but not every DM did that. So this subclass seems to address that since it sounds like they can enchant their own weapons and armor without needing to find them randomly.
 


Iry

Legend
I feel like he forgot that Corelleon created the Elves, Maglubiyet created the goblins, and a whole bunch of other creatures in the game were created by cranky insane wizards. And that's not even touching on what AO created.
 


Tony Vargas

Legend
We're not even going to re-invent the wheel, this time, we're going all the way back to fire, and re-inventing things that people came up with in the early days of fire, before they had complicated things like wheels distracting them...

...the pre-pre-Columbian, pre-Incan people who discovered the potato, for instance, they had fire, but not the wheel, if they'd like, had the wheel, they might have skipped straight to tater tots...


...

Serioulsy, though, in 1e, there was a cryptic notation in the Dwarf class/level table that NPC dwarves could be clerics up to a not terribly high level. Elves, IIRC, got a similar notation, and halflings (maybe it was Druid). I guess it was because well, these other races had to have religion, but EGG didn't want them being PC clerics... OK.

Thing is, most of the races could be some kind of spellcaster, but not the Dwarf - Fighter, Fighter/Thief, that's about it. So who made those nifty Dwarven Throwers? Must've been those NPC clerics. Why not, clerics can use hammers. Yeah.

Just another case of mechanical artifacts shaping the poorly-sketched world(s) of early D&D.
 
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Xaelvaen

Stuck in the 90s
Hilarious, and oh-so-true. I really did feel like Dwarven Clerics were forgotten about in the PHB. Every other racial cleric had a domain that at least -worked- roughly, but this... this I missed. Well-done.

As far as other Gods 'creating', Moradin quite literally -forged- the race, not just 'created' which is the difference he was pointing out. Elves came from droplets of Corellon's blood, in example.
 



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