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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Yeah, I'm just not seeing that.
Moradin forges the dwarves. Guess where they got that idea from? Tolkien. Its literally the origin story lifted right from there. Grumph One Eye? Guess who else lost their eye in a fight with the head of elves and leads armies of orcs?
 



Hussar

Legend
Adamantium armor is listed as a magic item in the DMG, uncommon (which I find weird), placing it between 101 and 500 gp in value, which is the closest cost equivalent we have

Yeah, I'm thinking that if my player tried to tell me that adamantine armor was a free add on to regular armor, it likely wouldn't fly too far. But, yeah, the DMG lists it as more than 100 gp, so, right there the ability wouldn't work.
 


Aldarc

Legend
"Ripoff" seems too strong a word for what amounts to light inspiration. The closest comparative parallel is between Aulë and Moradin, but the idea that an artisan deity/angel would forge their created race into being isn't exactly all that original in the first place. You have to squit to see Gruumsh as Sauron. To the best of my recollection, for example, though Sauron is associated with an "eye," he is never said to have lost one - though maybe two if one counts the loss of his entire body - unless he stores them on his fingers. And Sauron isn't their creator (or perverter of their creation), but, rather, Melkor. The closest to Melkor losing an eye was having his face scratched up by an eagle during the fight with Fingolfin. Who is Corellon Larethian's analogue supposed to be?
 

Azzy

ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ
Moradin forges the dwarves. Guess where they got that idea from? Tolkien. Its literally the origin story lifted right from there.

That's it? Moradin forges the dwarves similar to how Aulë forged the seven fathers of the dwarves (Seven dwarves? Tolkien ripped off Snow White!), and that makes the dwarven gods rip offs of Tolkien? Never mind that dwarves from myth and folklore are heavily associated with forging and crafting, and that Tolkien's take on them being forged by a higher power is a pretty easy concept to have (certainly better than the original—forming from maggots in a dead giant). Whether inspired by Tolkien or independently developed, this hardly counts as a ripoff, and also says nothing about the rest of the dwarven panthe

Grumph One Eye? Guess who else lost their eye in a fight with the head of elves and leads armies of orcs?

Who? Because it wasn't Sauron.

So that leaves Gruumsh and the rest of the Orc Pantheon, and Corellon Larethian and the rest of the Elven pantheon.

Yep, D&D has mined and ripped off Tolkien quite a bit and in many ways, but, aside from the creation myth of the dwarves, the nonhuman pantheons have very little in common with Tolkien.
 

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