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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arjomanes" data-source="post: 7672517" data-attributes="member: 94951">Well technically, the rules say "Divine magic, as the name suggests, is the power of the gods, flowing from them into the world. Clerics are conduits for that power, manifesting it as miraculous effects." It's pretty clear that the default D&D cleric gets its power from the gods. Now, you could certainly recreate the class into another class that has similar mechanics, but you would have to change a great deal about the class. The name, the holy symbol, the spells, and the abilities would all need to be changed. The trope of the holy warrior defines many of the mechanical choices, and changing the trope means some of the mechanical choices may need to be revisited. Why does the class grant medium armor and shield proficiency, for example? Why does it serve a patron and gain iconic domain powers from that being? What is the purpose of the relationship and why is that being represented by universal concepts? So yes, you could rebuild the class, with or without different changes to the mechanics, but the story and the non-mechanical rules and descriptions are very integral to the class as well. I'm all for tweaking the rules to fit the setting, and coming up with new and interesting variants. But the default D&D 5e cleric and its relationship with divine magic necessitates gods in the world. Of course the DM is welcome to change that rule as he sees fit, and actually is encouraged to by the rules, which is very cool.I'm not meaning to argue with you as much as drawing a distinction between the default game and each of our own settings. In my setting, for example, only humans that worship the gods of law are technically clerics. Chaotic non-humans or worshipers of gods of chaos are cultists (or their nonhuman equivalent — each race has its own name for warrior priests, as well as favored deities/domains), not clerics, with slightly different abilities. Even if the default game had a story about how psionics work and where that power comes from, that doesn't preclude me from tweaking it to fit my world as well. But a psion would still have a certain role and a story in the default game.</blockquote>

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