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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3225038" data-attributes="member: 29746">Very interesting point- and quite true, really. The classes as they are now did not exist in the original incarnation of D&D, when races like "dwarf" and "elf" and even "halfling" were implemented in game as classes in their own right. Magic-User and Cleric were the only two classes (besides "Elf," which I won't count in future discussion since from the modern perspective it's a race and this would cause confusion) which could cast spells.What happened was that, as future sets came out, new classes were introduced. The thing about the new classes was, you didn't start as one; you always started as one of the "basic" classes from the original Basic Set- the traditional four plus the three races. To become, for example, a Paladin, you had to be a 9th-level Fighter IIRC and be of Lawful alignment. It was sort of like Prestige Classes today, except that the new class sort of subsumed the original one and you became something new when you took it. This mechanic was largely left by the wayside when 1st-Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released, though you can still see echoes of it in the way the Thief-Acrobat was treated (for example).The first real use of the split between Arcane and Divine came in 2nd Edition AD&D, when they forced all the classes into the four-category structure. Every class in that edition, whatever it was, had to be a subclass of the four basic archetypes- Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Priest. "Psionicist" was a fifth type that was introduced in the Complete Psionics Handbook splatbook, and never really meshed that well with the others although the designers did try. 2nd Edition is where the spell lists were consolidated, and every class that got spells got them from one of the two base spell lists- Wizard or Priest. This echoes down to us today in the form of Arcane and Divine magic. But it came from the fact that they took 2nd Edition "back to basics," as it were and forced all the classes to conform to the base archetypes.all this leads me to ask- if Druid for example had been one of the basic classes in the very first Basic Set of the game, way back in 1974, might we today have a three-way split between Arcane, Divine, and Natural/Shamanistic magic? I think it's likely.The Monotheistic idea of the split between Arcane and Divine magic, thus, might not be so Monotheistic at all- the game as it is now is still grounded in its deepest and earliest roots. The question that should be answered, in this context, is whether and, if so how much, Monotheistic ideas influenced the choice of the earliest basic archetypes. If you read the class list for the Basic Set, one can't help but notice a similarity to the archetypes portrayed in the Lord of the Rings, and we know Tolkien was a devoted Catholic. So did Monotheistic ideas influence the split between Arcane and Divine? Yes, they certainly did- but probably not the way the OP (or most modern players for that matter) think they did. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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