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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6181299" data-attributes="member: 1879">Except in D&D what's happening is almost the opposite of what you describe. The Cleric prays to an otherworldly power who crams a set of instructions into the clerics brain. The cleric follows the instructions and magic happens but he doesn't understand why particularly. The Wizard performs rituals that she does understand which allow her to achieve magical effects, that's why she gets to learn new spells each level and research novel magics. Of course then you go and screw that relationship up with Sorcerers and Archivists. At any rate the point is that D&D Clerics do not, and never have, prayed directly to their Gods for miracles (barring the miracle spell.) The closest a D&D class has ever come to that approach to magic was the 2e Sha'ir, and he wasn't so much praying as ordering. The truth of the matter is that D&D magic is a horrid jumble of dozens of different fantasy and real-world mystical traditions, several of which have incompatible cosmologies, and it portrays none of them well. In the end D&D is D&D and if you really want to think about it and make it internally consistent then you can either prune out about half the classes or go with a Glorantha-like mythical reality and let the cosmology wars rage over your campaign. And the kicker is that even if you do apply that level of thought and effort to it, your results only apply to your own table and leave the game at large still a mess. That's why these internet discussions, while usfully thought provoking, are highly unlikely to actually lead to any kind of concensus. We've all built our own mental models of what this jumbled mash-up actually means and they don't even share the same definitions.</blockquote>

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