Psychopacifist clerics

[On Puget Sound]

I'm having trouble reconciling the rules on pacifist clerics with the fluff. Here is a cleric who is punished for dealing damage against a bloodied foe (even an ooze or a skeleton) but who can cheerfully commit mass murder as long as all the victims are minions.

The best I can come up with is, he actually has two separate sets of powers that use the same rules crunch. When he blasts or hits minions, he's using powers that knock them out, scare them away, disarm or demoralize them. These powers don't work on more powerful foes, so he uses his "other" powers (with the same area, range, keywords and damage) on them.

Given that whenever you reduce an opponent to 0 HP you can declare him to be incapacitated rather than dead, this sort of works... but then why does he freak out when he hits an injured enemy with one of these (non-lethal) attacks? And why is he OK with the fact that he travels with a party of stone cold killers, and every single encounter ends with a heap of bloody corpses? And what is the deal with being unwilling to damage a ZOMBIE? Or a mechanical trap with a "bloodied" level? Help me make sense of this character!

 

[ValhallaGH]

Help me make sense of this character!

Okay, here's my 6 step program:
1) Boggle at the inconsistency. You're doing great at this part.
2) Worry at it, endlessly. Let it keep you up nights. This is integral to ...
3) Go insane. Seriously, break with reality so that you no longer have an objective and accurate perception of it.
4) Look at the inconsistencies now that you're nuts. Isn't the book the best song you've ever heard? I could just lick it out of the air.
5) Repeat 1-4 as necessary.
6) Success! Spread the word. Martian grabble toothpaste.

All better now? Fantastic.



In all seriousness, it makes no sense. A pacifistic cleric would either never become an adventurer (given the incredible level of violence found in that profession), or he would just be a regular cleric that only knocks foes out. That one requirement, that you must choose to render foes unconscious, excepting monsters that shouldn't be (aberrations, undead, things that were never alive), would do the whole thing as well as it could be done.

 

[Lord Ernie]

Considering the cleric can take out minions without killing them, he might just use his powers to knock them unconscious, bedazzle them, or send them running to their mother.

Not very paficist, but still a technical pacifist, no?

 

[Turtlejay]

Since the whole HP/damage/bloodied part of the game is an abstraction, you can do this however you please. Perhaps your pacifist cleric never does any physical damage. His prayers that do HP damage are just that, prayers. Invocations. Pleadings to his God to aid his allies and show his adversaires the way. Once the enemy has been demoralized enough, trying to bring him down any further is pretty fruitless, hence the penalty. Minions are awed by the Divine power and faint or go into delusions, removing them from combat entirely.

This is just one flavor, that may or may not work for your pacifist. What if your Cleric is fine with defending himself, but has taken a vow not to murder? Once an enemy is bloodied, he must be very cautious as to not break that vow.

I would kind of like to have the feat come with at least a little roleplaying baggage, though. Declaring yourself a Pacifist should have more than just an occasional in-combat effect.

Jay

 

[Byronic]

When I think of a pacifist Cleric I think of Keiko in the last battle of the anime Doomed Metropolis. In this she confronts the demon sorcerer Yasunori Katō.

Now while she wasn't a pacifist previously, she becomes one at the beginning of the last battle. She drops her sword when entering and starts walking towards him. Katō summons demons of ill aspect, spirits so tainted and vile and they attack her. Does she attack? Yes and no, she becomes the bodhisattva Kwannon, channelling the Goddess of Mercy. While she probably attacks the minions in DnD terms, in the movie she redeems them. They turn from black blobs of malevolent evil to golden shiny things with the faces of babies as she cleanses them.

While it looks a lot better in the anime then I just described it, it's a wonderful example of a pacifist Cleric. Non violent, yet still clearly destroying the enemy. And I don't see why a pacifist wouldn't stay with the party. Think of it as a catholic priest, they can't marry or have sex but they can hang around with people who are married and have sex. Sometimes oaths serve to show that you are on a more advanced spiritual path then others. Or as a penitent act or any other reason which would result in you being a pacifist but being able to tolerate others. Who knows, maybe you redeem the souls of those that your comrades kill so that they may rest in peace?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Personally I just don't think it DOES make any real RP sense. You certainly can paper over it on a case-by-case basis but pacifist adventurers really are kind of a silly concept. I think it is purely a mechanical thing and you either decide to do it and live with the cognitive dissonance of the whole thing or just don't take the feat. From the game designer's standpoint its not really an issue, they're just presenting a mechanical option that works.

 

[KarinsDad]

This is just one flavor, that may or may not work for your pacifist. What if your Cleric is fine with defending himself, but has taken a vow not to murder? Once an enemy is bloodied, he must be very cautious as to not break that vow.

I think virtually no flavor works without an extremely weak stretch.

Mayor: "Did you kill any of the Orcs?"
Cleric: "No, I let my bloodthirsty friends do that. My hands are free of blood."

The entire adventuring concept is basically mercenary with the idea that most foes in D&D are generally there to be killed in the first place. A pacifist walking around with allies who kill is like the Pope walking around with mass murderers and saying "they're really doing God's work and are misunderstood".

Paladins have a similar dilema. D&D has historically been:

1) break in (i.e. trespass)
2) attack (i.e. murder)
3) loot (i.e. theft)

Adventurers are, for the most part, evil and minimally mercenary in concept. No real room for pacifists.

 

[Turtlejay]

Of course that is your opinion, but history is filled with examples of people with dissimilar goals and values working and living together. One example that springs to mind is embedded Journalists with soldiers at war. They are not fighters, and many may not be comfortable with killing, yet they live and work among the soldiers.

If you have a good RP reason to be with the party, you will stay with them and try to do good through *your* actions. I had a 3.5 Cleric of the Sovreign Host that was conflicted about killing. Every time a combat with sentient creatures was finished, he took time to administer rites to them, and placed a silver coin in their mouths to pay the Keeper (a bit of a heretic, sure). He was complicit with the killings, but his world view about the souls of the dead being freed from their evil existence allowed him to participate. He had become quite attatched to the party members, in particular a Warforged, and would not abandon them when things got hairy.

You can call that Pragmatic, or Hypocritical, or whatever you want, but people are people, whether real or imaginary. They don't have to be rational or make sense. If the character can rationalize his behavior and still obtain blessings from his Diety, then there is no problem.

Jay

 

[KarinsDad]

If you have a good RP reason to be with the party, you will stay with them and try to do good through *your* actions. I had a 3.5 Cleric of the Sovreign Host that was conflicted about killing. Every time a combat with sentient creatures was finished, he took time to administer rites to them, and placed a silver coin in their mouths to pay the Keeper (a bit of a heretic, sure). He was complicit with the killings, but his world view about the souls of the dead being freed from their evil existence allowed him to participate. He had become quite attatched to the party members, in particular a Warforged, and would not abandon them when things got hairy.

You can call that Pragmatic, or Hypocritical, or whatever you want, but people are people, whether real or imaginary. They don't have to be rational or make sense. If the character can rationalize his behavior and still obtain blessings from his Diety, then there is no problem.

I think people can rationalize anything they want.

It doesn't mean that it really makes sense.

Murder is murder. Theft is theft.

The only reason it is acceptable is because we are playing a game. Otherwise, most PCs are murderers bottom line. People rationalize it in game because they have a campaign where enemies exist. But, it's not much different than Japanese Whaling. Creaqtures are killed and one group of people rationalize it.

It's still murder. Doubly so in D&D where so many foes are sentient. But we let that slide for the most part because as players, we don't really want to delve so deeply into morality. We really want to explore, kill, and loot. Bottom line.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you maybe can stretch your brain around a pacifist healer to a certain extent, but it does become pretty difficult at certain points. I think it could work OK for a while, but its still not a terribly viable concept if you really buy into it. The character is going to be at odds with the rest of the party in a deep philosophical sense and if its RPed to any extent at all eventually you have problems. Its very similar to the old issue with having evil characters in your party. Sure, it works, until the logically inevitable happens and they express their evil on the other PCs or in a way the other PCs can't tolerate.

So I see it from an RP perspective as something you can deal with when say everyone is focused on a specific goal and the enemy is obvious and killing them is hard not to argue as a good act. Its pretty hard to see that over 30 levels. In fact its a lot easier to swallow in an epic party battling existential evil than it is in a low heroic party beating up on some local goblin tribe.

Overall its a pretty tough RP concept. It works mechanically and as long as your players don't really do anything more than fairly shallow RP they can certainly deal with it fine by ignoring it. Anyone getting into some serious character development? Its going to be a serious job to keep the character at all believable for very long.