Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 6059946" data-attributes="member: 52073">Paladins have traditionally gotten their powers from Good rather than serving a god--paladins of a god were only a thing in Forgotten Realms and then became standard in 4e--and clerics traditionally gained their lower-level (1st-3rd) spells via faith alone.  So yes, the paladin is still divine, and faith alone will suffice.Wizards don't have "faith" in their magic, unless you consider knowing that gravity exists means you have "faith" that you won't suddenly fly off the surface of the earth tomorrow.  If a good wizard casts an evil spell, tortures someone with his magic, kills a bunch of people, and so forth, the only thing that happens is that he hopefully feels a twinge of conscience, whereas if a good cleric or paladin does the same they've pissed off the source of their magic and it either is weakened or it goes away.Again, back in the day divine classes were better.  Do you know what the penalty for a paladin or ranger was for changing to a non-good alignment?  They became fighters, which I remind you in AD&D was a class actually worth taking.  That's right, paladins and rangers were strictly superior to fighters (until UA and 2e threw the fighter a bone) in exchange for having a code of conduct they had to follow to keep those extra powers.  As for clerics (and the subclass druids) vs. magic-users, I'd say clerics have a good argument for being better.  In an edition where magic-users had a cap on spells known, had to seek out new spells to learn them instead of learning a bunch automatically, only had a random chance to learn spells, and started off with random spells known at 1st level, the cleric knowing his entire list automatically was a huge deal, and in an edition where a single point of damage disrupted spellcasting automatically and you could kill most things with two fireballs to the face even at high levels, having armor proficiency and a d8 instead of a d4 for hit die was again a huge deal.  The comparison only became clearer in 2e with specialty priests, where you could build yourself a blaster cleric or a necromancer cleric to compete with your blaster mage or necromancer mage and so forth.And if you think falling was rare, apparently you've managed to avoid all of the interminable alignment debates with clerics, the "Will X make a paladin fall?" threads, and all the rest, for which I heartily congratulate you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> One of the reasons clerics of a cause were so popular when 3e first came out, aside from the ability to pick any two domains which is nice but not necessary for every pair, was that since you're not serving a deity (with all the associated rules, regulations, hierarchy, etc.) but just a cause (which is much more tolerant) your chances of falling were much reduced.Like I said, even if you attach no other mechanics to the terms themselves, it's useful to be able to "hang" things on them, like arcane-only feats and specialties and such, because the wizard, sorcerer, warlock, etc. are close enough thematically that they might often want to share themes with each other but not with the divine classes; it's much easier to say "all arcane" than to list everything out and have to errata things when new classes come out.But even in 4e, where power source meant somewhere between zilch and nothing and Lawful Good clerics and paladins of the God of Fluffy Bunnies could go ahead and raze forests without losing their powers, all divine classes shared Channel Divinity and had a thing for radiant/necrotic damage, all arcane classes had a wider choice of implements and had a thing for elemental damage, and a bunch of feats and path/destiny features work with only arcane or only divine powers.  I'd certainly consider god-based CD powers and arcane wands (among other things) to be "something" that the distinction is gaining us.</blockquote>

Verification