D&D 4E Spheres & domains in 4e

Kzach

Banned
Banned
I loved the concept of spheres and domains. I felt they did a lot to add flavour to the cleric.

So I was wondering if anyone has attempted to add something similar to their games in 4e and if so, how they went about it?

The channel divinity powers are along the right lines but are far too limited to really express the differences between religions.
 

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They were too... 3.5, for lack of better verbiage. A few domains (especially PHB ones) were in nearly every portfolio, and some domains were only for one god, despite having a severe case of Domain Awesome.

1 - What if you made it more general? It could be as simple as power-source-based. "Martial God" - moradin, bahamut. "arcane god" - raven queen, iounn. "primal god" - melora, etc. Channel Divinity feats are already VERY specific; by having a very general option and a very specific option, that cover

2 - I'd shy away from making them into Channel Divinity feats. Having 3 options already has a tendency to make it a tough choice. What if they were usable once per encounter, and replaced a Healing Word? That could justify a significantly more awesome effect.
 

I think one way to go about it would be to have a multiclass-only class for each sphere or domain. The initial feat would grant you access to a domain power, and you could use the power swap feats to get domain prayers.

That would be quite a bit of work, though.
 

I think one way to go about it would be to have a multiclass-only class for each sphere or domain. The initial feat would grant you access to a domain power, and you could use the power swap feats to get domain prayers.

That would be quite a bit of work, though.

I'm not sure I understand this fully but the glimmer I'm getting intrigues me!

Could you provide a basic example?
 

If you have the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide, the Spellscarred is an example of a multiclass-only class. Like normal multiclassing, you need to take a feat to gain access to the class and its powers, and once you've taken the multiclass feat, you can take Novice Power, Adept Power and Acolyte Power to swap one of your encounter, utility and daily powers with another one from the class.

As an example, let's say you have Frost Domain as a multiclass feat, and in order to take it, you need to have a divine power source and be a worshipper of the Raven Queen or whatever.

When you take the feat, you are considered multiclassed into the Frost Domain, and as a benefit (the domain power), say you get a +1 bonus to attack rolls for powers with the cold keyword.

When the character hits 4th level, he can take the Novice Power feat to swap one of his encounter powers with another encounter power from the Frost Domain power list. These could be original powers, or you could just pick existing powers to fill out the list.

Some existing powers that might work as frost domain encounter powers are: chill strike (wizard encounter 1), icy rays (wizard encounter 3), winter's wrath (wizard encounter 7), coldfire vortex, cold version only (warock encounter 13), and ice tomb (wizard encounter 17). Of course, you would need to modify the attack stat and implements of the powers so that they work better with a base divine character.
 

Ooh, I really like that idea.

I've so far come up with three alternate systems, all of which worked, but didn't give me the 'feel' I was after. This, however, could be tailored quite nicely to each god. It's more of a specialised cleric than domains, but still works for the ultimate purpose I'm after which is to give the cleric more flavour.
 

I think one good thing that comes of ditching the domain system is that not every deity needs to be equally badass. Since all clerics get the same abilities for the most part, you just need to design one attractive power for clerics of that deity and the rest just works. So you can have gods who formerly wouldn't have been badass enough for D&D.

In 3rd Edition, a god of love like Aphrodite would have been stupid for an adventurer, because the best you can hope for is the Good or Protection domains, which ended up being handed out to everyone who was too nicey-nice to get an ass-kicker domain. And as for the domains themselves, the farther you got from "Smite enemies, heal allies," the more of a stretch it got to fill in those domain spells. When I look back at the domain spells granted to some of those less canonical cleric domains, it always seemed like a lot of filler.

Now you can have Erathis, god of civilization, and Hermes, messenger god, and Jeff, god of biscuits. Just come up with a Channel Divinity power and they're just as good a patron god to choose as any other.
 

One of the things that domains did in 3.X was to provide clerics with limited access to spells that were usually only available to Socerors/Wizards or Druids. Along these lines, domains could be worked into 4e as something like multiclass feats that would allow a Cleric to swap out their powers for powers on the domain list.

Let's hope that the Divine Power book will offer some way of including domains.
 

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