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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9752525" data-attributes="member: 18">Not really imho.Cleric is a complicated set of fictional, mythohistorical, and mostly-Abrahamic religious concepts rolled into one. "Power from the outside" is not what defined the class at creation. Further, I would suggest that's never been at the core of the Cleric, never been definitional to the Cleric. If you're just saying "that's my opinion, man", okay, sure fine, that's a valid opinion, but it's not supported by the facts imo, so that's all it is, an unsupported opinion.Specifically, the Cleric class was created as a foil to the Vampire class (for that was a thing in the days of yore). The very peculiar traits it possesses are because the Cleric is a mixture of the mythohistoric version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odo_of_Bayeux" target="_blank">Bishop Odo</a> (this is where we get the armour + shield, the fact the Cleric is a battlefield fighter, and the aversion to edged weapons, which is a mythohistorical attribute of Bishop Odo), Hammer Horror-type takes on Van Helsing (this is where we get stuff like Turn Undead, and the general notion of Clerics as the fighters/destroyers of undead, as well as some Cleric spells), and Abrahamic religious stuff, particularly Biblical miracles is responsible for a lot of the other spells (including some weirdly hyper-specific ones like Sticks to Snakes). This isn't my opinion note, this is accounts from the people involved (particularly Gygax).Religion has always been a part of Clerics, but I don't think the "that's what a cleric is" is actually supportable beyond just a floating opinion, any more than "turn undead" is "what a cleric is" or weird Abrahamic-vibes spells (which have increasingly changed/vanished from D&D) is "what a cleric is".Further to support my point, whilst I'm talking outside of D&D, cleric-types, whilst incredibly rare in Western fantasy fiction aside from Van Helsing-types (who often have no supernatural powers), are pretty common in Japanese manga/anime/videogames, and a lot of those don't even pray or rely on an outside force at all, but just do "white magic" or the like, and honestly it ends up in pretty exactly the same place as the Cleric.Now I would differentiate the Cleric from a later D&D concept - the Speciality Priest - since 2E, the Cleric has increasingly evolved towards being the same as the Speciality Priest, which is to say a priest dedicated to a specific god. In 3E this was even more encouraged. 4E kind of moved away from that a bit, but then 5E 2014 finally made all Clerics into speciality priests and was the first edition to not allow you to not select a god ("As you create a cleric, the most important question to consider is which deity to serve and what principles you want your character to embody."), but 2024 once more makes the Cleric origin flexible enough that whilst you're accessing "divine magic", there's not necessarily any specific god involved, possibly not even a specific pantheon.TLDR: That's on the list of things a Cleric is, but it's not really #1.</blockquote>

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