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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9744842" data-attributes="member: 18">This feels to me like posturing/posing/"fronting" of the most risible kind.I guarantee if we look through campaigns you have participated in, even characters you've played, plenty of them will be "pointless" by this standard. And I very much doubt you were thinking "Well Jen's Cleric is a worthless loser fake-Cleric because ever second word out of her mouth isn't Lathander" or the like.What I'm saying is, I feel like you don't actually believe what you're arguing here, I feel like, and obviously it's only a feeling, you made an argument of a rather-over-the-top nature and instead of saying "Well, maybe it's not as extreme as I said but I like to see patrons matter at least", you're trying to support the insupportable position that this stuff has to matter or else classes, and in fact specific PCs are "pointless". JMHO and so on.Barbarian you're just illustrating the problem. The fiction is absolutely NOT, I repeat NOT, that Barbarians are "mad berserkers". That's just Berserkers specifically, a subclass. The 5E fiction is that Barbarians are this sort of "primal warrior"-type, and it's a bit confused and broad, and the Rage doesn't really support the fiction at all.<a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes/2190875-barbarian" target="_blank"> 2024 </a>bravely attempts to square this circle in how it describes Barbarians and Rage but I'd argue in fact that they're a good example of a fiction-mechanics mismatch, because I don't think it's very convincing or intuitive. It does not suggest they are "mad berserkers", note, click the link if you disagree.90% of Paladins in 5E go through adventures never really having their oath present a major problem (generally because players rarely pick and Oath that they know is going to cause a problem, and frankly Vengeance and Ancients, two of the most popular Oaths, are pretty much the old "Path of What I Was Going To Do Anyway" from oWoD, referring to various Sabbat Humanity-alternative Paths. Anyone claiming "That's just ur table man" is obviously and trivially proven wrong by looking at actual plays of D&D, whether podcasts or forum posts or w/e. This is probably mostly a good thing too, I'd argue. Further, Paladins have no features that foreground the oath, and no mechanics that require dealing with the oath, so your point re: Warlocks also applies here and indeed to several of the classes discussed (given you're discounting Patron-specific abilities and Pact-specific abilities as "foregrounding", so we must likewise discount those for Paladin, Cleric, etc.). I agree that Warlock doesn't foreground patrons, note, but I don't think that's an accident or bad design or w/e. I think the issue here is some subsection of DMs have an odd interpretation of Warlocks, and I suspect every single one of those DMs is someone who sees Warlocks as a relatively "new" class that they probably didn't actually see in play until 5E.That's simply not logical. In fact it's actively anti-logical. Warlocks existing doesn't mean they represent the sum total of pacts with powerful beings, any more than Clerics existing means they represent the sum total of gods investing mortals with power. The point of the class is to have a class themed around that - which absolutely does not mean that the patron has to play a major part in the campaign or drive conflict, as we've already established. But a class being themed around something, doesn't mean it's the only way that thing can be in the game. That's just not a thing.</blockquote>

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