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What Should The 5E Cleric Look Like?
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<blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5773962" data-attributes="member: 11999"><p>At the time, I loved the way that 2e had different spell lists, granted powers, and allowed weapons and armor depending on which deity they served.</p><p></p><p>I have long since changed my mind. Many of these specialty priests were terribly ineffective in adventuring parties ("what, you're a cleric and you can't heal or turn undead?").</p><p></p><p>Frankly a lot of them didn't make much sense from a world-building perspective either. So clerics of the God of Magic can use daggers and staves, can't wear armor, and have fewer hit points, but can cast some spells normally restricted to magic-users? Hmmm...</p><p></p><p>I see the cleric class as a holy warrior. They're well-trained in combat because they are the ones who are chosen or destined to actively defend and promote their faith, by force of arms if necessary. The gift of wielding divine power is too precious to waste one someone hanging around the safety of the church all of the time. </p><p></p><p>This concept of a cleric works very well with the approach to religion taken in the Eberron setting. The dominant religion is The Sovereign Host (the nine good and neutral/unaligned gods), and the overwhelming majority of people worship the Host as a pantheon rather than individually. It makes sense that a cleric of the Church of the Sovereign Host would have the abilities attributed to the traditional D&D cleric, as they don't serve such a narrowly-defined portfolio as "lightning" or "love." Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous uses a similar paradigm, where The Great Church encompasses all of the good and neutral gods of the world (although each does have their own smaller, specialized church).</p><p></p><p>Come to think of it, GAZ1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos (1987) also had a similar setup, with the Church of Traladara venerating the three Traladaran heroes who ascended to immortality, and the loosely-Catholicism-based Church of Thyatis worshiped a different group of immortals.</p><p></p><p>I think that this approach works best for a lower-complexity core game. There's no laundry list of a couple dozen gods (with often ridiculously narrow areas of influence) for players to have to deliberate over during character creation, and it allows for a versatile cleric class that has some in-world justification for its abilities.</p><p></p><p>Additional "modules" could include rules for building clerics who serve a single deity, including modifying their spell lists and granted powers to be more thematically appropriate. I love the church-of-a-pantheon approach and I think it works better for the game and from a world-building perspective, but the approach of 2nd Edition is equally valid and should exist for those who want it and the added complexity.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Keldryn, post: 5773962, member: 11999"] At the time, I loved the way that 2e had different spell lists, granted powers, and allowed weapons and armor depending on which deity they served. I have long since changed my mind. Many of these specialty priests were terribly ineffective in adventuring parties ("what, you're a cleric and you can't heal or turn undead?"). Frankly a lot of them didn't make much sense from a world-building perspective either. So clerics of the God of Magic can use daggers and staves, can't wear armor, and have fewer hit points, but can cast some spells normally restricted to magic-users? Hmmm... I see the cleric class as a holy warrior. They're well-trained in combat because they are the ones who are chosen or destined to actively defend and promote their faith, by force of arms if necessary. The gift of wielding divine power is too precious to waste one someone hanging around the safety of the church all of the time. This concept of a cleric works very well with the approach to religion taken in the Eberron setting. The dominant religion is The Sovereign Host (the nine good and neutral/unaligned gods), and the overwhelming majority of people worship the Host as a pantheon rather than individually. It makes sense that a cleric of the Church of the Sovereign Host would have the abilities attributed to the traditional D&D cleric, as they don't serve such a narrowly-defined portfolio as "lightning" or "love." Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous uses a similar paradigm, where The Great Church encompasses all of the good and neutral gods of the world (although each does have their own smaller, specialized church). Come to think of it, GAZ1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos (1987) also had a similar setup, with the Church of Traladara venerating the three Traladaran heroes who ascended to immortality, and the loosely-Catholicism-based Church of Thyatis worshiped a different group of immortals. I think that this approach works best for a lower-complexity core game. There's no laundry list of a couple dozen gods (with often ridiculously narrow areas of influence) for players to have to deliberate over during character creation, and it allows for a versatile cleric class that has some in-world justification for its abilities. Additional "modules" could include rules for building clerics who serve a single deity, including modifying their spell lists and granted powers to be more thematically appropriate. I love the church-of-a-pantheon approach and I think it works better for the game and from a world-building perspective, but the approach of 2nd Edition is equally valid and should exist for those who want it and the added complexity. [/QUOTE]
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