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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 236176" data-attributes="member: 537">The cleric has been around longer than the paladin has. In all incarnations of D&D, the cleric has always been based on the "holy warrior" or crusading template. This was even made explicit in the 1E and 2E rules, which used the historical crusading orders as examples of clerics. 2E also introduced the concept of generic "priest", which basically codified what a lot of people were already doing -- ie, using the cleric as a priest out of lack of any suitable alternative. However, the actual treatment of the priest was half-assed, to say the least.What _has_ happened is that the roles of the cleric and paladin have converged over 25+ years of D&D evolution, so that people now think of paladins as being generic holy warriors. Among other things, this leads to questions like "why can't you have chaotic or evil paladins?" However, carrying on about topic this would be boring, like I said before.What relevance does this have to D&D? Whatever "cleric" may mean in real life, in D&D it's just a word, used as a label for a particular class. You could call the class "foobar" and nothing would be changed.The turn undead ability is derived directly from old horror movies where priests use holy symbols to keep vampires at bay. It has precious little to do with calling or mediating with spirits.Thus illustrating that some splatbook authors don't really know what they're doing.If you REALLY want a generic priest, there have been six million alt.priests floated. I have one on my web page. There are more on the House Rules board.</blockquote>

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