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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8308145" data-attributes="member: 18">Ok but I've demonstrated that historically that's not what they've been. So what you want is at odds with their history, including their recent history (as in 5E they are very much "sword in hand" even if they aren't getting multiple attacks). You're basically describing the Loremaster subclass and nothing else. That would be akin to suggesting all Paladins should be Oath of Vengeance or something.Clerics are an accidentally-created class that have been a mess in in every edition and after 2E, been a borderline-OP mess. And yeah the line between them and Paladin has always been a confusing one. But I don't think D&D needs to be looking at drastic changes here, because at this point, it's become self-defining. The time for drastic changes was 3E, essentially, and Monte flubbed it - which is why he tried to re-write history with Arcana Unearthed (which I love, but is basically 100% an apology for 3E, or from another perspective a "What I actually wanted to do with 3E!").I don't think videogames are a good model to pursue with tabletop RPGs though. Videogame class divisions are serving a different purpose, a lot of the time. Thinking about classes as roles can have some value, but in the end, historically videogames have tended to divide stuff up in order to do things like force people to reroll their character a lot and spend more time playing their game, or to really simplify concepts because they were too hard for players, and obviously I think we all know any non-combat aspects of classes in videogames tend to get stripped away (slowly but surely) and replaced with more combat-oriented functionality, which again tends to point them towards narrow focuses. WoW, for example, has like 40-ish subclasses, most of which play like entirely separate classes - I think it's quite a good example of how videogames tend to keep separating stuff out and separating stuff out. Talking of Clerics, WoW does a kind of interesting thing, I think more naively than consciously, which is that the Paladin in WoW is basically both the D&D Cleric and the D&D Paladin, pretty clearly, but the Priest is a separate class entirely with is more like a combination of 4E's Invoker, and 3E/4E's Psion, with a bit of a Far Realm theme to the some of the Psion stuff.</blockquote>

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