Would you allow a player to take the cleric class and say he is a fighter and just refluff his spells as martial abilites. I wouldn’t. It breaks the game for me. Although it is 100% cool if you and your group want to do that. Monk abilities just don’t fit a brawler imho. It’s good to hear the things that break other people’s immersion and hear there styles of play. I’ve done a little of this with certain specific settings in mind. But it doesn’t work for everything. It really has to be table dependent.
I think this is an excellent question and I want to address it.
First: the one point I think everyone on the thread can agree with is that we are not talking about modifying mechanics, only the default flavour of the class. So, it is a given that your cleric-refluffed-as-fighter has to follow cleric mechanics: ie he has to prepare his “spells” in the morning, his “Sacred Flame” does radiant damage, “Sacred Guardians” works as per the spell and the character has limited “spell slots”. Any “spell” the character casts could be dispelled or counterspelled by an enemy caster.
Here is where we potentially run into the first issue: the flavour of the class is inconsistent with the mechanics. I would argue that this is a pretty big change from the other examples that have been proposed: the Barbarian Knight and the Cambion tiefling sorcerer. In theBarbarian Knight case, there is a reasonable explanation as why the character would be able to rage. In the case of the cambion, the new fluff arguably makes more sense than the original fluff (one of my ancestors is a red dragon and by the way, one of my other ancestors make a pact with a devil).
This goes back to a comment that I made earlier in the thread. You can adopt a restrictive approach to the flavour of the classes for the purpose of shutting out the 1 player out of 20 that will act abusively, at the cost of shutting out 19 players out of 20 who simply have cool ideas they want to model in the game.
But let’s get back to inconsistency of the fluff. This touches on my second point.
All characters are subject to the social contract of the table. If I make a standard Oath of Devotion paladin, and the rest of the table are rogues, swindlers and charlatans, I may have to change my character. If my bog standard fighter is named M’Cho Mann “Randy” Savage and yells out wrestling moves with every attack, he may not be appropriate in a super serious gritty campaign. And if the adventure will take primarily in the drawing rooms and salons of Waterdeep, a standard barbarian may not be a fitting character (but the Barbarian Knight would totally fit in).
A cleric fluffed as a fighter may not fit in at the table. This may especially be the case if the player doesn’t have a good answer when you ask him why his maneuvers do radiant damage, why he has limited maneuvers per day, and why his maneuvers can be dispelled.
That said, my ancestors were barbarians even though I am a knight is a pretty good answer to the question “why can you rage?”. My infernal bloodline has given me supernatural toughness is a pretty good answer to “why does a cambion get +1 AC and extra hp?”.
Just something to think about.
