Say NO to Clerics
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
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Great blog primarily concerning OD&D.
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If you want a Tolkien-like game, just reskin clerics as elves.
Amazing thought experiment with lots of cool suggestions for a cleric-free adventure. As a player who prefers a “hardcore“ adventure (one with danger and permanent consequences!), I especially loved the proposal of no raise dead, no easy healing, etc. thanks great video!
WFRP offered that experience. Healing magic, and magic in general, is relatively rare. There are temples and priests but they are rare as well. You are coin-clippers, stevedores, students, bailiffs and coalers. Fights are gnarly and maim people. Maiming, disease and insanity are the costs of adventuring, all great heroes of the empire are a bit worse for wear.
One kind of mistake you make here, often made by people voicing a similar opinion about clerics, is that magic user PCs are equally contrary to the swords & sorcery genre, especially of the grim and gritty kind. Wizards are almost invariably opponents, and you certainly don't have the kind of array of spells, cast without moral and physical cost, that characterize the MU in D&D. So, if you want to appeal to swords & sorcery literature, I am afraid you need to stick with fighters and thieves.
But... Vance?
That's a good point.
Lol, nope.
I enjoy role-playing as a Warrior Priest of Sigmar expy FAR too much. Charging around with a giant glowing hammer and bellowing sermons louder than Ian Paisley in a helicopter is just too much fun to pass up. If you to somehow succeed in getting clerics removed, I would 100% move to another system.
On a more serious note, the point about historical clerics not being especially involved in fighting is hilariously, ludicrously wrong. Clergymen in medieval Europe, especially senior clerics such as bishops and archbishops, were infamously militaristic and were in no way exempt from military duty. Priests, bishops and archbishops wore armour, led armies, and personally took part in the fighting. Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, led a division of the English Army at Falkirk. The German Archbishop Walter von Geroldseck died of wounds after fighting in an urban civil war. The French Bishops of Caliors would display their armour and weapons by the altar while delivering Mass. The Scottish dead at Flodden in 1513 included the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Bishop of the Isles, two Abbots, and a prior. They died on the frontlines, fighting in armour alongside their king.
While many in the Church allegedly disapproved of the practice, historians have actually found evidence that there were many clerics and laymen who saw engaging in warfare as an intrinsic part of their spiritual duties. The Shepherd shielding his flock, and all that. I mean, dude, c'mon, there are historians who have written articles, even entire books, on the subject. Here's just four:
warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/battling-bishops-of-christendom/
www.medievalists.net/2011/10/the-military-activities-of-bishops-abbots-and-other-clergy-in-england-c-900-1200/
www.jstor.org/stable/48578211#:~:text=Warrior%20bishops%20were%20present%20as,or%20preaching%20to%20their%20flocks
www.cambridge.org/core/books/christianity-and-war-in-medieval-east-central-europe-and-scandinavia/image-of-warriorbishops-in-the-northern-tradition-of-the-crusades/B0456F498C18B6ABFF9FC7B18EC49468
Thanks for the feedback. I will certainly read up on clerics in medieval warfare, so thanks for the references.
The knights hospitaler were literally battlefield healers in the crusades. They weren't frontline fighters and only fought when necessary BUT they had no issue fighting if pushed into the act.
Yep. And look at Islam - Muhammad was a full on army general
Uncommon Ranger Lemure L
Here's the thing about clerics, they're not the local friar. They're Van Helsing. VH is the archetype of the cleric, not actual religious offices. When put into that perspective, the cleric makes more sense.
I wanna play crusaders, ghazis and warrior monks. And I don't give a shit about LOTR as a template for parties. And you don't need to design a pantheon either, you only need ONE god.
That being said, raise dead isn't something PCs should not have, unless paid for an extremely heavy toll.
The example of "my party doesn't have clerics it's fine," well you could remove a fighter, mage or thief, and your party would be fine too. A good GM can make anything work. More options aren't aways better, but in this case, the cleric provides a light shining in the darkness.
Agreed. Me and my friends once played a heist without a single rogue in the party abd succeeded anyway, but that doesn’t mean rogues should be removed. If we're gonna talk about historical inspiration or plausibility, then we'd also have to delete Monks - because the idea of an unarmed, unarmoured dude surviving repeated melee encounters with competent adversaries is only slightly less implausible than a dude being able to bring people back to life.
If some folks enjoy playing a class, then they deserve respect for it - not a bunch of other guys whinging about how OP, redundant or outdated it is.
A few things. First alignment predates the cleric, alignment existed in chainmail as a way to build armies with mythic creatures, clerics have never been compelled to be lawful or good either. And in earlier editions turn undead is a part of game balancing. "Don't sword fight with Dracula," was a piece of advice I saw written in some early article I forget by whom. But the idea that the undead are so terrifying you shouldn't even get into melee with them, and they are, makes turn undead essential, undead have also historically been stronger than other monsters of similar HD, level, or CR with 5e being the only real exception. It's also worth noting the original cleric, Mike Carr's "The Bishop," was created as a direct opposition to another player, who had a powerful vampire, SIR Fang, that was warping the entire campaign world around how powerful he had become! Cleric has since occupied the middle ground between fighter and magic-user. I think healing is honestly the least important thing a cleric does. But there's also Dark Sun, a world without gods or divine clerics, but it has something equivalent to replace them with still. So whatever works best for your setting is what is best.
If I'm playing B/X D&D, then why not play with immortals and NO GODS! Have the immortals leaves their trails of teaching on how to tame the spirits, so that spells are allowed threw the local spirits, instead of permission of a god that should already be to busy to be bothered with in the first place. Using the Taoist teaching as a template into most church styles were one using teaching to attain enlightenment before mortal death is attain 1st, which seem to always do, except for the few. Just do not roll a natural one, which results in the local spirts are angered and bad things could happen.
We wrestled with this question while I was on active duty in the Army (AD&D rules). Having medics in our battalion, it seemed appropriate to create the task for someone for specialization. We allowed Both fighter and thief classes to participate but not mages since spells were no longer a part. Slightly more common availability of healing potions and knowledge of first aid techniques allowed for a useful level of medical attention, increased personal responsibility to carry first aid items and potions. The medics learned about medicinal herbs and such. Worked well but have gone back to clerics because everyone expects them.
Esoteric Enterprises, based on the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules, uses a non-magical healing class. The Doctor is a trained practicioner of medicine who has sunk down into the criminal-occult underworld, lost any license they might have held and now hovers in the same circles as the other low-level criminal PCs.
The Doctor has a high starting skill in Medicine. All skills are x-in-6. Everyone can use their basic chance at Medicine and hope for the best, the Specialist/Criminal class can dot out additional skill points at the start and with each level but the Doctor starts with 5-in-6 or even 6-in-6 if a high Int. Medicine is used to restore hp and stabilize conditions like bleeding and broken bones in the field and to conduct illegal and dangerous experimental procedures like curing people of vampiric infection or transplant monster parts to patients.
The Doctor also has a healing pool to represent emergency medicine without the need for a skill roll. In game mechanics, it is a daily pool of hp the Doctor can dole out similar to the paladin's Lay on hands ability. No roll, just decide how much of your healing pool is pumped into the patient. This increases with level, so a higher-level Doctor can more effectively treat mass casualties in the field.
WFRP is full of non-magical healers. Barber-surgeons, physicians, apothecaries outnumber magic healing and divine intervention greatly. A competend barber has a good chance at saving a characters life without maiming them that much more. Many diseases are survivable but maiming, most critical hits can force you to wear a hook the rest of your life but medical intervention can save you from bleeding out. A physician on the cutting edge of surgery can give treatment some centuries ahead of the early modern period but before Great War medicine.
The archetype of the cleric comes from a couple sources.
1. Turpin, Bishop of Reims, one of the Peers of Charlemagne.
2. Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half brother of William the Conqueror.
3. German Bishops and their retinues who fought as knights.
Outrage? Nah, anti-cleric sentiments are something I've run into quite often in the OSR (though not as much as anti-thief) and in my own current campaign I don't have clerics either, just Fighters and Sorcerers.
However I do want to address a few things from the beginning of the video:
1. No, OD&D really wasn't "based off Chainmail". Neither Arneson nor Gygax actually used Chainmail for playing OD&D (that whole thing was included in the text as a bid from Gygax to try and boost up the flagging sales of Chainmail at that time. It didn't work)
2. Clerics and Alignment, while linked, seem to have completely separate origins. Alignment comes from Chainmail, where it literally is just a basic excuse for you to have two forces fighting each other. Alignment is nothing more than a team to pick so you can play a wargame against your friend. I think once OD&D was published that's when the Cleric was somehow shoved into that whole mess, starting the slow and inevitable process of Alignment being turned into morality, into personality quizzes, into a horoscope or whatever else, instead of simply a soccer team you join in so you can have an excuse to get into fistfights with members of a rival team's club.
Beyond that yeah as I said I mostly agree with the things said in the video!
I run Pathfinder 1E most often, and since the game gave it to me, I use the Slow, Medium, and Fast XP tracks to balance the classes. Full Casters always get the Slow XP Track to make up for the fact that they have spells that automatically solve situations. This has the effect of lowering how many people choose to play as Clerics, Wizards, etc. It also balances the fact that Magic Items don't cost XP to create anymore, as magic item crafting is one of the best force multipliers you can provide as a caster. Multiclassing can switch characters to other XP tracks (which have been slightly adjusted to fix track switching exploits), and I mostly run E6 games, so the system doesn't leave players too far behind/ahead.
What I run is Dying Earth. No gods,no clerics. It makes a huge difference in feeling
Clerics are one of the first to go in my games too. Along with most magic-users, dwarfs, halflings and other non-human PC races. Elves remain but not as a playable race. Priests, cultists & sorcerers are often the antagonists, not the heroes. Plus, as there are no christians, there is no clergy & therefore no _clerics_
Sounds like you are describing Tunnels & Trolls which technically has never had a cleric, although one can easily be created. As far as the Friar Tuck type cleric, it is represented in Prince Valiant: The Storytelling Game, having no spells, only armed with a staff, relying on its high charisma skills to help the party out of tight spots, perhaps even some medical skills to aid in healing. I’ve noticed a comment stating, to be true to Sword & Sorcery genre the wizard needs to be excluded, this too is represented in Prince Valiant. As you can see these ideas have been around since the beginning of RPG history with Tunnels & Trolls being the second oldest RPG (1975) followed by Prince Valiant in 1989.
I have yet to check out T&T, I shall have to remedy that. Thanks for your comment!
Prince Valiant is a very low-magic or even no-magic setting. Church characters are defined by their social status, high education and authority.
A church man in there, and other games like Pendragon or Ars Magica, is more likely to be literate, speak additional languages, have a higher than average natural philosophy/theology/law education, have a social status above commoners and even the PCs and have a position of authority the PCs can't easily avoid.
Agree completely. I don't want to force Christianity into my gameworlds just to justify
the Cleric concept. I also agree with the unbalanced return of game time value in taking the prep time to work new pantheons into each and every setting , especially when Cleric is not the most common Class chosen by players to play. Conversely , I have no problem allowing a PC to be or become a priest of some sect that play at the table has unearthed.
In this way - with the players input , unique and useful priest types can be with each setting with a minimum of fuss and lost development time from the DM.
My issue with the Cleric was always how they tend to be a jack of all trades while being able to wear good armor unlike the wizard. The only downside to the cleric is the idea you have to follow the ideals of a God but that isn't brought up all that often and its only really at GM discretion, this tends to be less of a drawback though when you realize players can just invoke their Gods name on why they are correct and righteous on whatever they are doing and nobody, even people who disagree with that God will try to oppose you unless they tend to be of an evil faction. At least Paladins have a certain standard to live up to.
As a forever cleric, I have mixed feelings. Objectively, as written, the Cleric is potentially one of the most powerful in the game, and I've always enjoyed playing them. But we never really bothered with pantheons or religions to any degree, because honestly the only reason they exist in most games is to heal. ymmv. And I'm never moralistic or preachy because that's *not* what a representative of a supposedly GOOD GOD should be. But as a class they would be a lot better if they weren't the default healer. That imo should be its own damn class unrelated to religion and combat anyway, like a Wizard, but beneficent. Squishy but kind. And clerics should be free to be of any alignment or worship anything, like it says in the book, not just overbearing Deities with ulterior motives. Or excluded entirely if no one wants to play one. But that's something the individual DM has to deal with however it suits them. Good video.
I adore the well thought out comments that this video seems to have produced. Good on you for putting for a rather dividing idea, and giving your own thoughts as well as encouraging others to share their opinions. It was an interesting listen, and while I do not agree with most of it, I still enjoy hearing that dissenting opinion on the ideas of Clerics as a whole
Thanks for your comment. The video seems to be more divisive than I expected, but it's great to see people engaging with the subject.
I agree with many of the points here for certain kinds of settings ... but I think there are plenty of archetypes in fiction that amount to morally ambiguous clerics. In reality, not everyone calling themselves clergy (or equivalent) are exactly moral paragons, and there's room in this kind of fantasy for both an "arcane" magic user and a worshipper of a pagan god who isn't too worried about theft or the handling of prisoners.
That said, if your religious caste is intended to be full of moral paragons, with powers linked to behavior, it may be better to leave them out if your players want something darker.
You were absolutely right about the outrage lmao. These points are all spot-on if you run RAW with every bit of Gygax's nonsense and all.
I respect where you're going with this, I think taking a pillar that people expect in the game out can create interesting alternative takes. Plenty seem to remove the thief from the standard array to encourage problem solving rather than rolls for traps (although I think some recent talk about the thief have more saving throws than skills may be on the right track). The Cleric and Paladin roles do overlap, and you could eliminate one or the other and still have the aesthetic and abilities (I've seen it argued that the paladin is redundant). The Turn Undead ability does seem more vital when morale is a regular part of the game, the cleric basically giving the characters a fighting chance against creatures that lack morale and have devastating abilities. Lately I've had an aversion to class-based systems, but even when thinking of D&D equivalent abilities I tend to leave easy healing out of the equation. It's fun to earn restoratives, makes alternatives to direct combat more enticing...
Anything could be done in any way. However, for this game to be called D&D, it has to have clerics. What you describe is a different game with a different playstyle. Maybe you should develop and publish it.
P.S. As someone else said it in the comments; D&D fantasy isn’t even medieval. It’s landsknechts meet the wild west in a faux-medieval attire.
Shut up Gary and take your pills, I'll play D&D however I want.
I'm toying with the idea of having only one spell casting class: the sorcerer. But they can cast most cleric and druid spells as an option as an ecclesiastical magician (a Conan style priest) that learns and casts such spells as a thaurmatagial magician.
Also I use the roll to cast homerule with potential corruption on a bad roll. I won't include my ideas as it will be a weighty comment, but I'm optimistic about the final results.
Thoughts are welcome 😊
I think that's a great idea, I have a plan to do something similar in my games. I am undecided on the roll to cast rule, it can work sometimes though - it's interesting in DCC.
In my experience running Five Torches Deep, my players absolutely agree. Of the dozen-odd characters they've created, exactly one has been a cleric, and a cleric of the goddess of lust and wrath at that. He turned out to be the most degenerate of them all (and was divinely rewarded accordingly). In my current game, I introduced my own barber-surgeon class which has rudimentary healing abilities, so party survivability is not compromised and there is still a semi-martial utility character filling that archetype.
That's another thing I noticed a lot with players when it comes to cleric or paladins and upholding a certain ideal, they tend to just pick an ideal or oath that they are going to do anyway and don't have any real consequence like lust, wrath or vengeance unless the GM specifically creates an event for that that is an obvious trap for the player anyway
WFRP is full of barber-surgeons, apothecaries, physicians and other non-magical healers. Well not full of them, but definitely outnumbering all magical healing. A barber has a fairly good chance of not maiming a character further and keeping them alive.
Eh, where would Acquisitions, Inc. be without Omin Drann?
Where would the AV Club be without Avaricios, the Left Hand of Lisian (sp?)?
Also, Cadderly, from Salvatore’s “Cleric Quintet”, who even makes a cameo I. Baldur’s Gate.
I think Paul Anderson wrote a book about clerics who take a spaceship to another planet, or something.
The adventuring cleric is Dungeons & Dragons’ particular contribution to the fantasy genre.
Questing beast sent me here, and I agree with you so much! Stripping out clerics, or rather stripping them down is something I would like to see. The harder sell is parting rangers from their spell casting, that was a quick fix way back to make attempt to have players feel like Aragon.
I can list x games with non casting rangers
from DND 3 to midgard
Let the ranger stay as an alternate fighter. I'm tryin to create an entirely non-magical ranger right now. It's closer to a fighter variant in the last draft, a bloke who can track things and take them down.
I'm probably going to leave the bard with some limited spells.
Another person arriving from Ben Milton's 'The Glatisant' newsletter here.
Thanks for the thought experiment.
Presenting anything as this "must be made so" is a bit heavy-handed and daft, but I guess that's the clickbate.
Everybody should, of course, do what makes them and their group happiest when playing their own game.
I do agree that GMs and players can become better immersed in the emergent story when they think for themselves about ALL and ANY of the classes they include in their worlds and the effect they'd have. Even fighters have more flavour and depth when we have an idea where they'd receive their training and for what original purpose. Are they AWOL from the army of the Duke? If so how do they learn the skills to advance in level?
For me, if a cleric is the conduit to the gods of the world, their presence requires investment in working out how active divine intervention would underpin their societies. This generally doesn't happen enough to suspend my logical disbelief in many fantasy milieux. So, I agree, the cleric can be problematic, but they're easier to work out than why a barbarian isn't just a fighter of a different people, and why a monk (by definition, a prayer machine) is constantly thumping people.
Also, for me, I think the cleric would be more caught up in arguments with the faithless magic user about their uses and abuses of magical power, which should only be channeled through and bestowed by the gods. If the fighter was trained in the city watch, they could have far more to argue about with the thief!
Cheers for the musings… and including Friar Tuck - great Spoonerism that he is, he tickles my bunny fone 😂
Thanks for your comment. Of course the title of the video is intended to be provocative. I am not presenting my ideas as the way people *must* play, but rather an option to consider.
Including clerics in the game sets a certain tone and play style, just as including wizards, monks or barbarians does. That play style can sometimes be great, but I wanted to provide some reasons to exclude the cleric. I am sure that there would be an equal amount of consternation if I made a similar video about wizards! Still it's great that people are engaging in the topic.
@@rangerlemure Cheers for the reply.
Yeah, I too wish there was more advice on narrowing the field rather than playing with the whole 'kitchen sink.'
Thanks for cheering up my day. 😁👍
DnD is sword and sorcery?
show me?
Aragorn is clearly a king priest and Frodo padre if not saint
Which conflict
In my medieval no-fantasy game i made the Cleric a Catholic mystic incorporated in a holy order.
You'll get a realistic believable thing by mixing saint Joan of Arc with saint Hildegard von Bingen. Or saint Bernard of Clervaux with saint Padre Pio.
But make them a monk or a nun and not a priest.
does he look anything further than the "catholic" church?
I have to agree on all your points, and you are no minority ressing pcs is ridiculous and ruins tensions and any risk in the game
Good video, I enjoyed it.
While I'm not especially concerned about how well the cleric fits in with the settings that inspired D&D, I do think the mechanical discussion is an interesting one. It does seem like the way that healing is presented through the cleric is pretty boring and detrimental to the rest of the game. As an example, I have noticed that the slow natural healing present in old-school games gets undermined very quickly by the cleric's healing magic. Instead of the party spending a week or two in town gradually recovering hit points, the cleric just spends all their spell slots on healing for one day and then everyone is perfectly fine.
If you wanted to preserve a level of religious significance in your games, perhaps using the Neoclassical Geek Revival system for holy magic would work well. In that system, there aren't any spell slots for holy magic. You earn piety from pious acts and you can spend that piety to cast the spells. Anyone can do it, but the cleric gets to do it for a much lower cost than everyone else. If you took that system, let everyone engage with it, and remove the cleric as a class, it might be a good way to encourage players to treat the gods as a real force in the world while also restricting things like healing to a real limited resource.
I do!
Agree. There are very few settings in which the cleric makes any sense at all. Several OSR games omit them. So does Fantasy AGE. The type of non-magical cleric you describe can be found in Fantastic Heroes & Witchery. That's the only game I've seen that does them well.
I'd not heard of Fantastic Heroes and Witchery, I'll check it out, I'd like to see some alternatives to the traditional cleric archetype.
On the subject of pantheons, look up the video, "your d&d setting should only have one god."
I think some of this is a victim of the "fantasy is medieval" trope that people think original D&D (and its followups) really is ...when it is not. I think there's even room for a cleric style healer in the form of a ritualistic shaman or witch doctor style character...someone who potentially has to do something some characters might think is "dark" to them to perform...maybe a give and take style casting of some sort..."you can heal only as much life as you've taken" or something. You sacrifice a chicken then you can heal someone d2 HP or sacrifice a dog, something that culturally may or may not be an issue in the game, and you can heal for 1d6, something like that.
DnD is Renfair
Original D&D is medieval; just take a single look at the arms and armour and the classes. Gary Gygax painstakingly tried to recreate the various polearms. You certainly can twist this "presetting" any way you like, but claiming that D&D is not heavily rooted in medieval stuff (...arms, armor, dragons, dungeons, castles...) is simply not true.
@@xornxenophon3652 where did I say that D&D is not "heavily rooted in Medieval aesthetics"? Simply put, outside 1E D&D became a mix of medieval aesthetics and western rugged individualism.
@@Sammo212 You literally said:
"...I think some of this is a victim of the "fantasy is medieval" trope that people think original D&D (and its followups) really is ...when it is not...".
This statement of yours implies that original D&D is not medieval.
Original D&D has medieval setting, yes. I do not care about WoTC version of the game as it is vehicle for indoctrination of children in progressive political values - 'positive innovation & entrepreneurship' & changing the world for better. Dropping the cleric with roots in medieval Catholicism is consistent with purpose of the game. As I don't play Hasbot version of the game I indifferent about the cleric's removal. The cleric was stripped of Holy Wooden/Silver Cross with AD&D 1e, & class names - village priest, curate & bishop dropped. With Mentzer edition in 1983, the Cleric no longer needed to serve a Deity to access spells. In WoTC game the cleric is essentially a MU/fighter. As society has become more moral relativistic, irreligious & corrupt the Cleric's as character class is increasingly deprecated. The agents of de-Christianisation & progressive politics will welcome final 'cancelling' of Cleric.
which medieval setting?