Well, there are two options. One is that "divine" is a flavor of magic. Wizards gain magic through intellectual study. Sorcerors gain magic through natural mutant powers. Clerics gain magic through religious contemplation. But that magic comes from the _mindset of contemplation_, not from whichever deity or force is being contemplated. Or, to put it another way, no one asks what deity gives monks their powers.icyshadowlord wrote:So where would Divine Magic, domains and such come from in a setting like that? If the gods don't grant spells to the party's Cleric, what will? What is the Cleric class in such a setting?jadagul wrote:Look back at my post. This was all premised on the idea that we stop having gods grant spells at all, because that leads to all sorts of stupid--firstly, that we can't have a religion of the Prophet, and in fact can't really have a religion without a quasi-activist deity. And second, you can't have the PCs get powerful enough to challenge gods, because that does really weird things to your cleric's mechanical interactions.
Really, you should just go that Divine magic is a type of magic, and some people can use it. You can even say that its use comes from a type of focus and devotion usually associated with religion, but that it doesn't need to be tied to an actual god--which even D&D does, since you can have clerics of ideals or whatever. But stop having gods grant spells and then everything else becomes more sensible.
Edit: Had to fix this post a bit. I find the suggestion equal amounts intriguing and confusing, so I figured I might as well start asking questions about it.
The other option is that priest is a job description, not a class. And some priests of the Fire God can do magic with fire and that's represented game mechanically by them being fire mages. That's a totally sensible way to do things but isn't classic D&D.
