Religion is use

[DrPraetor]

With apologies to Wittgenstein:


in talking about religion in an RPG, you have to ask what it is for.

First, there's a common and very bad reason to include a pantheon of Olympians, so that they can be Deus Machina and drive the plot.


hack!

Zeus is the original DM penis NPC and you may think literature gives you an excuse to have him around but you shouldn't. The Monkey King jumps to the edge of the universe and shits on one of the Buddha's fingers; that's a bit better, but still not something you want in an RPG.

So, you want to reverse engineer your religion from cool elements.
[*] Duds.

The different colors represent different spell categories

Priestly and religious hierarchies provide an excuse for your imagination - which has an unlimited budget for sets and costuming - to go completely bonkers.
Therefore, you want temples full of fancy dressed dudes and dudettes doing ceremonies.

[*] Patrons and saints
By Crom's Beard!
Crom (Conan's deity) is a good one, because he may or may not even exist. Set exists but is a giant snake-monster, whom you are expected to kill; and Mitra likely exists but his priestess is the only one who hears him.
So you want deities or forces that the characters can swear oaths by.
You also want patrons, fulfilling basically the role of mentor spirits in Shadowrun, and you want orders devoted after specific heroes and such not. Crucially, these entities should enter the narrative preferably-never but at-best-sparingly and as a vehicle for some PC's ability. So if you follow Saint George the Dragonslayer you can by-all-means conjure his courage, but this is an ability your character has and not something that the St. George NPC does himself.
As with clans, it's an open question whether your choice of mentor spirit should do anything mechanically. On the one hand, people want it to make a difference (as they do with clan choices, and other choices from a menu of splats); on the other hand, it will inevitably be unbalanced, subject to charop, and thus effectively close off character conceptions.
If I want my Hobbit Wizard to have the Dragonslayer as his patron (because rule Britannia), this shouldn't make him strikingly inferior to a Gnome Wizard of St. Benedict. The same tension applies to the clan bonuses over in the Oriental Fantasy thread.

[*] Sinister Priests
Priests make great villains, and not just because of the awesome duds.


Witch Doctors, Demon Quellers, Exorcists, etc. are a job that would obviously exist in any demon-haunted setting, and also provide support for a bevy of useful tropes as both PC roles, and as antagonists.
Whether you want to admit or not, anyone whose job is to protect the population from occult forces is a priest. This is true whether you fight off or appease the local gremlins or whether you read the auguries to avoid offending some remote crypto-Olympian God. The crypto-Confucian scholar who keeps the calendar on behalf of the ancestor spirits may not have Demon Queller as a class, so you can have additional priests but if exorcisms need doing, exorcist becomes a profession.

Other than that, doing religious stuff can (and should) be a side gig available to secular warchiefs as well as the more conventional (and quite ancient) hierarchy of beureaucrats. In order to avoid having a pantheon of meddling Olympians, these priests can in any case make offerings to local monsters (which problems can also be managed through stabbings), expound more-or-less atheistic philosophies, and/or venerate more local deities, heroes and patrons. If you have them worshiping crypto-Olympians or "heaven" or "Maat", the existence of the targets of their veneration should not be definitively established - anything that enters the plot as an independent agent should be within the scope of the PCs.

I'm sure I'll come up with some more deliverables, but that's a good start.

[Usamimi]

Beginning development of religions with aesthetic elements is good advice. Establishing a distinct style for each religion will enable ease of development later.

If your setting contains a character archetype that draws power from divine sources, and the specific abilities vary by source, the available deities must cover the entirety of the design space. If clerics are potentially healers in your setting, but there are no deities that could conceivably grant the power of healing, you have failed to ensure the integration of mechanics and setting.

Although your religions can take aesthetic cues from real world religions, there is no reason to draw the majority of your inspiration from one place. For example, an animistic religion could have temples that resemble the Parthenon. A tradition of demon worshippers may gather in an observatory.

[Yesterday's Hero]

"Evil cultists of the dark god" as antagonists is such an iconic, useful and expected trope of fantasy RPGs that that alone justifies the inclusion of religion on the setting. Ironically it's the neutral gods and the gods that can potentially be on the PCs side that pose the more problematic questions. Mixing "real" religions and made up ones (like the Fire God and the Seven in the Song of Ice and Fire, respectively) might be the way to go. A Fire God cleric has cool powers (Buffs). A Seven Gods cleric has wealth and connections (Face). Both options are iconic character options.

[czernebog]

I have found that starting with a religion's social purpose leads to a better feel than starting with a mechanical one. You can start with a premise like "Cult that trains up necromancers and will raise an army of the dead once there's enough of them," but that leaves open the need to define the actual trappings, practices, rituals and beliefs of the laity, and relationships with other organizations in the setting.

This can be boiled down to a few essential points:

• Is there an organized church of some sort? (An established laity and a priesthood that administers to it? Or is this an elitist god who is worshipped exclusively by characters with levels in a divine casting class?)
• What does the religion offer to its adherents? (Do priests protect villages against the undead? Is the religion spread by force? This will also determine who bothers to partake of this religion; a god who grants boons to merchants probably won't be venerated by rank-and-file soldiers.)
• What does worship look like? (This is a complement to "who worships, and why?")
• Is there some greater social order that this religion is part of? (Is there a pantheon? An economic hierarchy in which dirt farmers worship Doug The Mud God because only Doug really understands the plight of the common mud farmer?)
• How do you recognize the faithful on the street/battlefield/town festival? (Or is this a religion that is not advertised openly?)

For example, here is a writeup from setting material that I've been using for a while. This setting already had two competing Church-With-A-Capital-C organizations, a mystery cult for shadowy bad guys like Fritz Leiber's Hristomilo to belong to, and other deities to round out civilized life, but there wasn't much for monstrous tribes or people at the periphery of civilization to interact with. The setting might be characterized as "points of light becoming citadels of light," so it makes sense to conjure up a fringe religion that is poorly organized and straddles the gap between the unforgiving wilderness and the expanding influence of "civilization." This allows for weird folk beliefs and bizarre-seeming religious rites (perhaps along the lines of what you see in The Wicker Man) when the party is adventuring on the settled side of civilization's fringe, and also a consistent lore and trappings for when an adventure calls for a religious site deep in a dark forest.

There are probably real-world typologies out there that you could use as the basis for generating deities: gender, association with high/low social status, attitude towards other deities, number of major aspects, means of communicating with mortals, etc. But I prefer to build an actual deity in the negative space left behind once you have defined major elements of one or more religions focused on that deity.

The Pack

Domains: Animal, Madness

The Pack is a fractured and unfortunate divinity. It is simultaneously predator and prey, frenzied and fearful; dam and cub, nurturing and needful; alpha and outcast, proud and craven. Hunters, shepherds on the lookout for wolves, and others who maintain a close relationship with wilderness beasts may raise prayers or make small offerings to the Pack, but its fractured and confusing mind does not draw many strong adherents.

Settlements with close ties to the wilderness may have an area for offerings to the Pack at their periphery. Altars to the Pack, with rough-hewn idols depicting its five aspects, can also be found in isolated places in the wilderness, where untamed beasts still roam and monstrous races live alongside them.

The Pack's aspects may each be invoked independently. The truly faithful make sure to give equal attention to all five.

Dam and Sire

This aspect is both male and female. It is the most stable, looking towards the future and acting as a guardian to prepare the way for those who are to come. This stability is compromised, however, by its intense need to provide for the Cub.

The Dam and Sire are typically invoked in rites of fertility or to ensure the safety of one's family or flock.

Alpha

Amongst wolves, the alpha breeding pair leads the pack on hunts. Amongst wild horses, the alpha mare leads the herd when it is on the move. In all cases, the Alpha keeps the Pack cohesive by exercising dominance over its individual aspects. After the Dam and Sire, the Alpha is the second most stable aspect of the Pack. It is focused on the Pack's immediate and short-term needs.

Its own needs come a close second. While the Alpha eats, drinks, and mates first, its life is not a comfortable one, for it is forever wary of the Least, which longs to usurp its position.

The Alpha is typically invoked when trying to influence the behavior of wild beasts or to ensure the well-being of one's community.

Cub

The Cub is the Pack's future. It is always pushing boundaries, focusing on the possibilities that the future holds rather than the concrete reality around it. The Pack's home den is wherever it chooses to play, and where it goes, the Dam and Sire unfailingly follow.

While it is the gentlest of aspect of the Pack, it is also the least predictable and hardest to understand.

The Cub is typically invoked when attempting to foretell the future or when seeking to influence other aspects of the Pack. It is also invoked as a herald of change.

Hunter and Hunted

The Hunter and Hunted lay the contradiction of the Pack bare. In this one aspect one finds both sides to the heat of the hunt: the hunter, frenzied at the scent of blood and heedless of anything beyond the chase, and the hunted, panicked and fearing for its life. Worshippers may focus on one half of this aspect or another, but it is impossible to invoke one without calling up both.

The Hunter and Hunted are typically invoked when seeking gifts of strength or endurance, influencing domesticated animals, or attempting to keep wild beasts at bay.

Least

The Least (also called the Last) is the counterpart to the Alpha. It is the outsider, the lowest in the pecking order, and when in wolf form it shows its shame in how it slinks about on its belly. But it is also the trickster, the one who purposefully rejects the social order imposed by the Alpha, and the one who exults in its violation of norms. After the Cub, it is the second most destabilizing aspect of the Pack.

It is typically invoked by those who are themselves last in the social order and seek to find a way out of it, or those who shun their community's norms for some other reason.

[OgreBattle]

Shisms between worshippers leasing to conflict is fun

Like having a monotheist god concept but then the YHWH type cult arises with specific ritual that clashes with rival golden calf worshippers and so on

I like the Conan convention of keeping things vague

[SeekritLurker]

One thing that is absolutely missing in a lot of RPG-ish material is the ability to have a heretical or faithless priest of whichever god is in question.

What I want to do with the concept is to have deities that never (or very rarely) interact with the mortal world, and whose very existence is up for questioning - but where divine power does exist and can be used.

Essentially, you want a divine source of power where you can have Joan of Arc drawing on it with the sheer power of their personality and devotion - but you also want to have Cardinal Richlieu, who pays only lip service to the tenets of the faith, but can draw on that same divine power because he knows how to do the prayers/rituals correctly. And you can have both of those people being associated with the same deity - and it doesn't even matter whether the deity actually exists, or is just a framework for drawing on divine power.

[deaddmwalking]

One thing that is absolutely missing in a lot of RPG-ish material is the ability to have a heretical or faithless priest of whichever god is in question.

What I want to do with the concept is to have deities that never (or very rarely) interact with the mortal world, and whose very existence is up for questioning - but where divine power does exist and can be used.

Essentially, you want a divine source of power where you can have Joan of Arc drawing on it with the sheer power of their personality and devotion - but you also want to have Cardinal Richlieu, who pays only lip service to the tenets of the faith, but can draw on that same divine power because he knows how to do the prayers/rituals correctly. And you can have both of those people being associated with the same deity - and it doesn't even matter whether the deity actually exists, or is just a framework for drawing on divine power.

As described in tales, you might have 'divine power' for Joan of Arc, but Richlieu was a D&D Expert. He had skills in Diplomacy and Subterfuge, but he never calls the wrath of god down on anybody.

D&D needs to decide if 'cleric' is a class (with associated powers) or a career (that anybody can do). Career is really the better option generally - having worshipers of Crom throw giant stones and revel in fighting makes more sense than casting curative magic.

Having Domains that you can bolt on to your character regardless of class is probably a better way to do Joan of Arc.

[SeekritLurker]

The objective is, of course, that Joan and Richlieu can have a miracle-off/wizard fight to try to prove that they are the true representative of YHWH. If Joan cast Cure Moderate Wounds and Richlieu can't, it doesn't go very far.

Perhaps I need a better metaphor - Grigori Rasputin, self-taught ecstatic holy man versus Honorious III, who reputedly summoned demons in order to bind and master them.

I do agree that using Domains (or Spheres) for various deities to better reflect what they are there for is absolutely something that you want - more than just channeling positive or negative energy, we want Lloth and Pelor and Crom to have access to different spells (or at different levels.)

But I absolutely want the thing where your PC cleric has to stand against Simon Magus or whoever to prove they're more righteous. Even if they are actually drunkard priestesses who sell blessings for cash instead of Saint Joan.

[deaddmwalking]

But what do you gain by having a divine class as opposed to various flavors of wizard.

Fundamentally, a divine power character has an external power source (the divine). In a class based game with levels, you want people to have an internal power source. If Joan of Arc is going to have more powerful miracles than Jesus Christ (or vice versa) that needs to be represented by level, not by abstract 'power of their faith'.

Otherwise, there's no reason why a 1st level character couldn't call on the full power of God.

In practical terms, what is the difference between a person who's magic comes from a divine source and a person who thinks it does?

[Omegonthesane]

You could probably come up with some rationalisation about how even a conscious and active deity needs a properly prepared channel through which to pour their divine power. Hence high level clerics getting more miracles than low level ones even if at any time their evil master could turn off the spigot.

I am of course explicitly imagining this as giving an incentive for gods to subvert high level priests if the opportunity presents itself, as this lets them skip the investment process of developing a high level priest from a 1st level chorister. Somewhat influenced by how in Crawl Stone Soup you get more out of certain deities if you got to train up Invocations under a different deity first, such that a common way to deal with the endgame content full of evil shit is to first worship Yredelemnul the Dark to get your skills up then swap to The Shining One and already be hardcore enough to use its abilities.

Rereading that, it's basically splitting the difference by requiring you have a form of internal power in order to make use of an external power.

Off the top of my head the practical upshot of someone whose powers provably and explicitly come from a specific god is that they can change power set by changing religion. You could even have sets of pantheons that fully expect you to change which one you exalt the most based on what you think the next adventure will be - for example maybe you swap from The Shining One to Elyvilon the Healer when you finish the mission of killing all the undead and now have to sort out a bunch of plague outbreaks.

[deaddmwalking]

Ultimately, the external source of power is just one more way for a GM to fuck with you. If you don't worship the god in the way they think is appropriate - no powers.

But I don't think encouraging players to switch deities regularly is thematically appropriate nor would it make sense from the deity's perspective.

This month's Knights of the Dinner Table has one gaming group that now has two clerics. Because they're dysfunctional, the original cleric charged for his spell-casting services and it was quite expensive. One of the players opted to switch patron deities and engage the new cleric for his healing needs. Unfortunately, the new deity declined to accept him (she values loyalty) and the original deity wouldn't take him back. He is now without a patron deity (and lost his 'member of the faithful discount').

In any case, part of what makes our world interesting is that deities are not provable. If you worship the god of fire and you have one set of mythology and I worship a DIFFERENT god of fire with a completely different set of mythology, that's fine (even if it means we kill each other). If your fire god is demonstrated to be real and mine isn't, there isn't room for my fire god. That makes the game world less interesting.

[Foxwarrior]

If the deity is the one with the power levels, then surely the obvious thing to do is to play as the deity itself, and maybe have a priest minion or two.

[Omegonthesane]

Who says deities get to choose if the system permits swapping religions to rapidly get an experienced servant without having to train them up first? Either on a micro scale ("I know this guy has 10 Cleric levels and just resigned from Zin the Law-Giver hoping to apply to me, if I don't recruit him then Makhleb the Destroyer will") or a macro scale ("in the discussions preceding Creation, the good and evil gods were agreed that it should be possible to redeem and/or corrupt other deities' servants, so the relevant amendment was baked into the cosmos and the time to veto it was aeons ago").

You can't write around toxic GMs, they will just ignore your writings if that's what it takes to be toxic. So that isn't a valid angle to attack any idea from.

In order for a world to contain one thing, it must exclude infinitely many other things. To say that objective and provable divine power is bad on the grounds that it restricts options is disingenous - all possible setting decisions restrict further options.

This is the part where I undermine everything I just said by iterating that there's not actually a good reason to have divine and arcane magic be separate unless the writing makes there be a good reason. Even dumb plot elements can be built into good stories, but there's no special reason why the only supernatural power source can't just explicitly respond to repeatable ritual and not to fervent faith.

[DrPraetor]

Y'all are engaging in a logical fallacy that I shall call: presuming Oerth.
Your setting does not have to be a high-fantasy Europe with an Olympian pantheon, or otherwise carry the tropes of Greyhawk.

essential points:
[*] Is there an organized church of some sort? (An established laity and a priesthood that administers to it? Or is this an elitist god who is worshipped exclusively by characters with levels in a divine casting class?)

This is a legitimate question, although these are by no means the only two possibilities, and you might not have a class-based system. Most settings will want both professional religious types who provide spiritual services to lay people, as well as mystery cults that only matter for initiates.

essential points:
[*] What does the religion offer to its adherents? (Do priests protect villages against the undead? Is the religion spread by force? This will also determine who bothers to partake of this religion; a god who grants boons to merchants probably won't be venerated by rank-and-file soldiers.)
[*] What does worship look like? (This is a complement to "who worships, and why?")

There are a number of assumptions here that may be false.
First, the religion may not have definite adherents at all. If I'm a Witch Doctor, I'm providing religion, but I may not demand any loyalty let alone exclusivity. My religion may not involve any worship at all, or as a priest devotional activities may be entirely my job and you hire me to do them. This was not an unusual pattern, historically.
The question of "spreading" the religion may be irrelevant. Missionary religions are a comparatively new invention - primitive and aboriginal religions have totally different properties, which all religions might have especially in a setting where magic is demonstrably real.

essential points:
[*] Is there some greater social order that this religion is part of? (Is there a pantheon? An economic hierarchy in which dirt farmers worship Doug The Mud God because only Doug really understands the plight of the common mud farmer?)

On the one hand, yes, obviously. The religion has to be part of the setting, even if it a mystery cult with only a few dozen adherents. On the other, this reflects a rather narrow range of conceptions.

essential points:
[*] How do you recognize the faithful on the street/battlefield/town festival? (Or is this a religion that is not advertised openly?)

First, in fantasy land, "faith" is a niche value. Demons are real, and some religion might emphasize the importance in trusting in the deity to combat them, sure. But, this should not be the default assumption.
Second, even if we say "adherents", instead, a religion need not make a distinction between adherents and non-adherents at all. People come to the temple of Poseidon to make offerings before going on sea journeys, even if they are foreigners with completely different cultural trapping and expectations.
The Priest of Poseidon is a professional who can show you how to make the proper offerings. He may not even like Poseidon - I wouldn't, Poseidon is a dick.

For example, here is a writeup from setting material...

That's all fine, but you are presuming Nehwon. I'm explicitly interested in breaking free of a lot of the assumptions going into this.

Shisms[sic] between worshippers leasing to conflict is fun

The various flavors of old believers are pretty zany, but this presumes that your religion has dogma and organization, which it may not have.
A religion that only has folk practices and wandering friars is still a religion, might be a very useful element in the game, and can't really have a schism.

(false priests should still get spells)

I certainly agree with that! It's very bad for the setting - for many stories that you would like to tell utilizing some kind of hierarchical church, you certainly don't want people to prove they're good by casting spells. But...

(various stuff about divine power sources)

These problems not only can go away, they should. Divine power sources are a bad idea.

So you don't need to have a priest class to have priests. Per an example Frank gave a while back, Priests of Lolth are poison mages, with the same class levels as a swamp hag and a spider theme. They're priests because they have a temple and spider demon. This doesn't mean that magic wielding religions shouldn't have domains associated with them, just that declaring yourself religious shouldn't change your spell selection versus someone who has poison magic, "just because".

If you do have priest classes, they don't have to channel divine power, they just need to provide a clearly religious function. I gave exorcists as an example, but this includes any job where you act on behalf of other people with respect to occult forces. This includes interpreting oracles, propitiating benevolent spirits or averting malevolent ones, and so on. Priests provide practical guidance on ancestor veneration, in most cultures historically, as a defense against necromancy, with the comfort of the deceased spirit as a secondary concern.

None of these require you to swear an oath to serve Mithra and channeling his power. In fact, most of the time, you don't work for Mithra you work for your flock. You may or may not have priests who even claim that Mithra is giving them spells, and for the health of the setting I maintain: if they think that, they are, for at least practical purposes, wrong.

The differences between religious, cultural and ethnic affiliation are not firm even today, and were much more ambiguous historically. These ambiguities give you a lot of degrees of freedom to design these aspects of the setting in order to support an entertaining narrative, without making players uncomfortable.

[Grek]

I think a version that would satisfy most people is that Mithra is a powerful being with strong opinions and personal knowledge of how to use healing, poison and fire magic. If you live up to the virtues that Mithra finds desirable, Mithra might appear to you in your dreams and tutor you in those forms of magic. But they might not, and learning magic that way doesn't give you any better spells than learning it from a book or a hermit or trial and error. And if you write down what Mithra told you (or what the hermit told you, or what you figured out through trial and error), you end up with a spellbook that is just as good at teaching people magic as any of the other sources. If you later betray Mithra's teachings, you don't lose your magic - you just get cut off from further mentoring and have to study elsewhere.

[Omegonthesane]

I think a version that would satisfy most people is that Mithra is a powerful being with strong opinions and personal knowledge of how to use healing, poison and fire magic. If you live up to the virtues that Mithra finds desirable, Mithra might appear to you in your dreams and tutor you in those forms of magic. But they might not, and learning magic that way doesn't give you any better spells than learning it from a book or a hermit or trial and error. And if you write down what Mithra told you (or what the hermit told you, or what you figured out through trial and error), you end up with a spellbook that is just as good at teaching people magic as any of the other sources. If you later betray Mithra's teachings, you don't lose your magic - you just get cut off from further mentoring and have to study elsewhere.

My first thought looking at this idea was, if you have this and have an organised church of Mithra, they 100% turned away from his teachings once the arcane research branch had everything they thought was useful. Not just because "let's dunk on the kind of organised religion the audience is likely to recognise" - having the secrets of magic revealed to you in a dream-sending is the route to power you'd expect of someone who wasn't able to get approval from the nearest bishop to study formally, either due to rejection or having refused to even try.

[Username17]

If you presuppose a class system, priests of different religions and gods should be different classes. A priest of Nerull is a Nercomancer, a priest of Pelor is a Paladin. A priest of Crom is a Berserker, a priest of Kossuth is a Fire Mage. And so on and so on.

And once you realize that, you also realize that "being a priest" doesn't need any mechanical effects at all. It can just be a background where you get Knowledge - Religion. Healing spells can just appear on the Paladin and Healer lists, and players don't need to be priests to be those classes and get those spells - and equally importantly being a priest of some other thing doesn't make you those classes or give you those spells.

The only common "priestly power" is actually planar ally, and that should in no way be on a spell list because it doesn't meaningfully function as a spell. It should instead be a Feat or Paragon Tier Background or whatever you want to call those selectable high level abilities. It's called "Divine Sponsorship" and it gives you an outsider cohort appropriate to the type of divine sponsorship you're getting. And even that doesn't require being a priest. I could totally imagine a character being a Rogue or a Bard and getting divine sponsorship by Pelor and getting followed around by an angel of light (or burning hate).

-Username17

[Yesterday's Hero]

On Pillars of Eternity you had a priest, Durance, who hated her goddess' GUTS and still received divine powers because in the setting "Divine" power came from one's soul (or one's belief or whatever). He was quite an interesting character and his unusual background, abrasive personality and personal history stuck with me. I agree with Frank when he says “A priest of Pelor is a Paladin et al”. I do believe that said approach (not having a dedicated, generic and powerful Cleric class on a class based system) will greatly diminish the importance of religion on a setting. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. But one should proceed with that in mind.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I do believe that said approach (not having a dedicated, generic and powerful Cleric class on a class based system) will greatly diminish the importance of religion on a setting. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. But one should proceed with that in mind.

Well, if we're looking at the model where priesthood is a background/job title, it could make a nice roleplaying incentive if devotees are able to acquire unique (non-shitty) feats or similar rewards by being... well, devoted.

Telling your party that the next adventure has to be cleansing a despoiled temple because the High Googlymoogly said so is perfectly reasonable, even if you the player know that it's going to get you Improved Fire Enema or whatever. That certainly makes more sense than the "kill 1000 gnolls to gain the Gnoll Killer feat" that has been bandied about before as a poor example of adventuring incentive.

[Thaluikhain]

If you presuppose a class system, priests of different religions and gods should be different classes. A priest of Nerull is a Nercomancer, a priest of Pelor is a Paladin. A priest of Crom is a Berserker, a priest of Kossuth is a Fire Mage. And so on and so on.

To clarify, are you saying that different priesthoods equate directly to different classes, or that some religions tend to mess well with some professions? Priests of God X tend to gravitate towards being Paladins, but make sense as Monks (or could be something else but not as well)? And that Paladins don't have to be priests of God X, I guess.

[Emerald]

If you presuppose a class system, priests of different religions and gods should be different classes. A priest of Nerull is a Nercomancer, a priest of Pelor is a Paladin. A priest of Crom is a Berserker, a priest of Kossuth is a Fire Mage. And so on and so on.

To clarify, are you saying that different priesthoods equate directly to different classes, or that some religions tend to mess well with some professions? Priests of God X tend to gravitate towards being Paladins, but make sense as Monks (or could be something else but not as well)? And that Paladins don't have to be priests of God X, I guess.

Pretty sure he means that a Cleric with the Death and Undeath domains overlaps a lot with a Dread Necromancer in terms of its flavor and capabilities, and same for Cleric (Healing, Sun) vs. Paladin, Cleric (Strength, War) vs. Barbarian, and so forth, so instead of having a single cleric class that you differentiate by god you could instead have priests just take different classes thematically appropriate for their religion, and anything particularly priest-ish that you want to represent mechanically could be a background/set of feats/whatever. You can still have Monks meditating in monasteries, Paladins being independent agents, and so forth in that framework just like in the standard setup.


Personally, I think that's overly-reductive; the existence of the Dread Necromancer class doesn't render Clerics of Nerull redundant anymore than the existence of the Fire Mage class renders Sorcerers, Warlocks, Warmages, Wizards, or Wu Jen redundant, because they do different things in different ways at different levels of complexity.

If you really don't want a Cleric class, a sphere-like system is probably the best approach, where anyone can pick up domains regardless of class so paladin priests of Pelor can launch sunbeams at people, rogue priests of Olidammara can turn invisible, barbarian priests of Crom can enchant their weapons and armor, and so forth. Maybe domains are accessible through feats with the prerequisite of a history of faithful service of the Church of Whoever, maybe divine investiture works like a magic item so a faithful barbarian can make a big offering to Crom at his temple to get War domain access and a nonreligious one can just get himself a big honkin' axe, whatever gets across "worshiping/learning from/going through the motions of/etc. this religion gets you fancy powers."

[Iduno]

Telling your party that the next adventure has to be cleansing a despoiled temple because the High Googlymoogly said so is perfectly reasonable, even if you the player know that it's going to get you Improved Fire Enema or whatever. That certainly makes more sense than the "kill 1000 gnolls to gain the Gnoll Killer feat" that has been bandied about before as a poor example of adventuring incentive.

It sounds a bit like the Planescape thing where you were a 3rd level thief, but also a member of the Fated. Both got you different types of benefits. No idea how that worked out in play, but it sounds like a good system could be made for that (or it could be left to GM fellatio fiat).

[deaddmwalking]

Personally, I think that's overly-reductive; the existence of the Dread Necromancer class doesn't render Clerics of Nerull redundant anymore than the existence of the Fire Mage class renders Sorcerers, Warlocks, Warmages, Wizards, or Wu Jen redundant, because they do different things in different ways at different levels of complexity.

The cleric 'chassis' isn't very flexible. If you think that you should have a priestly order of Necromancers that isn't quite like the Dread Necromancer, you can actually come up with a class that represents that. I'm going to guess that as you start thinking about your class there are a lot of elements that you'd be willing to start tossing aside that are part of the existing cleric. You might not care about 3/4 BAB; you might not care about heavy armor; you might not care about the d8 HD. You might end up with something that really looks more like a flavor of wizard for the chassis, but ends up having some unique flavor that really captures what your priest of super not-quite-dead things ought to be. When you dump those other abilities you can add things like sacrificing sentient beings for buffs to saving throws and/or hit points as class abilities, etc.

Fundamentally, a priest of undeath has more in common with a Dread Necromancer than with a priest of butterflies and happy thoughts - trying to make them fit the class is absurd when you think about it for any length of time. The only reason to do otherwise is tradition!*.

*I'm the papa.

[JigokuBosatsu]

The concept behind D&D paladins and clerics is essentially the same thing. Even as a person who is habitually a cleric player, I probably wouldn't cry if the class was dissolved. Sure, there's space for the high priest who has miracles or a crazy prophet likewise, but that isn't anything a wizard class couldn't handle.

[hyzmarca]

In any case, part of what makes our world interesting is that deities are not provable. If you worship the god of fire and you have one set of mythology and I worship a DIFFERENT god of fire with a completely different set of mythology, that's fine (even if it means we kill each other). If your fire god is demonstrated to be real and mine isn't, there isn't room for my fire god. That makes the game world less interesting.

One idea I've been toying with is that litterally everything is a god. That is, everything has a spirit, and every spirit is basically a god. There would be a symbiotic relationship between god and cleric. A god's power is the sum total of its cleric's power, one more priest is a linear increase. A god can always grant spells equal to the number of spells his clerics can cast.

That means that a cleric can pick up a random pebble, start praying to it, and the spirit of that pebble will grant him some spells. Because being a random pebble doesn't have much room for upward mobility, the pebble will probably be grateful and generous. Or maybe it won't care, because pebbles don't care much about anything. As more people start worshiping this pet rock the cleric is carrying around in his pocket, the pebble god becomes stronger, and also more demanding, with a clearer personality, partially influenced by its clergy's doctrines.

Of course, humans and whatever oher races are in the settings have spirits as well. So you can just worship people and they'll become living gods.