A Miracle By
Any Other Name
January 31st, 2011
Today marks the beginning of Cleric Week, a week devoted entirely to those hard-working and under-appreciated servants of the gods: the clerics. Clerics are a major part of both the fantasy genre as a whole (typically, at least: they don’t necessarily play a major role in every single fantasy setting), and of Dungeons and Dragons in particular. Normally, when I write sentences like that, both parts are getting at basically the same thing: that clerics are important to D&D in largely the same ways that they are important to the genre as whole. In this case, however, I’m saying something entirely different.
In fantasy, clerics are important because they are they eyes, hands, and other various assorted body parts (I was suddenly struck with a wave of nostalgia for Grandia II) of the various deities they represent. Through clerics (and priests and shamans and cult leaders) a powerful and mystical god, demi-god, deus or the like can make his or her will manifest, and intervene directly in the world. Theoretically, of course, they could do it all themselves, but having too many literal gods running around willy-nilly tends to either create a very chaotic and cluttered story (or setting), or else tends to drastically de-mystify the deities in question. Often it does both. Clerics and priests, then, are a great way for a fantasy writer to give his or her audience an avenue into that divine aspect of the setting (which proves perhaps even more fascinating in fiction than in reality, though only just), without having the place too wrecked up by Thor and his buddies.
In Dungeons and Dragons, however, clerics are rarely used in this way. They might act as this literary device in a book or movie about a D&D setting, of course, and at the table, you might even see some cleric NPCs serving as mouthpieces or pawns for the deities they serve, depending on the DM and the style of game. But it is a very rare thing indeed to see a PC cleric’s personal relationship with his or her deity become a matter of any real and direct importance in a game. The only way that is likely to happen, in my experience, at least, is if it is either very important to the player in question, and he constantly harasses and harangues the DM about it until he sees more of it at the table, or, sometimes, if the DM’s storyline is tightly connected to the affairs of deities and various quasi-deific entities (this, by the way, is usually the sign of poor DMing), and so uses the PC as a sort of funnel to force-feed the PCs his plot about long-dead anti-gods, or whatever the case may be.
Instead, the D&D cleric typically serves the role of unsung benefactor to the party, performing all of the non-gratifying but highly important functions, such as healing, providing buffs for the fighter and rogue, resurrecting dead party members (sometimes as an out-of-pocket expense), and generally being the glue that keeps the party together. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of cleric PCs who are able to rise above this to actually do some fun things—there are lots—but one of the things that I would say 4th edition certainly got right was its attitude to clerics and other “leaders,” in allowing them to at least have the pleasure of making an attack roll when they have to waste their time healing people (even if it does lead to the humorous and somewhat nonsensical “hit the opponent so that you can heal your friend” powers that crop up from time to time in the 4e Player’s Handbook). At the end of the day, cleric is very much a utilitarian class, which, ultimately, is sort of what I wanted to talk about.
You see, it’s always bugged me that, mechanically speaking, there’s not really very much that makes a cleric seem anything like, well, a cleric. If you scratched off all the class names and fluff paragraphs, you would ultimately find yourself with a class that offered impressive spellcasting, decent armor, and average attack progression. The domains (or whatever the class feature might be called) certainly seem to reflect areas of expertise, but they hardly indicate anything to do with the divine. The only tell-tale sign is channel energy (previously turn undead, which, though far less useful, was the one class feature that really made a cleric feel like a cleric), which, ultimately, doesn’t really feel like it would be that out of place on a wizard, and certainly not on a druid. After all, it’s basically just a big explosion, either of healing or of… hurting… and while wizards are typically not so great at healing, there’s certainly no good reason the average arcane spellcaster couldn’t be releasing waves of negative energy. And bards, as well as druids, would be perfectly at home with healing bursts, as well.
In fact, zooming back a bit with the proverbial scrying sensor, there is precious little to differentiate divine magic from arcane magic at all. There are some tendencies—for example, divine magic typically doesn’t use material components, but that’s by no means a hard-and-fast rule. Also, divine casters tend to be better at healing than arcane casters, but that doesn’t mean that bards can’t cast healing spells. In fact, the only real difference is that divine spells don’t have spell failure, something which hardly seems to be connected to religion or divinity at all.
But, before I get too off-topic and start biting off more than I can chew in a single article (admittedly a habit of mine), let’s get back to the point at hand: clerics, and how their flavor is so painfully divorced from their mechanics. I’ve said for quite some time now that it’s important for a game’s mechanics to work with, rather than against (or even remaining neutral to) its flavor. As it is, a cleric is a wizard with a slightly different selection of spells and the ability to wear armor. This does not go a long way towards making me think of them as emissaries or even servants of their deity.
The obvious solution is to treat each divine (or, at least, cleric) spell like a prayer, with the cleric making a request of his or her deity for aid, and then, depending on how persuasive the cleric is or on what sort of standing he or she is with his or her deity, the prayer is either granted or denied. Unfortunately, this is a very complicated issue, and one which will likely require a high level of DM policing, if you want it to really mesh well. The simplest solution might be to have each spell require a “prayer” check, with the possibility of failure taking the place of spells per day. Technically this doesn’t have a whole lot to do with divinity (after all, it’s the mechanic they used for the truenamer in Tome of Magic, and there wasn’t anything particularly divine about him… not that there was really anything all that “truename-y” about the mechanic, either), but it much better conveys the fact that a cleric’s spells are gifts, and helps to set him apart from the wizard or sorcerer in a clear and easy to see fashion. Those who were more simulationist, however, might prefer a system where the cleric actually gains and loses favor with his or her deity, based on deeds, attitudes, words, and the like. In order to avoid either player or DM abuse, and keep the class balanced, it would be important for this to be carefully tied to some kind of mechanical system, which may require a lot in the way of bookkeeping. Still, I’ve seen some less-ambitious approaches to this in some variant book or other, which used it to track extra boons and favors, rather than as a way of replacing the Vancian system, and I think it might be an interesting thing to explore. If you find the idea as intriguing as I do, you might want to keep an eye on our www.drivethrurpg.com store, as it’s likely to turn itself into a book before too many more months are out.
Stay tuned for the rest of the week for more divine action, and I’ll see you next week, when the sermon will be mystery-flavored. In the meantime, stay true to who you are in spirit, rather than by the numbers.