Dungeons and Dragons with no Divine casting

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
Yeah, this was entirely from apocryphal stories of Bishop Odo of Bayeux wielding a club-like mace at the Battle of Hastings in the Bayeux Tapestry, the idea being that he did so to avoid either "shedding blood or bearing the arms of war", which priests were forbidden to do by the Church.
It's the sort of odd restriction that relies on your deity being very very hung up on the letter rather than the spirit of their commands. Speaking personally, if an eternity upstairs or downstairs is at stake, I'd err on the side of caution. It's a good job that there's no such creature which delights in such games of trickery and wordplay, right?

I quite liked 4e's solution, which was to just give them laser beams instead.
 
They'd also pretty much dropped the edged weapons rules in 2e supplements. In that priests had favoured weapons depending on their gods (obviously a Priest of Peace isn't going to be using a bastard sword but a Priest of War probably is).

Dunno. The god I pray to most is Forseti, the god of peace and reconciliation... and his favored weapon is the double-bitted axe.
 
It's the sort of odd restriction that relies on your deity being very very hung up on the letter rather than the spirit of their commands. Speaking personally, if an eternity upstairs or downstairs is at stake, I'd err on the side of caution. It's a good job that there's no such creature which delights in such games of trickery and wordplay, right?

The more alignment arguments I've gotten into over the years, the more I'm convinced that-- at least-- a substantial minority of D&D nerds think this is how morality actually works, as a system of arbitrary rules to be manpulated for personal benefit, and thus why they react to any suggestion that those rules are vapid and toxic as an attempt to "get away with" acting like murderhobos (without doing the paperwork) rather than an attempt to not be forced to act like murderhobos by rules that... some of them say deliberately... don't reflect any kind of coherent human morality.

I used to hate these arguments because they bring out all of the qualities I hate most in the ruinous vermin we call "humanity", especially gamer nerds, but I've actually grown to appreciate them in recent years as a reliable litmus test for people I don't want to allow into my house.
 
The more alignment arguments I've gotten into over the years, the more I'm convinced that-- at least-- a substantial minority of D&D nerds think this is how morality actually works, as a system of arbitrary rules to be manpulated for personal benefit, and thus why they react to any suggestion that those rules are vapid and toxic as an attempt to "get away with" acting like murderhobos (without doing the paperwork) rather than an attempt to not be forced to act like murderhobos by rules that... some of them say deliberately... don't reflect any kind of coherent human morality.

I used to hate these arguments because they bring out all of the qualities I hate most in the ruinous vermin we call "humanity", especially gamer nerds, but I've actually grown to appreciate them in recent years as a reliable litmus test for people I don't want to allow into my house.
Alignment is Vapid? Ok.
Alignment is "toxic"? Get some perspective maybe.
 
Quite a few nice suggestions here. One thing I really liked about Tolkein's work was that Middle Earth has no organized religion. I wish more fantasy settings would borrow from that aspect of Tolkein.

As far as Sword and Sorcery priests and magic, the thing about S&S is that most "Gods" in S&S settings are quite often really alien Lovecraftian horrors lurking beyond space and time. Quite often "Priest" and "Sorcerer" are synonymous in Sword and Sorcery and whatever Magic they might posses are secrets of arcane knowledge gifted to them by these extra-dimensional beings in exchange for sacrifices. To say nothing of the "gods" that are really just beasts. Again this is fundamentally different from how Clerics are portrayed in DnD.

My final issue with Arcane casters not being allowed to heal is: why not? Wizards and Sorcerers are already demonstrated to be able to warp reality in highly complex and controlled ways. Not allowing them to cast healing spells feels kinda arbitrary.
 
In D&D versions I've seen without separate clerics (True20, some osr) I think healing then becomes just another mage specialty.
 
But if the clerics are gone from the game, whose niche is it stepping on?
I couldn't agree more. I am not a huge fan of niche protection and metagaming "we have to have X class" mindsets. No one should be turning away Turok the barbarian because the group already has 2 warriors, it's nonsensical for wandering mercenary adventurers and treasure hunters to think that way.
 
I'm all about murdering birds efficiently. In my opinion, healing is just too easy in most version of D&D. Why not drop it as a niche altogether? Or maybe there's magical healing, but not in the middle of the dang dungeon! You gotta go back to town and pay the priests, and it takes a week to get patched up from near-death. One less niche to protect and combat is a little more scary.
 
The real mistake is that instead of fixing the cleric's problems, they decided to create an overlapping holy warrior class that could use edge weapons and call it a paladin. So now we had two designs that didn't make sense amd occupied the same thematic and design space, instead of a single badass class.

No what happen is Gygax decided to add a combination of Knight of the Round Table/Charlemagne Paladin by allow a high charisma fighter to use a holy sword, a loyal mount, to lay on hands, get +2 to saving throws, dispel evil, and detect evil

1589299201073.png
1589299222838.png
Clerics remained as they were, undead hunters healers, and backup fighters.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top