Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Neonflux Jan 22, 2015 3:42:18	It was mentioned in another thread about the possibility of playing without clerics/religion. It came up in a discussion about dragon lance. I just wanted to start the idea as a separate thread because it's an interesting one I've been considering and have started using for my home brew world. I'll go into a little detail of that below for anyone that's interested.   but basically the question is... Have you tried it? Would you try it? What would your players think? Do you think it would work or is it removing too much a vital quarter stone of d&d classes? (ok that was a few questions)   heres my home brew idea...   initially I wanted religion to be tied to 'birds' but that seemed like a lot of work to flesh out a whole unique pantheon, but then I decided that the gods cannot reach this plane (it's currently meant to be a piece of the material plane caught between the abyss and the fey wild, again this is all under construction as a concept) and in the absence of gods people worship angels that once came in the form of birds.   I've told my players there are no clerics, but I have allowed paladins and Druids. we only played an intro session after making characters, there is a paladin in the group as the soul healer. I never played 4e but I feel with 5 there are more options for healing in this edition, also I want to give my setting something of a gritty survivalist feel with most the worlds cities turned to labyrinths long ago.   I am considering making a class something like a cleric version of a warlock where they are bound to an angel and get limited spells but other abilities. I've never really bothered with my own classes out of fear of unbalance.   anyway thanks for reading, feedback is always uncouraged.
#2 Makaki Jan 22, 2015 3:56:31	I guess a variant of this is your PC's story.   For example. I have a Cleric who still believes in his diety but has separated from the religion. He seeks knowledge, his background is a Sage. He believes in his diety in his own way, not necessarily how the religion portrays him/her.
#3 Neonflux Jan 22, 2015 4:18:28	That's a cool twist and sounds like good potential for roleplay.    I tend to find people tend to pick the cleric under the notion 'we need a healer in the party' rather than someone beng keen to actually play a cleric, which is why I just wanted to leave it out.    In a way I'm trying to give the world a feeling as much by leaving things out as putting them in... for example, there are no horses in my world either.
#4 Llenlleawg Jan 22, 2015 5:12:07	You need to clarify, actually? Which (pick as many as are true) do you want: a world without religion? a world without clerics? a world without gods? None of these implies, entails, or requires any of the others. You could imagine, e.g. a world where there are gods, and these gods empower some mortals as magical champions (i.e. clerics) but the gods neither ask for nor require worship from mortals (or you just don't treat of religion at all). OR, you could imagine a world in which there are religions and magic-wielding clerics, but the existence of the gods is less than certain (e.g. Eberron). OR, you culd have a world with gods who are worshipped, but who have no magic-wielding champions. OR...   My first suggestion is not to remove the cleric class. You don't need to have gods to have clerics, at least the cleric class. They might just get power from certain spiritual or philosophical disciplines. They might be calling on various spirits without worshipping any of them (e.g. the shamans of Oriental Adventures or even the Mystics in the old Red Death supplement for Ravenloft). In any event, many players like playing clerics as a class, and you can certainly achieve your goal of a religionless campaign setting without taking the class off the table, especially since you imagine that you'll allow druids and paladins. If nothing else, you can say that druids are empowered by the forces of the elements (and so the Material Plane and elemental planes and/or Elemental Chaos) while clerics draw power from the Astral Plane (which they learn to channel through various spiritual/ascetical traditions, i.e. the domains), except for clerics of Death, who renounce the Astral disciplines and embrace the power of the Shadowfell. No gods required!
#5 Neonflux Jan 22, 2015 5:33:07	it started with a very lazy approach to getting rid of religion to avoid having to assign cleric domains to every bird I could think of. but in the end I got more interested in the idea of getting rid of clerics as a class. I can always make it extremely rare and thus add it in later.   If a player had their heart set on it i certainly wouldn't prevent it. Although I did ask a player that expressed an interest in playing a cleric what his second choice would be, he thought for a second and then said 'dragonborn barbarian' and never really looked back.    Not trying to start a cleric bashing thread, more thoughts on if or how a campaign would work without them? also curious if anybody has tried this.
#6 Llenlleawg Jan 22, 2015 5:36:58	I've never tried it myself, but there's no reason that druids, bards, warlocks, and paladins would not be able to handle most everything you want from the PC side of things. Many of the iconic cleric powers and abilities are distributed among these classes.
#7 Vahnyu Jan 22, 2015 5:37:00	Neonflux wrote:
#8 EzechielDantan Jan 22, 2015 5:39:05	I'd use druids to get to a more of an Old Religion feel, that is tied to spirits and nature more than gods.   I'd consider to have unique cleric spells to be cast by the way of rituals, possibly only at specific locations tied to certain spirits, possibly requiring sacrifice of some kind, posssibly with a religion check.
(Reply to #6) Neonflux	Llenlleawg wrote:
(Reply to #7) Neonflux	Vahnyu wrote:
(Reply to #8) Neonflux	EzechielDantan wrote:
#12 Tempest_Stormwind Jan 22, 2015 9:35:27	Out of curiosity, have you read any Eberron or Dark Sun material? Both have interesting takes on religion and missing deities, and yet keep the cleric. (In Eberron, clerical divine magic comes from faith rather than gods (or a church - most church leaders aren't spellcasters, and many of the stereotypical church magical services are actually handled by guilds run by merchant family monopolies), and most of the "deities" probably don't exist, and those that do are rather limited in how they can act - or think, in some cases - and the druids are split into different religious sects rather than one homogenous "old faith"; in Dark Sun, the gods are absent, distant, or apathetic, but there are elemental priests (it's a heavily man-vs-environment setting), and powerful sorcerer-kings who empower their templars to act  out their will).
#13 Nevvur Jan 22, 2015 9:37:21	The above replies covered most of the concerns I would have running a setting as you describe. I just wanted to point out the in-combat healing a cleric brings is a tactical option, the same as being a heavy armor user, a control spell user, or a high damage class. In theory your party-sans-healing cleric should balance out against any other party composition of the same level. Not that this theory really pans out most of the time, but that's where you come in, designing challenges that won't TPK on a regular basis due to lacking one tactical option. The challenges don't have to become harder or easier than a 'standard group' (fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric), but maybe just a little different.    One other idea is to refluff the divine classes into being arcane. You could just treat healing and radiant stuff like a special discipline of the usual spellcasting metaphysics. Lleanlleawg suggested something similar to this already. The only difficulty IMO would be explaining why clerics get access to their entire spell list, while other arcanists have to select theirs.
#14 Illithidbix Jan 22, 2015 11:50:12	In most of my homebrew campaigns *Religion* is a very big part of the setting but tangible gods far less so.   I actually find Clerics and Divine Magic a bit... vexing because it is almost identical to Wizards and Arcane magic. Magical healing is so *mandatory* it is very hard to create a persistant sense of *miracle* with it.   I personally also really dislike the idea of visiting the local temple to get Raise Dead cast... aghr...   So, as with the consequences of mechanics that vex me; I work them into my setting.     Basically in most of my worlds (unless I go for a very fantastical one) divine Magic, is almost entirely unheard of, certainly it's not found in the hands of village priests or even the High Priests of the Great Cathedrals.   And... people wandering around able to perform dramatic miracles can REALLY upset the local religious hirearchy, so someone casting divine magic would be viewed as either a Prophet, a Saint or a dangerous heretic...  And some theologians claim that Divine magic is in fact from a far less holy source, pointing to empyrical similarities bettween it and wizards and warlocks...     Also, I very much like writing religions that don't involve deities.
#15 Qmark Jan 22, 2015 23:43:11	Ditching gods is incredibly easy: cleric stuff just works.
(Reply to #12) Neonflux	Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
(Reply to #15) Neonflux	Qmark wrote:
#18 Azylynne Jan 23, 2015 3:48:21	I agree with Qmark, if you don't want dieties etc., but want to have divine powers, there are a hundred ways to explain why divine magic works, or you don't have to explain it at all to the PCs.  However, if you're planning to be rid of Clerics, that's a whole different story. For example - If I was to create a campaign without "gods" per se, I could have the divine classes gain their magical powers from various aspects of nature or life.  Like Life and Light are from the sun and light, tempest from storms, wind, and air, war from earth, fire, etc.  Or perhaps in another setting, the various divine classes gain their power from motes or "power stones" round the world, and the various world powers are doing what they can to accumulate these "stones" to store up power against others. Likewise, one can easily cvhange the "Religion" skill into something else, like History, or even Arcane. However, I probably would not run a campaign that has Paladins and Druids and other divine classes but have no Clerics.  If I was running a grittier campaign, I may take out a number of the healing and life preserving spells, but still keep clerics in.  If I wanted to run a campaign with no gods, I can easily convert clerics into something that had no god, but still performed a role that would be "priest-like" in terms of taking care of their community, bringing healing (through medicine or otherwise), and in a way, was the support role in adventuring groups.   The reason why I would not remove clerics even though other divine classes exist is because, my players would meta the ruleset and bascially, if they were looking for a healer, they would just pick something from one of the other "healer" classes, even if they are not as efficient as the cleric.  As for angels and what nots, I actually don't see a difference between angels and gods in terms of giving characters divine powers.  A source is a source is a source, right?  Whether they be powerful gods, or angels, or minor spirits that preside over small shrines, to some power stone, or the sun, or moon, or nature, or death, or whatever else there is that grants "divine" power to these spell casters.  I would ask, what is the big difference between Paladins, Druids, and Clerics that Clerics are rare or removed from the campaign?  Paladins will gain spell powers starting 2nd level, they begin with Lay on Hands for Heal, they have various powers already... I don't see the difference, pleas explain?
(Reply to #18) Neonflux	Azylynne wrote:
#20 Pompadour64 Jan 23, 2015 12:55:17	I like the idea of a setting in which the existence of gods isn't concrete, and there is a lot of tension between believers and non-believers. And maybe different religions recognize only one deity as the one true god. Sort of like Game of Thrones, I guess. Just seems like a cool dynamic for a world. And maybe, if the truth is that there are no gods, clerics gain their power through "prayer," which they mistakenly believe is divinely bestowed, but really comes from the same place as "normal," arcane magic.
(Reply to #19) Azylynne	Neonflux wrote:
#22 BRJN Jan 26, 2015 19:15:21	4e Primal Power might be of help here.  The fluff can lead (in this context) to an animistic religion - your Cleric draws on the inherent power of the spirits ... well, of everything.  - Your healing comes from the spirits sharing their strength with your allies.  - Your Bless spell works because the spirits guide your aim / distract the enemy / nudge the arrow in flight.  - You can heal disease or cure poison because you chase out the spirits of weakness and corruption, making room for (or replacing them with) spirits of strength and wholeness.   -Some of the spirits have endured since before the memory of man knoweth not to the contrary, so you can ask them to foretell the future and they can speak from their vast experience. - A few spirits have such vast and weighty responsibilities that their attention is not easily drawn.  They only interact with powerful heroes.  (You've truly arrived when Thunderbird wants your help and asks for YOU by name.) - OTOH, the spirit of a squirrel will talk with whoever shows it some interest (Speak with Animals).   With all that said, I find creating a pantheon to be an enjoyable part of World-building, not a chore to be avoided.  If you don't like it, maybe one of your PCs enjoys the creative task and would take the job?  (Maybe somebody who REALLY WANTS to play a Cleric?)