Religion is too good for Clerics.

May 7, 2025

Created as part of Prismatic Wasteland’s Blogclave 2025, in which we all write about clerics during the papal conclave.

I don’t love almost any of the “core four” D&D classes - Fighter/Fighting Man, Rogue/Thief, Cleric, Wizard/Magic-User - if I’m going to be honest. Each of them feels simultaneously too vague and too specific, kind of thrown in there based on an initial reference that quickly became a reference to itself. But if I had to rank them with that caveat, I’d say cleric probably comes out 2nd to last.¹

There’s a few reasons. I’m pretty negative on “screw that particular kind of enemy” class features, for one, and they have the first and most prominent one. I don’t love how their spells feel so focused on emulating one particular family of real-life religion. I’m not fond of classes that inherently presume you have a particular affiliation or job. I think the thing that gets me about them the most, though, is that their presence warps religion around them by nature of its existence.

The nature of a class focused on a particular thing means that they’re likely to be The Only One Who Is Qualified, to the point of exclusion. You could have a non-Wizard character focus on arcane studies² but they don’t get half as much out of it, so if you want to be that character you’re probably just going to be a Wizard. And you could have a non-Cleric be really into religion, but like, if you want that to reflect beyond externalities you’re probably just gonna go for The Class What Cares About It.

Now, I’m not opposed to this, in theory. Like if you must have classes (the D&D kind, not the social kind (but that too)), having each of them handle A Particular Thing is probably good for role protection. My biggest issue here is that the social aspect of religion as a concept is varied and interesting and involves a lot of people. There’s a lot of meat on those bones! Schisms and conversion are really interesting and a lot of European history is shaped by them and their relations to politics!

The presence of The Religion Guy What Does Miracles³ makes it specific to a few people and less flexible. As soon as the presence of A Guy That Proves It’s All Real is felt, you have way less flex to just have people follow some wild-eyed prophet. It feels different having a nerd nail a bunch of complaints to the door of Pelor’s church when the big man directly gives people powers for doing what he wants, you know? Or you can, but you then have to come up with some narrative that makes that all still make sense, which then still focuses that on individual people instead of social currents. (As with a lot of magic, I’d probably prefer it to be less explained rather than more - or a matter of tradition rather than divine gift.) And this doesn’t get into basically any other non-Christian religion, which shouldn’t always work the same way or have the same strictures - and doesn’t always in real life! - but the presence of a Proper Cleric implies a certain structure of investiture that borderline requires religions to fall into that mold.

So basically: religion is way too interesting to be confined to one class. slaps the roof of the game You can fit so many antipopes (and other fun things!) in this bad boy if you free yourself from this class. Ditch the cleric and let’s get weird with it.

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