My Life As A Gamer: Clerics Are Not Generic Priests (An Opinion)

Okay, now that no one's trying (today) to shiv Jeffro, I can finally get this out there. The following is an opinion.

The Cleric Is Not A Generic Priest

For those coming in late, here is a summary of the Cleric's origin in Dungeons & Dragons:

Once there was an evil Fighter character, Sir Fang. Fang became a Vampire, but this was the 1970s so "vampire" meant "Hammer Horror Dracula" and not Horny Wine Mom Sex Fantasy, and thus soon came to dominate the campaign.

Players went to Gygax, who thought it would be fun to make Hammer Horror Van Helsing as a character class, and with a bit of Howard-style blending merged some Medieval fighting order trappings to Van Helsing and Clerics entered the game as the third character class (after Fighter and Magic-User).

What do you have here? A character class whose very origins rely on Christian cosmology, as filtered by the popular fiction of Stoker through to Hammer, with some Howard-style anarchronism as if he were retrofitted into the Hyborean Age.

That is not a generic priest, especially of a non-Christian religion; for that, the Magic-User is far more fitting and accurate choice to take. The Cleric is a dedicated hunter of supernatural evil, specifically empowered to deal with them- and the Undead in particular. The further you get from Christianity, the harder you have to squint to have Clerics make sense.

It would be better to use Magic-Users for a lot of what people use Clerics for when they want Evil priests, non-Christian priests regardless of Alignment, spell-casting leaders of cults, and so on.

We already recognize that the Druid class is very particular in its focus, and not to be taken as a generic priest class. I argue that this should be extended to Clerics and that Magic-Users be recognized as a generic class.

A lot of magical traditions (which is what a lot of priesthoods actually do) can be handled given how completely different non-Christian religion is in its practice (very transactional in a Patron-Client form, very Face-oriented where ritual matters more than belief, etc.).

I also argue that this recognition already exists because, no matter your opinion on them, the Wu-Jen and Shugenja classes exist in AD&D 1st Edition.

Furthermore, I remind you that the Dual-Class rules exist. While difficult to accomplish, you can play a Human character that begins as Class A and later switches wholesale to Class B. This allows you to play the young warrior who transitions later in life to a contemplative scholar and occultist (encouraged by the Aging rules)- and if you think that's impossible, you never attempted to play the Bard class.

"But this breaks the game."

Hardly. The implicit Christianity of the game is already apparent. I'm just sharpening that focus by making it more explicit.

What that objection really means is "I can't function without a healbot at the table", to which I say (a) Git Gud, (b) you already have other magic healing options, and (c) that's not how the game actually works. If you get messed up, you better expect to be spending time recovering from your wounds. Expecting that someone blow their magic wad on keeping everyone at full Hit Points is Mech-Piloting in action applied at the group level- and D&D is not Globe of Gankcraft.

Reconsider how you use the tools at your disposal, and reconsider what you think you know about the game. If you already accept that 1:1 Timekeeping and Patron Play are big deals that somehow went unnoticed for decades, consider what else you think you know that is actually wrong, and you will see that maybe--just maybe--I have a point.