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Showing posts with the label cleric

Magic-User & Priest write-ups for "Into the Unknown" (B/X-5e hack)

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I've already shared write-ups for the  Halfling [Race-as-class] ,  Fighter & Rogue classes  and  Book 2: Playing the Game  for my B/X-inspired 5e hack, Into the Unknown. Without further ado, here are write-ups for the last two core classes. The Magic-User (PDF) The Priest (PDF) Here, I am making use of the categorisation employed from OD&D all the way to 2nd edition - of later classes, such as druids, being sub-classes of the four main classes. Except, I've simplified the distinction even more and not even made them sub-classes but different class features. So sorcerers, warlocks and wizards are all the same class. The magic-user class feature only shows up at 1st and 2nd lvl and basically just defines how a magic-user learns spells. I feel each feature is still very thematically distinct without needing to be separate classes. With the priest class, I am stretching this a lot more - as druid/cleric as class feature shows up on a lot of levels and they

Fixing the Cleric? Make Sense of the Cleric

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Googling "Fixing the Cleric" in quotes give ca 17900 results. Obviously, this is a recurring theme of frustration among D&Ders. So here is take 17901 trying to do the same. Why this keeps coming up is not hard to see - There are no clerics in fiction. It doesn't match to any sort of narrative archetype. The only archetypes it is recognised as is gamist: "the healer". As it is, it falls squarely between the two stools of religious warrior (which is the Paladin) and Mystic (which doesn't really exist in D&D). It's not that divine classes themselves struggle with this. Paladins are an easily recognisable archetype, as are druids. Yet, somehow clerics seem to expertly evade narrative recognition after decades of being a core class in D&D. The Cleric as Gamist Archetype Maybe if they had made the cleric more like the monk, using simple weapons and little armor but being somewhat capable in melee anyway and then jazzed that up with cl