A good assessment of the evolutionary issues facing the Cleric and Paladin classes in #DnD. The points raised are good and worth considering. Some can be mitigated through world building, but others represent a fundamental issue in the core of the class design/narratives. https://twitter.com/synxiecbeta/status/1252648935895810051

I think a component of the problem is spell and task creep. D&D was designed around the concept of a tactical unit, wherein there was a Cleric/Fighter/Magic User/Thief combo team, each with a set of primary and secondary tasks that facilitated operations.

Early class expansions didn't do much to upset this. They changed the flavour of the party, but not the implied roles (for the most part, Wizard school specialists changed a lot). But with 3/3.5e and especially 5e; there's a lot of crossover on top of some radically different...

...expectations and conceptualizations of *what* fantasy is and what characters should be able to do. D&D isn't a super flexible system though, so it struggles with ever degree of deviation away from its core conceptualization and theory of play. And boy does this post nail...

...it with the issues around religion and the divine classes. Now, I rambled on about this yesterday, and it was pointed out that the "faithless" concepts have been around since 2e at least. And that's fair. But that was also an era when D&D was more fractured as to what it...

...was trying to be. Namely, it was trying to be a model for historical gaming and mythic earth gaming (as seen in the green book series), and trying to be a fantasy game at the same time. Something later editions toned down dramatically. Within the campaign settings though...

...things were pretty tightly defined. Divine magic, in the bulk of situations, came from gods and goddesses. But organized religion is on the outs in the modern day IRL, and this is reflected in game with the doubling down on the deity-less divine classes and in FR...

...specifically, the "silence of the gods". I have a huge number of issues with that latter one from a worldbuilding perspective, but that's a different rant.

Anyways, back to spell and task bleed. It's all over the place now. Sometimes it makes sense, but it also calls...

...into question what makes Clerics and Paladins really special anymore? In a lot of ways, they're facing the same issue the Ranger is. They're losing distinction as other classes assume more modularity and the ability to cover them off. And with gods being shuffled off...

...to the side, a lot of the core concepts built into them and their spells are developing some mechanical dissonance.

So yeah, good food for thought.