This is one of the reasons I love Runequest with its cult system. The same character can be a Mithraic initiate, an acolyte of the Eleusian Mysteries and a high priest of Mars.

Quote from: The Butcher;824632This is one of the reasons I love Runequest with its cult system. The same character can be a Mithraic initiate, an acolyte of the Eleusian Mysteries and a high priest of Mars.

Yes, RQ's more accurate (from the POV of what humans with pantheistic world views actually do in the real world) religions is one of the major reasons I switched from D&D to Runequest way back when. The cult write ups are huge improvements from the way D&D handles religions.

Quote from: Bren;824545True. And sometimes deities and pantheons are presented as more coherent and stable due to lack of knowledge by the author. But I think at least as often it is due to the author's need to simplify and clarify so as to present something understandable in less than a 1000 page tome to a potential player or GM. That sort of simplification and imposed coherence is really no different than what we see in how the history, etiquette, social relations, political hierarchy, law, or economy are presented for various settings.

Well, sure.  I'm not saying that this is terrible or something, a lot of settings don't need that much detail for these things.  But it also means that it can be done different, if someone worries more about these social-studies details about the setting than about carefully classing different types of pole-arms.  Neither is itself bad.

Quote from: RPGPundit;824780Well, sure.  I'm not saying that this is terrible or something, a lot of settings don't need that much detail for these things.  But it also means that it can be done different, if someone worries more about these social-studies details about the setting than about carefully classing different types of pole-arms.  Neither is itself bad.

Poor Gary. Its too late now for him to live that one down. That huge pole arms table in the Strategic Review seemed pretty whacked to my teenage self. And it hasn't improved with age either.

Runequest did a much, much better job with the pantheist religions. Actually of late, Glorantha has gone way too far in the direction of everything is subjective and in flux for the new mythology to be useful to me as a GM. So I want something in between that and D&D.

I don't have a big issue with clerics as written, but I also don't think that the one-god cleric is a necessary simplification.

I think it would be pretty easy to do pantheist clerics (or clerics of other different traditions) that are just as simple. I'd be interested to see this as an option, actually.

Henotheism and monolatry is still under pantheism, people. Do look them up. Everyone singing kumbaya is not the only form of behavior regarding a pantheon. The D&D Forgotten Realms style pantheism is not a modern anomalous creation.

Quote from: Opaopajr;824867Henotheism and monolatry is still under pantheism,

Don't know what your point is, since no, those are not "under pantheism". Pantheism is a very specific, usually philosophical, approach to religious belief.

Quote from: Opaopajr;824867Henotheism and monolatry is still under pantheism, people. Do look them up.

  Polytheism, not pantheism. The two are different things.

  On the general point, I'd rather lose the polytheism than the traditional cleric, but I find myself growing more and more attracted to a different form of 'old school inspiration'--the folklore and fairy tales, Arthurian and Carolingian legends, and Hollywood movies that inspired D&D alongside the Sword & Sorcery pulps and novels. The OSR seems to strongly favor the latter, but I think there's something to be done with the former.

  I do think conflating 'cleric' with 'priest' to the point of identity was a mistake; I'm not sure if it started with D&DG or Dragonlance.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;824971I do think conflating 'cleric' with 'priest' to the point of identity was a mistake; I'm not sure if it started with D&DG or Dragonlance.

I don't know what you mean by conflating cleric and priest. Could you clarify please?

Quote from: Bren;824973I don't know what you mean by conflating cleric and priest. Could you clarify please?

  All clerics (character class) are priests (role in the gameworld) and vice versa.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;824974All clerics (character class) are priests (role in the gameworld) and vice versa.

Whereas in the real world all priests are clerics but not all clerics are priests.

Follow up question: Is your desire to have or to allow the priest role in the game world include characters who are not clerics and thus presumably to have priests who do not have the powers (particularly spell powers) of the cleric class?

I've always just tailored a cleric to suit his religion/deity. Never cared for the pseudo-Christian assumptions inherent in the cleric and paladin. Lately my games have been set in a pastiche of the Balkans/Anatolia/Middle East and have had versions of Islam and Zoroastrian stuff for the religions. never found it hard to modify a class to suit my setting.

Quote from: talysman;824969Don't know what your point is, since no, those are not "under pantheism". Pantheism is a very specific, usually philosophical, approach to religious belief.

D'oh, brain fart. Thought we were staying on the OP.

Quote from: Bren;825019Whereas in the real world all priests are clerics but not all clerics are priests.

Follow up question: Is your desire to have or to allow the priest role in the game world include characters who are not clerics and thus presumably to have priests who do not have the powers (particularly spell powers) of the cleric class?

For me, that's how I do it.

The priests who officiate weekly at the temple, the religious beauocracy, and the village vicar are usually not "clerics" blessed with divine abilities. Those who specifically step up and are willing to directly serve and are chosen are invested with power.

The general priesthood, however, is tasked with the societal issues and the beaurocracy. These things are of no interest to adventurers. However, it is a place that people retire to, so the officiant of the seasonal and high holy days are usually classed clerics. RuneQuest informed my thinking on this quite a bit.

Quote from: RPGPundit;824540Now, if you were a priest, you'd be a priest of a specific temple, which was (almost always) a temple to just one god. But even you wouldn't just worship that one god. You'd only be able to perform the rites of that god and have a particularly special relationship with them.

So clerics being clerics of only one deity isn't totally out to lunch, but a lot of the OTHER stuff that D&D does with deities, like pantheons, or excessively-logical "domains", are more improper.

I'll take this in a slightly different direction. Your post was solid. But in game terms, I think there is a consistency that is finally being established/realized with the Cleric that started in 2e with the Specialty Priest.

In reference to the idea that strictly speaking - a "pantheon" is a cultural group of gods, that in a culture wasn't this edifice of solid understanding - is true.

The average person looked at the world phenomenologically - You wake up, you have your daily survival checklist (at whatever sociological stage your culture inhabits) - then shit happens. The "Gods" were the beings that oversaw these phenomenon and each culture projected their views on them. But that doesn't mean the gods worked in this unified understanding throughout the culture. If you were a viking from Sweden, you honored all the Gods on some level, but most especially the God that oversaw whatever endeavor you're pursuing. Horus was another such god. He and his father Re were believed to be different, related, and later the same being within the same culture.

Same is generally true about other pantheons.

Heck - even in Monotheism, Christianity wasn't codified until the Nicene Council almost 400 years after Christ. The Bible didn't even exist until Constantine forced the issue because all these Bishoprics used different books to teach the Gospel(s). That editorial jam-session gave us the New Testament. So even here, we see that the culture of monotheism isn't always uniform in their understanding (still isn't. Hello! all you other denominations!)

So in game-terms we have one BIG difference...

The Gods are Real. At least by implication of the game conceits. YMMV depending on the GM and how they want their fantasy world to operate of course.

But Forgotten Realms? Greyhawk?
Yep - These fuckers are real. They move. They do shit. They plot. They use mortals as their pawns. They're very much like the Greek Gods of old. But due to the analogous nature of kitchen-sink worlds the demarcation line over a God's influence is culture and domain.

So where does the Cleric come in? Back to my original claim - the 1e Cleric does assume a kind of a 1-on-1 relationship between Cleric and Deity. The natural fit for that class was obviously in the Church of that Deity. Sure. But if we're to assume that each God has its own worshippers - then the problem of all these Gods giving their Clerics the same powers and spells (at least RAW) became head-scratching moments.

Further complicating the matter was the conception of competing Pantheons. This is especially true of Forgotten Realms - where the syncretic nature of its "pantheon" comprised gods from different cultures and a handful of new deities. THEN it added entire pantheons from other cultures are separate Pantheons entirely - The Egyptian gods of Mulhorand, and the Celestial Bureaucracy of Kara-Tur. And representative of the God's and their own divine politics was this singular class?

Yeah - I remember in my own games as far back as the early 80's I was segregating spells off. No way Eldath is granting Unholy Word to her Clerics! But when 2e came out - they created the Specialty Priest as an option. I immediately said - Cleric class doesn't exist. Only Specialty Priests do.

This further made Clerics more specific to the Gods they supported. In my own games the Specialty Priests were the direct agents of those Gods and the spheres of influence their Gods controlled. More importantly - that "domain" was constantly in competition by other Gods who rubbed up against those areas of control. This promoted a lot of pro-activity on the parts of these priesthoods.

This idea kinda lost some ground, but not entirely, in 3e.... but the demarcation was there in the form of Domains.

The big revelation for me (and I still secretly think it's the best Cleric mechanic out there) - was Fantasy Craft. In Fantasy Craft the "Cleric" is the holy man touched by the Gods. You perform miracles within the context of the Domain - but you weren't mechanically a Wizard with the name Cleric painted over it. The concept is powerful - it hearkened back to the Abrahamic concept that anyone could become a Cleric - a direct agent of that god. A miracle worker. Even in a world of competing faiths - and was not Abraham in that boat? The irony brought up in religious debates all the time is that Yahweh didn't really become a monotheistic religion until all the other religions were run out of town. It's just that the enforcement of the idea they are the ONE TRUE religion becomes enshrined as a metaphysical fact. This is not something done in RPGs - though it would be interesting if it would happen...

 now... in 5e they take an even more DIRECT and intimate stance: The Cleric is not just a divine conduit, but it is exempt from the religion itself, much like Fantasy Craft in concept - but not mechanics. Clerics are in direct contact and therefore are agents of the Gods, potentially free of the religions themselves (through that would be extremely rare in my games). Run of the mill Priests have no clerical ability.

So how do you reconcile these ideas? Easy. It's already done for you. You just have to decide to what degree do the Gods tolerate one another, and to what degree to they meddle in the affairs of mortals. Flavor to your tastes by emphasis on what you deem important.