How do you make Clerics cool? Paladins are extremely cool because they're scary crusaders who slaughter evil by the thousands, but they're still good guys, classical scary but righteous warriors hidden behind their helmets and smiting evil with their flesh-tearing swords until all evil is destroyed once and for all.
And then you have Clerics, and they're just not as scary so they're not as cool.
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everybody be hating on clerics until they are 2 hit points away from being downed AGAIN
paladins can also heal and if you need a dedicated healer you're in a moronic group already
if you dont need a dedicated healer in your group maybe you should stop playing the bloody game on "easy"
d&d isn't a mmo
i know that but the encounters should be a little bit chalanging shouldnt they?
if the party can just sumon 18 cows 50 feet into the air and airdrop the bad guy for 300+ falling damage every turn it kinda defeat the purpose
make harder fights for your players so they have to plan around it
doing substantial damage to the enemy, or otherwise handling them, is better than popping off a riveting 1d4+spell mod healing until you run out of slots that could've been spent on useful spells
It doesn't matter if they're useful, being the teams' healbawd is never going to be cool.
D&D Clerics aren't healbots.
>how do you make clerics cool
You stick their corpses in cold storage. That class is responsible for the arbitrary arcane-divine divide that's plagued rpgs since day one. The whole holy man spellcaster bit is complete garbage. Clerics want the power of a mage without the conventional stigma of a magic user. These self righteous little shits have been hogging all the restoration or healing spells as well. These is nothing redeemable about this role or class whether they're called priests, clerics, cultists, or c**ts.
most settings are very bad with the idea of divinity. there is a wellspring of "cool" you could pull as a representative of a god. sacrifices, nothing large and small (votive offerings) are often missing from the pseudo paganism of most settings as well as the enormous political spiritual and social influence these people had either as pseudo pagans or pseudo Catholics.
if you want inspiration from real world religions your cleric should be summoning swarms of locusts or cursing your enemies with festing boils even as a good cleric. cursing or blessing people has mostly been the domain of the divine for all of human history.
to boil it down clerics should be buffing/debuffing machines with options for a "face character" who can gather followers around them.
>Paladins are extremely cool because they're scary crusaders who slaughter evil by the thousands, but they're still good guys, classical scary but righteous warriors hidden behind their helmets and smiting evil with their flesh-tearing swords until all evil is destroyed once and for all.
This isn't why paladins are cool at all
Then you explain why Paladins are cool.
"Lawful Good isn't Lawful Nice oooo scary" is tiresome, a Paladin that's a paragon of goodness for others to look up to, kind, generous, and wise, is cool
Lawful Good isn't Lawful Nice is just true, it doesn't matter if you like it or not, that's the way that being Lawful Good works. When God orders you to burn down a city and bash their children's heads against the rocks, that's what you do.
How tiresome.
Lawful Good doesn't have to be nice to evil, moron.
The whole lawful good is not nice shit is every single time without fail parroted by people who want to be evil bastards with a paladin's aesthetic and being right for being evil.
Not really. Historically, good guys sometimes have do deeds that the ignorant call 'attrocities'.
Paladins in regards to roleplaying games aren't historic paladins though, the entire point is they are a romanticization/idealization and not bound to the awfulness of reality and are firmly in settings where good and evil are fundamental forces and not a matter of opinion.
Fair. My paladin tries to actively encourage criminals to do good, unless their crimes are intentionally really depraved or blasphemous. He's even willing to try to help murderers reform, but killing children, selling children to vampires, defiling a church, devil worship, these buy you death. And not necessarily a fast one. If evil is a fundamental force, then extreme forms of evil must be stamped out.
>the entire point is they are a romanticization/idealization and not bound to the awfulness of reality
Except they are. Why do you think Always Chaotic Evil races exist?
Because most people are too cowardly to honestly kill or fight anything in their way and require a literal "kill this" sign plastered above a target to decide it's okay now.
Knights in shining armours, like Charlemagne's paladins (namesake) or King Arthur's knights.
Your powers vanish if you act like a base knave.
Every peasant rebellion in history was crushed by knights in shining armor riding them down like dogs. Knights are scary as frick.
Peasant fricking shits should know their place
This looks like anti-paladin propaganda.
A good God is a just God. Lawful good is lawful just. Only Mormons take genocide against nephilim spawn to expand it to non-nephilim, us humans.
Killing babies is satanic.
You make them cool by making them passively burn demons alive. You also make them cool by making them targets of the gay mafia.
>Killing babies is satanic.
You're calling God Satanic you drooling moron.
There's a difference between human babies and nephilim spawn, your mormon.
And God has ordered the killing of human babies before.
He didn't. He ordered the death of genetically modified spawn. In fact, He had the Earth flooded to surprise them.
>Killing babies is wrong
They hated Anon because he told them the truth.
God created Satan, QED nerd. Your god sucks, my god is fricking awesome and also lets me cast Call Lightning.
>t. Cleric
Yes it is.
>Lawful Good isn't Lawful Nice
>a Paladin that's a paragon of goodness for others to look up to, kind, generous, and wise
These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think they are, you're a fricking moron and your paladins aren't actually paladins.
You forgot to add that clerics, especially high level clerics, are fanatical to their god. They are 9th level spellcasters who are certifiably nuts.
How nuts are we talking? Because religious nuts are scary.
The most die hard jihadi has half the zeal your average libtard has nowadays. Secular zealotry far outstrips religious ones. Psychopathic quasi communists who believe cutting their dick off will make them a woman and replacing reverence for god with idolatry of man. Look how they behaved towards Obama, Fauci, etc..
I'll take this bump because clerics are cool.
They've survived enough life or death scenarios to become a big enough deal to cast the highest tiers of spells. So imagine the local preacher except they were a violent psychopath and also a veteran of like 3 wars and now in business for themself as a liquidator. They out-crazy mad mages.
When a guy walks in with the head of a dragon and says he offers it up to the glory of Garl Glittergold: you better play along.
Never heard of a badass priest or preacher?
That guy fricking dies
Robopriests
Take Judaism or Islam and make it polytheistic.
Clerics were always cool. In the name of my god I will smite thee, with holy symbol in one hand and my mace in the other I shall bring the illuminating ray of her magnificence into this dark warren. No beast, of nature or unnatural, shall stand before me without its knee bent or its back broken. Other mortals are my instruments, all for the greater glory of our lady, may she rule eternal. Praise be to Cyrrollalee.
You make Clerics cool by making them rant, preach, and prophesying their faith all across the battle field.
Remember clerics are the gods #1 fan
>Remember clerics are the gods #1 fan
That would be Paladins
No, Gods are the #1 fans of paladins
But Clerics are the #1 fans of Gods
Paladins don't get divine intervention though?
>How do you make Clerics cool?
It depends on whose sense of coolness you're trying to appeal to.
Ask them, not strangers on the internet you'll never meet.
My clerics are paladins, because Charlemagne doesn't exist in my game.
>Good man that can be incredibly scary when faced with evil
This is also a thing for Cleric-likes in literature and scripture if you're looking for scary - Moses in particular comes to mind. The moment your Paladin is killing entire armies with their sword the Cleric is so favoured by their God that you may be stoking divine punishment and damnation simply by raising a sword against them.
In our campaign, our party works for a church. The cleric is kind of the defacto "boss", but leaves a lot of decision making to the paladin, who was also raised by the church. The cleric however FRICKS SHIT UP, and obviously heals us. The church has as one of its social programs a thing where it sends out clerics and paladins with criminals that either want to reform and join the church, or were given the opportunity to participate in the program or be executed. The idea being that these criminals can be reformed by using their skills against worse evils (the church itself actively seeks to eliminate certain evils). So even though our cleric is nice (and unbeknownst to most of the party is an aasimar), he could easily have the tiefling and assassin executed (or do it himself)
>The idea being that these criminals can be reformed by using their skills against worse evils
One of my favorite tropes is Hellsing shit where there's a clearly evil entity who's kept on a short leash by a good organization to help take down bigger threats.
>The nuns in the covent take turns getting bitten by the bishie vampire
>have to undergo a cleansing ritual afterwards to stave off impure thoughts
Our party's church wouldn't go that far, would probably kill the vampire immediately at the first opportunity. If it was a humanoid murderer (and not of children) or a thief or something, sure. One if our teammates is a loose tiefling fighter who used to be a sword for hire, another is a con artist and serial murdering assassin (but we IC only know that he's a thief who tried to steak from the church, got caught, and chose this over exercution)
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Make them basically healers and nukers. While paladins smite with melee the cleric smites with magic.
Paladins follow deities, but Clerics can only patron reforming angels. It's possible for a Cleric to fall due to no faulter of their own accord, but because the angel they place their faith in. Then again it's possible that a rogue angel might prove to be very valuable to the Cleric and they might gain more power, or they might have an opportunity to assume their role for themselves.
On a long enough timeframe, perhaps there will be Paladins who swear an oath to that once upon Cleric who is now a deity.
Clerics are always cool. OP just has no imagination.
>Paladins are extremely cool because they're scary crusaders who slaughter evil by the thousands, but they're still good guys, classical scary but righteous warriors hidden behind their helmets and smiting evil with their flesh-tearing swords until all evil is destroyed once and for all.
D&D Clerics can be all those things except they typically have bone-crushing maces instead of flesh-tearing swords. Why do people assume clerics are just healbots when actual the rules of the game don't?
Clerics don't have smite and they don't have oaths.
Paladins are lame as shit and shouldnt even exist in setting unless theres an evil counterpart (i.e Deathknight). Clerics are far cooler.
They're necromancers and combat summoners, who also specialize in the afterlife, planar travel, and planar communication; tied to a god who could also be cool.
A Cleric of Mask, for instance. What's not awesome about maskarrans?
>And then you have Clerics, and they're just not as scary
they're ninth level spellcasters, they're the scariest and most dangerous thing in the world..The only edition this isn't the case is 4e and even then high level clerics are disgustingly capable.
A cleric can be as cool and scary as you choose to make them. The BBEG in a campaign I'm in is a storm cleric with an enchanted staff that's been running around the country blasting people into ashes. Divine magic can still be scary, harmful magic
Act like The Pope's Exorcist.
Most cleric abilities are reacting to what's happened. You generally don't have to plan ahead and can just relax and enjoy the game. It makes the game multidimensional rather than just hack and slash. I always play one if allowed.
Well, it would be cool if there were more elemental shit that clerics can do. Like, there's a Light domain that has some fire spells, but nothing specifically related to flame, no Water domain, etc. Like, what if you worship a powerful elemental and want to be a cleric of theirs, what are you going to do then?
My Reborn Grave Cleric with high charisma can be pretty scary if he wants to be. The irony of him being a Reborn as a Grave Cleric stems from that he was killed by someone before his destined death and brought back by his deity with a lease of life for that remaining time as an agent to investigate specifically that kind of stuff and "help people on their way" who cheated death and lived longer than they were supposed to. And despite him being not nearly as edgy as this might sound, from the perspective of the undead and unnaturally immortal when they hear the sound of his cane thumbing against the ground as he draws near, it is the sound of death finally coming for them. His deity isn't even all that prominent in the setting, but at one point for example an ambush we set didn't work out, because the guy opening the door, a mountain of a man, saw my pale, haggard character in his cleric robes sitting at the other end of the room and his first reaction was pretty much
>Oh shit!
He got a ledger from his deity that allows him to check if someone was indeed living beyond their destined point of death after they are killed (yes, sometimes that is a bit inconvenient but adds fun ambiguity to it) and that guy was such a person.
>divine tactical strike incoming