In my game, there are seven elements. Time, Space, Light, Sound, Life, and Death. There are also mages that specify in a specific element (ie Chronomancers, Necromancers, etc.). This creates an interesting problem. Namely that, with mages of the element of Life, what would be the purpose of having priests? Keep in mind that any answer that involves the phrase "they can turn undead" will be answered with "why?" I never understood the logic of why a priest can turn undead.

EDIT: And besides, I've already decided that IF there are priest characters in this world, they will not be able to turn undead, but will instead have a power dependant on which deity they worship (this idea came before I played D&D 3rd edition, in case anyone wants to know)

Kilor Di wrote: ...what would be the purpose of having priests?

Um, why do you need priests? Is it going to be a D&D game?

You could just have "priest" or "cleric" or whatever as a title; that is, someone who specialises in Life is called a priest.

Time, Space, Light, Sound, Life, and Death....

what's the seventh?

Lxndr wrote: Time, Space, Light, Sound, Life, and Death....

what's the seventh?

Oh, ha ha. I MEANT to type six. I don't know why I typed seven.

And the reason why I might need priests is because that people believe they are one of the prime classes. A prime class is the class that every other class is derived from. For instance, barbarians and monks are variations of the fighter, ninjas are a combination of a fighter and a thief, etc. In every fantasy game, you always have the prime classes. The problem with this theory is that priests, which most everyone believes is a prime class, are a combination of fighters and wizards (they can use weapons and wear armor, but they can also cast spells). The only reason the priest is considered different is because they have their own types of spells (in most games) and the ability to turn undead (in most games).

I could take Life Mages and call them Priests, but I'd rather use real priests instead of mages called Priests. I think I'll just give them normal magic instead of creating "priest spells", and let the deities worry about which clerics learn what spells.

Kilor,

You talk about people believing in "prime classes" as though they had some necessary existence in all of fantasy. It's certainly not the case that all fantasy games have them. D&D did it, yes. A lot of people imitated it. Why should you? Just tradition? There's more than one way to do fantasy, and the D&D way has been done to death already.

Your current scheme seems eminantly workable to me, as is. You want people in charge of healing, etc. You've got 'em. If you want the game to have historical roots, and therefore have priests, others have made good suggestions. Another would be that while you have mages doing life and death, neither has anything to do with after life, which is a big part of religion. Anyway, why do priests have to be wielders of awesome power?

Jasper wrote: You talk about people believing in "prime classes" as though they had some necessary existence in all of fantasy. It's certainly not the case that all fantasy games have them. D&D did it, yes. A lot of people imitated it. Why should you? Just tradition? There's more than one way to do fantasy, and the D&D way has been done to death already.

Hello,

Let's back up a minute. If you're asking, "Why would there be priests" and not coming up with an answer, then you've already answered yourself. Just don't have priests. If there are NPC priests, then they're the same normal-guy schmoes that they are in the real world, no powerz or kewlness or player-character status at all.

It sounds to me as if you're working with the assumption that people want to see all the same options in your game as they see in D&D. I suggest that you can lose that assumption without any trouble at all.

Best,
Ron

I too recommend on shucking tradition. Don't do something just because "another game" has it. This just leads to incestuous traps. If something's cool, imitate it and give credit. But if your pulling an element from a game, and it doesn't fit, ditch it. Ditch it, ditch it, ditch it.

(I speak from experience. Embarassing experience.)

But if you're dead set on including "priests" in your game, I suggest doing some research. Look back to the original roles of priests in Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Babylon. Look at the roles of priests in ancient Egypt. Look at Persian priests, priests of Greek mystery cults. Look at Doaist monks, Confucianist scholars, Buddhists and Shintos. Look at imams and heirophants!

Then look back at your priests with fresh eyes. A first and foremost, a priest is a promolgator of religion. What are the religions? Why are there religions? What morals do these religions enforce?

A good overview of the role of priests and religion in society can be found in J Campbell's Primitive Mythology.

Good luck!
-L

Or, for a really radical idea, have *all* the magic-users be priests. Have them pull double-duty in your game: not only are they philosopher-scientist explorers of reality's secrets, they also administer to the unenlightened and use their wisdom to promote harmony to their community. Have magic-using be a sacred art and a high calling. Adds to the drama when magic-users collide.

I am going to pull some of what abzu said to take the point further. BEfore you can have priests and worshipers you have to have "gods" or spirituality in whatever form, in the first place.

I think its too easy to assume that IF gods exist then MANY gods exist and they are going to empower their adherents with a divine magic. This is not necassarily the case. Perhaps its a world of science? Maybe its a Deist world, where the Gods left and forgot to take their toys? Maybe all religion is bunk, hiding the use of forbidden magics behind false dogma.
Perhaps its like Stargate? Bow down to your Gof, Apophis!

When the create a prime class you continue a stereotype. That is not necassarily a bad thing but think: Are people who like playing Priests but hate being the "Medic" going to want to play your game if once again they get pigeonholed? I would submit that of all the classes from the "original" no single one continues to be more broken then the Cleric. No aspect of fantasy role playing is less understood then Religion.

As a final thing, what have many Gods anyway? Whats wrong with 1 God and some less powerful rebel spirits aka Judeo-Christian idea. OR Twist it, how about a nasty One God and nice guy fallen angels who want to protect humanity as opposed to seducing us all down the dark path?

As an aside I love Sppoky's idea too.

Sean

I would have thought 'Priest' fits best as a social class, like peasent, freeman, gentry, nobility. This harks to the medieval idea of three classes of people: those who work, those who pray, those who fight.

I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this.
Priests don't have to be a spellcasting class! There's no particular reason (other than your desires for your game world) that a person who leads the people in religion should necessarily be able to simply call on their God to work a little magic when the spirit drives them.
Supernatural abilites granted by the divine should be based on a character's relationship with their God, if there are any at all. If you're priest class is branded, it sounds like they're pretty tight, but Miracles might still be an extremeley rare occurence.
Gods and Goddesses of Earthly religions rarely involve themselves directly with humans. Sure, He might part the sea, but only when His chosen people are about to be attacked and slapped back in irons. Even the Greek Gods, who have so many stories of their involvement with the peoples of Earth only have stories which are way off from actual history of the period.

Well everyone is making a good point but Ron really kind of hits the nail on the head. Simply put, do not assume that because its tradition that its right for YOUR game.

My best example is sitting with a friend who was designing his game and he was complaining that d10 Initiative was not working well and he was trying to add MORE rules so that it would. So I asked him why he had to have a d10 for initiative.

"Because thats what everyone else uses." Everyone else in this case being AD&D 2nd Edition and Cyberpunk. The point is though that just because thats the way it HAS been done does not mean people won't buy into what your selling if its Different. In fact I would dare so people in gaming are craving Different, but I could be wrong.

Sean

I think Ron has it right, but Jack has it right, too: priests are mainly a social or cultural distinction and do not necessarily need to have seperate game mechanics. historically, priests didn't have their own spells; saints might be able to pray for miracles (which is a matter of straight bargaining or social interation with the divine) and scholarly priests might know "secular" magic, but there is no seperate kind of priestly magic. heck, the archetype of the robed wizard comes from medieval belief that priests and monks, literate in latin and greek, had access to ancient magical learning. making the two traditions seperate but equal is unnecessarily confusing.

that fantasy games traditionally have a priest class is simply not true. of the oldest fantasy games (D&D, The Fantasy Trip, Tunnels & Trolls, and Runequest,) only two had divine magic distinct from other magic, and only D&D had a distinct priest class. Runequest aimed at being classless, while both Tunnels & Trolls and The Fantasy Trip based their classes on the two extremes of magic and combat. TFT even had non-magical priests in competition with sorceror-priests and no divine intervention at all.

so really, you have to ask "what is my setting like?" if you think people want a priest class, but don't want gods (or want to limit divine intervention,) then make priests a purely social roll, like a skill, feat, or advantage... or allow mages to choose whether they believe their powers to be divinely inspired or scholastically acquired, with no game effect outside of roleplaying.

For another take, you could have all magic-using people be priests. I mean, when it comes right down to it, if you have active, interventionist gods, why not make "magic" really mean supernatural?

If you like the model of mages and priests, it seems to me that you want to think about some sort of rough historical baseline to use as a parallel, or alternatively a fictional one. Tolkien, you note, didn't bother with priests, but on the other hand his wizards were really angels in human-like flesh. D&D followed a semi-European model, such that priests whacked people with a mace because using a blade was impure because extra-bloody (not that hitting someone with a mace is not bloody, of course).

I think you want priests to do something that isn't covered by other classes, if you have classes; this is the Prime Class thing, where there's some major niche filled by each Prime Class, and minor sub-niches filled by sub-classes. In D&D, the biggies were healing and getting rid of the fundamentally impure, i.e. the undead. If your mages already cover this, you don't need priests.

If you want priests to mediate between gods and people, as Andrew suggested, then you have them in a fundamentally social role [see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy]. In that case, you need all the other characters to have a need for such mediation, and not just for magical/healing/undead sorts of purposes. For example, when bad things happen, can priests make them better simply by praying and generally interceding? To be very blunt, can they maybe change die rolls or their equivalents?

I say don't worry about originality, or being like other games, or whatever. Come up with an important social role for priests, such that they exist for a good reason internal to the game-world. Then see whether they also have a role in a PC party, or whether they will generally be NPCs. In other words, you need to know:

1. What do the PC's usually do? Remember, they're unusual.
2. What do priests usually do, if they're not PCs? Most won't be PCs.
3. If priests were to be PCs, would they still be necessary?

One possible place to start on the "what do priests do?" question is to think about the issue of purity. When someone is in a state of impurity, how does this negatively affect him or her in general? Is purity binary, i.e. is one pure or impure, or are there gradations? If someone is very pure indeed, does that translate into some sort of special power? Is this like tabu in the classic Polynesian sense, where the very pure is also the very dangerous to be around (kings can't be touched, for the same reason that corpses can't, because both are tabu -- kings to the good, corpses to the bad, but tabu either way)?

You might think about how what is pure is what is normal, in place, proper, accepted; then when things go haywire, they become impure. For example, it could be seen as normal for women to hunt and men to defend the hearth. If a man is forced to hunt, he becomes impure; if somebody attacks the home and a woman defends it, she becomes impure. So then priests are needed, because they have to do rituals to return everybody to a state of ordinary purity.

Anyway, that's an anthro sort of take on it, as a starting-point. Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger is one of the best and most readable books on the subject, and might be useful.

I don't know, but I think you need to think about the "normal" before you start thinking about the weird and extraordinary, i.e. what PCs do. Build a cohesive world first, with a believable ordinary life. Once you have that clear in your head, the rest will flow relatively naturally.

Chris Lehrich

talysman wrote: historically, priests didn't have their own spells

abzu wrote: A first and foremost, a priest is a promolgator of religion. What are the religions? Why are there religions? What morals do these religions enforce?

greyorm:

Precisely why I'd like to see the magic-users act as priests, for this setting or any other. In the old, old days, priests were the mediators between the tribe and the Big, Bad Outside World. Having the magic-using class and the priest class be one and the same just makes more sense to me for some reason. But then, I'm weird. ;-)

greyorm wrote:

talysman wrote: historically, priests didn't have their own spells

Everyone keeps saying this, and I keep beating my head against the desk.