Completionism: Or how 5e's release schedule saved my life

I'm something of an obsessive-compulsive when it comes to D&D-- I want the game to feel complete, like nothing is missing or unaccounted for, like it's all thought through.

Sometimes this works for me. Sometimes it compels me to pull at threads and I get a fun, insightful article that gives me (and hopefully you) a greater appreciation for the game, or an interesting new way of handling things. Other times it just causes a lot of trouble and stress for me as suddenly it occurs to me that I overlooked something, and now its absence gnaws at me and leaves me dissatisfied.

This, as a matter of fact, is why I haven't really followed the OSR too closely since my big hiatus. I spent long nights cribbing from every blog post, retroclone, zine, and supplement out there-- and occasionally from the WOTC editions that formed the bulk of my background-- until I lost sight of the simplicity and fun of the game and developed a veritable Frankenstein's monster of house rules, custom classes, and edge cases, every bit as bulky and inaccessible as late-period 3.5 or tax law.

Enter 5th edition. A new D&D, compatible enough to be familiar, or even to reuse old material when necessary, but different enough from TSR!D&D to not allow for direct porting, containing very nearly everything I expect D&D to include in its toolkit, it gave me an opportunity to cast off all the cruft I let myself accumulate-- the cruft I would have had to make a significant effort to stop myself accumulating. It was a breath of fresh air.

There was, during the fall, an expectation that this Elemental Evil/Princes of the Apocalypse campaign they're now preparing to launch would include a supplement, an "Adventurer's Handbook." Whether this was the actual plan and they changed their minds or the whole thing was just misguided speculation isn't for me to know, but either way there's no Adventuer's Handbook planned, either for Elemental Evil or for any future offerings, and there never will be. For the foreseeable future, 5e is just those three books.

Of course there will in all likelihood be new options for Elemental Evil, in all likelihood released through the web (and the monthly Unearthed Arcana column as well, of course.) But the ethos of 5e has so far been very-core focused, so I expect they will not be too many or too sweeping and I also expect they will be treated in a more optional fashion than supplemental rules have been in the past. As such I do not feel the same pressure to keep up with them as I did when I played 3.x and 4e. And furthermore since I feel like I don't have anything vital to my conception of D&D missing, only things I might like, I don't feel the same pressure to incorporate additional options that fell outside of the traditional OSR purview that I felt from about 2011 onwards.

For the first time in a long time, I don't feel like I'm having to extensively kitbash or run the Red Queen's race to get the game I need. Instead, I have everything I need and am being presented with an occasional spate of extras if the mood should strike me.

Now if only I can start feeling ready to accept a little vagueness when I'm worldbuilding...

Killing the Cleric (Probably Not The last Cleric post after all)

Well, I arrived at that decision surprisingly quickly. And it was like a weight off my shoulders when I did.

As you know, or at least can see from five minutes in my archives, I've thrown away days of my life researching and trying to come up with a religious framework that is not Crystal Dragon Jesus, but adequately leaves room for the spells and class features typical of the cleric, which is loaded down with a lot of implicitly-middle-class-American-Christian ideas about both gods and holy men. Some may enjoy that, and far be it from me to condemn them, but for me it always seemed a little... intellectually lazy. So I had some cognitive dissonance to work through.

It has been less of a challenge and more of a vexation, frankly.

So, I got to thinking, something has to give, either I have to learn to stop worrying and love Crystal Dragon Jesus, or I need to stop trying to fit his vaguely-cross-shaped peg into my round fantasy hole. Apart from which, I think it's just not terribly compatible with my largely non-theistic (though not atheistic) take on the world... not to sound hidebound of course, but I just do not give a damn about the existence or worship of gods one way or another, and there's nothing worse for a story than not giving a damn about its subject material.

There is something that does come a little more naturally to me though, in terms of the human relationship with forces that are, by and large, beyond it: the sort of "virtuous pagan" attitude that seems to come standard for the good guys in Tolkien. Of course I come to it for different reasons-- him writing an intentionally Catholic work, and me, as I said, just plain not being arsed about gods in the first place. But that same sort of attitude-- reverence toward nature/the universe, song, belief in good and courage and stuff... that I can write for. Now, a druid (in the fantasy sense of the term, at least) or a witch, I think, can reconcile easily with that worldview, but not so much a cleric.

I think, despite my initial reservations, that just passing most of the spells that aren't already duplicated over to the Magic-User is probably a good start. Particularly if I just go with Wound Points and Vitality Points-- I think VP/WP reduces some of the burden on spellcasters to always have healing prepped (especially if healing only works on WP) because VP regenerates comparatively quickly.

The big mechanical problem I found myself stuck on, then, was what to do about the other vital function of clerics, the one which Mike Mornard and his friends originally demanded the creation of the Cleric for: Turn Undead. I've seen some retroclones make it a spell as well (usually a 2nd level one), but I wasn't sure if that was the best option. But I was concerned both from a gameplay perspective (that making it a spell might make it too scarce comparatively, making undead particularly nasty and killer opponents), and a thematic perspective (just what is the spell doing?).

To be honest I sort of always thought of it being like the "True faith" feat or advantage in many other RPGs... which... honestly doesn't make much sense given that paladins tend to be both more zealous in general and less effective at turning. Of course there's the 3.5 answer: that it's somehow channeling a positive energy that's anathema to undead... but the check for it is weird, in that case, isn't it?

But then... the fact that Energy Drain is one of those other things that just bugs me means undead lose a bit of their teeth in the first place, maybe I don't need Turn Undead so badly. So that was it. Kill the Cleric, pass on its spells to the Magic-User. My life is simpler now.

Of course this doesn't mean there isn't religion, but ditching the character class explicitly focused upon it means there's less of an obligation on my part to try to force together something that isn't crypto-Christian but where there's still somehow a militant order of priests that use maces and wear armor and heal and part the ocean and scare the undead and stuff. If I need priests or a temple for a story, or even if I have a player who wants a religiously-inclined character, I can make up something that works for the scenario I want to provide or the story they want to tell. And that's... extremely liberating.