How Common Are Clerics?

How common are clerics?

In AD&D and going forward the official literature seems to indicate that people are busting out with miracles left and right. Every village has a cure light wounds guy. Every city has a raise dead guy. And so forth.

The simulationist in me balks at this. The gamist balks too.

If you have a guy running around healing broken legs and so forth (or even curing diseases) then that’s going to change the demographics of a town. It also means that being irreligious or unobservant is kind of out. I mean, miracles left and right, right?

Same with clean water and safe food and a diminished fear of dark and frightful places fraught with disease and the restless dead. In other words, things are way less scary than maybe they should be. More folks would be adventurous and fewer would need to become adventurers. The world would be tame, which doesn’t fit with d&d at all.

Worldbuilding-wise it means that the assumptions of danger and fear of the unknown are diminished. It means fear of harm and death are diminished for the characters in their world.

And at the table, the same reduction in fear of harm means that the risk - that which creates meaningful drama - is also lessened. Less drama = less fun.

Therefore I have decided to make spell-using clerics rare and restrict them further than that, but also give common folks some pseudo-cleric power. Like so:

Not every religious figure can perform miracles (cast spells.) Just a very few special men and women can do it - people like Moses and Jesus and some of the prophets. In fact if you look at the early cleric spell list you will see an abundance of spells simulate miracles performed in the Bible. In fact clerics who can perform miracles might be outcasts, hermits, or otherwise viewed with suspicion. People may offer to pay them to teach the secrets of their tricks.

FURTHERMORE, and this is important, these clerics can’t just bust off miracles whenever they want to. On adventures they can. In dramatic situations they can. But they can’t just heal your broken leg in town or force you to tell the truth when haggling over the price of donuts. Miracles only happen when you really need them.

But on the upside, clerics of all kinds have a chance to diagnose monsters from their studies, knowing something useful about a strange beast on 3-6 on d6. Turning is also linear rather than with a 2d6 triangle-shaped probability distribution so it’s more likely they can turn higher-level bad guys.

For lay people, if they are Lawful and attend church, they can hold undead, demons and devils at bay with a holy symbol as a cleric of half their level. They can’t turn or destroy these entities but can hold them away indefinitely.

That’s how I do it. PC clerics are still powerful; churches function mostly as they do in real life; and commoners have a fighting chance against monsters as they come up.