Why are clerics so heavily armored?

When I think "cleric", I think about monks from some abbey, preachers in robes. The pope. None of them are famous for wearing armor. Why are clerics so heavily armored, then? In fact, they are traditionally one of the most heavily armored classes in the game, in any edition.
What's the reason or tradition behind it? I really think that wearing plate while bringing DEUS VULT should be paladin's niche.

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>The pope. None of them are famous for wearing armor.

Wearing it has become impractical.
They ride in it.

Pic related. Also blunt weapon.


Warrior bishops have been a thing in Medieval Europe. Not the most common thing, but happened.

The Bishop of Notthingham.

No really. there's a very famous account of his participation in Crecy, in full armor standing besides the king. That and there was a somewhat 'traditional' thing in christian Denmark where the clerics, who could afford plate due to their lands Tithe, would serve their kings in full plate and horse like a knight, instead of just sending their levies.

The Cleric WAS the Paladin for an entire edition originally. Holy Avengers were Cleric weapons, which is why he could use it in that 1e-inspired Capcom beat 'em up game.

Because way back in early DnD the Cleric had lower spell levels than the Magic-User, but got better armor to compensate since they were supposed to get up on the front lines and heal the Fighting Man. But just healing was boring, so now they also get 9th level spells and better buffs.

A cleric without armor would just be a wizard with healing spells... which admittedly is fine, I sorta wish 5e had a class like that, but the point is that armor allows Clerics to dip into melee combat and survive well enough to do their healing job even on the front lines.

Favored soul, it's a Sorcerer alternate that uses the cleric spell list.

Sort of a left-over from the past. Originally, Clerics were just low-level spellcasters with healing stuff, to keep the Fighting Men going in the frontline. The armour was needed to survive that and compensate for rather shitty magic capabilities.
Everything else just grown on that, over time turning Clerics into probably the best class over all editions.

If it didn't impact your ability to do your job, wouldn't you be as heavily armored as you could be?

If you make a class that does JUST healing, and you don't do it juuuuust right (e.g. TF2 Medic), it can tend to get boring. So the Healer could also serve as a backup Fighting Man, so you could have something to do until your allies got beat up. Like a more comprehensive version of the Magic User's crossbow.

Speaking of crossbow - can someone fucking please explain it to me why magic users are equipped with pretty much obligatory pocket crossbow?!

Ranged option in case spells fail.

Because strength tends to be their dumpstat, and with a decent dexterity score the crossbow ends up being a reliable weapon that they can use while maintaining their distance.

First of all, ranged combat in D&D suck balls and sucks pretty hard
Second - crossbows? Really? What is this? "We would give you an emergency gun, but we can't"?
Third - why does D&D has such hard-on for separating martial and magic, which ended up with the shitfest of 3.X, where every non-magic user was just useless. Any half-decent system doesn't outright forbid this or that character from doing X, because some imaginery "balance".

>Be low level caster
>Burn through spellslots (before 5e and infinite scaling cantrips existed)
>Engaging in melee combat is suicide
>All other ranged options require physical stats

Favored souls gets a bunch of bonuses that make them want to fight in melee though.

I'm sorry, but I can't take you seriously.

You seem to have swallowed a few too many of the worst Veeky Forums memes, and now you can't separate fact from what idiots repeat.

Welcome to D&D, son, where arbitrary set of rules will fuck you right in the ass with gas pipe covered in razor wire.

>D&D sucking at ranged combat is a meme
>3.X making casters ungodly unbalanced is a meme
>D&D perpetuating shitty rules from 0D&D for "game balance" as part of tradition is a meme

Yeah, so many memes!

Shit fantasy writers made hand crossbows seem like medieval glocks.

The D&D apologists are out in force today, I'd just ignore him.

>D&D sucking at ranged combat is a meme

It is tho?

I can't think of a single D&D where ranged was objectively bad.

Even in 3.5 (before PF super buffed bows) it was adequate with a bit of twinking.

The rest are spot on.

You and your three shitposting friends have been shitposting all morning. Take your D&D hate somewhere else, instead of constantly trying to derail threads into your silly memes that are worthless to anyone who actually played the game, because they know you're just filled with shit.

It's pathetic.

>It's pathetic.

Don't you mean... petty?

Yes, it's also pretty petty.

D&D's community sure is toxic.

It's just this one guy. Otherwise 3.PF fags seem to stay inside their containment thread. The last time I saw any discussion outside it was when Spheres of Power came out, since it can be used in a lot more generic way than core PF classes (and honestly, it's not bad and does make the game more bearable by making casters somewhat more thematic ability-wise).

You two should just find a board where people don't discuss D&D already.

Have you tried a subreddit? You might stop getting triggered if you avoid going to a D&D board like Veeky Forums.

Backline WIS-based Life Cleric is fine, especially coupled with Sacred Flame. The numbers are decent and it's got an "either spend for X or get Y for free" playstyle that suits new players with previous vidya experience pretty well. When they want to move on to something a little more fine-tuned they will. Or not, a lot of people are getting really into it and Champion Fighter both because they like focusing more on RP than mechanics. Successes all around if you ask me.

Terrible players and easily triggered too.

>What's the reason or tradition behind it? I really think that wearing plate while bringing DEUS VULT should be paladin's niche.
If you track back to the early editions of the game, the Cleric drew heavily on the Crusading Orders - the Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic Knights, and their less famous brethren. The Paladin originally had very little to do with the church and was based on figures like Holger Carsen and Lancelot.

2E moved the Cleric into the "Priest" meta-class, and this paved the way to the Cleric being conceptually the local vicar while still having mechanics suitable to a crusader. The Paladin fell into the abandoned conceptual territory while retaining mechanics based on its old concept, and the ideal of the perfected knight no longer gets a core class.

Now get off my lawn.

That's not even really Plexiglas. It's just regular glass but it makes people feel more secure.

>blunt weapon
Get out of here Gygax! You're drunk! Also dead.

In the Medieval Times the Clergy often fought alongside the knights.

>If you track back to the early editions of the game, the Cleric drew heavily on the Crusading Orders - the Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic Knights, and their less famous brethren. The Paladin originally had very little to do with the church and was based on figures like Holger Carsen and Lancelot.
Well, you got it half right, so not too bad.

You are correct that the Clerics are based--directly--on the Templars. The Paladins are based on the Paladins, though--not the Arthurian heroes.

They would go in place of their knights? Thats pretty cool.

>The Paladins are based on the Paladins, though--not the Arthurian heroes.
If I'm not mistaken, that guy actually has it in reverse: the Arthurian heroes are based on the Paladin. The Matter of England is, as far as I know, the Matter of France but with blackjack and hookers, with such things as Arthur being depicted as a more ideal king than Charlemagne.

A crossbow can do decent damage with just a bit of investment in Dex, and given that casters pretty much only need one stat to be good at magic, it's not to hard to make Dex one of your higher stats.

Not optimal, but it'll work.

>why magic users are equipped with pretty much obligatory pocket crossbow?!

Because they haven't updated to 5e where they can do at-will blasts instead.

You are mistaken.

I want to type intelligently, but I can't seem to produce anything that isn't nerd-rage at wikipedia-levels of point-getting.

The arthurian romance is not based on Charlie-fucking-mang. Arthur was not more pious.

I blame JFK. It was possibly the greatest tragedy, in Western literature, that Fie on Goodness got excluded from that fucking movie.

>I want to type intelligently, but I can't seem to produce anything that isn't nerd-rage at wikipedia-levels of point-getting.
I'm unironically okay with that, bruh. It gives me some reading material.

>I blame JFK. It was possibly the greatest tragedy, in Western literature, that Fie on Goodness got excluded from that fucking movie.
...at the risk of sounding stupid and uncultured, u fookin' wot?

The Arthurian Romance got re-interpreted, by Tennyson, TH White and Mark Twain.

They were doing something poignant and funny. It was good. I mean, not Twain--fuck that guy. But White and Tennyson were doing something really excellent.

The Arthurian Romances are about the simple follies to which people succumb regardless of their birth-right. They're mostly about murdering, robbing and raping people. They then turned into this other thing, three hundred years later, when Frogs started using them to retell stories about Frogs. And then Broadway and the movie and JFK's Camelot, and that wonderful, amazing movie that played the irony too dramatic for it to be dead-pan, so you didn't even get that you were supposed to piss your fucking pants with laughter, during c'est moi.

AD&D bows w/ poison were low level mage killers, and were fantastic with more advanced poisons that did stat damage.

Especially if you had a Dex wizard with abjuration for dispelling magical protections.

WARNING: This is how you get your GM to start sending Lichs your way.

Drunk and angry. Here. This is the difference. This is Arthurian Romance, and why it has nothing to do with the Paladins, even though it was those stories:
youtube.com/watch?v=TdrEmZ35fxc

He's not invincible. He's "unwinceable." That is pure genius. He's not unbeatable. He's too-fucking-stupid to notice that you stabbed you. That's Arthurian Romance.

They would go along with their knights and levies, more like. But still, pretty badass considering they were excused from miltiary service themselves due to their religious position.

"My faith shields me, my Kevlar helps."
-Micheal Carpenter.