Everything you described is known as an aggressive act. We use those spells AGAINST someone. We know we are transgressing, like we do when we are doing violence, to serve a greater good. But we still know that this would normally be wrong.
But when you call it LOVE. That is what the problem is. that is where it becomes more complicated. By saying to can warp someone's mind so they just do what you want, but do it in the name of love. Force someone to have affections for you and it is the will of a being dedicated to love. That is where people are uncomfortable. Maybe it will end up being a case by case basis. But as it stands, I agree that it is creepy.
Clearly you don't see it that way.
Oh, and Love potions are magical roofies, everyone knows that. that's why in most fiction you see them used on a man for comedy and on a woman by a villain.
Don't be dense. The spell list is the spell list. Nobody ever said the Love cleric casting Charm Person to get a guard to look the other way while the party cleans up their multiple murder in a bandit warehouse is any different than a Tempest cleric doing the same thing. Or a bard. Or a wizard. Or anything else that has access to Charm Person, which is almost everything because it's one of the most common and widely available spells in D&D.
Any given cleric doing the work of a God/Goddess of Love is no different than a given cleric doing the work of a God/Goddess of Storms. The Tempest cleric doesn't create a giant fuggoff thunderstorm every time it invokes its deity's power. The Love cleric does not generate True Love every time it invokes its deity's power.
People are uncomfortable because they're dumb and their knees are jerking. Some self examination is required here if this is the first time it has occured to anyone who's been playing this game for longer than a month that "Hey...mind control magic is actually kinda super scary. Maybe we shouldn't be leaning so hard on it, if we can?"
Yes, we are saying that the Love cleric doing it is different. That is what we are saying. And doing the will of a Love God/Goddess IS different than doing the will of a God/Goddess of Storms, because of their inherently different natures. Please don't be obtuse on this.
Clearly you're right. Some self-examination is needed. I hope you do it and figure out why this makes people uncomfortable, and why you feel like blowing off other people presenting some legitimate concerns is okay.
Well, then I guess you don't get a new cleric domain. Because the Love cleric can take those spells even if they aren't its domain spells, and a Love cleric using magic to manipulate emotions is No-Go Territory. Literally anything else using the exact same magic to do the exact same stuff to the exact same targets is perfectly A-OK, no problems at all whatsoever, but the Love cleric doing it is Just Not PC, Maaaaan.
If that sort of ridiculously shallow knee-jerk #FeelsBadMan counts as "legitimate concerns", then there's no possible way for Wizards to release this class in any format that will not backlash. This is exactly the same poorly thought out idiocy that got Feast of Legends deep-sixed from CR. Couldn't do anything about that raging hypocrisy, but damned if I'm going to let this raging hypocrisy stand uncontested.
Okay so reading the conversation going on here i do get the problem people are having with the naming of the subclass and the spells they are given. I'd personally not be against trading the charming spells for protection, I really want to play this class and I'm honestly not a huge fan of charm spells. However the gods of DnD are analagus to ancient pantheons, where gods are often meddling bastards who don't always act in perfect ways. I think it's a totally normal thing for a god with power over love to grant some of that to their clerics so that they can influence the feelings of people in the aid of doing the gods will, that is what most modern depictions of cupid often do. Is it a good and moral thing to do? No, not really, even if done against really bad people. But the domains aren't all about being good and perfect clerics, light clerics get a literal nuke, even life clerics get bonus damage at level 8.
Do i sympathize with people who feel uncomfortable with some of the implications? yeah. Do i think it's a neccecarily bad way to portray a Love cleric? No, not really.
So, Yurei you feel it is your responsibility to tell people they are stupid for their opinion and desires for a game they play? I think you are taking this a bit to seriously or personally
LLHati, I edited this so you didn't think I was directing that at you.
One of the players at my table loves the idea of this subclass. It amuses her greatly and is something she wants to try sometime. Given her situation (skipping the particulars that aren't mine to tell, it's Not Great but also not directly related), I would like to see her smile more while having fun with a Love cleric.
I understand that some people are offput by the thematics behind this thing. Those people do not have to play it, and those tables do not have to deal with it. The Zoken stance of "this thing is evil, Wizards is evil for making it, anyone who likes it is evil for doing so, and it should be expunged from the game while everyone who didn't immediately hate it should feel awful about what they've done to their fellow player" is shallow, obnoxious, and deeply hypocritical.
You can play a Fiend-pact warlock in D&D who has, actually factually, sold their soul to D&D Satan for power. You don't see Christian players these days raising a hue and cry on social media over the inherent evilness of this. Not anymore, anyways - nowadays the Satanic Panic is a point of comedy rather than a point of concern, almost a badge of pride.
The average tenth-level PC in D&D has a body count somewhere in triple digits behind them. The number of tables where this matters and has any impact hovers somewhere well below ten percent. Hell, ******* Shadowrun pays more attention to this than D&D does - I picked up the latest Shadowrun book on a lark and one of the things it stresses to the GM is that killing people is still murder, murder gets investigated, and any runner team which starts accruing a grisly body count is going to start making a deeply troubling number of enemies. The book offers suggestions on how a GM can weave the consequences of this excessive blood thirst into a game, and remember - this is a game system where every PC is a professional criminal operating in the grey-and-black morality of one of the worst variations of cyberpunk dystopia.
Let's go one further - systemic genocidal-level racial purging and racism are codified into D&D. Goblins, orcs, kobolds, and many other sapient races are categorized as Clearly Always Evil, with absolutely no moral compunctions or complications appended onto massacring them in droves. Burning out a goblin village root and branch, down to the last pregnant woman and the last screaming toddler, is an afternoon's easy paid work for most adventuring bands. Kobolds lair deep underground behind multiple layers of defensive traps specifically because big scary surface-worlders will murder them in job lots and destroy their unborn young kinda just because. Again - at most tables this is just part of how the setting works, no issue at all. Goblins are Enemies, enemies are there to be killed, their precious lootz and Ex-Peez harvested for the betterment of Adventurer Kind.
This is all perfectly fine. Love clerics (and Love clerics only) manipulating emotions is not.
I just find it reprehensible that people are crying "Not PC! Not PC!" over this Love cleric when they give absolutely no shits whatsoever about anybody else's problems. Just this one tiny, narrow facet of the game that personally ruffles their personal feathers.
I called no one evil. And I have been very careful in my wording to avoid personal attacks, as that would be terrible of me to do. And I like all of the class features revolving around the bond. I want this released, but without the elements I find problematic. Just as you want some stuff released without the elements you dislike. You are very vocal when it comes to new UA content and not afraid to comment on features that you dislike. That is what I, and a lot of the people talking about this stuff are doing. We are expressing our opinions, and how we hope wizards will alter it. Further, your arguement is because we haven't gotten rid of the "Always Evil" races yet, we should start on this? I'm all for the settings that ignore such things, Like Eberron, where an Orc is more likely to be a Paladin than Barbarian. Or Exandria where we see an entire kingdom of Drow and Goblins and other "monsterous" races living fairly peacefully. Improvement should be the goal. Lack of it should not justify maintaining a lack of it.
No one has said "PC" or "Politically Correct" here but you. I dislike that term. It's a pejorative term for "manners" or "empathy to others". And you are also minimizing or obfuscating the issue. it is not love clerics messing with emotions that we are talking about. it is putting in a mechanics that reinforces the idea that you can just MAKE someone love you, no matter what you want.
It is entirely context. I do not hate the idea of Love cleric manipulating emotions, but when a main feature of theirs is "Magically make someone attracted to you and do whatever you say" that is a huge problem.
I do not have a problem with there being a love cleric. If anything, I welcome it. I really like their features, with the exception of getting Charm Person and ESPECIALLY Impulsive Infatuation. I do not have a problem with love cleric being able to cast Charm Person, I have a problem with it being one of the spells granted to them by nature of being a love cleric.
And Honestly? I am ok with there being charm person, that is a minor complaint for me (although it is related to my other, much more serious complaint). I can understand that a love cleric might be more charming than the average cleric.
The 2nd level feature of this cleric is... bad. You use magic to force feelings of infatuation to yourself on a creature, and utterly remove any form of option from that creature to do so. The other features are usually "enhance emotions! fight harder for love! Yeah, lets spread the love wooo!" this one is "I am going to force you to love me and either attack your friends or do nothing but admire me". This is a problem.
And yes, Yurei, genocide against races in D&D is a bad thing, and it is a good thing that it has been effectively removed from the game. I guarentee, however, that in no official adventure in this entire edition, have you been supposed to commit genocide against a race, especially the "Killing pregnant women and toddlers" picture that you paint. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is what villains do.
Just because whataboutism can be invoked does not make the point that having "Love" represented as "Forcing someone to love me and controlling them, remove their free will" is seriously problematic.
It's simply immensely frustrating to watch people carp so heavily on this - and absolutely doom the subclass, if you guys think Love cleric is coming back at this point after the social blowup you're nuts - when the exact same people give just absolutely no shits whatsoever about anybody else's problems. The answer has always been "if this is a problem at your table, solve it at your table".
I am not indifferent to the plight of abuse victims. Quite the opposite - I am a big fan of the RPG Consent Checklist and believe things like it to be an excellent tool for setting up a new campaign. Players and DMs alike should absolutely be wary and respectful of issues that deeply trouble the players at their table. However. I also don't believe anything positive ever comes from burying, banning, and ignoring those problems, which is what this all smacks of. "Make the bad optics go away so we can all go on pretending nothing is wrong!" is an awful stance to take, and I will not stand for it in D&D or in anywhere else.
Exandria came up, the new Wildemount book in particular and its emphasis on the conflict between the human-dominant Dwendalian Empire and the drow-dominant Kryn Dynasty. This is a fantastic book and a setting I'm deeply excited to play in some day, in part specifically because it tackles this issue of interspecies tension, cultural dissonance, and racism whilst removing the inherent righteousness from the human side.
Roleplaying games are one of the best ways out there for people to wrestle with ideas society frowns upon, experience and experiment with them, come to grips with them and form an opinion based on thought, consideration, and some degree of experience, not just first-off knee-jerk gut reaction. Everyone in the world could do with a bit more actual thought in their lives.
I agree, it is the burden of the individual at the table to play their character. Love Cleric's CD is problematic because of how deliberately it is made where you are FORCING people to fall in love with you. It does not go with anything else thematically in the subclass, with the exception of the Charm Person spell being there.
But of course, anybody who disagrees with you belongs to the same crowd, and can be put into the same box in every argument, therefore you can make whatever strawman you want to attack the people and pretend like you are fighting for justice. I am not trying to change this, I am trying to point this problem out so that it can be fixed. This is the literal reason that UA exists. Do you think I don't want this subclass to get printed? Do you think I don't want to help people with their problems?
All the mind-controlling, will-dominating, SOUL-STEALING magic out there in D&D...and it's the Love Cleric that gets everybody up in arms saying "hey, that's not okay!"?
Nah.
No.
I don't buy it.
Players have been using Charm Person to literally get away with murder for decades. Dominate spells have been forcing nameless mooks to turn their blades on their comrades, friends, and/or loved ones for the same decades. Half the extraplanar nasties in the Monster Manual have the ability to distort the will of anyone who misses their save; does no one else remember Caleb blowing up the Nein because a succubus told him to? This shit is not new.
If this sort of will-distorting magic was perfectly A-OK in your game before now, the Love Cleric does not suddenly make it worse. Put that shit away and get off the high horse. Come on. The game has a LITERAL LOVE POTION. See? This one > Philter of Love. "...you regard it as your true love while charmed..." No save, nada. Spot something you'd be willing to bonerize and you are in love with it for an hour. If that's perfectly fine, no trouble because it's a fantasy game and errybuddy knows where the boundaries are - or is willing to admit it and step back when they accidentally nudge up to or step over a boundary, like reasonable adults - then the Love Cleric isn't going to change that.
Let's maybe be a little less obtuse than the average sheeple and dial back the hypocrisy a bit, shall we?
Well fortunately for you, Bunsen, it's not going to be a problem anymore because the Love cleric's been scrapped. We won't be seeing this document again with a Love cleric in it, nor will Wizards nudge anywhere near that design space again. Problem banned. Not solved, just banned.
Allow me to faintly, futilely hope people will remember this whole ruckus the next time they make an illusionist or enchanter, or literally any form of bard.
We are thinking. The problem is that this class labels mental domination as "Love". That is some toxic shit we don't want to encourage, so we don't want to see it. It is a mechanic that states you can subvert someone's free will and it is being put into a class that is supposed to be about love. And given the channel divinity is written, specifically "can choose to fail this save" it is intended to be used on Player-Characters as well as NPC's. The kind of people who would do that are the kind who would try and roll to seduce another Player-Character. It encourages skeevy behavior. Not to mention being a love domain with always prepared mind-control spells means it encourages mind-controlling other beings to fall in love with you. We have a word for that in reality: ****. it has mechanics that encourage/normalize ****.
But because it came to you couched in what you've referred to as "PC". You've thrown a knee-jerk reaction to ignore problematic elements and defend it.
The main feature of the love domain is the bonds that let you empower your allies, that is a pretty awesome representation of the love domain They have one ability that lets them charm a creature, in the context of the ability it looks intended to be a combat power, so it lets you charm a creature already threatening your party. I mean what more appropriate weapon for a cleric of a love deity than to twist the aggression of a foe into an unwilling ally for a short time. Love domain clerics still live in a dangerous monster filled world too, it hardly denigrates the tenets of their religion and the majority of the work they do empowering bonds between people to use their power in such a way when lives are threatened. It's a darker use of their powers for sure but most of these love gods aren't complete hippie pacifists anyway.
I think the Impulsive Infatuation ability is a good reasonable control spell for such a class. They are unleashing the raw power of their charming, loving but awesome and overwhelming deity in a situation which is probably life or death. The enemy will of course fail before this power, and be unable to do anything but love the wielder of this power, completely enthralled by this physical manifestation of a philosophical concept torn from all context and boundaries. The more sensitive cleric may use this sparingly and perhaps seek some sort of atonement after for doing such a thing in a dark time. The more arrogant may revel in the power, whilst still easily understanding its a power to use only when life is threatened.
Well fortunately for you, Bunsen, it's not going to be a problem anymore because the Love cleric's been scrapped. We won't be seeing this document again with a Love cleric in it, nor will Wizards nudge anywhere near that design space again. Problem banned. Not solved, just banned.
Allow me to faintly, futilely hope people will remember this whole ruckus the next time they make an illusionist or enchanter, or literally any form of bard.
Was there a release from WoC regarding this? I hadn't heard. or are you speculating a future to match your argument and justify your reaction? We have all said we liked a lot of the Love Domain. We jut want WoC to go over it again and adjust it, removing a problem we find problematic. as I said earlier, you are very vocal about UA when it comes out. You passionately point out design you feels is bad. The Noble Genie Patron comes to mind as something you have ripped into. We are simply doing the same.
It doesn't really matter whether or not it makes sense anymore, Iwright. Sadly, the subclass is already sunk. Even if it's not pulled from the next UA doc completely, which I'm still strongly expecting, it'll never progress beyond that point. People'd rather ban it than wrestle with the issues it may highlight.
I've kinda given up on arguing the case as everybody's already dismissed me as a raving lunatic who hates fun, people, and life. The Bunsens and Zokens will have their victory over the Forces of Evil, and people like you and I who thought there was actually something kinda cool in this domain's primary bonding ability get to lose out. Sucks, but there's nothing we can really do about it at this point save keep the idea in mind for homebrew in the future.
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Everything you described is known as an aggressive act. We use those spells AGAINST someone. We know we are transgressing, like we do when we are doing violence, to serve a greater good. But we still know that this would normally be wrong.
But when you call it LOVE. That is what the problem is. that is where it becomes more complicated. By saying to can warp someone's mind so they just do what you want, but do it in the name of love. Force someone to have affections for you and it is the will of a being dedicated to love. That is where people are uncomfortable. Maybe it will end up being a case by case basis. But as it stands, I agree that it is creepy.
Clearly you don't see it that way.
Oh, and Love potions are magical roofies, everyone knows that. that's why in most fiction you see them used on a man for comedy and on a woman by a villain.
Don't be dense. The spell list is the spell list. Nobody ever said the Love cleric casting Charm Person to get a guard to look the other way while the party cleans up their multiple murder in a bandit warehouse is any different than a Tempest cleric doing the same thing. Or a bard. Or a wizard. Or anything else that has access to Charm Person, which is almost everything because it's one of the most common and widely available spells in D&D.
Any given cleric doing the work of a God/Goddess of Love is no different than a given cleric doing the work of a God/Goddess of Storms. The Tempest cleric doesn't create a giant fuggoff thunderstorm every time it invokes its deity's power. The Love cleric does not generate True Love every time it invokes its deity's power.
People are uncomfortable because they're dumb and their knees are jerking. Some self examination is required here if this is the first time it has occured to anyone who's been playing this game for longer than a month that "Hey...mind control magic is actually kinda super scary. Maybe we shouldn't be leaning so hard on it, if we can?"
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Yes, we are saying that the Love cleric doing it is different. That is what we are saying. And doing the will of a Love God/Goddess IS different than doing the will of a God/Goddess of Storms, because of their inherently different natures. Please don't be obtuse on this.
Clearly you're right. Some self-examination is needed. I hope you do it and figure out why this makes people uncomfortable, and why you feel like blowing off other people presenting some legitimate concerns is okay.
Context is definitely the key distinction here.
Well, then I guess you don't get a new cleric domain. Because the Love cleric can take those spells even if they aren't its domain spells, and a Love cleric using magic to manipulate emotions is No-Go Territory. Literally anything else using the exact same magic to do the exact same stuff to the exact same targets is perfectly A-OK, no problems at all whatsoever, but the Love cleric doing it is Just Not PC, Maaaaan.
If that sort of ridiculously shallow knee-jerk #FeelsBadMan counts as "legitimate concerns", then there's no possible way for Wizards to release this class in any format that will not backlash. This is exactly the same poorly thought out idiocy that got Feast of Legends deep-sixed from CR. Couldn't do anything about that raging hypocrisy, but damned if I'm going to let this raging hypocrisy stand uncontested.
Please do not contact or message me.
Okay so reading the conversation going on here i do get the problem people are having with the naming of the subclass and the spells they are given. I'd personally not be against trading the charming spells for protection, I really want to play this class and I'm honestly not a huge fan of charm spells. However the gods of DnD are analagus to ancient pantheons, where gods are often meddling bastards who don't always act in perfect ways. I think it's a totally normal thing for a god with power over love to grant some of that to their clerics so that they can influence the feelings of people in the aid of doing the gods will, that is what most modern depictions of cupid often do. Is it a good and moral thing to do? No, not really, even if done against really bad people. But the domains aren't all about being good and perfect clerics, light clerics get a literal nuke, even life clerics get bonus damage at level 8.
Do i sympathize with people who feel uncomfortable with some of the implications? yeah. Do i think it's a neccecarily bad way to portray a Love cleric? No, not really.
So, Yurei you feel it is your responsibility to tell people they are stupid for their opinion and desires for a game they play? I think you are taking this a bit to seriously or personally
LLHati, I edited this so you didn't think I was directing that at you.
@LLHati
One of the players at my table loves the idea of this subclass. It amuses her greatly and is something she wants to try sometime. Given her situation (skipping the particulars that aren't mine to tell, it's Not Great but also not directly related), I would like to see her smile more while having fun with a Love cleric.
I understand that some people are offput by the thematics behind this thing. Those people do not have to play it, and those tables do not have to deal with it. The Zoken stance of "this thing is evil, Wizards is evil for making it, anyone who likes it is evil for doing so, and it should be expunged from the game while everyone who didn't immediately hate it should feel awful about what they've done to their fellow player" is shallow, obnoxious, and deeply hypocritical.
You can play a Fiend-pact warlock in D&D who has, actually factually, sold their soul to D&D Satan for power. You don't see Christian players these days raising a hue and cry on social media over the inherent evilness of this. Not anymore, anyways - nowadays the Satanic Panic is a point of comedy rather than a point of concern, almost a badge of pride.
The average tenth-level PC in D&D has a body count somewhere in triple digits behind them. The number of tables where this matters and has any impact hovers somewhere well below ten percent. Hell, ******* Shadowrun pays more attention to this than D&D does - I picked up the latest Shadowrun book on a lark and one of the things it stresses to the GM is that killing people is still murder, murder gets investigated, and any runner team which starts accruing a grisly body count is going to start making a deeply troubling number of enemies. The book offers suggestions on how a GM can weave the consequences of this excessive blood thirst into a game, and remember - this is a game system where every PC is a professional criminal operating in the grey-and-black morality of one of the worst variations of cyberpunk dystopia.
Let's go one further - systemic genocidal-level racial purging and racism are codified into D&D. Goblins, orcs, kobolds, and many other sapient races are categorized as Clearly Always Evil, with absolutely no moral compunctions or complications appended onto massacring them in droves. Burning out a goblin village root and branch, down to the last pregnant woman and the last screaming toddler, is an afternoon's easy paid work for most adventuring bands. Kobolds lair deep underground behind multiple layers of defensive traps specifically because big scary surface-worlders will murder them in job lots and destroy their unborn young kinda just because. Again - at most tables this is just part of how the setting works, no issue at all. Goblins are Enemies, enemies are there to be killed, their precious lootz and Ex-Peez harvested for the betterment of Adventurer Kind.
This is all perfectly fine. Love clerics (and Love clerics only) manipulating emotions is not.
I just find it reprehensible that people are crying "Not PC! Not PC!" over this Love cleric when they give absolutely no shits whatsoever about anybody else's problems. Just this one tiny, narrow facet of the game that personally ruffles their personal feathers.
Please do not contact or message me.
I called no one evil. And I have been very careful in my wording to avoid personal attacks, as that would be terrible of me to do. And I like all of the class features revolving around the bond. I want this released, but without the elements I find problematic. Just as you want some stuff released without the elements you dislike. You are very vocal when it comes to new UA content and not afraid to comment on features that you dislike. That is what I, and a lot of the people talking about this stuff are doing. We are expressing our opinions, and how we hope wizards will alter it. Further, your arguement is because we haven't gotten rid of the "Always Evil" races yet, we should start on this? I'm all for the settings that ignore such things, Like Eberron, where an Orc is more likely to be a Paladin than Barbarian. Or Exandria where we see an entire kingdom of Drow and Goblins and other "monsterous" races living fairly peacefully. Improvement should be the goal. Lack of it should not justify maintaining a lack of it.
No one has said "PC" or "Politically Correct" here but you. I dislike that term. It's a pejorative term for "manners" or "empathy to others". And you are also minimizing or obfuscating the issue. it is not love clerics messing with emotions that we are talking about. it is putting in a mechanics that reinforces the idea that you can just MAKE someone love you, no matter what you want.
It is entirely context. I do not hate the idea of Love cleric manipulating emotions, but when a main feature of theirs is "Magically make someone attracted to you and do whatever you say" that is a huge problem.
I do not have a problem with there being a love cleric. If anything, I welcome it. I really like their features, with the exception of getting Charm Person and ESPECIALLY Impulsive Infatuation.
I do not have a problem with love cleric being able to cast Charm Person, I have a problem with it being one of the spells granted to them by nature of being a love cleric.
And Honestly? I am ok with there being charm person, that is a minor complaint for me (although it is related to my other, much more serious complaint). I can understand that a love cleric might be more charming than the average cleric.
The 2nd level feature of this cleric is... bad. You use magic to force feelings of infatuation to yourself on a creature, and utterly remove any form of option from that creature to do so. The other features are usually "enhance emotions! fight harder for love! Yeah, lets spread the love wooo!" this one is "I am going to force you to love me and either attack your friends or do nothing but admire me". This is a problem.
And yes, Yurei, genocide against races in D&D is a bad thing, and it is a good thing that it has been effectively removed from the game. I guarentee, however, that in no official adventure in this entire edition, have you been supposed to commit genocide against a race, especially the "Killing pregnant women and toddlers" picture that you paint. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is what villains do.
Just because whataboutism can be invoked does not make the point that having "Love" represented as "Forcing someone to love me and controlling them, remove their free will" is seriously problematic.
And yes, a devil is held to a lower moral standard than a cleric. I do not know why that surprises you.
*Sigh*
Okay.
It's simply immensely frustrating to watch people carp so heavily on this - and absolutely doom the subclass, if you guys think Love cleric is coming back at this point after the social blowup you're nuts - when the exact same people give just absolutely no shits whatsoever about anybody else's problems. The answer has always been "if this is a problem at your table, solve it at your table".
I am not indifferent to the plight of abuse victims. Quite the opposite - I am a big fan of the RPG Consent Checklist and believe things like it to be an excellent tool for setting up a new campaign. Players and DMs alike should absolutely be wary and respectful of issues that deeply trouble the players at their table. However. I also don't believe anything positive ever comes from burying, banning, and ignoring those problems, which is what this all smacks of. "Make the bad optics go away so we can all go on pretending nothing is wrong!" is an awful stance to take, and I will not stand for it in D&D or in anywhere else.
Exandria came up, the new Wildemount book in particular and its emphasis on the conflict between the human-dominant Dwendalian Empire and the drow-dominant Kryn Dynasty. This is a fantastic book and a setting I'm deeply excited to play in some day, in part specifically because it tackles this issue of interspecies tension, cultural dissonance, and racism whilst removing the inherent righteousness from the human side.
Roleplaying games are one of the best ways out there for people to wrestle with ideas society frowns upon, experience and experiment with them, come to grips with them and form an opinion based on thought, consideration, and some degree of experience, not just first-off knee-jerk gut reaction. Everyone in the world could do with a bit more actual thought in their lives.
Please do not contact or message me.
I agree, it is the burden of the individual at the table to play their character. Love Cleric's CD is problematic because of how deliberately it is made where you are FORCING people to fall in love with you. It does not go with anything else thematically in the subclass, with the exception of the Charm Person spell being there.
But of course, anybody who disagrees with you belongs to the same crowd, and can be put into the same box in every argument, therefore you can make whatever strawman you want to attack the people and pretend like you are fighting for justice. I am not trying to change this, I am trying to point this problem out so that it can be fixed. This is the literal reason that UA exists. Do you think I don't want this subclass to get printed? Do you think I don't want to help people with their problems?
Lol my thoughts exactly.
Well fortunately for you, Bunsen, it's not going to be a problem anymore because the Love cleric's been scrapped. We won't be seeing this document again with a Love cleric in it, nor will Wizards nudge anywhere near that design space again. Problem banned. Not solved, just banned.
Allow me to faintly, futilely hope people will remember this whole ruckus the next time they make an illusionist or enchanter, or literally any form of bard.
Please do not contact or message me.
We are thinking. The problem is that this class labels mental domination as "Love". That is some toxic shit we don't want to encourage, so we don't want to see it. It is a mechanic that states you can subvert someone's free will and it is being put into a class that is supposed to be about love. And given the channel divinity is written, specifically "can choose to fail this save" it is intended to be used on Player-Characters as well as NPC's. The kind of people who would do that are the kind who would try and roll to seduce another Player-Character. It encourages skeevy behavior. Not to mention being a love domain with always prepared mind-control spells means it encourages mind-controlling other beings to fall in love with you. We have a word for that in reality: ****. it has mechanics that encourage/normalize ****.
But because it came to you couched in what you've referred to as "PC". You've thrown a knee-jerk reaction to ignore problematic elements and defend it.
The main feature of the love domain is the bonds that let you empower your allies, that is a pretty awesome representation of the love domain They have one ability that lets them charm a creature, in the context of the ability it looks intended to be a combat power, so it lets you charm a creature already threatening your party. I mean what more appropriate weapon for a cleric of a love deity than to twist the aggression of a foe into an unwilling ally for a short time. Love domain clerics still live in a dangerous monster filled world too, it hardly denigrates the tenets of their religion and the majority of the work they do empowering bonds between people to use their power in such a way when lives are threatened. It's a darker use of their powers for sure but most of these love gods aren't complete hippie pacifists anyway.
I think the Impulsive Infatuation ability is a good reasonable control spell for such a class. They are unleashing the raw power of their charming, loving but awesome and overwhelming deity in a situation which is probably life or death. The enemy will of course fail before this power, and be unable to do anything but love the wielder of this power, completely enthralled by this physical manifestation of a philosophical concept torn from all context and boundaries. The more sensitive cleric may use this sparingly and perhaps seek some sort of atonement after for doing such a thing in a dark time. The more arrogant may revel in the power, whilst still easily understanding its a power to use only when life is threatened.
Was there a release from WoC regarding this? I hadn't heard. or are you speculating a future to match your argument and justify your reaction? We have all said we liked a lot of the Love Domain. We jut want WoC to go over it again and adjust it, removing a problem we find problematic. as I said earlier, you are very vocal about UA when it comes out. You passionately point out design you feels is bad. The Noble Genie Patron comes to mind as something you have ripped into. We are simply doing the same.
It doesn't really matter whether or not it makes sense anymore, Iwright. Sadly, the subclass is already sunk. Even if it's not pulled from the next UA doc completely, which I'm still strongly expecting, it'll never progress beyond that point. People'd rather ban it than wrestle with the issues it may highlight.
I've kinda given up on arguing the case as everybody's already dismissed me as a raving lunatic who hates fun, people, and life. The Bunsens and Zokens will have their victory over the Forces of Evil, and people like you and I who thought there was actually something kinda cool in this domain's primary bonding ability get to lose out. Sucks, but there's nothing we can really do about it at this point save keep the idea in mind for homebrew in the future.
Please do not contact or message me.