Serving a god or oath seems inherently different than knowing about religion.
Seriously. How hard is this to comprehend? “Communing” with your magic sky daddy is “wisdom” and believing irrefutably that you are His will incarnate is totally “charisma”, but memorizing lore of multiple religions and the fiddly details of all manner of adjacent facts is completely “intelligence”-based. I mean, fucking duh.
Never met a religious person who didn’t know anything about their religion?
It was quite a cultural shock for me when I first met Americans vehemently claiming that Catholics aren’t Christians.
Tbf, Catholics used to say the same thing about Protestants.
I always interpreted it as knowledge of religion in general. You can be faithful to a god, but knowing what rites, edicts, ceremonies, rituals, holy texts, and even history of other religions is separate from that.
Like, if you are Catholic, does that mean you know all about other religions like Judaism or Islam?
Shit, tons of religious people don’t know much about their own religion.
Which is why they fail their religion checks when questioned. They are however good at passing deception checks
Yeah, like the proficiency represents training and study, but an Int (religion) check usually involves knowledge of deities, mythology or symbology. That said, you might rule that a practical application of that knowledge, such as how to perform ceremonial rites, might constitute a Wisdom or Charisma check instead.
If you’re a Catholic cleric you should. Comparative religion and the study of other faiths and faith traditions is essential to seminary studies as well as the practical education of the ordained.
What you’ve got here is the difference between an ethical person, a good leader/prophet/pastor, and a theologian/liturgist.
It mostly has to do with remebering things about your religion. Wisdom i can maybe see but charisma is defintely not - and the checks are the same across all classes too which is another important thing
Charisma is for making your own religion.
Religion checks are about recalling knowledge, which is intelligence. It’s already a severely neglected stat, it doesn’t need to be made worse for the sake of making clerics more SAD.
Well 5e is more or less a basic version of 3.5/d20 system, so there are lots of things that no longer make sense after you gut the rulebook. 3.5 had skill ranks. Clerics started with a bunch of ranks at 1st level and then would continue to buy ranks in religion every level, and would be much better at related knowledge checks than an unranked 18 Int wizard in no time. Knowledge skills relying on Int makes sense. Having a skill system that no longer takes into account character life choices and experiences, does not. I’d really like to see the solution to these problems be to add back rules rather than further dumb things down by making every class centred around a single stat. Despite its flaws, 3.5 had a lot that is sorely missed.
Intelligence checks are a measure of your knowledge retention about a topic. Worship in the face of a lack of understanding is literally part of Christianity.
It’s maybe a problem that everyone assumes fantasy religion should be based on modern Christianity…
IMO, religious checks should be inverse intelligence checks.
IE the higher your int, the more likely you suck at religion.
That’s not even true. Highly intelligent people may feel it’s all bullshit, but a lot of highly important scientists were clergy. Hell often tracking the stars, reading, writing, pharmacology, medicine, and math were the responsibilities of the priestly class in ancient religions. Modern genetics was discovered by a monk. The pope currently has astronomers.
It’s wisdom in the system I play.
In 5e, a religion check isn’t to see how well you commune with your God. It’s how well you know any given god’s traits, domain, followers, plane, etc.
Thats why we have society and lore skills.
