ayyy thanks nonnie!! as established i really love clerics so allow me to pile some peer pressure on top of your decision pile!! go be a cleric!! (if the playstyle appeals to you etc)

it sounds like you're talking about pen-and-paper dnd, yeah? (you might be my earlier anon??) disclaimer that i'm not a 5e lore expert, but one difference ime from the bg3 experience is that bg3 is coming to you as a pre-written narrative with its own themes (such as humanoid choice in the face of manipulation, which extends to gods).

5e lore, on the other hand, is written as a bunch of open-ended hooks you/your dm can choose to engage with or not. also most gods in 5e don't have a ton of complex canon lore about being secretly evil or selfish--it's kind of bluntly "good god" "evil god" "neutral god" etc to leave you room to play and worldbuild. (other than uhhh i guess being complicit in the wall of the faithless 😬 which is dubiously canonical now anyway.) like, a god like eilistraee is going to be very easy to imagine a positive relationship with for a good-aligned cleric if that's what you're looking for. and even a god like mystra who comes off pretty bad in bg3, is like...relatively fine in canon 5e lore. i think of bg3 almost like someone's fleshed-out tabletop game where the dm has made characterization and world decisions to flesh out the lore

plus the gods do have personalities, greek god-style, which means that your cleric might, idk, overarchingly agree with their own god's goals but find bits of their dogma annoying or wrong, or otherwise relate to them with a bit of conflict (for spice!) without necessarily feeling used/betrayed. this lends itself to storytelling where a cleric might find themselves challenged by what they find on the road: the gods aren't perfect, just like, idk, your friend the wizard in your party isn't perfect

(ALSO like. if you're not married to the idea of playing an unambiguously good-aligned cleric, there's nothing stopping you from playing a character who unabashedly loves their awful god lmao. or like, a lawful neutral god like kelemvor--you could create a cleric who is so so into that very specific, harsh-but-fair moral code)

(the fic, for reference)

hi yes hello!! i'm so glad you liked the fic, first of all, i had never written anything quite like it (essentially canon/oc fic. video game fandom is weird. i love it)

secondly i am so glad you've given me an excuse to talk about this!!! i love playing clerics for a few reasons. in order of simplest to most complicated:

1). on a purely mechanical level i love their versatility; that you can both deal heavy damage and protect your friends. i think the existence of Healing Word makes clerics 100x more fun than they would be otherwise, because then you can both attack and heal in the same turn. i am someone who LIKES feeling that responsibility for the party each turn, and feeling like each choice involves sacrifice: thinking through who can make it through the next turn without healing vs. needing it now, whether to remove a status effect (using a full action) or let it wear out, etc. you do get the fun of essentially fireballing your enemies while also doing powerful utility stuff (that plants the seeds for interesting character relationships too imo)

2). god the roleplay potential??? it's so good??? you have a very strong "type" you're playing against: the stereotype of a "person of the cloth" existing makes it twice as fun to be, like, a little nihilistic or a little sexy or a little angry, but always always driven by that core of Belief inside of you. all the better if the belief system doesn't naturally fit with the character's personality, and you have to reconcile those things. it builds someone complex

also like. roleplaying a cleric (or a paladin) is marinating yourself in the midpoint between human fallibility and divine "infallibility," wherein actually sometimes it's the human fallibility that needs to win out over the inflexibility of dogma. it's a bit warlock-y in that you are making decisions both for what the character wants to do and what they feel they MUST do per the voice in their head. but it's still flavored differently because, in theory, the cleric has opted into this for moral/belief reasons! and those reasons get to be challenged or reinforced through the campaign

3). world building! you get to parse out how a belief system works in the day-to-day. rn i have two clerics who are driven by a belief in how they need to ethically act in the world (lash as well as duna, an ornery old lady grave cleric--spoiler, they have very different definitions of "ethical") but also an alien cleric in a homebrew campaign whose gods actually dont give a shit about how he interacts with outsiders because that pantheon’s entire existence is built around protecting and saving one specific alien species. the decisions that cleric makes are going to be extremely different than the first two, but i'm always going to be thinking about how those belief systems affect his actions, and when he pushes back (and how much he is ALLOWED to push back).

ngl the psychological element is twice as interesting to me as someone who grew up in a religious environment. what do i appreciate about that kind of person that could be amplified? what Makes Everything Worse?