For thy sins, I cast thee out! [spell] [PEACH]

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Hmm. I'm not sure I like this. Excommunication really ought to be a total loss of divine class features, as happens to characters who violate their deity's requirements. Since such a violation is considered an atonable offence, excommunication should be as severe (if you consider it to be undoable, which is the historical political reality) or worse (if permanent, as I understand it was intended).

I think excommunication has potential as a spell, a kind of counterpart to atonement, but it really ought to be worse than this. This isn't 'you're out of the church', this is 'you're back to scrubbing boards with the novices'.

(And you get a will save! You don't have to much worry about the level if you make it such that it can only be cast on a character who's already lost divine abilities through misconduct, and perhaps only with divine assent. And with divine assent, that will save should be cut out. Unless, y'know, you're a god yourself.)

I get what you're saying, but this is a spell used by mortals to punish a character, not the god of the church casting the character out. If you are truly thrown out of the grace of your god, you get no save, you lose ALL your spells and powers - it says so in the PHB, page 33: "Ex-Clerics". The purpose of this spell is to have a mortal avenue for punishing within the church, rather than the absolute divine retribution of stripping all powers. Because the spell is mortal, it isn't as powerful as the divine punishment. Of course, an Excommunicated character may wish to convert to another faith after such a punishment...

MeklorIlavator - Conversion to another faith was something that I was thinking about last night - how does that normally work? Can Clerics and Paladins just switch deities with no penalty? That doesn't feel right.

Yes, a Blackguard can use their Paladin levels, but that is because "those who have tasted the light of goodness and justice and turned away make the foulest villains" and "Evil deities like nothing more than to see a good heart corrupted" (DMG pg 183).

From reading the PHB entry on Clerics and Atonement, it looks like a Cleric could decide to follow a new god of the same alignment (but different domains) without penalty - or indeed that they could reject gods altogether and follow their alignment without losing spells. Or do these decisions count as "violating the code of the deity"? In which case, the cleric loses ALL divine abilities until Atoned - but the wording of the Atonement spell appears to suggest it ought to be cast by the Cleric's superiors...

Can anyone point me at any other rules that have been written on the subject?