People who treat D&D's classes as like being in any way representative of fiction outside of D&D are my nemesis, I just saw a post that was like "remember the difference between a Sorcerer a Warlock and a Wizard is this" and treating like those words as if their very D&D specific meanings were like universally accepted I'm going to start taking hostages
"remember as we all know a Paladin is like this" Oh I'm sorry I didn't get the memo that Charlemagne's twelve peers could all use divine smite and divine sense and cast divine sense and summon magic horses. You piece of shit. Don't ever talk to me
"the difference between a Druid and a Cleric" You are nothing. Words mean things here in the real world.
The definitions aren't even consistent across different editions of Dungeons & Dragons. The earliest codified use of the term "sorcerer" in D&D had X-Men style mutant powers rather than being a wizard variant. Druids in 2nd Edition were a militant brotherhood who determined their internal rankings by having anime-style tournament arcs. The bard's first core-book appearance was as as a high-level prestige class for dual-class fighter/druids. If you wanted to be a wizard with a sword in BD&D you had to be an elf, because the race/class split didn't exist, and "elf" was the hybrid arcane caster class. "Warlock" has meant about four different things. If you're trying to universalise these definitions, you aren't just going to be wrong about fantasy fiction more generally, you're also going to be wrong about most iterations of D&D.
Hell, let's look at "wizard" specifically. Over the history of Dungeons & Dragons and its various first-party campaign settings, a "wizard" has variously been:
- A spellcaster whose power derives from a mystical attunement with one of the world's three moons, and whose strength waxes and wanes with their chosen moon's phases
- A spellcaster whose power derives from draining the life from nearby plants and animals each time they cast a spell, as part of a hilariously unsubtle environmentalist allegory which positions arcane magic as the equivalent of the oil industry
- A spellcaster whose power derives from a curse that's slowly warping their body and mind, and if they cast too many spells they'll turn into a werewolf or a Frankenstein monster or some shit
- A spellcaster whose power derives from a little elemental familiar; when they want to cast a spell, they need to send their little buddy to fetch the spell (spells are physical objects) from the Elemental Planes, and sometimes it comes back with the wrong spell
Again, this is all just from material the game's publisher has historically seen fit to put their official seal of approval on. The game doesn't even agree with itself about what a wizard is; that's not a great basis for a universal taxonomy!
Wait which setting is that third one from? I recognize Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Al-Qadim, but not that one.
Originally from Ravenloft, I believe.
(Confusingly, the 2.5E supplement Player's Option: Spells and Magic later renamed the Ravenloft wizard the "warlock", being one of the several different uses of that term I mentioned above.)
I had forgotten about the "Druids are in touch with nature so of course they fight over territory and have such a strict hierarchy that you can't level up past a certain point unless you go find another druid and beat them in ceremonial combat to take their place" thing!
The funny thing about the Druids' fighting each other to rise in their hierarchy thing: it's based on a real-world thing, but one that has nothing to do with Druids and that might actually have been a Roman fabrication.
The high priest of the cult of Diana at Lake Nemi, the Rex Nemorensis, was supposedly a position that could be usurped simply by killing the current high priest. I think Gygax may have gotten the idea from a book called The Golden Bough, a work of comparative mythology from the early 1900s, which proliferated that legend, and simply decided to apply it to Druids in D&D.
