Hot take: clerics in D&D 5e feel like the blandest superheroes. Without a clear relationship with a greater power or a faith, it’s easy for them to float in the narrative void like a cornucopia of bandaids. The solution lies in placing more expectations on them, constraining them, and giving them a deeper connection with the story’s world and whatever they serve.

Clerics should be expected to adhere to their god’s teachings and fulfill their god’s (or their faith’s) goals. That could mean pursuing god-given quests, it could mean upholding a set philosophy or creed. It certainly means not blatantly violating their god’s or creed’s rules.

What’s more, there should be consequences for acting against the preferences of whatever divinity you serve. Like a paladin with their oaths, a cleric who fails to uphold their god’s teachings or ceremonies ought to lose their powers. Those powers might fade slowly, there might be subtle warnings, or there might be dramatic signs of divine displeasure, but if your abilities are granted by a god then disobeying or disappointing your god should have consequences.

Regaining access to those powers might require atonement, or ritual purification, or taking actions that your god approves of. This process might even leave the cleric adventuring for some time without access to their divinely granted abilities. Stripping a PC of their powers isn’t something to surprise a player with, but storytellers can foreshadow those consequences, and gaming groups can talk about what transgressions (or pattern of transgressions) might lead to that sort of clerical crisis.

Finally, according to the 5e Player’s Handbook, clerics aren’t everyday priests. But that doesn’t mean that they should exist entirely separately from their fellow faithful. If your role as a cleric puts you in a position of authority within a faith, you might be expected to tend to the faith’s needs: leading services, performing rituals, making offerings, whatever is fitting for your faith. Unless clerics hide their god-gifted abilities, their fellow faithful no doubt have nearly as many expectations of clerics as their shared god does—if not more. The expectations of one’s fellow faithful might even vary significantly from place to place, making hugely different asks of a cleric as they travel on their adventures. Maybe that’s why so many holy figures have been hermits: there’s no other way to escape from all the claims on one’s time.

It’s easy to forget or ignore all the other, larger connections a cleric has, and all the larger demands that might be put on a cleric. These details can fall by the wayside on a grand heroic quest, where the PCs are traipsing about to rescue someone or lift a curse or save the world. But neglecting these details sucks the flavor from the narrative, and leaves characters less vibrant and interesting. Remembering these narrative ties, and holding clerics to the expectations of their deities, can create meaningful relationships for the PCs—with each other, with the cleric’s god, and with others in the story world.

If you play a cleric, or if there’s a cleric in your party, put time into understanding what the cleric’s god cares about. Consider how people might pray to that god, what they might do that they think makes the god happy (and whether it actually does), whether that god expects people to follow a moral code or whether specific actions are considered sacred, and what elements of the world fall into that god’s purview. Clerics can feel like more than a box of bandaids, and their relationship with their god is a great place to start.