Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D is the titan from which the pantheon descended.

A Cleric of Hammers stands at their forge

“Please oh god of hammers. Grant me the power to smite thine foes with this hammer you have bestowed upon me the knowledge to create in my forge with my own hands and the fire from the materials I gathered and turned into this icon of your glorious divinity.”

A humanoid stands within the grove of a Fey Queen.

“Hey, umm, fey queen. How about you give me a little juice and I’ll get rid of all your enemies for you. Like be your personal assassin on the prime material plane. Sounds good. Deal.”

Gods and Patrons. That’s the jist but Ang and Jared get more into it along with the evolution of the concept through the years and editions of D&D, I know the show is called Thac0 with Advantage but it’s more like from Thac0 to Advantage D&D through the years some episodes.

Clerics were the 3rd class created for original D&D, after the Fighting Man and the Magic User. It arose from Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, created as a variation on a vampire hunter. Good old Gary Gygax decided to give the cleric class spells sometimes based on Biblical stories (sticks to snakes), an inability to use edged weapons from apocryphal stories about Odo of Bayeux (vai-You), and a focus on monotheistically following a specific deity, rather than pantheons, even in D&D settings with multiple gods. That seems to have drifted a bit from the Van Helsing archetype, but I’m sure Van Helsing wouldn’t have minded the ability to call down a flamestrike or two.