Why are you not asking for Warriors to be able to sneak into people's tents and attack them?
I am not asking for anything. I put it in bold, so maybe you'll believe me this time. I wasn't around when priests first came out and I've never played one. I am merely curious about the reasoning for some of the gameplay mechanics. There is not an '...and so you should change it' attached. It's true that it's not what I would have thought of but so is half of BM and somehow we all get by.
I've never played an infiltrator but I don't see any particular reason to stop warriors from sneaking around and stabbing people. They'd probably just stink at it, like most medieval warriors would unless they had a lot of practice with skulduggery. They'd also stink at converting people, though that didn't stop them from trying.
On a purely theoretical level, you could make a case for removing class entirely: if somebody wants to priest-ify you, you're a priest. If you want to stab people in the dark, go for it. But I'm not a dev and I'm not interested in fighting that battle: I'm interested in how you came about to how and why things are they are, if you can process an academic question for its own sake that isn't serving some secret agenda. Hence the title of the thread as a question and my first post indicating ignorance as the source of my question.
Were there never Prince-Archbishops? Were they not essentially Dukes?
There were indeed, but in my hypothetical non-argument I'm trying to balance how things actually were with BM's religious system and gameplay requirements.
Basically, priesthood was a kind of backup career for nobles - it's one of the things you did if you weren't going to inherit a lot of land or money or else somebody wanted you out of the line of inheritance. But once you were in, there were huge power struggles and lots of land and money to be handed out, of which Prince-Bishops and particularly Prince-Archbishoprics were some of the nicest.
They were still not terribly common, though, so while you'd want to capture the possibility of a landed, fighting priest, you'd need to allow for the fact that this would be sort of the top of the priest game, not the everyday priest game.
I agree that restrictions wouldn't make much sense in theocracies, but then there weren't really any medieval theocratic 'realms' - just fiefs (like Prince-Bishoprics) other than the Vatican, which was still pretty big and could feasibly constitute a BM realm.
One of the big conflicts of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was the perception that it was completely obsessed with secular power and wealth and thus disconnected from the spiritual needs of, well, everybody. For many decades huge portions, an easy majority, didn't even bother to act otherwise. But wading directly into secular politics tended to spark a lot of the latent resentment about this, which is one reason that the Templars were ultimately rooted out and destroyed by the King of France and his Pocket Pope. So you had the Prince-Bishops with a fair amount of local influence but not usually far-reaching.
