Clerics: overpowered or overrated?

[AcidBlades]

Whenever I cleric, I just have most of those spells on scrolls. Those are in the level 1-2 area anyways. So are rarely that expensive.

At least the status removal ones.

[Username17]

I honestly don't know why Frank is being so obtuse.

The pathfinder spontaneous casters all get "bonus spells known" for various class features. If his problem is that the favored soul sucks compared to the cleric then I also agree, but again, I am not saying "make all the clerics play favored souls" I am saying make all the "memorization" casters use the equivalent "spontaneous" caster spells known/per day rules. The sorcerer and his spells known/spells per day list is not hard to understand.

Just imagine the cleric chassis only they were bound by the sorcerer spells known/spells per day charts. Then, give them bonus spells known to cover the mandatory status condition removal spells.

Yes, this does mean that there are spells on the Cleric list that are unlikely to EVER be chosen because they are to situational. That's fine, the sorcerer has that problem as well. It is handled simply, those spells become something you buy scrolls of in the event that you need them. This works better anyway because then the party has to spend real resources on getting these/managing these types of spells.

Again, the issue with casters who can memorize spells is that they are to flexible. This would address that.

My goodness you're an idiot. We already went over this.

The Cleric's spell list is full of niche spells. That's what the spell list is. And giving them a couple of bonus spells known is not going to address this. You're never going to choose find the path or legend lore if you have to choose it several adventures in advance.

And that's what the Sorcerer is. He's a caster who has to choose his spells when he levels up instead of when thee sun rises. And when you choose spells at that point, you never ever choose niche spells like attune form. The Cleric spell list just is full of shit like that. Thematically, that is what Clerics do.

You asked a question and you got an answer. Your idea is bad and does not address the real issues that Clerics have. The fact that you're still acting like we just don't "get" your bad idea means that you lack the ability to take criticism.

-Username17

[Smeelbo]

The more I think about it, the more I like the option I was offered for Rise of the Runelords described previously. I don't mind the Cleric spell list, but I hate the fiddliness of deciding in advance how many castings of each spell I will memorize. It's not so much the choosing of the spells, but the choosing of the duplicates.

The option of changing spells known each morning for spontaneous casting that day is a very manageable alternative. Combined with Scribe Scroll, and such a Cleric will have easy access to the niche spells they need, when they need them.

Smeelbo

[momothefiddler]

The Cleric's spell list is full of niche spells. That's what the spell list is. And giving them a couple of bonus spells known is not going to address this. You're never going to choose find the path or legend lore if you have to choose it several adventures in advance.

I either don't get Frank or Frank doesn't get souran or I don't get souran or-

Anyway. The idea is not "Clerics get 21 bonus spells known and we hope they make shit choices", it's "Clerics get however many spells know that they get to pick and they can do that well or poorly like a sorc. Also, because people are going to expect it of you, and having to spend your slots is bad enough without having to spend your spells known, all Clerics know Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, Heal, Raise Dead, Resurrection, Remove Disease, Remove Poison, Dispel Magic, Break Enchantment, Lesser Restoration, Restoration, Greater Restoration, Remove Fear, Remove Paralysis, Calm Emotions, Remove Curse, Remove Blindness/Deafness, Regenerate, and Atonement, too."

Obviously that's not a complete list. The idea is that Clerics get a list of shit niche stuff so that they can do the things expected of them, and then get to be spontaneous off it with some indeterminate number of spells known of their choice to be fun and useful.

[Prak]

So basically they cast like Spontaneous Casters, but some spells are automatically known. Like a Tome Jester. Sort of.

[Username17]

The Cleric's spell list is full of niche spells. That's what the spell list is. And giving them a couple of bonus spells known is not going to address this. You're never going to choose find the path or legend lore if you have to choose it several adventures in advance.

I either don't get Frank or Frank doesn't get souran or I don't get souran or-

Anyway. The idea is not "Clerics get 21 bonus spells known and we hope they make shit choices", it's "Clerics get however many spells know that they get to pick and they can do that well or poorly like a sorc. Also, because people are going to expect it of you, and having to spend your slots is bad enough without having to spend your spells known, all Clerics know Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds, Cure Critical Wounds, Heal, Raise Dead, Resurrection, Remove Disease, Remove Poison, Dispel Magic, Break Enchantment, Lesser Restoration, Restoration, Greater Restoration, Remove Fear, Remove Paralysis, Calm Emotions, Remove Curse, Remove Blindness/Deafness, Regenerate, and Atonement, too."

Obviously that's not a complete list. The idea is that Clerics get a list of shit niche stuff so that they can do the things expected of them, and then get to be spontaneous off it with some indeterminate number of spells known of their choice to be fun and useful.

You get souran and I get souran. His idea is simply not very complicated. The problem is that it is actually a pretty shitty idea.

The Cleric list is really, really big. And it's big because none of the spells in the Cleric list are particularly versatile. They are almost all niche spells. There is no "killer app" for Clerics like color spray or sleep. There are twenty five 1st level Cleric spells in the PHB (not even counting protection from chaos and protection from evil as being different spells - it's over thirty if you do), and they are all shit like hide from undead and comprehend languages. Seriously. All of them. And with very few exceptions the expansion spells continue that trend. No one is ever going to be happy preparing and then being stuck with air breathing, locate water, rigor mortis, or control sand two or three adventures ahead of time.

The entire model of "here's a core list of spells plus a small number of dumpster dived spells you get to choose" thing that Dread Necromancers got going is not going to fucking work for Clerics. Because all of the spells they are supposed to care about and use are weirdly specific.

If you want to make Clerics into some kind of Beguiler casting class, you first have to basically rewrite the entire Cleric spell list so it actually works when used in that fashion. Or reconcept the entire Beguiler casting system so that the various Cleric spells are in spell groups and then you select spell groups rather than individual bullshit spells like positive energy protection or mana flux.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

But of course, once you have that chassis and you start getting spells that are actually individually good at doing shit like wall of stone and wrack, then you're rolling in the moneys.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Is that a feature, not a bug?

Pretty much, yeah. Cleric spells are narrow in application but you do not have to fill all of your slots with prepared spells during your first prayer session of the day. You're supposed to be bugging your god for exact solutions fairly often.

[souran]

You get souran and I get souran. His idea is simply not very complicated. The problem is that it is actually a pretty shitty idea.

The Cleric list is really, really big. And it's big because none of the spells in the Cleric list are particularly versatile. They are almost all niche spells. There is no "killer app" for Clerics like color spray or sleep. There are twenty five 1st level Cleric spells in the PHB (not even counting protection from chaos and protection from evil as being different spells - it's over thirty if you do), and they are all shit like hide from undead and comprehend languages. Seriously. All of them. And with very few exceptions the expansion spells continue that trend. No one is ever going to be happy preparing and then being stuck with air breathing, locate water, rigor mortis, or control sand two or three adventures ahead of time.

The entire model of "here's a core list of spells plus a small number of dumpster dived spells you get to choose" thing that Dread Necromancers got going is not going to fucking work for Clerics. Because all of the spells they are supposed to care about and use are weirdly specific.

If you want to make Clerics into some kind of Beguiler casting class, you first have to basically rewrite the entire Cleric spell list so it actually works when used in that fashion. Or reconcept the entire Beguiler casting system so that the various Cleric spells are in spell groups and then you select spell groups rather than individual bullshit spells like positive energy protection or mana flux.

-Username17

I still don't see how this is any different than the sorcerer. The mage spell list contains plenty of spells that you also would only have in your spellbook because you know you can swap them out. A sorcerer deals with these by buying scrolls of spells he might need. A cleric could just do this.

Again, the problem is clear: the cleric is too good because he can swap his spells to anything printed ever every day. The solution seems equally clear: don't let the cleric fucking do that. Infact this issue is larger than the god damn cleric. All casters who can memorize are to versatile. So make them less so.

Also, the idea that the clerics spell list would need to be re-written because cleric spells are to narrow in use is outlandish to say the least. There are plenty of games whose entire magic system is more narrow than the basic divine spell list. There are 25 years of D&D videogames were clerics were limited to a tiny fraction of the current list with only the most "iconic" spells.

Its not like being forced onto the sorcerer spell system wouldn't still mean you couldn't do a cleric archer that was better than the fighter could ever be at archery. It would, however, mean that choosing to be the cleric archer would mean that you could not wake up the next morning and be a cleric necromancer. Nobody likes the nerfbat obviously but 3.x has a few things that clearly need it and the cleric is one of them.

[Kaelik]

Again, the problem is clear: the cleric is too good because he can swap his spells to anything printed ever every day.

That is so fucking clearly not the problem that I genuinely question what delusional universe you live in.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I don't think the problem is as clear as you are insisting it is. One thing to get through your head right away is that nobody likes sorcerers. Many players consider the way that class is set up to be taking the worst of both worlds--sorcerers can spam black tentacles and make people feel inadequate just fine but they're also more unforgiving to build than other casters and their limitations punish people for trying to branch out into group utility.

By contrast the cleric's ability to reconfigure with down time is powerful and all, but it's actually one of the cleric features I like best in D&D. It makes them a forgiving class for beginners without encouraging them to just wander around spamming killer apps--they are versatile with time but are not necessarily world beaters in their "I'm just walking around" setups. Basically, your proposed setup promises to let people keep most of the necro archer shtick at the expense of the stuff stereotypical grognard teammates actually like about clerics. It makes them less forgiving while only indirectly addressing splat book power creep.

[Ancient History]

The d20 Cleric is weird if, for no other reason, than the designers seem to have seized on it rather late in the game as a possible chassis for 4e...but then the whole psionic mantles thing and Binders turned out to be such a fucking disaster they gave it up.

Frank is right in that Clerics have a lot of niche spells, and the general consensus that Cleric spontaneous casting is their key design feature are right - but it's wrong to ignore the whole "pick two domain" elements of it, because as a limiter, that is where the late-edition d20 designers obviously wanted to go. Sure, there are umpteen feats and classes building off of turn/rebuke undead, and hundreds of spells, but there are also over a hundred published domains - often weird, overlapping concepts each with their own little list of spells and piddly-ass power...and that's sort of the image of clerics that the designers thought was good. They wanted PCs to be locked into one skillset/powerset, for most of the edition they were working strongly away from generic/universal classes or builds (which is, I think, one of the reason Fighters never got nice things).

[Covent]

What about an arcanist-like casting system, where a cleric prays for spells known once per day, but casts them spontaneously?

This may be an absolutely shit idea but I am just spit-balling here.

[Kaelik]

What about an arcanist-like casting system, where a cleric prays for spells known once per day, but casts them spontaneously?

This may be an absolutely shit idea but I am just spit-balling here.

I honestly have thought about doing Spirit Shaman type casting a lot, but I've never really come up with an implementation I like. I usually end up with substantially different kinds, ala Kaelik Wizard.

Although, now that I think about it Kaelik Cleric might be perfect. Or might be OP, can't tell yet.

[tussock]

for most of the edition they were working strongly away from generic/universal classes or builds

Maths, dude. Broadly-applicable things are fewer in number than more specific things. Your early books have to cover a lot of concept space in relatively small page space, so get a few broad generic options. If you want to keep writing material to cover that same concept space, it has to get more and more specific over time or you quickly run out of room.

So while they wrote lots of domains for Clerics, including various ways to get an extra domain for your current Cleric; they didn't have any real choice. Like the feats they kept writing, and the spells they kept writing. It's not that they "wanted" Clerics to be more specific, they just needed to fill more books, and more specific was all that was left.

[RadiantPhoenix]

reconcept the entire Beguiler casting system so that the various Cleric spells are in spell groups and then you select spell groups rather than individual bullshit spells like positive energy protection or mana flux.

That's what I assumed was being talked about by the end of page 1.

EDIT: So you'd basically have a bunch of spell lists kind of like how Wizards have schools, only there would probably be more of them and there might be some overlap. I now picture it as kind of like picking what colors to build your deck out of in Magic.

[Ancient History]

for most of the edition they were working strongly away from generic/universal classes or builds

Maths, dude. Broadly-applicable things are fewer in number than more specific things. Your early books have to cover a lot of concept space in relatively small page space, so get a few broad generic options. If you want to keep writing material to cover that same concept space, it has to get more and more specific over time or you quickly run out of room.

So while they wrote lots of domains for Clerics, including various ways to get an extra domain for your current Cleric; they didn't have any real choice. Like the feats they kept writing, and the spells they kept writing. It's not that they "wanted" Clerics to be more specific, they just needed to fill more books, and more specific was all that was left.

You're not reading me. It's not a case of going from more generic -> more specific as the edition goes on because you're running out of stuff to elaborate on, because you see the opposite of that in several cases - like that Wizard substitution level in the Planar Handbook where you can spontaneously swap out spells for summon monster, or the magic item property that lets you change what kind of weapon it is, or druids with that feat that gives them spontaneous summon nature's ally, etc. But those were the exception, not because the game was running out of generic options, but because the designers were deliberately moving toward more limited character concepts. Look at 4e wizards for fuck's sake, or Tome of Magic. They didn't want swiss army knives in D&D anymore, they wanted to squeeze players down into much more limited roles and concepts, much more like an MMO with your tanks, healers, and lancers.

[DrPraetor]

You certainly could compress the Cleric's abilities into a template-based thing, where you would pick a creature type or an energy type and you'd get some mix of template-generated spells to ward off, debilitate, and clean-up-after negative energy beings or aberrations or fire creatures or whatever. This would be some work but not a lot, and it might be a marginal improvement on the current setup. It could certainly make a Favored Soul type that was on the scale of the Tome classes, over the course of a campaign. Would it be enough of an improvement on 3.5 that I, personally, would give the requisite 25% of a fuck to encourage someone to play one? No.

You would lose a lot of character, unless you did a lot more work. Invisibility to undead (or whatever it's called that legislates around undead being able to see through illusions), is a good spell but Invisibility to demons would be unsatisfying. It would be a lot more work - because you'd have to think carefully about what different favored enemies religions should have and how they interact with other parties abilities and what's on the monster list et al. etc.

Furthermore, once it was all done, if someone sat down at the table and said "I just want to play a Cleric. Praise Pelor!", it wouldn't be worth fighting over.

[Username17]

If you were going to divvy up the Cleric list, you'd need to chunk it. Obviously no one is ever going to select locate water if they have to pick the spells one at a time, like how Sorcerers don't end up ever getting any use out of most of the "Sorcerer/Wizard" spell list. But if locate water was just "part of the package" when you got a bunch of spells of thematically similar but more general utility like create water, then you'd have it on some of the characters where it might actually do some good in that one adventure where you're wandering in a desert.

But now when you look at what those packages would actually have in them, it's really quite a lot of spells. If you're going to have tiny niche spells like Radiance, it's going to have to come bundled with a bunch of spells of more general utility like true seeing. And it's going to similarly have to have moderately normal, obscure, and niche spells at pretty much every level. And you're going to need several of these packages to make that actually work. The Healer shows us that even a fairly total package of "clean shit up" spells does not actually make a viable character. You're going to need things to do in combat, before combat, after combat, and all that. You're going to need to have enough of these packages that you can pull your damn weight in every adventure.

Do you see where this is going? This is going towards there being actually only a couple of viable collections of spell packages. This is going towards it actually being better to scrap this Cleric concept altogether and just make new classes with tighter focuses. The actual Cleric system works fine, but with the amount of expansion content it eventually became ridiculous. It would be better if there were several classes that each had smaller and better designed spell lists.

I still don't see how this is any different than the sorcerer. The mage spell list contains plenty of spells that you also would only have in your spellbook because you know you can swap them out.

Uh... that is why the Sorcerer is a terrible class. And beyond that, Sorcerers actually do have "killer apps" at every level, but Clerics don't.

So... Sorcerers are a badly designed class that can't interact with most of the game's content that is nominally "for them" and take an enormous amount of game mastery to play without sucking. And the Cleric list doesn't work the same way. So your goals are shit and you're also failing at implementing them.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Spell "packages" also run into the difficulty of being hard to expand easily - you can see this in the early clusterfuck that was the Wujen, where the addition of a new elemental spell was to the immediate detriment of the class. With clerics it's even worse - what if you have a spell that would conceptually fit into one of the domain/areas of focus, but came out after the domain itself was published? At best you're reduced to something like schools for Wizards, except multiplied by a factor of ten shitty little sub-schools for every little thing.

[OgreBattle]

TOME already has various spell spheres, that seems a good starting point for creating clerical domains.

There's a ton of bloat and fiddliness in spells though, at this point it seems easier to just use one's knowledge of D&Disms to create a list of useful spell effects and work it out from there.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I've gotten kicked out of more than one game because I played clerics who kept referring to themselves in-game as warriors. One time the GM gave the party fighter a +8 str item at level 4 because he didn't like that I was better at swordery than her. He specifically told me before the game that I specifically was not allowed anything outside of the PHB. It was kind of adorable, really.

Adoeable? Really? I'd love to hear those stories.

They're not exciting. Mostly people not believing what I say, then trying to sabotage what I was doing somehow. I briefly played with one GM that decided he was going to ass-pull rulings that made it so everything I did had the opposite effect. Mostly revolving around "If you hadn't done XXX, the super-powered NPC brigade would be saving you right now". I think it made him more angry that I started playing my character as Zapp Brannigan (i.e., being comically unaware of how inept he was). I was supposed to get assmad it seems.

I told my previous group that sometimes having a deceent will save is more important than dealing hundreds of points of damage a round and they looked at me like I just farted in church. Cue one of the players playing a druid with a huge flying mount in an adventure path with lots of underwater combat and tight tunnels... (I think it was backlash because I told him it was more effective to play a small race with a medium mount of some sort... He only saw the reduction in damage and didn't think being able to be useful more often was worth it. And that charging is very easy to prevent in Pathfinder)

[Eikre]

I'm super down with what Frank is saying about how the Cleric should be taken in the direction of an exclusively domain-derived spell list. I've held the same position for years. There are other benefits, beyond the balance angst; it smooths out a shitload of the option paralysis that comes with picking every single discreet spell every single day by collapsing the number of options into bundles. It moves a lot of the cleric's versatility out of the reactive, downtime, and precognizant applications which are only variably viable from table to table into being hot and ready for the adventuring action that actually comprises the most significant fraction of the game. And I think it does a lot to remodel the Cleric into actually resembling the character it's supposed to be; see, the priests of the soft-spoken lightning god, muscular but crippled forge god, purger-of-impurity fire god, illiterate cave-dwelling carnivore god, and inscrutable veiled stranger god all being 98% interchangeable and serving equally competently as healers, summoners, and zombie shepherds needs to end if anyone wants the powers derived from their divine connection to actually reflect a distinctive mythical identity.

The only other satisfactory way to make that last bit happen (and truthfully, probably the better option, of the two) would be to dissolve the Cleric class entirely and model all the priests as liturgically-minded Aristocrats and every serious religious exemplar as an anointed members of a thematically appropriate PC class. Jesters, paladins, druids, fire mages, dread necromancers, bards are all fine for messiahs and saints if you just say you owe it all to divine inspiration.

[Chamomile]

The only other satisfactory way to make that last bit happen (and truthfully, probably the better option, of the two) would be to dissolve the Cleric class entirely and model all the priests as liturgically-minded Aristocrats and every serious religious exemplar as an anointed members of a thematically appropriate PC class. Jesters, paladins, druids, fire mages, dread necromancers, bards are all fine for messiahs and saints if you just say you owe it all to divine inspiration.

Absolutely. The idea that all priests of every god are Clerics needs to die. While domain-based casting is definitely an improvement over the current option-paralyzed absurdly hyper-flexible class, having one class who needs to be everything from a fire mage to a necromancer to a beguiler really should be replaced by an understanding that the priests of the gods of fire, death, and love are just actual fire mages, necromancers, and beguilers.

[Eikre]

The idea that you're an otherwise worthless, boring, and impressionable individual and that your only saving grace is that someone more powerful and interesting than you took a personal interest isn't really a super concept, anyway. It's a fine for an NPC; you can keep the Adept class around and nail down their allegiances with a domain, like they get in Eberron. You should probably let everyone else have a domain, too, for the price of a feat; include free domain spellslots if they're not already a caster. Heroes get discreet boons from Minerva or Crom sometimes, it's just not their whole deal.