Monday, December 15, 2008

Cleric Requirements

In 3.5 D&D there are multiple negative conditions such as negative levels, poisons, ability score damage, diseases, curses, and so on. One of the major problems is that to deal with these you need a cleric. This forces most serious parties to have a cleric. Those without will soon run into issues.

One thing they did in 4.0 was to remove this 'needed' class role. They did so in two main ways. The first was simply removing the vast majority of these conditions. Negative effects tend to go away with a save and healing powers just have a generic bonus to saves. Also these negative effects don't stay around between encounters because they moved towards the model of each encounter being an event instead of a set of encounters designed to wear you down. The other way they handled this was Rituals. Vital out of combat spells are no longer limited to a Wizard or Cleric. You need your Fighter to be able to teleport the party? No problem. A couple of feats and he can. So all of the special healing tasks can essentially be performed by anybody.

I am briefly going to describe how these things work in World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there are basically 5 types of debuffs: Curses, Poisons, Diseases, Magic, and Untyped. Untyped debuffs can not be removed by players but the other types can all be removed by various healing classes and one non-healing class. Each class can remove from 2 to 3 of these types with a single non healing class able to remove 1. I like this approach because it makes each class able to do a lot in terms of debuffs, but it leaves things that they can not do. But WoW benefits from the same model of encounter battles as 4.0 D&D. Effects do not persist between encounters.

So if you were a player, how would you handle the lack of a cleric. You would have to purchase magic items such as Wands of Cure Light Wounds and Lesser Restoration along with a couple scrolls in order to make up for the lack of cleric. This forces you to have these items readily available for sale which you might not really want for campaign feel.

So how could you change 3.5 to reduce the need for a cleric. You could add spells to the paladin, druid, and even wizard spell lists. You could allow negative effects to be treated with the Healing skill, although this kind of reduces the dire feeling of negative effects if they can be simply removed by non-magical means. Or you could add Rituals. Spells that people could get that removed negative effects, but that could only be used outside of combat and possibly required expensive materials. This would help you get by without a cleric, but it would also move 3.5 D&D away from an attrition model. But in my mind that is a good thing.