Balance Question - Cleric spontaneously cast domain Spells?

This may have been discussed before, but I was curious if anyone had tried making clerics less of a 'healing machine' and bring them closer to their relgion by changing the spontaneous casting of cure spells to being able to spontaneously casting their Domain Spells?

We have been discussing this within our group and I think for lower levels it will be fine, but I am trying to anticipate higher level impact.

Cheers

Darren

I'd be concerned about two things.

First: spontaneous healing was given to Clerics so they'd feel free to prepare non-Cure spells. If that's taken away, and if the Cleric is still the party's main source of healing magic (as opposed to a Wand of CLW), the Cleric's player may feel pressured to prepare Cure spells instead of spells they'd rather use. Of course, they could always convert their Cure spells to domain spells, but that might still leave the Cleric's player feeling a little boxed-in in at times.

Second: some domains include spells that aren't on the Cleric's spell list, and which are probably balanced for the Cleric by only being available to a Cleric once per day (so as not to step on arcanists' toes too badly). You'd probably want to check through the Cleric's domains to make sure that won't be an issue.

Personally, I'd rather leave spontaneous healing in place, and let the Cleric spend a turn attempt to convert a prepared spell to a domain spell. Maybe make that a Divine feat?

I believe there's also a variant rule that allows you to spontaneously cast your domain spells (in addition to cures as usual) at the expense of losing the extra domain specific slot.

I've been playing in a Shackled City campaign for a while now with this rule, and it hasn't changed the feel of a cleric much. The only change is our clerics typically have more offensive spells than normal and we rely on staves and wands more for healing now then we used to. All in all, I think this is a fine variant, and is more fun for our cleric players.

Edit: Forgot to mention, we dropped the ability for clerics to spontaneously cast cure spells. Instead of getting to cast one domain spell per level per day, the cleric gets one cure spell at each level. This seems to be enough healing for most situations, but then again we are only level 14, so I can't say for sure beyond that.

IMHO, the concern is treading too hard on the toes of the Sorcerer or Wizard. Given some Domain spell lists (Travel and Trickery, but also Fire at low levels), the Arcane caster may feel overshadowed by the guy in armor.

(So my solution was to re-write all the Domains to focus on Clerical and Druidic spells mostly, with a few Wizard spells where it was just impossible to find a good match on the C.o.D. lists. They're on my web site.)

Cheers, -- N

I posted a variant Cleric called the Champion a while back. Can't find it because I don't have the search function. Basically, it grants access to 4 Domains from a deity. Those are cast spontaneously. You still have the same number of spells per day that the Cleric does. When it comes to bonus spells for a high Wisdom, though, these may be cast spontaneously from the whole list. Ultimately, the Cleric is going to have the ability to pray to his god for something right when he needs it a few times per day, but he can already do his other stuff all of the time because that's his deity's focus. I also gave it the ability to use Domain abilities more often and changed a number of Domains. If my current character dies, I might use this class. I love spontaneous casters.

Maybe not what you're going for, but what we did in my group was allow the cleric to choose which domain spell to cast at the time of casting. IOW, he didn't have to memorize his domain spells, but he still had to use the domain spell slot at each level for a domain spell. (1st level slot, 2nd level slot, etc.)

A typical cleric will have only two domains, so there's not a lot of choice - but sometimes it's just enough to help, especially if one of the domain spells is something that's rarely used, but invaluable in specific circumstances.

This allowed a small amount of flexibility, without causing the problems others have mentioned.