Things that Irk Me about DnD (Somewhat long, kinda ranty)

[mikebr99]

Clerics don't bother me - they're holy crusaders, prepared for war.

Sounds like the Paladin's area of influence, no?

It's not like you're forced to wear heavy armor... you can make it that way if you want, but you can also go the dex+bracers+whatever route too.

Why? Why not just put all your abilities into WIS, and let your purchased stuff do all the rest?

They may be 'unbalanced', but in the ones I've seen that extra power gets spent on making other players do great things... supporting role, blah blah. If it weren't for their extra power, letting them shine occasionally on their own, nobody would ever play 'em. In my games in earlier editions they were almost always NPCs.

Respectfully, then your players didn't know what they had in their Clerics.

Clerics & Druids can be just about anything their party needs, just about at any time of the day, unlike the one trick ponies (warrior classes). YMMV


Mike

 

[Psion]

I don't really understand the Cleric class. How does killing goblins make you more pious? Why doesn't your God want to give you powerful spells from day 1, instead of waiting until you kill a whole bunch of monsters?

Nothing whatsoever. This depends on which xp rules you use, which is a function of gm choice, not class.

 

[WayneLigon]

Yeah, but why does one advance in Cleric levels by bashing in the skulls of goblins and ogres? If it's just a matter of faith, wouldn't it be better to sit in a monestary and contemplate the nature of god?

First, quantify 'faith', then come up with some hard and fast rules for it so there's no arguing about when someone goes up a level. A couple of systems have even tried this, but the rules for it were pretty dismal failures. Or, you can go the Ars Magica route (which actually has faith points) which is 'you gain in faith when you've convinced the GM you have'. See if that doesn't lead to some truly epic-level arguements when Player A's cleric is still 1rst when everyone else is ninth.

In other words, asking about 'why not make class X advance in this manner while this other class advances in a totally different manner' just invites complete chaos. I've never seen a system designed to do it that works at all correctly or equitably.

I've had GM's in the 1E days declare things like 'OK, mages get XP just for casting spells. That's what mages DO. Thieves get XP for finding traps and picking locks, clerics get XP for fighting undead and healing people, and fighters get XP for killing things'. Do you see how inequitable that is? And how everything depends on things out of the players control? That pretty much led to no-one playing a magic-user (which as it turns out later is pretty much what the GM wanted).

 

[WayneLigon]

As someone who has read for 25+years all I could about history,religion,science;I think from what I read that science/magic/religion was the same thing till the 18th century.elforcelf.

That whole 'magic not actually working in our world' kinda screwed us up that way.

"Wizards" in some myth and legend do get their power from various gods, correct? The Wizard in the movie "Conan the Barbarian" casts exactly one spell, by performing a long ritual calling upon either gods or demons. Thulsa Doom, on the other hand, seems to have his magic inherent in him, and can "cast" much more quickly.

They do indeed. The terms 'wizard' and 'priest' are usually interchangable in early fantasy, particularly in Conan. Until Moorcock it was very, very rare (I might go out on a limb and say 'nonexistant') for a wizard to be a hero of the story, so they kinda got shorted.

 

[Drow Jones]

The Arcane/Divine divide

I've never had a problem with this one. It's D&D magic, although I do use Rolemaster justifications for the three flavours of magic. (Essence/Channeling/Mentalism vs. Arcane/Divine/Psionic)

And so we have Wizards and Sorcerers barred from things (they aren’t allowed to truly heal at all), and they are rather weak in several areas (defense for instance).

IMHO, defensive spells compensate pretty well for their weaknesses, especially against melee and ranged attacks, but I agree that a cleric is better in defense overall.

In DnD rather than master mages, Wizards and Sorcerers are mainly magical artillery.

Sorcerers yes, but it's not as true for wizards.

The Cleric class: I dislike the Cleric class for three reasons. 1) its mildly unbalanced in its current form.

I agree.

Even with Domains, a Cleric is going to have a lot of extra baggage that isn’t going to fit very well with many deities. Just the spell list alone. Why would a god of slaugher grant healing spells? Why would a god of knowledge grant Righteous Might or Divine Power?

This is my pet peeve with clerics. The automatic knowledge of all spells is tedious for both DMs and players. A player has to read and memorise all cleric spells in PHB, and the DM has to plan with a character in mind, who has access to hordes of different spells which cover a great amount of challenges. Cleric's known spells per level is perhaps one of the very few things, which AD&D 2e handled better, eventhough the sphere system was not perfect either.

Magic Item Dependency

This one bothers me as well, because it's not as prevalent for each class. Clerics again do very well with a few magic items, where fighters need a large variey of different, often specific items for countering spellcaster tactics.

- DJ

 

[Vindicator]

Druids. Druids are underpowered, and gnerally even with their shapeshifting they arn't worth playing. They need something give them a bit of boost and need a few more decent spells to make them viable.

You really think so?? I've heard the opposite complaint far more frequently: that druids are now *over*powered, especially when they're shape-shifting into dire bears five times a day, etc.

 

[Vindicator]

As for clerics, I was always had the understanding that they represented the romantic vision of templars and hospitalers. They were made up of crusading knights who formed religious orders dedicated to protecting religious sites and pilgrims. They wear full-plate because they were primarily a melee class. They are opften described as "warrior monks", though, again, this is a romantic description. They aren't the priests who stay home and present mass.

This has long been a gripe of mine with the D&D view of clerics:

If the cleric is a crusading knight dedicated to protecting the righteous, what's a paladin?

 

[johnsemlak]

One thing about the arcane/divine split:

D&D is not only inspired by Fantasy Literature, but by real-world myths, especially Norse, Greek, and Egyptian.

I think the idea of 'pantheon' of dieties is imbedded in the D&D game, for better or for worse. However, giving the prominance of mythology in our culture it's an easy concept for people to imagine.

Given that, if you have gods who play a major role in your campaign, doesn't it make sense for those gods to have servants, and priests in particular?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I've had trouble with sorcs and wizards being wimpy - and by wimpy I mean they usually have weak defensive spells, or they have all-or-nothing spells (often overpowered, such as greater invisibility or campaign-killing).

I would love to see a scaling mage armor spell, for instance.

Clerics are kind of odd... I wouldn't be too upset if they lost armor proficiencies, but then you'd have to give them defensive spells to compensate. However, I do not want to go back to a "sphere" system - the spheres weren't balanced with each other (and they were bigger than domains, so any balance problems with them just got multiplied) and they made clerics too similar to each other, IMO.

Magic Item Dependency
I've got several problems with this.

For starters, the GM has to hand out massive treasure hoards. (Otherwise the players get weaker and end up dying.)

NPCs are weaker because they must have less treasure. (Otherwise the players get too much gear and power.) As a result, they're not worth their CR - which is annoying when the main villain of your campaign is a high-level fighter or cleric or something. Furthermore, fighter items are more powerful and more "required" than spellcaster items, so fighter NPCs suffer doubly (or triply) because of this - they end up with much lower damage, usually, than an equal level PC fighter.

Characters can't learn to dodge. (D20 Modern, Star Wars and some other D20 settings solved this problem with a class bonus to Defense. I vastly prefer this to using only magic items and Dex to boost your AC.)

No, really, I hate having to "get your +1 ring of protection by x level or your AC sucks" whatever other "required" items there are.

This makes it really hard to design NPCs, too, or players at a level higher than 3 or so. A D20 Modern NPC (even if played in a medieval setting) is a lot easier to design. He's got his sword, his armor, maybe his shield, and maybe a bow. That's it. He doesn't need his ring of proteciton because he was taught to parry and dodge. You don't have to sit down and figure out how much gear he should have and then spend the extras, and when you have cash left over you have to frantically spend cash to boost his Will saves or AC score or what not...

And last, but not least, I hate skill-boosting items (or items that replace skill checks). You have your own character abilities, so use them.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

This has long been a gripe of mine with the D&D view of clerics:

If the cleric is a crusading knight dedicated to protecting the righteous, what's a paladin?

Mikebr99 had the same issue. Two things about this:
1) The cleric predates the paladin. In the BD&D series (the one I started with), paladin appeared as a prestige class for fighters in the Companion set. For those who went from OD&D to AD&D, the cleric also appeared first. So if the cleric was originally designed as a crusader type, why not gripe about the paladin infringing on his turf?
2) In my opinion, the paladin is *not* the champion of a god or a servant of a church. He's the ultimate champion of Good, not of a god, and he is granted his abilities by the purity of his heart - no god can choose to take them away. Granted, I didn't always think of it this way, but it seems much better to me.
3) There is very little reason for the paladin to exist as a class. If you want to have paladins, they have to be something quite distinct from clerics or fighters (not merely a multiclass), unless you want to say the paladins are a particular order of clerics or fighters.