cleric spontaneous casting HR

I'll just paste this latest addition to my house rules document. I was trying to tone down the cleric a bit , as well as make domain choices matter a bit more ...

Spontaneous casting and domain spells: all Clerics cannot cast cure spells spontaneously. Only their Domain spells can be cast in this way. Clerics do not get bonus spell slots for their Domain spells. Also, there are now 0-level Domain spells ...

Comments? (Does it tone them down a little too much?)

Removing the domain slots does hurt clerics a good deal, especially at early levels, but I think a smart cleric could survive this change. A cleric who chooses his or her domains intelligently should be able to be just as powerful as before.

I still think this might underpower clerics just a bit, so you might want to throw some other benefit into the cleric class.

One VERY big probelm with clerics in earlier editions of D&D was that they HAD to load up on masses of healing spells to be any use, so they ended up being nothing but walking hospitals, and so boring to play. The reasonn for clerics being able to spontaneously cast healing spells is so that they can spend less of their spells memorizing healing, so that they can cast more spells from their domain spells and so be more 'flavourful'. If you change it so that they cannot spontaneously cast healing, they're right back where they started.

Two possible solutions that I can think of :
1) Make the change, but make natural healing a LOT faster, so that clerics don't have to load up on masses of healing.
2) Instead of making domain spells spontaneous, expand the domain lists (so that there are 2 or 3 spells at each level instead of 1) and give clerics 1-2 extra domain slots, but take away a similar number of ordinary slots.

Muchas gracias to both of you. That's an intriguing suggestion, IM-I'll work on that ... It fits in with another idea I'd been working on, to expand the domain lists & give the clerics a choice of more than two. With four domains, they'd get four domain spells to choose from for those extra slots ... and with three domains with two spells apiece, they'll have six! Then shift one more spell slot of each level into domain spells ... Could work, definitely.

Thanks again!

Infinite Monkey said:

One VERY big probelm with clerics in earlier editions of D&D was that they HAD to load up on masses of healing spells to be any use, so they ended up being nothing but walking hospitals, and so boring to play. The reasonn for clerics being able to spontaneously cast healing spells is so that they can spend less of their spells memorizing healing, so that they can cast more spells from their domain spells and so be more 'flavourful'. If you change it so that they cannot spontaneously cast healing, they're right back where they started.

Two possible solutions that I can think of :
1) Make the change, but make natural healing a LOT faster, so that clerics don't have to load up on masses of healing.
2) Instead of making domain spells spontaneous, expand the domain lists (so that there are 2 or 3 spells at each level instead of 1) and give clerics 1-2 extra domain slots, but take away a similar number of ordinary slots.

Click to expand...

That was only a problem for roll-players. I've not once encountered issue with a cleric who had a problem not being able to swap out healing. Most of the clerics in my campaigns would not even think of healing someone unless it was a dire emergency anyway. They don't abuse the gods-given power.

In contrast, I find that swapping out spells for domain spells really promotes sticking to the ideals and tenets of the cleric's faith.

I think if the whole healing thing becomes an issue, the player playing the cleric should refuse to cast cure spells on anyone for several adventures. When he begins casting them after that, his abilities will be much more appreciated.

And yes, I think it is a problem to remove the bonus spell. I always leave it. Makes it so that a cleric casting his full allotment of spells in the day, casts at least one or two spells related to his faith. If he never has a use for those spells, he's probably not sticking very close to his religion.

Christian said:

Muchas gracias to both of you. That's an intriguing suggestion, IM-I'll work on that ... It fits in with another idea I'd been working on, to expand the domain lists & give the clerics a choice of more than two. With four domains, they'd get four domain spells to choose from for those extra slots ... and with three domains with two spells apiece, they'll have six! Then shift one more spell slot of each level into domain spells ... Could work, definitely.

Thanks again!

Click to expand...

HAHA!!

I just posted this to another thread. My final solution is 4 domains, swappable, one bonus spell still, but only one domain granted power (for balance).

IMC, Clerics get:
- NO spontaneous cure spells
- ONE Domain at 1st level
- NO Heavy or Medium armor

BUT, they can spontaneously convert prepared spells to Domain spells, and they can take additional Domains as General Feats starting at 3rd level.

I've had to re-work Domain spells to account for their spontaneous status, removing a host of Sor/Wiz spells (which shouldn't have been there in the first place). Take a look here for my Spontaneous Domains:

http://klimt.cns.nyu.edu/~fishman/DnD/DHE/domains3.5.shtml

-- N

Ooo, another note: IMC, there are only six gods, so each god has more Domains than the Core D&D gods. All three good gods have the Healing Domain.

-- N

Christian said:

I'll just paste this latest addition to my house rules document. I was trying to tone down the cleric a bit , as well as make domain choices matter a bit more ...

Spontaneous casting and domain spells: all Clerics cannot cast cure spells spontaneously. Only their Domain spells can be cast in this way. Clerics do not get bonus spell slots for their Domain spells. Also, there are now 0-level Domain spells ...

Comments? (Does it tone them down a little too much?)

Click to expand...

IMHO it makes the clerics slightly better, not worse

It will always depend and the domain chosen of course, but having 2 spells per spell level which you can cast spontaneously is a very good advantage, even at the cost of one slot per spell level less and not spontaneously casting the healing spells. After a few levels, the bonus spells lost won't hurt that much.

A cleric with the Healing domain will be the clear favourite of any party and actually better that the core cleric spontaneous casting IMO. Almost every other domain has some winner spells that you'll always love having spontaneous, just check the lists and think about it!

We tried something similar, but found it was a bit too strong. The reason was simple: in the old rules, adding a new domain through Feat or Prestige Class wouldn't really help much. But with this change, it helps tremendously; if someone has four domains through PrCs, then they can be the equivalent of a Sorcerer who knows 5 spells at each spell level just by filling every level up with one spell... and they'll still have the higher HP, armor use, better saves, better BAB, and so on.
I'm not saying extra Domains are commonplace. But, it's just an example of how something that was relatively harmless under the old rules suddenly becomes unbalanced.

So, the way we did it was this:

Just like before, at each spell level you get one Domain Slot. Each day, you can pick any Domain spell to put in that slot; it can be a metamagicked version of a lower-level Domain spell if you want, but the metamagic is applied BEFORE memorization.
But, that's not a slot you cast out of; the spell in that slot is the spell you swap for. So, if you want to trade out a 5th-level spell, you HAVE to trade it for whatever spell you put into the level 5 Domain slot for that day. No metamagic can be applied at this point.
Basically, you still have STRATEGIC flexibility, in that you can change which spell you trade for. But, tactically, you aren't really approaching spontaneous-caster flexibility, any more than a current Cleric is.

We also added a couple other minor rules:
> Domain spells can violate alignment limitations. So, if you're a Good cleric whose neutral god includes the Evil domain, you can still swap for those spells.
IMC, we also said that all negative-energy spells (Inflict, Harm) are Evil and all positive-energy ones (Cure, Heal) are Good, so this allows evil Clerics to heal.
As a flavor addition, we have counter-alignment domain spells act a bit more... conspicuously, to make it clear this is normally not allowed. Evil healing spells leave scars, and so on. Nothing that affects game mechanics, though.
> There's a feat, "Domain Preparation", that allows you to memorize domain spells into normal spell slots at one spell level higher (a second feat, "Advanced Domain Preparation", drops it to equal level). But, these spells are still alignment-limited.
> Also, add a feat to allow metamagics to be applied to the spontaneous spells.
> Most gods have 1-2 more domains than they used to; Healing has become a bit more widespread, for instance. Also, we reworked Paladins to use a Domain-like system instead of the hard-coded disease powers, so there's a couple new domains for mimicking the old Paladin and Blackguard class abilities.

Anyway, it worked just fine. Clerics' domains were new really important; if someone said they were a Fire Cleric, chances are they'd be throwing lots of fire spells around. But, this wouldn't automatically make Sorcerers or Wizards worthless.