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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6090801" data-attributes="member: 6688937">That was certainly something I experienced during the "Skills and Powers" time of 2e. Three parties in a row with nothing but (mostly Elven) Speciality Clerics from an array of deities permitting "dipping" of other class abilities.What if those encounters were much more "horrific slogs" than they would have been if the cleric had been some other class? I guess what I'm feeling is that (under traditional D&D mindset) "healing" is a resource the cleric transfers to other players who, in turn, translate it into their own mechanical effectiveness. (This gives the cleric disproportionate utility to "mundane" party members, since healing doesn't replenish spells.) If this was all the cleric did, it would be easy: The cleric can heal one fighter's worth of HP/rest (about 5d8 + 5 every 4 levels, old-school)!* However, that's not all the cleric does. Especially after about 2.5e, the cleric is also a <s>second-string</s> fighter, but also a <s>second-string</s> wizard. So, in one way, the solutions could be simply to write encounters without much presumption of healing capacity, and drastically reduce clerical healing capacity (probably take it out of spells).[ranty]Is healing really such an immensely powerfully disinteresting but necessary force in the game that we need CoDzilla to bribe people into playing it? What makes it that way? What could we change about the game to make this less so? Why does the fraction of players who like to play old-school  clerics seem small compared to other classes? I think it goes beyond the mechanical balance of healing and into fundamental issues of character/player motivation. I suspect that its about feeling "in control" of your own character. "Being the healer" means your primary function is to be at the beck and call of the other characters, and you're the jerk if you aren't. Find a way beyond or around that, and you can make this balance issue go away.[/ranty]Frex, if I'm right about reducing the amount of healing, maybe a "Healer" specialty is the only place extraordinary healing is available (translate the spell names into feat names). In the basic game, that specialty is attached to the Cleric. In Standard and Advanced games, you can attach it to other classes. So a Warlord-lite might be a Fighter with the Healer specialty (with the true Warlord getting the action-boosty stuff). In this case the Cleric class would be the ready-made gish, and the cloistered cleric is just a re-fluffed Wizard with the Healing Specialty.    *When was the last time you saw a cleric with that sparse of a healing capacity?</blockquote>

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