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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 6091948" data-attributes="member: 6688858">Doesn't bother me much -- I think of hp as the capacity to continue fighting (at full strength) while more and more beat up, so it takes a highly skilled fighter longer to get back to full strength than a weak one.It's the same thing with sports, a championship boxer/mma fighter has to rest for months between fights, while children can get into a fight and then are fine the next day. The rule of thumb for race running is to rest for 1 day per mile in length the race was. I couldn't complete a marathon to begin with, so I'll never be in a situation where I have to rest for 26 days after a run.I could see increasing the healing rate for higher level characters a little bit, but I don't like fully proportional healing. I like this idea that higher level characters get beaten up more before they are susceptible to a killing blow (and therefore take longer to recover) than lower level chars.Yes! I think it's a really elegant solution to the wealth by level problem. IME in 1e it's more like 2/3 of XP (you get more xp from monsters and magic items) and in Basic it's 3/4-4/5.My thought -- and this is kind of speculative because I'm not personally really a cleric fan, nor is anyone in my group, but I have some familiarity with the archetype from MMOs, and then I'm also going by [MENTION=27570]sheadunne[/MENTION] 's opinions, since he seems like the thread's representative of fans of the traditional cleric -- is that with the cleric it's kind of all-or-nothing: you either have enough of an impact on the group's stamina to get into that strong "altruistic" support role, or you don't. I absolutely think that reducing the cleric's other abilities can be part of the solution--I know when we playtested the first round the cleric had a "laser beam" at-will thing that felt really OP and unnecessary.A little bit IME with early editions. We just did character creation for a 1e hexcrawl campaign and the party doesn't have a Cleric. It's probably going to be more difficult, but maybe not if the party finds a lot of healing portions and doesn't run into many undead, and it's uncertain how much more frequent natural resting is going to cost them, and if they really need one they can probably find a Cleric henchman later. It would be nice to have a cleric PC but there's not really enough predictability about what the game will be like for rolling without one to have been a major cajones displaying moment. A better example of this kind of thing would be the gamist pride associated with accepting and playing with crappy ability score rolls. That is a choice, because the players know that if they really, really want another set then they can have one, but it will elicit some playful tongue-clucking around the table.I bet this is more common in 3e groups where the classes are so unbalanced that there's actually a widely accepted tier classification system for them. I could see it being a point of pride to complete an Adventure Path with all Tier-4 classes.Where I'm really familiar with this is playing multi-player Medieval II Total War, which is a similar experience to playing gamist D&D in a few ways (there's no "end", you just keep playing until you have so many cities and armies and it gets so complicated that it becomes unplayable, and then you start over). During the game every once in a while you brag to each other about what you've been able to accomplish vis-a-vis your starting position and resources. If you play as Scotland then you've done well if you manage to conquer England before the end of the game, if you play as the Fatimid Caliphate then you need to conquer like all of Asia Minor to get the same amount of props.I dunno, how often do 3e groups do something like "let's complete Red Hand of Doom with all Tier-4 classes!"? Is that a thing?What I'm saying is the more transparent the game is about class/group balance and the more predictable it is in play the more you would see groups purposefully choosing less optimal configurations because they can play with the shared understanding that their in-game success is to be judged relative to their starting choices.Char-op becomes a bigger part of the challenge of the game the more that the game is a black box about what's going to happen* and the more complex and opaque the various character options are, so pre-play the players all research their separate spheres of character options and the in-game if somebody ends up having a particularly powerful character everybody else says "huh, they must have made good choices in the character-creation minigame" and gives them props that way.So reducing that charop pressure is part of the solution I think, to reaching this desired situation where the cleric is useful enough that the cleric fan can feel needed and get into that strong support role, but without being so necessary that groups without cleric fans feel like they need to have one.*Of course, this is one of D&D's best features so there's tension here.I like the extra texture of having to weigh aesthetics against pure fun against effectiveness sometimes, and I feel slightly insulted/this-is-lame when the game seems to be trying really hard to make sure I don't have to.If clerical healing is mostly out-of-combat then clerics trade power at the individual encounter level for greater inter-encounter endurance (in addition to whatever other special abilities other classes have). Not just because of their lesser offensive output but because the other classes' damage mitigation abilities are used in-combat. A cleric decreases the resources used over 5 encounters, a Fighter decreases the chance of a TPK in a single "boss" encounter. Assuming that the Cleric's buffing ability is kept under control of course.</blockquote>

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