D&D 2E 2E specialty clerics

[Ratskinner]

It really depends on the specialty priest. The ones in the Complete handbook were pitiful compared to the standard cleric. The standard cleric got major access to most of the spheres, all armor, decent weapons, turn undead, and the 2nd-best THAC0. Aside from tacking on lots of special class abilities, you couldn't really get all that much better.

As with a lot of game elements, 2e wins when it comes to flavor and loses when it comes to effectiveness or balance. I loved the specialty priests, but I thought the 3e designers' criticisms were valid, and I think the 3e cleric was a good compromise between customization and niche/role fulfillment.

IIRC, the 2e Legends and Lore was the first source for a bunch of favorite specialty clerics. (Also a lot of weird ones.) Once the Skills and Powers came out, though, things got out of hand.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I remember the opposite, the specialty clerics were usually selected to help min/max a character. Many of the specialty clerics were quite awesome in their own rights. Particularly in games using the Player's Option: Skills & Powers rules it seemed like all I ever saw were elven Specialty Clerics or Specialty Cleric/Something Elses.

Of course, many DMs ignored ability requirements or players fudged ability scores. I suspect there would have been fewer otherwise (but still a lot, they sometimes had huge advantages.)

I was deliberately not mentioning Skills and Powers - that's a different can of worms. The specialty priests were balanced (i.e. slightly weak) when published for Greyhawk, slightly stronger for FR. Skills & Powers let you cherry pick the domains to an entirely different level.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Count me as another who thinks they were better in 2Ed than in any other.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I liked 'em. In my longest-running campaign all clerics were specialty and I wrote up about twenty very different ones.

 

[tlantl]

I remember the opposite, the specialty clerics were usually selected to help min/max a character. Many of the specialty clerics were quite awesome in their own rights. Particularly in games using the Player's Option: Skills & Powers rules it seemed like all I ever saw were elven Specialty Clerics or Specialty Cleric/Something Elses.

Of course, many DMs ignored ability requirements or players fudged ability scores. I suspect there would have been fewer otherwise (but still a lot, they sometimes had huge advantages.)

AD&D using the skills and powers rules was an entirely different creature. You could really overwhelm the system by using them. Some of the stuff looked really interesting as concepts but the rest of the game wasn't designed to accommodate the increased strength of the players. there was precious little that could challenge a party of 15th levels as it was then adding those rules totally broke everything. It took me half a year to regroup after that fiasco.

I never got into using the prepared settings when the rules for specialty priests came out. The guy who used to DM the forgotten realms at the time went off to college so we missed out on that.

I have my own homebrew world where I spent a lot of time making spell lists, granted powers, and other rules for my rather complex religions. No one ever complained that my specialty priests were overpowered or too weak, although there are dieties that are anything but martial. Players just avoided using them.

 

[Elf Witch]

I love love love specialty priests and they were all that was allowed in our games back then.

While I am a big fan of 3E I hate the clerics. They made every last one of them the same no matter what god they worshiped and the domains didn't really add that much flavor or difference.

Sure you could choose sub optimal things for your cleric for flavor like giving up better armor for leather because you worship a nature god. Or using a quarterstaff instead of a mace because it fit better.

I like the idea of armor, weapons, spells being determined by the god that way a cleric of Pelor should look different then a cleric of Ehlona.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Never really took much notice of balance, but I know I did a LOT of writing for 2E customising my clerics/priests to each god.

Whilst I wouldn't go that far again, I would like to see a little more than one quirky power giving a nod to your god. Domains are OK, but I still don't like the idea of gaining powers/spells that have nothing to do with deity. Even worse when you granted power doesn't (you may have read my WT? thread and Pathfinder's Earth Cleric Domain granting acid powers ).

Like Dangerous Jack I could see themes filling this concept, but like all thematic parts of the game, I would love for these to be covered by Talent Trees (Saga style, not feat trees, or some computer games egs people bring up...separate thread for this too).

For eg: Priest worships nature deity - this may grant access to 3 nature-related Talent Trees (preferably chosen from a list of several), such as Weather, Animal Companions & Plant Connection. These Talent Trees would also be on the Ranger and Druid lists too (but they 'may' choose different ones). Anyway, I have another thread on HOW TT's could work, but I really think the concept supports Specialty Priests perfectly.

 

[Blackwarder]

Skills and powers was the beginning of the end for 2e IMO, we banned it in our group after playing around with it.

I always saw speciality priests as the tamplet for the Druid and in our campaigns we tried to make each priest as unique as the Druid, heck in one campaign paladins were essentially the priest of the god of justice, we just gave them more healing spells.

Warder

 

[Henry]

I loved the concept, the exedcution needed to be a little more balanced -- which it could have been with larger spell lists.

It's too bad WotC no longer allows free PDF download of the 2nd edition legends & lore book -- it was on their website until a couple years ago.

For those who never experienced it: They took the 1st through 7th level (yes, clerics had all their spells crammed into 7 levels instead of 9) and divided them up into "spheres" - plant, animal, lesser healing, greater healing, charm, etc. - the precursors to domains. But instead of giving extra spells, often outside of the traditional cleric levels of power, as domains do, they just divvied up the existing cleric & druid spells. So, if your cleric had "lesser healing" he had CLW, slow poison, a few others, but no cure serious or higher spells. If he had greater healing he had cure serious, critical, heal, resurrection, etc. So you could have clerics who could heal, just not heal major issues. Plus, there were concepts for different powers than turn undead, just as the druid can shapechange, another clerics might have different special abilities they could use infrequently to distinguish themselves from other clerics. In my homebrew, I had thunder clerics who could clap their hands together for a lesser version of the shout spell, I had clerics with the thief skills charts (as three levels lower, I believe), etc. To be a Cleric of the Thunder God and the Cleric of the Thief God were VERY different things.

 

[TerraDave]

This was something I got way too into in my 2E game, designing a range specialty priests (and orders and religions) for pcs and npcs.

And I did have a dwarven priest of war and elf elementalist in the party who were pretty different from each other.

But as noted, there were issues. One was that the default cleric, with all the spells in the 2E PHB (and Tome of Magic and other books), was a pretty powerful option, and there was some push to use the specialty priest to balance that.

Take the cherry picking mentioned above. I remember a case were a player pushed for a sphere that allowed for hold person, and this annoyed the DM. But of course clerics always had that! And heal and raise dead and silence and commune....and plate mail...

But back to my game, you could still make very viable specialist, but it took some thought. I mean the dwarf priest of war did have specialization in the bastard sword from level 1 (note sword, not axe), so that probably counted for something.