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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
D&D 3E Design: The Unbalanced Cleric
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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 7903950" data-attributes="member: 907"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/693162514704543744" target="_blank">Jeremy Crawford disagrees on that point</a>. The intent is clearly that you can't combine a bonus action spell and a 1st-level or higher spell on the same turn, regardless of order.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Core 2e had something like 15 Spheres, with another half-dozen or so being added in Tome of Magic. One of the spheres was the All sphere which all priests had major access to. I don't recall exactly what spells were in it, but it was a pretty small number and primarily about the actual religious aspects of the class. Other than that, priests could have access to any spheres. In practice, particularly in Forgotten Realms, priesthoods usually used the cleric spheres as a baseline and added/subtracted from that.</p><p></p><p>The issue with 2e priests is that D&D is a class-based game, and relies to a large degree on having certain abilities available in a party. This is most apparent when it comes to healing (including condition relief), but also includes things like planar travel at higher levels. So your priest of the God of Serpents might be real cool and stuff, but if he can't <em>plane shift</em> the party to Gehenna he's not fulfilling the cleric's role. This is a place where game design and world design clash.</p><p></p><p>Which brings me to one of my main issues with clerics: their existence as a class warps all D&D world-building. Having the cleric as a core class where one of the class's defining traits is worshiping a deity almost demands that you build a pantheon with varied deities, ideally designed to provide PCs with lots of options for their clerics. You can swim against the current (for example, see Eberron with its mix of inactive-and-possibly-nonexistent Sovereigns, divine impersonal forces like the Silver Flame, and philosophies like the Blood of Vol), but the game design strongly pushes you in this direction.</p><p></p><p>This in turn often leads to a lot of attention being paid to these when it comes to the rest of the worldbuilding as well as adventure design, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Forgotten Realms where almost every major plot line is the result of divine meddling - starting as far back as the Moonshaes trilogy and moving through the Time of Troubles, the Cyrinishad debacle, the Spellplague, and in modern times we have at least four 5e campaigns being the result of plans of divine or semi-divine beings (Tiamat, the Princes of Elemental Evil, Annam, various demon lords). This is, all things considered, fairly dull, particularly when repeated as often as it is.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 7903950, member: 907"] [URL='https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/693162514704543744']Jeremy Crawford disagrees on that point[/URL]. The intent is clearly that you can't combine a bonus action spell and a 1st-level or higher spell on the same turn, regardless of order. Core 2e had something like 15 Spheres, with another half-dozen or so being added in Tome of Magic. One of the spheres was the All sphere which all priests had major access to. I don't recall exactly what spells were in it, but it was a pretty small number and primarily about the actual religious aspects of the class. Other than that, priests could have access to any spheres. In practice, particularly in Forgotten Realms, priesthoods usually used the cleric spheres as a baseline and added/subtracted from that. The issue with 2e priests is that D&D is a class-based game, and relies to a large degree on having certain abilities available in a party. This is most apparent when it comes to healing (including condition relief), but also includes things like planar travel at higher levels. So your priest of the God of Serpents might be real cool and stuff, but if he can't [I]plane shift[/I] the party to Gehenna he's not fulfilling the cleric's role. This is a place where game design and world design clash. Which brings me to one of my main issues with clerics: their existence as a class warps all D&D world-building. Having the cleric as a core class where one of the class's defining traits is worshiping a deity almost demands that you build a pantheon with varied deities, ideally designed to provide PCs with lots of options for their clerics. You can swim against the current (for example, see Eberron with its mix of inactive-and-possibly-nonexistent Sovereigns, divine impersonal forces like the Silver Flame, and philosophies like the Blood of Vol), but the game design strongly pushes you in this direction. This in turn often leads to a lot of attention being paid to these when it comes to the rest of the worldbuilding as well as adventure design, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Forgotten Realms where almost every major plot line is the result of divine meddling - starting as far back as the Moonshaes trilogy and moving through the Time of Troubles, the Cyrinishad debacle, the Spellplague, and in modern times we have at least four 5e campaigns being the result of plans of divine or semi-divine beings (Tiamat, the Princes of Elemental Evil, Annam, various demon lords). This is, all things considered, fairly dull, particularly when repeated as often as it is. [/QUOTE]
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