D&D 5E Death, dying and class balance

[Tony Vargas]

I’d also point out that 1st and 2nd editions were much deadlier than 5E. In those editions clerics were probably the most survivable class (plate armor, good HP, defensive and healing spells), yet surveys from back then showed clerics were the least played of the four main classes.

The old-school cleric had a lot of strikes against it. I carried religious baggage. It had to devote most of it's spells (typically all of them at 1st & 2nd level) to healing (the only saving grace being spell levels, in 1e, which simply included no healing spells on their list). I clomped around in heavy armor wielding un-cool weapons like the mace. It had to devote many of its actions in combat to casting those healing spells. It was decidedly un-fun and un-popular, and the game struggled with making it more desirable for most of it's history, and is has re-joined that struggle with 5e.

Er, D&D is all about the potential for violence. If you want lethal failure to be a strictly unimportant part of your game--if you want "bankruptcy" and "loss of social status" to be what your players worry about rather than death--your campaign might work better in a different system like GURPS.

GURPS can be pretty darn lethal. No hit-point/plot-armor padding.

Ah, I see. Maybe you could elaborate on what you dislike about heal-from-zero? I kind of dislike the aesthetics that result from stopping at zero.

Up from zero is one of those trade-offs. It make bookkeeping easier and expending slots to restore allies' hps in-combat more worthwhile. OTOH, it gives the game that whackamole dynamic, actually encouraging support characters to wait until an ally drops before helping them (because it's more efficient) and, perhaps, strains credulity.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Tony Vargas]

I'm going to slightly disagree with you, here. The old school cleric tended to drive very divergent opinions- many people either really enjoyed playing them, or hated playing them.

I've seen very, very little of the former. I did have players willingly playing clerics & druids in my AD&D campaign, but I had very heavily modified them - each deity gave quite different spells and had their Turn Undead ability work differently (or be replaced by something, especially post-2e, when 'Granted Powers' showed up). Outside of that, I'd only ever me one player who related enjoying playing the cleric, and he played an evil cleric who coerced his party and managed to get them killed at the right moments so he could collect a whole adventure's worth of exp and treasure for himself. (CoDzilla? hah, pikers.)

As you correctly point out, the baggage of the cleric is that the party's cleric was the designated heal-bot. Some people hated being that, some people liked it. But the rest?

Overwhelming, it was the former. The pseudo-Christian religious baggage (look at the illos in the 1e PH sometime), and general un-cool-ness. The obligator Band-Aid role.

Finally, I disagree with your assertion that it has rejoined the ranks of the undesirable in 5e.

You read a little too much into that. 5e actively tries to /avoid/ making the Cleric undesirable in a number of ways. Regaining full hps overnight relives the player of the Cleric of the nearly-pointless bookkeeping exercise of memorizing-and-re-memorizing full slates of cure spells to get a badly mangled party back up to full power, and the added silliness of everyone, fully-restored, 'resting' again so the Cleric can prep a more normal slate of only-mostly-cures. HD relieve the cleric of casting cures between combats as the WoCLW did in 3e and Surges in 4e, and, like surges (though to a lesser degree0, spread the healing burden to the whole party. Neo-Vanican casting means that the cleric need only prepare Cure Wounds 'once' and cast it as much or as little as needed, leaving more opportunities to do something beyond applying band-aids. Domains make the Cleric more customizable as they did in Essentials, 4e, 3.x, and in the form of spheres, 2e.

 

[lowkey13]

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[FormerlyHemlock]

The old-school cleric had a lot of strikes against it. I carried religious baggage. It had to devote most of it's spells (typically all of them at 1st & 2nd level) to healing (the only saving grace being spell levels, in 1e, which simply included no healing spells on their list). I clomped around in heavy armor wielding un-cool weapons like the mace. It had to devote many of its actions in combat to casting those healing spells. It was decidedly un-fun and un-popular, and the game struggled with making it more desirable for most of it's history, and is has re-joined that struggle with 5e.

The 5E cleric unfortunately carries the exact same kinds of religious baggage unless the DM goes out of his way to get rid of it, e.g. by declaring clerics of Death to venerate, not an actual god of Death, but simply Death in the abstract. You'll know that the religious baggage is gone when a cleric of Life or Nature in your game can as easily be an atheist Greenpeace activist, a devout Catholic priest, or a worshipper of Gaia. 5E isn't anywhere close to there by default, in fact it has tons of (boring) gods listed right in the PHB and the clerical capstone is actually built around having a privileged personal relationship with your object of worship.

Religious baggage in 5E is worse than it was in 2nd edition.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, all personal experiences are personal! I don't think it was the most loved class, but it was far from the least favorite. Other than me, I can't recall anyone else who enjoyed playing the Illusionist, for example. And the Monk ... eh, let's just say it wasn't a popular class in 1e (IME). And Druids? They were clerics, except worse, and without healing.

After playing a lot of magic-users, Druid became my favorite class in 1e. Really pretty awesome in a lot of ways, and less of a healing burden.

Cleric was easily the least popular class, excepting the barely-there Monk & barely-accessible Bard. It was, however, no less played than the other standbys, because you /needed/ one. Or else.

And, while that was my personal experience, and the personal experience of everyone I ever met - again, except the one guy who loved playing evil clerics - it was also the dominant paradigm in the pages of Dragon in that period. Nor did I see it change in the early on-line community, even as Spheres and custom priesthoods made the class more interesting - and in the case of some L&L specialty priests, apparently, broken.

Denial of healing burden and the unpopularity of the Cleric seems to be a pretty new thing. Even in the 3e era, it was broadly acknowledged that the game had over-compensated for it by giving us CoDzilla.

I may have missed the pseudo-Christian religious baggage, however.

It was hard to miss: you've got a guy holding a cross in some 1e illos, the spell list leaned heavily towards biblical miracles, turn undead was an obvious reference to holding vampires at bay with a cross, and the blunt-weapon restriction was derived from a certain interpretation of scripture.

Level titles, OTOH, were taken from a broad range of religions. You went from cultist to Anglican to Catholic to Tibetan Buddhist amongst other things as you leveled. ;P

I agree with what you write here. The Cleric is definitely more intriguing as a class option in 5e.

More potentially interesting than it was in 1e, certainly. And not as bad as 3e's CoDzilla.

The 5E cleric unfortunately carries the exact same kinds of religious baggage unless the DM goes out of his way to get rid of it, e.g. by declaring clerics of Death to venerate, not an actual god of Death, but simply Death in the abstract.

That's not that bad, at least you can squeeze in a variety of death and other more pagan/fantasy-feel religions via Domains.

Religious baggage in 5E is worse than it was in 2nd edition.

But better than 1e.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Tony Vargas]

Because I liked the illustration in the Rogue's Gallery for them. I am nothing if not shallow.

On the other hand, druids were never played. Never being an exaggeration, of course!

Not a huge one, really. The common perception was 'only good in the woods' or couldn't handle dungeons, when, actually, the could be quite effective underground. There was a broadly-held perception of them, just as there was for the cleric, and, as with the cleric, it was fairly negative. Druids just weren't needed to get through 1st level, since they didn't start with Cure Light Wounds, the way Clerics did. Druids were unpopular, Clerics unpopular but mandatory.

But I never noticed any particular antipathy towards Clerics; again, in my circles, it was always, "You fight, and you can also cast spells."

That's also the much more popular elf fighter/magic-user. The difference: you cast spells other than Cure Light Wounds.

The Cleric's stigma was not a group-specific nor regional thing, it was pervasive, it was in what passed for community media at the time, the pages of The Dragon, and it drove all the extra customization and goodies 2e & 3e heaped on the Cleric.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of 1e UA, 2e, 3e, 4e, Next & 5e all trying to get the fighter up to snuff, or 3e & 4e trying to rehabilitate the Bard into something you'd actually want to play (with 'Elan' of OotS fame illustrating how well that went), or 3e making the Rogue into a high-DPR class (which 4e & 5e have stuck with).

But who cares about the illustrations (except the awesome one for illusionists in the Rogue's Gallery)?

I think that says it all.

Maybe I'm a bad person?

Not relevant.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Tony Vargas]

See, that's where personal experiences and general play areas can matter a great deal.

They do. In the case of the popularity of clerics, though, that didn't matter much because the overall band-aid stereotype and negativity was there, regardless of your personal experience. Just like the Druid was overall quite unpopular, in spite of my personal experience.

CoDzilla is one of many, many builds that came up in 3e that are questionable.

It's not really a build though, just a Cleric or Druid who doesn't cast a lot of Cure spells, but self-buffs. That was kinda the point the fellow who coined it was making: you can get all upset about 'abusive' power builds and broken non-core material, but the 3.x Cleric & Druid already have that level of 'abusive power' brokedness out of the box.

And, that was, indeed an overreaction to their past lack of popularity in face of their continued necessity.

One could just as easily say that the 3e spellcasting builds were an overreaction to the 3 hit point Magic User, huddling in the corner with his dagger, afraid to cast his single magic missile for the day.

You could, though just the simple fact that a 1st level caster got more than one spell per day would seem to be the reaction, right there. And the wizard got the crossbow instead of just a dagger for low level plinking between casting his several spells. Etc.

Really?

To this discussion, yes.