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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 6710245">Ok, awesome example.  I love it.  (And, by the way, I grew up in a household that believed strongly in stuff like this.)It's telling that this worked worked even when your XBiL did it.  To me that says the explanation lies in the faith of the recipient, not the intrinsic qualities of the giver.  Which means we're talking about a totally different mechanism than "some people are such natural leaders that they can exhort people to heal themselves."  Unless we're attributing it to a charismatic leader who has been dead for 2,000 years.And since we're talking about faith it seems to me we're straying into the realm of historical/fictional source material for Clerics.  Yes, the mechanic by which Clerics heal is different, but if we're mapping game concepts ("magical healing spells") to real-world antecedents, let's face it: the Christian tradition/myth of divine healing is why there's a Cleric class.  Unlike, say, fighting styles, we can't look for actual 1:1 historically provable antecedents for spell-casting; the tradition derives from something mundane and this is it.  If Warlords claim faith healing as the basis for their own tradition, what's left for Clerics?No, I think "Live, damn you!" is better source material for Warlords, but then we run into the interpersonal bond vs. extrapersonal charisma problem.  It's a narrative device almost always used in the development of the story, not in the development of the character.Does that make sense?  Conan grits his teeth and flexes his muscles and slays enemies because "ferocity" is part of his character.  Trinity does not have some intrinsic ability to motivate people to resist death, but the growth of the bond between her and Neo is part of the story's plot, and it's that which enables her to "heal" him.  (Otherwise it would have been Morpheus who called him back.)Thus building a character concept around that action seems...odd.  Like building a character class concept around the narrative devices of facing your fears, or leaving home, or outgrowing your friends, or the loss of innocence, etc.  A character backstory and roleplaying concept?  Sure.  Just not a class.</blockquote>

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