Eldragon said:
Hardhead's comments are very correct. Words coming from someone who clearly has had the same problem I am expecting in the next campaign. I encourage readers to re-read a few of hardhead's lastest replys to get a strong idea of the cleric party I am dealing with.
OK, so you've got a group of players who've figured out how to play very effective clerics. Good for them. Hardhead's claim that a well constructed 12th level character can be more effective than a typical 16th level character, however, seems WAY off the mark. Unless your idea of a typical character is the rolewimp, you'll be lucky to get one or two levels in effectiveness above a solidly constructed "typical" character.
And, in any event, that is not a problem limited to parties of clerics. A party of good players will be able to
slightly overperform their level on a regular basis whether it's balanced, all clerics, or even all bards (obviously a somewhat unusual campaign but I've seen all kinds of bards). If you succeed in pushing your players away from clerics but don't change their style of play, you'll be facing the same problem again anyway.
Heres a great analogy:
Battles in DnD are like rock-paper-scissors. When the party has *Rock*, its the DM's job to make sure they fight pleanty of *Paper*. The problem with a party full of *Rocks* is that I need to keep using *Paper*, and now my *Scissors* are getting rusty from neglect.
I need to push the party away from taking rock, and start using paper and scissors. I don't need more pieces of paper.
Well the nice thing about D&D is that scissors actually CAN beat rock. You can build the baddest fighter-type you want but your DM can still toss you up against a troll barbarian with Reckless Assault (enemies and allies) and a potion of bull's strength. You can be the "unhittable" monk/wizard and you'll crumple in seconds against a character that can actually hit (which isn't that hard to do--a kobold fighter/sorceror with true strike and a small greatsword will typically eat such characters for breakfast).
Or maybe that's the players trying to use rock to beat paper.
But scissors can work against rock too. There are plenty of spells and effects and ways to make the little guy do better. An evil priest with recitation, bear's heart, and a bard lackey with a natural horn (Song and Silence) will make his mook legions tear the PCs up pretty well. The low-level evil clerics can use summoning spells, etc rather than will-save spells to deal with the all-cleric party.
Sure there are lots of types of paper. Many shapes, sizes, and colors. But it's still paper, and I'm getting sick of paper.
I'm still not sure where this is coming from. Combat in D&D has a rock/paper/scissors aspect to it but it's not rock/paper/scissors. There's an almost infinite number of strategies and situations for the DM out there--even if it's against a party with nearly all the same strengths and weaknesses.
I have seen a lot of good ideas so far. My favorite right now is the prayer-book solution. Where the prayer book functions just like a wizards spellbook. Cure spells, inflict spells, and domain spells can be prepared from memory, but everything else would need a prayerbook. Don't remember who posted the idea right now. My thanks to the poster of that idea, and all other good ideas on this thread.
I really don't see how that will actually help you. The clerics will still have the ability to take the two or four non-cure and non-domain spells per level that they actually use right now. This technique is a decrease in flexibility for the clerics not a really significant decrease in power.
Clerics are a particularly annoying class to have many in the party because the more you have, the less they get shuffled to the rear-lines healing people. Out of a party of 6 people, and 1 cleric, the lone cleric is going to use all of his/her spells on healing. But when you have 4 clerics, they will almost always get away with using their spells for combat, especially at the higher levels.
I don't see the problem with this. One of the reasons that a lot of people don't like playing clerics is because they are always casting all their spells for healing and never actually doing anything. (It's also one of the reasons people play melee-focussed clerics: so they have something to do other than heal).
Since we've got the time to ask questions here, how do you normally generate attributes for your party? In my experience, the lower the point buy, the less effective cross-trained characters are. The 25 point buy cleric can't simultaneously be both a cleric and a fighter. (Or at least the difference between him and a real fighter is MUCH more noticable because the difference made by weapon focus and a few points of BAB is a lot more noticable when characters are running around with 16 and 14 strength instead of 18 and 16).
Another factor about low-point buy is that a lot of tweaking depends upon combining various feats and abilities. Low point buy makes qualifying for the various feats very painful if you're trying to keep your wisdom boosted high enough to be a cleric as well. So the tendency to want to tweak characters and explore intersting combos mitigates against clerics in a low point buy game far more than it does in a game where a cleric could actually have Str 14 (power attack, etc), Dex 13 (dodge, spring attack, etc), Con 14, Int 13 (expertise, Imp Trip, etc), wis 15 (spells), cha 13 (Divine Might, etc)
This is probably the most significant thing you could do to release the pressure of the all-cleric party that is playing effectively above it's level in power. With reduced stats, the differences between classes are more noticable. And, more significantly for the overall power creep angle (which seems to be your real problem), highly optimized, tweaked 25 point buy characters are challenged by the exact same foes as normal, non-optimized 32-36 point buy characters and role-wimp 42 point characters. So, the lower point buy reduces the power pressure on the DM.
Also, just to add one note of disagreement into this: beefing up other character classes does run the risk of power creep but it isn't as great as some people seem to think. (Or, at least, game balance is often a more durable and predictable thing than people think). For instance, my suggestion of giving fighters a free exotic weapon prof would have quite a predictable effect: most fighters would use exotic weapons. If you really dislike the spiked chain (as many people do) you could ban that. What you'd be left with is a few more double weapon fighters and a lot of bastard sword and waraxe fighters. Basically, you'd get 3.5 dwarf fighters in 3.0 only they wouldn't have to be dwarves. (And despite suggestions to the contrary--many of which I made myself--3.5 dwarven weapon familiarity hasn't killed 3.5 balance yet). Similarly, if you gave wizards extra skill points, the results would also be predictable: if knowledge skills are useful in your game, the wizards would have more of them. If not, they'd buy cross-class ranks in spot and listen or tumble. The game is IMO fairly well balanced as is, but balance can survive small adjustments. And if getting people to play classes other than cleric is a more important goal than pushing back the power curve, then upping the other classes a bit may lure some people away from cleric painlessly.
