Help me swing my players away from clerics

[VirgilCaine]

Few religions have tenets that cover the rampaging drunkard adventurer lifestyle and nothing else:

Some, however, are friendly to that...Olidammara and Norebo come to mind, maybe Ralishaaz and Pyremius for slightly more "Stupid Evil" parties.

 

[VirgilCaine]

[Double Post ]......

 

[El Ravager]

I too think some of these propostions are a bit drastic. In my experience, I have not found the cleric class to be overpowering. While they might look unbalanced on paper, in practice this hasn't been the case for me and my gaming groups. Clerics have access to many powerfull spells, but they rarely get to use all of them and instead use them for healing. Perhaps if you hit the party a little harder and give them a little less time to rest the clerics may begin to use the spells to heal party members rather than using so many for personal buffs.

Now its possible you are doing the above and the PCs are using other sources for healing such as magic items. If that is the case, you may be able to get by with cutting back some of their cash income. When you mentioned that the PCs would often buy their way out of problems by hireing appropriate NPCs to aid them, it indicated this could be a problem. It might not be but it is something to consider.

Another point is that this might not be a cleric problem but a player 'problem'. You indicated that the players of the clerics are more adept at 'tweaking' their characters than the rest of the players. It may just be that those players would dominate no matter what class they play because they are good at tweaking and the cleric class just happens to be the class they like most. You may have luck at leveling the playing field a little bit by introducing some more powerful magic items that would help out the other players.

I think that maybe emphasising the clerics respoinsibilities in society could be a good thing but I would advise against changing how the class works mechanically. I think that nerfing a players favorite class could come off as arbitrary and may cause some hard feelings.

 

[Orius]

I too find it astounding there's a whole group of player who want to play clerics. I remember there was a time when this would have been a situation that damn near most D&D players would find inconceivable. It used to be cleric was the class foisted off upon the newbie, 'cause no one else wanted to play it.

Still, there's no major problems here. If, as you say, the players DO engage in roll-playing and not just mindless munchkinsim, then let them enjoy their holy smackdowns. If they're all part of allied faith, maybe set up a situation where a powerful god of evil is waging war against the good faiths. Give them a crusade to fight. The bad guys will probably have lots of evil clerics to foil them.

Don't forget church hierarchies, too. Most lawful and a good number of neutral churches will have superiors the clerics are expected to obey. Only chaotic faiths will tent to let the priest do whatever they want. Of course, if the heirarchty is corrupt, and the priest is faithful, that could offer some good role-playing opportunities. Especially if the god in question is refusing to grant spells to the heirarchy, but giving them to the PC cleric.

As for hirelings, enforce some role-playing flavor here. Tell the players that they can only hire NPCs who are faithful followers of the church. This may very well cut down on rogues and wizards, if those classes tend to be rather impious.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

If you really want to pump down the number of clerics rather than eliminate them, then what you need to do is not so much nix the cleric as make the other classes more attractive.

Maybe you ought to create cool spells for clerics that really only benefit members of other classes.

Or religions that emphasize spending lots of time in another class before you can become a cleric, or spending lots of time with other classes as you are being a cleric.

Or throw RPing situations at them that commonly favor classes other than cleric.

Or just talk to them ask them if they might try a more mixed party and then keep throwing situations at them that reward that behavior as a game experience.

Also, they should certainly be betrayed by all their non-cleric followers at some point.

The wilderness is another good cleric killer, why do you think all the missionaries are constantly getting eaten.

 

[qaaral]

You could try some minor tweaks to your pantheon:

1-Suppose all the gods were jealous of their own power and forbade their clergy to associate with those of other gods so that your players all had to worship the same diety.

2-You could limit the gods to only one domain and could make some the better ones (say War) be only available to evil deities.

3-You could require clerics to use their gods favored weapons. And if those were mostly martial weapons they would need to use a feat in order to be effective.

 

[Trainz]

put a disease into your campian that isn't curable and is highly contagious. The population starts to hate all clerics because they feel the clerics aren't doing enough or something along those lines. Every town they enter, swamp them with sick people seeking them for salvation. When they can't provide it, have the town turn on them. a time or two and they will be so leary about going into a town. Tension for the party should rise and assuming they are playing good clerics, should seek to find a way to cure this plague.

*Side note - I didn't read everyones replies so if this is a repeat idea, excuse me.

R.A. Salvatore did this precise thing in his demonwars trilogy (that has little to do with demons...). In the third book (IIRC), there is this mass plague that hurts many towns, and the monks (those who heal in this setting) are totally inefficient in thwarting that plague. People slowly start to revolt and mob the monasteries. The setting is on the brink of civil war before a cure is found.

Muy cool.

 

[Anthraxus]

As a rule, I assume that the cleric-types have worse base physical stats than the fighter-types, which buffing then offsets. Obviously, the cleric-barbarian probably has good physical stats.

I am the party cleric, and I always look on in amazement when the Dwarven Fighter wades into combat in the first round and does like 60+ points of damage with his Waraxe on a crit(19-20 from Improved Crit).

In 2 or 3 rounds of buffing, I could get to be highly effective in combat, but then the BBEG might have already taken the Fighter way down in Hp.

I wouldn't allow the Clerics to hire all these NPC Rogues/Mages/whatever. Maybe they can only find a low level Rogue after searching through town for one, etc... Seems like a big incentive NOT to be other classes.

-A

 

[LGodamus]

Straight from my book of house rules....
clerics do not recieve proficiency in heavy armor


if you wanted to take it a step further make clerics use the arcane spell failure chances on armor.

 

[Goblyn]

The typical campaign starts with a very diverse party. Then a PC dies and the player comes back with a new PC...a cleric. The preceding sentence then repeats until we have 3 to 4 clerics in the party. I am a little sick of seeing so many clerics, so I am looking for ways to nudge the party makeup a little.

It sounds to me in this statement that the proliferation of clerics is a reactionary thing for your players. I know that when I play, I don't like dying; I'm guessing your players don't either. So, when the PC dies, the player, not wanting to die again any time soon, takes the class that looks to have the most longevity, one that can heal itself: the cleric.

Is the game too deadly for PCs of other classes?

A lot of these suggestions would skew the game against playing clerics; which is fine, that is their intention. But is the game, asit stands, already skewed in favour of playing them?

I know I haven't offered any suggestions for a 'fix', but something like this might be the reason for your dilemma.