D&D 5E How important is party balance in Next? (iow, how necessary are clerics?)

[Majoru Oakheart]

I wonder sometimes if the 3e cleric was a victim of its own hype, so to speak. Because the discussion on game balance decisions made about the system was made very public, a lot of the assumptions that were used as the baseline for game balance (i.e., the four-member traditional adventuring group, with a scouting/trapfinding optimized rogue, a heavy-armor wearing fighter/tank, a magic-missile and fireball slinging wizard, and a healing and buff-dealing cleric) I think a lot of people fell victim to confirmation bias.

Either that or so many encounters were designed specifically with those assumptions in mind that it led to confirmation bias of another kind--because encounters were designed with the four-roles in mind, lack of the four roles led to more failure.

I played a cleric in Living Greyhawk from level 1 through to level 16 with the paltry rate of XP given out by LG, this is an achievement.

I can tell you that most encounters we fought in LG tended to drop at least one party member unconscious if the enemies rolled higher for initiative. This included the fighter or barbarian with the most hp in the group. When you lost 150 hitpoints every encounter and need to fight 2 more encounters before the end of the day with no time for resting, there is only one way to make it to the end of the adventure: a cleric or druid.

And with a cleric or druid, it was then a cake walk. Enemies do 150 damage in one round of combat? *yawn* I cast Heal. I can cast 3 more Heals today so we should be fine. If things go horrible wrong, I suppose I can start using my Cure Critical Wounds spells.

In AD&D (or BD&D or OD&D, or whatever), all of those assumptions were much more subtle, and therefore parties that didn't necessarily have them could muddle through. A good GM who managed to "tweak" the experience slightly to account for what the party was missing, could make sure that the party had a good time and were successful. Unless, of course, they played in the "skilled play" mindset, in which case, the four role party was already fairly well established. But outside of the skilled play mindset, I don't think many gamers necessarily gave this notion nearly as much thought.

We never once had a group in our 1e/2e hybrid game that didn't have a cleric. That thought was unthinkable. If the cleric died, the player was required to make another cleric. If they decided not to, we looked around the room to see who would immediately retire their character and roll up a cleric.

Maybe we were a "skilled play" mindset group. But all we knew is when we went into a dungeon and monsters attacked if we didn't bring a cleric we'd have to run away and hide for a day after nearly every fight. With a cleric we could fight 10 combats in a day without worrying too much(at higher level).

 

[Desdichado]

Maybe we were a "skilled play" mindset group. But all we knew is when we went into a dungeon and monsters attacked if we didn't bring a cleric we'd have to run away and hide for a day after nearly every fight. With a cleric we could fight 10 combats in a day without worrying too much(at higher level).

If you were thinking about how to optimize for a dungeon run, then I'd say yeah, you probably were.

My groups rarely went into dungeons at all, and rarely thought having a cleric sounded like much fun.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

If you were thinking about how to optimize for a dungeon run, then I'd say yeah, you probably were.

My groups rarely went into dungeons at all, and rarely thought having a cleric sounded like much fun.

I don't know if optimizing a dungeon run was really what we were thinking about. Everywhere we went there were monsters. If we were traveling overland it was possible for the DM to roll 3 or 4 random encounters a day. We needed to survive that. We didn't have enough hitpoints to survive without someone healing us.

Once we got to wherever we were going it was likely that we'd end up being attacked in alleyways by ruffians and have to fight our way through 3 rooms of guards in order to confront the BBEG...who we'd also have to fight. That is whenever we weren't grabbed by demons or archmages and thrown into labyrinths for their amusement or have to crawl our way through the Underdark to save my character's wife from Drow...again.

To us, fighting nearly continuously is what you do in D&D no matter where you are. A Cleric is kind of required to do that and not have to run away and recover all the time.