If A Rogue Has The Ability To Use Any Magic Item...

[Henry]

Count up here a player whose PREFERRED class is cleric - ever since 1st edition AD&D. In an earlier thread on this forum, I counted up the number of PC's I played with cleric levels - and surprised myself. No less than 15 characters I've played over the past 25 I've played have been divine spellcasters, including my most recent two!

Clerics have serious advantage over rogues in magic - their magic is from an renewable source, whereas it costs a rogue much money to attain more.

From a roleplay standpoint, my characters have never found it very difficult to placate deities, especially polytheistic ones, unless the cleric decides to do something GROSSLY outside of the deity's wishes. (For example, Druids razing a forest because a PC ally wants to build his castle there or something.) If one wishes to play a morally insane character, who is helping the needy one minute and burning down orphanages the next, then there are morally ambiguous gods who would fit that bill.

Lastly, the PHB also gives guidelines for running Clerics who follow philosophies or alignments, leaving deities out of the picture totally. Following the wishes of deities is not a big sticking point to most campaigns.

 

[Mystic_23]

I've developed my Dwarven cleric to be a fighting cleric. As such he does a great job. It's pretty nice when I can be in the thick of combat...right next to the fighter, and can heal him at a moment's notice. And with spells like divine power (Give the cleric the 18 str, and bab of a fighter of his level) can, for a short time at lease, be just as effective in combat as that fighter.

With the other buffs that I can get, I'd say my cleric is a great character.

Now, I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't like clerics. If they're not your thing, that's fine. But, in my opinion, I don't think the rogue makes the cleric useless.

 

[tonym]

Re: Re: Re: If A Rogue Has The Ability To Use Any Magic Item...

I don't get this. I almost never save slots to heal when I play a cleric. If someone wants to be healed, I'll use the wand of CLW he's bought for himself, but thats it.

Nobody in our party carries a wand of CLW. Except the Cleric, I mean, who occasionally loots one from a body. So I guess we are 'obliging' the cleric to Heal our wounds. In our DM's campaign, our party doesn't get a whole lot of gold, so when we buy magic items, we have to think long and hard about what we want--and settle for what we can afford.

Our cleric, by healing our wounds, allows us to spend our small amount of wealth on magic armor and better magic weapons instead of potions and healing wands, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Nonetheless, the cleric also blasts monsters with his spells whenever he can. He threw a Blade Barrier recently into a room containing twenty-something ogres, for example (boy, that was cool).

Anyhow, I like your idea, Numion. The next time I'm in town, I'm going to consider buying a CLW wand rather than something else.

HOLY CRAP! I just checked the price of CLW wands! 750 gold for a wand with 50 charges! What a frikkin deal! Man, I can't believe I've been wasting money on an occasional 300 GP Healing Potion!


Tony M

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

If you haven't found clerics useful, then either you haven't played seen them played competently or your DM goes real easy on you.

Whether you or any of your friends would enjoy playing a cleric is another matter entirely.

Besides the cleric's many obvious attributes such as decent melee combat ability and a pile of utility spells, an oft underestimated advantage of the Cleric is a strong Fort and Will save. That means a single spell is unlikely to take a Cleric down. A Rogue, Fighter, Wizard or Psion can fairly reliably taken out of combat by targetting a weak save.

The only 'weakness' of the cleric is the class is not really the best at any one thing except healing. But clerics are 2nd or 3rd best at a lot of things, and that more than compensates powerwise.

 

[Blockader7]

There was one 2e Cleric character that I've enjoyed playing. He was a Gnome whose primary weapons were cestuses and a chakram. He made it to 5th level before the campaign fizzled and the gm moved away for a better job.

He did something for his temple and risked his life for it fighting a vampire. As a result his deity enchanted the cestuses to +2 and would turn them into major artifacts when he would die.

He wasn't bad at combat, but he wasn't really a combat monster. I used him mostly for missile support and guarding the rear flank.

But of all the other Clerics that I've run, that was the only one I've truly enjoyed playing.

 

[Drakron]

...Lastly, the PHB also gives guidelines for running Clerics who follow philosophies or alignments, leaving deities out of the picture totally. Following the wishes of deities is not a big sticking point to most campaigns.

Or play in Ravenloft were deities have a hard time to find out what their clerics are doing ...