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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 5848449" data-attributes="member: 694">Turning Undead is No Longer NecessaryI don't see the point.  I mean, let's be honest here: why was turning undead added to the D&D game in the first place?The game originally had two classes: fighting man and magic-user.  The classic swords & sorcery archetypes.  They went into dungeons to contend with monsters and deathtraps to take treasure and get rich and powerful.  But fighting men and magic-users are not particularly well-equipped to always handle certain specific situations.  Deathtraps are one example.  You can only get so far poking the corridors with a 10' pole.  So these early players started hiring NPC "thieves" who functioned as trap-finding (and door-opening) specialists.  It was quite a long time before the thief role became associated with the "Grey Mouser" character archetype and became a worthy PC class in its own right; originally, the thief was a tool added to the game so that fighters and mages could bypass a specific kind of problem.Ditto for the cleric.  Fighters were usually pretty good at handling most kinds of monsters, but undead were SCARY.  They permanently drained you of experience levels, NO SAVE.  The cleric was added to the game, once again, for the sole and specific purpose of countering this scary-ass problem.  Clerics were the "turn undead" guys, based loosely on the Hammer Horror version of Dr. Van Helsing, with a bit of "Christian crusader" trappings layered on top to make it more palatable in a medieval setting.  Their whole point was to give the real characters, the fighters and the mages, a chance to escape from level-draining undead with their lives and XP totals intact.  End of story.Now, what are the odds that D&D next is even going to include level-drain at all, never mind the nasty kind where it's permanent and doesn't allow a saving throw?  Practically nil, right?  So what need for clerics to drive off the undead, if they're not even all that scary anymore?  If the undead are just monsters like any other monsters, giving the cleric a special means to drive them off just makes them... weaker and less interesting monsters than all the other monsters in the game.So either drop turning undead, or make the blasted undead scary and effective again!</blockquote>

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