D&D 5E On Healing and Broccoli

[Chris_Nightwing]

I'll crosspost myself from the other thread about this:

I'm going to try to rulify my suggestions, so they can be poked at.

Rituals
The first important thing is that Rituals are divided into categories, or given relevant keywords, so that they are accessible according to your skill training. Most relevant to what I am writing here is that there will be healing rituals, suggested as follows:

Cure Light Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 10gp worth of medicinal components such as herbs, salves, gauze and thread. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

Cure Moderate Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 50gp worth of magical and medicinal components such as herbs, salves, blessed gauze and thread. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to 10 + the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

Cure Serious Wounds (requires training in Heal)
This ritual takes 5 minutes to complete and requires 250gp worth of magical components such as rare herbs, blessed salves and holy water. It restores a number of hitpoints equal to 25 + the Wisdom modifier + Heal check bonus of the person perfoming the ritual to a single patient, who may be themselves. A patient healed by this ritual cannot regain any more hitpoints from another Cure Wounds ritual until they are again significantly injured.*

The costs and amounts restored are very hard to judge at the moment, but you get the idea. *denotes that you shouldn't play silly buggers and deal 1HP damage to someone just to cure them some more - I tried to avoid a direct GP-to-HP conversion, so that cheap rituals are more efficient, and the advantage of the higher rituals is time-saving. Parties will naturally start with Light rituals, but as they gain HP and start taking bigger hits, they should value more effective, if expensive, healing. I've also considered the cost of a potion, 25gp, which is the other healing option. Potions should generally be more expensive, since they are available in combat.Speaking of which, crafting such potions should be a ritual, not a feat.

By default there will be no Cleric spells that restore HP, though I would favour a cantrip that prevents bleeding at a distance, for downed allies. A Cleric of the Lifegiver, however, would channel divinity, or have a domain feature, or domain spells that do heal. My preference would be the use of channel divinity, restoring HP at around the same values as level-appropriate potions - in effect this Cleric saves the party actions and gold by becoming a walking potion-fountain. I would offer all Clerics the option to pick Heal as a trained skill over a Knowledge, so that in theory any Cleric can still fulfil the healer role.

The basic idea is to make healing a party resource, not a cleric resource, whilst still allowing for a Lifegiver Cleric who does heal, at the cost of not bashing/buffing/blasting.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I see a number of issues here.

* I really don't like the idea of clerics or priests being "healers first, speciality second". I'd rather see them as the non-martial champion of their deity, casting the buffing spells. Buffing doesn't have to imply healing.
* In that light, the paladin class should be the "sword" to the cleric's "shield".
* Related, in the interest of preserving class niche, wizards should generally have reduced access to buffing magic (just as clerics traditionally had reduced access to smiting magic)....

Interesting idea, maybe the Cleric should have some access to spells that generate temp hp (lost first) in combat and rituals to heal excess wounds?

 

[Cadence]

I like variety in my clerics.
-- So I want the rules to have suggestions on making new domains, things to sub in for less combat ability if appropriate (a la priest/cloistered cleric), and things to sub in for turning. The gods aren't stupid though, so I would probably leave most spells on the base list (including healing) and note that both background and need should reflect what is chosen.

Too much choice is supposed to be intimidating for new players and raises the specter of capitalizing on mastery of the rules. Too much change from traditional DnD-isms seems to lead to hate.
-- So I think the base cleric should be the classic build that is decent at combat and with a variety of spells including healing type.

I don't need much realism, but if you step too far away from the tropes it just seems silly.
-- So I'm ok with magic letting the really injured person jump up and start fighting, and I'm ok with heroic characters being able to take a heck of a beating and keep on ticking. But I'm not ready for slapping on a few bandages and yelling words of encouragement to do entirely the same thing.

I'm not against reasonable change as long as it doesn't seem to be overturning things just for the sake of doing so - I want it to be recognizably D&D in the sense of being able to convert pre-existing stuff over and have it still carry the feel with it.
-- So I'm good with maybe giving eveyrone one healing surge per day. I'm fine with having a bloodied status and having some more common healing work on the non-bloodied. I'm happy to have creative new healing spells.

I don't like the idea of everyone being able to do magical things... "And when everone's [magical], no one will be."
-- So I don't like having rituals sitting around for everyone to use without special magical training, and I don't want them to be an expected part of the game for non-spellcasters. I don't want everyone and their friends being able to find healing potions like they grow on trees as a default.

In other threads I keep reading about how its bad for Rogues to steal the Fighter's combat maneuver thunder, and its bad for Mages to steal the Rogues thunder, and all kinds of turf protection.
-- So I want turf protection for big healing.

In other threads I keep reading about how its bad for parties to need a healer type or for the cleric to be expected to be focus on healing, but also how some parties are at a disadvantage if the Paladin is the only fighter type and they want to have a high charisma and mediocre stength.
-- So I don't really understand why needing a healy type is different than needing a melee type and needing a missile weapon type and needing a skills type. I want something prominent in the book about the importance of having a good idea for a character that you can get into, while also respecting that its cooperative -- and that its not the job of the players to fill out slots on a roster. I want the rules to give advice on what to do if an important character type is missing from the party in general (having an appropriate NPC, having an appropriate magic item, etc...).

I read in various threads about how one-trick characters can be boring and drive the game in particular ways the other party members don't want. And I see the idea of balancing the three pillars. And I notice that the cleric is pretty good at fighting, has a variety of support spells, and has specials that encourage taking WIS and CHR which are helpful in exploration and social things.
--So I want someone to explain why being a cleric is bad... is part of it because its about the only class that's actually balanced and so they is expected to take up the slack for everyone else being unbalanced? Is it because a lot of players need special ways to kill people to be happy?

 

[Ashtagon]

One way to allow variety in cleric focuses and still provide a playable and easily-accessiblebase class in the core book is to limit the core product to just three deities: a generic god of good, a generic god of evil, and a generic god of nature. For a surprisingly large number of story lines, this is actually sufficient to cover all the bases. A dedicated splatbook for clerics (which, let's face it, is going to happen in every edition anyway, so we may as well plan for it) can provide rules for building new cleric spheres/domains, rules for building deities (wrt their effects on their clerics), and a host of pre-built deities and their associated effects on their clerics.

That splat book could go on to give names and backgrounds to the three generic deities of the core book. And it'd also avoid the accusation that 3e had of being "Greyhawk lite".

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I think you see Clerics as "those followers of the gods who wear heavy armour, use weapons, have healing magic, and can turn undead" with everything else being the stuff that varies both with which god the Cleric follows, and with each individual Cleric's personal taste.

Kind of. I'm actually not a fan of the weapons, and turn undead isn't needed, but yes, I expect them to have healing magic. Otherwise they're not a member of the cleric game class, they're a member of the priest social role.

Whereas I choose to view Clerics as "those followers of the gods who have been gifted by their chosen gods with the ability to cast spells", with all of the other stuff being variables that should be up to a combination of what's appropriate to the selected god and what's appropriate to that individual Cleric.

This is why I distinguished the two. (I also don't think the term "cleric" applies to holy men, shamans, etc from many other cultures. I don't see cleric = priest.)

4E's clerics could be armoured melee combatants or ranged magic specialists. They could be pacifist healers who never inflicted damage and who specialized in healing, or they could opt to never have any healing ability beyond their automatically bestowed Healing Words. I'm just suggesting going that one step further and saying that Healing Words (or whatever the system-appropriate counterpart is) need not be an automatic. It's something that could be left to choice.

I disagree. I think the choice is which class you're playing. Playing a non-healing cleric is as weird as playing a ranger with no wilderness skills.

That Invokers as divine magic controllers in light armour were a separate class from Clerics in 4E is a relic of that system's choice to divide classes by combat role (and as a 4E player and DM, I take no issue with that at all). However, Next isn't sorting classes by such roles, and in fact they've said they want such roles to be a matter of choice within the classes. In such a system, there's no particular reason to separate the Invoker out from the Cleric, when it's really just a flavour of the same thing.

That's actually one of the issues I have with Next. I don't think it's a good idea to (for instance) make the Swashbuckler archetype a fighter build, even though they fight. In 3.x, WotC tried numerous times to build a swashbuckler PrC that built on the fighter, and it didn't work very well. The way magic items work in 3.x played a role in it, but trying to turn a class that's optimally wearing heavy armor hurt.

if the Cleric is only the armour-clad, mace-wielding, healing magic, turn undead guy, regardless of what in-class options are selected, then I think they've failed to make it sufficiently broad.

That's a lot of unneeded options there. I think the cleric had a role too "broad" before (eg undefined), so you were basically buffing, debuffing, blasting, whacking, tanking and healing. Many of those roles can be taken by other classes, but healing is something only clerics have been able to do well since 1e. That's why I focus on the healing part. Naturally any cleric could then "build" toward taking other roles, but I expect healing to be part of all clerics. If you're a divine spellcaster who doesn't heal, then you're playing some other class.

Captain Blood is one the more iconic swashbuckling stories. Swashbucklers are one of the sources of inspiration for D&D, and have had a role in the game from its earliest days (it's even one of the level titles for the original Fighting-Man). Most people seem to think that, if we aren't going to give swashbucklers their own specific class, then they fit into either the fighter or the rogue class, or both.

I'd rather give them their own class. I don't think even the rogue is a good fit for a swashbuckler, even if it's a bit closer than a fighter.

Peter Blood, the hero of that tale, is a doctor. Should a character inspired by him not, then, have access to some ability to heal?

Was he a magical healer? Or was he doing the kind of surgery you do in real life (or d20 Modern), where you spend a considerable amount of time patching up holes and then, being unable to repair all the damage, leave the patient to rest, possibly "low" on opium? That's quite a bit different from clerical healing.

Perhaps divine magic healing should be inherently better than the options available to those using mundane means or arcane magic, but I don't see any particularly convincing arguments that it should be the only viable option. (and no, "TRADITION!" isn't a terribly convincing argument from a game-design standpoint)

I think roles are a much more convincing argument.

2) It's possible to reduce or remove healing (or magical healing) in many ways. Some of them are harsher than others, such as the whole "months of natural recovery" approach. Others are much less so. Dragon Age II (I know, I know, shun the heretic referencing a videogame in a D&D discussion) took the approach of treating HP as an encounter resource: outside of combat, they regenerated so fast as to be virtually indistinguishable from an automatic restoration to full after every fight. It combined it with a system in which being reduced to 0 bestowed an injury, the effects of which was that injured characters had lower max-HP than they did uninjured. Stack up enough injuries, and it was very hard to stay upright during combat. Magical healing (both in spell and potion form) existed, but if you fought well enough to avoid being reduced to 0, it wasn't actually necessary.

That DoA II stuff sounds a bit like healing surges (except unlimited surges), the challenge being to survive a fight (and then heal up) rather than try to keep hp up all day.

As long as all flavours of priest/cleric are reasonably balanced against each other, then in terms of broader game balance which one joins the party shouldn't have any particularly different impact.

They might all be balanced, but they're playing different roles. I don't think a cleric of death and a cleric of life are playing the same role in the party, and it doesn't make much sense to give them all the same weapon proficiencies/armor proficiencies/hit points/Hit Die values either. They're both priests, and play a similar societal role, but I don't think they should be part of the same class.

It may come as a surprise, but not all parties (even in the days before 4E's significant expansion of the availability of healing) went into battle with a Cleric on their side. Even those that did have a Cleric didn't necessarily have a Cleric that used their healing abilities (one complain often lobbied against 3E Clerics is that they were more potent when they weren't using their magic to heal).

My experience in AD&D was not having a cleric was ... boring. We had a campaign that only went from 1st to 2nd level where our only healer was a paladin. That was 2 hp per day. (Maybe 4 at 2nd-level?) The DM took to letting us find lots of healing potions, but gave up because it was breaking suspension of disbelief. (Every edition prior to 4e had really slow non-magical healing, so needless to say we felt that hard.) Sure, it was possible. That didn't mean it was good or fun.

The existence of non-healing Cleric variants as potential members of the party is no more of a game-balance upset than the possibility that you might not have a Cleric in the party at all.

See above. It was a game balance "upset".

I think that a single societal role should translate into a single class.

And I disagree. And this is one reason why I think we're arguing semantics. The name of the class is much less important to game design than what it does.

After all, if the Fighter is expected to be broad enough to cover the category of "really good at fighting with weapons", which includes such concepts as the plate-wearing sword and shield knight AND the leather wearing archer

Naturally, since WotC is dumping 4e design, this is the case, but I think it's kind of ... bad. You can even get stuck with some of the issues of the 3e ranger (or frankly any of them) or monk where you get abilities you don't want or need. (A fighter with low Strength, high Dex and the Archery specialty is still getting the ability to gain bonus damage to melee attacks, for instance.)

Of course, WotC isn't going to listen to me

 

[Grydan]

Kind of. I'm actually not a fan of the weapons, and turn undead isn't needed, but yes, I expect them to have healing magic. Otherwise they're not a member of the cleric game class, they're a member of the priest social role.

It was entirely possible for the original Cleric to reach Patriarch (the final named level) without ever gaining a single healing or disease curing spell. It was never possible for them get around the edged weaponry restriction. All Clerics automatically had the ability to turn undead. Which then is more essential to being a member of the Cleric game class?

While yes, they were the only one of the original three (and if you add the later Thief, the "core four") classes that had access to healing magic, there was nothing that required an individual Cleric to ever have any of the healing magic on their spell list.

This is why I distinguished the two. (I also don't think the term "cleric" applies to holy men, shamans, etc from many other cultures. I don't see cleric = priest.)

Alright, but I also don't see "Cleric" as representing "magical healer", because that has even less thematic overlap.

I disagree. I think the choice is which class you're playing. Playing a non-healing cleric is as weird as playing a ranger with no wilderness skills.

Interesting then that both non-healing clerics and urban rangers have been supported over the years. Even as recently as 4E, the Ranger class could choose to take Dungeoneering rather than Nature as their skill, leaving them no particular automatic advantages in surface wilderness over anyone else. Even as one of the Leader classes, the role to which the vast majority of healing abilities was granted, it was entirely possible to build a 4E Cleric that never gained more healing abilities than Healing Word.

That's actually one of the issues I have with Next. I don't think it's a good idea to (for instance) make the Swashbuckler archetype a fighter build, even though they fight. In 3.x, WotC tried numerous times to build a swashbuckler PrC that built on the fighter, and it didn't work very well. The way magic items work in 3.x played a role in it, but trying to turn a class that's optimally wearing heavy armor hurt.

To be honest, I think the Fighter class is both too broad (in terms of what archetypes they want it to cover) and too narrow (in terms of the support given to it in order to represent those archetypes).

That's a lot of unneeded options there. I think the cleric had a role too "broad" before (eg undefined), so you were basically buffing, debuffing, blasting, whacking, tanking and healing. Many of those roles can be taken by other classes, but healing is something only clerics have been able to do well since 1e. That's why I focus on the healing part. Naturally any cleric could then "build" toward taking other roles, but I expect healing to be part of all clerics. If you're a divine spellcaster who doesn't heal, then you're playing some other class.

This seems to be the meat of our disagreement. To me, all divine spell-casters are Clerics, to you, it's the smaller category of divine healers.

I'd rather give them their own class. I don't think even the rogue is a good fit for a swashbuckler, even if it's a bit closer than a fighter.

A well put-together Swashbuckler class would be a wonderful thing to see, but I'm not holding my breath waiting on it. It needs the combat prowess of a Fighter, while doing so in light armour or no armour at all, and needs the cunning wit usually restricted to dashing rogues and charming bards (verbal fencing being often just as important, or even more so, than the physical).

Does it make any sense at all for such a character to wade into battle alongside a medieval style knight in plate armour? Not really, but hey, that's D&D for you.

Was he a magical healer? Or was he doing the kind of surgery you do in real life (or d20 Modern), where you spend a considerable amount of time patching up holes and then, being unable to repair all the damage, leave the patient to rest, possibly "low" on opium? That's quite a bit different from clerical healing.

He was not, as you say, a magical healer. However, he is from a non-magical setting. I also never said that magical healing needs to be available to all.

I think roles are a much more convincing argument.

I love 4E's combat roles (and think the system suffers somewhat due to there being no roles outside of combat). However, their presence apparently deeply offends some people, so away they go. I do think that subsuming the role of "healer" into "leader" was a smart move, though. One can fill the same approximate combat role with defensive buffing of allies: preventing damage often produces results indistinguishable from repairing it.

That DoA II stuff sounds a bit like healing surges (except unlimited surges), the challenge being to survive a fight (and then heal up) rather than try to keep hp up all day.

The fact that healing surges are limited is virtually the entire point of them, as far as I'm concerned. I view their role of allowing healing to be roughly proportionate amongst characters with differing HP totals as being entirely secondary to their role of presenting a limit to daily healing. That role didn't even require a name, they could have just used "25% of your max HP, rounded down" in every healing ability to gain the same effect. It's the fact that they're a resource that you need to manage is what requires them to have a name.

They might all be balanced, but they're playing different roles. I don't think a cleric of death and a cleric of life are playing the same role in the party, and it doesn't make much sense to give them all the same weapon proficiencies/armor proficiencies/hit points/Hit Die values either. They're both priests, and play a similar societal role, but I don't think they should be part of the same class.

Whether or not they're playing the same role depends on how a Cleric of Death is put together. A OD&D Anti-Cleric is the same, mechanically, as the Cleric, with the Cure spells having reversed effects, and the Raise Dead spell becoming Finger of Death: in all other mechanical respects, the two are identical (and as repeatedly noted, it's entirely possible for either a Cleric or Anti-Cleric to have none of those spells in the first place, which would make the two indistinguishable). Certainly a 4E Cleric of the Raven Queen who chooses to embrace no more than the bare minimum of healing effects plays the same role (in the 4E sense) as a Cleric of Pelor who chooses to be a pacifist healer and choose every single available healing option. They're just approaching it in different ways.

In terms of weapon proficiencies and armour proficiencies... that's one of the very things I'm arguing (and judging from the playtest documents, WotC already agrees with me to an extent) doesn't need to be decided at a class level. It can be decided within a class. Followers of the Warbringer already gain additional weapon proficiencies, as do followers of the Trickster. In the last package, though we only had one subtype of Sorcerer available, that subtype modified the proficiencies from those listed as the base proficiencies of the class.

 

[Libramarian]

(Emphasis added.)

Why?

This is one of the heaviest bits of setting that gets embedded into the system in D&D, and I simply do not like it.

The Cleric is the servant of some god (well, not originally, as there wasn't actually a mention of any gods whatsoever in the original class description way back when, as far as I can see), but who says every god cares about the life/death cycle?

Say I decide to use the Norse pantheon in my setting. Thor is the god of, among other more well known domains, healing. So it makes sense for a cleric of Thor to go about healing people's wounds (though he should also be bringing the thunder...).

But the cleric of Týr? He's the god of law and justice and the sky and a whole bunch of other things, but not a single one of them is healing, life, or death. Why should any of his followers gain those particular gifts? How would he bestow them, if they're something Thor or someone else is in control of?

How about if I'm using the Olympians? Now, a few of them are hooked into that whole life/death cycle to be sure, but healing folks is Apollo's turf. Hermes might escort you to the afterlife, but he's not going to give anyone the ability to make return trips. Aphrodite's got procreation covered, but that's making new life, not keeping those already here around. Hades rules the dead, but he's generally not all that keen on the idea of giving anybody back once he's got them. Ares' domain will have you killing or getting killed, but healing and resurrection are off the menu.

Most real-world pantheons that I'm aware of included a god or goddess who was the patron of healing. D&D-specific pantheons generally leave this out because they all post-date a system that assumed that clerics of all deities were healers.

The idea that all clerics are healers and able to turn the undead traces back to the fact that the sources of inspiration used to create the class were monotheistic rather than polytheistic, and were put together to represent one specific archetype, not the entire category of "divinely empowered representatives of the gods". They're armoured priests from the Crusades combined with elements from Hammer horror vampire flicks with a few other random bits from various other sources. The fact that the published settings the system was used in, even from the earliest days, embraced polytheism (whether it was planned or not) created a tension that I don't think has ever been fully resolved.

Making all clerics healers isn't a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

It creates unnecessary limitations on the system, the settings, the DM, and the players.

It's almost as bad as making all healers clerics.

Yeah I agree with you about the tension there, but I think the pseudo-monotheistic crusader aspect is key, so I would rather warp the assumptions of a polytheistic pantheon to make it work. I think that idea runs deep (deeper than D&D) and allows people to immediately connect to the class in a way that they wouldn't if it were generalized to "divinely empowered representatives of the gods".

I know that idea pings me in a way that other sorts of divinely empowered representatives don't. Does it not for you?

Have you ever seen Mazes & Monsters? (it's a terrible film but should be amusing for any D&Der). I can't imagine Tom Hanks' character getting so deep into roleplaying Pardieu the Cleric if the Christian inspiration for the class were lost.

edit:
For another example, the clerics in Dark Souls (recent successful Japanese videogame) are very pseudo-Christan Crusader-ish. It's basically the one thing they took completely wholesale from D&D. I find that significant.

 

[cmbarona]

For what it's worth, I played a 4e Warlord from 1-30, and I had a blast. Some things I think contributed to my enjoyment:

• With rare exception, healing didn't take my entire turn. I still had a Standard Action to do something quite cool and non-healing-ish after healing someone.
• Damage was big and healing was big. When I saved an ally, I knew that I helped them recover from a huge hit. Further, I knew that my healing wasn't essentially wasted because I knew that, for the most part, my heal would sustain them past the next potential hit. There was a lot of back-and forth to the damage, so healing in the thick of battle mattered.
• I had many ways to heal. Aside from Inspiring Word, I had the even more awesome Rousing Words and a few other tricks up my sleeve which varied and grew over the course of the campaign. Every turn and every battle, I could take a look at my resources, my party and my enemies, and say, "Don't worry, we got this."
• I kept adding useful riders to my Inspiring Word throughout my career. I think this is one aspect the OP is getting at. The healing was primary to that ability (I almost never used it primarily for the rider effects), but there was more to it than just the HP count. This further differentiated my healing abilities from those of Clerics or other leaders, or even our Paladin. What this meant was...
• My healing fit my character concept. I liked the idea of the Warlord class from the beginning, and I felt during my career that I healed like a Warlord. My character (or class) wasn't cool because I healed, my healing was cool because it fit my character (or class).
• Finally, I wasn't just a healbot. To liken it to a meal, I felt like I was given a delicious feast, and everything went together. There's a reason some vegetables go better with certain meats, which go better with certain starches, wines, desserts, etc. The broccoli was good, but the broccoli was even better not just for its own merit, but for the way it complimented everything else. Classes should be holistic experiences, and while you can make healing very interesting, it should always be considered alongside the ways it fits the rest of the class.

Great, now I'm hungry...

 

[Grydan]

Yeah I agree with you about the tension there, but I think the pseudo-monotheistic crusader aspect is key, so I would rather warp the assumptions of a polytheistic pantheon to make it work. I think that idea runs deep (deeper than D&D) and allows people to immediately connect to the class in a way that they wouldn't if it were generalized to "divinely empowered representatives of the gods".

I know that idea pings me in a way that other sorts of divinely empowered representatives don't. Does it not for you?

No, it does not for me. To me, the assumed polytheism of the system and its settings should trump the mechanical and thematic restrictions of a single class.

I don't get any immediate connection to that construction because that's what it is, a construction. At no time prior to the publication of the original D&D system had there ever appeared in history, myth, legend, fiction, or fable that particular peculiar combination of benefits and restrictions that made up the original D&D cleric.

The armoured crusading priest who forswears edged weaponry because they're not allowed to shed blood (because beaning someone in the head with a mace won't cause bleeding? uh-huh) is a misunderstanding of history.

(We also already have an adequate class to represent the historical crusading clergy-man: the Fighter. After all, the priests of the Crusades fought Muslims, not the undead, and generally speaking had a distinct lack of magic of any sort, healing or not.)

The clergy-man who can chase off the undead is largely borrowed from Hammer horror films, and in none of those that come to mind do the clergy run about in armour or have magic spells.

The original D&D spells that bring about plagues of insects and turn sticks into snakes are obviously Moses references (and I don't recall any tales of Moses going about clad in armour, or about him fighting the undead, but maybe I skipped that part).

Raise dead? That's a whole other biblical figure. Pretty sure he didn't use weapons or armour of any sort.

Have you ever seen Mazes & Monsters? (it's a terrible film but should be amusing for any D&Der). I can't imagine Tom Hanks' character getting so deep into roleplaying Pardieu the Cleric if the Christian inspiration for the class were lost.

edit:
For another example, the clerics in Dark Souls (recent successful Japanese videogame) are very pseudo-Christan Crusader-ish. It's basically the one thing they took completely wholesale from D&D. I find that significant.

I can't say that I've seen the film or played the game.

I'd say it's also significant that a rather more famous and successful series of Japanese videogames that were clearly inspired by D&D fill the magical healing role with White Mages wearing robes, rather than mace-wiedling psuedo-crusaders. I'm sure more people have heard of Final Fantasy than of Dark Souls.

---

I think I should probably clarify my position by listing a few of the things I'm not saying.

- I am not saying that no Cleric should be able to heal.
- I am not saying that no Cleric should turn undead.
- I am not saying that no Cleric should wear armour.
- I am not saying that no Cleric should have weapon restrictions.

Instead, I'm saying that all of those should be optional aspects of the class. If one wants to play a OD&D style Cleric it should definitely be one of the possibilities of the class.

But at the same time, both you and KaiiLurker commented on classes carrying unwanted baggage, and to me, these things can be just that. Why is every Cleric expected to have abilities that specifically combat the undead? Are we building into every existing setting, and every possible not-yet-made setting the idea that ALL gods have grudges against the undead? That all possible interpretations of what undeath is in your campaign world must be anathema to what the divine is?

Clerics of war gods should have better arms and armour than clerics of healing gods. It makes no sense at all for a Cleric of Kord, Bane, Ares, Týr, Odin or any other war-god to have the old-school restriction against edged weaponry.

Clerics of healing gods should have (far) more healing than clerics of war gods. I want it to be possible to have a pantheon in which divine magical healing isn't a universal gift of all gods, but something that only the god of healing can bestow. The system should be flexible enough to allow either approach.

To me, if we're to consider Cleric to be one of the four core classes, then it should be the broader "primary divine spell-caster" and not the narrower "specific artificial archetype combining pseudo-Crusader with Hammer vampire hunter, Moses, and an unprecedented in legend and lore degree of magical healing".

Heck, if it's the semantics of the whole thing that are bugging people, then sure, let's rename the class the Priest, and make the classical Cleric a subtype of that.