Sorry, I meant the class, not the societal role. I hope we're not talking semantics. The druid class, for instance, bears virtually no resemblance to the "real" druid.
Well, the druid class has a hard time resembling the "real" druid, because all information we have in druids is at best second hand (more often third hand or worse) and recorded by foreigners who had a tendency to misinterpret and misrepresent cultures they viewed as more primitive.
But I was meaning both the societal role and the class, as I see no particular reason why the two cannot be combined.
I suppose it is, to a degree, semantics. However, if I can say so without putting words in your mouth, 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. 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.
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.
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.
They've said that the four core classes are the broadest in terms of the archetypes they cover. While that's certainly true of the fighter, and to an extent true of the Rogue (though occasionally they wander a little too close to making it just the Thief again), 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.
Somehow I don't think a fighter makes a great healer. Or a low-Int rogue.
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.
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?
Should all fighters be healers? Probably not. But if we allow
any inspiration based healing into the game, then certainly
some fighters who choose to pursue it should be allowed a degree of access to it. Even without inspiration based healing, surely any character who was a doctor or healer of some sort prior to becoming an adventurer (which seems to me an eminently viable character background) should have access to some healing abilities, regardless of their class.
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)
[Shifting healing into a specialty available to all classes]only works if you make healing OP, in the sense that you're giving this incredibly powerful specialty to a certain character. It becomes a bribe, like the 3.x cleric.
I disagree. There are people who enjoy playing healer. It's certainly not everyone, and not necessarily even one in every group that plays, but as we've had people come forward on this very board and say "I like playing healers/other support characters", denying the existence of such people is foolhardy. If healing were to be a specialty then the approach to how potent it should be would be to make it as valuable as any other specialty, rather than making it more potent. The game could then be balanced around the idea that healing is less necessary than it has been at times in the past, but still desirable enough that nobody ever complains that one (or more) player in the party has chosen it as their specialty.
1) Healing is a D&Dism, and it's one that's not likely to go away.
2) I don't think it's possible to make it go away. While I always run D&D (except when I ran d20 Modern), I've played in a wide variety of game systems. Lack of healing is one of the worst things you can do to a game. I've seen this crop up in everything from ASoIaF (the non-d20 version) to Warhammer to D&D 2e (without a cleric) to d20 Modern (without someone having Surgery). It sucks when the PCs are too wounded to continue (especially if natural healing takes a long time), and it sucks even worse if only one PC is wounded. You pretty much have to tell them "thanks for playing". (We had a PC in ASoIaF out for a month after taking wounds in battle, and not a single other PC was wounded. That PC was half-dead for being brave and frankly saving the rest of our butts. His reward was being too badly wounded to move, for a week, in bandit-infested mountains.)
3) I don't think D&DN's system of trying to give PCs high hp but low healing will work. Luck will work against the PCs. Eventually someone will be dropped to low hp, or just dropped, and no one can heal them. At least at low levels, because you apparently get a lot of HD at higher levels.
1) Every D&Dism that
has gone away has had that argument put forward before its departure. Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings having class and level restrictions was a D&Dism; it went away. THAC0 was a D&Dism; it went away. Change is always possible, if enough people want it.
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.
And the thing is, I'm not in fact arguing for its removal from the game. I'm arguing for it's reduced necessity, and for it's removal as an assumed feature of all clerics, and for it's availability to non-clerics (either to specific classes such as warlords, or as broadly available specialties).
3) I think this is an area where they're expecting to give us several dials to adjust to suit our individual campaigns, and they're still working on nailing down a default setting that works well.
One reason I didn't like spheres is you couldn't predict what kind of priest you'd get. It didn't work well for game balance. If you're looking to play a priest of Non-Lifebringer, that should be a different class with the same societal role of priest. (I'd say invoker, but WotC has some weird flavor issues with it.) I don't see why they'd have anything in common with a priest of Apollo except divine flavor.
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. 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). 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.
I think that a single societal role should translate into a single class. If one role is significantly similar enough that we can give it a fairly specific blanket description ("all those members of the clergy who have been bestowed with the ability to cast divine magic by their god"), then it's probably specific enough to be a single class. 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 AND the rapier-wielding swashbuckler, then it's entirely possible and equally reasonable for a single class to include both the armoured mace wielding "traditional" cleric and the "my god granted me the ability to do crowd control" invoker, as well as the laser-cleric who fights the undead with his god-lasers.
