Semi-Vancian Divine Magic

[Li Shenron]

Am I reading this wrong?

Has this been done before in 4e or Pathfinder?

Otherwise, how come there are so few comments on the currently proposed mechanics for casting Cleric spells?

It seems to me that it heavily changes both the tactical and strategic scope of clerics...

 

[CM]

You still have to decide what to prepare each day, it's just a little more flexible.

Now what would be really cool is a feat (or even class feature) that lets you pray as an action to swap out one prepared spell for another. I'd think the gods would be OK with granting that boon to their faithful servants.

Edit: To expand on that--I was never a fan of divine casters being limited each day to spells that they decided to pray for that morning. I can't see their god saying "tough luck buddy, you asked for hold person this morning, not silence--I can't help you."

 

[Li Shenron]

You still have to decide what to prepare each day

Are you sure? It's not possible to infer clearly from the pregenerated characters, but there is no mention that they know spells other than those prepared.

 

[godfear]

To me, it appears that you have all of your "known" spells prepared and then can cast any of them by spending a slot of the appropriate level. It reminds me rather of the Favored Soul from 3.5.

 

[hafrogman]

Given that two clerics have different spell lists, with no mention of them being interchangeable, it does lean more towards either a sorcerer type system, or an entirely domain based system.

 

[The Shadow]

As I've said elsewhere, this is my favorite thing about the playtest. I've always, since AD&D days, felt that clerics would make more sense with a smallish number of 'divine gifts' rather than memorizing spells from the entire list. When the sorcerer came out, I thought, "Clerics should be like that!"

There are so many benefits to doing things this way:

* It's no longer the case that every new published cleric spell makes every cleric more powerful.

* You can easily regulate which gods grant which spells.

* It works better, fictionally. The idea of a cleric preparing a fixed list of spells each morning just doesn't FIT. The idea he's been granted a set of abilities by his god - that does.

Also: Turn Undead is a spell! FINALLY! This is another thing I've been thinking since the early 80's. And yet Divine Channeling still has the potential to give you old-school turning - best of both worlds!

Now can we do the same thing with Wild Shape?

 

[CM]

Are you sure? It's not possible to infer clearly from the pregenerated characters, but there is no mention that they know spells other than those prepared.

No hard proof, it's an assumption on my part that there will be a generic spell list available to all, and some domain-specific spells as well. The fact that they use the language spells prepared implies (to me) that there is some choice to be made in what to prepare.

This would all be beyond the scope of this playtest, though.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The Shadow knows!

 

[The Shadow]

No hard proof, it's an assumption on my part that there will be a generic spell list available to all, and some domain-specific spells as well. The fact that they use the language spells prepared implies (to me) that there is some choice to be made in what to prepare.

This would all be beyond the scope of this playtest, though.

Hmm, you may be right, though I would find it slightly disappointing. That's more or less how 2e did things.

I wouldn't object to a small set of spells that all clerics have access too - things like Bless.

But even if you're right, there's still a massive change in how clerics work - they cast spontaneously, even if they do need to prepare the spells they have access to in a given day. I mean, even if they're only prepared two spells, they can still cast up them up to the number of slots they've got.

I do note that even at 3rd level, it's assumed that both clerics have all their spells prepared every day.

 

[Li Shenron]

It is very possible that with the adventure being short and the rules at an early stage, they just limited both clerics to preparing the same few spells without mentioning that their known spells are in fact many more. I'm not sure what I would prefer.

Anyway for the Caves of Chaos playtest at least the Wiz has some strategic edge in knowing more spells (and more diverse in effects) than the Cle, while on the short-term the Cle is more flexible but the Wiz casts more spells per day. The latter is reversed compared to 3ed, where also the Cle had way too much long-term flexibility even if counting only core spells IMHO.