Spontaneous Cleric?

[Ilja]

Making a small Pathfinder E6 campaign for some friends to play, and was thinking about the cleric. The thing is, I hate the normal issue of players having to look through fivehundredandfiftyeleven different spells each day, and thought of making a consistent change to all clerics in the campaign world (I'm not in favor of an excessive number of classes either). Since at least the main antagonist is a cleric, I need to make this change, if it should be made, right now when I'm working on the campaign.

So I was thinking, what is a balanced change into spontaneous casting? If I just change the casting part into the Favored Soul's, leaving everything else intact, would that be balanced? Should they get their two domains, only one domain, or no domains? The favored soul doesn't get domains, but I feel since in PF the domains has even more importance it might be good to add at least one of them.

EDIT: Maybe this is a good solution: Giving them two domains, which they add to their list of spells known, but no extra spell slots for those spells. So that it's simply to domains that they always know. If I do that, should I lower their normal spell knowledge progression by one per spell level?

 

[Reneshat]

Have you considered the Advanced Player's Guide playtest Oracle? They spontaneously cast divine spells.

 

[Minicol]

Oracle seems fine, even though it is still in playtest, favoured soul looks too, but I do not like it as much, otherwise, you could also try green ronin's Avatar handbook for 3.5 : a mix of favoured soul and summoner.

 

[Anguish]

What's worked for me doesn't involve changing the class at all. I pick a "default loadout" for my spell-casters who have to prepare spells. Unless otherwise specified, the character can be assumed to be walking around with a certain set of spells. There are a bunch of staple spells that you really should have prepared. Things like dispel magic, protection from evil, for instance.

Have your players commit their defaults to their character sheet. Done.

Sure, there's the occasional day where you know you're going to be heading into the lair of a nasty beast that grapples everyone. Those days, your cleric simply crosses off a few other spells and writes a "x4" beside freedom of movement. What I'm saying is that you really, really don't need to review spell lists nearly as often as you can.

Oh, and once you get to a decent level where you've got a lot of spells, a great tactic is to deliberately leave a slot at each level empty. If you happen to get nailed by blindness, after the fight's over let the cleric pray for remove blindness and cast it. Basically, save a slot or four to fill out the "damn, I didn't know I'd need that spell" moments.

 

[Remathilis]

WotC's Unearthed Arcana to the Rescue!

Spontaneous Divine Casters :: d20srd.org

 

[pawsplay]

Also, if you choose not to go spontaneous, you can still implement custom class lists, rather than "every published cleric spell."

 

[MerrikCale]

even though its only in playtest form, the oracle is free and really good