Li Shenron said:
I haven't tried the optional rules yet... I still have to get UA! However I have a couple of questions to you.
OK, I'll do my best to answer with clarity...
You have a point with this, but do you really think it's too bad? I agree that basically every Cleric would want to have several healing spells, but that simply makes for all clerics to be still identifiable as the same class. You may not choose to learn healing spells, but you'd be an atypical cleric.
It is possible that someone would wind up designing an atypical cleric that doesn't actually know any cures. She might just wind up using a handy dandy cheap wand of
CLW for patching her teammates. But it's more likely that a cleric would simply pick some healing spells and not others. For instance, UA points out that with
cure light wounds and
cure moderate wounds learned, a cleric may opt to forego learning
cure serious wounds. Remember, spells can be cast using a higher level spell's slot if necessary. Also, just like a sorcerer a spontaneous divine caster is allowed to swap out an old known spell for a new one at every even level, allowing clerics to cast off obsolete spells (like CLW when 750 gp wands are easy to come by).
It's true that if you can cast them spontaneously you will need to care much less about "surprise monsters" which can paralyze or turn someone blind; but IMXP that's not a very big fun, to have to prepare many spells just-in-case, and in all our campaigns the clerics basically had to back themselves up with scrolls, potions or wands exactly for those occasions. It wasn't that bad to do that, but I think this variant doesn't make it worse...
Well, it all depends on the cleric's repetoire. Encounters with a sea hag or mummy or some other foe that lays curses will make for a dire scenario, if the cleirc doesn't actually have access to
remove curse. OTOH, having a cleric around that
does know that spell not only makes that encounter much more bearable, but it likely gives that priest an opportunity to really shine. As the DM, I know exactly what maladies the cleric is capable of healing, so I'll know whether a certain type of encounter will be dire or easy, and that's a big help in how I pace the entire adventure for the evening.
Also I wanted to ask you how really the UA variant works. Does the spontaneous cleric get exactly the same spellcasting progression of the Sorcerer? Both spells known and per day? Does he get 2nd-level spells at level 4? Does he give up any class feature or traits for this?
I was just wondering about this because if it uses the same spellcasting progression as the Sorcerer, he will get all those spells - except orisons and 1st-level spells - one level later.
The cleric casts the same number of spells per day as before, except that he doesn't have an extra spell slot reserved for a domain spell. Instead, that extra domain slot becomes just another slot, and is rolled into his total number of spells per day. That effectively puts him between the wizard and sorcerer in terms of daily spell quantity.
The cleric's "spells known" progression is identical to the sorcerer's with the major exception that the cleric also learns the spells from his two domain lists in addition to the number of spells he's allowed to pick from his class's standard spell list. And the progression is set up so that at 3rd level and every odd-numbered level afterwards, the cleric gains access to a new level of spells, just as he does now, but at that level he only learns the domain spells. It isn't until the next (even-numbered) level that he learns a "generic" spell (just as a sorcerer would be learning his first higher-level spell until that level).
