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<blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7597404" data-attributes="member: 6919838">&quot;When it doesn't, then maybe the last person to turn up has to play the cleric!&quot;Or the druid or the bard or the divine soul sorcerer or they say &quot;let's go without a cleric&quot; and as the ancient text above mentions they find other means and methods.One of our more memorable 1e campaigns had a very imbalanced party where nobody had anything more than leather armor, no fighter, a half-cleric half thief and we completely changed how we approached problems than we did with the typical &quot;balanced party&quot;. This gets to the point I made above, character choices in game can influence or decide a lot about the nature of challenges they face, unless the GM is taking that away. Another game, in 3.5 equally memorable had no cleric, only a ranger-druid multi-class as any healing, so, again they adjusted their choices, managed to find non-standard solutions and find ways to fill in some of that gap by other means. Its played very different than it would have with a typical standard well balanced party.The last 5e one shot FLGS, the four players chose a warlock, a sorcerer, a bard and a rogue from the 15 pre-gens - adventure unseen. Ran thru it taking very different choices and methods and means thsn if they had chosen the barbarian, fighter, wizard and cleric from the pile.All this to me boils down to... in my experience direct and indirect - players in the vast majority of cases *do have* choices in character abilities chosen by them to play and that in a lot of those cases it is done by preference, not to &quot;forsee&quot; as much as to inform their choices going forward. If one is forced to treat rpgs like a adventure book solo thing, then when they choose rogue, they then also decide as much as possible to the pick up to play the &quot;sneaky tunnels of loot&quot; book as opposed to the &quot;tunnel of raging trolls&quot; book.But, others may have different experiences, especially if their primary basis is only or mostly in flavors of DnD&nbsp; or even only the recent editions. My gaming and GMing draw a lot from a wide variety of games - some with as much playtime under my belt as the various DnDs together, and quite a few with more than DnD5e. That is for better or worse of course. Someone who puts value in *running 5e how it was intended by designers&quot; likely sees this as a poor choice that leads to getting less out of it. Me? I long ago dismissed &quot;how strangers think we should play their game&quot; as irrelevant to our fun.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="5ekyu, post: 7597404, member: 6919838"] "When it doesn't, then maybe the last person to turn up has to play the cleric!" Or the druid or the bard or the divine soul sorcerer or they say "let's go without a cleric" and as the ancient text above mentions they find other means and methods. One of our more memorable 1e campaigns had a very imbalanced party where nobody had anything more than leather armor, no fighter, a half-cleric half thief and we completely changed how we approached problems than we did with the typical "balanced party". This gets to the point I made above, character choices in game can influence or decide a lot about the nature of challenges they face, unless the GM is taking that away. Another game, in 3.5 equally memorable had no cleric, only a ranger-druid multi-class as any healing, so, again they adjusted their choices, managed to find non-standard solutions and find ways to fill in some of that gap by other means. Its played very different than it would have with a typical standard well balanced party. The last 5e one shot FLGS, the four players chose a warlock, a sorcerer, a bard and a rogue from the 15 pre-gens - adventure unseen. Ran thru it taking very different choices and methods and means thsn if they had chosen the barbarian, fighter, wizard and cleric from the pile. All this to me boils down to... in my experience direct and indirect - players in the vast majority of cases *do have* choices in character abilities chosen by them to play and that in a lot of those cases it is done by preference, not to "forsee" as much as to inform their choices going forward. If one is forced to treat rpgs like a adventure book solo thing, then when they choose rogue, they then also decide as much as possible to the pick up to play the "sneaky tunnels of loot" book as opposed to the "tunnel of raging trolls" book. But, others may have different experiences, especially if their primary basis is only or mostly in flavors of DnD or even only the recent editions. My gaming and GMing draw a lot from a wide variety of games - some with as much playtime under my belt as the various DnDs together, and quite a few with more than DnD5e. That is for better or worse of course. Someone who puts value in *running 5e how it was intended by designers" likely sees this as a poor choice that leads to getting less out of it. Me? I long ago dismissed "how strangers think we should play their game" as irrelevant to our fun. [/QUOTE]

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