When Did Cleric Spell Selection Change?

[Dannyalcatraz]

When I did it, I did it in moderation...and even then, I got a few dirty looks until the players figured out my motivatons. Once they understood that my actions were modeling the gods' superior knowledge of the course of future events, they played along. They knew I wasn't being arbitrary.

To go whole-hog with this, you'd be best off if you let your players know ahead of time what was going on, and even then exercising this power with great care. Perhaps certain spells would be on an "auto-approved" list.

 

[Orius]

It was taken out in 3E, ostensibly as part of a plan to remove all those little "DM fiats" that were spread through the rules. I'm guessing it was felt they weren't needed because of the overriding "step 0" clause, but somewhere the implicit "rules as written" approach taken by a large portion of gamers started to override it, so "step 0" tended to fall into the foreground a lot.

I think there was some move to the cleric spell selection like this in 2e. In the Basic rules, the whole process of how clerics got spells always seemed kind of vague and fuzzy to me. In 2e, especially in the later rulebooks, it seemed to get more codified, probably because it wasn't all that clear to begin with. It's one thing when the rules tell the players its up to the DM; it's another thing when the rules DON'T tell the DM anything, and he's got to figure it out on his own.

Starting spells for wizards seemed the same way to me. The number of spells a wizard started with in his spellbook always seemed contradictory. And sometimes the rules were wonky, like in Basic D&D it was kind of implied that a wizard only had 1 spell to start with, but how the heck is he suppoed to add more if that one spell isn't read magic?

Now more on topic. As is frequently done in 3e the power is out of the DM's hands. 3e does specify that clerics can't cast spells with a alignment descriptor opposed to his or his dieties alignement (p. 33 Chaotic/Evil/Good/lawful spells). I wonder how often this is really followed.
Who doesn't want to be able to cast Protection from Good and Cure spontaneously.

That was a good move IMO. There were implications to these effects in the 2e rules, but this codified things for the sake of consistancy.

 

[RFisher]

hrmm...

I wonder what it would do to the game if you made the clerics spell selection completely up to the DM. (Or a random table or soemthing.)

Not to put the DM on a power trip or soemthing, but sort of a way to show the priest as being but a servant of his god...

The humble cleric should voluntarily leave the choice up to his patron anyway, right? (^_^)

And sometimes the rules were wonky, like in Basic D&D it was kind of implied that a wizard only had 1 spell to start with, but how the heck is he suppoed to add more if that one spell isn't read magic?

It’s a strategic choice! You can choose Magic Missile now and be zapping things right out of the gate, but you can’t take advantage of any scrolls or spell-books you find. On the other hand, you can choose Read Magic, rely on your wits alone for a while, and put the DM in the situation where any spell he uses against you has a good chance of becoming yours.

(A common interpretation, BTW, is that MUs in B/X D&D don’t need Read Magic for the spells they get automatically when leveling up.)

In my recent classic D&D campaign, the Elf PC choose not to take Read Magic, but later acquired it through the spell research rules—once she had found a number of scrolls and spell-books to use it on.