Who heals in a Druidic society?

[Byronic]

An additional note about my setting:

While Shaman's are part of the primal powersource I didn't use them or Barbarians in my "Druidic society" for two reasons.

1) The Elvish influences in Druidic society colour the classes used. The mechanics and flavour of the Shaman and Barbarian classes do not fit in well with the nature of Elves in my setting

2) One of the things I've done to make my setting more diverse and satisfy my players desires to see and experience different cultures I've created certain mechanical differences. The Tribes on the planes are the one of the only ones to use Shamanistic magic while the Druid class is mostly limited to Druidic society. I've done the same with certain feats, paragon classes etc.

 

[Solodan]

You could also use rituals - create "Druid Only" rituals in your game that have some decent supernatural healing. Blammo, it not only can be a cool roleplaying descriptor, you've got your druidic healing. Since it is a ritual, you can potentially make it far more powerful than mere Cleric words, offering healing beyond mere HP's. Say a PC gets maimed, the druid could plant a seed in the missing limb and have it regrow much like a plant until it fully forms into a new functional arm.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Based on my admitedly limited course on witchcraft, the occult, and stuff like that, the idea of divine, arcane and primal power sources fit into different types of religion/magic.

Arcane taps into sorcery and magic, which unlike religious rituals involves direct control of supernatural forces. Religion (divine) involves negotiating with a god, goddess or multiple gods/goddesses. In the case of shamanistic (primal) cultures, the supernatural is not gods, but spirits that are in all things (instead of that exist beyond). Similar negotiation is made, but the spirits are essentially equals in the equation as the shaman's spirit speaks to the spirit of a deer willing to give his life for the village, etc.

It is possible to create different kinds of societies, but societies built around classes probably aren't the best idea. Technically, there aren't tons of PCs running around in a 4e setting. If there was, then a society that completely lacks certain roles would be destroyed by rival groups.

 

[Nivenus]

No offense, but it seems to me that you're inventing the problem rather than dealing with one the 4e rules throw at you. It's not that I mind you choosing to fluff your setting differently - that's fine. But is there any real reason shamans can't fit into your druidic society, simply refluffed? That would solve your healing problem right there.

In fact, in some ways, 4e shamans are very much like 3e druids - they have animal companions of a sort, which druids do not by default have, and they're excellent healers. In truth, I can't see any reason why they don't work.

However, maybe that's just too far for you to go and there are specific reasons why you don't feel as though the spirit-fluff of shamans works with your druidic societies. That's fine. But it should be expected that the more you diverge from the 4e mechanics, the more you're going to run into "issues" like this.

 

[chitzk0i]

It might be clearer if you stopped calling it a "druidic society" and called it Bigwoodsistan or something. You don't really need a mystical healing font for the PCs to visit. You just need someone who's trained in the Heal skill (for the common folk's problems) and someone who can cast rituals that will deal with more supernatural diseases.

Further, Druids, Wardens, and Shamans in 4e all channel the power of nature and spirits to acheive their goals.

Besides, gods don't fit in the elven psyche. Why do humans cleave so closely to the elven pattern that they still don't revere gods?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't really like the current description of the Primal Powersource so I'm ignoring it. Druids in my setting have a religious function, although with spirits and elements rather then Gods. And as I'll explain later the typical DnD Cleric is quite impossible in Druidic society.

I shall attempt to explain Druidic society in my game as an example.

Well, this makes it a much more specific question than it seemed to be from the start of the thread, but that's cool.

I think that in terms of the conception of Druidic society you would get just from familiarity with the game Shamans or Clerics would be pretty well an assumed inclusion.

Partially because of Elvish influence the most common Heroes to come from Druidic society in my game are Warlords, Druids, Rangers, Wardens and Fighters. If Druidic society would need to defend itself or form a raiding party said warband would be heavily influenced by these kind of classes (while obviously not all PC's, they would be the equivelent in NPC or Monsters). This would be handy if they were fighting with or against a group of PCs. And I like my setting to have internal coherency.

From this description I think Warlords are really we're you're going to have to go for healing. If you need it to be supernatural - as you explain elsewhere - than I think you should either say that Warlords in this scheme have some access to supernatural healing or just say that people use rituals on top of mundane healing efforts.

Are bards out for this society, too? Because that would solve your problem and seem to fit the theme.

In my game the Druidic society was started by Elves and later on copied by humans who decided that these Elves might be on to something (of course with some differences). However neither the Elves or the Eladrin in my setting believe in Gods. The concept of religion simply does not exist in the Elven psyche.

Druidic human societies instead revere and try and live in some sort of harmony with spirits representing certain things like Cats, Trees etc (borrowing the concept from the Elric mythos).

And how are Shamans different in your setting? Because this seems really really appropriate to Shamans. Almost more appropriate than to Druids.

So I'm interested to see what you are doing with Shamans since from my reading of the classes I'd almost reverse their positions in terms of what you are saying here.

However this still leaves me in a pickle. Since setting wise they have no healers. And when my PC party goes through a Druidic society I would like to see that they have SOME access to SOME sort of supernatural healing. The simplest way to solve this is to either use some kind of Leader class (fluffed to fit) since this also means that if a party with a Druidic theme wanted supernatural healing they could get it.

Warlords are not an option for this. While I can swallow their healing ability used in an adventuring party as the person only having a flesh wound, the same would not work as the main healer in a society. for immersion reasons if nothing else.

If this is really how you feel about this, then - aside from Bard - I think there's a simple way to go about this.

Create an NPC sub-type for this society that does supernatural healing. Unlike the supernatural healers in other societies it never developed into something that could go out and adventure as a discipline.

You already have Warlords and Druids with rituals who can provide adequate healing 'in the field' so if you need something that fits into the society 'at home' you have no need to make it mappable to an adventuring class.

Just create an NPC type that does supernatural healing and then maybe a paragon path that gives some of those abilities to PCs from Druidic societies who want to pursue that path.

Borrow from 2e and call it Hierophants and you've both crafted an easy elegant solution and put in a nice shout out to Druid's Past.

 

[Irda Ranger]

What's with this assumption that every NPC in the world has a PC character class? The DMG is pretty clear that such is not the case.

If people need a healer, they go to a healer. That person has ranks in Heal, maybe some healing rituals, maybe some herbs, etc. Maybe they even have skills or powers not available to adventurers, sort of like how surgeons that go to medical school are better "healers" than Marines who are "trained" combat medics (my modern analogy to being a Warlord). They're not an adventurer. They're neither Cleric, Druid nor Shaman in the "I'm 6th level" sense. Maybe they're a cleric, druid or shaman (note the lower case) in the professional sense, but that's a campaign setting issue.

 

[Fede]

As Irda said, you shouldn't try to pigeonhole your npcs in pcs classes. If you need some healers for your druidic society, you simply know that npc X is the person people of that society go to if they are in need of healing.
If you need game mechanics (because X has to interact with the PCs) you should make him trained in the heal skill and you can give him some rituals (remove disease, remove affliction, etc.).
If this isn't enough, you give him the ability to perform "healing magic": from a fluff standpoint, it's described as you want; from a mechanical standpoint is the cleric's healing word or the warlord's inspiring word refluffed.

 

[Sir Brennen]

Even if there is no Cleric class, you could still allow Druids to multi-class into Cleric to re-inforce both the Druid as religious leader and healer roles. This gets around the gods issue but still allows a class with an amount of magical healing that would be just fine for the types of injuries he'd have to heal day to day in a village.

One thing about MC'd characters in 4e, especially from a DM's perspective, is that you can think of them as sub-classes of the primary class. They can represent specific orders or schools of training for the primary class. For instance, a particular order of elves in your world might be known as strong front-line warriors who seem to appear out of nowhere. This group could all be fighters that are required to multiclass into rogue.

So for a Druid/Cleric, just forget the fact that the healing comes from the Cleric class, and consider the skills/powers just things that druids of a particular order learn to do.