Quote from: Werekoala;372325Clerics have much more leeway (to be good or evil or anything in between), and you do in fact need evil clerics. Who else is going to create the roaming armies of the undead?

LN clerics of Wee Jas! I speak with authority, as my character is the head of that church!

Quote from: T. Foster;372335Since evil clerics (at least in Original D&D) are set up as mocking and perverted mirror-image of standard clerics -- crypto-Satanists to the standard clerics' crypto-Christians: they're labeled as "anticlerics," have all the same spells in reverse, and have all the same level titles but with the word "evil" added (evil acolyte, evil adept, evil priest, evil bishop, evil lama, etc.) -- it follows that they'd abide by the same weapon restrictions out of a sense of perverse irony, the same way they have upside-down crosses, "unholy water," and so forth. Think of cartoonish mustachio-twirling 60s-70s Anton LaVey/Rosemary's Baby/if-Chick-Tracts-were-true sort of Satanists; they're not just evil, they're proudly, self-identified Evil, presumably at least partly for the sake of taking the piss out of the standard (non-evil) clerical establishment.

I utterly agree, but you don´t need them as player characters.

Quote from: T. Foster;372335Since evil clerics (at least in Original D&D) are set up as mocking and perverted mirror-image of standard clerics -- crypto-Satanists to the standard clerics' crypto-Christians: they're labeled as "anticlerics," have all the same spells in reverse, and have all the same level titles but with the word "evil" added (evil acolyte, evil adept, evil priest, evil bishop, evil lama, etc.) -- it follows that they'd abide by the same weapon restrictions out of a sense of perverse irony, the same way they have upside-down crosses, "unholy water," and so forth. Think of cartoonish mustachio-twirling 60s-70s Anton LaVey/Rosemary's Baby/if-Chick-Tracts-were-true sort of Satanists; they're not just evil, they're proudly, self-identified Evil, presumably at least partly for the sake of taking the piss out of the standard (non-evil) clerical establishment.

You just described a lawful evil cleric I ran years ago.

I played him as a low-key megalomaniac. If he didn't get his way, he would say something like, "When I come into my own, all of you will be slaves chained in the depths of my temple. Now, where are we going again?"

Abyssal Maw said...

QuoteActually I think quibbling is stupid because of this.  I grant that this makes mathematical simulation of reality guys unhappy. But hey, D&D.

Anyhow, Without taking the powers into account all you get is a pinhole view of how it all works.

A minor difference being multiplied by 7 makes it less significant?
Powers actually compound the problem, in this case at least. You can't just houserule up x-bow damage without causing further issues e.g. without rogues whose powers need to use 'crossbow, bow, or sling' becoming unbalanced.

Also, I'm curious as to why your GF took superior crossbow (d10) instead of superior longbow (d12), if they're both exotic.

Speaking personally, I think the best thing 3e did out of all of it's contributions was totally opening up the class of cleric both in terms of alignment, and belief system.

They took a class that was basically "paladin, with better spells", and made it something that could be tweaked all it's own to fit all sorts of religions and beliefs and concepts.  

I love clerics largely for that reason.

Quote from: J Arcane;372405Speaking personally, I think the best thing 3e did out of all of it's contributions was totally opening up the class of cleric both in terms of alignment, and belief system.

They took a class that was basically "paladin, with better spells", and made it something that could be tweaked all it's own to fit all sorts of religions and beliefs and concepts.  

I love clerics largely for that reason.

I would say that Faiths and Avatars from middle 2nd Edition was the foundation for that, and is also an excellent book in its own right.

Complete Priest's Handbook:

The move from the generic jack-of-all-trades Cleric to the specific Priest builds that happened in 2e was one of the really good things from that edition. Makes more sense in a play balance , class niche, and most of all a role-play perspective.

Quote from: Benoist;372511Complete Priest's Handbook:

Also a good book, but not as thorough as P&A.  Unfortunately, P&A was entirely focussed on Forgotten Realms, but the format and the ideas were easily translated to any campaign or pantheon.  The two books together really made the resistance to playing a cleric obsolete.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372521The move from the generic jack-of-all-trades Cleric to the specific Priest builds that happened in 2e was one of the really good things from that edition. Makes more sense in a play balance , class niche, and most of all a role-play perspective.

The idea was good (and has its roots in the special notes Gygax attached to the various World of Greyhawk deities) but the implementation, at least IMO, left a lot to be desired. The cleric class made sense in OD&D where it was almost-explicitly (they use crosses as holy symbols) medieval Christian. When AD&D went to explicit polytheism but kept the cleric class as medieval Christian it made a lot less sense and it was obvious something needed to be done about that in the next revision of the game. 2E, to its credit, took that obvious and necessary step. They just didn't (at least IMO) do it very well.

That's one of my pet peeves about pretty much everything TSR did in the post-Gygax era. It's almost all good ideas -- if you read a 1-2 sentence summary of the product's contents you'll almost always find yourself saying "yeah, that sounds like a useful and interesting product that will improve the game," but when you got the actual product and read through the actual details it was invariably disappointing and less-than-expected, not only failing to live up to the promise of the premise but, at least in some cases, actually tainting it and inhibiting further progress and development in that area.

I finally, just within the last year (when ex-TSR employee Mike Breault showed up at the K&K Alehouse briefly to talk about his tenure at TSR (~1984-1989)), learned why that was: that TSR management came up with proposals for books -- title, format, page count, cover price, and a 1-2 sentence summary of contents -- and solicited them to Random House (their distributor to the book trade) on that basis, and then whatever Random House expressed interest in they assigned somebody in the design department to write, whether they had anything interesting or worthwhile to actually say on the topic or not. You've been assigned to produce a 128-page book and can only come up with 80 pages of actual interesting and useful content on that topic? Well, you'd better come up with 48 pages of filler in a hurry because that book's coming out in August and Random House has already ordered 100,000 copies!

Whee.
I wonder how they actually come up with the page counts.
"and I think the Complete Munchkins' Handbook should be [rolls dice]...147 pages." ??
 
I didn't particularly like Spheres as far as personalizing 2nd ed clerics went, and I found priests of specific mythoi generally too much work. Even though, yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Both of those are core (PHB) concepts though, so probably not due to weird page counts.

Comparatively, I thought the Wrath of the Immortals set (0D&D, Rules Cyclopaedia era) had some interesting 0D&D 'specialty priest' rules (ignoring some of the filler - e.g. too many clerics who just got Infravision as their power ). Haven't actually gamed with said rules though.

Quote from: T. Foster;372553The idea was good (and has its roots in the special notes Gygax attached to the various World of Greyhawk deities) but the implementation, at least IMO, left a lot to be desired. The cleric class made sense in OD&D where it was almost-explicitly (they use crosses as holy symbols) medieval Christian. When AD&D went to explicit polytheism but kept the cleric class as medieval Christian it made a lot less sense and it was obvious something needed to be done about that in the next revision of the game. 2E, to its credit, took that obvious and necessary step. They just didn't (at least IMO) do it very well.
!

We kicked it a stage further. so if you want d8hd and thaco you get less spells. If you want to get full cleric spells you get thief ranked thaco and d6hd.
This moved away from the christian  cleric to a different thing.
I was never convinced by the christian Cleric thing anyway. The idea that they were based on the Crusaders didn't wash with me as the templars are either straight up fighters or possible paladins. What confused me was the cleric as described as a justification for the armour and the Thaco was describing a fighter or a paladin at the best. Paring them down to priests made far more sense.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372670I was never convinced by the christian Cleric thing anyway. The idea that they were based on the Crusaders didn't wash with me as the templars are either straight up fighters or possible paladins. What confused me was the cleric as described as a justification for the armour and the Thaco was describing a fighter or a paladin at the best. Paring them down to priests made far more sense.

I think it's important to point out that the Paladin was a later addition to the classes of the game, which originally included Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic User. These classes and the way they were conceived/thought of owes a lot to the miniatures wargame Chainmail, which explains why Clerics were originally thought of as sort of Crusading Priests healing other Hero figures on the battlefield. It's only later that the Paladin broke through, which gradually asked the question "what do Clerics represent in this game, exactly?" and led to their ultimate versatility in later editions of the game (though one should not forget, their spells' selection already was a pretty significant way to customize them in actual play).

Quote from: Benoist;372675I think it's important to point out that the Paladin was a later addition to the classes of the game, which originally included Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic User. These classes and the way they were conceived/thought of owes a lot to the miniatures wargame Chainmail, which explains why Clerics were originally thought of as sort of Crusading Priests healing other Hero figures on the battlefield. It's only later that the Paladin broke through, which gradually asked the question "what do Clerics represent in this game, exactly?" and led to their ultimate versatility in later editions of the game (though one should not forget, their spells' selection already was a pretty significant way to customize them in actual play).

This is a bit like have multiple conversations on similar disjointed topic with the same person but in different rooms
I really have no attachment to original rules. I played Blue Book for about 3 months before moving to AD&D, but I was 10 and self taught so had no preconceptions. Generally where something came from for me is only of historic interest. The cleric in AD&D was I felt restricted to a healer role which was dull and almost pre-ordained. If as a PC you opted not to fill with heal spells the other characters gave you so much grief
Then there was the wish to use dieties out of the Deities and Demigods books and then you hit why does a god of Ptah have healing spells? 2e fixed all that for me and really felt like a progression.  
Once we were all using 2e priests I came up with a new hit point system that tried to do what hit points claimed to do and was in that regard much closer to what you see in 4e (but with an underlying wound system apart from the hitpoints) and the rapid recovery of hitpoints meant we didn't need healers, certainly not as PCs, a model which is much closer to the fiction.

Quote from: T. Foster;372553The idea was good (and has its roots in the special notes Gygax attached to the various World of Greyhawk deities) but the implementation, at least IMO, left a lot to be desired. The cleric class made sense in OD&D where it was almost-explicitly (they use crosses as holy symbols) medieval Christian. When AD&D went to explicit polytheism but kept the cleric class as medieval Christian it made a lot less sense and it was obvious something needed to be done about that in the next revision of the game. 2E, to its credit, took that obvious and necessary step. They just didn't (at least IMO) do it very well.

That's one of my pet peeves about pretty much everything TSR did in the post-Gygax era. It's almost all good ideas -- if you read a 1-2 sentence summary of the product's contents you'll almost always find yourself saying "yeah, that sounds like a useful and interesting product that will improve the game," but when you got the actual product and read through the actual details it was invariably disappointing and less-than-expected, not only failing to live up to the promise of the premise but, at least in some cases, actually tainting it and inhibiting further progress and development in that area.

I finally, just within the last year (when ex-TSR employee Mike Breault showed up at the K&K Alehouse briefly to talk about his tenure at TSR (~1984-1989)), learned why that was: that TSR management came up with proposals for books -- title, format, page count, cover price, and a 1-2 sentence summary of contents -- and solicited them to Random House (their distributor to the book trade) on that basis, and then whatever Random House expressed interest in they assigned somebody in the design department to write, whether they had anything interesting or worthwhile to actually say on the topic or not. You've been assigned to produce a 128-page book and can only come up with 80 pages of actual interesting and useful content on that topic? Well, you'd better come up with 48 pages of filler in a hurry because that book's coming out in August and Random House has already ordered 100,000 copies!

Correction: The idea was fantastic, and the implementation was fantastic. Spheres of magic? Thank you very much. 2e specialty priests rock on toast. Period.