Depending on how 'old' the old school is, clerics being assumed may or may not be true.

E.g. "B2 - Keep on the Borderlands" wasn't necessarily built with the intention that you'd pull a room at a time and clear it all in one day.

Honestly, I don't think the 'balance' you're speaking of really came into being until the introduction of the 'challenge rating', with 3e.

As for what we did back in the day - any full trip back to your home base would restore you to full health.  If this was at the end of the module, great.  When it wasn't, we often never made it back to that particular adventure site anyway.  We were way into 'ooh shiney' back then.

Quote from: mcbobbo;630621Depending on how 'old' the old school is, clerics being assumed may or may not be true.

E.g. "B2 - Keep on the Borderlands" wasn't necessarily built with the intention that you'd pull a room at a time and clear it all in one day.

Honestly, I don't think the 'balance' you're speaking of really came into being until the introduction of the 'challenge rating', with 3e.

As for what we did back in the day - any full trip back to your home base would restore you to full health.  If this was at the end of the module, great.  When it wasn't, we often never made it back to that particular adventure site anyway.  We were way into 'ooh shiney' back then.

Yea, good luck 'finishing' B2 without many, many retreats back to the keep.

In my early years of 1e dnd, people knew a cleric was good for healing up between tough fights, but I don't think in combat healing became a real factor until you could cast the level 6 heal spell.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;630581That's a non-answer, since monsters and encounter balance in all editions of D&D have been designed with Clerics being present in mind.

No, they haven't.

The healing powers of clerics were an afterthought. They fit in with the "holy man" archetype, so they were added. The *reason* for clerics existing, though, was to turn undead.

So yeah, you can just drop clerics and not worry about healing. Or merge the cleric and magic-user spell lists. Or add non-magical healing. I've seen several blog write-ups of house rules that drop the cleric, although I can't point to any specific downloads. I believe Jeff Rients ran a campaign without clerics, for example, and at least one of the several OSR Conan write-ups eliminated clerics. But you don't need a special ruleset.

Just. Drop. Clerics.

OD&D characters (especially before Greyhawk's variable hit dice) don't tend to have a lot of hit points, though, so the 1 point per day rule makes sense. Although I can't even remember right now if OD&D even has a healing rule.

Dark Sun is D&D without clerics and it works awesome.

Carcosa has no clerics...and no traditional spellcasters.

Healing in OD&D was about days/weeks of rest between adventures. This worked fine, but doesn't emulate a lot of modern genre fiction where such downtime would not be possible.

I use the 1 HP / LEVEL / DAY + CON bonus for a full day of rest. I personally love clerics because I love meddling gods, but healing magic isn't the domain of most of my gods.

The Tunnels & Trolls spell list has "Poor Baby" which does some nice healing and they dropped the whole cleric thing in 1975.

Well, I'm playing a Pathfinder Cleric of Sarenrae right now and I'm having a lot of fun, so I'm not the best guy that can answer your question. However, the Occam Razor is "realism". If you want for your players to be fresh and healed every time adventure calls, then you need an alternate healing system. Many have been suggested in this thread (potions/balms/salves, healing spells for Wizards, etc.)

But if you choose this path my personal question would become: why to ditch Clerics in the first place, then? (*)

The alternative is "realism": an adventurer life is short, brutal, and you end up with half of your main organs still working about three adventures in.

I see no middle ground.

(*) If you hate Clerics because they are unfun to play, then you could consider to use them as NPCs only.

I personally have a lot of fun with Clerics. I see them not as Paladins wannabes (amazingly enough you have Paladins for that), but as someone whose life gets interesting as soon as Macho-Fighter screams "MEDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIC!!!!!!!!!!!" And weapons and armor are there for the same reason I would wear a flak vest were I an Army Medic in the middle of a war zone.

Lastly, under 3.X/Pathfinder don't underestimate the "Heal" skill. I'm amazed by how many people don't even bother to read what you can do with it.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;630539To my knowledge, only Crypts and Things folds the spell healer role into the Wizard...

Quote from: K Peterson;630558Crypts & Things is the only OSR/Retroclone that comes to mind that scratches Clerics.

Nice to see some mentions of Crypts and Things here!

The magician class in C&T is a modified version of this one from my house rules for Swords & Wizardry:
http://akraticwizardry.blogspot.com/2009/07/magicians-and-colours-of-magic.html

The C&T version restores traditional D&D 'spell slots', whereas my earlier version used an 'exhaustion' system for spell casting. (Following further playtesting, the C&T version was found to be less vulnerable to abuse.)

Tunnels and Trolls gives healing spells to Wizards, along with a LOT of other things.

Dark Sun had clerics--clerics of elemental forces (and druids) in 2E at least, both are able to heal and are religious character sorts. There are no Paladins in Dark Sun, but there are clerics.


Warrior Rogue and Mage doesn't have clerics, and I seem to recall a few other similar games that didn't of the more modern but classic take on fantasy (Ancient Odysseys Treasure Awaits IIRC also nukes the cleric

Sabres and Witchery (available for free download here) has healing spells rolled into the Magic User (called a Magus).  It has a cleric type class (called a Hunter), but they don't do healing, they are more like Paladins who can turn undead and smite evil (no spells).

The tech level is a little more advanced than typical D&D (roughly the 16th-19th century level), but leave out the firearms if you want and you're good to go.

Quote from: Melan;630646OD&D characters (especially before Greyhawk's variable hit dice) don't tend to have a lot of hit points, though, so the 1 point per day rule makes sense. Although I can't even remember right now if OD&D even has a healing rule.

The OD&D rule was 1 point per TWO days. How's THAT for gritty?

I have a rule that any act of comfort -- drinking wine, cooking a good meal, listening to a bard -- done while adventuring has a 1/3rd chance of healing 1 point of damage. I had a limit of 1 point per day through this method, though. Perhaps I will up it to 3 points. I also allow people to erase all damage if they reroll their hit dice after returning to town. The one time someone took that option, though, the player rolled badly and wound up at 1 hit point.

Quote from: Reckall;630650The alternative is "realism": an adventurer life is short, brutal, and you end up with half of your main organs still working about three adventures in.

I see no middle ground.

Well, a lot of it has to do with the pace and intensity of combat, which is in the hands of the GM and players.

The only thing clerical healing does, that slowing down doesn't do directly, is give you a reserve pool of hit points that can be applied to any character, instead of having all your party hit points siloed per-character.

This means that an individual combat is probably going to have to end earlier (all else being equal) if things aren't going the party's way. I.e., someone will die, the party as a whole will retreat to protect someone, or someone will need to hang back or retreat, leaving the party short-handed.

So you'd have to slow down even more. What I mean is: you have to be more careful in individual fights, and you can't fight as often.

If the players and GM are aware of this and can entertain themselves with less fighting, I don't see a problem.

An alternative would be to just give everyone more HP to start with but keep the same pace & intensity. Or some combination.

Backswords & Bucklers has the Wise Woman/Cunning Man which is akin to an herbalist and alchemist with some very minor divination magics.

Oh, forgot to mention earlier, the game "3D6 In Order", while it has clerics, also has an arcane Healer class, which means the cleric can easily be dropped.

In Arrows of Indra, I almost considered not having a "priest" PC class, because priests weren't really adventuring types in the myths (holy men, siddhis, and yogis, yes, but not so much temple-priests).  But in the end I kept them for completion's sake.

However, priests in AoI are much less essential than Clerics in D&D.  Healing rates are handled differently, there's a doctor skill, herbalism etc.
There's no "Turn undead"; however, healing magic is available to both Priests AND siddhis (though priests get it as a basic skill, and siddhis get it as an Enlightenment power); and both classes can have access to magic that affects the living dead.

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