Aleena the Cleric by Larry Elmore
With AD&D, the cleric’s role as a healer was established from 1st-level on, and they even got bonus spells for high Wisdom scores. They went from having fewer spells than magic-users did to having more. In 2nd Edition, the rules talked about clerics without healing powers, but that sort of cleric was not popular. Someone had to play the cleric, and that meant a cleric who healed party members. The poor cleric had to memorize healing spells, limiting their access to all the other cool spells that clerics have. Some spell levels lacked good healing spells, which was reportedly intentional. Since healing spells pushed out most other spell types, giving clerics no good 2nd-level healing spells meant that they were free to pray for spells that were more fun to cast. For 3rd Ed, we addressed that problem with spontaneous casting, letting clerics swap out any prepared spell for a healing spell of the same level.
One thing we decidedly did not fix in 3E was that somebody had to play the cleric, or something close. In the RPGA’s Living Greyhawk campaign, my barbarian picked up a level of cleric at 2nd level just so I would never again play in a party with no cleric. Then for the next two levels I continued with cleric because I was not a fool. The 3E cleric ended up so unbalanced that at Wizards I gave a presentation to RPG R&D on why it’s more or less impossible to balance the class. To understand why the cleric is hard to balance, it helps to think of the cleric’s opposite, a “berserk” class.
With a “berserk” class, the barbarian-type character deals an oversized amount of damage, which is balanced by damage that the character sometimes deals to allies. The “berserk” is cool to play because it deals lots of damage, and it’s the other players who really pay the cost that balances this benefit. Variants on this idea have appeared a couple times, but I consider this sort of class virtually impossible to balance. For its distinctive feature to be powerful enough to appeal to the player’s sense of power, the damage to allies has to be high enough to annoy the other players. If the “berserk” is fun to play, it’s at the cost of other players’ fun.
The cleric is the opposite of the “berserk.” The cleric’s combat ability is penalized in order to balance its healing capacity. This healing power, however, benefits the rest of the party more than it benefits the cleric itself. Unlike the player who likes playing berserks, the cleric player gives up some of their power in order to benefit the party as a whole. The cleric’s trade-off is something like, “Well, you’re not as combat-worthy as a fighter or wizard, but that drawback is balanced by all the healing you provide to other player characters.” How do you get players to play an altruistic character class like a cleric? How, as game designers, could we make clerics interesting to play when so much of their power benefited other characters instead of making the clerics themselves cool? We never framed the question that clearly to ourselves. Instead, we intuited a balance that seemed right. The answer to the trade-off was to make the cleric pay a small cost in terms of reduced combat abilities for a large benefit in terms of healing. Players would play them because they’re almost as cool as other classes in their own right (small cost), and they offer a significant amount of healing, which makes them valuable (big benefit). What do you get when you give a class a significant benefit and balance it with an marginal penalty? You get a class that’s overpowered.
On the plus side, I’m pretty happy with how the clerics turned out in terms of flavor. The 2E clerics were sort of generic. Since the 2E Player’s Handbook was world-agnostic, the rules for clerics were based on their Spheres of Influence rather than the identities of particular deities. In my personal AD&D experience, I liked playing clerics because one’s connection to a deity and religion gave me plenty of material for how I would roleplay a character. In 3E, the gods of Greyhawk gave default 3E clerics more world flavor than default 2E cleric had. Short descriptions in the Player’s Handbook were all players needed to hang their imaginations on these gods.
The puzzle of the altruistic character class intrigued me, and I came at the concept with two new classes for 13th Age. The occultist is a spellcaster who breaks the laws of space and time to protect allies and to make their attacks more effective. Most of the occultist’s spells are interrupts that get cast on other characters’ turns. For 13th Age Glorantha, I designed the trickster class. Their default attack deals literally no damage, but it sets up allies to hit the target for additional damage. Tricksters also have various ways of drawing bad luck on themselves to benefit other characters. The trickster class is so altruistic and masochistic that it has, I think, only niche appeal. It might be a class that’s more fun to watch being played than to play.
Another issue with the cleric is that it’s impossible to balance classes with mostly per-day abilities (that is, spellcasters) against classes whose abilities are at-will, such as the fighter or rogue. That issue, however, is a topic for another day.
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