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Originally Posted by tbeard1999
If you include me in that category, you have not read my posts very carefully. [...] I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic.
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I'm not being ironic, and I'm not sure which category you mean (people who agree with my position or people who disagree). I think we're mostly in agreement on the nature of the problem, perhaps less so on the nature of the solution. But since there's been a misunderstanding let me try phrasing it differently.
- In order to be exciting/fun, fights have to be difficult. There should be at least a perceived risk of player characters dying and/or of the heroes being defeated and starting the next session in some unpleasant situation like being enslaved and trying to think of a way to escape from a salt mine.
- In order to avoid long boring pauses in the game, wounded characters need to more or less full health at the next fight. In particular we want to avoid a situation where some of the party is healthy and wishes to continue, but are held back by the most wounded members.
- For various reasons I can enumerate if required we don't want player characters dying very often.
But:
- It's easy to achieve Objective 1 by making fights hard. It's easy to achieve Objectives 2 and 3 by making fights easy. It's hard to achieve Objectives 1 to 3 simultaneously. In practice it involves a good deal of suspension of disbelief.
- But in the absence of healing it's pretty much impossible to achieve 1 through 3 simultaneously. If the fight is at all tough, serious wounds are almost bound to accumulate in substantial amounts.
- Therefore, bring on the easy convenient effective healing as Steve proposes. In fact, make it easier and even more convenient.
- It needs to work between battles. Having it work during a battle is optional but I think could be made interesting. Perhaps only the higher-IQ spells or talents allow it.
Maybe my phrase was a poor choice. I just meant that the party could keep fighting without pauses between battles. I adapted it from one someone else used, I thought to describe that concept.
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I think a 32 point physicker is a tough sell to a player.
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It is. In some parties it might be possible to play a fighter-scout-skill monkey hybrid along the lines of ST 10, DX 11, IQ 11: Knife, Sword, Shield, Literacy, Alertness, Physicker, Tactics, a couple more points of talents. Or an archer-thief-scout-skill monkey character who gets Bow and Missile Weapons, doesn't bother with melee weapons, and grows into the skill monkey role with experience. But I think a character that sees Physicker as the core skill is unviable, it has to be one skill among many.
Fundamentally the cleric job isn't usually a lot of fun. For that reason I'd discourage trying to make it essential. Make healing an easy ability that anyone can pick up as an incidental hobby. If there is a healer then let them do other things most of the time, and be almost as good at them as they could have been if they hadn't bought healer.
Or just have a magic waterfall nearby that's all healing potion.