Hints on Class Design in 5th Edition

I’m going to make a slight detour in my series on Mass Effect 3 to talk about the first truly interesting tidbit to come out of Wizards of the Coast’s weekly “Legends & Lore” column regarding 5th Edition (or, as they’re strangely calling it, “D&D Next”). Just today, Mike Mearls gave us the first in what will hopefully be a run of articles on general class design. This first article discusses broadly the design goals for the cleric in the next edition. What you’ll find in the article probably won’t feel very interesting at first. Clerics will be healing, using divine magic, representing their gods, and perhaps wearing heavy armor. If you’re familiar with clerics at all, all of that’s been the case for around thirty years now. We do, though, get a few interesting tidbits, and I'd like to speculate wildly about what those tidbits mean for the new edition's class design as a whole--if the world needs more of anything, that thing is lots of speculation from everyone (What, you think I forgot about it?).

The first of these tidbits has to do with divine magic as a whole, which could have some implications for the druid, as well (all quotes are, unless otherwise noted, drawn from the "Legends & Lore" article linked above):

Divine spells are rarely naked displays of power meant to smite and blast the cleric's enemies. Instead, the cleric's magic lends strength, support, and durability to both the cleric and his or her allies. Spells such as bless, cure light wounds, and neutralize poison are iconic divine spells. They lend aid to the cleric's allies and help reverse the efforts of the cleric's enemies. A cleric might help overcome an ogre berserker by healing the party's fighter, allowing the fighter to survive long enough to deal a deadly attack.

For veterans of D&D, this probably seems pretty familiar. The prevailing wisdom regarding clerics has always painted them as support characters, but there's actually been a shift in what clerics actually do (or at least, what they're best at) recently. And no, that shift didn't actually start with 4th Edition. 3rd Edition did a lot of weird things with the clerics because no one liked playing them. In 3rd Edition, clerics were solid blasters at many levels with the right domains and spell choices. Higher level spells like storm of vengeance and miracle were far from the subtle, indirect things we were used to clerics focusing on, and you could now play a cleric that did all of that stuff without having to be a specialty priest (that is, a priest your party hates because you don't heal them).

4th Edition continued the trend, blending healing with flashy damaging effects and the like as part of the standard kit of the Leader Role. The role itself was heavily influenced by the crusader class from 3rd Edition's Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, which is perhaps appropriate, given that Gygax's original inspiration for the cleric were romanticized crusaders.

Now, by and large, in 3rd Edition, most cleric spells were still subtle, but with game improvements like spontaneous healing, you didn't have to sacrifice the flashy spells to keep the subtle ones in stock. Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game continued the trend by essentially allowing clerics to heal without using spells at all, and indeed, with proper character choices, also handle things like poison and disease without them, too.

With my best speculating hat on, I wonder if specifically calling out the subtle effects that in some ways fell by the wayside means we'll be seeing something more like the cleric of old than the cleric of the last decade or so. Pre-release material for the cleric in 4th Edition highlighted the exact opposite, emphasizing the fact that you could heal while doing cool things, instead of having to waste your actions on them. That's a notable shift, I think. By way of association, this seems to suggest that the druid (assuming it makes it into the Player's Handbook) will have a spell list a lot like the one it has to day, as their spell list is still largely rather subtle, excepting the thematic spells like chain lightning and ice storm.

Next on the list, we have clerics reflecting the gods they worship:

A cleric of the god of shadows should have different abilities than a cleric of the god of storms. On an adventure, they should have different approaches that are supported by divine gifts given to them by the gods. We should expect a cleric of the god of shadows to excel at hiding—even in heavy armor—while a cleric of the storm god can call down thunder and lightning.

Of the Editions of Yore, AD&D 2nd Edition went the farthest with this concept, giving specialty priests spell lists made up only of spells appropriate for their deities. No doubt this led to a lot of strife at the table, though, as no matter what, people seem to expect clerics to be walking life batteries. A cleric of the thunder god that doesn't even have raise dead on his spell list isn't useful to a large number of adventuring groups. 3rd Edition attempted to solve that problem through Domains, which provided a small thematic list of spells, but these spells were so few in number they were often eclipsed by the frankly gargantuan general cleric spell list. As a result, most clerics ended up feeling a lot like each other, regardless of their domains.

I'm actually not too familiar with the way clerics and their gods were handled in 4th Edition, but it does seem at the least that the developers want a cleric's choice of god to have a far greater influence on his or her abilities than it did in 3rd Edition. If done properly, this may make clerics far more interesting to play, but historically, nobody's really succeeded at that yet (in D&D and its successor, anyway). Beyond all that, if clerics have too many cool things, they may end up being too powerful, which was a major problem in 3rd Edition, which gave a lot of new toys out in an attempt to make people play the healer.

If I had to hazard a guess, we're going to see something like additional domain abilities as a cleric gains levels, as we find in Pathfinder for the cleric, and also the divine oracle's mysteries. Whether or not we'll see a compartmentalized spell list I can't say from this with any confidence. I can imagine, though, a base cleric list of those subtle, iconic cleric spells mentioned above, fleshed out by spells in thematic keeping with one's deity. Considering I've tried to do that on my own (and gave up in the face of the task's immensity), I wouldn't mind seeing something like that in a new edition.

Last, and definitely actually foremost, for me, though, is this bit:

Keep in mind that these goals are guiding principles for the typical expression of a class. One of the concepts we've embraced is the idea of creating starting points, but then allowing a lot of room to maneuver for players who want to tinker with mechanics or who prefer to craft their character's story first, then find mechanics to match that story second. As I mentioned at our PAX East seminar, our battle cry is "Don't get in the way." The basic idea behind that approach is that we create a starting point, but then give players the options and tools to modify their characters as they see fit.

One of my personal problems with 4th Edition was that the strictly codified class roles and class builds and power selections got in the way of my character concepts. I'm the sort of player that likes to take a relatively flexible base and try a lot of different things with it over time. Every time I play a character of a class I've tackled before I like to explore a fighting style I haven't tried before, or focus on non-combat skills, or whatever else. Because 4th Edition wanted a set of finely tuned classes for balance, you didn't actually get a lot of options in determining how your character fought--most classes had two basic fighting styles (say, the ranger's archery or two-weapon fighting) and if you wanted a ranger with a two-handed sword, you'd probably have to play a barbarian, even if you didn't want to be an angry savage.

For me, that lack of player option really limited the potential I saw in the game, though I know it worked really well for a lot of other people. Personally, if the above bit about not getting in the way isn't just "PR speak," I'll be far more willing to check out 5th Edition when the time comes. If 4th Edition had released with a more open class system that allowed for a lot of experimentation and a wealth of options for every class, I probably could have overlooked many of the other problems I had with it. As it is, I switched to Pathfinder some time ago and haven't looked back, but a small part of me has always pined for D&D itself.

These little tidbits are the first thing that have me really thinking Wizards might have a shot at winning me back.