I really don't care you can heal (rant)

[DM Pun Pun]

So I recently rolled a cleric and began RPing a goodly sort that goes out of his way to help people. Sadly I ran into a roadblock almost immediately. Everyone and their mother immediately tells me "Don't heal me I do that on my own". Seriously. . . I am a cleric, I do like 1 thing - heal. I'd say about 1/3rd of the server will advise you not to heal them and the other 2/3rds look at it as a "meh, I can do that but ok" type of thing. I have only ever had one character that reacted like that myself however this was back when fast healing 3 was a thing and he had it along with 700 + hp unbuffed. I am not even talking about divine casters either. Pure fighters and rogues and stuff are telling me to pike off.

It gets worse - I practically have to race people to use my raise dead spell. The problem I think is that raise dead scrolls are extremely common. You can even buy them if you don't feel like searching a few dungeons for them. My own cleric had two of them by level 6 from the hilltop ruins for example. This means that a pure fighter can raise the dead and heal himself without any issue or worry about spending too much. No scrolls? No problem, chances are you are within a few transitions of a temple that will rez your buddy for a mere 500 coins. At that price it is probably easier and more efficient to pay than to RP with a cleric standing outside the FAI for a minute as they, being super excited to do something ICC (in cleric character) for a change, want to talk about their deity for a moment first.. Dying has really become trivial.

/rant

Honestly people have such an immersion-breaking, gamer approach to divine spells that really irks me. Here's three points about why you shouldn't mindlessly heal everyone without at the very least permission.

- Priests don't go about healing everyone in FR and or other D&D settings without charging you, or at least if the one to be healed are serving the purpose of their faithful for that moment. The reason is, why would a church need donations, if they could simply heal everyone? Even they need money. The powers of the gods don't come freely. Nor would there be much point for adventurers to do much, if everyone lived in a utopia where everyone got healed or raised from death free of charge.

- Your priestly spells are not your own! They come from your god. You are drawing power from your god. Don't overindulge the gifts your god bestows you. Use them where you have to. Your character should always be aware just as you were given these divine blessings, you can just as easily be stripped of them.

- If my character follows a god that is a rival of your god, I don't want to be touched by your god's magic. Likewise, if I have no experience with spells, my character has no certain way of knowing that you are casting what you claim you are casting. You might be healing my character at cost of something else very important for all my PC knows.

Here are the two main extremes regarding "healing" and cleric RP on this server, IMO. If the community could work together and alleviate these two dilemmas, it would certainly make the server a better place. Perhaps even compromising between the two, so that they become less of an issue would be progress. After all, it appears solving one of these problems could solve the other one as well.

[Considerate_]

Concerning the Forgotten Realms vs. NWN2 debate.

It's a bit of a difficult line to balance because NWN2 offers a very poor representation of Forgotten Realms. Just to list a few points on this area alone:

• Unbalanced economy in NWN2
• 'Unlimited' spells/rests every day in NWN2
• Easy access to conventional healing (do you know how difficult it is to heal in Forgotten Realms without magic?)
• Everyone are fully healed upon resting for six seconds in NWN2
• Lack of NPC representation and their clerical needs in NWN2
• In NWN2 you can't speed forward several days to represent travel or recuperation time

Comparing our situation to how it should be in Forgotten Realms is very difficult at the moment. Imagine that if your character broke an arm, he would need 6 - 10 weeks for it to heal without magical aide. HPs are recovered at a rate of Character Level + Constitution Modifier per day. If you got a healing kit and the skill points, you can double that - but you can no longer instant heal with them.

Player Characters would suddenly be cheering in delight at every cleric who took the liberty to offer them healing, if our situation was like Forgotten Realms. But it's not. But I'd be very delighted to see a discussion in our community for how to portray this as authentically as possible!



Regarding healing in NWN2 and deities.
There are actually a few deities who offer healing and aide, without asking anything in return. But these are the exception, not the rule (Ilmater and Lathander comes to mind).

As a general rule of thumb though, my Lathanderite will not offer divine healing to someone who doesn't give permission or ask for it. If a character is so wounded that they cannot ask, she will use conventional means to stabilize them, until they are fit to respond.

She will however resurrect anyone who has died in an area infested with the undead, or offer free protection spells to those seeking to eradicate such beings.

I have found the occasional Player Character who has refused healing, but the majority has actually accepted and RP'd well around it. Which makes me happy.
Unfortunately, I'm more inclined to remember the three players who declined, than the twenty who accepted - but that's human nature I think

[PJtheFey]

This is all true, however you can't really blame -players- (or characters) for this reaction. If they can patch themselves up just as well without a cleric, really all the cleric is doing is saving them a few coins for the healing kits, potions, etc.

I'll admit that I do have a character that will say "You can if it helps you feel closer to your god," but that's because the character doesn't like feeling she has to pay a debt to someone. The only way out of the situation short of an outright refusal, is to make it seem like by allowing herself to be healed she's doing a favor to the cleric. Should I discard this part of my character's personality (not wanting to owe anyone anything), just because there are healing kits and potions widely avaialable?

While I can sympathize, I think you need to broaden you're view of what a cleric can actually do. If you want to place yourself in a support role, then providing buffs are a much faster ticket to seeming useful than healing a few hit points. It makes it so characters aren't losing health in the first place.

More importantly within the context of the an RP server, clerics -should be- the epicenter of religious culture in the game which, unfortunately, they are often not. I often see people throwing around random cleric buffs, and as a player I have no frickin' clue what diety is granting the power. You'd think there'd be some clue based on the prayers to cast them. What's more, a lot of Clerics seem to more or less sit around and act like every other random adventurer. While this is fine at times, it'd be nice if they were were more that took steps to rep their diety. I'm not saying that there are no Clerics that rep their class, because that's not the case. I am saying that fairly small percentage of them are easily identifyable as priests and priestesses based on their non-DM event RP. It's a missed opportunity to fulfill a role along the lines of "What they do."

[Steve]

This is a Role-play Server set in the Forgotten Realms campaign world.

BGTSCC has always been considered and thus developed to be a moderate/medium Role-Play Server. So yeah, you get what you get under that classification—maybe half of Players play heavy RP, but take advantage of the lighter Rules; the other half play light RP and take advantage of the heavier Rules.

Supposedly this is what the Community Playerbase wants, because there are few calls made to change environment (but many statements that changes to a heavier RP would destroy the Playerbase population).

I'd love it to see Clerics be so special that without them, adventuring would be nigh impossible—that is true D&D for me. But since I'm usually wrong about gameplay things....

[DM Ioulaum]

Druids and paladins can also heal, and there are potions in dnd. Clerics are special in a setting which emphasizes Deities. Such as the forgotten realms. Healing doesnt make them special, divine intervention, the afterlife, and miracles do.

Of course those things are difficult to portray in the game. Especially outside of DM storylines.

[Nomster]

[...] I often see people throwing around random cleric buffs, and as a player I have no frickin' clue what diety is granting the power. You'd think there'd be some clue based on the prayers to cast them. What's more, a lot of Clerics seem to more or less sit around and act like every other random adventurer. While this is fine at times, it'd be nice if they were were more that took steps to rep their diety.

Are you sure you are not encountering favoured souls instead?

I find that not so many create clerics but maybe I am wrong.

[AlwaysSummer Day]

*asks if people can stop giving him a hard time for RPing a cleric healing them*

*gets berated for not RPing a cleric that doesn't heal people*

*gets berated for healing people without their consent*

*gets berated for healing people without RP*

*gets berated for healing being widely available*

*pretty much stops playing his cleric. . .*

[Karond]

Is this that common for you?

I've just began playing a cleric, but I've recieved a different treatment. I usually throw around lesser vigors and vigors of all varieties, and play a support role with constant buffs like recitation or prayer. The response I've gotten is all positive so far up to level 11. Although it has to be said that healing is generally fairly weak in NWN2. Damage outdoes healing regularly. When the Hierophant gets out, the healing clerics should get a much appreciated buff however.

It can be a bit difficult to roleplay a cleric sometimes. Sure, the miracles, afterlife, intervention thing DM Ioulaum speaks of are tricky, but it's not that. To me it's that most people that roleplay act like clerics. They've picked their deity, and act their dogma to perfection like it was a mold that holds their RP in place. I think most worshippers might not even know the dogma, or at least have a wide difference of opinion on their worship, but instead I find most people are just little Sharite, Banite or Lathanderite clones. This is what makes it difficult, a cleric's word on the faith is typically above other worshippers of the faith, guiding people on. But that's never really needed as most people have a perfect clerical vision of what the deity is and follows it to the letter.

[thids]

Karond you are forgetting that various faiths keep classes other than actual clerics as members of their clergy.

That aside, I do not see anything wrong with people playing highly religious characters, unless they use that as an excuse to ignore clerics of their faith. If anything, the more religious a character is, the more they should look to the clerics of their faith for advice and guidance.

[VitalTouch]

I empathise entirely with the OP, on NWN1 servers and here I have played healer focused clerics and lost count of the times that a random passerby has interrupted my RP with a casual bit of healkit or spell assault on my patient coupled with some pithy over the shoulder comment about they "fixed it for me" or words of a similar sentiment.

That said I have also had many more instances of really great cooperative patient/healer rp many of which began when a random pc came to my temple (on one of the NWN1 servers I used to play on) with some ailment or injury.

I'm looking to return to this server to try my hand at it again but whilst I know it will never happen these kinds of servers really need to improve the worth of clerics in general in respect of mundane healing and heal kits and also raise dead scrolls.
For all the reasons others have put so well, the idea that a barely literate fighter class character could command the gods to channel immense power to rob Kelemvor (or which ever setting based death deity it is) of their due is ridiculous really.

But of course for ease of play reason kits and scrolls are artificially available and usable by those who in a pnp game would never be able to use or read them.

So I guess it's just all on the cleric player to do their level best and pray for respectful players to meet them halfway.

[Karond]

Karond you are forgetting that various faiths keep classes other than actual clerics as members of their clergy.

That aside, I do not see anything wrong with people playing highly religious characters, unless they use that as an excuse to ignore clerics of their faith. If anything, the more religious a character is, the more they should look to the clerics of their faith for advice and guidance.

Sure, druids in some faiths. While there can be blackguards, sacred fists, favored souls and so on, clerics usually are a bit ahead.

Anyway, it's not the "hierarchy" I was after in my comment. I just feel like that if a character tells me who they worship, pidgeonholing them after that is often rather easy and frighteningly accurate. Pre-Time of troubles, deities are rather distant to their worshippers. It seems like a rare thing for non-clergy to have a perfect understanding of something as alien as a distant deity, even among the clergy in fact! I've read of bloodthirsty barbarians worshipping Selune in lore. That's just one example of something I don't expect to find in our community. The lack of complete information, or aspiring towards a deity, following them out of tradition or upbringing, or acknowledging the polytheistic behaviour of pretty much any character in the setting. It's a single choice on the character sheet, and I at least find that most people emulate that choice to the letter. It's like the deity section is a space for picking your personality.

[burbles]

I'm slowly taking steps to becoming a responsible cleric player and countering with it a MMO-buff-healbot mentality at least for myself. What matters is the availability of players interested in RP, not rules. I normaly disdain servers with "application only" classes. Let natural selection decide if a certain PC lives or dies as a RP entity. So, I try to build, choose spells and act around a concept, not just for convenience. And there is a convenience of having a cleric in a party even if it doesn't trying to squeeze every buff of their (almost identical) spellist.
I wish wis/sorc could also heal, if worse than a specialized clr.
I wish ToT never happens to this server, because it's basicaly just a (cheesy) way to restart a franchise and sell moar books.
And so faiths remain diverse and speculative. FR gods are not that cool, realy, when it came for actual appearance and strict dogma afterwards.

[DM Pun Pun]

I wish ToT never happens to this server, because it's basicaly just a (cheesy) way to restart a franchise and sell moar books.

You have your wish for at least 6 years.

[burbles]

Should be enough of good times for me yet