Clerics and Detection, PART 1, or "If You've Stuck Yourself in Heal-Bot Mode You've Got Your Own Damn Self to Blame"

Thus does pronounce The Spawn of Endra!

[Okay, here's my Cleric cred, right off the bat. I've been playing the Cleric Innominus the Follower of Endra in Carter's game since January of 2010. I've read all the LabLord and AEC rules about Clerics closely, I compile all of Bat's Ancient Vaults and Eldritich Secrets Divine Spells, and I think about how to use my PC to do more interesting stuff all the time. Because of this, I am biased toward the view that Clerics are Bad-Ass.]

There's been a bit of a "Clerics ARE Bad-Ass" vibe going on in the blogospheroid, between Carter's last post on the subject and this one at Grognardia that really didn't have much to do with Clerics initially (it was about a Rients post on class generation). But a segment of the comments on Grognardia boiled down to the relative merits of Clerics, and how they are perceived by some as just heal-bots that no one wants to play. I made a comment there that was perhaps more abrasive than is appropriate for a Canada-based blog (just kidding, Canucks! I know you're not as civil as everyone thinks!):

Quoth I: As a person playing a LL cleric for the last year and a half, I have to say if your cleric is turned into a heal-bot, or never gets to fight, or never uses all the really useful detection spells to make yourself like f'ing Van Helsing then a) you suck as a player, b) you play in a pretty sorry game, with c) other pretty sorry players. If you can't make a B/X cleric awesome and fun, you've got serious problems.

Maybe that's harsh. A commenter suggested that they have a hard time elbowing in to get their way in a game ... and so I guess they get pressured into not fighting and just healing folks. Some folks suggested it's the MMOs that are the problem. Others said it goes further back. Well, I'm sorry but ... well, what I said. Something SUCKS: you, the GM, the other players, the gestalt of all that. B/X/LL Clerics are bad-ass and a lot of fun to play. They don't suck. Some human element of your game sucks.

Clerics apparently are terribly boring in later editions of D&D. I haven't played those editions, but I get that impression from such posts as this one at Rule of the Dice. There I read this rant, and I commented thusly:

Ahoy. I play a cleric in what are essentially B/X rules.... I'm not savvy with later editions, and have no opinions about their mechanics. But for the earlier editions, the magic isn't super spectacular, but the cleric whips ass in combat compared to many other classes (outside of fighters, of course). Yes they can cast Cure Light Wounds, but this idea that they hang back and offer first aid like M*A*S*H doesn't happen in play.

Is this a common thing in 3.x or later that the Cleric ... just ends up being a first aid kit? That's not my experience ... yes, there are times where my character heals a bunch of folks, but it's after my character crushed several skulls in a series of withering flail attacks.

And CDGallant_Knight (the author) responded:

Back in the "old days," clerics were the second-best option for combat, after fighters. (They had to do something once they ran out of spells, after all). The recent addition of so many other classes with specialized attacks and damage-dealing options, however, makes what little combat potential clerics had obsolete. The clerics are there to keep the strikers/DPS characters alive, so they can keep pouring on the damage.

And I said "Well, yeah then that DOES suck." (NB: I'm so old-school I have no idea what 'strikers/DPS characters' are, though I get the drift.)

But I'm not playing that edition. When we first started the Lands of Ara campaign back in January of 2010, I recall Carter mentioning that our party might want to have a Cleric, or even his setting-specific Sword Cleric of Frey, on board, and I took this off-handed remark to heart. I assumed he had some undead-heavy stuff planned. And I also was being that sort of "responsible player" that is alluded to in the Grognardia post comments: somebody has to be the stupid cleric or else we can't play, I'll take one for the team. But my motivation as one of two experienced gamers in the group with a bunch of almost total RPG newbies (two of whom choose to be house-ruled Bards off the bat ... humanities grad students!) was to make sure we were a well-balanced party, because I wanted the campaign to succeed at gaining and keeping new players and giving them enough time to figure out the game through play.

I NEVER played Clerics back in the day and I assume that it was because of all the god-damned (as it were) tonsured monk-looking fools with crosses and rosary beads that were depicted. And not having a spell at first level in B/X also seemed sucky (a topic well-treated in Rients' post and on Grognardia, and in Carter's last post). And no edged weapons. They seemed sucky, but now I know they weren't. The Lab Lord Cleric borrows the AD&D spell progression for the class, and so another layer of potential suck has been stripped away.

Before I get into the detection stuff, which is the point of PART 2 of this post, I'll touch on a few things that make Clerics play really cool. Many of these are not new ideas but there are enough *^$*)$#@ers out there crying about Clerics sucking that they need repeating yet again:

•  The blunt weapon restriction isn't that severe. In most B/X-style play you've lost only lost rare d10 weapons, d8 one-handed weapons, and d6 missile weapons. If you're JB and consider variable weapon damage optional (as written), it's almost completely an aesthetic choice.
• They aren't ^&@#@ing priests telling everyone to be nice and turn the other cheek, and they aren't paladins with a boring moral absolutism that has almost no place in a party of killers and looters. They are trying to destroy evil or chaos or whatever in the world. By smashing its fucking skull in with a blunt object. And with righteous fury, I would expect.
• They have access to all spells of the level they are able to cast each day. This is really important. As Carter has noted, this was one of the first insights I had about the cleric when I got back into the rules. Clerics don't have to find scrolls or buy spells to gain magic. They don't HAVE to slect CLW as their first spell (as opposed to MUs that logically really HAVE to choose Sleep as their first spell after Read Magic, since they are so weak in combat). They just have to pray and do what their deity wants (i.e., destroy enemies of the faith with righteous lust ... duh, what else were you planning to do?). 
• This means that Clerics are in a better position day-to-day to assess what sorts of spells will be useful in the adventure scenario, and are able to move the game forward in the non-combat sessions when detection is going to be more productive than healing or offensive spells. It's powerful because the Cleric never incurs long-term opportunity costs for selecting a 'lame' spell over and 'awesome' spell, like Magic Users might. You select spells for the day, if they aren't useful, so what? In fact, the ability to choose each day promotes experimentation and creative application of the spells because there is no long-term commitment to keeping those spells.
• The ability to customize the day's spells to suit the gaming situation (especially if you're using the AEC Wisdom bonuses too) means that around 3rd level and higher, the Cleric's player has a lot of strategic options to consider, whether they are going to be Abu Nidal jihadist or Christopher Lee Van Helsing that day. Nobody else gets that flexibility. And in my experience that is really FUN. At times this can put you in the party's driver's seat, but just as often you get to do your bad-ass thing while the other party members do THEIR bad-ass things and it's like the A-Team just showed up to save Prince Arkus from demons from Hell!

Next time I'll talk about my favorite daily spell lists for Cleric Detective, as well as for Cleric Holy Warrior. For now, let me re-emphasize that I play my Cleric for me,and though I have a sense of trying to support the whole party, I don't put it up to a vote what spells I'll choose for the day to help everyone else out. Van Helsing wouldn't. He's trying to save reality, not save Dungo the Fighter with a +2HP CLW so he can swing his sword one more time. Seriously, folks. Clerics have have bigger fish to fry.

LL Cleric = Powerful (and well it should be)

I ran my first ConstantCon game on Monday (play report forthcoming), and since we use Swords and Wizardry White Box rules for that, I got to talking with Spawn of Endra during the session about the relative power of the Cleric class across several D&D rules iterations and their retro-clones. It turns out that 1e AD&D and Labyrinth Lord favor giving clerics spells at first level, a privilege denied them by other systems like White Box, Swords and Wizardry in general, the LBBs, Holmes, and even Moldvay/Cook, upon which LL is primarily based!

Even James Raggi's LotFP Grindhouse, which has sparked much of my recent thinking on this matter, slightly de-powers the cleric from its LL / AD&D heights, NOT by denying clerics a spell at first level, but by making their Undead Turning ability into a spell. I think that is a very clever approach, and yet as I step back and reflect upon this whole cleric scenario, I find that in the end, I may actually prefer the "high-powered" cleric of LL and AD&D.

Why?

Well, this current campaign of mine is really the first time I have ever gamed with a cleric for any sustained period of time. I never realized how cool and versatile a class the Cleric was until this campaign. I will leave the particulars of my positive cleric experiences to our group's play reports and possibly Spawn (I am hoping he may eventually post on "The Cleric as Detective"), but I do want to note here why I think that clerics SHOULD be powerful, SHOULD get spells at first level as well as their Turn Undead ability.

It really boils down to their alignment, to whose team they're batting for. As I have recently outlined,

"All clerics, unless they serve demons or chaotic demigods, are aligned with Law. [. . .] Law is what 'naturally' occurs in one's home dimension, including its 'indigenous' gods, and Chaos always comes from without, crossing into a foreign dimension via the energies of Chaos."

So Lawful clerics worship the gods local to this dimension, the so-called "True Gods" or even "Lawful Gods" -- though recall that, at least for me, deities are NOT bound by strict alignment guidelines -- so it follows that their magic should flow more easily and "naturally" here than do the arcane forces of inter-dimensional Chaos. Clerics play by local rules and accrue benefits therefrom. Magic-users tamper with inter-dimensional forces and so should have a harder (and more dangerous) time of it.

May the Arandish gods bless Dan Proctor for going with the slightly more potent AD&D-style cleric for Labyrinth Lord. I can see why some folks prefer the lower-powered OD&D cleric -- for tradition's sake, or because of the "prove their faith before being granted the ability to work miracles" angle -- but I think that, now that clerics and the Lands of Ara have finally met, the spell-at-first-level-having, undead-turning cleric of Labyrinth Lord suits my campaign's (developing and evolving) assumptions quite well.

The Funk Bard David Snell: Giving the Party Bonuses to Certain Activities

Thinest Spawn McSays:

I was minding my business about Bards recently, since I got sort of burned out on the 2d6 Bard, and I think Beedo and Carter are onto a good thing with the LotFP Specialist Bard. And I'm not against bards fundamentally. I started up a new character in the ConstantCon session the other night, Chundarr the BardBarian. He's an S&W fighter, and since he had no cash he doesn't even have an instrument. But that's the fun. How do you have a Bard when there's just no such thing as a Bard in the system and you're not going to make one up? What a quandary!

No quandary at all, says I! I'm just going to play him as a Bard and be as bardly as possible in every fight and the bonus is not in PC morale or to-hit bonuses,  but in human-being player morale, a.k.a.: fun, laughter, camaraderie, nonsense, a good time. I spent a great deal of time in the last session thrusting a giant bat carcass on a stick in the faces of our foes, which is in-game barbaric and meta-game hilarious nonsense. I daresay it was BardBaric. Chundarr is learning to be a taunting monster puppeteer. We don't need rules for that. I don't anyway.

At any rate, there's this outstanding question in the blogosphericon about how a Bard playing a harp (or lute or whatever) can inspire anybody in a fight. Well, this may not be fight music, but this guy David Snell has the range that your classic Bard Harpist would need to be a real bad-ass. Check it out:

Maybe this works better at the tavern than in the dungeon, but even so he's not messing around with that harp.

Evil Gods and Summoners

I like evil gods. I like them a lot.

This is, in part, why I am immensely appreciative of James Raggi's discussion of alignment in his LotFP Grindhouse rules, about which I have mused at length before. The main idea is that Law and Chaos are palpable cosmic forces affecting the game-world, not just moral abstractions. So almost everybody in the human and demi-human species are neutral. Demons and the undead are aligned with Chaos, as are those who meddle in the arcane arts (which could simply be called "chaotic arts"). All clerics, unless they serve demons or chaotic demigods, are aligned with Law.

In some ways, this Law/Chaos business all ties back to the presumption of a multi-dimensional universe and the possibility for inter-dimensional travel: Law is what "naturally" occurs in one's home dimension, including its "indigenous" gods, and Chaos always comes from without, crossing into a foreign dimension via the energies of Chaos.

Again, I did not really make this up on my own, although it makes a lot of sense to me. I am once again indebted to Mr. Raggi, who succinctly describes arcane power thus:

"Magic fundamentally works by ripping a hole in the fabric of space and time and pulling out energy that interacts with and warps our reality. Various mages have managed to consistently capture specific energy in exact amounts to produce replicable results. Spells.

"The Summon spell opens the rift between the worlds a little bit more and forces an inhabitant into our world to do the Magic-User's bidding. What exactly comes through the tear, and whether or not it will do what the summoner wishes, are unpredictable."

[from the Summon spell description on Grindhouse Rules and Magic pg. 142]

This description fits perfectly with the core assumptions about how magic works in Ara. We have always included summoners as part of the Lands of Ara setting, and acknowledged in our own original writeup how dangerous Summoning could and should be. Summoning is a major part of what attracts demons -- i.e., Evil Gods -- to Ara in the first place. That is why it is technically an outlawed Art in the Lands of Ara now.

Yet Summoning surely still persists. Hell, the PCs in my current campaign are hot on the trail of some demonic entities that seem to have access to Summoner-created dimensional gates of some kind!

On a practical note, I wonder if I should technically make Raggi's Summon spell available in the Lands of Ara setting? Seems logical. . .

Beedo Gives Sage Advice

I think Beedo over at Dreams in the Lich House has been on quite a roll lately -- his posts have been getting me all jazzed up and inspired. His latest one, which constitutes the debut of a new regular feature called "Saturday Sage Advice," considers the use of encounter tables as the very definition of a campaign setting.

This is a subject I remember Zak blogging about, talking about how we should describe our settings "in the form of rules (and monsters and items and all that) and nothing else." In other words, as Zak so eloquently puts it,  we should "build the fiction out of the tools you give us to run it." I like that idea a lot.

Beedo does too, celebrating collaborative setting generation wherein "details emerge organically through play at the table and no mind-numbing info dumps are necessary. Players learn details only as they become relevant." Indeed!

James Maliszewski has commented on this idea before, including back when he discussed his original intentions for Dwimmermount, stating that "Dwimmermount is explicitly an experiment in seeing how both rules and campaigns develop organically through play. [. . . ] The setting[s], like the rules, are living things and they grow best in response to stimulus, not by being force fed."

This sort of stuff has been on my mind lately due to my decision to abandon the megadungeon project on the grounds that it was being "force fed" rather than organically grown through play. In the same post in which I announced the megadungeon's temporary cancellation, I mentioned my interest in other projects such as the Lands of Ara Compendium 2011 (due early 2012) and The Tower of Death (due 2012) -- both of which HAVE grown through play. That is why they remain viable.

Even more recently, I have begun to talk with Spawn of Endra about a future project called The Lands of Ara Gazetteer, and this is where the "build the fiction out of the tools you give us to run it" ruminations really come into play for me. I have already written text blurbs about many of the key regions of the Lands of Ara for this blog (see Gazetteer hyperlinks on this page), and see no reason to repeat them in a more formal Gazetteer. No, our Gazetteer may have some very short text blurbs for each region, but it will mainly consist of encounter tables, maps, NPCs and monsters, and all that usable, gamable stuff that would allow people to play adventures in the Lands of Ara. That is a superb game product design principle, and I thank Zak and Beedo and James M. for reminding me of its importance. 

In fact, thanks are due to all the various OSR Sages who have helped me improve my game, as well as the ways in which I share it with the public. The RPG projects that are flourishing over here at Lands of Ara Enterprises are the ones that have grown out of the insights I have gained interfacing with the OSR blogging community and playing Labyrinth Lord these past couple years. I literally could not have done any of this without you!

And best of luck on the new regular column, Beedo. I know I'll be tuning in.

Session 44: Temple Desecrators-R-Us (Part 2 of 2)

This part of the session, a continuation of this one, included PCs Innominus (Clr 6), Yor (Dwf 5), Dak (Dwf 6), Vivuli (Assassin 5 / MU 4), and Uncle Junkal (Rodian Bard 4).

Underneath Kaminster's Country Manor. 
Map scale = 20' per square.

This concluding part of Session 44 started right near the end of recently killed and subsequently raised Dak's two-week recovery period, roughly Days 161 and 162 of the party's Arandish adventures.

The still-mobile members of the party ventured back down the 500' shaft a few times during Dak's recovery time, to have Viv do x-ray searches of the various rubble piles and to collectively perform such excavation operations as could be safely conducted. Thereby were recovered a few more items of interest, including a note reading: "Dearest Bobby -- Keep the faith. --Sir Reginald"

In related news, Innominus cast Tale of Death on the skeleton he and Dak had earlier excavated from a rubble pile in the caverns far beneath Kaminster's Country Manor. He learned that the fellow had died by being ripped to shreds by three saurian Balrogs named Gor, Threk, and Zorchl*.

Meanwhile, Yor sent a letter north to his relatives in the mountains west of Farn Junction, hoping to obtain news about the fate of the supposedly plague-ridden city. After a few days wait, Yor's relations reported the worst: yes, there seemed to be a deadly plague sweeping the walled town. The malady was known locally as "the Dark Plague" but Yor's dwarven cousins hadn't seen any actual cases in person; they were staying the hell away from the town and the roads.

The day of Dak's restoration to full health, Day 163 of the party's Arandish adventures, the whole group returned to what was left of the Temple of Thoopshib. Innominus inserted a gold coin (1 gp) into the slot at the base of the (now demolished) altar. The coin instantly vanished. The cleric then cast Locate Object and sensed that the coin was now far away beneath them, more or less directly downward from their present position.

So Innominus next cast dispel magic on the Thoopshib Temple's eastern exit door, green sparks shot everywhere, and the door opened. The party proceeded along a 40' eastbound passage to another door marked with the Thoopshib fish-head glyph. Dak hand-axed this glyph, only to be zapped by green sparks and knocked a pace back by the potent electrical charge. So Innominus deployed his second dispel magic spell against this magically warded door, which opened, leading into a circular chamber almost 60' in diameter.

Viv inspected the whole place with his x-ray vision, and discovered that the circular room was in fact a cylindrical elevator car seated within a slightly larger (60' diameter) shaft. Through the three other Thoopshib-glyph doors, he saw a passageway (north), a small control room with knobs and four levers (east), and another passageway (south).

The session ended with the group standing in the elevator room.

--
* The "chl" at the end of Zorchl's name is an approximation of a letter (and pronunciation) with no direct equivalent in human language.

LotFP Specialist = The Future?

Inspired by Beedo's excellent take on the Bard, I have lately been oohing and ahhing over the LotFP Specialist class (described on pp. 10-11 and pp. 30-42 of Grindhouse Rules and Magic).  As Spawn of Endra comments on Beedo's blog, the latter's graft of Bardic skills onto the LotFP thief-substitute "points the way towards using the LotFP Specialist in new ways."

Indeed, to me the implications are quite clear: we should use LotFP's Specialist as a "conversion kit" for any custom class (or so-called "Advanced" class such as those in the Advanced Edition Companion) that we want to bring into our Basic D&D-ish games.  As Raggi himself puts it on p. 71 of Referee,

"Assassins and Bards are Specialists.  If the adventure or supplement text mentions specific power that these classes might have in other games, just grant it to the particular NPCs."

What Raggi suggests we grant to particular NPCs could be used, as Beedo has ably demonstrated, to streamline the process of bringing oddball PC classes like Rangers, Bards, and Jongleurs into the mix of our campaigns.  Need a sea pirate with sailing skill?  Make Sailing a Specialist skill and make Sailors Specialists.

Using this logic, I could port the Delving Deeper Bard over to the LotFP Specialist paradigm -- or, I suppose, simply steal Beedo's Bard.  I would also like to graft Ranger skills* like Tracking onto the Specialist chassis:

Tracking - "Familiar with the signs left by humans, humanoids, and various other creatures as they make their way through the wilderness, rangers can discover and follow the trail of those they are pursuing -- sometimes even in the worst of conditions."

So the standard Ranger (according to Brave Halfling) would have points in Tracking, Move Silently, Hide in Shadows, Bushcraft, and Hear Noise. Any Ranger wanting to take the "Damage Bonus" option instead of the "Additional Skills" option (see Delving Deeper: Ranger) -- I've been using the former to represent northern Achelonian monster fighters -- could simply spend one of their initial allotted skill points to gain that ability, maybe swapping out Hide in Shadows and/or Hear Noise and instead spending a point to get that damage bonus vs. evil humanoids and giants.

Under this system, the standard LL thief would simply be a Specialist who spends points on Pick Locks, Find and Remove Traps, Pick Pockets, Move Silently, Climb Walls, Hide in Shadows, and Hear Noise.

After chucking in the Bard and Ranger skills, and changing some of LotFP's thief skill names back to their Labyrinth Lord equivalents,** my custom Specialist Skill List would look like:

Architecture
Bushcraft
Climb Walls
Find and Remove Traps [EDIT: Tinkering in LotFP]
Hear Noise
Hide in Shadows [Stealth in LotFP]
Languages
Lore [described here]
Move Silently [Stealth in LotFP]
Open Doors
Performance [described here]
Pick Locks [Tinkering in LotFP]
Pick Pockets [Sleight of Hand in LotFP]
Search
Sneak Attack
Tracking [see Delving Deeper: Ranger or description above]

It is too late for me to make the LotFP Specialist conversion in my current Labyrinth Lord campaign, because it would seriously change the nature (and , I think, potency) of our home-brewed 2d6 Bard class, currently active in play.  But one day, after the current party retires or dies (TPK!), maybe I will run my NEXT Lands of Ara campaign using a more lean and mean ruleset, mostly using Labyrinth Lord but with the LotFP Specialist thrown in to replace all non-core custom classes including the standard LL thief. I would also be ditching all the AEC crap as well, except, perhaps, the expanded spell lists. But that is for . . . the future?

Labyrinth Lord is my lover. . . from Hell!

--
* I am stealing these Ranger abilities straight out of Delving Deeper: Ranger. Raggi's Bushcraft skill already covers foraging/wilderness survival (p. 33) as well as direction sense (p. 34).
** Thanks to Mr. Raggi for providing skill name conversion guidelines on p. 70 of Referee.