I Swing the Vorpal Spork of Irony like some Hyperborean Usurper through the Hordes of the Unwashed.



Thursday, December 2, 2010

Gleefully Killing Clerics Since 1981

First off I would like to tip my hat to the RPG'ers who voluntarily play healers in adventuring parties.  They rarely get awesome treasure or have bards compose lengthy biopic songs about them.  But, they are extremely important! 
     The newest incarnation of every one's favorite RPG has brought some healer issues to the forefront.  The main one is that "You can't kill a 4th Ed. Party that has a good cleric/healer."  Now this might be a tad overstated, but in a balanced encounter the players will always have a huge upper hand.  Is that so bad? Yes.  It makes combat extremely boring and sometimes painfully so. 
     So how do you change that.  You can tweak the monsters, give them regenerative powers and action points among other things.  But, that has the unwanted effect of extending the combat.  The easiest and most efficient way is to go after the cleric.  You certainly don't HAVE to kill them, but you should definitely make them a focus of the bad guys.  When the healer is more worried about his own ass, he becomes less of a healing machine and more of a real party member.  This makes combat more fun, and makes the time fly by.

5 comments:

  1. We had this happen last night. Our DM went after our healer hard. It certainly spices up the combat. I was down to 9 hp from 70 at the end, and had to make a choice between saving my own sorry butt, or hoping my attack would kill the last foe threatening the party. (I chose the attack, and fortunately succeeded.)

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  2. This also happened in the Encounters game last night, our dm, Tom, Went after my Cleric hard...I survived, but only after using all my healing powers on myself. Unfortunately meaning one of the other party members went down... I was able to stabilize him, but with no healing powers left, he was out for the rest of the encounter.

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  3. I'm reminded of the PA comic:

    http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/9/21/

    True that.

    -Ben.

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  4. Right on Tom. Two weeks ago I made the mistake of not killing the cleric and going after the tank instead. Through various healing words, second winds and machinations it took over 90 hp of damage to kill a level 2 fighter with a 21 AC. Obviously the monsters were spent at that point and easy prey for the rogue and cleric who survived.

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  5. Nice article. Reminds me of some of the Dark Sun games we played!

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