Once upon a time, there were these D&D designers who decided that clerics were boring. Why should every cleric have the same powers, even though one cleric was a priest of the god of battle, and another was a priest of the god of love…

Now, all of this makes a lot of sense. It really does. Why should the powers that one god grant be exactly the same as another’s? Well, unless the gods all got utterly drunk one night…

Where things go pear-shaped is when you get to actually implementing it in the game.

D&D is designed, at its heart, as a team game. Each of the characters has their own abilities that are meant to be distinct from the others. The Fighter has good armour, lots of hit points, and hits things with weapons. The Thief has poor armour, moderate hit points, and attacks from positions of stealth and does lots of out-of-combat things. The Magic-User has no armour, poor hit points, and uses magic spells to kill monsters and perform various utility tasks. In pre-4e games, the Magic-User also had that strange aspect of Vancian magic: they had big effects, but a limit on how many per day, whilst the Fighter, like the Energizer Bunny, would keep running on…

The Cleric, as originally conceived, is a holy warrior. Their armour, hit points and melee strength is just a little lesser than the Fighter’s, and they have a minor form of spell-casting; primarily curative and aiding magics.

As D&D has progressed, the Cleric’s spell-casting has become more and more significant. At times, they’ve infringed very heavily on the Magic-User’s turf (as the MU has infringed on the tasks of the Thief). One of the problems with the system of magic we have… which is very much “whatever sounds like a cool idea at the time” can go into a spell, without always a proper check of whether it actually fits the class or not.

However, during the design of 2nd edition AD&D, some of the designers had this bright idea of dividing up the spells into “schools” and “spheres”. One was for magic-users and one was for clerics. The idea was that by creating these different groups of spells, it’d be an easy way to create differentiated clerics and magic-users. You see, Gary Gygax had included the Illusionist class in AD&D, as well as the Druid class. And the designers thought that it’d be the work of an instant to create eight specialist wizard classes just by dividing up the spells. Oh, and you could create speciality cleric classes (just like the druid) by doing the same with the cleric spells…

It was a terribly flawed idea.

The reason it’s so flawed is twofold. The first is that spells are not created equal. Divination spells are not the equal of evocation spells. The second is that you actually expect a wizard to be more than “guy who cast spells”. You need them to be “guy who casts spells to blow up our enemies”. And cleric is “guy who cast spells to heal us and hits monsters with mace”.

When you looked at an AD&D 1st level magic-user, you could be 99% sure that he had the sleep spell memorized, because it was what made the character worth playing at that level. Friends? So, not. The AD&D magic-user was the artillery that got the group out of the really bad situations they found themselves in. Just a few goblins? The fighters got into the action. A lot of goblins? Then out rolled the magic-user and his sleep spell.

The cleric was a support melee guy with support spells. Of course, this isn’t always the most exciting role – which is why we got the horribly, horribly overpowered 3e cleric – but it actually does have a niche and doesn’t step on too many toes. And it’s important to have him in the group!

Unfortunately, AD&D 2e and the Complete Priest’s Handbook with its “build your own speciality priest” managed to forget that the cleric had a role. They looked at the roleplaying conception of the class without actually remembering that it had to be played in a game.

So, you could have the wonderful sensation of having a Cleric of the God of War with all these destruction spells (but no healing), or a Cleric of the God of Love with all these healing spells, but nothing to help in combat…

It’s little wonder that when 3e came along, the designers threw out all of this “make your own bad character” material and standardized the cleric. Now, if someone was playing the cleric, you knew what you were getting. It wasn’t a poor wizard, or a wannabe fighter, it was a cleric – melee, healing and buffing. Priests of various gods were distinguished by domains. Of course, the balance of domains had its own problems…

4e continued with the 3e path, except it defined roles a lot better. The Warlord is a Cleric without the god bits. It actually plays quite differently, although they have overlap as both are “leaders” (i.e. buffing and healing). The domains are gone, absorbed into deity-specific feats, which are very sparse in the initial books. One expects that with the feats and paragon paths, designers of speciality priests in the future will be able to make some itneresting combinations. However, all of these things are based around the same core.

Of course, you can still customise your cleric with your selection of powers. What 4e does is say “this is your role, and you can fulfill its minimum requirements”. Unlike 2e, which ignored whether you’d be any use to your party or not…