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| The cleric has been dying since the day he was born. by Jerry Whorebach 11/18/2010, 3:54pm PST | ||||
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| The Cleric was one of the three original classes introduced in 1974 by the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. He was envisioned as a cross between the two other classes, the Fighting Man and the Magic User. Filling both the roles of holy warrior and combat spellcaster, this Cleric was both flexible and pro-active, neither of which are terms anyone would associate with the Clerics of today.
The first (and perhaps greatest) blow to the Cleric came the very next year, in 1975's Greyhawk supplement, which introduced the Paladin. Suddenly the "holy warrior" archetype was off the table for the Cleric, and it wouldn't be long before a string of more and more specialized classes (Bard, Druid, Spellsword, Battlemage, etc.) co-opted the role of combat spellcaster. By the time the first mass-market MMORPGs came around in the late nineties, the Cleric had been reduced to a supporting player, with little to do besides heal and buff his sexier colleagues. The Cleric had become the classic bored girlfriend/little brother class we know today. It was only a matter of time before video game conventions like regenerating health (and the video game-inspired "innate healing surges" of 2008's Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition) rendered him completely obsolete. (Something similar happened to the Thief, who had history's most beloved rogue - Robin Hood - stolen out from under him by the upstart Ranger, just because Robin happened to do his sneaking, stealing and swashbuckling in a forest instead of in a city. In all the stories of Robin Hood I've heard, I don't once remember him scaling the castle wall only to immediately turn around and scream "Curses! I've lost all my stealth abilities now that I'm on Urban terrain! That's a whole different skillset!") I think the lesson to be learned from the sad story of the Cleric is that, in game design as in life, you don't get something for nothing. Carving up the core classes of Dungeons & Dragons into increasingly smaller pieces only resulted in weak core classes and over-specialized new ones. If you want a new class for your Fantasy Adventure Game, try coming up with something genuinely new. Sure, it might be a complete failure, but it's also possible you could add something great to the genre, without destroying something great we already had. |
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