Thursday, July 10, 2014

Healers in Old School D&D

I was going through some old materials the other day while working Strange Brew and found my notes on the Healer class.

That got me thinking and I dug up my 1st Ed AD&D characters and found my character Celene (enspired by this bit of Elmore art).  She was a Healer. Not a Cleric. Also she was my first 2nd character. Stuffed into the wrong folder I guess.

The healer I used back then was an odd mix of materials I had written for the witch, a necromancer class that no one has seen and the Sun Priest.
They all related in a weird way.

I tended to use Clerics more as the Occult Researchers of D&D.  If it was an evil monster then they knew about it.

So healers, even pacifist ones, had more to do in my games.

Did any of you use Healers as a seperate class? If so how did it work out for you? Did they have awesome 80s hair?



3 comments:

Tom Doolan said...

All of my characters had awesome 80's hair (and some still do!). But, I never used a "Healer" before. Strictly Clerics and Paladins for this kid.

Scott Anderson said...

Sounds dull, tbh

Woodclaw said...

I've never run the Healer as a separate class (although the idea occured to me once or twice) but, at the same time, I've never been really satisfied on having healing being the exclusive domain of one class only.
While I'm relatively comfortable with restricting battlefield healing to one or two people in the group (the Priests in most D&D-ish games) I think that out of combat healing should a bit more widespread among adventurers. The "healing magci euqals no need for healing skills" philosophy that many dungeon crawlers tend to adopt often makes me uncomfortable. Matter of fact when I tried to rework some games in something of my liking, I often try to tie the two together, so that magic is more of boost over the basic skill, instead of an overall automatic success.

As for the 80s hair ... I never consciously used them, in spite of being a children of the 80s.