Pastor- A cleric archetype.


Homebrew and House Rules


Primarily as a thought process, I've come up with an idea for a Casting, support focused Cleric.

The Pastor:
Primarily focused on helping people, these folks are not as adept at the art of warfare as their Clerical cousins, but are far more adept at conversation and connecting with their allies.

Spontaneous Casting: A Pastor does not gain the ability to Spontaneously cast Cure or Inflict spells.

Sermonic Performance

An Pastor gains the ability to deliver a select number of supernatural and spell-like performances through the force and power of her divinely inspired preaching and exhortation. This ability is similar in all respects to bardic performance as used by a bard of the same level (including interactions with feats, spells, and prestige classes), using Perform (oratory) as the pastor's performance skill. However, an pastor gains only the following types of bardic performance: countersong, fascinate, and inspire courage at 1st level; inspire greatness at 9th level; and inspire heroics at 15th level.

Sermonic performance replaces a Cleric's good fort save, replacing it with a poor one.

Channel Energy: The die healed or hurt by a Pastors channel energy is increased to d8s.

Divine Connection: A Pastor may connect to a number of people equaling his Charisma modifier- They gain all the abilities of being a familiar, treating their masters level as the Pastor's level. Their intelligence is not modified.

Domains: A pastor, at level 10, gains a bonus domain of their choice.


First off, this sounds like a good idea. Clerics delivering sermons before battle, letting their allies know that god or justice is on their side. There should definitely be a way to do this. Below is just advice, treat it as such.

This is a bit overpowered, let's analyze.
Losing:
Spontaneous casting cure/inflict
A good save
Gaining:
Bardic Performance for countersong, fascinate, inspire courage, inspire greatness, inspire heroics.
Average +1/2 /level channel energy
'Divine Connection'
Third Domain

For a good example, lets look at the newly introduced variant multiclassing. If the cleric gave up half her feats, she would gain Badric knowledge at a later level, Performance at a later level and at a penalty, Versitile performance at level 11, lore master at 15.

So, half feats means more bardic performance that you're giving, and a slew of other things Bardy. You're giving up spontanious casting, which while not a feat, can be gotten similarly with a feat, as you can replace it for specific spells. The save is worth 3 feats technically, but isn't an even trade. You're close, at least.

I don't suggest paying for more abilities with saves; I know where you're coming from here, but balance IS an issue, and I'm not sure how it will play out.

The channel energy bonus is bad. Don't be better than the standard class at that, unless you're a specialty, i.e. two-handed fighter gives up armor training to hit harder.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean with divine connection. DO NOT give the ability to cast self-only spells on people; the alchemist can do it, its broken there, don't do it here.

The third domain adds insult to energy; This pastor is already a straight step up from a cleric, when he should be a step down in areas like this.

In summation, the Cleric doesn't have much to give up. She can pay with lowered saves, losing feats, lowering the channel energy die, domains, class skills, and arms/armor proficiencies.

Here's two options:
1. Pastors, since they don't see as much front-line battle, should lose Medium armor proficiency. I'm not seeing a cleric archetype that loses spontaneous casting, so I wouldn't do it. Lose one domain, and lower your channel energy die one step to a d4. Gain the bardic performance, versatile performance, and well versed abilities 4 levels later than a bard as your pastor level-4.

2. Lose both domains, and the spell slot that accompanies them.
Gain the Bardic performance ability of the bard, versatile performance, and well versed.

It may still need some refinement, but I would allow it in my game, assuming no one else wanted to play a bard or bard-barian. For other things like this, I'd suggest you take a look at rogue genius game's class fiddling, you can find it here. Basically you look at a parent class, give up one set, and gain another; if your case, take the cleric, lose the 'domain servant' features, and gain the Bard's 'performer'. Although not completely balanced, these approximations are a great starting point, and are straight up what my second suggestion is.

Good luck.

RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8

I wouldn't suggest losing both domains as pseudos suggests but I would suggest certainly rather than gaining a domain, the pastor actually lose ONE of them. The performances should then replace the domain skills one normally gains at certain levels. Domains vary but for most domains you gain an ability at 1st, 8th, and 20th level. So you would therefore get a performance at 1st, 8th, and 20th level.

Remember, rule of thumb for archetype design is that there should be a generally equivalent tradeoff level per level for a given ability. I.e., trade trapfinding for an ability that boosts skills in a different way. It doesn't always work that way precisely -- tactician fighter gains skills for loss of bonus feat, but you can still see easily where the tradeoff is. As Pseudos points out, there are nowhere near enough tradeoffs here. And a change of a fortitude save for a gained class ability is way, way too disparate to work. Fort save loss might account for, say, a boost in skills/level.

Spont casting is a pretty minor ability and would thus only warrant a fairly equally minor tradeoff. Something like a low level spell like ability or the ability to spontaneously cast a domain spell are common. I can see the slightly boosted channel trade off here (lose one positive energy ability to slightly boost another -- giving it roughly +1 damage/channel increase on average).

If, with your support caster theme, you had the class give up certain spells from the spell lists (evocations and other direct attack spells, etc.) then some of the tradeoffs would be more apparent.

Also, it is typical for "support clerics" to lose a lot of weapon and armor proficiencies (see also cloistered cleric and ecclesitheurge).

Good luck!


... Crap. I forgot the core function of the class. Primarily, it was intended to be a more caster support Cleric... So it was supposed to shift down to poor base attack bonus.


The purpose of spontaneously casting sure spells was so that clerics don't have to grudgingly choose cure spells every day. You have hampered his ability to choose good support spells.


If your intention was to change the BAB, that's not an archetype, that's a new class. Even if you're heavily based on cleric, you've made enough questionably even trades and core adjustments that your neither a cleric nor are you appropriately powered anymore. It seems playable where you left it, but not balanced.

Ciaran Barnes wrote:
The purpose of spontaneously casting sure spells was so that clerics don't have to grudgingly choose cure spells every day. You have hampered his ability to choose good support spells.

Totally agree; don't ditch this minor but very important ability.

Playtest it, and see how it goes.


+1 on just making a new class, and +1 on modeling it on the arcanist.

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I don't see why you can't have a cleric archetype with low BAB and no armour proficiencies, if everything else is the same. You merely have a non-combat cleric focused on other specifics such as skills, domains, or channeling.

I have felt very much for the longest time that there should have been a non-combat cleric, much like how a wizard is a non-combat class, and focuses on spellcasting,

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