The cleric's Channel Energy ability works pretty well in that a cleric can heal up the entire party with a supernatural ability instead of spells. It draws from a resource that is separate from spells, which allows the cleric to use spells to actually doing something aside from heal. There are some moments where a cleric is forced to heal enemies in order to save an ally, but these are the kind of tactical choices I enjoy. Plus, being able to damage groups of undead but not your allies is a nice nod to the legacy of the cleric I think
But it creates a strange thing for evil clerics. Why can they only heal the undead? A minority of evil clerics are necromancers. Most of them could would hate or fear the undead as much as good clerics. Why can these clerics not heal their evil allies? Surely their faith is strong enough, but why is their god not willing?
I have been toying with a variant to the Channel Energy that has been used in Pathfinder RPG since the beginning. The basic idea is this: it heals or harms based on how close the alignment of the creature is to the alignment of the deity being channeled. For example, a cleric of a neutral good deity decides to use Channel Energy to heal. All creatures in the ability's radius within one step of this alignment (CG, LG, N, and NG) are healed. If the same cleric used it to harm, then all creatures two or more steps away from the deity's alignment (CE, CN, LE, LN, and NE) would be harmed. A cleric of a neutral deity would be able to heal the five neutral alignments, and harm the four extreme alignments.
This could still create some tricky situations, such as "why can't my cleric of Cayden Chilean heal the paladin?" My idea for that would be some domain-themed options that are tacked on. The "good" domain would allow you to heal any goood creature regardless of alignment, the "evil" domains does the same for evil creatures, the "animal" domain the same for animals, etc. Some domains don't have a creature theme, and those would have some other effect.
Anyways, I'd love to hear your input on possible strengths or pitfalls of such a system. Let me know.
Alignment Healing
Neat, and I'm a huge fan of supporting and making more use of the Alignment wheel with in game effects whenever possible. So I support this idea on principal, but I'm not sure I'd use it myself. PCs tend to have varied alignments to put it mildly, for various reasons not every player wants to play similar alignments. And ending up in a situation where a 4/5’s of party are able to benefits from group healing and one player cannot simply because he wanted to play the CG Robin Hood is just asking for strife to start.
For clerics I tend to use the Variant Channeling from Ultimate Magic:http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/cleric/variant-channeling
It's not 100% prefect, but tend to reflects Gods and their Clerics a little better than just healing.
I really wish they'd produce more of these actually.
I'm with Zombie boots on this one. It's good in theory, but your LG cleric might end up harming your CN Rogue on accident, and that will probably result in conflict between players
If a cleric had this type of healing and there was only one party member outside of the alignment range, then a couple of healing spells could cover it. Also, I alluded to some domain-based options with which customize who is healed or harmed.
As far as accidentally harming a party member, it wouldn't happen. The existing Channel requires choosing either to heal or harm - not both - and I would keep it that way.
That being said, I completely understand why this is still tricky and comes stocked with potential problems. Thats why I'm looking for input, particularly how the problems could be addressed. I will check out this variant healing.
Wow. I've heard this variant healing mentioned a bunch of times but never looked at it. It has a lot in common with a completely different Channel Energy variant I have written. The existing ones seem to do a variant based on thei deity's portfolio, whereas mine is based on domains. Some of the bonuses are very similar though.