I was reviewing the CRB, and per the description: "Each cleric must choose a time when she must spend 1 hour each day in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain her daily allotment of spells." This implies to me that a cleric could potentially cast their spells, take an hour break and meditate, and get everything back again all in the same day.
Contrast that to the description on how the wizard regains spells. "He must choose and prepare his spells ahead of time by getting 8 hours of sleep and spending 1 hour studying his spellbook."
Am I right?
J
This implies to me that a cleric could potentially cast their spells, take an hour break and meditate, and get everything back again all in the same day.
There is a rule about that in the magic chapter:
Recent Casting Limit: As with arcane spells, at the time of preparation any spells cast within the previous 8 hours count against the number of spells that can be prepared.
So you can profit from spells that last significantly longer than 8 hours, casting them early enough, but they are rare. Candidates would be consecrate respective desecrate, create water and food, endure elements, undetectable alignment and water breathing - that's it in the CRB, from what I see.
And of course you can burn down your instantaneous spells at the same time. Most obvious application should be cure spells.
I was reviewing the CRB, and per the description: "Each cleric must choose a time when she must spend 1 hour each day in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain her daily allotment of spells." This implies to me that a cleric could potentially cast their spells, take an hour break and meditate, and get everything back again all in the same day.
This isn't as clear as it could be either, but the bolded section means you have to meditate at the same time every day.
Typically Clerics of Sarenrae (a god of the Sun) meditate at dawn, while Clerics of Groetus (a god of the Moon) might meditate at dusk or at midnight. There is no *rule* about when you must meditate (a Cleric of Sarenrae CAN meditate at midnight if they prefer), but this is something you pick at character creation and can't change (as a GM I'd let them change it at level-up or something, this is a bit of a wishy-washy rule). This means that you can't do your meditation twice in a 24 hour period unless for some reason dawn happens twice (or something similar).
There is a proviso that prepared casters (including Clerics/Druids/etc) don't have to prepare their entire allocation of spells in their initial meditation, and can leave spell-slots un-prepared. If they do this they can prepare those spells later in the day by spending an equivalent amount of time to prepare them, eg. If you want to leavel 1/3 of your spells unprepared, then later in the day when you prepare them it takes you 1/3 of an hour (20 minutes) to prepare them. This also comes with the caveat that it takes a minimum of 15 minutes to do this (so if you prepare 90% of your spells and later go to prepare the last 10% you still take 15 minutes, not 6 minutes).
None of those rules allow you to cast more than your allocated spells per day by preparing kore than once though.
Putting the Recent Casting Limit and the ability to prepare some spells later together, my interpretation is that you prepare all the spell slots at dawn (or whatever) and can prepare spells into those slots then (but don't have to), or you can prepare spells into those slots later if desired.
BTW a cleric who chooses noon as the time to prepare spells is a bookkeeping hassle and generally weaker than one who chooses a more discreet time of day.
BTW a cleric who chooses noon as the time to prepare spells is a bookkeeping hassle and generally weaker than one who chooses a more discreet time of day.
Yeah I don't think I've ever played in a game where this wasn't hand-waved to be at dawn. I can see midnight being fine (it's functionally almost identical to dawn), but midday or dusk would be a pain.
But you know, you do you.
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BTW a cleric who chooses noon as the time to prepare spells is a bookkeeping hassle and generally weaker than one who chooses a more discreet time of day.Yeah I don't think I've ever played in a game where this wasn't hand-waved to be at dawn. I can see midnight being fine (it's functionally almost identical to dawn), but midday or dusk would be a pain.
But you know, you do you.
Generally, unless the PCs are from nocturnal races, it is better if all of them recover and prepare spells at dawn. Having people in the same group preparing spells at different times is problematic. If the PCs are diurnal, having some divine caster that prepares the spells at dusk or at midnight often generate problems with the recent casting limits.
Arcane casters need to sleep and be fresh to recover spells, so they need to do it in the morning. If you keep a regular night watch a party of 5 need 10 hours to rest 8, then 1 hour to recover spells and maybe 10 minutes to eat and break camp (if the non-spellcaster do all the work of breaking camp).That means that if pray at dusk if want to avoid losing spells to the 8 hours recent casting limit your adventure hours end at 9:00 AM (!) during the shortest day of the year(dusk is at 5:18 PM at the Rome latitude) or at 2:00 PM during the longest day (dusk at 9:23 PM). If you pray at midnight it ends at 4:00 PM.
At that point, it is convenient to have everyone sleep during the day and be active at night.
Just for the record, I have played in a group where one of the characters was a Mystic Theurge, follower of Groetus, and having her memorize her arcane spell in the morning and her divine spell at midnight was a pain. At the same time, we had social interactions most of the time, so it wasn't possible to shift our active ours to the night, nor was convenient as no one in the party had darkvision or low light vision.
Okay good, it didn't make a lot of sense to me so I appreciate the concrete feedback.
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Having a holy time to pray makes sense from a gaming perspective, but every single cleric PC I have ever seen worships in the morning. I am probably the only player in my group who is even aware that this is "wrong".
I don't get the tie between rest and regaining cleric spells. It's just easier to worship in the morning.
Divine spellcasters have no need of rest, it is the arcane spellcasters that need it. The problems are that:
- recovering spells takes time, so recovering them at different times in the day generate some problem;- more important, all spellcasters can't recover the spell slots used in the last 8 hours, so praying at dusk of midnight means that probably the divine spellcasters can't recover all the spells.