Why I Play a Cleric

In Dungeons and Dragons, I prefer to play a healer. There are a handful of reasons for this. One is that I know people get attached to their characters, and given that D&D characters often find themselves in combat, there's a chance that careless and/or unlucky characters can get themselves killed. I like to reduce that risk, for the sake of those who emotionally invest themselves in their characters. However, given the 5th Edition's generous healing rules, which basically gives all characters a chance to regain their full hit point total an average of once or twice per day, a D&D team no longer needs a dedicated team healer any more, so I'm free to explore other options. However, I still gravitate toward healers.

The main reason I like to play healers, even if the party doesn't need one, is that healers tend to be devoted to their religion, which typically includes tenets of morality and goodness. It allows me to role-play as someone with high moral standards without seeming especially pretentious. It allows other players/characters to say "Of course he thinks we/our characters should do the right thing. He's a cleric!" rather than encouraging other players/characters to ask why I'm being such a stick in the mud. Naturally, I don't want to spoil anybody's fun, but if people (or their fictional characters) can't have fun while being, or pretending to be, decent human beings (or dwarves, or elves, or whatever), then I'm not sure I'd like to go to their parties or invite them to come to mine. If there is any inclination toward unnecessary violence (and there almost always is in a D&D party), I would like there to also be a moral compass on the team, and I don't mind if that role falls to me.

Still, I guess I don't have to play a healer to play a good guy. I could be a noble warrior with a strong sense of fair-play. I could be a dwarf with high ideals of honor. Heck, I could even be a wizard or sorcerer with a pragmatic approach to altruism (e.g. "If we don't act like jerks, maybe fewer people will hate us"). So I could still try out new classes while maintaining my insistence that our party doesn't act against our moral values. But is that what I want to do?

I am in love with the idea of the classic heroic knight. I want to be a healer in armor with a shield. I want to play a defensive character who causes harm only when absolutely necessary. That's the kind of character that I really want to play, and the D&D Cleric is perfect for that. Of course, D&D's Paladin class is also tempting, as is the Fighter class, each of which grant more hit points than the Cleric gets, making them better for a defensive build, but the Cleric gets much more healing than either of them, which I count as bonus (transferable) hit points, so it probably evens out. So, given that the Clerics still get everything I want my D&D characters to have, I think I'll stick with them as my favorite character class, even if their healing power is a bit beyond what's needed and I could get some of their other benefits elsewhere. Clerics fit my preferred role too perfectly. So, I'd probably still play the party's healer even if we never needed any healing at all.