Healing spells and alignment

[White Knight]

I just got the expansion Heart of Winter last night, and I was glancing through the manual and I noticed something interesting...namely, they put restrictions on the alignments of clerics and druids and whether they can cast the high level healing spells. The restrictions are as follows:

Raise Dead: Only non-evil chars can cast the spell
Resurrection: Only good chars
Heal: only good chars
Cure Critical wounds: Only non-evil chars

What?!? Since when has there ever been any restriction on casting healing spells by evil or neutral chars in the D&D rules? Healing and raising the dead are not by themselves in any way related to alignment. It's what you do with the spells that matter. So if I cast Raise Dead on a chaotic evil assassin so he can be alive and keep on killing, that is by definition an EVIL act, and okay if I am evil (or neutral), and not okay if I am good. Imagine if you are playing an evil party and your cleric can't perform more than the most minor of restorative magics--you are forced to quaff expensive potions of extra healing, or run to the temples every time you get a scratch in combat (also an expensive proposition). Ridiculous.

What do the druids become...just variant, summoning related mages who can't cast more than the most minor of healing magics? The spell reincarnate is not in these computer games, so that is not an option for our hapless neutral druids. Why not just restrict us to playing good chars and leave it at that?

As a lifelong D&Der, it pains me to see these out and out contradictions of the rules in a computer game, whether for "play balance" or for whatever other reason. It's hard enough playing neutral or evil parties...don't make it harder.

That's it for my tirade...I just hope somebody releases a hack which gets around this stupid and ill considered rule.

(Note: I also posted a variant of this in the BGII forum...I think these changes in the expansion would make the game unplayable except by good chars.)

[Leafy]

I agree, that sounds absurd that evil clerics can't cast the high end heals or resurrects. I haven't gotten my evil cleric up high enough to see how the game actually handles it. so i'm still a bit optimistic that it's just another bug (in the manual this time). i'm still cheesed about certain thief/ranger items not usable on rangers in HoW.. and out right mistake that the play testers overlooked. I DO like the idea of "cause critical wounds" and how they only allow those to evil creatures. (i wonder if evil, extraplanar creatures take damage from a regular heal spell?) and the few other evil cleric spells like "bone barrier" and "cause disease". but to take the major heals out? i wonder if evil clerics get the "heal" spell that restores all but 1 hp? if they have that, then i can overlook missing out on one higher level heal spell.
Evil clerics can;t raise dead or ressurect? well, at least they can cast the reverse, "smot living" or whatever it is.