Quote:
Originally Posted by demonsbane
Nonetheless, the mentioned section of GURPS Fantasy by roquebfl, Man Proposes, God Disposes (p.F148) is good and suitable by being related to the approach of GURPS Powers: Divine Favor, along with Prayer (p.F149), Sacred Places (p.F149) and Miracles (p.F151). However, the section on Sacrificial Magic in p.F165 could have been linked, in some way, with the reaction roll mechanics for prayers. The same is true for GURPS Thaumatology in its section about Sacrifices (p.T54-58).
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Yes.
The whole prayer thing is problematic, given that some historical or pre-historical religions had no tradition of prayer whatsoever, but instead used sacrifices (and other equally non-prayer-like rituals) to attempt to communicate with the gods.
It would be a mistake to try to use GURPS Divine Favor to simulate some of those religons, e.g. the prehistoric Norse one; they're much better handled in other ways (Powers, or more likely something similar to GURPS Psionics Powers, using Religious Ritual and Poetry as control skills - I think that could be made to work in GURPS).
Still, it would have been nice to have rules for sacrifices that tied in with Divine Favor, for GMs who want to create ahistrical mix-and-match religions that use both prayers and sacrifices (and I'm not even sure if that is 100% ahistorical... didn't Judaism at one point have prayer and sacrifice simultaneously?.