Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
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?.
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While sacrifice rules would certainly be a nice addition, I'm not sure it's true that these historical religions
never prayed to or invoked their gods without an accompanying sacrifice, or believed that you couldn't
communicate with the gods without their aid. It was just that the gods were far more likely to listen to and especially
grant your requests with a sacrifice, or even just a promise of one.