Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
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.
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In the context of
some religions, sacrifices could modify positively the reaction roll for prayer. Anyway I was mainly concerned with the approach that you are mentioning here:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
Yes.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
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I was mostly aiming for a fantasy approach. Still, real world religious practices sometimes were extremely complex and impossible of summarization, hence the point that I was signaling about offering links with other
GURPS concepts and rules, for easing a more streamlined path for implementing extra meanings and added complexity.
On the other hand, when I think about religious sacrifices, I'm not having in mind human sacrifices -specially stressed in that way by popular fiction that many times is just vulgar and misleading. There are or were a plethora of things considered as sacrifice ("to make sacred"), without any connotation of barbarism or evilness. Also,
why to sacrifice and
what you get by sacrificing had different answers according to each religious tradition -and even more of one in particular religions, according to different levels of intention and meaning, some of them unknown by the "low-rank" profane practitioner. The "doctrine of sacrifice" is complex.