GURPS Powers: Divine Favor

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Langy

Surely that's not just a silly mistake - it's a ridiculous one.

No, it's more than that: it's a funny one.

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

Extraordinarily so.

LOL, this is going to run in circles.

[Sorry, I'm highly sensitive to naive puns]

[lachimba]

yeah it is pretty good.

I really like having one more worked example to compare to psionics. (but maybe a sample character as per PP would have have been nice)


Here looking forward to the other 'powers' books on the list.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by b-dog

But to me what makes it cool is that it is close a real world cleric. A cleric of Islam, Hindu, and Christian religions would all be fun to play. Using cross to turn a vampire is better than using a sacred tire iron of some made up religion for the game atmosphere to me. Plus the holy items found while dungeon delving are cool if they are from some real world religion. Somehow GURPS Banestorm, Cabal and Innomine were able to take real world religions and add them to the gamecworld and not create a huge uproar while almost all dungeon delving games avoid them like the plague. I know DF is supposed to be devoid of any setting assumptions but most of the stuff is from real world myths and legends with a coat of paint covering it. Instead of having the evil cleric worship the demon lord Chroing the Nasty just go for the real thing and have the evil cleric worship the Devil.

If you want inspiration for using real-world religions in fantasy genre roleplaying gaming, check out Quest FRP, either v2.1 or v2.0. It's a freeware RPG system, and you should still be able to find those older versions on the Internet somewhat. From v3 onwards the real-world religons were dropped and everything got genericized, because a few people got offented at a honest attempt to simulate various mythologies.

[Peter Knutsen]

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).

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?.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

And that's exactly what I was saying. I tried to make this as "realistic" a take on holy powers as possible, from the perspective of people who believe in flagrant miracles (of any real-world faith).

What would your advice be, to someone who prefers his miracles much subtler? Can GURPS Divine Favor be adapted to that?

Clearly., the Learned Prayers can just be toned down a lot (to give smaller bonuses), which lovers their point cost, but what about the core cost of the Patron? How should that be changed?

I'm thinking one possibility would be to ask how the Patron would be Limited if the result was capped at Good and can never be better. I think that would be a reasonable fit for my preference.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by b-dog

I thhink you have started a dangerous trend now that you have tried to make clerics seem "realistic," now we will need some revisions on other spell casting classes like witches, druids and different types of wizards.

Druids, in particular, since they were a core class in most versions of AD&D/D&D.

It's just a question of dumping the spells and going more Powers, though, so a supplement fixing up the Druid would boil down to a long list of lovingly tailored Powers.

One minor problem would be whether it should be a D&D-shaped druid for Dungeon Fantasy, or a much more historically and mythologically authentic druid for use in serious historical fantasy. A bigger supplement could do both, but it doesn't seem that SJ Games operates that way.

[RyanW]

I just noticed an oddity. The cost for Patron comes up to 57 before taking into account frequency of appearance. However, that comes out to 29, 57, 114, and 171 for the standard frequencies of appearance. Divine Favor "rounds to the nearest 5 points" but gives 25, 55, 110, and 170. I assume this was a conscious decision to get a steadily progressing incremental cost.

[PK]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

What would your advice be, to someone who prefers his miracles much subtler? Can GURPS Divine Favor be adapted to that?

To that I answer, "It's built with GURPS!" That is, it can be adapted to anything. :)

Clearly., the Learned Prayers can just be toned down a lot (to give smaller bonuses), which lovers their point cost, but what about the core cost of the Patron? How should that be changed?

I'm thinking one possibility would be to ask how the Patron would be Limited if the result was capped at Good and can never be better. I think that would be a reasonable fit for my preference.

Hmm, good question. Off the top of my head, that's basically the equivalent of moving down the Patron list -- that is, you're slowly moving from "true god" to "limited manifestation of a true god" to "limited manifestation of a minor god" when it comes to power level. I'd want to keep it simple, using -20% increments (since Divine Favor is divisible by 5). All considered, off the top of my head, I'd use something like:

Limited Manifestation: For whatever reason, your god cannot bring His full power to bear on our material plane. For game purposes, this caps the maximum effective reaction that you can roll and the strength of the learned prayers you can obtain. Limited Manifestation, Very Good is -20%; Good is -40%; and Neutral is -60%. This limitation only applies to the cost of Divine Favor -- not to any learned prayers!

This way, the GM could allow a weak version of Divine Favor for a more realistic, subtle game. I could see a preacher with Divine Favor 9 (Limited Manifestation, Neutral, -60%) [22] and several learned prayers, all only minor blessings. That limitation might be worth more, but at the same time, I'd hate to make it too cheap to be able to easily get your god's attention, even if His actions are limited!

[PK]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I just noticed an oddity. The cost for Patron comes up to 57 before taking into account frequency of appearance. However, that comes out to 29, 57, 114, and 171 for the standard frequencies of appearance. Divine Favor "rounds to the nearest 5 points" but gives 25, 55, 110, and 170. I assume this was a conscious decision to get a steadily progressing incremental cost.

Sort of. I turned the existing FOA modifiers into an equation (a while ago -- don't have it anymore), used that to get the new values for each FOA (which included obtaining new, slightly-different values for the canonical FOA breakpoints), and then rounded those to the nearest 5 points. So there's a bit of a double-adjustment going on here.

Anyway, don't sweat small differences too much, here. Divine Favor is a new, standalone advantage, not a worked example/ability -- which is why I didn't give an actual breakdown and statistics line for it. Think of it as "inspired by the Patron advantage with these modifiers," if you prefer. :)

[vitruvian]

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?.

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.