Clerics made simple
 

Original rules for Clerics are very hands off. Up to GM fiat. But the suggestion is to give some sort of luck bonus.

The Charm magic items are extremely powerful, but I like the idea of luck.

So here is my slight modification of the talents and the reasons for implementing them:

Faith will still be a big thing since it is hard to prove the existence of luck.
Everybody can benefit, but those that devote themselves benefit more.
There is a reason to go back to the church/Temple/holy grove/shrine and see your priest/mentor/guide on a regular basis and the gods are very easy to adapt from any game world or setting.

All you have to do as a GM is give some examples on how to worship a god or pantheon, give the gods different portfolios or domains, or if it is a monotheistic religion divide it into different aspects or the equivalent of saints or ideals.

Then you need some general costs for different blessings in accordance with how popular the god's portfolio is. The blessings could then be paid for by a church tax, gifts to the priests or you bringing the sacrifice needed yourself.

[All three of the talents can be taken at normal cost for a wizard.]

New:
IQ 8 Devout (Once per god) (1p)
The number of times a blessing can be used by you is increased by 1.

Mostly unchanged:
IQ 9 Priest (Once per god) (2p) Prereq. Devout (same god). No Charisma needed.
Can bless people (count as a magical item - the rule of five). Usually 5 dice vs IQ. With offerings and preparations 4 dice, high holydays or very elaborate and costly (in time and money) ceremonies 3 dice.
The blessing gives a one time +-1 adjustment within the area of that god's dominion to a follower of that god. This bonus can be used after a die roll has been rolled that directly affect the blessed person. One could use it to make an enemy miss if it was close or turn a critical hit into a normal hit if you were blessed by a war god or survival god. It could be used for a reaction roll if the blessing fit the occasion or a local seasonal weather roll if you are blessed by a farm god. Other common civilian uses would be professional jobs roll, etc. The blessing will be lost if you act contrary to your god's wishes or disrespect the god, but otherwise, it will stay until used.

Mostly unchanged:
IQ 14 Theologian Increases the number your priestly blessings can be used by 1. Taken once, not once per god.

So a Theologian without any preparations could give two uses of a +-1 bonus to a normal follower. On a 5vsIQ roll. With a proper ceremony or a quick sacrifice, the roll would be easier. If the receiver of the blessing is a devotee of the god he would get another use out of the blessing.

A character can follow more than one god, be a devotee of more than one god and have active blessings from more than one god. Blessings doesn't stack, you can't use more than one on any given die roll. You can only have one blessing per god at a time. If you have a 2 use blessing and get another triple blessing, you can change the double one for the triple, but they don't stack in any way.

A system like this would be important enough for most people to go to a Priest regularly and at the same time not be so important that people have to do it. There is no time limit on how long the blessing stays with you, and it is impossible to know for the character if it has been used or not. So most people will renew it as often as they can, just in case. And even a casual blessing from a wandering priest without any sacrifice can work, so it can't hurt to try.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

For reference, the priest and theologian thread has a discussion along these lines, which is what motivated me to make the theurgy system.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

In case there are people who don't already know this, my Theurgy thread is called "A different take on priests".

It's not a minimal system like the one Nils suggests.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I have read most of it I think. And I kind of like it for what it is. But I am a little apprehensive about rules bloat. The more you add, the more detail and flavor you add, the harder it will be to change the system to fit your campaign and the longer it will take to make a character and it will make the system more crunchy.

I kind of love the 5 min NPC.

So in my eyes, the best house rule or suggestion for change is the ones that change little but still have an impact in the right direction. It doesn't have to solve everything since the vanilla system worked fairly well.

But then again, the Priest system is almost none existent, so it is hard to change it just a little and make a great system out of it. :-)

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Oh, believe me, it takes WAY less time to make a theurge than it does to make a wizard!

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I saw this char of yours in the other thread… I've played with Rich's rules too, and they make for interesting characters and options, but 5 min NPC are hard to do. (And that lost talent point you mentioned was probably Literacy.) :-)

And I kind of doubt that this character took 5 min to put together. But it looks interesting and it is far from a basic vanilla 32 pointer. But 20 "spells" takes time to choose and write down. The cult/religion needs to be specified. Players need to write down times for ceremonies, adjust the play around said ceremonies and I'm not sure that appeals to the people that want a fast paced hack a slash? Maybe if the GM do all the prep work ahead of time, and only let the rule focused people play Theurgs. Then a lot of the rule crunch wouldn't slow down play.

And there are some good things too, like placing most of the Priest stuff outside combat, and more of an in between type of activity. The ritual times seems a little bit arbitrary. It would work great for some religions, but not at all for others.

And I am not quite sure why theurgy needs to be excluded from wizardly magics and vice versa? If you want them to exclude each other, just make the Priest talents cost triple for wizards. In most religions there are no distinction between wizards and priests. And in many fantasy pantheons there are gods of magic.

But all in all an interesting read. And if I had a campaign starting I might consider using some of them. But I would rather see it as an optional rule if it was implemented in the new version of TFT. Just too much crunch. It is like Rich's divine system with a 4th attribute. It works, but it adds too much. I am a minimalist when it comes to house rules. Do some with little rather than everything with a lot.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

To get the crunch level straight: don't be fooled by the font size and formatting. The actual rules for theurgy would fit into less than 3 pages of Advanced Wizard (about 2 1/4 pages, by word count). I'd call that very slim for an alternate magic system that's as fun to play (IMHO) as TFT magic is.

Btw, AW's spell list is actually in a smaller font and the complete list of talisman powers and ceremonies would fit into less than 2 of those pages. The complete rules, talisman powers, and ceremonies would fit into 4 pages of Advanced Wizard.

It's less crunch by a huge amount than the current rules for wizards and magic, which are already part of TFT, so I don't think the crunch level of theurgy is at all inappropriate for TFT.

Does it take 5 minutes to make a wizard character? There are 51 spells to choose from just for an IQ 12 wizard and 77 for IQ 14...

But even so, are wizards reserved for "rule focused people"? In my opinion, wizards aren't and neither are theurges. Also, as I note at the top, the theurgy rules would fit into less than 3 pages of Advanced Wizard.

Thanks, making important out-of-combat activities was one of my goals for the system.

If there is a system that works great for every religion, though, I'd like to see it. Each major world religion does rely on "appointed times", as well as every other religion that I have know of. In general, Protestants have very few appointed times, but Catholics have many, as do Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, Druids, etc. As far as I know, all of the ones I listed, except for Protestants, have daily appointed times.

Maybe it doesn't. Theurgy 1 costs 5 talent points, which would be 10 for a wizard. Maybe that's prohibitive. I'll have to think about it.

One reason I did it was to give heroes one leg up on wizards, just this time. Heroes already get -4DX for spell casting, in addition to the -4 DX from any iron weapons and armor that might have.

Another reason was to try make a naturally emerging rivalry / jealousy between the two groups.

Well, I'm with you there. Of course, theurgy certainly isn't trying to do everything and it's not a lot.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

In my experience rules doesn't tend to shrink much when you write final versions. They tend to expand with explanations, background/flavor and exceptions/clarifications and secondary dependencies on other rules that might be found in play testing.

But if you compare them to the whole magic system, they are very light indeed. I compare them to my suggestions that are more of an errata, one small new talent and a paragraph of fluff and application. I would still say that implementing my rules would take very little effort and playtest. Implementing yours would be a lot of effort (new rule pages, testing, balancing, etc), probably more than SJ wants to do, since he rather let go of the whole religion thing completely if possible. I just hoped that he might try some errata type of change that almost makes it playable as is.

But if they said they wanted a proper cleric system, yours looks very interesting.

When it comes to times for worship, I think there are very few religions that are so picky. Most stick to a few days per year, and maybe one day per week or they have a range of smaller holydays spread out for regular service. But for individuals that are not in a temple/cloister setting I think there is a lot of leeway. Muslims being the only exception that I know of that pray many times per day.

And if you go back in history and look at other pantheons the specific times are usually connected to temple rules. If everyone should congregate at regular intervals it was easier to implement it at sunup, sundown or other easy to recognize times. But again outside the temple I don't think they followed such strict time rules. Especially religions where many priests also did other things, like being a mystic, ruler, local politician, war leader, councilor, seer, etc.

But even if this was true for most real religions, don't bind player's and GM's hands with rules about it. Leave it as suggestions or examples in your presented religions. And discuss other limitations that could fill the same function.

Not all religions even have regular praying. Many focus on leaving offerings or live by example in all things or have another day job.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Have there been anything more official from SJ on how to handle religion? Should it be a light clarification like this (that could be made optional), or are they looking for a more robust system or do they want a third "class" comparable to Hero and Wizard? Or maybe a later companion book?

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Yes, Steve and I had a long conversation about my Theurgy system and this is the statement he ended up making:

This is why I reformulated the system into the Theurgy Toolkit, so that it won't favor any particular religion and players and GMs can use it to create phenemena for the religions of their choice.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Thanks for the clarification Zot.

So if there will be any changes in the normal TFT rules, it will be a light errata/clarification to the existing minimalistic talents, but no more. And probably not even that. :-(

I would have liked to se something along the lines of my light weight, low word count and inoffensive change in the official RAW and then something like your Toolkit for an optional rule or article in the Companion. :-(

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Since Guy's article, "Beyond Warriors and Wizards: The Clerical Character", is a simple priest toolkit, this gives me hope that my system, now that it's a priest toolkit, will be acceptable. :-D

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Where is that article?

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I have to say, I strongly disagree with Steve's reasoning here. The vast majority of games and gamers use 'Fantasy' religions and no one has ever complained of 'short changing' real ones.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Here it is -- finally found it!

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Since you wrote "no one", I'll just mention that I quite agree with Steve's reasoning, have always appreciated and enjoyed that TFT left religion as a blank that GMs can either fill in or not however they please, and that there are zero mechanics suggesting religious is any particular sort of magic power.

As for fantasy religions in other games, they're a case by case affair, but I have a deep aversion towards D&D-style religions with official Alignments, literal personified gods, "clerics" that heal, religious rites that are really just an alternate book of magic zap-power spells, etc.

There's also the whole view (which seems correct to me) that thinking of religion as literal beings and magic spells for personal power is severely missing the mark of what the actual intention of most religious traditions are about.

I have quite enjoyed religions in various homebrew TFT & GURPS fantasy settings, but I think leaving them open to GM creation, mystery, or omission, is a good thing.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I enjoy the ambiguity of TFT's approach to religion.

I've created sets of house rules for performing sacraments and miracles, but I also think you can do lots of interesting things with such characters using RAW, where they are either heroes who known a spell or two or wizards with the Priest talent. I have a character like this at the moment. He's an old christian orthodox priest ('Father Pyat') who is also a master physicker and knows two powerful spells of protection. Completely useless as an offensive combatant, but he doesn't view murder as an important goal for a person of his vocation.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Yes, I've also seen very interesting and fun "clerical" & religious characters who have zero magical nor healing nor "blessing" abilities at all.

If the official rules said religious people get standard sorts of abilities, that'd tend to lock in a mechanical assumption.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Exactly; what if you want your priest of Thor to be able to throw lightning bolts as a manifestation of the god's power? In TFT this is trivially easy to write up, whereas in most other games with nominally more developed systems of religious magic you might struggle to find just the right class, or it would come with a bunch of baggage that you didn't intend for your character.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Ah this makes me laugh.

Every once in awhile, I realise that our group of PCs have serious, SERIOUS issues.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I thought I'd summarize my position, since you guys are kind of doing that as well :).

I think the "reskinned spell caster as priest" is definitely a valid approach. And it doesn't require any new rules, which is a plus. That said, I don't like how ITL leaves Priest and Theologian at, "If the GM is giving Priests any special abilities or bonuses, a Theologian should get about twice as much".

If the GM is going to give priests and theologians special abilities, they should be carefully thought out and play tested. Which is why I made a toolkit so people who want priests with special abilities at least have the option to use my toolkit -- and they can skin them however they want, real world religion-y or not. Also, TFT's magic system just doesn't feel at all to me like what priests/shamans/cultists do in stories, which is why I went with a ceremonial magic system.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I like that it implies that many GMs may give zero abilities or bonuses.

I sort of don't like that it might seem to some to more than just suggest that if they do get bonuses, they should be about double, and that there should be some standard implementation of religious abilities and bonuses where Priest gets you X of them and Theologian gets you twice X. But if the words "for instance ... might" were there (as I imagine was the intent), I wouldn't mind it.


That is, I quite agree with you that:

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I like the fact that it is left to the GMs. It’s like all those evocative monster ecology articles that led to a thousand “You’re having fun wrong!” arguments. People can decide for themselves.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

The way I implement religion is by awarding a special kind of XP to devout characters for making right and godly choices especially when they're difficult. The special XP can only be used on lesser wishes. I feel like this makes sense and is easily balanced, and gives thaumaturgic characters some corporeal power that they can actually heft in the hand instead of simply "I hope my god is helping me."

Re: Clerics made simple
 

It's no more difficult in 'other game'(s) than it is in TFT. I'll assume you are actually speaking of D&D here considering your class references. Even Deities and Demigods made some allowances for followers of different gods to break the class rules and that's been hardcoded into the game since 2nd edition (even Immortals did it in BECMI). So no, that's really a strawman argument.

What's not trivially easy in TFT is writing up a follower of a healing god....Physicker ain't laying on hands!

TFT has its own baggage...for example if you think divine magic shouldn't be hampered by metal, your are out of luck. If you think it should involve sacrifice rather than st drain (say RQ style) you are out of luck. TFT is no better at modeling this stuff outside of its own preconceptions than any other ruleset is.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

You're only out of luck if you feel the need for a published rule. Otherwise people can make up whatever they want.


e.g. Bob's House Rules:

* Divine magic doesn't have a cold iron penalty.

* Divine magic involves sacrifice - half the ST of the sacrificed beings is available for spellcasting for 3 turns after the beings are sacrificed.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Personally I'd make the ST available for the rest of the day and put a cap on how much you can store, using the mana staff as a model. That way evil priests could pose a credible threat to the PCs. Otherwise evil priests are kinda wimpy.

Also, you could argue that lifeblood is stronger than fatigue so maybe a sacrifice's ST should be worth double instead of half.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

I was just posting an example from the perspective that "it's easy to house rule" as a counterpoint to "["Bob" is] out of luck".

As for the above, I'd say it depends entirely on what other spells are available to use the ST on, what they have to sacrifice, etc.

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Couldn't resist -- I've been thinking about sacrifice and magic lately :)

Re: Clerics made simple
 

Yeah, I'm aware. My point was the comment above complaining that other systems couldn't similarly be handled (or that they in-fact have been handling it for decades).

Re: Clerics made simple
 

That is a really sweet and simple mechanic.