Faith and worshipping multiple deities

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lanyara
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Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#1 Post by lanyara » Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:55 am

If your character gets a "You feel drawn towards <deity>." message, should he/she respond to this message in a specific IC way?

For example, let's take a human following Gwen. For some reason, this human also has some faith in Evren. Now, after a death and ressing at Gwen's shrine, he might (technically) feel drawn towards Evren. Should he then really go and regain favour in Gwen? Or should he just let things be how they are. I am trying to find out whether a message such as the above could be taken as an indication that another deity wants you to worship it.
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luminier
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Re: Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#2 Post by luminier » Sun Nov 15, 2009 8:19 am

Well one shouldn't be so bold as to assume a God wants you (but I am sure there are some whose roleplay is arrogant enough). However, since a conversion counts as a death (stat-wise anyways), I think it would be most helpful to let people make that decision on their own. Most of the In game messages are just prompts to help you along with your roleplay, and not really written in stone in so far as you must do what the messages say.
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lanyara
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Re: Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#3 Post by lanyara » Tue Dec 22, 2009 2:40 pm

one shouldn't be so bold as to assume a God wants you
From a modest and devout IC point of view, surely. It is not the only possible point of view here, but I am not so much talking about IC point of views, rather the general framework for roleplaying a religious character today.
I can't recall any old character worshipping more than one deity years ago, for instance. It probably would not have been as easy back then, i.e. there was no way to gain faith in certain deities as far as I remember.

OOCly speaking, though, I can not understand why a god would NOT want to care that people worship or follow him/her and the teachings. If anyone could explain this, please do so. It makes a huge difference - do gods care about their followers/clerics, or not?

I think that they would want to care given that more followers and clerics means more influence (in the game world).

But right now you can worship Zhakrin for 10 years, then easily switch to another deity. The penalty of one death is extremely light, honestly.

To set this into perspective - another form of punishment, one used by Lilith, to burn those that abandoned her faith was in my opinion a lot more interesting. You recover quite quickly from a death, but the repeated punishment of Lilith for some time had a big IC impact and gave other players a chance to react to it (or at least know about it).

Of course you can still roleplay that recovering from a death makes your character depressed, etc. But compare this to someone who suddenly starts to burn.

Not sure if I am getting anywhere with this hmm ...
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rafael
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Re: Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#4 Post by rafael » Tue Dec 22, 2009 6:49 pm

My character wrote in his diary, rexamined his relation to the gods, and kept his distance for many years and had some conversations that revealed some of the impact of his experience. It was low-key, but present for a long time and still affects his roleplay. I imagine it's up to everyone to find a way for their character to deal with such things, code is one thing, but depression is not the only reaction. Being/feeling cursed ought to change one's behaviour, even if one was not particularly religious, and there's no fire involved.

I imagine there could be other alternative punishments or consequences.

May squirrels bite all ye unpious Evrenites, et al.

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Re: Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#5 Post by lanyara » Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:57 pm

I imagine there could be other alternative punishments or consequences.
I think that would be interesting to see.

But anyway, I am still pondering about some things, so I will try it differently.

Worshipping multiple deities still confuses me (OOCly), and of course if I am confused OOCly it makes it even harder for my character to not be confused about something ICly. Since I do not quite know what to make out of certain code changes.

Let me briefly put this into perspective:

If I am not mistaken then years ago, before crusaders, there were no characters who really actively believed in more than one deity. I don't think it was possible to gain faith in Evren back then at all for instance. But you could do "god Evren" (or "worship Evren"), and then go on to roleplay as a worshipper of that deity.

At least with crusaders, this is no longer entirely exclusive, and it is not possible to ignore this ICly (because the crusaders have unique abilities, and this must logically stem from their belief in Evren and Taniel). So obviously, for whatever reason, these two deities more or less joined forces, empowering those that follow the restrictions imposed by those two deities. (If I am wrong OOCly here, help me out.)

So now I am wondering whether it would be possible to be a cleric of more than one deity at the same time. And this puzzles me heavily. I can very well imagine for several reasons that the answer will be no, but let me elaborate.

On the one hand all deities seem to behave the same. For instance, no matter what deity you leave, your character will appear weaker temporarily due to the vitality loss "punishment". No matter if the deity is the all forgiving and loving Gwen or the ruthless ruler of all undeads Sathonys, this reaction seems to be absolutely the same. No matter if you were a cleric, or a worshipper of that deity before. No matter for how long you were a cleric or worshipper (i.e. technically the switch seems to be quite easy, no matter what individual background that character would have)

Additionally, if you have more faith in a respective deity, you get a clear IC message "You feel drawn towards", so in a way you still can only worship one deity, otherwise you will "feel drawn again" and start worshipping another deity.
(The IC message also slightly confuses me, because I wonder if the character should actively try to resist this? Why does he get the IC message? Shouldn't he be proud that a deity would like of him to start worshipping instead? Or is it an OOC message?)

Hmm, I seem to lose my train of thought, so let's go to one question and remember that I more wonder about the roleplay than code technicalities:

- Would it be possible, with adequate roleplay, to worship two deities at the same time as a cleric, including to pray for miracles? I used to think that gods are extremely exclusive, but if they can do alliances and empower their servants, why would it be strictly impossible to be a cleric of TWO deities at the same time (if it makes IC sense, and so forth).

Of course there is an OOC issue involved here. Unlikely that "super" clerics with a greater access to miracles are wanted, since this could devalue "normal" clerics quite quickly.

But this is a balance issue, you could just as well have those clerics access to more miracles, yet tone the effects down a lot, so that he would not become a "super" cleric. Or, another idea would be to have this cleric "switch" between deities: for one year he would have access to Taniel miracles, then Evren miracles, etc.. Anyway, this is a balance issue, I am puzzled about the IC implications more.

I don't know how many remember the time when every miracle had a "mastery". Then came the beseech deity skill switch, which is cool to have for several reasons in my opinion, the most important being that you don't have to artificially spend time "training" individual miracles anymore.

Also, a nice change seems to be that miracles can not be interrupted as easily. In the past it was quite easy to force aborting miracles by "tickling" your enemy during combat.

I guess I am trying to find out how exclusive deities really are (OOCly), and also whether it *would* be possible to have non-standard clerics. I have no preference at all for either way, but I am confused about some things here.
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rafael
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Re: Faith and worshipping multiple deities

#6 Post by rafael » Tue Jan 05, 2010 4:21 pm

I think clerics of more than one god is a big no-no and a non-starter. A lay elf worshiper may "worship" Gwen in that he makes a sacrifice one day or occasionally for luck in love, but in general he sacrifices to Taniel as his forefathers. Taniel is his main god and he has the most faith in him. He also has some faith in Gwen, but not too much as this would soon become a chore and a juggling trick. Having high faith in two deities is very hard.

Check out this post that I made after some faith code changes:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=771

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