Halls Hopper
Posts: 76
Joined: Sunday, 15th December 2013, 19:43
God Proposal: The Union
Worshippers of the Union gain piety by offering sacrifices (praying over corpses), but said piety steadily depletes over time.
If a character has at least one rank of piety with the Union, they will occassionally get a message saying they hear a flurry of voices. When this happens, they gain a temporary list of divine abilities that they may pick from. The potential divine abilities are taken at random from the lists below. The player picks the ability they want and assigns it to one of up to six slots, which correspond to piety levels 1 through 6. They may not assign an ability to a slot for which they don't have the piety level to use.
The abilities they may choose from are divided into active and passive abilities. A player may not have more than three active abilities and three passive abilities at any one time.
The player may change the ability in a slot to another one at any time (so long as they're being offered a new ability). However, each time they replace an old ability, they risk invoking the Union's wrath. This acts as a lesser version of divine retribution. The exact effects of the divine retribution in some way reflect the ability that was abandoned.
ACTIVE ABILITIES
PASSIVE ABILITIES
The Union is meant to give players the opportunity to "build" their own god. The random element of what abilities are offered to you can cause a fair bit of variation in gameplay, as you can either choose to pick an ability you're semi-interested in now, or wait for an ability you really want to come along. The option of replacing abilities is meant to prevent you from getting burdened by early choices (whilst also not invalidating the choice aspect of this deity once all slots are filled). Meanwhile the mini-retribution system is there to prevent this from being abused so that one can make sure they have the optimum set of abilities for any specific area.
The "flurry of voices" would likely come intermittently, based on XP gained. So one could not just wait it out for the abilities they want to come along. Perhaps there'd also be a mechanic to decrease the frequency of the voices based on how many abilities had been picked thus far. So that a player who'd left themselves slots free for abilities they wanted would have a greater chance of receiving them than one who loaded up all their slots straight away.
The fact that a character is not being allowed more than three passive or more than three active abilities is a way of preventing the player from either ignoring active abilities (and thus the need for training invocations) or relying entirely on active abilities (and thus putting a lot of weight into training invocations).
The list of abilities is really just a loose idea of different powers, aren't set in stone. A fair few of them were lifted from or inspired by other gods' abilities. However, such abilities would be weaker than the conterpart abilities that other gods offer.
Whilst the list of abilities offered can easily be changed, the idea behind most of the abilities should be a feeling of genericness. A sense of slightly improving existing abilities or offering something that can be done just as well (if not better) elsewhere. The reason being that if they're too powerful and a player can pick any set of abilities they want, the god immediately becomes overpowered. The "lore" justification for this is obviously that the gods are weak, vague concepts unable to assert much major influence on the world.
However, despite the individual abilities being weak, each of them are meant to serve some kind of use to somebody. Some combinations of abilities might be stronger than others, but only in the same way that some race/class combinations are more powerful than others. Though, obviously, with an increased amount of possible combinations, it would be a lot harder to balance all the abilities appropriately.