Priest System

[Wynna]

I've written a sweeping change to all healing priests in the TSM mod. I'm hoping to test it on AL's machine first, to familiarize all with it. Once finalized, priests will share a dialog structure. Fill in the structure below with unique, faith specific phrases. Italics are for branches not found in all trunks. When/if we get it up on a test server, I'd love for people to log on and test it en masse. Until then, here's the outline, fyi:

• I. Welcome to X Church! I am Y.
  • A. I am a member of this faith. What can you do for me?
    • 1. Pray with me brother/sister!
      • a. Prayer (Deity check returns positive for matching priest's)
        • i. PC tagged persistently as member of faith
          • a) Healing services through CCW & Restoration at 5% discount
            b) Store -- Full store at 5% discount
      • b. Prayer {Bluff DC20} (Deity does not match priest)
        • i. Bluff succeeds, PC tagged as member of faith.
          • a) Healing services through CCW & Restoration at 5% discount
            b) Store -- Full store at 5% discount
      • • ii. Bluff fails. PC tagged persistently as liar/unfaithful.
          • a) Healing services through CMW & Lesser Restore at full price.
            b) Store -- Non-faithful store at full price
      • c. Oh, did you say Deity X? I must not have been listening. What services for an undeclared?
        • i. Healing services through CMW & Lesser Restore at full price.
        d. Oh, did you say Deity X? I must not have been listening. What sales to an undeclared?
        • ii. Store -- Non-faithful store at full price
        e. Eh, never mind.
    B. I am a member of an allied faith.
    • 1. My god won't mind if you offer a prayer to an ally in this church. I will hear your prayer, that my god may intercede with his ally on your behalf.
      • a. Prayer (Deity check returns positive for matching ally branch)
        • i. PC tagged persistently as ally of faith
          • a) Healing services through CCW & Restoration at no discount
            b) Store -- Full store at no discount
      • b. Prayer {Bluff DC15} (Deity does not match chosen ally branch)
        • i. Bluff succeeds, PC tagged as ally of faith.
          • a) Healing services through CCW & Restoration at no discount
            b) Store -- Full store at no discount
      • • ii. Bluff fails. PC tagged persistently as liar/unfaithful.
          • a) Healing services through CMW & Lesser Restore at full price.
            b) Store -- Non-faithful store at full price
      • c. Oh, did you say Deity X? I must not have been listening. What services for an undeclared?
        • i. Healing services through CMW & Lesser Restore at full price.
        
        d. Oh, did you say Deity X? I must not have been listening. What sales to an undeclared?
        • ii. Store -- Non-faithful store at full price
        
        e. Eh, never mind.
    
    
    C. What services can you provide? (Undeclared faith)
    • 1. Healing services through CMW & Lesser Restore at full price.
    D. What can you sell me? (Undeclared)
    
    • 1. Store -- Non-faithful store at full price
    E. I would like to tithe to the church.

[/list]

[Mick]

I love this idea. Thanks for the effort on this Wynna.

Is the 5% discount for faithful a canon value? I ask because I can't find it anywhere and it seems rather modest for one of the faithful.

Additionally, it strikes me that someone who is labeled unfaithful and/or a liar might be paying more for anything they are trying to buy and might even be denied the store or healing if they fail spectacularly enough or actually follow a diety in opposition to the diety of the temple in question.

[Rusty]

The discount is rather problematic. While one can see that priests might offer special services or products to the particularly devout, there's scant reason why they'd offer an odd 5% discount to someone who can say a prayer right. Faerun is, after all, a polytheistic society: most people will pay respect to a dozen or more gods, and, moreover, those gods & their agents want to win that respect and devotion. A one-twentieth price-cut for the already committed seems rather, well, odd. And that's before you even get into the fact that, typically, churches don't give materially to their followers, they take, tithing being the most obvious incidence (they are giving you an afterlife, after all). So, it might make sense for churches to offer material benefits to the particularly devout and generous, offering them to random passers-by who can say a prayer...

[Wynna]

I'd given thought to the thought of opposition deity treatment, but decided that as the chances of a Helmite PC walking into a Banite temple for healing or a Banite PC walking into a Helmite temple and declaring his true god were slim to none. Which meant that in the main part we'd be back to psychic priests. I decided to leave that option off.

As for the discount, the DM team has kicked around going up as far as 10% and Rusty believes any discount is indefensible. The 5% middle ground is looking better and better. (-: I am of the opinion that 10% is too much over the long term; 5% offers a nice incentive without being greatly unbalancing; I do not agree with no discount. Veilan has previously offered the exact same reasoning as Rusty that the gods want their faithful to tithe. My gut feeling to that is that tithing is a separate issue. (I did forget to write in the tithing branch to the above convo. I did include a voluntary tithing branch as a main response to the priest's initial greeting. Pretend I wrote it in up there on my outline.) Faithful can tithe. Perhaps they /should/ tithe, but I argue against including any required tithe as a wealth sink. However, in a world where the gods have an active presence and holy wars are waged daily, it is in the gods' interests to have healthy foot soldiers. Hence the price cut. It isn't much, but 5% is all the church's coffers can stand.

I rest my case for the middle ground and await Their Honors the Administration's judgment.

[Kalrenath]

Thank you, Wynna.

[Rusty]

It's not a situation where "5%" is some kind of reasonable "middle ground". If 10% doesn't make any sense (and there's no canon basis for it), then 5% doesn't make any sense. It all seems to stem from the rather odd situation experienced on a number of NWN1 servers where NPC clerics would heal only PCs who had pledged their soul to their specific deity, which is a clear nonsense when it comes to religion in the Realms, particularly when it comes to deities such as Ilmater. Coming from that position, a discount seems reasonable, but as it's a fundamentally flawed point of departure, later conclusions are inevitably compromised. 5% discounts for prayer-recital as a universal temple policy have nothing to do with FR deities and organised religion; moreover, there doesn't appear to be any actual explanation of why they should be doing this (i.e. what "case" is rested?), other than maintaining elements of a broken legacy system.

[ayergo]

You're certainly welcome to implement this, but i urge you to consider a very good point brought up by Rusty, and one that i confront at work all the time. The issue of :

"How do it know?"

How do the priests know they are of the faith? we have had pcs in ALFA before fake to be of one faith to avoid persecution.

[indio]

Spells, not priests, bestowed by deities, would know, however. For example, you die and the deity plays a role in where you end up, by default. Given this, the spell (being an extension of the will of the priest's deity) would know when cast, as deities are certainly aware of your chosen god when both casting and dying. Thus a priest divines the true identity of the worshipped as the spell is cast through the spell itself, and charges gold accordingly.

Clearly this is sketchy logic and all that, but it allows for a system to be implemented meaningfully. And to my mind there's enough of a connection to justify the extra cost.

[JaydeMoon]

I thought they 'know' because they take the word of the guy for it, who, if lying, rolls a bluff check against the Priest's sense motive.

If the Priest wins, he 'knows' the guy is lying? If the priest 'loses' he accepts the individual as a member of his Church. On... Faith! OHBOYOHBOY!

The 'if 10% doesn't make sense then 5% also doesn't make sense' argument is kind of dumb. I can think of lots of cases where 10% doesn't make sense but 5% is a good middle ground. It only doesn't make sense if your position is right. Which it isn't. It's only your opinion. Lot's of things aren't supported by canon, after all... most DM plots in ALFA, for example. Should we not run them because they aren't specifically supported by canon? Canon doesn't say faithful are given a church discount, but neither does it say, anywhere that I've found, that churchs specifically don't give their faithful a discount. So maybe it isn't supported, per se, but your stance that they can't give discounts is also not supported by canon. (Likely at this point the place where it specifically states in FR canon that churches specifically do not offer their faithful a discount will be shown to me and I will be:

).

While giving a discount to the faithful surely isn't necessary, it can only help to add flavor and a sense that we aren't intractable in a perceived stance of not giving any leeway to players.

5% discounts for prayer-recital as a universal temple policy have nothing to do with FR deities and organised religion... unless we say they do.



On tithing:

Tithing is indeed a separate issue, and I wonder if some sort of tracking system could be implemented. Paladins would need to meet their tithing requirements or be blocked from progressing as a paladin.

Discounts could be made as high as 6 or 7% for faithful who the scripts recognize as having met a certain tithe amount (we know we can give you 6% off instead of 5% because we KNOW we'll more than make it back through your tithing and it is FURTHER mitigated by knowing you'll be ever more loyal to the church).

DMs could check how much a PC has tithed to determine NPC reactions to a PC in a local church. A PC who has never tithed will likely not get the same attention from the local clergy as a PC who has tithed 1000 gold over the past ten-day. That's how it works in real life as well. Though, I must say I can't find a place where preferential treatment of contributors is supported by canon.


[Edit] Regarding Indio's statement: I would disagree and offer the following opinion: I feel that the Deity doesn't necessarily care to be paying special attention to every single casting of CLW across the realms. Priests make the call on the Deity's behalf. If the Deity eventually notices a Priest misusing his divine spellcasting by often times supporting the wrong cause, he may strip the cleric of that ability.

I support my opinion by showing that this gives a place where a PCs bluff skill might come into play, which it won't if the spells themselves display that level of omniscience. Any time you can encourage the use of skills that don't have a lot of mechanical purpose otherwise, I think it should be heavily considered.

[Wynna]

Thank you for the quick answer!

It is my belief that I've satisfied the 'How do you know' question with the Bluff roll. The answer is: They don't know and can be fooled. Liars who are not good liars will be caught. Liars who are good liars win their bluff. (Of course, this does not mean that they can't be spectacularly unmasked further down the road in the course of RP.)

On the other hand, I readily admit that treating real believers with 100% win and liars with a possibility of failure is treating each differently, but in my opinion these rewards encourage a sense of belonging to each religion, foster RP and simulate the intangible real world benefits of belonging to a faith. In our world faith healing of believers is a part of many religions, and prayer is both an offering and an avenue to a deity. In return for faith, believers receive a sense of belonging, a glow in the heart, proximity to their god and a ticket to heaven. I can't code faith or any of its returns. I can code prayer and discounted healing. This is my attempt to provide a mechanical facsimile of the intangible give and take between a worshiper and his/her deity.

That reasoning laid out, I thank you again for giving us the option to implement and I will defer to HDM Curmudgeon in any decision.

[White Warlock]

I like it. But... is there any consequence for a bluff fail, or do they just not get the services? I mean, i would like more violence, death, dismemberment.

[Rusty]

This is my attempt to provide a mechanical facsimile of the intangible give and take between a worshiper and his/her deity.

In a world where, at divine intervention, pillars of fire fall from the sky and the dead come back to life, you think the best way of representing "faith" is a 4 gp discount on some magical healing? Seriously?

Quite simply, not only does this derive from the same inappropriately monotheistic weltanschauung as those insane scripts that had priests entirely deny healing based on deity field entries, and not only does it pay absolutely no regard to any kind of canon church approaches to healing, it also introduces the unwelcome principle of reward without effort. There's no justification for introducing such a system outside of maintaining a broken legacy, which is precisely the kind of shoddiness we were trying to get away from with NWN2; it seems a crying shame to start crowbarring it into servers now.

[ALFAModerator2]

Please tone it down Rusty.

Disagreement is one thing, but be respectful when you do it.

Thanks for your cooperation.

[Rusty]

Four simple examples that demonstrate how broken this implementation is (without even addressing the basic propriety).

1. PC A is nominally a worshipper of Deity B. PC A, however, has never been to a service in a church of Deity B. The player of PC A has never role-played any particular religious affilitation or learning. PC A has never, IG, entered one of Deity B's churches. After getting injured, PC A goes to the church of Deity B and is automatically sufficiently versed in dogma to be able to flawlessly recite a prayer.

2. Merchant Bob was saved from the fire that killed the rest of his family by a passing Tymoran priest. Since then, he has believed that Tymora took special care of him and in his luxurious mansion, he has a chapel to Tymora. However, he is also a prominent merchant, which is convienient, given his name. He donates generously to the local temple of Waukeen and regularly attends services. As a grain merchant, he also makes sure to pay respect to Chauntea and visits her church every week, without fail, for a service and to make a donation. And as his grain is shipped along the coast, he's extremely careful to pay respect to Umberlee and also donates to her church and pays a weekly visit to a service there. Merchant Bob, though technically a "Tymoran", is intimately involved with these three other churches, donates to them, and is regularly present at their services, knowing all of their prayers, which being a humble and devout fellow he regularly says before and after business meetings. Yet when he is stabbed in a market brawl and retires to the temple of Waukeen/Chauntea/Umberlee for some emergency healing, he suddenly loses all memory of religious dogma, and his dedications are forgotten by the priest, and he has to (mechanically) make a Bluff roll to say a prayer he says (IC) every day of his life.

3. An Elven PC and a Dwarven PC walk into a temple to the Seldarine. The Priest of Corellon asks them if they worship Corellon. The Elven PC is, technically, a worshipper of Sehanine, and declares her to be an 'ally' of Corellon. The Dwarf is, technically, a worshipper of Vergadain, but declares himself to worship Corellon. He is required to make a Bluff roll and succeeds. The priestly servant of the father of the elven race proceeds to give a discount to the dwarf.

4. A dying man dressed in rags and a luxuriously-dressed noble with a minor cut on his arm enter the shrine to Ilmater. They both approach the priest and ask for healing. The priest asks them both to say a prayer with him. The dying man in rags stumbles over the words and the priest demands that he pay more for being healed than the obviously-wealthy noble.

This implementation - regardless of propriety, which is dubious at best - creates problems, without solving any. It is not worth setting up (potentially) infinite absurdities for what is, at best, a extraordinarily marginal gain. It is also non-ideal to introduce 'money for nothing' situations. Is it better than having priests metagame deity field entries and deny healing services? Yes. Is it better than no variation? No.

[JaydeMoon]

Now you're talking.

Those four points don't address whether clergy might give a discount to those they deem faithful followers.

But they do point out how the system as presented might come up with some wonky results, and they are all very valid points.

Any way to take such things into account?