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I had a OOC discussion with a fellow player about supplicating a item. He told me that gods only give three items and that they won't make your character unqiue, plus that they might not even work for your class. I was THINKING perhaps add a larger list of items that can be supplicated, and make it so when you supplicate a item that it reads your class and grants you a item based on that class. Just a thought.

I agree that supplicated items could use some love, but also a little regulation overall. Perhaps based on rank in the faith along with favor level for the first two items, and the third is reserved for clergy. So non-priests get 2, priests can get 3. With added power comes added responsibility.

Something similar was suggested here.

I was thinking about supplicate object recently and decided to give a thought on it without making a whole new post. Here goes:

At the present the system isn't broken and people can get good items from it, however I've read through a variety of posts like this dating back for some years now and I have to wonder if the current system was initially intended for some older version of the code that's now out of date.

As a gift from your chosen god it might be better to simply be an object/faith/class related blessing laid upon an object already owned by the supplicant. As in, Besky supplicates to his deity and asks for his special sword to be blessed.

Deity favors Besky and lays upon the sword a mighty boon. This boon could be +N bonus or a skill boost or even a stat perk coupled with it being an immortal object. Meaning it can't break during normal play. (It would require an IMM run plot to RP it as shattering or some such.)
Or say Besky asks that his special platemail be blessed and it gives him a boost to natural healing, or otherwise. That way the items feel more personalized to the character and give them an important advantage geared towards their chosen style of play.

From a code standpoint I don't see this being immensely difficult so please tell me if it is. A list of boons for each class might just do the trick and it randomly selects the affect + the strength. It might even go so far as to make a list per class per deity (though I'd suspect the lists to be shorter, but I could write them if an Imm would like me to.) so that it focuses on that faith's flavor as well. Tempurans get bonuses to strength, consitution, HP, combat skills while Mielikkians receive bonuses to dexterity, trades, etc.

Thoughts on this?

Personally, I think the game is too heavily focused on the religion as it is. And I really don't want religious objects to be "gated" by faith levels or anything like that. The religions are a mess, in my opinion. You've got faith managers who rarely play and don't promote anyone. You've got faith managers who run their faith like a boot camp and others who just sort of hand out the holy symbol and never interact again.

In addition, there's no reason why a cleric of a holy (unholy) order should be in charge of handing out the favors of their god. That just doesn't make sense, even in a fantasy setting. The priest of Ilmater in the field tending to the lepers and feeding the orphans could be MORE beloved than the high-ranking priest of the order who spends all his time standing in the market square and pontificating about how good his deity is. Your level of favor between you and your god should be independent of the church hierarchy.

I haven't seen a lot of faith objects which are just gamebreaking. Most of them are something minor here or there. They generally give you a bonus that is just as attainable through non-faith magic items, spells, or easily-acquired potions.

On the more secular side, I'd like to see non-faith organizations brought into the game. Stuff like the Harpers, Cult of the Dragon, or the Arcane Brotherhood. There are plenty of organizations which are not faith-based and could be slid into the favor system smoothly and without unbalancing the game. A necromancer guild could give you favor for animating the dead and/or casting necromancy spells. An explorer's guild could give you favor based on your geographical knowledge increasing. Guard organizations for a nation or city could give you favor for killing specific races, alignments, or mobs within a geographically defined area.

No reason why these secular organizations can't have their own artifacts, which WOULD be controlled by the bureaucracy since there is no deity being supplicated to. Such as the "tireless patrol" badge given out by members of the Purple Dragons which removes the need for sleep, food, or drink.

There's some good stuff being mentioned here and I appreciate people taking the time to opine.

First, I would say that the purpose of faiths is to enhance and flesh out role-play. So keep that mind as you shape recommendations.

Secondly, organizations (religious, secular, etc.) require leadership which is active and consistent in order to really be fully valuable. Many secular organizations do (or did) exist and faltered because no one really took ownership of the idea in a meaningful way. This is by no means a dig at Ungtar; I only want to point out that people can really fix a lot with dedicated role-play. While it might be cool to have an organization that benefits one player, it is a lot cooler to have such an organization which benefits (and involves) many players.

After considering what Ungtar has said, I can see what he's talking about when it comes to some of the faiths and the system that controls it. Personally only one of my characters has to date successfully faithed and the other one was trying to faith during a time there was no faith manager and sort of went into this limbo after I took hiatus from online gaming. So my suggestions aren't entirely personal centric.

I guess what I'm trying to offer is a less hard-lined code intensive approach to offering RP flavorings like the supplicated objects that are specific to the character. I see faith as an RP tool used by the character and anything that he and his god work on between them can help add to that RP's function. If you take a more MUSH-logic point of view on it you get this idea that the item itself isn't important but the RP functionality of the item is.

That's where my suggestion comes into play. I'm trying to offer the best of both game styles, the MUD style of objects where it actually has coded value and the MUSH style where the system is open ended to allow the user to define how that coded value affects their roleplay. The code on the objects themselves isn't intended, at least in my eyes, to over help min/max-ing ability by the player for their particular character but to assist them in playing their character in the larger community in total. For me this is what the faith system was built to do but has since lost sight of due to any number of reasons. It just feels like the faith system in general forgot to grab a torch on the way out of Waterdeep and now the sun has gone down.

Ungtar wrote:On the more secular side, I'd like to see non-faith organizations brought into the game. Stuff like the Harpers, Cult of the Dragon, or the Arcane Brotherhood. There are plenty of organizations which are not faith-based and could be slid into the favor system smoothly and without unbalancing the game. A necromancer guild could give you favor for animating the dead and/or casting necromancy spells. An explorer's guild could give you favor based on your geographical knowledge increasing. Guard organizations for a nation or city could give you favor for killing specific races, alignments, or mobs within a geographically defined area.

No reason why these secular organizations can't have their own artifacts, which WOULD be controlled by the bureaucracy since there is no deity being supplicated to. Such as the "tireless patrol" badge given out by members of the Purple Dragons which removes the need for sleep, food, or drink.

I think that is has been brought a very interesting topic that deserves its own topic.

I dunno. The final word on that has sort of been given.

My thought is that, if you have a character who wants to start a FR organization (or make up your own) then just do it. See how much steam it gathers. If you do it well I bet nobody complains and you might even get some imm support. If you do it poorly then it wouldn't have worked out anyway.

Ungtar wrote:On the more secular side, I'd like to see non-faith organizations brought into the game. Stuff like the Harpers, Cult of the Dragon, or the Arcane Brotherhood. There are plenty of organizations which are not faith-based and could be slid into the favor system smoothly and without unbalancing the game. A necromancer guild could give you favor for animating the dead and/or casting necromancy spells. An explorer's guild could give you favor based on your geographical knowledge increasing. Guard organizations for a nation or city could give you favor for killing specific races, alignments, or mobs within a geographically defined area.

No reason why these secular organizations can't have their own artifacts, which WOULD be controlled by the bureaucracy since there is no deity being supplicated to. Such as the "tireless patrol" badge given out by members of the Purple Dragons which removes the need for sleep, food, or drink.

I agree though honestly I often feel like there are a number of guilds already in game that aren't player run or introduced that people tend to forget are guilds at all. All the wizard ones for example, The merchants, fighter guilds, thief guilds, some with different branches and outposts, all with their own thing going for them that in some cases due to oversharing of skills / spells have become redundant.

Don't get me wrong... Arcane brotherhood? Sign me up. I do feel though that a greater focus should be in giving PC involved IC advantages to being part of these guilds though. Some like the school of wonder's mage's guild though may need some more content added to them to give them a better understanding of their political standing and goals to really flesh things out. Which *cough* I wouldn't mind researching and writing up. *cough*

To draw an example out of the ether of my mind without any forthought, what I mean by a PC involved advantage would be something like.. the Mage guild having a Teleportation circle, or a crystal orb that mages can use to cast magic mirror once a minute but would need PCs to collect items from god knows where to charge up. Each guild having something like this inside the guild that only members have access to and each member can use but also benefit from the cooperation of other members.

This way, we're not overloading the game with scores of organisations that the playerbase doesn't have the players to support, or a a multitude of personalized, wearable items that a player doesn't have the wear locations for.