Priests Magic (aka Miracles)

The enemy lurks in shadows
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Yepesnopes
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I would like to hear opinions on two points that bother me about Priests.

1) Miracles and how rare they are.
I have always envision an Old World where miracles and blessings are a rare occurrence. This has been supported by the lore in the different editions of the game, for example quoting the 4th edition "A small number of the faithful stand apart from their peers, seemingly able to appeal for their deity’s direct intervention in the form of miracles."

Sadly no edition has supported this with the career & talent mechanics, that allows for early and easy access to miracles.

This is no big a deal I guess, with my players for example I killed the topic of "let's go to the temple to get healed" by saying that in the Old World Miracle casters are very rare and that the career system is something for PC only. They took it well, bu I would have preferred a mechanics supporting the lore. For example, similar to what is done with the Witch! talent, the Invoke Talent could have required the expenditure of a Fate point to learn it.

2) (Some) Miracles are "overpowered".
That is probably the issue that currently annoys me the most. My players have characters that have recently entered their second level of the career. That gives you an idea of their power level. The Warrior Priest of Sigmar got Sigmar's Comet. This Miracle is one of the most powerful spells in both Arcane and Miracles and it is ridiculously easy to get it and to cast it.
Of course the miracle it self is not overpowered, but the fact that you can get it so early and that it is so easy to cast (as compared to the bizarre difficulty of casting spells) makes it overpowered.

I know that Priests have to follow Strictures (which is great for role-playing conflict opportunities) and that there is the Optional Rule Petty Concerns, but some how it does not feel that it compensate. One single Comet at the beginning of the combat is enough to decimate most of the enemies that I can pin the party against. Increasing number or strength would risk too often a TPK, so all my combat encounter design is warped around the Comet thing.

How are you dealing with this? are you using any particular set of house rules?
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Orin J.
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this is only the guidelines i was planning before my group laughed the idea of playing 4th out of the room, but my general plan was to have a GM-held "needful intervention" stat, where the degree to which their actions would benafit the followers of the faith (and the world in general) and the priest's adherance to said faith would determine how much access to miricles and such. so most of the time the average priestess of shallya wouldn't have a drop of godly power backing them up because they're idling in the temple where they can get by on the skills shallya teaches, but when someone that absolutely MUST live to stymy the chaos gods and dragged in on death's door, they might manage to muster enough faith to pull them back from the brink to recover under the temple's watchful eye.

by the same set, that would mean that the player's priest could count on some magic when doing things that are reasonably important to their god, but when they go to rough up a noble as a favor some a loan shark (why do my players always dive in when i mention there's gambling going on?) they won't be able to deliver a holy smite to back up their words. it has the twin benifits of putting the powers of the gods squarely in the position of "beyond the player's control" which i feels the gods should be AND lets me use their limitations to drive the story where it's useful. my main concern with this is with how the rest of the rules make everything very player-centered they might complain i took what they see as "the key perk" of playing a priest.

EDIT: i like your burning a fate point for miricles idea though. really drives home the seriousness of them and provides a good tradeoff.
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Yepesnopes
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Yesterday night it occur to me a mechanic about currying favor, where a miracles caster would need to have curried a certain amount of favour before being able to perform a miracle, and each miracle would have a favor cost. Now, I read your post suggesting something similar :)

Did you further developed your idea? I would love to read about it.

Also, what do you mean by "my group laughed the idea of playing 4th out of the room"?

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macd21
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Something to consider regarding your first point is that in 4ed there’s no requirement for a priest to have the Miracle talents. You only need 1 career talent to finish the career, so an NPC can have one of the others.
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Orin J.
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Yepesnopes wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 12:59 am -what do you mean by "my group laughed the idea of playing 4th out of the room"?
to cut a rambling story short, my gaming group was fairly cuthroat about abusing game mechanics if they can at all get away with it and 4th ed's system has a number of glaring holes for anyone willing to poke at it. i think it took them about fifteen minutes of reading the rules for combat to figure out a way to trivilize any realitvely equal combat with the usual minmaxing, which in turn led them to agree they could simply seek heaven through violence and disregard the actual gameplay if they didn't care for it. as they already figured out how to "win" the game without playing, they didn't bother with actually trying to play since they didn't want to deal with missing XP by "playing smart".
macd21 wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 4:15 pm Something to consider regarding your first point is that in 4ed there’s no requirement for a priest to have the Miracle talents. You only need 1 career talent to finish the career, so an NPC can have one of the others.
this doesn't really answer the question, it just adds the additional layer of "why wouldn't you learn to channel divine miricles if you could?" to it.
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Yepesnopes
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macd21 wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 4:15 pm Something to consider regarding your first point is that in 4ed there’s no requirement for a priest to have the Miracle talents. You only need 1 career talent to finish the career, so an NPC can have one of the others.
I totally agree with Orin here. Additionally, the same argument can be used for wizards right? You could advance up to wizards lord without knowing how to cast a single spell.... So the collages of magic could be filled with (NPC) Wizards that cast no spells.
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Yepesnopes
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Orin J. wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:38 pm
Yepesnopes wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 12:59 am -what do you mean by "my group laughed the idea of playing 4th out of the room"?
to cut a rambling story short, my gaming group was fairly cuthroat about abusing game mechanics if they can at all get away with it and 4th ed's system has a number of glaring holes for anyone willing to poke at it. i think it took them about fifteen minutes of reading the rules for combat to figure out a way to trivilize any realitvely equal combat with the usual minmaxing, which in turn led them to agree they could simply seek heaven through violence and disregard the actual gameplay if they didn't care for it. as they already figured out how to "win" the game without playing, they didn't bother with actually trying to play since they didn't want to deal with missing XP by "playing smart".

I totally understand this, as I am of the same type, after so many years of playing different rpgs, I have developed a sort of detector for mechanics that can be abused. When I first bought the core book my eyes bleed (Advantage, magic system, talents bonus SL...). It has taken me like a year to mod the system to something we like playing and is fairly clean of "mechanical holes". As you can imagine, I am now trying to mod the Priest system :) At least this edition (contrary to the 3rd ed) is based on a d100 system which is fairly easy to mod.

So what did you end up playing?
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Orin J.
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they ended up going back to playing warhammer 40k, then there was some thing that prevented everyone from meeting up...what WAs that.....
Yepesnopes wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 11:55 pm I totally agree with Orin here. Additionally, the same argument can be used for wizards right? You could advance up to wizards lord without knowing how to cast a single spell.... So the collages of magic could be filled with (NPC) Wizards that cast no spells.
this is actually true in-setting for the light collage. because the color of hysh is so hard to pull down to the earth to use for magic, they keep a horde of apprentaces that proved unable to learn spells around to channel magic for them at all times in big chanting choirs. i was thinking of giving that school a channeling limit on the number of people in a certian range, but discarded it as a bit excessive in favor of giving each school a higher channeling difficulty under bad conditions. then discarding everything because nobody wanted to play it, admittadly.
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