A post on Dios got me thinking about the recurring posts I've heard regarding tattoos, empowerment, and staff login schedules. Players thus choose empowerment classes and religion largely based upon immortal login hours, which inhibits variety in roles.

Here's a set of ideas pertaining to religion:

a) all immortals associated with a character's chosen sphere may empower a character. Restructure the pantheon so that all spheres can be covered 24 hrs/day. This would require more spheres associated with each immortal and likely a reduction in the permissible spheres. Maybe each god would have major and minor spheres depending upon the emphasis of their personal religion.

b) make empowerment a skill/supplication package that is granted in addition to the standard(warrior, bard, thief, mage, etc.) skill set.* There are multiple empowerment packages available for each sphere, and a character can earn more than one package through good roleplay. Use of the packages does require practicing the individual skills/supplications without gaining additional practices & trains. Characters may still earn a tattoo for roleplaying their religion, but it is symbolic, like a title change, and it need not be tied to having logins corresponding to those of a particular immortal.

c) Empowerment juice has a timer associated with it, and if the character isn't roleplaying the religion he has put in his role, then the immortals can passively let his empowerment expire. Then no immortal player has to be an asshole, and yet characters are held accountable. If a character screws up in a way that demands action, any immortal can nerf the character's package timer(s). The character cannot see the current value of their timer, and the timer does decrement (although at a much slower rate) when they are not logged in.

d) If you as a character wish to roleplay a traditional empowerment class, then don't practice up your career skills and focus on maintaining your roleplay as a champion of good or evil so you keep access to your empowerment packages.

e) Immortals should be playing a game against each other through their pawns, the players, and receive IC awards accordingly. Perhaps their temples bustle with more activity with the more followers of their related spheres (I think of the Hamsah dock echoes). Immortals could receive a pool for empowering people, and the more followers, a little more goes into their pool. With a limited empowerment pools for each sphere, people of the same sphere will be forced to compete against each other and there will be a natural tendency to spread out membership to the other spheres. A third suggestion would be to tie immortal IC powers to the number of followers of their spheres. The gods would then have a reason to encourage their followers to proselytize.

* Existing empowerment classes would need to be modified. The traditional healer (call it priest or whatever) would have skills geared to administering to a church, emphasizing people skills, theology, and education. A benefit of this class could be that empowerment packages would last longer and have more powerful effects associate with them--maybe a Faith skill that has spellcraft-like effects.

Shamans and Paladins are combat-oriented holy-men, with more offensive communes in the former and more defensive communes in the latter. These two classes could share a base skillset common to both and show their variety through their empowerment packages. The classes themselves could be abolished, and their select skills and supplications added to the various empowerment packages, or the classes could be kept with a skillset that is not dependent upon empowerment. This latter strategy would be necessary if druids were to persist in a recognizeable form.

I suggest giving druids skills and supplications in a manner akin to invoker affinities (water, earth, sea, air, flora, fauna, life cycle). This would create variety among druids and fit with the package/path approach I've suggested for empowerment and which appear in all the other classes to some degree.



Respond as you will. I can elaborate any of these ideas or field your hatemail in mail sent to emrys_myrddin@yahoo.com.

a) all immortals associated with a character's chosen sphere may empower a character. Restructure the pantheon so that all spheres can be covered 24 hrs/day. This would require more spheres associated with each immortal and likely a reduction in the permissible spheres. Maybe each god would have major and minor spheres depending upon the emphasis of their personal religion.

This, on which the rest of your suggestion pivots, is impossible. Login times are not predictable for many imms, and many imms - with the other projects they have going on - can barely keep up with the sphere load they have - let alone adding on spheres that they may or may not even be interested in roleplaying out with mortals. Add to this the fact that imms come and imms go, thus any 'restructuring' like you suggest would be rendered inert as soon as some imms jump ship and new ones join the staff.

Now if we were all paid staff that could be ordered what to do and when to do it, and if we had enough of a player base to support such a multi-faceted conflict system based on religion - there might be some discussion here. However, that is just not the case.

- a) all immortals associated with a character's chosen sphere may empower a character. Restructure the pantheon so that all spheres can be covered 24 hrs/day. This would require more spheres associated with each immortal and likely a reduction in the permissible spheres. Maybe each god would have major and minor spheres depending upon the emphasis of their personal religion.

In character, I despise all other immortals who intrude on my spheres. Also, I think 3 sphere is just right, or even too many for any immortal.

- c) Empowerment juice has a timer associated with it, and if the character isn't roleplaying the religion he has put in his role, then the immortals can passively let his empowerment expire. Then no immortal player has to be an asshole, and yet characters are held accountable. If a character screws up in a way that demands action, any immortal can nerf the character's package timer(s). The character cannot see the current value of their timer, and the timer does decrement (although at a much slower rate) when they are not logged in.

If immortals can't make the tough decisions on when to pull the plug, they shouldn't be immortals.

e) Immortals should be playing a game against each other through their pawns, the players, and receive IC awards accordingly. Perhaps their temples bustle with more activity with the more followers of their related spheres (I think of the Hamsah dock echoes). Immortals could receive a pool for empowering people, and the more followers, a little more goes into their pool. With a limited empowerment pools for each sphere, people of the same sphere will be forced to compete against each other and there will be a natural tendency to spread out membership to the other spheres. A third suggestion would be to tie immortal IC powers to the number of followers of their spheres. The gods would then have a reason to encourage their followers to proselytize.

While I don't agree with your suggestions on how that would play out, in general I think there should be a lot more friction in the heavens, and between the followers.

Multiple spheres add complexity to a character. I have not interacted with Khas, but I doubt that the role associated with your character is flat or one-dimensional. But in response to your statement that more spheres assigned to each immortal would be bad, I'll reiterate my suggestion that the number of spheres available could be reduced.

The empowerment timer and empowerment pool ideas were conceived as a limitation on the possibility should EVERYONE actually practice a religion, that not everyone has the power of the pope. In no way do I think that would be a good idea in conjunction with the present system.

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My hope with this thread was to start a discussion regarding how religion, empowerment and the tattoo systems could be improved more than to advance my own ideas. It might not be a glamorous project, but as item standardization has had an impact on everyone's play, so to do spheres and the religions associated with them.

>Players thus choose empowerment classes and religion largely
>based upon immortal login hours, which inhibits variety in roles.

I don't think your suggestions would change this in practice.

Qaledus

a) all immortals associated with a character's chosen sphere may empower a character.

This is more or less already true. It's only if you plan to follow a particular religion later that you would need to seek out one particular god.

Restructure the pantheon so that all spheres can be covered 24 hrs/day. This would require more spheres associated with each immortal and likely a reduction in the permissible spheres.

This would be beyond impractical... never mind the fact that the times immortals can play vary pretty regularly. Also, each imm would end up with like... 15 spheres each. At that point, why even HAVE spheres? Too diluted!

Maybe each god would have major and minor spheres depending upon the emphasis of their personal religion.

There's nothing written about this, but again it more or less works this way with a lot of religions.

make empowerment a skill/supplication package that is granted in addition to the standard(warrior, bard, thief, mage, etc.) skill set.* There are multiple empowerment packages available for each sphere, and a character can earn more than one package through good roleplay.

There has been talk over the years of doing something vaguely similar to this, in particular for shamans. Nothing compelling enough to make it in to development though. The biggest argument against hitching powers to spheres, in particular, is that people would be picking their spheres for powergamer reasons, not for roleplay reasons. If anything, I would be more inclined to let shamans have one or two custom things based on the god that they follow.

Empowerment juice has a timer associated with it, and if the character isn't roleplaying the religion he has put in his role, then the immortals can passively let his empowerment expire.

This would make the problem you're trying to address worse, in my opinion. Besides, how would you justify empowerment going away automatically for a really good priest, if they just haven't been able to meet up times with their patron? Also, it would be unfun.

Then no immortal player has to be an asshole, and yet characters are held accountable.

We don't mind holding people accountable. :)

Immortals should be playing a game against each other through their pawns, the players, and receive IC awards accordingly. Perhaps their temples bustle with more activity with the more followers of their related spheres (I think of the Hamsah dock echoes). Immortals could receive a pool for empowering people, and the more followers, a little more goes into their pool. With a limited empowerment pools for each sphere, people of the same sphere will be forced to compete against each other and there will be a natural tendency to spread out membership to the other spheres. A third suggestion would be to tie immortal IC powers to the number of followers of their spheres. The gods would then have a reason to encourage their followers to proselytize.

How much would that suck if you have been trying to get empowered, you finally find your god, and then he doesn't have enough points to empower you with. Boo.

Maybe empowerment, empowerment classes, and tattoos aren't perceived as problematic, but my perception is that the system is flawed. Healers, druids, and shamans are cookie cutter compared to thieves, rangers, warriors, shapeshifters and invokers. Paladins have slightly more variety because of their dual path system, but they are highly dependendent upon the virtue packages they are (my perception again) more likely to receive if they have a specific patron immortal.

>Restructure the pantheon so that all spheres can be covered
>24 hrs/day. This would require more spheres associated with
>each immortal and likely a reduction in the permissible
>spheres.
>
>This would be beyond impractical... never mind the fact that
>the times immortals can play vary pretty regularly. Also,
>each imm would end up with like... 15 spheres each. At that
>point, why even HAVE spheres? Too diluted!

I understand that we have a small staff with duplicate roles. My recommendation is 3 major and 2 minor spheres, with a reduction of the number of spheres available. Coincidently, I think characters should have more than one sphere, for different motivators inspire internal conflict.

>make empowerment a skill/supplication package that is
>granted in addition to the standard(warrior, bard, thief,
>mage, etc.) skill set.* There are multiple empowerment
>packages available for each sphere, and a character can earn
>more than one package through good roleplay.
>
>There has been talk over the years of doing something vaguely
>similar to this, in particular for shamans. Nothing
>compelling enough to make it in to development though. The
>biggest argument against hitching powers to spheres, in
>particular, is that people would be picking their spheres for
>powergamer reasons, not for roleplay reasons. If anything, I
>would be more inclined to let shamans have one or two custom
>things based on the god that they follow.

I've heard a similar argument about tattoos--people want to follow religion X because his tattoo is SO AWESOME. My thinking with the package approach is that it does not make a great deal of sense to me for a Sphere Destruction healer/shaman to have protection from bash, sanctuary, protection from evil, and why would a shaman of Mercy be empowered to maladict?

>Empowerment juice has a timer associated with it, and if
>the character isn't roleplaying the religion he has put in his
>role, then the immortals can passively let his empowerment
>expire.
>
>This would make the problem you're trying to address worse, in
>my opinion. Besides, how would you justify empowerment going
>away automatically for a really good priest, if they just
>haven't been able to meet up times with their patron?


This is only a problem if you maintain the current approach where a player has to hook up with a specific immortal. My model, admittedly needing improvement, would ask that the immortal staff take on a more interactive role with the players without regard to whether the character worshipped that god directly.

>Then no immortal player has to be an asshole, and yet
>characters are held accountable.
>
>We don't mind holding people accountable. :)


Some people enjoy smiting people more than others. Reduction of a workforce by attrition is more appealing to many than layoffs. Think about our own staff, and I think you could divide the hatchet-men from the attrition mindset.

>Immortals should be playing a game against each other
>through their pawns, the players, and receive IC awards
>accordingly. Perhaps their temples bustle with more activity
>with the more followers of their related spheres (I think of
>the Hamsah dock echoes). Immortals could receive a pool for
>empowering people, and the more followers, a little more goes
>into their pool. With a limited empowerment pools for each
>sphere, people of the same sphere will be forced to compete
>against each other and there will be a natural tendency to
>spread out membership to the other spheres. A third suggestion
>would be to tie immortal IC powers to the number of followers
>of their spheres. The gods would then have a reason to
>encourage their followers to proselytize.
>
>How much would that suck if you have been trying to get
>empowered, you finally find your god, and then he doesn't have
>enough points to empower you with. Boo.

It would suck majorly, no doubt. But looking at how common it is to see posts on here and on Dios regarding immortal login times, it would suggest people are having to conform their roleplay to OOC concerns. I do not think that is the desire nor intent of the staff.

>I've heard a similar argument about tattoos--people want to
>follow religion X because his tattoo is SO AWESOME.

However, the bar for empowerment is much lower.

Many a person has tried to base their character around a tattoo they wanted and failed to earn.

>My
>thinking with the package approach is that it does not make a
>great deal of sense to me for a Sphere Destruction
>healer/shaman to have protection from bash, sanctuary,
>protection from evil,

Because it's easier to destroy things when you're not yourself dead? :)

>and why would a shaman of Mercy be
>empowered to maladict?

Well, there are two different schools of thought in answering here.

The first might be: Ok, so there just shouldn't be destruction healers or mercy shamans.

The second might be that you're just not being very creative in your thinking. For example, I could easily write a Mercy shaman role that would only maledict and never use the damage spells, because to temporarily cripple someone is a lot more merciful than killing them.

Ok, the Nep has spoken. Without marginal approval from you, I'll redirect my creative energies down a different path.

Thanks for discussing it at least.

Heh. I was just tossing in commentary on a few specific points, not taking a great big piss on the whole thing.

At least, not in that post. ;)

which you two remained quiet, and that communicates a few things too. ;-)

I'm not feeling like Nep's water closet quite yet, heh.

If druids playstyles are cookie cutter, that is due to the playerbase and not the class. Druids in my oppinion are the most diversified class as far as playstyle in the game, because it is constantly fluid. Where as with a warrior, you decide on your specs and legacies and they are set in stone. With a druid you could fight me one time and I would come at you like an invoker and the next time a healer with pets. But that is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

>If druids playstyles are cookie cutter, that is due to the
>playerbase and not the class. Druids in my oppinion are the
>most diversified class as far as playstyle in the game,
>because it is constantly fluid. Where as with a warrior, you
>decide on your specs and legacies and they are set in stone.
>With a druid you could fight me one time and I would come at
>you like an invoker and the next time a healer with pets. But
>that is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

What you speak of is due to the versatility offered within the skill set. However, every druid gets the same set of skills & supps to throw at you. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying druids are underpowered, I'm saying Druid A and Druid B have the same tools available to them.

In my opinion, variety is good. I like the excitement of fighting a warrior for the first time and not knowing what their specs and legacies are. I enjoy that sick feeling you get when you discover that the thug you were fighting is also a poisoner.

That was my point however. From that point on, you know what to expect from that warrior and when that thief blackjacks you again, you know what to expect from him. That same druid could come at you in several different fashions each time. The only empowerment class I feel needs work at the moment are shaman. I have played every empowerment class, shaman are the only ones lacking in some kind of specialization or flair.

>>How much would that suck if you have been trying to get
>>empowered, you finally find your god, and then he doesn't have>
>enough points to empower you with. Boo.

>It would suck majorly, no doubt. But looking at how common it is to >see posts on here and on Dios regarding immortal login times, it >would suggest people are having to conform their roleplay to OOC >concerns. I do not think that is the desire nor intent of the staff.


Would suck worse then playing an imperial and being stuck at oath for weeks because none of your full members has enough donations to promote you. :P

Some of the rest I like.