I’m always hesitant to make a new religion for my empowerment characters, since it is highly dependent on an immortal liking it, taking time out of their normal routine, etc. So, I’m proposing a sort of standardization process for it, so people like me who don’t really want to follow any known religions can have their fair share.

I think after the normal character generation(role, sphere, etc), a priest should write a missive to all the immortals explaining their religion. Now I think this is already suggested in a help file, but I suggest giving a specific format so everyone knows exactly what they need to do. A format will make it easier for a person to design their religion. I think it is very easy for a player to forget a detail that might be important for the immortals to know before empowerment.

For example the format could be:

Name of religion/god/object of worship:

Spheres that he covers:

What’s the religion about?(about a paragraph)

Why these spheres?

How do you exemplify this religion?

Expected Play times:

Tattoo: This is an optional thing I decided to put here. This can be ignored, but I think it would be kind of cool if the player can design what their religion’s tattoo looks like. No powers, no stats, nothing. So if they player did get a tattoo, it would be of their design, but it wouldn’t give them any benefit other than saying they are a cool priest of xyz.

Writing down the expected play times I think is very important. This will enable the immortals to look at the missive and decide if they are able/willing to empower someone who plays these times.

I may be missing some important questions, but a standardization of religion creation would help with empowerment woes. Also, if someone makes a really badass religion, its possible(with player permission) to give it a level 53 imm to use as a new religion with the necessary tweaks. I might be going too far with this idea, but it is something to consider.

I'd like to see LESS custom religion empowerments, but that's just my bias speaking.

... to have almost every player follow different religions...

I can buy it if you have a really super cool role but it just can't fit in with ANY current religions and it NEEDS a religion.

The cool roles that haven't fit any religions that I've had just haven't joined any religions at all. (Haven't really NEEDED it for the role to work.)

Sure, maybe it took me longer to get some immteraction, but once I did and imms started to snoop me (I just suppose that they did) I begang getting some nice immteractions.

And when I begin thinking of a cool role I directly consider if it needs a religion or not (empowerment chars need them of course.) and if they do I directly start to think which religion I'd want to try out that works with the basic outlines I have in my head. Not until that is decided do I start to finish the role.

I believe the imms have enough work with their own religions + the other "behind the scenes" stuff to deal with a bunch of custom religions.

Because there's absolutely no lasting impression after said char dies. Where did this god come from? How did they remain hidden up until now? Why do they fluff out when the char that worships them dies? Must've been a very weak god.

If you have a really cool role, but no religion to follow, get empowered by an Imm that fits closest to you or one that sits over your sphere. Or pick an Imm you like that might grant you empowerment and deal with the firsthand "what are you doing here, you don't belong" bs. I've had ONE priest that followed a religion. My favorite was Grecken who was empowered by Marcatis but in no form or fashion was a Marcatis follower. There was a certain amount of lining up between my role and that religion that I explained in our first meeting and with some role-fudging, lengthy discussions, and general kick-assery that was Grecken I ended up getting empowered to 51 and had the OPTION to become a full-fledged Marcatis follower. But I was having fun with Grecken being a champion of balance and being a druid of light would have been weird considering his role was to balance all the forces so that the world would mercifully die and cease to exist.

...required you to only use the established pantheon of Thera not only would that immediately increase the workload of the staff, to handle the volume of empowerees you would have to have multiple gods of the same religion with varying interpretations like mini-cabals, or you would have to drastically reduce the creativity allowed for roles to actually get empowered since they have to fit the framework of whoever the hell happens to have a moment they don't have a toddler on their knee to go empower you. Additionally, staff members who don't necessarily *want* a religion would eventually be pressured into half-ass writing one to take on their fair share of the workload in regards to empowerees.

In short without custom religions empowerment, while already varying from 'decent' to 'extremely irritating' it would break the concept completely because you'd essentially be hacking off limbs of potential clerical class players.

If that's what you want, more power to you, I wouldn't mind all empowerment classes becoming as rare as druids, but I don't seriously believe just because nepenthe is stating that, that it's what's going to happen. Empowerment classes milk RP out of people and they will continue to be set up to do precisely that to keep their baseline superior power level relative to other classes.

Bard Repertoire Clarifications:
http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=23735&mesg_id=23735&page=

This is two in a row someone has responded to my post and I get the impression they didn't read what I said.

What I said in plain engrish is that you can have these cool "custom religion roles" without the need of a "new god". Grecken was an example of a unique role that fit into zero god's religions. Not one... except Zurcon's I guess. So instead of playing hamster on a wheel, the sphere Death druid went with the only imm that was over the sphere death and got empowered literally 2 hours into the char's life, inducted 11 hours in and spent the next 500 hours doing druidly nexus stuff.

I don't think the gods in CF need preachers. But they have the preacher edge for those that want to be. And the beauty of the sphere system is that you don't need to be a pure-bred follower of a religion to be empowered by a god. If you want a tat, then that's TOTALLY different. That is not an empowerment related discussion. These two ideas should really be separated completely.

I think it's bad practice to look at a religion and make a role to fit it. I think it should be the other way around, make a role, then see if a religion fits it. That way you are less formulaic and more human and more likely to RP and not say stupid #### like It adds "plus 3 to dam" or "That was before I had two legacies".

You are correct in that my preference for less custom religions doesn't mean that's what's going to happen.

I think pretty much everything else you said is wrong.

Some of my favorite empowered characters have been custom religion empowerments (Landren, that panda dude, some dude Beer played that got empowered by the dark waves, etc, etc, etc).

I have a wicked awesome paladin role I've literally been saving for years but it's totally a custom role (actually, if I ever IMM'd I would tailor a religion around this idea).

Any answer you give is a good one.

A few things off the top of my head:

1) It's more interesting if there are multiple people in religions to interact with each other and conflict with each other. You can't have interesting religious politics, wars, etc. if everyone has their own religion that no one else is a part of. A custom religion character is almost always that.

2) I'm not personally interested, 99% of the time, in being the interacting imm for them.

3) Generally, they're sources of player discontent about empowerment. Overall, we're not great at covering them, and I expect we never will be for very long at a time. For every player who has a great experience with it, there's got to be at least a dozen who never go anywhere and feel surly about it. You may think, "This is great! Any imm can help me out." but as an imm when I see you praying, <i>I</i> think, "I've got too much other #### to do; that's someone else's job."

Or look at it another way: pick an imm that at that time is pretty active about empowerments. You're more likely to get interaction from them if you're of their religion vs. unclaimed. pick an imm that's pretty bad about empowerments; you're also more likely to get interaction from them if you're their religion vs. unclaimed.

You can make the argument that all of us can't be as lazy as one of us, but I haven't seen that bear out.

Note that I don't hold up any of these as reasons that custom empowerments should go away entirely, and I've not suggested that it should either.

What has happened to you?

Can't disagree with what you said though, and what Thror alluded to on Gameplay vis a vis Time committments (PS Thror, I found your post very well put, and fail to see why someone would get upset about it), which is why the role is STILL on the shelf ;)