Power of the gods, GURPS style
Jun. 18th, 2015 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm tired and grumpy today and may or may not have a headache and in general am not having my best research day.
I was looking for rules to spin stories around, specifically stories of mortals attempting to become gods. There's rules for becoming a spirit, and there's a bunch of mentions that gods draw on their worshippers to gain power, but today I cannot find a points cost or mechanism for such a draw.
In Nomine has a lot of rules, including ways to pretend to be a god to get their worship juice. The general suggestion to players though is Don't, because gods have more power than you and will be annoyed.
Which is well and good, but if you're setting up a world from scratch, how do you define said gods? Power depends on worshippers, more or less? Okay, but how many worshippers per how many fatigue points?
And how to points cost it for having such a nifty ability as a giant sink of extra fatigue points?
Closest thing I could find in the GURPS Basic Set was Familiars, those being animals or spirits that a mage hangs out with. Allies are physically present and can be directly affected by your enemies, but worshippers are numerous and distant and can be attacked without you immediately knowing about it, so while different there's still the common thread of vulnerability. Familiars that are Constantly available and have the Special Ability to grant you fatigue somehow, but are built on less than 25% of your points, cost all of 6 points. After that you can figure out how many of them there are. More worshippers, logically more fatigue granted, right?
Fatigue is simply bought with the Granted By Familiar modifier -40%, but it comes from the familiar in the first place, who has to buy it at full cost. Since allies are bought as a proportion, the amount of extra fatigue your sidekick can have would vary substantially depending on other decisions.
But an Ally Group of up to 10,000 only costs 24* more than the one ally, in this case costing 144, though you can probably take them as Dependants too and reduce the costs by like 40. Worshippers are an Ally Group, right? Ish? With possible modifiers as to how much you can order them around, to taste. But then you've got the Fatigue of 10,000 humans to draw on, which for an average human is 10*10,000 fatigue, at which point all your followers are unconscious but you can basically re-enact creation via spells like Sanctuary and the whole Illusion/Creation college... with a worshipper pool smaller than my town. That seems a bit overpowered.
So possibly you can't suck your worshippers dry? And on a given day they might not have contributed? So your actual working pool of Fatigue, outside of high holy days, is probably lower.
Rules for drawing on the contributions of groups to cast big spells usually come under Ceremonial Magic. You could call worship a special case of ceremony where nobody knows the spell but they're all happy for the focus of their attention, their deity, to cast whatever they want with their powers. But Ceremonial Magic has some limits on both contribution of non-mages and skill of mages when using large contributions.
Thaumatology has 'Mass Magic' on p51 that scales up the ability to draw power from crowds. A single mage with a spell at 15+ can coordinate up to 10,000 spectators in ritual actions that will generate one energy point per 100 participants, up to 100 points total.
So if you've got a worshipper group of 10,000 and they've got the same limits as human ritual, they can contribute 100 points in total, ignoring the skill requirements and priests for a minute. 100 is not huge. You can cast a bunch of stuff, but it's still in the range the tables for ordinary mages might play at. A 100 point Powerstone bought as Signature Gear would only cost 68 character points... though come to think it would take 100 days to recharge. The vastly superior recharge rate of worshippers is certainly worth more. 100 extra fatigue points granted by a familiar costs 180 character points. The recharge rate would have to be decided actually, it's sort of not logical to have 1 point every ten minutes like for your own fatigue, and if you spent it all you wouldn't get it back in a hurry, despite still having just as many worshippers to call on. The ritual to get 100 points out of 10,000 people takes however long the spell you're casting ceremonially does. Those extra points are there, or fail to be there, when you make your spell roll. And they can be actively blocked by unbelievers, which isn't quite how this worshippers-as-familiars thing ought to work at all.
If it's just a question of waiting for the worshippers to replenish fatigue then all 100 would logically be there in a few minutes rest. If it's a question of waiting for worshippers to do the ritual and pass that fatigue up to their deity then that would be more of a fixed point in the day sort of thing. Wouldn't know how to points cost either option.
Deities can have a whole lot more than 10,000 worshippers. So then they'd need priests to do the ritual, coordinate, and pass it along to the deity. One priest per 10K people would work if they're all in the same stadium. Not so much elsewise.
Wanting to put a points cost on a deity seems daft. But wanting to be able to point out to a PC that they are not, in fact, currently a deity, seems more helpful.
Also with the population surge on Earth then the amount of power available could be going up even if the percentage who are religious are going down. There could be maths to demonstrate.
And if you could get a bunch of people to participate in a ritual, say by making it a dance craze, how powered up could you get? With a network of mages to bring it together?
There's some very powerful spells that could make world changing effects, and if you want to run something in the here-now you keep crunching into the thing where they ought to have done so by now, and should be able to do so really easily.
The usual GM level answer for why they don't is there's always a bigger fish.
Which is sort of boring.
Okay, pointless rules poking done for the day, this is going nowhere.
I was looking for rules to spin stories around, specifically stories of mortals attempting to become gods. There's rules for becoming a spirit, and there's a bunch of mentions that gods draw on their worshippers to gain power, but today I cannot find a points cost or mechanism for such a draw.
In Nomine has a lot of rules, including ways to pretend to be a god to get their worship juice. The general suggestion to players though is Don't, because gods have more power than you and will be annoyed.
Which is well and good, but if you're setting up a world from scratch, how do you define said gods? Power depends on worshippers, more or less? Okay, but how many worshippers per how many fatigue points?
And how to points cost it for having such a nifty ability as a giant sink of extra fatigue points?
Closest thing I could find in the GURPS Basic Set was Familiars, those being animals or spirits that a mage hangs out with. Allies are physically present and can be directly affected by your enemies, but worshippers are numerous and distant and can be attacked without you immediately knowing about it, so while different there's still the common thread of vulnerability. Familiars that are Constantly available and have the Special Ability to grant you fatigue somehow, but are built on less than 25% of your points, cost all of 6 points. After that you can figure out how many of them there are. More worshippers, logically more fatigue granted, right?
Fatigue is simply bought with the Granted By Familiar modifier -40%, but it comes from the familiar in the first place, who has to buy it at full cost. Since allies are bought as a proportion, the amount of extra fatigue your sidekick can have would vary substantially depending on other decisions.
But an Ally Group of up to 10,000 only costs 24* more than the one ally, in this case costing 144, though you can probably take them as Dependants too and reduce the costs by like 40. Worshippers are an Ally Group, right? Ish? With possible modifiers as to how much you can order them around, to taste. But then you've got the Fatigue of 10,000 humans to draw on, which for an average human is 10*10,000 fatigue, at which point all your followers are unconscious but you can basically re-enact creation via spells like Sanctuary and the whole Illusion/Creation college... with a worshipper pool smaller than my town. That seems a bit overpowered.
So possibly you can't suck your worshippers dry? And on a given day they might not have contributed? So your actual working pool of Fatigue, outside of high holy days, is probably lower.
Rules for drawing on the contributions of groups to cast big spells usually come under Ceremonial Magic. You could call worship a special case of ceremony where nobody knows the spell but they're all happy for the focus of their attention, their deity, to cast whatever they want with their powers. But Ceremonial Magic has some limits on both contribution of non-mages and skill of mages when using large contributions.
Thaumatology has 'Mass Magic' on p51 that scales up the ability to draw power from crowds. A single mage with a spell at 15+ can coordinate up to 10,000 spectators in ritual actions that will generate one energy point per 100 participants, up to 100 points total.
So if you've got a worshipper group of 10,000 and they've got the same limits as human ritual, they can contribute 100 points in total, ignoring the skill requirements and priests for a minute. 100 is not huge. You can cast a bunch of stuff, but it's still in the range the tables for ordinary mages might play at. A 100 point Powerstone bought as Signature Gear would only cost 68 character points... though come to think it would take 100 days to recharge. The vastly superior recharge rate of worshippers is certainly worth more. 100 extra fatigue points granted by a familiar costs 180 character points. The recharge rate would have to be decided actually, it's sort of not logical to have 1 point every ten minutes like for your own fatigue, and if you spent it all you wouldn't get it back in a hurry, despite still having just as many worshippers to call on. The ritual to get 100 points out of 10,000 people takes however long the spell you're casting ceremonially does. Those extra points are there, or fail to be there, when you make your spell roll. And they can be actively blocked by unbelievers, which isn't quite how this worshippers-as-familiars thing ought to work at all.
If it's just a question of waiting for the worshippers to replenish fatigue then all 100 would logically be there in a few minutes rest. If it's a question of waiting for worshippers to do the ritual and pass that fatigue up to their deity then that would be more of a fixed point in the day sort of thing. Wouldn't know how to points cost either option.
Deities can have a whole lot more than 10,000 worshippers. So then they'd need priests to do the ritual, coordinate, and pass it along to the deity. One priest per 10K people would work if they're all in the same stadium. Not so much elsewise.
Wanting to put a points cost on a deity seems daft. But wanting to be able to point out to a PC that they are not, in fact, currently a deity, seems more helpful.
Also with the population surge on Earth then the amount of power available could be going up even if the percentage who are religious are going down. There could be maths to demonstrate.
And if you could get a bunch of people to participate in a ritual, say by making it a dance craze, how powered up could you get? With a network of mages to bring it together?
There's some very powerful spells that could make world changing effects, and if you want to run something in the here-now you keep crunching into the thing where they ought to have done so by now, and should be able to do so really easily.
The usual GM level answer for why they don't is there's always a bigger fish.
Which is sort of boring.
Okay, pointless rules poking done for the day, this is going nowhere.