Thursday, August 23, 2018

Calling on The Good God

In our last DFRPG session, one of the PCs prayed to the Good God for guidance.


I was thinking about how I'd like to keep the split between "Seeking Guidance" and "Praying."


Praying is for danger. Stuff is bad, you need help. The examples are pretty clear - serendipitous saving of a life, teleportation to safety. I'd add arrival of help (if such help was on the way). Disruption of an enemy attack. Parting of Red Seas. Stuff like that.

I may even allow players who try the roll and fail to re-roll it immediately if they sacrifice character points to do so (and get the bonus, naturally.)

But you don't want to do this too much. Just because your roll is an easy 10 or 11 doesn't mean you should do this repeatedly during a delve. Save it; the GM is more likely to be generous if you ask infrequently.

But it's for "things have gone badly" situations, not "we're not sure what to do" situations.

Seeking Guidance is what you need to do if you need a hint, a clue, or a tip on what or how to do something. This may or may not be really helpful. It might just be obvious. And like any other "ask the GM" approaches, the more you use it the less likely the GM is to keep giving you useful stuff. "I roll Theology about going left or right." "I wonder what the Good God would do when confronted with this empty room that I think is something special!" Things like that will get old quickly.


I think the books make these clear enough, but I wanted to show my way of thinking about them. Theology and Meditation get you hints. Actual prayers get you miracles, potentially - but flat-out fail if you do them too often or try when you carry the way out yourself.

4 comments:

  1. "But you don't want to do this too much."

    If the ability didn't cost character points to get it on the sheet I'd agree with you. But it does. Would you ask the Wizards to cut back on casting his spells? The Knight from swinging his sword?


    And, what ability are they are even using? If it's Divine Guidance that has inbuilt limitations... being that it's simply a Divine form of Intuition.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Neither Praying or Seeking Guidance costs no one any points at all. They simply reward you for having spent points with a better roll.

      And Seeking Guidance is ultimately a skill roll to ask the GM what to do. Who is playing, the GM or the players?

      Delete
    2. Oh right, the Last Ditch sidebar. I keep forgetting it exists, I never see it come up in play.

      Delete
  2. off topic: Do you give Vryce and presumably other fighters who wear a full face helmet 1/2 DR when their eyes are targeted or 0 DR over their eyes?

    ReplyDelete

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