Custom Class: Priest

[DreamChaser]

I designed it this way on purpose, of course. The fewer worshippers a god has, the less powerful it is. The less powerful it is, the fewer powers it can grant, and the less popular it is. It makes a lot of sense to me, balance aside. If someone wanted to play a priest of a lesser god, it would most likely be for fluffy RP reasons, which is great. Although some lesser gods may grant access to awesome domains that no greater god does. In general, I see a lot of people playing paladins of lesser gods instead of priests.

So, lesser gods have dedicated knightly orders but few clergy?

IMO, this system would have pretty well guaranteed that all gods would be "average" goods. Here's why.

Weaker gods have fewer followers and thus less power. They can attract fewer because of this lower power. This means that they will become even weaker eventually dying out...

Unless, they can steal followers away from other deities. Which is exactly what would happen. Religious PR campaigns (commonly called missions and holy wars) would result in many sects dying out as their followers are obliterated or by simple attrition. Greater gods would find some of their followers fall away to the fringe, which reduces their power and enhances the power of the other gods. Even if the greater gods manage to destroy all the followers of all the lesser gods, they would only find that they are now more equal with their peers.

In this system, every demigod that vanishes helps another demigod become a lesser god, because in the long run the greater gods are in the most precarious position. Over the millennia, the gods would have entered a state of dynamic equilibrium where there overall power would ebb and flow with the trends of the mortal world but overall the would remain in balance.

Essentially it becomes an issue of divine economics.

In a pantheon where the levels of godhood are based upon concept (for example the God of the Sun being a greater god while a god of a particular forest is only a demigod), this is not an issue; gods do not have power based upon the number of followers but they have followers based upon the scope of their power.

DC

 

[GreatLemur]

I really wanted to do something like this. The problems that I ran into with custom spell lists is that my players and I both use so many spells from outside the PHB. It would be such a pain to assign every divine spell from every book we use to custom spell lists for priests. I suppose I could do it on a case-by-case basis.

Case-by-case seems fine, really. If a player wants his priest character to have a non-domain spell, let him make a case for it. If necessary, screw with the spell's subtypes. There are a lot of fire spells out there that would work just as well as electricity spells, for example.

Another thing I forgot to mention: instead of the generic "pray at this time of day" requirement for Clerics in the PHB, most of the gods in my campaign also require a sacrifice of some kind (which entails a successful Knowledge (Religion) check), which may be anything from fresh fruit, expensive incense, or a virgin elf-maid.

That is a seriously great idea.

A long while ago, I was toying with the idea of a divine class who, instead of casting spells, would bargain with spirits for favors. They'd make some kind of Diplomacy or Knowledge (religion) or level + Cha check to try to convince the spirits to help (in ways which would mechanically resemble existing spells). Each request--successful or otherwise--would impose a cumulative penalty on the character's next attempt, and the penalty could be decreased--or even turned into a bonus--by making various kinds of sacrifices (consuming time and money, and possibly requiring skill checks). But now I'm getting off topic.

I designed it this way on purpose, of course. The fewer worshippers a god has, the less powerful it is. The less powerful it is, the fewer powers it can grant, and the less popular it is. It makes a lot of sense to me, balance aside. If someone wanted to play a priest of a lesser god, it would most likely be for fluffy RP reasons, which is great. Although some lesser gods may grant access to awesome domains that no greater god does. In general, I see a lot of people playing paladins of lesser gods instead of priests.

I don't really see a lot of need to make mechanical distinctions between the servants of greater and lesser gods, but I think that if you're going to give one type additional domains, you might consider compensating the other with additional skill points. Since there are fewer aspects to their gods' power, after all, it seems logical that they might have more time--and more need--to study other things.

You could take it even further, too, making the priests of greater gods more reliant on their magic by decreasing their hit die, taking away some armor proficiency, and maybe even cutting them down to Wizard-level BAB.