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Message: <blockquote data-quote="harpy" data-source="post: 5161767" data-attributes="member: 85243">Thanks for all of the in depth responses.  I have to say I'm surprised at the resistance to the idea.I guess I wasn't intended this as some proposal for an official Pathfinder redo, I'd assumed everyone was seeing this as a homebrew.I'm actually doing a small version of my idea in a current campaign.  Before going out for adventures, players can go to the local temple and make a donation to one of the gods.  In return they get to call upon the god once a day to receive a cure light wounds.  So far it has been working pretty well, lots of players and classes that never bother to have any spiritual dimension to their characters are now, and it's fun to see each of the players come up with their own particular desperate plea for aid when they need the healing.  It also means no one has to play a cleric, which none of the players have much of a desire to play.Like I'd mentioned, doing a real treatment of "everyone is a cleric" would probably require an extensive overhaul, that is why I was hoping someone might have already have done this.  On one of the other forums I'd posted on about this issue pointed out that someone had done a light treatment on this with called The Book of Faithful.  It looks interesting, though it doesn't go as far as I'd want to go.In digging around it also looks like the Conan RPG also takes a similar approach to the spiritual.  Anyone can become a "Priest" by just spending a feat at 4th level or above, and with it they get a specific set of benefits and powers depending on the God that they are devoted to.There is a lot of metaphysical fluff that I guess can stand in the way of someone not wanting to have a world where everyone can get divine powers, but because of that it can easily be hand waved away.  There is nothing in the Pathfinder system that requires that Gods only having enough divine power to distribute to an elite hierarchy.  You can easily crank up the dial so that they have plenty of power, and happily dole out energy to anyone who would pay attention to them.I guess I'm thinking of things more in terms of the old computer game Populous, where you were competing with other gods to rake in as many followers as possible.One of the things that makes it hard to compare D&D spirituality with real world spirituality is that in D&D you get empirical cause and effects, whereas in the real world there is no direct connection to divine powers.  In D&D if you make a relationship with a God then you can do all sorts of miraculous things, whereas in the real world you're just pleading and hoping that something good might happen to you.One of the things that I think about in the D&D world is why peasants put up with toiling the earth when they see a guy in the village who can just make water and food?  It seems as if there would be a massive incentive to worship whatever God is allowing that to happen, rather than have to hope the next harvest will succeed.  Now, to keep things looking kinda medievalish you then have to put in place limited divine resources and choke point elite hierarchies, that way the bulk of the populace has to stay in their place and grovel to the local cleric to get what aid they can from the divine.  So yeah, if you want to keep to a traditional image you need that kind of structure.But, if you want something different then just open the floodgates and make everyone have a direct connection to one of the gods.For a large overhaul you could still have lots of choke points in place.  One of them is just to keep the standard Wisdom requirements to cast spells.  You'd need at least a 10 to cast Orisons, and higher if you want more potent abilities.  That would prevent almost half the populace from being able to toss around spells right there.Another choke point is to break up what spells are available to each God.  One way is just to take the domains and just expand upon them a bit so that the whole cleric list is covered.  That way who you pick to worship has a real impact on the abilities that you can have.In terms of the arcane issue... Yeah, I've often wanted to tinker with a setting where anyone can get access to spells.  They are simply things written down that if you can read and master them then they can be cast.  Basically a kind of magical technology.  As with the divine above, Intelligence is one way of limiting who has access.In the end though, I guess the main point of reshifting things for a setting would be to emphasize the spiritual.  In 30 years of RPGing I've only seen a handful of times when people would make the religious pantheon matter to a character even though they were not some kind of divine class.I don't play with hard core roleplayers.  Everyone's rather gamist with their characters, so really the only way to bring out the religion in the world and make it important to everyone is to provide some mechanical bennies to all of the players right from the start.  Basically as the player what their primary god is among the pantheon and then give them a divine ability or small spell casting ability.  If they want to invest more into it then they spend feats, or some other resource.  That way everyone's involved in it right from the start. I think the biggest issue I'm having at the moment is just trying to figure out the impact of the monster CR.  It might just be simple enough to just raise the party's APL by 1 or 2, but that needs a bit more examination.</blockquote>

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