Prophet Mechanic: Preaching in Churches Options

[Gospel Knight]

Hey all!

I have a mechanic I want to run by everyone and get some thoughts.

The game I am designing is called Prophet (Note that this is a working title.). In this game, you play as a Warrior Priest. Now, plenty of times throughout the game, you will demonstate the Warrior aspect, and in interactions with NPCs, you will show the Priest aspect, but the ratio between the two is not as even as I would like, so I thought of the mechanic.

When evangelists go to preach at churches, they are often times given a "love offering," which is where members of the church give money to the evangelist. I was thinking of using a similar system in my game in an effort to increase Maximum SP (Spiritual Power) and Money. If you go to a town's church, if your SL (Spiritual level) is high enough, then you can be invited to preach at the church. Of course, the higher your Spiritual Level, then the higher your rewards. (Spiritual Level is increased by completing quests, as well as using many of the different attacks you would get. It would work similar to Fable, in that whatever way you use to fight, you get experience for THAT style.)

It's an idea. One that would take a while to implement and it's something that I feel would be a good show of the aspect of the fact that he is a Warrior, but also a Priest.

Any feedback appreciated.

[Shaddow]

I actually like the concept there! It really makes the player think about their actions, in combat and out. I do have one thought though. This shows you what happens when you focus on the priest side of your character; but what happens when you focus on the warrior?

It would be pretty bland to not really get any out of combat benefits if you focus on the warrior. The only way a system like this works is if you balance it finely. I think it's a fantastic concept, but I'd also like to hear what you have planned for the other side. Only than can I truly give any feedback.

One last thing: You should also make the preaching some sort of minigame, even if it is just using the right verses or whatever. Would add another level to it.

[Gospel Knight]

I really like that concept, to be honest. It'd be interesting to match up the correct verses, which would also be a good teaching tool for people who are interested. Maybe make a reward sustem for it, like, if you're interested in trying the minigame, your rewards are doubled, but also if you choose to not play the minigame, you get substandard rewards, to almost encourage it.

As far as the Warrior path, you get the usual physical rewards. However, in order to get the best ending for the game, of course, you would have to choose the Priest path. As the path of the Warrior is the path of physical power, you would get a different ending for applying mostly physical force towards something that requires a Spiritual answer, so to speak.

[Rukiri]

I think the rewards system should be applied to everything, now if your a warrior and in battle because you fought you should be rewarded 1.5X EXP opposed to the standard characters. But I also think the rewards system should be linked with items and weaopons and if you have any quests and the quest achievements were set to you can only use this X weapon but you use this X weapon because it's stronger you shouldn't be rewarded for that and EXP from battles should reflect instead of 1.5 it should be .5 or .25.

As with everything, GL!

This post has been edited by Rukiri: Dec 30 2012, 06:09 PM

[LockeZ]

Preaching should totally act like an RPG battle, except instead of an enemy you have a congregation, and instead of lowering their HP to 0% you have to raise their faith to 100%. And then instead of having HP and MP, the player could have time and energy, which his different skills cost different amounts of. And then skills can combo together like normal RPG skills, like maybe you have a skill called Original Greek Text which briefly lowers a congregation's resistance to faith-building skills, and then a main faith-increasing skill could be something like Exegesis or Life Lesson, and you could have a skill called Can I Get An Amen which doubles the effectiveness of the previous skill used. And different congregations can use different techniques like Fall Asleep or Crying Baby or Speak In Tongues or Keep Singing For Like Forty-Five Minutes to interrupt and counter you and reduce your time/energy, and would have resistances to different kinds of preaching techniques. (Does it show that I'm a pastor's kid?)

[Gospel Knight]

Preaching should totally act like an RPG battle, except instead of an enemy you have a congregation, and instead of lowering their HP to 0% you have to raise their faith to 100%. And then instead of having HP and MP, the player could have time and energy, which his different skills cost different amounts of. And then skills can combo together like normal RPG skills, like maybe you have a skill called Original Greek Text which briefly lowers a congregation's resistance to faith-building skills, and then a main faith-increasing skill could be something like Exegesis or Life Lesson, and you could have a skill called Can I Get An Amen which doubles the effectiveness of the previous skill used. And different congregations can use different techniques like Fall Asleep or Crying Baby or Speak In Tongues or Keep Singing For Like Forty-Five Minutes to interrupt and counter you and reduce your time/energy, and would have resistances to different kinds of preaching techniques. (Does it show that I'm a pastor's kid?)

Hmm....that sounds like a wonderful idea, actually! I didn't think about it quite like that. And it does show, and I can appreciate the insight you have, my brother

[bulmabriefs144]

Hmmmm.

In a real life congregation, preaching about the right thing might increase church donations, and the wrong thing (say, something that happens to be a troubling current event), could possibly get you canned.

Preaching then should involve a couple of variables.

Prophecy Exp
Prophecy Level
(Various Topics, each of which has their own variable: for example, Law, Healing, Nature, Death, among others)

For example:

1. Tell them about how it's time to resist the current government (Chaos +5, -5 Popularity)
2. Tell them about rules and how to follow them (Law +3, -1 Popularity)
3. Tell them about the afterlife (Death +2, +5 Popularity)
4. Tell them they should recycle (Nature +1, 0 Popularity)

You start at prophecy level 0, and whenever talking to a crowd use a choice of four topics (possibly randomly chosen by a variable roll). One of the four will be very popular (+5 popularity), one will be either mildly popular or unpopular (+/-1), one will not affect the crowd at all and they ignore it, and one will be very unpopular (-5).

Just because the topic is unpopular, doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to preach about it, since the more you preach about a subject, the more you gain topic points, so if you later do become popular, that unpopular topic will now be a safe option. But you will need to fight alot of people at level zero and then later rack up popularity. There might also be ways of changing popularity that don't affect your topic, such as good deeds (this can keep another topic from becoming the new leading topic).

At Lvl 0, anything unpopular makes people pick fights with you. At +100 Prophecy Exp, you level up to 1. At -100 from 1, you level back to 0 (at Level Max, maybe 5, this stops levelling down). Also, at each level up, this changes your class to whatever the most dominant topic is (meaning if the topic of your preaching is Nature, you get plant powers, where if you thereafter suddenly change topic to Law, well you get the idea). In addition, preaching about your favored topic, is now a safe option (you always get +1, even if otherwise you would get -5, since the audience is used to you preaching it, of course it's never gonna get a +5, since it is a safe option). As you reach level 2 and onward, you start to get abilities based on this. At level 3-4 you can earn money for a good sermon. At level 5 (Max), you can actually build a church (the screen changes with heavy forests and natural church for Nature, dead trees and mounted skulls for Death), and your class no longer changes. Also, every good sermon not only leaves personal handouts, but collection plate is passed around before people leave, multiplying your money by as much as 4x. A really terrible sermon means no demotion anymore, but even the collection plate won't get filled not to mention the personal handouts.

This post has been edited by bulmabriefs144: Jan 27 2013, 10:30 PM

[elliott20]

Everyone here has had some great ideas.

I would suggest you push this framework one step further!

Maybe the church is not just a place of worship, but an outright political center. Create multiple factions, each one with it's own hold on the population in some way, and each one with it's attributes. The preacher game is now not just a mini-game you use to earn some more experience, it's now how you exert control over the populace. (And depending upon how you play it, more missions / quests / plotlines can open and close)

To start with a crude framework, you can do something like this

Church Attributes
Income: self-explanatory
Knowledge: measure the amount of knowledge the church has about religion and religious issues. High knowledge areas would be a center for theological studies
Honor / Prestige: This is kind of a measurement that takes in all of the church's other factors. (except income) High honor / prestige will allow you attract more donors and can potentially allow you earn more income
Luxury: how grandiose and luxurious the church looks visually.
Influence: measures how much clout the church has with the social elite. The reason this was distinguished from prestige is because a church can have a lot of prestige among the general populace, but doesn't always have strong ties with government
Assets: this is basically a list of items that the church owns and they can range from a knight templar organization, to rare artifacts, to special business connections.

Worshiper Attributes
Mood
Loyalty
Number of Worshipers
Energy

When you enter into a preaching session, you will take actions very much the same way you take skill actions.
How you want to organize the skills actions is up to you. But you can categorize by say, approach: i.e. fire and brimstone style sermons vs. inspirational sermons, etc. My suggestion is to split it all into different types like allegories (Stories), moral preachings, and topical references. Each category will have it's own list of "moves" or "canned content" that you can use. And each move will shift the worshiper's mood from one step to another, depending upon the situation.

Your sermon then can be limited by not just your energy, but the audience's as well. This energy level drains every round, by the last round, you have used up all of their attention span for the day and they will all leave.

Another way to organize the skills is to simply reduce it all down to approaches and goals of the sermon, which would be basically stuff like "fire and brimstone", "inspirational", "raise money", or what have you. But that limits the variety of things you can do.

If you're interested, I am more than happy to work on this together with you and help you write up some of the code. (I'm still learning myself though, so you'd have to bear with me)