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.

[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