Clerics, Spheres, Domains, and Spell Tags

Clerics, Spheres, Domains, and Spell Tags

It seems that clerics live rent free in my mind. Back in the day when I was playing D&D 3.5, I was discontent with how clerics worked there. The choice of the patron deity had only very minor mechanical effect - you simply chose two domains from the short list of that deity's domains, gained two usually very minor abilities and a handful of spells added to your already enormous spell list. Thus, a cleric of Corellon Larethian was almost identical to a cleric of Moradin. In GURPS, I made clerics similar to wizards, but limited only to the "domains" provided by the patron god. However, I've been reading some AD&D books lately, and they made me rethink my approach.

In AD&D, each patron deity provided access to spheres (there's 16 of them in total). They are basically the domains of the more recent editions, but with the following differences. First, a sphere is not limited to only 9 spells (one for each spell level); thus, a sphere can contain any number of spells, and not all spheres have an equal number of spells. Second, a deity is not limited to only six spheres. Finally, there are two types of spheres - minor and major. Major sphere access lets the cleric cast spells of any level from that sphere, but a minor sphere access limits him to 0th-3rd-level spells. Of course, there's also the "All" sphere that is comprised of some universal clerical spells.

But how is that different from the way I do priests in GURPS? Let's take a look at two entries from the deity table from my setting document.

Marduk

Portfolio: Cities, wind, thunder, storms, rain

Domain Limitation: Weather, making and breaking (-30%)

Maglubiyet

Portfolio: War, domination

Domain Limitation: Spells that improve physical characteristics, martial prowess; spells that repair weapons and armor; spells that grant bravery; spells that conjure weapons and armor; spells that improve weapons and armor (-30%)

For clarity - domain limitation is the scope limitation applied to Divine Empowerment, a variant Modular Abilities package (that I'll probably ditch altogether in the future). As you can see, domain limitation of priests of Marduk are quite clearly defined by GURPS magic colleges. However, do they really correspond to Marduk's portfolio? Sure, "wind, thunder, storms, rain" does indeed fall under "weather," but "cities" and "making and breaking" only have a tenuous connection.

    As for Maglubiyet, what the hell is this scope limitation? Wouldn't it be great to have something like a College of War magic to avoid this clunky description?

    This outlines the first problem - magic colleges often don't correspond to portfolios well.

Let's take a look at another pair of deities.

Moradin

Portfolio: Dwarves, creation, smiths, engineering, war

Domain Limitation: Making and breaking, metal (-30%)

Persana

Portfolio: Tritons, architecture

Domain Limitation: Water, healing, making and breaking (-20%)

Both of these deities provide Making and Breaking spells to their priests. A priest of Persana could be as good as a priest of Moradin as magical artifice, despite the fact that for Moradin this is the primary part of his portfolio - he is the god of creation, while for Persana this is a secondary thing. Despite the two deities being very different, their priests can be quite similar (I could come up with an even better example, where portfolios and limitations are almost identical, but this one is the first that caught my eye).

    This outlines the second problem - there should be different "levels" of domain/sphere access to make priests of deities with similar portfolios more different from one another.

Now, how could I be able to rework my approach to divine magic for my games to accomodate all this? Quite easy - by introducing spell tags. Each spell (or ability) should have a list of tags to make is associate not only with different colleges of magic, but also with different divine domains.

    For example, Guided Shot would have the following tags: Elf, War, Weapon. Endure Elements would have Cold, Endurance, Fire, Protection, Sun, Weather.

    As you can see, most of the tags actually are the D&D domain names, but "Weapon" is something new. These tags make it easier to understand what spell can be granted by what deity, and the "domain limitation" thing that I mentioned before should be replaced by a list of tags.

    The tags may be useful not only to divine spellcasters, but also to the arcane ones. In settings where the college structure is a cultural phenomenon instead of some underlying structure of magic itself, different spellcasting traditions may have different college structures. For examples, while wizards of New Aventus use the "classic" college structure, wizards of the Sadolian Empire may employ a different classification. Maybe instead of the Colleges of Necromancy and Body Control they have something like a Colleges of Bone, Flesh, and Spirit? Or maybe they use the D&D school division - Conjuration, Evocation, etc.? Thus, you can apply these tags to the wizardly spells to assign them to these variant colleges. This also works perfectly if you're using material components that improve your skill with spells of certain tags.

How do I do it practically? I probably won't know all the tags in advance, so going back and editing the spells to include the tags sounds very inefficient. However, there's a wonderful tool called GCS, where I could create a library of spells and assign the tags to them. That would not only allow easier character creation, but would also allow you to filter spells by tags.

But what about the different levels of domain access? I have some thoughts on that as well.

"If a deity provides major access to a domain, the caster can learn and cast any spells and abilities from that domain. If a deity provides minor access to a domain, the caster can learn and cast only spells and  abilities with a full cost of up to 20 points"

But wait, I also have Domain skills that are used to cast divine spells. Domains clearly are different in scope, so let's also say the following:

"A Domain roughly comparable to a college of magic in scope is a Hard skill, while a more narrow Domain is an Average skill. For example, Domain of Air is a H/IQ skill, while Domain of Insanity is a A/IQ skill."

What about the Talent?

"For the purpose of Talent cost, if a deity provides access to more than four major domains, the Talent costs 10 points/level. Anything less makes the Talent cost 5 points/level. For this purpose, every minor domain is considered a half of a major domain."

I looked through my wizardry spell list, and it seems that most of the spells that I'd classify as "minor" fall into this point limit. But what about Divine Empowerment? I think it'd be sensible to just ditch it and say that clerics may learn spells limited to their patron deity's domains and optionally take them as Alternative Abilities without all this Modular Ability nonsense that is rarely useful and mostly works as a point tax. However, I do like the limitations and mechanics of Divine Empowerment! So, let's adjust the way clerics use Using Abilities at Default (p. P173) / Hardcore Improvisation with these rules to get the following:

"Even if the character hasn't purchased a particular divine spell or ability with character point, he may be able to improvise it by praying to his patron deity. The following requirements must be met:

    - The spell or ability to be improvised must exist in the setting. The character cannot improvise a spell that doesn't exist. However, he may invent a new spell using the Invention rules (p. B472), if the GM allows that.

    - The spell or ability to be improvised must belong to one of the deity's domains, and if it belongs to the minor domain, it should have a full cost of no more than 20 points.

    - The spell or ability to be improvised must not be more expensive than the most expensive divine spell possessed by the character granted by the same deity.

If the requirements are met, the character may attempt to cast the improvised spell. The spell's properties are modified as follows without changing the spell's point cost:

    - Fatigue Point cost is increased by 3.

    - Casting time is multiplied by 10.

The casting roll takes the following modifiers:

    - Cost Modifiers: -4 for any spell whose full cost is no more than 25% of the character's most expensive divine spell granted by the same deity; -6 for any spell whose full cost is no more than 50% of it; -8 for any spell whose full cost is no more than 75% of it; or -10 for any spell with a cost up to 100% of the most expensive spell.

    - Fatigue Modifiers: The character can spend extra FP to offset the cost modifiers listed above. Each FP eliminates a -1 penalty, but cannot provide a net bonus.

    - Sanctity Modifiers: -5 in a place of low sanctity to your patron deity; +1 in a place of high sanctity to your deity; or +2 in a place of very high sanctity to your deity. In an area with no sanctity to your deity, you cannot cast spells at all.

    - Prayer Modifiers: +1 for a five-minute prayer or +2 for a two-hour prayer. This is in addition to the increased casting time. +1 if you pray loudly, brandishing your holy book or symbol, and succeed at a Religious Ritual roll.

    - Congregation Modifiers: +1 if at least 25 devout worshipers join you willingly and wholeheartedly in your prayer; +2 for 100 worshipers; +3 for 1,000; or +4 for 10,000 or more.

    - Repeated Attempts: -1 for every failed improvisation performed by you in the last 24 hours.

    - Talent: the caster's Talent applies here as a bonus.

Success means that the spell works once. If the spell is maintainable, then it can be maintained without recasting. Critical success means that there is no FP cost for this spell, including all the extra FP the caster was supposed to spend. Maintaining the spell is not free. Failure means that the spell fails and FP and time spent are wasted. On a critical failure, make a reaction roll for the deity, at -1 per similar failure since the caster last paid penance, sacrificed, etc. A Poor or worse reaction results in the same outcome as violating the power's Pact limitation."

What's different here? The most important part is that I rolled in some of the modifiers from GURPS Powers: Divine Favor and removed an extra skill roll. The latter was inspired by Mailanka's Psychic Sorcery. Since the spells themselves have a casting roll, unlike the default sorcery spells, that extra Religous Ritual (or Thaumatology in sorcery) roll feel unneccessary. The arbitrary casting time increase also was inspired by Mailanka. When used this way, hardcore improvisation should be more streamlined, flavorful, and less "broken." I like the result, but it may not be the final version.