Divine Favor, Pulling Rank, Agency, and Investment

Divine Favor, Pulling Rank, Agency, and Investment

GURPS Powers: Divine Favor is something like proto-sorcery. Despite the "proto" part, it feels more like a magic system than a raw framework. The gist is basically the same - you have a "base" advantage, and your learned spells/prayers are taken as alternative abilities. The difference is not only in the flavor, the way spells/prayers are constructed, but most importantly in that base advantage.

By using Divine Favor, you can either invoke a general prayer or a specific prayer. A general prayer is just a cry for help, and if you roll a good reaction roll, your patron deity immediately intervenes and, depending on the result, gives you a minor blessing or performs a true miracle that may kill your enemies, resurrect the dead, etc. A specific prayer is a more specific request, such as "teleport me out of this pit."

While this is flavorful, I really dislike this mechanic.

First, the range of effects is immense. Do you know just how many points it would cost to ressurrect the dead, cause earthquakes that swallow your enemies, or part seas? And how much it would cost to do all that? Sure, I'm exaggerating a little bit, because all these results happen only on an Excellent reaction, but my point still stands.

Second, the effects are quite arbitrary. One of the examples for a "Very Good" reaction is "you emit a holy light which destroys supernatural enemies." What's the area of effect? Is there really no resistance roll? This is way too vague for me.

Finally, the most important thing is that a player relinquishes agency by using this ability. Imagine your character messing up and, for example, being ambushed and surrounded by 20 orc raiders. You send out a cry for help, make a good reaction roll, and the GM decides that the orcs suddenly run away. Yay, you lived! Would that feel rewarding? To me, it definitely wouldn't. I, as a player, didn't do anything, I just asked the GM "please, I don't want to die, help me!" I didn't use the tools I had at my disposal to solve the problem, I just told the GM to solve it for me. This situation would immediately make me lose whatever investment in the game that I had. It reminds of that time when a combat encounter wasn't going in my favor, and then suddenly enemies started dropping dead or crippled on damage rolls that before didn't even penetrate DR. I understood that the GM is pulling punches, and that I would succeed regardless of what I do. No stakes => no agency => no investment.

This is one of my problems with flexible magic systems. Flexible systems, more often than not, limit actualy creativity and emburden the GM. When you have fixed spells/abilities, you know what to expect, and you know what tools you have. How to apply them - it's up to you. Both you and your GM play by the same rules. Whatever the result - you did it, not the GM.

Speaking of emburdening the GM, what if the GM performs a miracle, but the player still manages to get his character killed/injured/captured due to his own actions? He may feel that the GM "cheated" him and performed a miracle that was too weak, that he's going after the player specifically, or that the player spent points and got less in return that he thought he would. When you have fixed, concrete effects, you know what you spent your point on, and both you and the GM know what kind of effect to expect. Using this ability would be a meaningful decision, and not a plea to the GM, and without meaningful decisions there can be no agency. This is why I'm a strong proponent of "fixed spell list" magic systems.

Now, to something else - GURPS Social Engineering: Pulling Rank. In essence, it's pretty much the same thing. However, you get a list of actions your patron may perform for you with effects that are much less vague than those in Divine Favor. In addition, the effects are not immediate, they take time - from minutes to days, and not 1d seconds. A lot of stuff can happen in that time, and the entire situation can change. I feel that this is a much more sensible approach that gives the player many options but feels much less arbitrary.