(no subject)

[seekingferret]

An idea I had that could go terribly wrong:

I had to figure out how clerics would work with my guild merit XP system and I thought for a while and decided they just wouldn't. Clerics and paladins and druids get normal XP, i.e., XP for defeating bad guys.

This works at a simple level to mechanically indicate that they're not part of the guild system, which I like, but the more I thought about the more I like the implication that there's an economic incentive to the religious orders to provoke wars and send out holy warriors to spread their God's message in a way that nobody else in the economy has. And one of the roles of the guild system is to restrain the religious sects.

And yet the political order is dependent on the Temples, because literally one of the first ideas I had about this world when I first conceived of the earliest versions of it for a one shot seven years ago was that the powers that be take Divination and Prophecy EXTREMELY SERIOUSLY. That one-shot revolved around a false prophecy that caused the council to send the party on a risky and unsupported mission with poor intel. The direct link to the Gods that the Temples have is both extremely important and extremely dangerous.

Comments

[bookherd]

This won't complicate party goals and decision-making at all, heh heh heh...

[jack]

Yeah, variety is good. I hadn't even considered the implications if different party members level up in different ways, but if they're not locked to the same level anyway, that won't make any additional difference, and it's the sort of campaign where you want lots of different drivers.

I'm not sure why you say it couldn't work, there could easily be a "more money = more time for mentored meditation = better connection with divine forces". Maybe not for druids. But plausibly something else is more interesting. I'm not sure if "defeating things" make more sense, now I think about there are many options (for exploring, for gaining gold, fulfilling divine mandate, etc), but it makes sense.

The split responsibility and interaction between the guilds is interesting. Interested to see how it goes :)

[seekingferret]

My concern is that too many things dividing the party will make the game less fun. It's going to be an interesting thing to juggle, because as a DM I love engineering intra-party conflict, but I know that's not a recommended thing to do in D&D for very good reasons.

[jack]

Yeah. My description for some of the underlabyrinth campaign was same objectives, different priorities. I'm not sure if that's right, but I think it's part of it. It's good to have the party with different opinions on what to do. But it's also good if they all have SOME investment in what they end up doing, and (for most games) not so much conflict they split up or attack each other.