Religious Prayers

[Alpha]

I’m not a religious man myself and I really am not looking for any debates on any of the sort, but it would be cool to play as one, i find it would be cool to add religion for moral and role play purposes, and i can see how it would be a subject most game devs wouldn’t wanna touch as it can be very offensive to some players, but i think if you added just a few main religions and then let the mod community take over from there it would be fun for some gamers who enjoy going all out on role playing.

It would be nice to see Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Christianity and Atheism. each getting their own moral needs and habits. I really see these prayers being used somewhat similar to The Unreal World RPG’s prayers and traditions.

Muslims need to pray 5 times a day, when they do they get a large bonus to their moral. Seeing as this is in New England i do believe, there wouldn’t be much need to add buildings for these types, though you could add something, a lot rarer than the catholic and christian churches.

Catholics need to see the cathedral and pray once a night before eating, murder of NPCs would inspire large amounts of guilt until you went to the church and confessed… but the killing of the undead inspires a feeling of redemption(not sure if this is the right word).

Christianity has a need to pray at night time and before eating. They dont need to see the cathedral but need to confess at churches when they have murdered NPCs. They also need to eat bread and drink wine that you can find in the churches. If accomplished they get a lot of moral boost.

Jewish… I really don’t have a whole lot of understanding about the Jewish religion so ill leave this one all up to you.

Atheism has little to do with religion, has no need for confession or prayer but doesn’t get any moral boosts.

If the devs don’t feel comfortable with these the only thing ill ask for is to add atheism and allow modders to add more.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

I think the politically (religiously?) correct way to do it would be to add no religion whatsoever, but instead add a framework for them to be added by modding. That way the devs don’t show preference to any one belief system, and can just pile on the whole set once the modders complete everything.

Also, I think this will only need to go in after NPCs are working.

[Alpha]

[quote=“Sean Mirrsen, post:2, topic:5646”]I think the politically (religiously?) correct way to do it would be to add no religion whatsoever, but instead add a framework for them to be added by modding. That way the devs don’t show preference to any one belief system, and can just pile on the whole set once the modders complete everything.

Also, I think this will only need to go in after NPCs are working.[/quote]
Thats kinda what i was getting at in the just adding atheism cause they would have to set it up in the character interface which would require it to be in the core game, but maybe instead just adding it to the interface and leaving it to the community, but for the same reason this is why i asked for the main religions, i guess hinduism and a couple others shoulda been included if i was thinking in that manner but i do agree with you that taking the neutral route is the best for the devs, it is something id like to see, and im pretty sure NPC’s are one of their more worked on projects at this point.

[Binky]

I hate people that get worked up about this kind of stuff and needlessly censor themselves out of some pious ideal of political correctness, but I don’t really see the need to add this in. As in, I feel that if a player wants to do these things he can already role play them, and adding in set religions with modifiers would cause needless arguments and problems.

For instance, in your system it makes it look like atheists wouldn’t get the same amount of guilt for killing someone as a Catholic. I know you didn’t mean that, but it’d just cause that kind of confusion/misinterpretation.

Even though modding wouldn’t show preference, it’d still cause way too much anguish for such little gain.

[Hyena_Grin]

Where it comes to religious characters, I figure the prayer is the only thing keeping their baseline mood at 0 instead of putting it into freefall.

I don’t really see a need for religious stuff myself. Someone a while back suggested religious items (Like Holy Books and Prayer Beads) that would only give a morale bonus from reading/using if you selected the appropriate religion on CG.

Hell I’d be tempted to make a priest character if there was such a mod available, just for kicks, but I dislike basically institutionalizing the notion that somehow religious people are better off than atheists. Or more moral, or whatever. And I don’t think you could just throw bonuses at religious characters without simultaneously penalizing them to balance it out, and once you get into that territory people are likely to get argumentative.

Mostly I just doubt very much that any kind of comfortable consensus could be formed on the topic of religion in the game. All in favor of mods though.

[KA101]

Yeah, creating separate mechanics by religion (especially when you don’t practice the religion) is a good way to cause controversy. If nothing else, certain religions can become “better” from a strictly mechanical perspective. I’d imagine a generic trait-based $RELIGIOUS_ACTION could make it in but would have problems assigning separate stuff per religion.

Last I checked, the only difference between the religious texts was name, description, and (marginally) weight. All conferred the same benefit: a Fun book that didn’t run out of chapters. (In that sense, they’re superior to other works of fiction, but not to each other.)

[Binky]

Yeah, I mean an easyish way to do it if you really needed it would be to create a priest profession which had rosary beads as an item, and upon use they got a small morale bonus for a few hours or something.

[kevin.granade]

the only way I can think of adding something like this would be as a framework where you could add moral (not morale) traits where your character is pro or con various actions, and taking or not taking those actions would in turn have various reprecussions.
then you could mix and match these traits to represent your view if a particular religion or belief system. This isn’t a matter of not wanting to make statements about religions, but rather it’s the right way to handle it from a programming point of view.
That having been said, it’d require quite an elaborate system to handle this properly, and it’s pretty far down on my list of priorities.

[turtleagldragon]

Um… This is not a simulator. This is a game, which is shooting for super ultra realistic, but is still mainly for entertainment.
In an actual real cataclysm, i’m pretty sure your moral would just spiral down until you met someone (and they wouldn’t act real weird like they do now hopefully) who you could talk to and kinda spark some purpose to live and move on and keep pushing. Some people might lose their whole religion, some might literally pick up a new one from a church, and some might cry to themselves every night for something to do with religion.

Sorry, but there are so many variables that I just don’t see it happening anywhere but in our heads as stories. Lots of people already add a little extra to their games by making stuff up themselves, and I think it would simply be better not only to make up something slightly more possible or realistic than something generated by a computer, but it would be better just to hear some stories made up by others here in the forums, and there are some already.

As a fairly christian person who knows lots of christians and a couple of jewish people (what do you call them, just jews?) I know that not only would different people react differently to their religion at the end of the world, but even today, there are almost degrees of how much faith you have, or effort which some people put into it, and I think you would have to be very sick to try to represent that in a game like this by putting degrees of faith or slamming a number on how bad you would feel for doing something or how good you would feel for not doing something, or for how relieved with whatever God for something bad not happening, or trying to calculate extra luck into things just for praying a certain amount of times, and I don’t mean physically sick.

[dovla]

The only way I could see this as adding to the game is if you made horribly twisted and anti-PC versions of major religions and explored various tropes in a tongue-in-cheek dark humor kind of way. For instance, who needs prayer when you have self-flagellation? Anything else, I think I’ll pass.

[Funk]

Don’t you get a boost for reading the bible and other Religious books?

Adding a few Religious items in that you can use for a boost as well, and that is all we need.

Edit: yes let have the church of Satan, pastafarianism and the like

[Rog]

Instead of an active boost, I’d rather add items that give passive boosts to moral for wearing, more if you have a Fan of God trait for some items (rosaries, crosses, Star of David, religious garb), more for other items (symbols of philosophy, science, civil institutions, sports teams) if you have a Fan of the Secular trait, in the vein of Stylish trait.

[Wuzzy]

I don’t see how the original suggestion would benefit the game in any way. This basically sounds just like a cheap way to push the morale. There is little incentive not to pray then and not to pick atheist, since you are giving away potentially free moral boost.
You could as well add a key binding called “add 10 to morale”. It would be mostly the same thing.