Making Miracles
May 30th, 2011
A little while back, we released a book about divine magic. Actually, we haven't released it yet, at the time that I'm writing this, but by the time you read this it will have been out for a pretty good while. Probably months. We write our articles a lot further ahead of time than we do our books, it seems. Anyway, the book was called A Necromancer's Grimoire: The Book of Faith, and our main goal in its design (besides making it a fun, enjoyable, and generally worthy addition to the fabric of the game, that is), was to "fix" our problem with the cleric class, which was that it didn't feel particularly religiously-inclined, and certainly didn't feel like the cleric received his spells from a deity, instead of in the same way that wizards did.
This is probably not news to you. I've talked about the book before, in multiple articles. In fact, the whole concept of the book was spawned by an article about that very issue. As those of you who've read the book (or at least know a lot about what's in it) already know, the way that we set about doing this was to ensure that the mechanics we used supported this divine flavor, and supported it (as opposed to the cleric mechanics, which are almost entirely divorced from their flavor). The "star" mechanic of the book was favor (and, by extension, piety), which allowed DMs to reward the priest (a new class introduced in the book, our answer to the cleric) for roleplaying their religion and faith, providing them with concrete mechanical bonuses for staying true to the tenets of their religion and actively striving to please and serve the deity that is granting them their magical abilities.
I've already said a fair amount about that mechanic, however, and today I'd like to focus on a somewhat more thorny area of design in the priest class. There were a number of things that set priests apart from clerics. Faith and piety are obvious choices, of course, and the extensions of that change, such as using a spell point system (which serves as sort of the heart of faith-based spellcasting, and was used as a guideline for the amount of favor a priest should be receiving, since favor = spell points), but that's far from the only difference. I'm not referring to the simple differences, like armor/weapon proficiency, either. Ultimately, what I'm talking about is miracles.
For those of you who didn't read the book, priests can perform miracles. Put simplistically, miracles are a lot like spells. Well, even when you put it in a more complicated way, there's no getting around the fact that miracles are a lot like spells. That's not really surprising, as it was purely intentional. The point of miracles, however, is that they're different from spells in a few key ways, which hopefully help to drive home that a priest is a different kind of magical creature than a wizard (something clerics always had difficulty doing).
Miracles were not an easy thing to design. Here's what I knew when I started with miracles: I wanted something that could replace the channel energy class feature, and I wanted it to make use of the priest's piety score. I also knew that I wanted it to be fun and exciting. For a while I considered some constant-effect sort of abilities, some of which became the other priest class features, and most of which I backed off of because they were taking up very similar territory to the abilities for the devoted apostle prestige class (also included in The Book Of Faith, in case you were wondering).
I couldn't tell you exactly how I tuned in to the idea of spells whose power and effect depend on the priest's piety. My best guess is that it was a pretty straightforward evolution from passive abilities (like bonus AC, or not needing to eat and sleep), to active abilities (such as attacks or blessings or the like). Because the priest was a spellcasting class, modeling them similarly to spells just felt natural, I suppose. I seem to dimly recall that it all started with banish vermin, a miracle which was inspired by an old character I had.
A while back I was in a campaign that took the best bits of the adventure module Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and inserted it into a medieval European setting. I think that it wound up somewhere in Switzerland or the like. The important thing is that I was playing a Catholic priest, and I put a little time into the character, being a bit of a medieval history buff (big surprise, huh?). I had read some stuff about medieval life recently, and it had talked about the typical duties of village priests, one of which was blessing farms to protect them from snakes and rats and other pests. I talked to my DM, and we arranged some cool compromises on abilities like that, which weren't very combat-capable but were memorable and pretty fun. I wanted to find a way to bring that (and other abilities like it) into the priest class.
Once we determined that miracles were going to be very similar to spells, the real difficulty became making sure that they weren't too like spells. Innovation is not the end-all-be-all of game design, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is definitely something that players look for, especially in third-party publishers, like ourselves. If we can't immediately demonstrate something new and innovative about our product, it's going to have difficulty standing out against the crowd of other third-party supplements vying for your attention. So while innovation is less important to me than having a good product, it's also very important that there be enough innovation in each product to make you sit up and take notice.
We've had some successes and some not-so-successes with innovation in spells before. One of the major criticisms of Liber Vampyr was that a number of blood powers closely mirrored existing spells. This was an intentional part of the design: the innovation in the book was the blood point system itself, not the individual powers. In fact, it's very difficult, from a creative (ie, flavor) perspective, to find an effect that isn't already handled by at least three spells (since miracle and wish can theoretically do anything, it's impossible to find a flavor effect that can't be accomplished by any spell). The existing spells are pretty comprehensive, as far as fantasy magic that people might actually be interested in doing is concerned. There are a few places you can find niches to add improvements, or spells specialized to a certain thing (and you can definitely play with the mechanics of the spells, as evidenced by Advanced Arcana I's success), but from a pure flavor perspective, if it's magical, there's a pretty good chance there's a spell that does it already.
So, we wanted to make sure the miracles were able to stand out a little bit from spells, and develop an identity of their own. It helped that we already knew we were looking for spell-like effects whose magnitude would be determined by the character's piety. Since the actual flavor of the miracles would probably not be something that was all that different from existing spells, I decided to focus on the magnitude. If miracles couldn't really do anything that spells couldn't do already, they would have to do them in ways that spells couldn't do them. For the most part, that meant a larger area of effect, or a longer duration. Miracles like revival and reanimation allow you to raise the dead (in one way or another) on a scale that spells simply don't grant you.
Because these miracles could have a very large magnitude, they also had the potential to have a very large impact on your game. That led to the other big difference between miracles and spells: miracles can only be performed so often, even if you can afford to perform them again. It also led to the unwritten rule (which is actually written pretty clearly in a sidebar, if you bother to read it) that a deity who feels his miracles are being wasted will simply refuse to perform them, and probably take back a bunch of the priest's favor, to boot. Deities are vindictive like that.
Still, something felt like it was missing from miracles. The rest of the priest was tied in pretty squarely to the theme of "divine magic is divine, and that should mean something," and it's true that miracles were pretty dependant on piety for power, but they still felt a lot more akin to the epic spells of the Epic Level Handbook than they did, you know, divine phenomena. Besides, it seemed a little odd for the god of death, for example, to be able to help you banish rats and snakes from an area, or create 500 loaves of bread. So, we determined that some miracles (all right, most miracles) should have restrictions on which deities could grant them.
Here we had a bit of a pickle, however, because we can't really reference any deities that you're likely to want to work with. Besides the legal issues of referencing, say, Pelor or Lathander, there's also the difficulty that many DMs use their own home-brewed pantheons, of which we know blissfully little. So, we tied it to the one thing all deities have in common, and which usually paints a pretty good picture of what they're like and what sorts of powers they should grant: domains. Under Pathfinder, each deity has five domains (which happens to correspond with the number of miracles you get), and most miracles require that you have at least one of several different applicable domains. To ensure that players always had at least two choices of miracle, we also included a handful of miracles with no domain requirements, which were "general miracles" available to any priest.
And that, most likely, is more than you ever wanted to know about making miracles. Join me next week, for an article I’ve titled “Non-Euclidean Designs.” In the meantime, have faith in yourself, and you'll be amazed what kinds of miracles you can perform.