Knowing Deity relationships

[Skywatcher]

It has been stated in another thread that the divine classes (cleric, paladin, champion) should know the relations of their deity to others. I understand that in meaning that the character would know how their god felt about all the other gods in the pantheon. My question if they are expected to know the deity relationship with other individuals without the other party directly revealing the deity they follow. Clerics have a cantrip "divine relation" that reveals this relationship so in that case the situation is obvious. The cleric should cast that cantrip on anyone they meet so they know how to RP. The question is how are Paladins and Champions to come by the same information? They don't get cantrips so they can't determine this via a spell. The deities are no longer on server status, of which I am glad, to prevent metagaming. Is this something where a Paladin or Champion should be asking other players in tells what deity they follow since they would somehow know this information from a feeling or something? Or should they just be basing their actions on the information inferred from the other characters RP? I guess a good example would be if a Corathite trying to conceal that fact and acting like someone who doesn't worship any diety walked up to a Paladin/Champion of Toran, would the Paladin/Champion just know that Toran hated the god of this person or would it have to be discovered through RP that they worshiped Corath and then RP'd from there? Thanks.

[Shadowblade225]

In most cases it's determined from RP. You can ask however if the character walks around bearing the symbol of their god. Sheilds are obvious. Amulets will need to be determined through tells. Who they summon if that's their thing. In some rare but legitimate cases, another character will warn you of said character in question. It's a factor of everything really. But in general, there is seldom a giant pointer at this character saying "hey, this guy is evil".

However, once you determine that, you will need to make the tough RP decisions and in some cases that will hinder both your character progression and theirs. But then, when you submitted your paladin/champion character, you essentially signed a contract to uphold and agree to that.

[Leanthar]

Very good question Skywatcher. I agree with everything Shadowblade stated.

[lonnarin]

Originally Posted by Skywatcher

The cleric should cast that cantrip on anyone they meet so they know how to RP.

This might be considered a hostile action however. Not everybody has the spellcraft points to identify a spell, and casting spells on people in town without their permission was stated in another post before as being an illegal in Hlint, and most certainly Prantz. I would prefer the direct approach of asking, and most of my characters would likely gut a stranger attempting to cast a spell on them without permission. You might be able to secretly pull this off though while partying with somebody and while you're already laying down a huge chain of buffs on them.

*an unknown Cleric walks up to a wizard and casts divine revelation on him*

"My god doesn't like you!"

*wizard returns the spell with combust and laughs as the cleric runs around in circles with his head on fire*

"Wow, my god REALLY doesn't like you!"

Conversely, it would be funny for a Corathite priest to cast virtue on a person, drop his jaw and proclaim "Fetch the torches and pitchforks, we have a Corathite!"

[DMOE]

Not sure which thread it was actually in but if I remember correctly it was decided that casting divine revelations is akin to a 'private conversation between god and caster' not the big flash graphic on the screen that you see....

Can someone with a better memory confirm that or tell me I'm losing my marbles please

On the whole....I think the RP route is the one to go too...Although if it comes to a Raising my cleric casts it if she doesn't know

[Dorganath]

DMOE is correct here. Mechanically, it's a spell/cantrip. In "reality" it's a "sense".

[Acacea]

Yeah we have no way of knowing that a priest just sensed our divine links, and its poor RP to react to that. HOWEVER it's also generally considered poor RP to cast divine relation and go off on the handle about said person and use it as meager justification for an all out war etc. But! One saving grace is that no matter what the character says, the cantrip doesn't say WHICH deity they worship, so if they announce that they know, its just a guess wanting to be confirmed.

[Drizzlin]

Originally Posted by lonnarin

This might be considered a hostile action however. Not everybody has the spellcraft points to identify a spell, and casting spells on people in town without their permission was stated in another post before as being an illegal in Hlint, and most certainly Prantz. I would prefer the direct approach of asking, and most of my characters would likely gut a stranger attempting to cast a spell on them without permission. You might be able to secretly pull this off though while partying with somebody and while you're already laying down a huge chain of buffs on them.

*an unknown Cleric walks up to a wizard and casts divine revelation on him*

"My god doesn't like you!"

*wizard returns the spell with combust and laughs as the cleric runs around in circles with his head on fire*

"Wow, my god REALLY doesn't like you!"

Conversely, it would be funny for a Corathite priest to cast virtue on a person, drop his jaw and proclaim "Fetch the torches and pitchforks, we have a Corathite!"

Let us not dig the old thread up...but the ruling on this is that the "spell" divine relation is really just a "feeling" your pc gets from their god. There is no component, visual or somatic casting going on.

I have used this spell a lot on large parties during a DM event, to see who I will help/not help. I have had pcs start rping that "casting spells on me will get you killed ect" and sometimes they have sent me tells saying "please do not cast on my pc without asking".

Just make sure to explain to them in tells that they did not actually see you cast a spell, but due to game mechanics that is the only way the spell could be put in the game. You can also refer them to this post.

[Skywatcher]

Thanks so much for the answers to the question. This is pretty much the way I have been doing things but it's nice to know that my assumptions were correct.

[Acacea]

In fairness, I think it's kind of a bummer that Champions don't have such a cantrip. In Layo, they are actually a step above others instead of a step below - sort of directly chosen to stand for a deity, which is why they are lock in step instead of one step away. It seems like in theory, if they're in-line to the extreme, they should at least have the same deity sense as someone else in the faith.

On the other hand, no offense or anything, but how many champions are there? :P They don't have a spellbook (I think?) so you couldn't just toss it in.

[Skywatcher]

Champions usually come from fighters who become very devout or paladins that become more no nonsense if you can imagine that. The palaldin version likely has a spellbook at least but no cantrips. The fighter version obviously does not. I don't know how the game mechanics work but if you could add a class on the deity relations cantrip wouldn't it make that cantrip available to that class? I guess there has to be somewhere in the data a spells/day table to define how many cantrips could be cast/day or something so I am sure it's complicated but there have been many times when I would have loved to be able to get a sense of some sweet talking NPC's true nature and that cantrip could have added some clue.

[lonnarin]

It would be great if these classes could do this as an ability which wasn't represented in game as that which looks, acts and smells like a spell. Using a natural ability appears as innocuous as eating a food ration. I can understand though why it was not implimented as such, since it would require coding and making customized versions of each class.

As long as people are actually being informed as to what is happening when this spell is being cast, I have no problem with it. When a random stranger just walks up to a group however and wordlessly casts a spell on each person just sitting there without explaination though, one can only expect things to get heated.

Still, it'd be great if there was a 1st level spell like in PnP which negated this spell entirely or duped it to make the caster think it was aligned. The divine equivalent of undetectable alignment... pretty hard to keep secret in a Corath cult if everybody and their brother can just walk up and scry you without even a willsave to resist it. Without such countermeasures, it would be nearly impossible for any real infiltration or trickery to take place.

[Acacea]

I had a question regarding this ability, actually - what are they sensing? It's easy with clerics, who are conduits to the divine. It's easily plausible that one deity whispers to his cleric that this man is linked with another bad one. But what about casual followers? There are a lot of people with deities in the deity field who don't know anything about the church, don't play the relations, aren't necessarily even about what their chosen deity is about, because they aren't clerics and just picked it because it sounded nice or appropriate. What is there to sense? I don't really buy that any level 1 cleric can smell who the last god you prayed to was...it seems more like you'd have to have an actual connection, you know?

Reasonable things I can imagine getting a sense of from a non divine character - consecrated amulets, arcane casters who have used the censer of arcane devotion, someone under a blessing from an enemy god... but for several characters, it just seems like the deity field is just a word and not REALLY something clerics should be able to judge them on. On the other hand, most people probably shouldn't HAVE a single deity in the field unless they were devout in some fashion - not in the praying at church kind of way, but you know, as some people don't do that even if they are devout. "My life is in your hands" look to that deity over others for answers etc kind of way.

[LynnJuniper]

I agree Acacea, but then again I think that people shouldn't just shove a deity in there because it sounds nice if they're not going to incorperate it into their character enough so that it would be detectable by the cleric. But then, you've pretty much stated that explicitly.

Which leads me to the people that worship no deity and my question:

Even the people that worship no deity feel a different way about say: Toran, then they would about say, Corath. Would Clerics be able to sense this or would they need to see it explicitly:

Example. Rhynn hates Lucinda. Does that mean all Clerics of Lucinda should get a "My god doesn't want me touching her" vibe? Or do they just not care that much on an individual level? Or as a third choice, is it up to the player with the affliction to say "I don't want your god touching me." ? I think that sounds most plausable..

Sorry for the one way dialogue

[Dorganath]

Your god doesn't care what another person thinks about your god...they care about what that they think about that other person's god.

[miltonyorkcastle]

Just for reference, a little update:

Divine Relation


Oh, and having a PC that doesn't align himself/herself with a single deity is awesome.