its-okae-carly-rae: its-okae-carly-rae: ...

Sunday, May 14, 2017

its-okae-carly-rae:
its-okae-carly-rae:
Concept: Gods that become less powerful the more people believe in them.
Ooh, but make it so the information they have and their ability to act still only occur through prayer.
A god only worshipped in a small village can control weather and calm earthquakes, raise buildings, smite invaders, cure disease, provide supernaturally healthy and fast-growing crops, maybe resurrect the dead. But their knowledge of the wider world and its problems is limited, people might neglect to pray for things the god could provide, or the desires of the worshippers might conflict with the values of the god.
A god worshipped throughout an empire, on the other hand, would only be able to perform smaller miracles such as providing good and bad omens, slight psychological effects, relatively minor luck blessings… I can’t think of other things in the “small miracle” category right now, but that sort of thing. And then it could leverage those small interventions for scale, such as by selecting good rulers, warning of disaster, guiding people to discoveries the prayer information could provide, and having more choice of what to do that’s in accordance with the its values.
Got quite longwinded elaborating on this idea, so I ~~put my rambles under the cut~~ apologize.
If gods can’t directly communicate with each other, this could make polytheistic religions pretty interesting. Vicious cycles of prayers to a particular god for a particular domain, and that god having more information to work with within that domain. Conflicting miracles from different gods would likely necessitate distinct iconography in signs they send. Priests and such could be people particularly familiar with how a god communicates, or in skilled distinguishing signs from chance, or meditating so as to get more detail from subtle psychological effects, and use these skills not only to communicate from their god to the populace, but to other gods through other priests. Lots of informational warfare and political intrigue.
The politics/ecology would be interesting too. Gods might have booms and busts in popularity, or they might be relatively stable since people anticipate the corresponding loss in power. If they have different values they might try to identify each others strengths and weaknesses, and attempt to affect each others popularity, domains, or demographics in a way to minimize the relative influence of competitors, while trying to maintain a strong position for themselves.
There needs to be some limitation on how shared their values are, how inherently capable of cooperation they are, or how well they can communicate through people, or there’s an obvious exploit where two gods work together, with one secret from the public and the other commonly worshipped, and nullify the whole tradeoff. I’d like there to be some of that sort of cooperation, just not in a gamebreaking way.
Maybe pantheons, where there’s some value conflict between all gods involved, could have cycles of worship. This way they can have aspects of that setup, but no god is secret so they’re not too much more powerful in their off-season, and they can try to keep an eye on each other. Such religions would have norms against praying to gods at the wrong time in addition to encouraging prayer to the right one.
Also, I notice I’ve been treating the mechanics here as less about belief being the operative thing, but prayer. It seems a bit more exploitable and concrete, but not too much so, so I’ll just make how I’m imagining those mechanics to be a bit more specific.
Each time a god receives a prayer, they get a boost in attentional capacity and a reduction in how much power they can spend per prayer, proportional to how informative that prayer is. Attentional capacity and max-power-per-prayer revert to baseline at a rate proportional to how far from such they are, so at a given rate of prayer there’s some equilibrium. I think that’s all that’s needed to be consistent with what I’ve said so far.