However, there was some disagreement in the topic about how exactly this should work, and whether or not deities should be hidden on altars. I wanted to bring it back up here to discuss it and get some more thoughts on the topic.
And the reply I wrote after the topic was locked...Nitro wrote: ↑Tue Sep 03, 2019 4:14 pmThat's kind of strange honestly. If you kneel down at an altar and do some heartfelt praying to Chauntea you're not going to attract the divine attention of Cyric because whoops that blank nondescript altar was actually his teehee.Xerah wrote: ↑Tue Sep 03, 2019 4:05 pmThis is something that I had to consider while I was doing this.
In the end, I felt the best idea was to leave it as is. You come to an altar that you think is set to X and after you take a moment to pray, you realize afterwards that you've taken a blessing from someone else. You can then react ICly to that, so we felt that was the best approach.
Now that altars and religion are becoming more prominent due to recent changes, I think it would be good to hash these ideas out before they're too set in stone one way or the other.Subutai wrote: I was just writing a response to the same effect. While praying at an altar consecrated to the god you're trying to get a blessing from is important, it seems like it would be a two step process. The correct altar being one, and the prayers being another. Since FR deities get their power from being actually worshiped, I don't think tricking people into worshiping them in that way quite works. While many of the gods do so by taking on avatars, or by killing and replacing another god and pretending they're totally definitely that original god, I don't know of any situation in which they gain followers by just answering prayers directed at other extant deities.
In fact, I'm personally not even entirely sold on the idea that you could have an altar consecrated to a deity that didn't identify itself as being consecrated to that deity. Even clerics of Mask and other secret deities are still required to carry holy symbols of their deity to evoke their powers which, even if they don't need to be 100% overt, still need to either somehow signify the deity, or contain some or all of a sacred relic, which they need to hold or expose visually to use. It seems to follow that an altar would have similar constraints, rather than just being a rock that a cleric sprinkled some holy water on.