Dungeons & Delvers 2nd: Variable Favor

In Dungeons & Delvers clerics have a Favor resource, which used to be based on Wisdom and is intended to reflect a measure of how much your god is willing to intercede on your behalf at a given point in time: should you run out, it's at that point that your god\wants you to stand on your own two feet for a while (though clerics soon gain a class feature that allows them to try and get an advance on Favor).

Contrasted to the wizard's Willpower and sangard's Mana, Favor is safe and predictable: you know how much you have, and there's no chance that you'll accidentally hurt yourself, though a Talent lets you optionally decide to suffer WP damage in order to get some temporary Favor.

While working on Cowboys & Cthulhu we considered doing a kind of Prayer check to reflect whether or not your god is willing to intervene, but this created an issue of infinite "magic": if the cleric can just keep spamming Prayer checks to try and get a result, there needs to be some drawback or penalty (or stricter limitations on what Miracles can achieve, as with bards).

One option is to revoke access to a Miracle if you fail. This creates a risk but doesn't make sense "in-game". Namely why your god is cutting you off from just, say, healing someone but not causing fire to rain from the sky? Also, why did your god get angry for merely asking for help? Too often the consequences could be wholly unrelated and even unreasonable compared to the impetus.

3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons had a class called the truenamer, which was able to alter creatures, objects, and places in various ways using what were effectively spells called utterances. The base DC of an utterance was 15, which could be further modified by the CR of a creature. Each time you successfully used an utterance, the DC would increase by 2 for the rest of the day (if you tried to use it and failed the DC didn't increase).

An interesting idea, and the designers even tried to rationalize with varying degrees of success via universal truename "laws" in-game (ie, Law of Sequence), but not really appropriate for clerics. Just imagine one trying to heal you: he makes a Prayer check and fails. Nothing happens, so he says, "Wait, lemme try that again." Rinse and repeat for however long it takes for him to succeed, since there is no penalty for failure, only success.

I think this would make more sense for very minor effects. Such as a character asking for aid on a task, making a Charisma + Theology check, and on a success gaining a small bonus or something (and maybe a penalty if he failed). This I think is reflected on the new Hymns, which require sufficiently high Prayer checks on a round-by-round basis in order to take effect (and the higher you roll, the better the bonus).

So to keep things simple and to avoid one spellcasting class being really swingy, we're going to stick with Favor but are considering the following twist: 

Instead of just praying each day and capping off your Favor, you make a Charisma + Theology check against a DC of, say, 10. If you succeed your Favor is set to its maximum, which is equal to your cleric level (as opposed to cleric level + Wisdom or Charisma). If you fail, then for that day your Favor is reduced. and if you exceed the DC sufficiently it is increased (probably +1 for every 5 points). Critical failure is another -1, critical success is another +1.

You add your cleric level to the result, as well as other modifiers that depend on your in-game activities. Get more followers for your god? That's worth a bonus. Erect a church? Another bonus. Do bad stuff, that's a penalty. Sacrifices would I think be a one-time bonus. In this way the cleric gets a kind of reputation modifier that affects your Favor points for the day, and you could bring along priest henchmen that pray with you for another bonus.

Now you might think that a DC of 10 is too low, and that very quickly you're going to get a modifier so high that the only time the cleric will fail is on a natural 1. This would be true, except that it will further be modified by the amount of Favor you expend the previous day. Use up 5 Favor? Whelp, that's -5. This could be interpreted by your god thinking that maybe you are relying on him too much (though the gods are also dealing with crap behind the scenes, so might also be unable to allocate as much influence next time).

The GM would also be free to ignore some uses of Favor, especially if they are keeping within what the god expects and demands (ie, cleric of a god of health healing commoners suffering from disease). Of course, he could also increase it, especially if the god's gifts are used in a flippant or even contradictory manner (ie, fighter is missing 2-3 WP but isn't in any real danger of dying).

This adds a complication, something for the cleric player and GM to track, but addresses criticisms of clerics being able to manifest miracles every day without the god really caring (except, perhaps, in more extreme cases). Here the cleric has to be a bit more careful, but there are also clear(er) rewards for behaving as expected.

Something to playtest, and perhaps to relegate to an optional rule.