Biggus Geekus: Settings

I either miss the Biggus Geekus shows, or only catch bits of it here and there. In either case, I watch them after the fact and there are often parts that I wish I could have commented on while it was live. But since I can't I've decided to just blog my thoughts and responses. This post pertains to their episode mostly about settings, which can be watched here in case you want more context.

The first segment kicks off around 25 minutes, though they do talk about not caring about specific individuals in the industry. An example given is when attention-starved narcissistic tourists prattle on about various invented -isms. Their response is, "Who cares?"

While I agree that they should stop caring about, say, WokeC--and should have stopped nearly 10 years ago--I do think it is important to at least contest false narratives like Gary Gygax secretly hating Jews. You don't need to overly focus on it; just bring it up, refute it (ideally with some mockery in the mix), and move on.

As for longsword and shortsword damage, really the better question is why do people keep referring to an arming sword as a longsword, and a longsword as a greatsword? On a more serious note, the obvious answer is that an arming sword is longer, and so should possess some sort of advantage, though I wonder if it should be increased accuracy.

In any case, in Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition weapons have a Reach value, which determines who strikes first in melee combat.

Joe then brings up the horse girl fetish...thing, I guess you could call it, as it's not even a game (you just randomly determine events so you can pretend to be someone suffering from the delusion that with enough manipulation and mutilation, you will somehow become a horse). Again I don't think an entire episode or even a meaningful length of time need be devoted to it, but simply bring it up, mock it, and move on.

Half an hour in and Joe brings up a good point: published settings publish too much, though I would add to this that they can also feature a bunch of useless information, something akin to entertainment for DMs that will never use the setting, anyway, and this is ignoring all the splatbook clutter that could accumulate for a given setting.

While I don't hate Forgotten Realms, I certainly don't like it. I got started on it in 2nd Edition and ran it a bit into 3rd Edition, but abandoned it due to the prevalence of high-level characters and bizarre ecologies. For example, I recall reading a region in which the forests were filled with, among many other monsters, green dragons, which begs the question: how the hell does anything there survive?

Given that I've never found a setting that I would run even mostly as-is, I agree with Randy that you should just run your own. While a setting may possess some material or ideas that could inspire you, I think you'll avoid confusion and hone your skills in creating your own. That said, most tabletop material shoved out in the last couple of decades are largely vapidware trash efforts, so you'll also save money and are virtually guaranteed to come up with something vastly superior.

In response to Randy's question of changing a setting if it's really good the way it was, as with adventures I look at campaign settings as foundations that you are expected to build on and modify (assuming you are using a published setting in the first place). I find it strange that people are fully willing to modify an adventure for their table, perhaps extensively, but not a campaign setting, even though they both serve similar time-saving functions. 

Randy: "I got a lot of homework to do."

Yep. This is why I think campaign settings need to be organized in a manner that makes it clear what the GM and players each need to individually know at minimum in order to properly evoke the setting's default tone and feel, what sets it apart from your bog-standard pseudo-European world.

It can have an elaborate history and an extensive roster of NPCs, but if I don't need to know that to run the setting, I don't want it front and center: tell me what is necessary to start running in that world as soon as possible, and I can learn additional information later. This could also le me know what can be easily changed or ignored without adversely affecting everything else, in case I want to change something.

Around 35 minutes we get a question intended to help establish the foundation of your setting: what sort of adventures do you want to run there. I think this is useful, though perhaps more so for game mechanics, as I can run domain play in pretty much any setting I can think of, but if the game doesn't even have vague costs for fortresses and castles then I'll have to do all that legwork myself before I can even get the ball rolling. 

I think these questions also help guide the GM in adventure and campaign design: if you want to do a bunch of exploration, then you'll want to create places to explore. If you're only interested in dungeon crawling, then you won't need to go into a lot of detail as to what the characters might discover en route to various dungeon environments.

A few minutes later Randy states that he rarely runs dungeon crawls, and won't run a campaign where you tackle "400,000 encounters in Undermountain".

I've tried to at least read through Undermountain, but cannot get past the first few pages of rooms. Undermountain to me exemplifies the worst stereotypes of dungeon crawls: there is easy access to the entrance, yet somehow still treasure in the first few rooms. There are also somehow still monsters infesting these rooms despite no readily available food source. On top of that, there's no rhyme or reason to the layout or room contents.

(I'm going to go into more detail here, so feel free to skip down if you don't care.)

For example, the first room is the Hall of Many Pillars. Here's the description:

Two broad steps lead down into a widening room crowded with a forest of stone pillars. Archways can be seen in its northern, western, and southern walls. Something metallic glints on the floor, among the many stone pillars.

One pillar has a hidden alcove, but it just contains three mundane wooden sticks (yawn). There is also a brass key, but it has no purpose, here (it is stated to open anything the DM wants it to in another adventure).

There could have been an elaborate puzzle involving the pillars, something that opens a hidden passage or disables a trap elsewhere. Instructions could and by now should have been written in the pillars, indicating what sorts of rooms and threats might be found further within, or even in the next room over.

But, nope! There is no purpose to this room other than a time sink. Waste time, maybe find some useless trinkets, pick a random passage and on you go.

The next room (in numerical order, anyway) is the Hall of Mirrors, which is a long hall featuring sixteen mirrors. This room is technically more interesting in that you can remove the mirrors and find some storage niches that for some reason contain healing potions, and a brass cauldron with 40 gp. Except for one niche, which is empty.

Bizarrely, you can use the cauldron do deal damage as a mace, but only while filled with coins, but each attack causes the coins to scatter, so I guess it's only good for one hit before having to scoop all the coins back in for another go. This sounds stupidly arbitrary and I have no idea why anyone would bother doing so.

Oh, and one mirror is a mirror of opposition, which creates a double of whoever looks at it that you have to fight.

There's no way to tell the mirrors apart, and no hint as to what's to come. New players unfamiliar that such a mirror exists will probably just walk down the hall, maybe checking and/or smashing mirrors as they go, until they stumble on the trap. Veterans will probably just smash all the mirrors because that's precisely the sort of banal gotchas they've come to expect.

I'm just left wondering why the crazy wizard made such a lame gimmick hall in the first place? Did he really need sixteen mirrors? Why are the niches there? Did he really not have a better way of hiding/storing his coin-filled brass cauldron and some healing potions?

It's a crazy wizard dungeon and you don't even have it setup so that the mirrors distort the characters, twisting them into a Junji Ito-esque carnival of horrors. Like one could temporary enlarge a character, inflicting damage in the process or imposing a Dexterity penalty because he's lop-sided. One could force a save to avoid being squished down, suffering damage and reducing speed. 

Of course, to avoid it being merely a series of "make saves to avoid bad things", the mirrors could unleash horroric versions of the characters to fight. The mirrors could also be removed and used against monsters, up until they are broken by a stray attack or effect (or maybe the effect only lasts while the creature can see itself).

One more room before getting back on track: Nimwraith's Rest. This is basically a nondescript room with a skeleton in it, carrying among other things an ivory tube containing a map and some cure light wounds scrolls that miraculously no one has found by now. The skeleton isn't undead, but its helm is described as both containing "nothing of value" and as the "sleeping-place of a thirsty stirge".

How the stirge is still alive despite a dearth of dungeon denizens for it to easily feed on, as well as the adventurers and bugbears that recently very recently massacered each other nearby.

This guy has been dead in here for quite some time, and I'm guessing there would be a pretty strong odor that would have attracted something at some point. So why are his remains intact? And again, why is the ivory tube still there? Did no other adventurer stumble across this place (despite the odor), and if so, did none of them bother looting the corpse?

Also, what was the original purpose of the room? It's just an empty 10 x 15 foot room, the source of much derision in my 4th Edition days, but is apparently standard procedure here.

I can't imagine who would want to run 400,000 encounters of this. Or even four. They have seemingly random themes, determined by what I can only assume was throwing darts at a wall, all chaotically strung together by senselessly meandering passages. This is all easily solved by instilling some background and purpose to the dungeon, beyond a crawling ground where players just select doors and halls on a whim solely to bear witness to its contrived contents.

On switching up campaigns from something like building/owning a castle and/or running some sort of organization, or just dungeon crawling to level x before abandoning the whole thing, I feel like those goals go hand-in-hand. Want to get that castle? Go adventuring to either find one, get the money to buy or have one built for you, or save up enough money to renovate an existing castle. Or attract the attention and favor of nobility to grant you one.

Exploring the world also tends to lead to the discovery of "dungeons" (ie, any suitable adventuring environment not limited to subterranean catacombs and ruins), which in turn leads to the discovery of interesting things to interact with and treasure (assuming the GM isn't stingy on the latter).

Joe states something similar to these playstyles playing off each other, and had I watched the video before writing this post instead of listening, pausing, responding to it bit-by-bit, it would have been more succinct to just say that about 38 minutes in I agree with him. But then this post would be a lot of that or I would probably forget what I was going to say at any given point in time.

Joe uses a cliche example of rats in a cellar, something I've often heard but outside of the Playstation 2 version of The Bard's Tale never experienced, though I do have an idea of how to write a rat-based intro adventure. Could be a good learn-as-you-play scenario for Dungeons & Delvers.

Randy follows this up by claiming that for new DMs at the least dungeons are a good place to start. Personally, I think they are ideal for a DM of any experience, as they make it easier for parties on both sides of the screen: the DM doesn't have to concern himself with every possible variable, and the players don't suffer from choice paralysis (and benevolent players don't have to worry if they are going to "waste" what the DM has prepared by going in the "wrong" direction).

This is something that Melissa has learned during her last adventure, where we had to escape from a druid's lair in a forest. While there was an obvious path and destination (light in the distance), a lack of barriers meant that we could see obvious encounters well in advance, and being 0-level commoners would just take a wider route to avoid them all. She has since learned that forest crawls are better when we are trying to find something, and would therefore be more inclined to investigate strange sites.

Joe thinks that when you're in a dungeon the setting doesn't matter, and I don't think this is completely true. It really depends on the nature of the setting and whether or not specific elements can even be notably incorporated into the dungeon.

If your setting is stock pseudo-European, there's probably not a whole lot that can be done, but if it is something like Ravenloft, you can include all manner of horrific content to remind the players where they are. For our in-house setting Sundered World (which I'll go into more detail about near the end), you often explore ruined heavenly domains, which can have their own laws of physics, and the corpses of gods and primordial, so there's plenty of opportunity for the setting to influence the location, layout, encounters, etc.

For a video game example, if you were to run something in the vein of Phantasy Star IV, many dungeons could take place in high-tech facilities, or even on other planets if you grant your players access to shuttles. It can also help to include dungeons that aren't located underground: in Melissa's faery tale-themed campaign setting, we used a magic bean to grow a beanstalk in order to gain access to a castle atop some clouds.

A commenter mentioned that whenever he offers something other than dungeon crawls, most players don't seem interested. I am curious what he has offered his players, as I've run a variety of adventures that weren't dungeon crawls and the players enjoyed them all. The first session for Ashes After Ragnarok took place in a dried out lake, and I also ran a sort of dryad-murder mystery. Oh, and then there was the time I ran an adventure that took place mostly in a city, where the party had to deal with a boatload of mimics.

Another commenter mentions starting off with three kingdoms, at least one of which is a potential enemy. I think you can get away with just one, at least for the start of the game, though having two or three could be useful for prolonged play, or even if you start a new campaign: the players could kick off somewhere else, give the world a sense of depth.

I know some players and even GMs balk at the idea of being able to go to a tavern or whatever to get an adventure hook or dungeon destination, but I think this is fine as it keeps the game moving forward. Due to a 2 and 4 year old we have severely limited time to play, not counting work and other hobbies such as painting and playing Warhammer 40k, and I'd rather not spend an hour or so trying to "roleplay" my way towards the fun part of the game.

Whenever we start a new game, we typically just summarize the goal or how we go to the dungeon, and then just start right at the front door. Saves a bunch of time. We never waste time trying to get the party together, instead assuming that they started adventuring together awhile back. Kind of like how in Firefly most of the crew starts the show together, and you don't really find out why until later (not that you ever have to explain their origins).

54 minutes in the idea of having magic essentially replace technology comes up. This I'm not a fan of at all, as it not only takes the magic out of magic, but is never utilized to its full extent. Instead, you get magical airships and trains, even elevators, a sort of instant messaging service, but then most people are still using bows and swords. 

A prehistoric setting is briefly mentioned. This is something I've entertained and would be trivially easy to do in a d20 system, you'd really only need to change up how magic is learned. They begin talking about dark ages and having magic be something "man was not meant to know", and I think this could concept would also work in a prehistoric game, with sorcerers learning magic from lovecraftian entities.

You could also change it up so that no one can learn what would be considered arcane magic (or at least not easily and at great risk/cost), it becoming largely the purview of malevolent sorcerers who must engage in blood sacrifices and other complex rituals in exchange or power. Would provide an easy and ideal villain.

I imagine such a world infested by cosmic horrors that lurk in the darkness, risen dead that crave flesh and warmth due to dying from starvation and exposure, and dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts (some mutated by alien presences or likewise undead).

They kind of circle back to commonplace magic, where wizards could be "a dime a dozen" and no one would really react or notice when a wizard teleports in. Eberron is brought up and this is what I was hinting at a few paragraphs up: you make magic trivial and it's no longer magical. The world would be viable, sure, but it wouldn't be as interesting.

Low magic I think would be much more interesting, so long as it can still have a meaningful impact, even if there are greater risks, costs, and/or prerequisites to wielding it. As for Randy's comment about not having seventeen magic items per character, if the items have interesting effects and the math bonuses aren't essentially necessary just to play, I think players would treasure their treasure all the more.

In regards to worrying about the weapon and armor arms race, not really. For a time I fretted about plate armor, whether it was something one could reasonably wear for hours at a time while adventuring. I even considered selecting a time period as a cut-off point to determine how far weapons and armor would have advanced due to available technology (including means of production), but then came to three realizations:

The arms race in a fantasy world would be largely driven by the existence of monstrous creatures, accelerating the development of weapons and armor. People would also be more likely to be better armed and trained, and the demand could reduce costs for many forms of equipment. This would also have other effects, such as how defenses are constructed and laws prohibiting carrying weapons in towns and cities (or, rather, the lack thereof). 

Given that non-magical alchemy exists in our game, this could be used to circumvent technological limitations and/or assist in the production of materials and armor, making plate armor available earlier than would normally be expected (not that I run my games on Earth), and also easier to produce. 

There are also races renowned for their smithing skills such as dwarves, so even if alchemy is not an option I'm just going to assume they would have learned these methods much sooner than expected and would have shared these secrets with humans. Or the humans would have figured it out as well. Or would have learned it via divine insight from a forge god. Or whatever.

Point is, you don't need to and probably shouldn't bother cleaving to real-world history. The people, history, resources, and land are different, and likely includes supernatural forces and intervention. Then you add in magic, monsters, fantasy races with their own histories and capabilities. And then the fact that most people don't even know how medieval societies were structured or operated (some people think peasants only bathed once a year if that) and do you really want to waste God knows how many hours doing homework and addressing anachronisms of your pseudo-European game world that the players won't even know or care about?

It's a fantasy game where you explore dungeons that somehow remain undiscovered and unlooted despite existing for hundreds or even thousands of years and within relative proximity to various points of civilization, fight monsters that would realistically pulverize or tear them to pieces, and bring back such an absurd amount of wealth that the only reason your character would need to continue adventuring or work is because the prices are absolutely bonkers (seriously, why the hell is a longsword 15 entire gold pieces?).

Related: Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition has some primitive firearms, and these work perfectly well with armor due to our DR mechanic and Armor Penetration. We also have a sort of fire shotgun, but you have to load it with a fireflask each time, changing its blast radius to a cone.

Randy makes a comment about how in combat you wouldn't have 5,000 orcs lining up Lord of the Rings style, using ladders to scale walls due to the existence of wizards and clerics, but this entirely depends on the prevalence of either, as well as their expected capabilities. Wizards might exist, but if they are rare and can only be expected to sling one fireball-tier attack in a given battle, then yeah, I would expect those orcs to resort to ladders to scale the walls.

Sure, you might obliterate 20 or so (depends on organization, damage and Dex-saves), but if that's the only wad the wizard has to blow he's barely made a dent in both the opposition and his XP required to level up. If mid-level wizards are a more prominent feature and/or have 5th Edition-esque access to what it considers to be magic, then I can see fighting strategies being shaken up in a more meaningful manner.

But then I would imagine that wizards would be trained for assassination, more like a special forces unit. Instead of dropping fireballs on the other army, they would use stealth and teleportation spells to locate and capture, incapacitate, or kill. Alternatively, they could use their magic to manipulate and/or spy on the enemy, charming a general, implanting suggestions or false memories, demoralize or frighten off enemy units.

This could of course result in arcane countermeasures, though this depends on what if any limitations magic has. See Invisibility could detect invisible wizards, but is it feasible to have a wizard spamming this spell essentially all day? What about antimagic shell, which is a high level spell and I cannot imagine an army having constant access to it.

But I'm not a fan of ubiquitous, risk free magic (especially when it relies on nonsense pseudo-Vancian mechanics), so while an interesting mental exercise this doesn't really concern me. Likewise, I don't like the idea of every city having one or more powerful wizards, magic colleges, and magic stores, which contributes to the issue of characters treating magic items like mundane commodities.

Since Randy brings up non-magical alchemical potions, this gives me yet another opportunity to direct him towards Dungeons & Delvers: there's a bunch there, starting on page 264, and in 2nd Edition there's going to be even more, including a panacea to help deal with diseases, partially because clerics won't be an adventuring class so there won't be easy access to Cleansing Touch.

The idea of magic not working if people don't believe isn't as silly as it might seem. This is how it works, or rather doesn't in Mage: the Ascension: reality is shaped by belief, and since most people don't believe in magic, the mage is essentially working against the majority to create magic. This not only makes it quite difficult but dangerous, as using magic to generate obviously magical effects (I think this was referred to as vulgar in the books), it also generates paradox, which accumulates and creates backlashes that can harm or kill the wizard.

In the game's history or flavor or fluff or whatever you want to call it, the Technocracy did this on purpose, teaching people science (something anyone could do, not just the relatively privileged few with avatars) and convincing them that magic isn't real. From what I can recall the Technocracy still used magic, but dressed it up as high-tech science so that the masses would buy into it. 

That said I see no reason why magic would be less effective in a city, especially if magic is predictable and safe like in Dungeons & Dragons, where it's really more of a science since it always does precisely what is expected. I would think people would actually appreciate magic, since it could quickly and easily resolve many issues, and in a big city it would be much easier to pay the wizard what he wants.

Now, I could see a wizard not wanting to live in a city because people would badger him constantly, even threaten or rob him. I could also see this in a game where magic is actually dangerous and unpredictable, where a bad spellcheck could have disastrous results. 

I see a place for both magic and science. Science can be taught and replicated by pretty much anyone, while depending on the type of magic requires something more, maybe a knack or gift but also a different sort of discipline, meditation to try and properly orient your mind. Because if was as easy as science then pretty much anyone could do it.

For magical creatures like faeries I don't see them performing magic like mortals do. I know in Dungeons & Dragons everything relies on the same nonsense pseudo-Vancian system, but I think a creature with innate magic shouldn't necessarily be burdened with the same restrictions. But if you want to say that faeries derive their power from nature, then I could see it being less potent in cities, but again I don't think that that limitation should apply to all forms of magic.

What's funny is that in the end of Wizards the good guy just shoots the bad guy with a gun.

At an hour and ten minutes, the topic of xenophobia is brought up. How people react to various non-human races depends entirely on the race in question and the setting. Are people leery about elves? Maybe. Depends on how elves think and act in your world. People might instead be in awe of them, especially if they tend to be benevolent.

You could also mix it up, having groups of elves behave differently: maybe in one region you can easily locate and visit their cities, and they are more or less welcoming, and in another they are reclusive so no one knows much about them, giving rise to all manner of legends that might be true or false or at least exaggerated. And maybe a third group is not only reclusive but murders any humans who venture too close or deeply into their territory.

Orcs are of course an exception to all of this: those are always evil, savage, and stupid.

When you have a group with a half-dragon, tiefling, sprite, and a normal dude, you have a circus freak party without any sense of cohesion, and while you would normally expect them to be run out of town or at least briefly scrutinized, those sorts of parties are the purview of post-modern vapidware rehashes with Seattle demographics and what could loosely be considered sensibilities, so of course not only is no one going to bat an eye, regardless of location and settlement size every race will be improbably represented.

Randy isn't sure he is going to keep halflings in his Mudsword game. I not only support this, but recommend he check out kobolds from Dungeons & Delvers: same size and shape, but more than just "short humans with perhaps some sort of banal luck mechanic". I'm also not a fan of gnomes, preferring to portray them as a type of earth elemental, though for an optional Delvers supplement I did include both halflings and gnomes in a way that makes them more interesting.

As for a giantish race, it depends on how big they are. Too big and they have a hard time engaging in the typical Dungeons & Dragons activity of delving into dungeons, as well as making use of magic items and treasure manufactured by humans and human-sized entities and must also be worn to be used. 

I am skeptical of a setting without humans, as I feel like they would just be lazily replaced with something else that would essentially act human (with human societies, architecture, etc), just with a different appearance and perhaps some abilities. Like replacing dwarves with some sort of fungus person, which looks different but has the same flavor, personality and racial traits: good for you, I guess, but that's not particularly creative or innovative.

I agree with Randy about "grounding", which is why I would probably not enjoy a setting and/or game where everything is too alien or different for its own sake. Having a lot of similarities makes it easier to keep everyone on the same page without having to have everyone read a sort of setting primer, first (and then memorize all of that information). I think it's best to keep the civilized world/starting area mostly normal (it can have some weirdness to it), and relegate the really bizarre content to dungeons and distant lands.

I am curious where the idea of elves coming from pods stems from, as during my fairly extensive research on elves I never came across anything like that.

I'm not sure if someone else thought of this, but dwarves turning to stone as they age was something I came up with in Sundered World, which would have been over ten years ago and carried forward into Dungeons & Delvers. Not only do dwarves in my settings gradually petrify, they also begin resting for longer and longer periods of time, and even when unable to move can still communicate by vibrations or dwarves using their "speak with stone" ability.

Apologies for the terrible art. Six or so years ago from my Mignola phase.

Around the hour and a half mark they bring up a setting called Sundered Skies and Discworld. I was actually present for this part, and because of the description of Sundered Skies (something to do with floating islands) mentioned our Sundered World setting:

This was something that I originally created for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. It was a twist on the 4E Dawn War lore, which was inspired by Greek mythology: the gods and primordials fought, the gods won, and either killed or imprisoned the primordials. In Sundered World no one won, and the war shattered the barriers between the planes and caused all realities to collapse in on each other.

So everything is suspended in astral space: you have chunks of the worlds floating about alongside corpses of gods and primordials, as well as their slowly decaying dominions. Here characters sail about the "world" in ships and other vessels exploring ruins and remains.

There are humans, though they were spawned from the blood of gods. There are also elves and dwarves, which operated more or less normally. This is where I devised our version of the kobold, and made distinct versions of dragonborn (tarchons), tieflings (cambions), and a race formed entirely of astral essence bound together by thought (t'pual).

We also created new classes, such as the battlemind (uses psychic powers to transform into weapons and armor), invoker (possesses a tiny sliver of a god's power), and shaman (your body is host to a powerful nature spirit). Some of these were necessary due to a lack of clerics and paladins, as there are no gods to worship.

For armor versus weapons, this is pretty easy to handle: you give armor DR, and if you want to get more granular you make certain types more resistant to certain damage types (ie, plate would be more resistant to slashing weapons). You can also give weapons an Armor Penetration value, which we mostly do for weapons where the impact is concentrated, such as with spears and warhammers.

You can just do that, though if you want to get realistic armor would have pretty high DR, especially once you get to plate, which would be at a point where normal weapons have little to no chance of harming the wearer.

To work around this we gave armor an Armor Class, and if you exceed this you effectively bypass the target's armor and avoid its DR. This is similar to how it works in Dungeons & Dragons, except you can still fail to beat the AC and hit the target, it's just that unless you deal a lot of damage most or all of it will get absorbed. 

In regards to psionics, if you can make it meaningfully different from other magic systems, I say go for it. I should note that in Dungeons & Delvers the magic systems for bards, clerics, druids, monks, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards are all meaningfully different. We didn't include psionic classes in 1st Edition, but those are also different. Finally, paladins don't have an elaborate magic system but inherent powers, which also stands out from the rest.

I hated bards until we made our own bard class, which is actually good at what it's supposed to do and again is distinct from other classes. Rather than go into detail, just watch Bruce's in-depth video about it.

Clerics are weird because you are granted divine powers and rather than use them to spread the word of your god (which by the rules would provide no benefit, anyway), you muck about in dungeons for personal gain. This is why we're removing clerics as an adventuring class. Characters will be able to pray for divine aid though. This requires a Prayer check which can be modified by donations and other actions, meaning that you'd have a mechanical reason to convert others.