Power of belief gameplay mechanic

I'd set both the difficulty class and minimum number of worshippers needed to create a god much higher. I would also make the god begin as a quasideity (DC 0).

Indeed.

There are many factors to consider. Let me try to list them.

A. Number of believers - How many berks are beleiving in something.

B. Coherency of Belief - How "firm" is the beleif in question? Is it a hazy thing like "good will win eventually." or is it definate like "Our god lives on top of that mountain, he looks like this, dresses like this, has a small garden and three goats."

C. Coherency of Believers - How close one believer's exact beliefs are to another's.

D. Potency of Belief - How strong the belief is or how much the believer believes in something. Is it taken as an ablsolute that cannot be shaken? How does this belief rank compared to the believer's other beliefs?

We should probably differentiate between unfocused and focused (by feat & skill) belief.

For the first part we can combine Coherency and Potency into one, I'd say (making for a nice tripartite equation). Only in, say, a small group of Signers trying to imagine someone away this would really matter. Numbers would be the most important factor, as one could include the potency simply by counting especially devoted believers twice or more often. Similarly one could reduce the total by a percentage corresponding to the 'unfocusedness' of the group.

Example: 20 thousand people believe, that Shemeska is the best connected chant-monger in the Cage. Maybe five thousand of them are really convinced and we count them twice for a total of 25k. Now the content of the belief is rather narrow, so we rule that the lacking focus removes only 10% for a final of 22500. We take a look through our logarithmic table and arrive at the conclusion, that Shemeska gains a +4 bonus to all checks pertaining to her trade.

Of course I pulled all those numbers out of my ... bag of holding, yes, that was what I wanted to say :oops:.

Now the Signers have to wait for later ... it's 5:30am, after all

This interpretation leaves us with four degrees of shifts to reality (discounting for the moment the difficult matter of The Truth) - a sufficient classification to include this factor into a mechanic.

Mmhh, for the 'mass belief' system I still like the idea of a scale system. I'd build it along the powers of three, partly because it's a nice touch considering the Rule of Three, partly because the resulting numbers look about right to me.

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Mass Belief
Recap: Factors are Number of Believers (1), Potency of Belief (2), Cohesion between Believers (3) and Plausibility of Belief (4).

Step 1: Determine the number of people believing in the same thing. Count lukewarm, convinced and fanatic believers separately.

Step 2: Reach a total number by dividing the number of lukewarm believers by two and multiplying the number of of fanatics by three, then add the numbers of the three groups together.

Step 3: Determine the degree (a percentage) to which all believers agree about their subject of belief. Details are less important than philosophical differences here and the complexity of the belief is important, too. Substract this percentage from the total number gained in the step before.

Step 4: On the scale of Unthinkable - Unlogical* - Unlikely - Unknown - Reality determine how many steps a change would span. Making the unthinkable reality takes four steps, shaping the unknown is only one step. Divide the total figure by the number of steps.

Step 5: Finally consult the table below to see, how great an effect is achieved.

Total         Bonus     Type of Effect
3			+1		   	Minor
9			+2
27			+3
81			+4
243			+5           	Small
729			+6
2187			+7
6561			+8
19683		+9
59049		+10           	Major
.
.
.
.
14348907		+15			Divine
.
.
.
.
3486784401	+20			Fundamental

Effects: 

Minor – an almost negligible change to reality. 
Small – a small but papable change. ‘Luck’ interceding on behalf of an individual, a curse manifesting in a limited area, a ghost being formed.
Major – a significant influence on reality. Shifting a planar layer, a curse of great power, a change to being’s nature.
Divine – a really big change. Influencing the tides of the Blood War, altering a plane’s appearance and ‘physical’ nature, mysterious forces acting on behalf of the belief.
Fundamental – whatever. Examples may include changing the ways the planes work, Sigil’s position, the nature of the multiverse, anything.

Now this table is as much as stab into the dark as anything we've said so far. It's a model of what I envision the final result to be like, no more. The examples given for each category are just that, examples. To truly transfer Sigil from the Outlands to the Prime (or the Far Realm for that matter) might require a Belief Score of 30 (3^30 believers) or more - DM's decision.

A problem we haven't considered before is the matter of numbers. The figures one hears for the population of Sigil run from under 100'000 to many millions (I myself would put it in the low millions range, half-remembering a tidbit about a million Indeps being a considerable part of it, back during the Great Upheaval). But what of the other planar cities and the Prime?

Also I didn't touch on the matter of gods ...

Mr. Epic Bard could abuse that, easily. Give him a high enough Diplomacy score that he can shift people's attitudes from Hostile to Fanatic (even with the -10 penalty to do it as a full round action), and the Epic Leadership and Legendary Commander feats, and he can easily whip up a cult that will elevate him to deity-hood in a matter of days.

Give him enough time to have his fanatical army conquer a Prime world or two, and he will have enough belief to begin reshaping the planes. :shock:

I don't really think the game needs a specific mechanic for generating deityhood via force of belief from worshippers. Anyone who designs something like that would have to make it far too difficult for PCs to manage normally. It shouldn't ever happen unless the DM wants it to happen. And if the DM wants it to happen, it's all too easy for him to make the circumstances anyway. If the DM wants a new god to appear, he's just going to have to insert a secretive cult numbering in the hundreds of thousands into his campaign, or a Prime world full of adoration. If the PCs want to make a new god appear, too bad. It's the DM's world, and the ascendance of new gods is far beyond players or player characters.

Would a mechanic like this require some kind of resources to be spent (like time, XP, or action points?)