Shattered Kingdoms

So I was poking around in some other threads and read something interesting. Not all religions have high priests and such. Take the Yed religion for example. It basically is a worship of the elements and such and has more a warlock following than a priest following.

Algorab, Sargas and Ain have Hellions as well as Priests while Alshain, Dulrik and Ain also have Paladins and Priests.

This got me thinking a bit. With those specific religions, or really any, why not make the Create symbol spell flagged like cabal spells and set it so any high follower or F2 is able to cast it despite class?

Or if you think that eliminates the need for priests, just make it so the religions that could have clergy other than priests are capable of creating symbols.

Thoughts? Ideas?

I fail to see how anything could eliminate the need for priests. They've always been a very strong class, and a very useful one too.

In order for a priest to cast the majority of their spells, they NEED to follow a faith, so the need for priests in any religion will never diminish.

This isn't quite true. The idea of religious spells was to make priests more likely to join the traditionally underpopulated religions (from a priest perspective, anyways). The problem with the implementation of this idea was that the already popular religions got some of the best religion spells, and others that were (and are) less popular for the priest class got absoutely pathetic spells.

This was then exacerbated by the person who implemented the spells being just about completely unwilling to re-examine the spells themselves.

I don't know about you, but I have a priest alt, journeyman I believe, no religion, and can't cast jack all.

edit: wait, not journeyman, initiate (don't play it often :p ) and I had way less spells then I remembered. So what spells do you need a god and how far can you really go without one and still be a useful priest?

My point, and I believe the point of the OP, was that certain religions are consistently jacked as far as priests go and so are consistently jacked as far as symbol creation goes.

Knowing your backstory with your character Kin, I can't help but agree.

I've always thought that all F3s or even F2s of magical classes should be able to create symbols - especially paladins, hellions, sorcs of Mira, or warlocks of Yed - where those classes are just as important as priests.

OA is right. Sorry, allow me to elaborate.

As was stated above, a lot of clergy are suffering due to the lack of priests. Yed and several others being one of them. There are some religions however, that have "clergy" other than priests. Yed has warlock, and as above, ain, sargas and algorab has hellions while ain, alshain and dulrik have paladins.

The paladins, hellions and warlocks SHOULD be able to create symbols, however leave the spells to priests alone. I'm just saying that these faiths shouldn't be confined to the "Hf must be a priest" syndrome like all the other religions and such.

I disagree. Priests are fundamentally representatives of their god. None of the other classes has that as their base concept. Paladins and hellions have other things to consider. Users of a god's areas of interest don't qualify either. By that standard, any barbarian of any alignment would be a fitting provider of Sargas holy symbols.

If we choose to broaden holy symbol availability, I'd rather it be done by NPC priests via script.

Religions are supposed to be hungry for priests. If some religions aren't as ICly appealing, that sounds like a problem to be solved ICly. (That may well include the immortal providing better benefits, but it's not clear that's the fundamental problem.)

[The_me, you need to be invested before being able to cast Initiate or better spells.]

You're wrong. It's very clear that the fundamental problem is that some of the already less popular religions got completely and totally cheated out of a decent religion spell, while previously popular religions got made more so by hugely powerful religion spells.

There's only one immortal who can fix that though, and he's not willing.