I feel really sad for Tortuga.
However, you've also just explained Christianity's rise during the era when Judaism was dominated by the Pharisees, as well as the Protestant Reformation at the height of Catholicism. Because what would Tortuga do? He'd send out a prophet to topple the whole thing and restore the true faith of Tortuga!
I think you just solved world religion here at the ACKS forums.
[quote="James K"]
You mean like this?
[/quote]
I think we've completed this thread; I'd quoted a passage from Small Gods on page 1 ;)
[quote="Alex"]
A living creature sustains its soul through the biological processes of its living form. It bleeds off excess divine power each day equal to 6% of its XP value. Casters use some of this to fuel their spells but the rest is dissipated or bequeathed to a god through worship. A cleric that leads a congregant in worship collects about 10% while the god collects the rest – which is why 50 0-level congregants (worth 5xp each) generate (5 x 50 x 6% x 10% x 7) 10gp worth of divine power for their cleric.
[/quote]
By this, then, one would expect that a congregant who is higher level - the cleric's own henchmen, for example, would produce more divine power per week for the cleric. A cleric henchman of 3rd level, for example, is worth 65 XP, and as such produces (65 x 6% x 10% x 7 = 2.73) ~3 gp of DP each week. The domain ruler whom the cleric services would be a good source of DP, for that matter.
Given that expectation, one then could extrapolate that a combination of congregant size modulated by the Demographics of Leveled Characters may tend to produce more DP over time, as there will be some higher HD congregants included because demographics, at least, demands it, and it'd be a poor priest indeed who actually exclusively services the needs of the weakest. Just plain ahistoric, really.
Hold my beer, see if I did this math right:
A congregation of 400 0-levels produces 80gp per week of DP; or, on 30 day months, 343 DP. The cleric pays 400gp per month to maintain that congregation. In any case, the cleric pays about ~116.6% of the DP value to maintain the source.
A population of 400 includes 20 1HD, 8 2HD, 3 3HD, and 1 4HD persons.
The average XP value of those 32 people, if we account for the ones that may themselves be clerics or mages, is about 669 XP, and the remaining 368 0 level folks are worth 1840XP.
That's 2,509XP worth of congregants, who then produce ... 105 DP per week. If the cleric is still paying by congregant irregardless of HD, the ratio of DP/GP drops to 88% - he's paying 400gp for ~451DP. That ratio seems like it starts to bottom out in the low 80%s for increasingly improbable congregation sizes, say, 12,800 individual congregants producing 15,601 DP per month.
If instead he pays for DP at the standard rate of 116%, the 451DP costs him 526gp.
It could be said then, on average and taking the stance that the cost should remain the same for a given return of power (i.e. assuming we pay more to maintain higher level congregants), that investing in a source of "generic power" for purposes of magical research should cost about 180GP per resultant GP value per week (1000/5.5, the avg 1d10 result), with a continued investment of 1.16 gp per month (or 1 gp, 2 sp -> 6gp per 5 power points) in maintaining that source.