I thought gods could be where ever they want, whenever they want, and as many places at the same time as they want. After all, they are gods.

interesting idea, but the idea of the gods being humans serverside wouldn''t work. If I read right you want the gods to be humans choosing which requests to respond to. Think about how many requests they would have to handle in a hour. Personally I''d just freak out and just set the system to authorize all the requests automatically.

A better system would be for every character to have invocation points which are earned the doing deeds. For example praying to the god, making offerings, healing the sick or smiting the wicked depending on what type of god it was. When you pertition your good the liklyhood of getting your way is determined by how many points you have. If you get your way you lose points. If you try to summon your god with little or no points you may incur the wrath of your god and be punished.

In return for there aid the gods offer, the player is every once and a while forced to perform a task. Eg. one month a plague breaks out in some city. A touchy feely god tells her followers to god heal the sick. If the player does this they get a healthy amount of invocation points, if they don''t they lose respect in the eyes of their gods and lose some points.

The problem would be making sure not to many points are given for killing things or otherwise some PKer may amass a huge amount of points and then tell his god to level a city or something.

Just an idea.

Doesn''t ultimate power corupt ultimately? I can see some online ''gods'' taking real world monetary tribute in order to perform acts of seemingly random carnage on fellow players. Perhaps god favors could be auctioned on eBay instead, just to cut to the chase?

Real world money for aid it the game wouldn''t that be a little weird. Plus it would be a little unfair. A person who plays by the rules could get toasted by a PKer who slipped a extra $20 to the game company for some extra godly assitance.

I think the summoning points are a better idea. The summoning points are just a way of tracking how religous a character is. The player doesn''t actually know how many points they have, its a hidden stat. You have to have some way of deciding if the god is going to aid the person. Obviously the god is going to be more helpful to a devout follower than someone who is only a token believer. So the points help track this.

The points are referred to when the player casts a spell. Depending of the size of the request(E.G a fireball is a small matter compared to razing twelve kilometres of forest), its determine the likelyhood of a spells success. If the player has 200 points(your average believer) and has asked for a fireball the likely of success is about 30% that the god will give them a fireball. But if the have 1000 points(devout believer) would have and 80% chance of success with getting a fireball.

MAybe instead of requesting the god to actually appear the user could request for a predefined action or something. Then the server side employee could dimply grant or deny requests. You could probably set up a bot to handle some stuff too.

How about like having gods of beer, then you could collect points and trade them in for, well, like 6 packs, and if you are really good, the god will throw you an all night kegger with, well, like the Swedish bikini team, but then if you are, well, like really, really offensive to the god, he gives you like a light beer, or even worse, something like one of those non-alcholic beers or somthing. Sorry, I need to watch ''Strange Brew'' to get that out of my system. Sorry, sorry...