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Well, I was looking at the Priest O.C.C. for ammunition to dissuade a player from switching to that class and I see a strange mission in the prayers on page 65 of the main book. It says Blessings only take 15 seconds to manifest, and then it lists the blessings. Then it talks about Prayers (Strength, Communion, Intervention) but it does not mention how long the priest needs to pray to achieve the effect. Further, the same issue is there for the Miracles. Are these ALL a 15 second "cast time"? It seems like they rather clearly are separating Blessings, Prayers, and Miracles. Or am I missing this as I keep re-reading it?

-Vek
"How many of you thought I was going to ask people to pray? Please, I'm an atheist!"

Veknironth wrote:Well, I was looking at the Priest O.C.C. for ammunition to dissuade a player from switching to that class and I see a strange mission in the prayers on page 65 of the main book. It says Blessings only take 15 seconds to manifest, and then it lists the blessings. Then it talks about Prayers (Strength, Communion, Intervention) but it does not mention how long the priest needs to pray to achieve the effect. Further, the same issue is there for the Miracles. Are these ALL a 15 second "cast time"? It seems like they rather clearly are separating Blessings, Prayers, and Miracles. Or am I missing this as I keep re-reading it?

-Vek
"How many of you thought I was going to ask people to pray? Please, I'm an atheist!"

I knew exactly what you were going to say because I had the same question several months ago. I want to create a Palladium Fantasy character that I can port over to Rifts for convention games. I already have a Heroes and Robotech 2e so I want a fantasy character thought the priest would be a good one. But as I looked the priest over I was just too unfamiliar with the powers and had to many questions (this among them) so I am eager to see if anyone has a good answer.

I would lean towards 15 seconds for all of them. They're all put under the same general heading, and the paragraph on page 65 seems to move back and forth between "blessings" and "prayers".

Besides, I figure you can manage a quick but intelligible prayer done in 15 seconds.

Mark Hall wrote:I would lean towards 15 seconds for all of them. They're all put under the same general heading, and the paragraph on page 65 seems to move back and forth between "blessings" and "prayers".

Besides, I figure you can manage a quick but intelligible prayer done in 15 seconds.

George Carlin did a joke about how many Hail Mary's you could say when falling from a truck. You would be surprised how fast you can get through some of those.

In addition to the time it takes what do the conditions have to be like? Is this like a spell where if you have any interruptions you have to start all over or is this something you can do while running and dodging?

I've never found a definitive answer to this, but we have always played all prayers as taking 15 seconds, same as blessings.
This despite the fact that the statement under blessings says "Such short prayers usually take only one melee round (15 seconds)", implying that, if blessings are considered short, other prayers must take longer. We still house rule them all as 15 seconds anyway.

I have taken to having Prayer of Communion take a couple minutes if you are successful. I mean, you are having some sort of vision with the possibility of divination, so it probably isn't too quick. On the other hand, I can't imagine it is used during combat very often... Having visions during combat sounds like a really bad idea.