The power of Faith has long been a staple of gaming from the earliest edition ofDungeons & Dragonsto characters and classes in modern gaming. A higher power lending their strength to its devotees in miraculous healing and spectacular destruction is a common occurrence.
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With such a long history as a gaming trope, it has been played straight, subverted, and zig-zagged across all the types of games it has appeared in. How a game interacts with faith has implications about the world it’s in, especially if it allows you to raise the dead, heal wounds, or make the biggest, brightest explosions you’ve ever seen.
6What’s Right Is Light - World Of Warcraft
One of the more interesting examples of those who wield the Light inWorld of Warcraftis the Paladin class, who all draw their power from it, but in different manifestations.
Humans and Dwarves draw from The Holy Light, Blood Elves draw it from the Sunwell, Tauren draw it from An’she (the Sun), etc. You might expect that like other ‘holy’ powers, there’s a moral component to their use, but while there is, those morals are vague and ultimately don’t matter.
What really matters is the wielder’s conviction, thebeliefthat they’re right rather than what they actually believe in. This is what allows organizations like the Scarlet Crusade– a band of fanatic zealots to wield the Light to dark ends like torture and genocide.
5True Faith - World Of Darkness
The World of Darkness lives up to its name. Thematically, it’s a dark setting where the bad guys have won, and rule the night with impunity, and darker beings still lurk in the shadows of reality, waiting to make things much worse. It’s the kind of setting where implements like crosses and holy water are more likely to make a vampire wet and annoyed before making a meal of you rather than stop them.
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But there is a small glint of light, even in this dark world. If you have True Faith, not only will standard anti-vampire gear work against them, but your very existence is anathema to them to the point that your touch will burn them. Having True Faith makes you effective in combating all sorts of supernatural creatures as well, from Werewolves to Mages to Demons, in addition to allowing you to perform miracles. Unfortunately, this is a rare trait to have, even amongst devout practitioners of any faith.
4Aberrant Sorceries And The Blood Star - Elden Ring
The Lands Between,Elden Ring’ssetting is a place full of magic and danger, withpractitioners of sorcerygetting their power from a myriad of sources, from the Moons and Stars to living Demigods to… lava snakes. One of the most interesting and least explained ‘schools’ of magic is Aberrant Sorcery, which originated from criminals who were banished to the Mountaintops of the Giants.
It was there that they found their “Blood Star,” which they worshiped and gave them power. Through sacrificing their own blood, they could summon briars and thorns to assault their enemies. Unlike other Sorceries, Aberrant Sorceries are powered by the Faith stat and not the Intelligence stat, meaning that rather than studying it like a science, it is ultimately powered by the belief in its source– likely the Blood Star that the original criminals found.
3It Really Happened, Though - Dark Souls Series
There are two contrasting sources of magic in the Souls series. Sorceries, which are an art granted to humans by Seath the Scaleless and are more powerful the more knowledgeable the practitioner is (powered by Intelligence). And then there are Miracles.
Related:Dark Souls 3 - The Most Powerful Miracles, Ranked
Miracles, which are powered by Faith, are basically retellings of heroic gods and goddesses whose powers are replicated by the telling. Its link to the Faith stat likely means that the more you believe in it, the more powerful it becomes. An interesting feature unique to Miracles is the resonance mechanic. If you’re playing a Dark Souls game online, the Miracles you cast will leave a resonance ring in the area they were cast in - these can be seen by other players, and casting the same Miracle near one will empower it, meaning that Faith even resonatesacross realities,something that sorceries don’t do.
2The Faith And Faithlessness - Final Fantasy Tactics
It’s rare in any game for the faithful to have their faith quantified. If a character is said to be devout, you tend to believe it until the story or their actions prove otherwise. However, FFT is perfectly fine with assigning a numberto every character’spiety. And far from just being a number to denote how hard that character prays, it is an important stat that can determine what that character should be doing.
The Faith stat helps determine how much damage and healing you get from spells, and how much you deal and heal with your own spells. If you believe in magic, you benefit more from it and can be harmed more by it and if you don’t, then it doesn’t really work well on you. Unlike most stats, you don’t want to have this all the way up since you become more susceptible to enemy spells and more importantly, a character who has max Faith will leave your party to pursue religion instead.
The Light in WoW has almost as many manifestations as the number of different peoples who can call upon it, but none are quite so interesting as how it interacts when wieldedby the Undead.
As you’d expect, the Light is a powerful tool against the undead, burning them with Holy fire. However, the Undead can still be healed by Holy magic as well. When healed in this manner, it is less a soothing balm and more like a cauterization, healing and burning them all at once.
The Undead who wield Holy magic are some of the noblest creatures in the WoW universe, according to the lore since not only is channeling this Holy power painful for them but has a gruesome side-effect of revitalizing their deadened senses. Undead Priests find that they can smell their rotting bodies, taste their rotting flesh, and even feel all the creepy-crawlies that have made their home in their corpses…
