In Kyler, where ya at buddy?, John Cross wrote:
Let me guess. A bad dice roll here can mean I botched and killed myself right? How can you botch on praying?? That don't make no sense.Well, I sympathize, but call it a matter of being consistent.
First, let me say that the rules specify that holy magic botches are inherently limited, because they are prayers, messages to intelligent beings, and thus it is to some degree in the hands of those powerful beings what happens.
Second, let me ask everyone to recognize that not all "prayers" are directed to The God, Creator of All. Not everyone who prays believes that there is such a being (although the cosmology of Multiverser maintains it as a necessary fact for their to be a multiverse in which all imagined things exist). I think that most would agree that a prayer to, say, a demon has a very good chance of going wrong. The same might be said of prayers to other gods who are in competition, such as Baal or Dagon.
The problem arises when I, as a player, make the assumption that my chosen deity is infallible. Of course my character believes that about his deity, and I believe it about mine, and the fiction attempts to make these as close to each other as possible--but despite John's suggestions to the contrary, I do not really play God, and I attempt to avoid doing so as much as possible, and thus his prayers to God are answered by what the dice and I guess that our fictionalized version of his God is likely to do in response to that prayer.
I am caught by the fact that I don't believe his God would "botch"; that, though, does not prevent him from doing so himself.
There is the factor which someone has called "those prayers which heaven in mercy declines to answer," that what you prayed will bring you great misery in the long run and God knows it. A botch might mean getting what you requested and discovering that it is not at all what you expected.
There are also the unforeseen consequences factor. King Hezekiah was informed by the prophet Isaiah that he, the king, was going to die within days, and the King then prayed that he might live. God granted that request, and sent Isaiah back to tell him that he would live. The good king lived almost two more decades, but in that time fathered Mannaseh, one of the worst kings in Judah's history--the king who would never have been born had Hezekiah not prayed that prayer.
It is also entirely possible that some other entity might become interested in the situation. When the angel Gabriel brought news to the prophet Daniel, he apologized that he had been delayed by some being called the Prince of Persia. It could be that your prayers stir up a supernatural battle in which the enemies of your God take it upon themselves to mess with you, and to keep your God's forces occupied so that they cannot assist.
When people tell me that God can do anything, I tell them that they are wrong, that that is a faulty premise which is not at all biblical. It is, for example, impossible for God to lie; it is thus equally impossible for God to renege on His promise. The Multiverser cosmology tacitly includes within it that God made promises to certain created spirit beings, that they would have power and authority over certain spheres within the multiverse for certain periods of time. God can punish those who overstep their authority, but as with Aslan and the White Witch in Narnia, she could not be brought to justice until she overstepped her authority.
So there are ways to explain holy magic botches; you just have to be creative to do so.
--M. J. Young