The game-mechanic powers of priests are exactly commensurate with those they might have been expected to have in the RL middle ages.
In other words, influence and power over people, not mystical magical powers.
But, on Beluaterra and Dwilight at least, there
are mystical and magical powers, and they are
not a vanishingly small part of gameplay.
Even aside from that– here's a half-dozen possible non-mystical changes that make sense and would help:
Make religion members able to give flag something as "heresy," like vulgarity, and it automatically goes to the religion's elders, who rule on it anonymously. i.e. "the lesser nobles are grumbling that you've started to stray from the One True Path"
Stop making your own realm's troops throw priests in enemy dungeons.
Create a mechanism for an RTO where a priest can make
someone else the lord of the region, besides themselves.
Allow religions to declare
realms "evil" or "misguided" or "faithful" or "ignore."
Allow religions to declare
characters anathema, whereby they may have a random chance of being assaulted by peasants in areas where that realm is dominant, especially if they're a courtier or something. Obviously the number of anathema persons should be capped, probably as a ratio of the members or priests of a religion.
Boost the H/P available in the priest game.
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These all seem feasible. These all are non-mystical. None of these have been previousy explicitly rejected. None of them give religions some kind of god-moding power. None of them could substantively replace RP and influencing by players. All of them could plausibly augment and encourage such– and even the most peaceful and get-along religions will eventually be tempted to declare someone anathema or proclaim a realm evil.
