Title: Meaningful Paganism Penalty
Summary: Increase penalties for pagan nobles so there is more incentive for them to join in-game religions
Details:
According to the Battlemaster's Lore "paganism" is defined as a variety of peasant superstitious beliefs and practices. It is supposed to be shameful for a noble to be a pagan. In practice however, no one really seems to care. Pagan nobles are quite common and it's almost unheard of for this to result in consequences from players. In-game penalties for being a pagan lord are minor and in fact it can be much worse to choose a religion that is hated by your peasants.
I propose increasing region penalties for pagan lords. This can be done by simply increasing the existing penalty to the point where it will actively encourage players to select a religion. Flavor texts should read "The region's lower gentry are mortified to be serving a pagan lord. They flagrantly shirk their duties and refuse to pay taxes, some are even sowing unrest among the peasantry". This is will better explain the rational for the penalty, particularly in regions with high pagan peasant populations.
Benefits:
Encourages more players to join in-game religions which is porporteday expected of them according to BM lore. Creates potential for roleplay, P2P conflict and intrigue.
Possible downsides/exploits:
It might be possible for a player to sabotage their own region by withdrawing from their religion. However it is worth keeping in mind that there are plenty of other ways a player can sabotage their own region if they want and the realm's leadership has the power to penalize and even remove them to stop this from happening.
This rule will give more power to the heads of religions. This is not an inherently bad thing. In the middle ages the heads of major religions, most notably the Pope, could be quite powerful and able to influence politics all over Europe. However some players may dislike giving a particular class more power.
Religious leaders could cause harm to a realm by excommunicating lords from their faith. This action would in most circumstances be of limited effect as the noble could simply join a new religion.
Such excommunications would be more impactful however if:
1. The region in question overwhelmingly follows the religion in question.
2. That religion has declared all other religions evil.
On the other hand this will encourage more careful consideration for inter-religious politics and religion-realm relations.
Finally all of these potential problems can be mitigated by fine-tuning the penalty to be just high enough that a casual player will simply choose to join a religion rather than having to keep holding court but not so onerous that they can cripple a region within a short time.
