Christians in Nero's Rome

[Harmast]

I've had an idea brewing for a while about game that somewhat reverses Sorcerer or KPFS in that the characters represent highly moral people (in game objectively a la DitV) who have no power due to their morality being out of sync with their culture

The idea jelled today with the above setting (I'd been looking at modern period).  I'm hoping it's to the point to be appropriate to these forum.

I have two specific questions...one is a "feel" test for my statement of premise:

Commitment creates isolation

I've toyed with "moral commitment" and with replacing "isolation" with "separation".  Early on I considered danger, but that didn't quite work given I want to concentration not just on the possibility of winding up as a martyr but with the fact the neighbors think you're odd and make fun of you.  Think a range from Christians and lions to how Ned Flanders is portrayed on The Simpsons.  Does this premise communicate the conflict and the stance the game is trying to show.

My second question is the only mechanical idea that I've had.  I'm considering a statistic of piety which only has meaning on character death...a positive piety would indicate dying having maintained your moral character while a zero or negative would mean too much compromise with the world.  Gaining piety would be difficult, generally by conversions or some other action that creates genuine risk (social or physical) merely by taking the action.  Losing piety would obviously be much easier and would have less to do with actually sinning than with denial or ignoring morals to just get along (stealing liberal from the ideas in The Screwtape Letters).  The problem is piety will have no in game value in the sense that it won't provide metagaming benefits like redemption in Dread and allowing it to be used as resistance to temptation ignores the risk standing by morals is supposed to entail.  Having converted a bunch of new people shouldn't make it easier for you to not speak up for one of them when they get arrested.  In fact, I'd think the higher the piety the bigger the lose when you stray.

So, how can I make piety important in the same manner humanity is to a Sorcerer player?  Or, is a piety mechanic like this barking up the wrong tree?

[Valamir]

How important is the historical authenticity of your setting to your premise?  There is a vast gulf between the Myth of the conditions of Christians in Nero's Rome and the reality.  The myth may be what is important for your purposes but you should be fairly clear about your intents.

In truth, prior the fire Christians were just a minor sect of Jews that garnered little attention.  The Jews themselves enjoyed a measure of fadish favor...a curiousity for Romans to dabble with and influencial enough that when Nero needed a scapegoat he couldn't afford to alienate them.  But the Christians...a minor sect that had no friends and even the main stream Jews couldn't stand...now they made perfect scapegoats.  Until then there really wasn't any persecution of Christians in Rome...and the martyr of so many at the hands of Nero was really just a matter of political expediency than any sort of religiously motivated endeavor (for those who don't know Nero used many Christians as human Tiki Torches for his garden parties...as an interesting piece of historical trivia this garden...the Vatican...was later intentionally chosen as the site for the holy see.

But that reality doesn't necessarily mesh well your goals...so the myth of persecution might be a better fit for your game.

[Harmast]

How important is the historical authenticity of your setting to your premise?  There is a vast gulf between the Myth of the conditions of Christians in Nero's Rome and the reality.  The myth may be what is important for your purposes but you should be fairly clear about your intents.

I'm using the myth...the original idea was to be set in the modern day (hence the emphasis on alienation over physical danger) but I couldn't get it to work mentally until I hit upon persecutions in Rome during the early church.  I ran with Nero and the fire as a primary background simply because I though it's easy to explain.

It doesn't even have to be about Christians at all.  I'd love to get it working so people could discuss alternate settings, much as I've seen with DitV.  The core idea is the tension between the immediate price paid for commitment to and ideal versus the long term price of just going along with things.  That's why the first thing I'm trying to figure out is the piety system, which maybe I'm still making too much like humanity in Sorcerer.

[Bill_White]

I think this is interesting. I would phrase the premise as "commitment alienates," because I like how that telescopes the tension of the game, between private individual belief and public collective acceptance. If you stick with Piety as your measure of commitment (which is fine), then it clearly needs to have a game-mechanical association with some measure of alienation (or a negative association with social integration). For the game to get at the tension you want to evoke, there will have to be a mechanical incentive to strengthen integration just as there's one to strengthen piety. You've suggested that one is short-term beneficial while one is end-game beneficial; that's good.

So the game is about martyrdom, maybe, and has high/low victory conditions. The player with the highest piety "wins" because he or she gets to narrate the heavenly fate of the other characters; the player with highest social integration gets to narrate his character's escape from martyrdom, and everybody else gets eaten by lions.

There are ways of making that tighter and more satisfying, mechanically, so that it's not just parlor narration, but the game-mechanical tension between piety and integration is the basis of this, in my opinion.

[Harmast]

Great thoughts Bill...your post really got my juices going.

The big idea I've been turning over comes from you finding a use for zero piety.  I thinking as soon as one character hits zero his character winds up betraying the others to survive.  The character who then had the highest piety at martyrdom gets to narrate as you suggested, as does the zero player, but he had to include describing his betrayal.

Notice I said death at martyrdom.  I'm thinking allowing characters to be martyred before end-game.  The players could then start a new non-Christian character and work to compromise the others or convert and be martyred as well.  The death prior to martyrdom would provide incentive to stay in play because characters surviving longer have more chances to gain piety by conversion.

Another option is to allow non-martyrdom outcomes when players face it such as fleeing...this might be an interesting run as well...a player who successfully flees is assumed to start a new church elsewhere but might have to compromise to escape.

My only issue with this line of thought is it might move me towards a more gamist experience especially if I allow players whose characters have been martyred to come back as tempting forces.  I was aiming towards narrativism.  Then again, maybe "commitment alienates" naturally slides that way.  Or maybe I'm confusing "end-game" with a slide towards gamism.

I think for now I'll leave what to do with players whose characters have been martyred for now and look at the rest of bits I need to get a working first draft to inflict test on my gaming group.

[contracycle]

I suspect you may be too close to the material to see the abstraction, and may be confusing morality with courage.  Having a strong commitment to an ideology or belief system can certainly result in people choosing outcomes that are bad for them personally in order to uphold a higher principle.  You piety stat then is not relevant at a point after death, but rather in opening opportunities for a manner of death.  Thus I think that your piety value would supplant or add to another score which controls the characters ability to suffer personally for that higher cause.  I don't like a automatic betrayal arising out of a zero, as that seems IMO to assume too much, but it could represent the displacement of risk onto the movement as opposed the person.  That becomes your moral dilemma - to carry the risk yourself or to pass it on to your comrades.

[Harmast]

I suspect you may be too close to the material to see the abstraction, and may be confusing morality with courage.  Having a strong commitment to an ideology or belief system can certainly result in people choosing outcomes that are bad for them personally in order to uphold a higher principle.  You piety stat then is not relevant at a point after death, but rather in opening opportunities for a manner of death.  Thus I think that your piety value would supplant or add to another score which controls the characters ability to suffer personally for that higher cause.  I don't like a automatic betrayal arising out of a zero, as that seems IMO to assume too much, but it could represent the displacement of risk onto the movement as opposed the person.  That becomes your moral dilemma - to carry the risk yourself or to pass it on to your comrades.

I like the commitment equals resisting suffering...taking it from Rome to one other context I've considered: in a "Left Behind" type scenario piety could increase the ability to resist starvation so you don't take the mark of the beast.  That gives me a here and no reason to raise piety and try and keep it high that doesn't seem to cross the underlying idea of alienation from the world.

Taking it back to the Rome context, piety would help you resist torture, run from lions, or even high in deep shadows to avoid arrest.

The idea of displacement is nice, but I think it could become the second way to reduce piety.  If I know that soldiers are coming for someone else in the congregation but not me, if I try to warn them I risk being discovered as a Christian, but I have a duty to my brothers to warn them.