For Ben: The heaven game.

[Ben Lehman]

I really ought to be doing work right now, but I just had some thoughts on "systematizing" Shreyas's ideas on creation and also the relationship between the players, the "gm" (if any), and the system, and they need to get written down before I forget them.

On Creation:  I don't know if this is *necessarily* all you do in the game, but it should be a part of the whole affair (perhaps the lowest node of the tree of life, each node of which is a subsystem?) and here are some ideas on systematizing it.  If this looks a lot like Universalis, that's not an accident.

1) Creation is systematized in a series of concepts, called "Logos" and written down on 3x5 cards with a series of traits.  So you get things looking like:
Orchid:
Flower
Six Petalled

Perhaps there is some limit or requirement for number of traits.  I haven't thought about this yet.

1a) The initial card is, by tradition, "Light"

2) When you want to add a card, you describe the sort of thing that you are creating and, utilizing effective speech, add it into creation with the aid of the angels.  When you describe the object, you take 1-3 dice (your choice) and roll them, depending on the strength of your concept -- if it is muddled, take less dice, if it is clear, take more.  Also, any other member of the Metatron (see below) can give you an extra dice.  If you roll high, your creation is so strong that the other bits of creation wrap themselves around it.  If you roll low, your creation is weakly formed and the rest of creation takes bits of it and changes them.  This manifests as adding and taking away of traits.

3) There are ways around these rules -- ways of directly effecting the board.  These are handled by Lucifer, through the Scar of the War.  The question is "is shaping creation as you want it to be shaped worth the cost of exerting your will on it?"  Wham.  Narrativism.

So about the players -- this is pretty far out there:

I would like to note to Jonathan (and Shreyas) that I don't need the players to be humans.  It was just an idea.

I suggest that the majority of the players are, collectively, the Metatron -- the voice of God.  It is through them that creation is order, and through them that the angels are directed, and through them that paradise is both created and experienced.

(Traditionally, for the curious, the Metatron is a transcended human.  So that's one option.)

I suggest that the system, and possibly a "GM-player" represent "the Host."  This player has no real "free will" as it were -- they merely enact the rules and assist the other players, as well as role-playing all the angelic (and demonic) host.  The particular caveat here is that "the Host" has one role that gets to make its own decisions -- Lucifer.  But perhaps only when the Metatron invokes him.

Other thoughts -- Christ and the Holy Ghost -- how do they fit into the system?  Memories?  Mary?

I also think that the approach to important religious figures -- Satan, Christ, Mary, etc. -- should give multiple approachs drawn from various Christian sects that can be combined into your unique "metaplot," as it were.  Or can be tailored by members of a particular Christian viewpoint, if using the game as a religious tool.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben O'Neal]

Wow, after reading this thread, I've realised that there are way too many differing notions of angels out there, even within the christian tradition. Throw in a few other religious sources, and it's a right bloody mess.

Metatron is a singular, not a collective. Metatron is The Voice of God. In life, he was Enoch. In life, God charged Enoch with the scribing of His history and intentions, so that mortal men may know the true God. Enoch and Soloman are the only two humans who have never died. Soloman was taken up into heaven, but Enoch, rightous above all others, became the official Voice of God: Metatron.

The reference to any angel as a "Fallen" angel is reserved for those 200 odd (most of whom were Watchers) who were seduced by the beauty of mortal women (all angels are male, imagine the angst!), and their fall came from two reasons: One, god forbade any angel to sleep with any mortal, and they did, giving birth to the nephillim (sometimes known as the grigori, though this term actually means the Watchers), which were huge giants of great power who had no souls, but had an "eternal and insatiable hunger" which they could never satisfy, and thus they all waged war on earth, corrupting everyone and causing great amounts of mischief and carnage (as has been mentioned, the nephillim were the reason God created the flood, and FYI, Goliath was a nephillim). The second reason was that the fallen watchers taught mankind things that God deemed suitable only for heaven, and commanded the angels to never teach to humans. These things included metallurgy, sexual positions, make-up, written language, magic, medicine, and knowledge of plants and herbs.

God punished the fallen by devising an individual punishment for each of the 200 odd. One of them is said to be buried deep within the earth for all time, another was sent far away among the stars, others were sent to live in eternal burning torment within the sun, but yeah, 200 different punishments.

No other angels should be called "Fallen".

"A Dictionary of Angels" by Gustav Davidson is a worthy, well-researched, and extensive resource that I would recommend to any person interested in the goings on of angels and the inner workings of the 7-10 (pick one!)heavens.

If you want to make a game that is not "a superficial mythology with no substance" then I reckon you may have your work cut out for you. Mainly because agreement on any particular mythos is rare, even among advocates of a superficially similar view. I reckon your best bet would be to pick one particular perspective that you really like, and run with that, rather than mix and match and piss everybody off for doing so (kinda like if someone mixed babylon 5 with star trek to make a cool sci fi game).

Alternatively, and this is what I would recommend most strongly, you could find aspects that you like from various views, but then create a new one, that might bear similarities with other sources, but which stands clearly apart as a distinct and inventive perspective.

So yeah, my 2 cents = pick a single attractive existing perspective or make up a new one, but don't blend or you'll end up with soup that doesn't taste really nice.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Probably too much Gaiman, but I actually would prefer no focus on creation, and players as angels. It seems to me that the Fall is the interesting thing, and any metarules for general creation of the world would only efficiently sidetrack the game from the human (angel) issues. The point isn't what colour of daffondils this or that player would prefer for the Earth, is it?

It'd be very easy to walk the road already travelled and make this metaplot-heavy character simulation like WoD, Nobilis or In Nomine. All one needs to do is to make Satan a NPC and there it is, players going on assignments for bigger angels with their low-on-the-totem-pole human souls or angels of lowest rank.

What I'd want to see instead is probably a game affected by the aesthetic idea of morality play: Let the game be about the eternal questions of religion, as evidenced in simple form in medieval moralities. This is how I envision it:

First of all, the structure of the story is already known. The God creates, angels fall, humans live and die and the world ends. All will be so. All is so, because God and angels both are outside time as earlier suggested, and do indeed already know how it will end.

The reason for Lucifer's fall in this scheme is that he does it despite knowing how it will turn out. This most pure creation will not abide by a world in shackles, and therefore he has no other course but to make his terrible mistake. He's too much like his creator to not Fall. What matters it if he will fail, if it's still the right thing to do?

What players do: they tell moral stories within the confines of the big story. "Characters" are angels, that each and every one are represented by individual scores in various attributes (similar to Pendragon virtues). There isn't two angels with the same stats, and stats do not degree game efficiency. Statistics are derived from the player's moral choices (or choices he chooses to defend in-game). Satan, or Michael, or whoever isn't any stronger than other angels, they just happen to be the right ones for their roles.

Now, players are effectively playing philosophical paradigms at this stage. They have chosen who they play, even Satan, if a player can support those kinds of choices. How the conflict is realized through play?

The players can stage short scenarios in Heaven or Earth or where-ever, at any point of history. Usually the angels cannot affect Earthly stories, but they can choose representatives for themselves from among humans. The scenarios played can concern anything from petty theft to the Fall itself, as preferred. The style is similar to thought games of philosophers or medieval morality plays, as preferred. What if you had to do this and this? Or this and this? What if then happened so? Short and hard, and refereed by the statistics of the angels in question. The GM is called GOD, of course.

The idea is to deconstruct or reconstruct the concepts of God, Heaven, Fall, Creation and Judgement. Are these possible bases for cosmology, ethics or aesthetics? What they have to be like, to work at all, or are they after all not possible, is Satan right? The players can reveal during play if their angels were among the fallen, and one way for the game to end is for all the players to come to shove their angels off the ledge.

This'd probably need some heavy support structures, like "life-plays", where the players go through lives of mortal characters who make different decisions, just to illustrate their side of the great argument. Some support for how to begin to hash the differences between the players.

Just some rough first impressions. Carry on!

[DannyK]

Another quick comment: in some parts of the Old Testament (the book of Job is a good example), Satan is portrayed not so much as the personification of evil, but rather simply as an angel who is inimical to humanity.  That's his job.  He is rather like the prosecuting attorney in a case, whose role is to make the best possible case against the person on trial, regardless of their personal feelings in the matter.  

In other words, Satan is the devil's advocate.

Since it's awfully easy to get emotionally involved in your job, and since we've already said that angels are pretty passionate, perhaps the whole War in Heaven and Fall is sort of a political/legal argument which got out of hand, leading to the parties to the argument coming to blows.  

It makes you wonder who or what was on trial before humanity, that the angels were able to come to terms on.

[Jonathan Walton]

Wow, after reading this thread, I've realised that there are way too many differing notions of angels out there, even within the christian tradition.

Yeah.  Which is why you're statement that only the Watchers should be called "the Fallen" is silly.  People have been calling Satan and the other demons "the Fallen" for thousands of years.  Since most holy texts (The Torah & Talmud, the Gospels & Epistles, the Qur'an) say very little about angels, everything is based on widely-ranging speculation, with very little consistency.

Metatron is a singular, not a collective. Metatron is The Voice of God.

Dude, there are so many competing traditions about Metatron (or any other angel, as you say), that I'm surprised your being such a stickler about the "accuracy" of certain things.  In L'Engel's writings, angels don't have a singular identity like people do.  There's this great passage where an angel says, "We are a Cherubim," or something like that.  Angels that aren't just "people with wings" are pretty dern cool.

Enoch and Soloman are the only two humans who have never died.

I thought it was Enoch and Elijah.  Elijah gets taken to Heaven in a fiery chariot and becomes the angel Sandalphon (just like Enoch becoming Metatron).  You can look it up in Gustav if you like (which is a great reference, but just as self-contradictory as any body of angelic lore).

Personally, I'm with Eero on the Creation issue.  I don't find the Creation of the world particularly interesting (heck, it's the most boring chapter of Paradise Lost).  I think the Fall and the motivations for it have much more potential, especially if Ben wants to cry at the beauty.  Creation, honestly, isn't supposed to be as beautiful as Heaven or God, and I find it less compelling, just because we live there every day, whereas Heaven is something alien and different.

Then again, I would advocate for something much less traditional than the kind of game that Eero is describing.  I like the idea of it being a mortality play but the "little episodes across the world's history" doesn't excite me as much.  Eero's description of Lucifer, though, is dead on.  He does his "job," as Danny says, in a universe where everything is preordained.  He is, in effect, fighting against predestination even though his rebellion and failure is preordained it and of itself.  How delightfully tragic.

Shreyas, if you're going to take the Lead Designer role on this project, I think you need to start making some decisions soon and laying down an outline, because we're all over the place.

[Shreyas Sampat]

I agree that it's important to create or adopt, for the purposes of the game, a mythology that's stable and consistent, rather than cobbled of spare parts. Preferably, to stay with the original idea, a literal interpretation out of the basis mythology should be the source of everything else. I will note that we're messing with powerful themes here, and I'm not really worried about creating a superficial mythology.

Now on to other points -

Heaven as the Zen motionless point! Yes!

I'm still interested in this two-level play idea, so I would like to have a way to "roll your Razael dice" as well as play out celestial struggle. Free will is a weird concept since Time doesn't exist in Heaven - so then is it even possible (comprehensible?) for timeless entities to make choices? Somehow it has to be. I think that interfacing between Heaven and Earth forces angels to choose how much of their power to exert at any one point in Earthly timespace - to an angel Creation is an instant, but it is a very complex instant that it cannot influence completely or perfectly (though the summation of angels completely and perfectly executes the Almighty's plan.)

Perfected human souls as PCs - Interesting, interesting. This folds back into the "two levels" thing, and I think I'm getting some idea of how it'll work. More soon!

On prophets: On one level, I don't want to tuch this because I don't know a lot about it. On another, I know that even if I did know a lot about it, I would colour my presentation of it with my fairly strong biases. I think the most respectful thing I am able to say is that, occasionally, certain people come into contact with the Divine personally, rather than through angelic mediation, and they are inspired by holiness. I will leave it there.

So, my idea:

Angels, when you want to simulate angelic agency, have a job and a pool of points that represent their attention. To angels, existence is an instant, and so once they've spent all their attention, that is all the influence they can exert on the universe, ever. Angels who're out of attention can always try to persuade other angels to spend their own attention toward a mutually beneficial goal.

Resolving human actions means resolving the conflict between passive angelic will and human free will. The effect of passive angelic will is a function of the angel's absolute power and how much attention the angel has chosen to reserve.

This means that play proceeds in two phases for any given game; the first, where angels act consciously on Creation, and a second where mortals act out their free will, influenced by the dregs on angelic power.

[Shreyas Sampat]

This thread is hard to keep up with.

Anyway, more agreement that creation isn't interesting. I'd rather deal with the reasons that the angels have for doing the things they do to Creation, once it has come into existence and they are acting in their capacity as components of the divine plan.

The best part, of course, is that there are some angels whose job it is to oppose and to suffer, and to cause mortals to do the same. God is in an eternal state of suffesring, because he has decided to be so.

[Jonathan Walton]

I think somebody once said that at the moment of an angel's creation, the choice is set before them: support or oppose God?  But then, after that, they get no more choices.  Honestly, I think that might just have been an attempt to let God off the hook for punishing angels that couldn't choose to be obediant.  Perhaps angels make ALL their choices at the moment of their Creation (their identity is self-determined basically, "I choose to reflect the strength of God"), and then spent the rest of their existence being true to that original set of choices.

I do like the concept of angelic Passive Will vs. human Free Will.  That's a powerful theme.  The question remains, though, can humans convince angels to do things that they might not have done on their own?  This would seem to imply so, that human (and maybe animal) will is the only real variable in the deterministic universe.  If that's the case, perhaps a human convinced Lucifer to rebel in the first place.  That could be cool.

On prophets: Shreyas you'd absolutely love the prophetic tradition, especially in Islam where it's heavily aestheticized.  Prophets are both conduits for the Word of God and models for how human beings should live their lives.  This is why there are so many records kept of what the Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) did, because his actions are just as important as his words.  They reflect God's plan for human beings.  The Qur'an implies that the Prophet was given the Qur'an (which started out just as an oral tradition that was memorized and recited) by the angel Gabriel (Jabril), and that the Qur'an and other holy books are simply imperfect copies of Mu al-Kitab, the Mother of the Book, which is in Heaven and contains the perfect rendition of God's Word.  There are parallels in the Mormon tradition, in which the prophet Joseph Smith translates the Book of Mormon from gold plates with the help of the angel Moroni.  In Taiping thought, prophets were often actually possessed by God or Jesus (based on traditional Chinese shamanism) and literally spoke the words of the divine, in the form of classical poetry.  In Judaism, there's a strong tradition of the prophet denouncing his own people, who have turned away from God, but also speaking with God's voice and authority ("Oh rebellious children, says the Lord, who carry out a plan but not mine..." -- Isaiah 30:1).  Isaiah is a really great example of this, as is Elijah.  Christianity doesn't really have a strong prophetic tradition.  We have Saints and Martyrs, which are pretty different.  Islam considers Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) to be the "Seal of the Prophets," i.e. the last real prophet, but they do consider people before him, such as Jesus, to be prophets.

Hope that helps some.

[Jonathan Walton]

One more thing:

Prophets are often poets, which is really cool.  Everyone from Isaiah to Hong Xiuquan to Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) to Joseph Smith was known for writing beautiful verse/prose.  In Islam, the indescribable beauty of the Qur'an is taken to be a sign of its divinity and its status as the words of God and not man.

[DannyK]

I see a nice congruence between two themes that have emerged:
--the conflict between the loyalists and the fallen
--the aesthetic politics of the angels.

It reminds me of something Mephistopheles says in Faust (also a must-read, I'd think):
"Alles, was besteht, ist wert dass es zu Grunde geht."
In English, my lousy translation: "everything which exists, is worthy of ceasing to exist."

It's an attitude a little bit like the Excrucians in Nobilis, but I think we could interpret it in this light as aesthetic agreement.  Perhaps Satan had been unhappy with Creation for quite a while, but when humanity came along, and he raised his objections, and the human race was not exterminated, he lost his patience and decided to take a more direct, violent hand in the development of things.  

So perhaps a central dialectic of this game could be... conformity versus perfection?  The loyal hosts of Heaven are working to continue and develop creation, while the rebel angels feel that much of reality should be wiped out and God should start again, maybe at the fifth day or so.

Hmm... conformity vs. perfection... sounds kind of like Ayn Rand, doesn't it?  Maybe you should call it Satan Shrugged.

[Eero Tuovinen]

This does indeed need some design decisions, and fast. I'm seeing so many different foci here that I at least have difficulty finding the game for the ideas. I love the background many have provided here (much of it familiar), but won't join in with the alternative interpretations because that really doesn't further any narrowing down of ideas. It'd be great to construe heaven by some Indian tradition, for example, but that doesn't answer the very human thematic questions here. So lay off with the esoterica, and focus on what the players will be doing, ne? It's likely that the result will support many different intertextual interpretations anyway.

I'm not actually too hot about the idea of contrapositioning human and angel free will; it is necessary when the focus is on humanity, but it's unnecessary if the game will concentrate on the Heaven. Admittedly you'd get some wicked cool games out of humans, flipping in to the world for a fleeting moment and coming back in the Judgement, but that would necessitate the kind of life stories I proposed earlier. If the focus should remain in Heaven, there's no consistent way of getting humans in important roles: what a human is is necessarily defined by his or her life on Earth, so play would one way or another come back to the temporal world.

As far as the game goes, for most approaches it's sufficient to keep in mind that the angels indeed don't need to have free will for successful play. One can always assume that although the angel knows his destiny, the players, as audience, don't. The angel does what he does because he is predestined to, despite there being a player making the decision.

I find the subject matter here extremely problematic, because one has to either allow for perfection in the background of the game, making actual play unnecessary, or focus on the moral questions inherent in the setup, somehow building a very general and ritualized approach to moral disputation. To say it in another way, you can either assume that heaven is perfect (losing all incentive for play) or roleplay Lucifer and Raphael arguing about meaning of free will (hard, but not impossible to play). A tough one to crack. My first approach was to let the angelic conflict shine through into the human world, so that the moral questions get a little bit of background from actual situations of humans. A mor(t)ality play approach, if you will. Is there better options?

That said, let's try:

How about a Setting focus? Split play into four phases, the Light, Fall, History and the End. In the Light phase of play the focus is on detailing the plans of Heaven for humanity and the world in general. Construct elaborate heavenly imagery, plot the rough outline of human history, that kind of thing. Make something to weep over. This is all formalised by the creation of the great Plan for the Creation. The Plan is made by the players, but the mechanics are such that players get different amounts of say in the matter.

In the Fall phase the players have all the information about the Plan, which was made to ensure that some player's notions were intentionally (largely) disregarded. Now such a player may take on the mantle of Satan, and the players get to play the Fall, which happens over whatever issue of Creation the Satan player objected to. Satan loses, of course, so the objection is indeed that, something for the record. Main focus would here be on the damage Satan succeeds in inflicting on the structure of Heaven and human history detailed in the first phase. Presumably very sad, if both the Plan and it's destruction are done with gusto.

In the History phase the Satan player and his adherents get to structure their own version of the Plan and execute it over the ruins of the Heavenly Plan. Instead of Heaven they plan Hell, and what was left of the last plan after the Fall phase will resist their plans for the rest of the creation.

In the last phase, the End phase, there is a miraculous comeback by the Heavenly host, when all the satanic plans fail to come to fruition in some manner, and it's revealed all to have been a part of even greater plan by God, who is played by the game designer.

Hmm... this could be done, but I don't know if it's what we're trying to find here. At least the structure is interesting and leaves enough room for the players to choose their issues. The dual structure, where first all players plan, then split and destroy, and then one party plans and other resists, and then everyone cooperates on a final destruction, is interesting too. I'll at least keep this in mind, in case it doesn't catch anyone's imagination.

It's hard to do any setting heavy game, obviously. I'm  of the mind that although the game should include heavy background on traditional heaven imagery, the rules should leave the poetic visions untouched and up to taste. Maybe some reward mechanic for focusing on visuals. Although I totally get winged amalgams as angels, they might not speak about beauty for all.

I'd try to come up with something definite, but it's late and I have to get going if I'm to get to start my Easter holiday. Long live Jesu!

[Ben Lehman]

I'd again like the emphasize that time and place are continuous here -- I envision "phases" like creation, the fall, whatever as *places you can go* or perhaps even *actions that you can take*  So I don't think we need to worry about a timeline, and I think that a group can focus on on what "areas" they find, personally, interesting.  If you're into creation -- create!  If you're into the Fall -- Fall!  If you're into Jesus -- Jese!  If you're into the Last Day -- Rapture!

I would also note that human souls are very important to the conception of Heaven as I have seen it presented in the materials I'm talking about (Hymns on Paradise) in particular.  Remember, the Last Day has already happened, and is happening simultaneously with the rest of this stuff.  Heaven is packed with the souls of the righteous, and they're doing more than just sitting there.  No matter whether or not they are PCs, they are important to the Scheme of things.

I also get the feeling that I should duck out and let Shreyas do his work on the game.  I feel like a too-picky customer.

Mostly, I wanted to post that I have some comments from a priest-in-training and gamer friend of mine on the game.  Ethan knows his stuff on this topic Notes:  Babel is Ethan's theological game, and it's actually pretty different from this.  Also, I think he means "insane" in a good way.  I think.

Look, they're writing Babel. Or at least, you're telling them to write Babel. Neat. I should get on this when I feel I have the head and time to respond in a concerted fashion. Mayhap tomorrow. Yay!

On your comments: the comment you made about time periods is absolutely vital. Any game and gameworld that purports to be about the Christian timeline must be applicable to any time period: otherwise you get into an "in the Beginning, there was the Word, and in the End, there'll probably be the Word again, but you know, right now, you're probably out of luck." Dealing with Heaven in a game is inevitably going to drag you into the pulsing, bleeding heart of time itself, and if you haven't thought that out better than it takes to say "eh, set it 6000 years ago," you're not going to have a game that paints the required picture.

I also agree that angels make bad player characters, because they're just really hard to get your head around. I would caution, though, that they DO have free will. They just exist in a flow of time external to our own (it seems to me analogous to the relationship of eternity to angelic time, but that's bonehead speculation; still, useable in a game.) Their choice has already being made, or rather is made and was and will be as far as our perspective is concerned, as the basic data structure of our time appears to be composed of their choices, but it is theirs. Still, making the angelic accessible is key, and the world of angels is an appealing mystery to explore in a "real-world magical"esque gameworld. The most important thing in dealing with them, I think, is not what to make them abstract representations of (as your colleagues seem to be debating) but to make them people. That's the most amazing part of angels as Christianity treats them: these perfect cosmic entities are in fact people, with souls and choices and personalities and loves and needs and all the rest. Losing that under a clever cosmology is disastrous for the impact of the game. The understanding that the fundamental disposition of the world created by conscious choices, made by persons and not inevitable mechanism, is key to Christianity, and necessary to any game that tries to deal with it.

Shifting up an infinite number of gears: dealing with God the I AM too directly can be really difficult, for obvious reasons. Any GM who starts playing the part of God the Father really needs to start evaluating whether he/she/it is in way over his/her/its head. I think a Nephilim-esque setup, in which angels reveal themselves to humans as influences, and begin drawing the players out of time in stages, first through simply synchronicity, identification with historical and mythical figures, until time-periods begin to become interchangeable in the narrative, would be good to deal with the worldly part.

The Heavenly directly is just insane to attempt. This is not to say it shouldn't be attempted. But it is insane. Words fail by definition. To describe Heaven, though words fail twice in sequence, and the failures compound exponentially.

Also, from someone else:

I'd suggest looking at the works of Rilke for inspiration, particularly the Second Duino Elegy, but a lot of his stuff touches on these themes. (I like the Stephen Mitchell translation, unless you or your collaborators happen to be able to read German.) Rilke's got this idea that the reason humans exist is to bring the world into eternity through their connection to or observation of it, in some sense, and that angels aren't so much things that have emotions or do things, but rather are emotions, self-contained and complete in a way humans aren't. This seems related to the whole idea of human souls remembering Creation into being that someone in the thread brought up.

[Ben O'Neal]

Yeah. Which is why you're statement that only the Watchers should be called "the Fallen" is silly.

Yep, I was just illustrating my point: that trying to nail down heaven/hell/angels/God/existence by looking at more than one perspective is futile, and time would be better spent either picking one and running with it or making up something totally different.

Heaven as the Zen motionless point! Yes!

Sure, great idea, but...

If time is predictable, if any being can directly observe time at different points, or move through past and future (either physically or mentally), then all time must be predestined. If all time is predestined, then "choice" and "free will" become no more than illusions. Sure, you think that you just chose to take a walk right now, but God knows you were always going to take a walk just now. The illusion is yours, and only God knows the truth.

Why does this matter at all? Well, if your game is specifically stating and making salient the fact that all time is predestined, or worse, that time does not exist, then players who play any character other than God will know both implicitly and explicitly that the choices that they make are only a "wank" for lack of a better term. The system is saying "you make choices, but these choices are mechanically just a way of describing post-hoc what your character was always going to do, and in fact, your character would have made the exact same choices with the exact same outcome even if you weren't playing, so you can't really claim ownership over your character, any more than you can claim ownership over any other person's character. "

But this problem is more of an aesthetic problem compared to the real downfall of fucking with the concept of time: that of "pre-empting". For example: "Azazel sides with Samael", "Before Azazel sides with Samael, I convince to not to". What just happened? Well, the player has the power to play any instance of time, and thus their character knows things which they could not have known if time were linear and they were bound by it. If I could transfer my conscious from the moment just before my death to the moment of my conception, I would go through life knowing all that would ever happen to me, but I'd be building new knowledge into this from my new frame of reference, and thus when I was about to die again, my conscious would be different from when I first died and I could do the same transfer again, compounding the problems infinitely. Does that make sense?

If you want to deal with time as a variable within your system, you must deal with the paradoxes by imposing strict limits. Without limits you are boned, and if your limits are arbitrary then you're boned again. I suggest scraping the "existing outside of time" thing and just stick with something more functional like "time has a vastly different scale in heaven than it does on earth, but it is still linear and you are still bound by it".

[Ben Lehman]

I would like to note that Heaven having a timeline in which all things have already occurred, at least according the Xtian philosophy, does not in any way invalidate free will.

Plus, I think its cool.

I think that, for instance, one could say the there are Decisions which cannot be invalidated.  One can go and talk to Lucifer at the right hand of God or in the pits of Hell, but it does not chance the fact that it will happen.

Once a player has made a Decision, it is done.

yrs--
--Ben

[Shreyas Sampat]

When you think of Time as a motionless point, it constrains you in two ways.

1) Each game has to be a unique Creation; a different mortal timeline unfolds each time, because different things happen in the instant of heaven. It isn't the case that each game is predestined just because time in the gameworld is predestined. If it were, the game would be entirely worthless.

2) Angels cannot directly interact in the way you describe; there is no such thing as "before" in angelic perception. This means that you can say, "I come to the portion of Azazel that is being persuaded by Samael and try to convince him to be loyal", but you must keep in mind that all angelic action is, from their point of view, simultaneous.

Importantly, the players are playing out, through time, an instant, because humans cannot take in so much salient information at once. Angels still make decisions, and they're still capable of changing their minds about things - in a strange way - because until the whole instant of heaven is played out and all angelic decisions are locked in, time in the game's Creation has not begun.

I suggest that timelessness is not the bug-eyed monster you make it out to be, and abandoning it makes the game lesser.

Ben, please thank Ethan for his comments; they were really great.