[Gods] First thread - basic concepts

[Bret Gillan]

Using the guidelines posted in "What's the best way to present a mechanic for discussion?", I'm trying to nail down a game concept I've had for about a decade or so and get it into development mode. Ideally, the game would eventually be published as a PDF of an as-of-yet undetermined but hopefully cheap price. The working title is "Gods" (not too interesting, I know) and I'm hoping something better will emerge as I design it.

The Premise of the game is roleplaying gods, creating and shaping a world, and watching the mythos that emerges over time and continued gameplay. The game is based on something like The Silmarillion or the world-building that many of us did for Dungeons and Dragons games.

The Setting of the game is indeterminate - it would emerge through gameplay. Characters are the Gods of this imagined universe, and the game would be driven by their petty grudges, ennui, and power.

Character creation would begin by selection the God's sphere or domain - wisdom, death, fire, peace, etc. I haven't yet come up with the different attributes that would need to represent the gods, but Boredom/Ennui is definitely one of them (and would be spent to create events of a destructive or manipulative nature). They would be fluid and would change during play as the characters spend them to create and destroy, and would accumulate over time or when certain conditions are met. All players would start with the same attribute scores. The Resolution mechanic would come into play when the God's goals are at odds - war, duels of heroes, or disagreements over where a lake should be placed. This is also something I haven't pinned down yet, but I have one of two things in mind - players bidding points from their attribute pools with whoever bids the most winning the contest and ALL bidded points being lost (meaning the bidding process would have to be tracked), or the attribute pools being spent to buy dice and whoever rolls the highest winning.

The Reward Mechanic would be narrative control and the ability to establish aspects of the world (and perhaps make some of them sacrosanct). I'd also like to include an optional End of Times mechanic for one-shots or limited story arcs that would allow the "winner" to narrate the world's end, or at the very least the end of the Age of Gods and what's to follow. During play, meeting certain conditions would move the players closer to that goal.

Right now my goal is to get all of these defined enough to come up with a rough copy of rules so that I can begin playtesting. From there I'll revise the rules until I'm satisfied enough to come up with a draft of the game for publishing.

All that said, do you see any points of disconnect between the different aspects of the game? Does one resolution mechanic (auctioning vs. purchasing dice for a contest) float above the other as making more sense? Or is there anything at this point that I absolutely must nail down before any discussion can take place?

Thanks for your time,
Bret

[Judd]

I'm not sure how you achieve these concepts through mechanics, making it difficult to give feedback..

Please explain.

[Bret Gillan]

Okay, let me see if I can shape this amorphous mass into something a little more defined.

Players take the roles of gods of specific spheres. Application of these spheres to the narrative provides them with bonuses, and all their creations must have an aspect of this sphere (the god of fire can make volcanic wastelands, fire elementals, beings of living molten earth, etc.) I'm thinking something like Fire would be a trait assigned to the God that can be used a number of times per turn. This trait is passed on to all his creations.

A single turn is an Age, during which the players take multiple actions. Creating new lands and so on. Creating Agents and People would be an effective way of getting more actions in an Age, and allow you to build cities, nations, and so on that revere you which would give you more Power in the following Age.

The Gods would be eternally fighting Boredom, which is a score that increases over the Ages. When it reaches a certain cap, the God is overtaken with Boredom and cannot use his Power until he does something to relieve it such as start a war, or make a wager with another god or somesuch. Boredom can be spent in the place of Power for these actions, which means creating a world of eternal bliss and peace is damn near impossible.

Right now I'm imagining the world being mapped with a number of index cards, each index card listing the traits of the land which can be applied for bonuses in any conflict involving it. The traits are chosen by the creating God at the moment of its creation. Same with peoples, or heroes, or what-have-you.

Keep in mind that I don't have my rules clearly defined yet. Does this clear things up, though?

[Jasper]

Avoiding boredom, and its ineffectiveness, sounds like a decent drivign force. One quesiton I have: are the players really building a whole world? With a big map with continents in front of them maybe, and reams of paper describing cities, important personna, etc etc etc? That seems...almost masochistic. Building a full world by oneseulf is hard enough. But if I'm reading you right, this isn't really a tool for creating a world, it's a game that takes inspiration from world-building. So why build the whole world?

An alternative might be to just allow the players to highlight whatever things they want. So there's no need for 100 cities in a god's chosen continent. Instead, the player would just say, "Okay, and Belluria, that's a really importan city right now, because a new prophet has arisen there." No more detail is necessary, because all that's important is the fact that there's a prophet in Belluria now. And what cities are nearby also isn't important, unless they start followign the prophet, or whatever.

Basically, my qusiton comes down to "how much detail are you imagining players actually creating?"

[Bret Gillan]

Jasper,

Key elements for the players to track would be the geographical lands (I'm not thinking nations and cities so much as blasted landscapes like Mordor or, if you play World of Warcraft, the Barrens). Nations and cities in those lands would be notes, if anything.

They'd also want to track their creations: specifically the different races and the areas they've come to inhabit. There will probably also be things like monsters (their creations or children) and whatnot.

I'm also imagining heroes playing an important role in gameplay and being noted on the landscape using tokens.

This is going to be a key question, though: how much is detailed and how much is left to float in the shared imagined space? I'd say only things that are going to be utilized to a great degree in conflicts needs to be defined, or entities that the players themselves have chosen to emphasize. We can, for example, imagine there being a great number of other heroes wandering around besides the ones the players create, but the heroes created by the PCs are the ones that have become caught up in the gods' petty games.

[Arturo G.]

Well, this is a philosophy similar to Universalis'. You pay for something, somehitng appears in the story. You pay to add details to something, something becomes more relevant in the story. About the rest? It is surely there, but it is not relevant.
I would suggest: Work on mechanics which take into account the relevance of a place/characer (the amount of investment used to create it) when it is involved in a conflict. Check Universalis for a good example.

Cheers,
Arturo

[Hans]

Okay, let me see if I can shape this amorphous mass into something a little more defined.

Players take the roles of gods of specific spheres. Application of these spheres to the narrative provides them with bonuses, and all their creations must have an aspect of this sphere (the god of fire can make volcanic wastelands, fire elementals, beings of living molten earth, etc.) I'm thinking something like Fire would be a trait assigned to the God that can be used a number of times per turn. This trait is passed on to all his creations.

A single turn is an Age, during which the players take multiple actions. Creating new lands and so on. Creating Agents and People would be an effective way of getting more actions in an Age, and allow you to build cities, nations, and so on that revere you which would give you more Power in the following Age.

The Gods would be eternally fighting Boredom, which is a score that increases over the Ages. When it reaches a certain cap, the God is overtaken with Boredom and cannot use his Power until he does something to relieve it such as start a war, or make a wager with another god or somesuch. Boredom can be spent in the place of Power for these actions, which means creating a world of eternal bliss and peace is damn near impossible.

Right now I'm imagining the world being mapped with a number of index cards, each index card listing the traits of the land which can be applied for bonuses in any conflict involving it. The traits are chosen by the creating God at the moment of its creation. Same with peoples, or heroes, or what-have-you.

Keep in mind that I don't have my rules clearly defined yet. Does this clear things up, though?

This idea reached out and grabbed me.  But what I am picturing more of a hybrid role-playing/tabletop game. 

It would be useful if you defined the limits of what can be created, and classified those creatable items.  For example:

* Geography - Jungles, oceans, mountain ranges, etc.  Geography would be the substrate that all other creatable items are based on, and different kinds of geography might provide different advantages or obstacles to creating other items.  Geography could be build up in a way analogous to the Illuminati card game, or using hex tiles from several copies of Settlers of Cattaan.
* Races - Elves, humans, inteligent gorillas, pokemons, etc.  There would need to be a set of traits that describe a race (Intelligence, Devotion, Beligerence, etc.)  This level may be unecessary.
* Cities/Cultures - If you keep the game to a bronze age type setting, a city = culture in many ways.  Think Babylon versus Jerusalem versus Athens versus Sparta.  Again, cities/cultures would need traits that describe them.
* Heroes/Prophets

Essentially, the game itself would be a tabletop game, but one in which the capabilities of the "pieces" (Cities/Cultures and Heroes/Prophets) and the playing board (Geography) are designed by the players during the course of the game, based on the characters ("Gods") those players are playing. 

[Hans]

See, I told you this one had grabbed hold of me.

The more I ponder this, the more I think an important question should be answered before moving forward: what is the creative agenda the game will support? 

• Is this a game about collaboratively creating a mythology for a new world?  (Narrativist)  If so, then the majority of the work should go into the direct interactions of the gods themselves, and the world they are creating is in a way background material.  What is more important is the development of the relationships between the gods (who hates/loves who, who steals whos golden chalice, who cuts off whos genitals when they aren't looking, etc.)  This becomes more like a role-playing game with table-top game elements grafted on to it.


• Is this a game about building worlds, and what it feels like to build them? (Simulationist)  If so, then your best bet is to stop now and buy one of the many computer games (SimCity, for example) that do this very well.  To my mind, this is strictly a solo activity.


• Is this a game about the conflict of the gods, how they use mortals in these conflicts, and who rules the pantheon?  (Gamist) In this case, I think, the relationship angles between the gods, as described above, will become more mechanical, and the game will be more about the strategy of building the world for your advantage (i.e. if you are a god of oceans making sure there are lots of oceans), and maneuvering your worshippers to control of the world.  In this case, the game probably has a "win" condition or more than one, with a built-in end point.  Functionally, this is very similar to a table-top version of a game like Age of Mythology, with signficant role-playing elements grafted on to it, almost like a fusion of Age of Mythology and Diplomacy with character sheets.

From what you described, Bret, it sounds like you were tending towards the Gamist type game I described in my third point above.

Do you foresee the players truly playing the role of a particular god (i.e. Actor Stance, I think), or do you foresee the players selecting god traits for their utility during the course of the game (i.e. Director Stance, I think)?  Is there a GM, who somehow sets out the boundaries of the conflicts or provides input to an on-going story, or is there no GM, and it is strictly the interactions of the players that drive the story.

Of course, there are multiple ways of framing the game beyond what I have described above.  The "characters" the players play could be more like religions/cultural movements, where the type of God is really just a set of attributes on the "character" sheet, and the story that the players are telling is really the history of an entire world.  The world could be pretty much in place already, and the god characters are essentially VERY highly powered superheroes in that world.  And there are certainly other ways I haven't thought of.

[Bret Gillan]

Arturo,

I've never read Universalis but I've doubtless absorbed some ideas from it through the gamer collective consciousness. Your reply did set off a chain reaction in my brain which has caused me to change direction in the way I'm designing the system. Thank you for that.

Hans,

I'm glad the idea grabbed ahold of you. It's grabbed ahold of me too. Your post is really gratifying to me because you're thinking about all the things that I've been thinking about when it comes to the game's design. However, today I did some rethinking of my design and I've more or less jumped the tracks to something different completely.

My original intention with the design is almost exactly as you described - categorizing and classifying items, and having the game emerge as a result of their interactions, but it wasn't sitting well with me. If this is going to be a game about gods, as I envisioned it, then I want you to be able to go beyond whatever categories of creatable items I come up. I want to play this with people and have them do something that says, "Wow, I never would have thought of it," and I want the worlds and stories that are created to be as fantastic as the players can dream up.

Also, this game at its heart is about world creation, not strategizing against other players. When I was a kid I had reams and reams of notes on Dungeons and Dragons settings. Nevermind that I didn't actually have anyone to play Dungeons and Dragons with. The creation was the fun. I want to capture that in this game. That means I need to make the system more fluid and more abstract.

Things have slid into place in my mind now - the game just needs a rough copy of the playtest rules hashed out, and then needs to be playtested thoroughly. I'm going to try and hammer those out this weekend, but for now here's the main concepts. Note: The terminology I'm using right now is just what occurred to me as I sketched notes today, so if Keys or GodKeys sounds lame, bear with me.

Keys - These are the building blocks of the game - these are the things that matter to the gods and to the setting. They are how the gods affect and change the world, and how the world relates to the setting. They are people, places, creatures, concepts, and anything else that makes the world what it is. The initial Keys established during the Creation Myth will provide the foundation for the world. Keys created later can reference previously established Keys making them harder for the other Gods to affect. They're more "real." For example, creating a key called the Sword of Nar'jul and describing it as a sword forged by the Rock People out of the bones of the Iron Prophet will make it harder for opponents to Meddle with than if it's just some magic sword.

GodKeys - You will have the option of purchasing Keys as GodKeys. This means that these Keys are important to your god. They could be his sphere of inluence, a realm he has chosen to inhabit, or one of his monstrous offspring. Anytime someone creates a Key that references one of your GodKeys, it is easier for you to Meddle and affect the creation of the Key.

The Creation Myth - The first phase of the game. This is where the players establish their personas within the setting, as well as the very first Keys of the game.

The Ages - These are the "turns" of the game. They represent a significant period in the history of the universe. Each Age has an AgeKey associated with it that gives the Gods more Power if they reference it in one of the Keys the create during the Age. Examples would include the Age of Fire, the Age of Men, or the Age of Bone Butterflies. The Age progresses through the creation of new Keys.

Power - The raw material of creation. Gods spend this to create new Keys and to Meddle with the Keys created by the other gods. Power is gained at the beginning of an Age, when you create a Key that references the AgeKey, when you create a Key that mentions another god's GodKey, or when someone gives you their Boredom tokens.

Boredom - Being an ageless, powerful, and ineffable being can grow tiresome over time. As the Ages pass, the gods grow bored and must cause trouble to prevent Boredom from overtaking them. If this happens, the god grows weary of creation and the universe, and loses the ability to spend Power in any way but Meddling. One decreases Boredom by Meddling in the Keys of other gods. After the Meddling is concluded, you may give that god any number of Boredom tokens you have, which then becomes Power tokens.

The End Times - This is the end of the game, which occurs after a certain number of Ages have passed, the players run out of time, or if all the Gods are overtaken with Boredom. I don't have any rules for it because I'm hoping the players can come to some sort of agreement over How It All Ends. If inspiration strikes, though, there will be rules.

Theres more to write - Turn Order, Conflict, and so on, but I think I'll just wait until tomorrow and write up the rough copy of the rules.

Thanks everyone for the comments so far.

[Hans]

My original intention with the design is almost exactly as you described - categorizing and classifying items, and having the game emerge as a result of their interactions, but it wasn't sitting well with me. If this is going to be a game about gods, as I envisioned it, then I want you to be able to go beyond whatever categories of creatable items I come up. I want to play this with people and have them do something that says, "Wow, I never would have thought of it," and I want the worlds and stories that are created to be as fantastic as the players can dream up.

Also, this game at its heart is about world creation, not strategizing against other players. When I was a kid I had reams and reams of notes on Dungeons and Dragons settings. Nevermind that I didn't actually have anyone to play Dungeons and Dragons with. The creation was the fun. I want to capture that in this game. That means I need to make the system more fluid and more abstract.

I find it interesting how a single game idea can go in radically different ways in terms of the experience that the players will have.  Personally, the more challenge oriented role-playing/tabletop hybrid seemed more interesting, but I'm not the designer. :)  The whole idea is still an interesting one.  Now that you have framed the goal of the game, it makes it easier to provide feedback. 

You say you want to concentrate on world creation, but a lot depends on what you mean by that.  Do you mean the world itself, or the story of that world, its mythology.  One thing I would encourage you to avoid is an intent to create a simulation of godhood.  The reason I say this is that even in games where there is a very low power level, it can often be very difficult to ensure that a role-playing experience where simualation is the goal doesn't break down with the players going in all different directions, trying to explore different and competing aspects of the game.  I think this would be magnified in a game where so little is set before hand.  Its bad enough when one character wants to visit Moria and another Minas Tirith.  It would be even worse if one character wants to create lots of oceans and another wants to explore the idea of bevys of nymphs.  That is one reason why "Sim" type computer games are almost always single player games.  I would encourage you to concentrate on a role-playing game design that concentrates on the story, in this case the growing mythology of the world.   The physical elements of the world (its nations, peoples, geography, etc.) are in a way simply background to this story.  The one thing computer based "God" games CAN'T do is provide a storyline to accompany the developing world and explain WHY it is what it is.  A role-playing game can do that.

What kind of interaction do you foresee between the players during a typical session of the game?    How will the players bring their keys or godkeys into the ongoing story?  In your example, how would it be established that the Sword of Nar'Jul was forged by the Rock People from the bones of the Iron Prophet?  Would someone simply state this?  Would they state it, but have to narrate it in the form of a myth ("And it came to pass that the Rock People were oppressed by the Druids of Tarmor, and they were sorely grieved, and they called out for a redeemer...")  Would their be a Rock person blacksmith character who would be played through a scene where the bones are collected and forged?

Perhaps a way to organize this would be to have two levels to the game.  The higher, less interactive level, is where the large scale events and ephemera of the game world are developed.  This level would involve less "role-playing" per se, and more collaborative narration.  But then, there would be a focussed level of the game, where under some circumstances, a particular element of the ongoing mythology is played out in detail.  Each player then selects one or more characters in the scene they will play, and the scene moves forward to its conclusion.  There could be only one scene (i.e. Acteon stumbling upon Artemis at her bath, and getting killed for it), or it could be the subject of many game sessions (i.e. Odysseus wandering the Mediterranean after the Trojan War). 

Another issue is characters - how many?  If you think of the typical mythology, the number of characters far exceeds the number of players in an average gaming group.  Maybe a "troupe" idea, similar to Ars Magica, might be a good idea.  Each player might have one or two major gods, one or more minor deities, spirits, demons, etc., and then one or more earthly heroes (along the lines of Theseus or Jason).  There could be a mechanic in place that allows a player to create, using the power of a their major god, another character, that then becomes the character that player plays in the next scene.

I could be dead wrong, of course, in what you are interested in designing, in all I have said above.  Therefore, I will restrain myself until you have posted the first draft of some rules.  Good luck!

[Bret Gillan]

Hans! Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate your questions and you've given me a lot to think about. I'm going to hold off on answering some of them since I now have a set of rules that can be found at http://gillan.coopster.net/gods.doc . Keep in mind that these are just proto-rules at this point. Their purpose is to provide people who would be interested in playtesting the game the basics to work with, as well as letting myself organize and put together all my thoughts so I can begin playtesting immediately. After playtesting I will eventually expand it to make the text more illuminating and give more examples - essentially flesh it out into a fully-fledged roleplaying game. And maybe I'll actually think of some rules for the End Times.

Anyhow, specific things I'm looking for in terms of feedback from anyone who would be interested in providing me with some:

Does the game sound like something you'd play? If not, why not and what do you think could be improved?
Do you foresee any problems with the rules as they are currently?
Anything you particularly like?
Anything you particularly hate?

Thanks everyone.

[Owen]

I like your idea, and the initial draft does appear interesting.

But I also had a few questions after reading it, mostly concerned with how meddling worked.  Let's consider that in the previous age my god created a major civilization, and that in the present age someone wants to cause that civilization to fall.  Is that possible?  Is that considered meddling with the older Key, or is the creation of a new Key "The Fall of Nowheresdom"?

I think a few play examples might be helpful.

[Bret Gillan]

Hey Owen!

You're not the first person to tell me I need an example of play. That's going on the docket and I'll try to get one into the document tonight.

Yes, it is possible to cause the fall of a major civilization that someone had created in a previous Key. Keys created in previous Ages are untouchable, though. The only time you can Meddle in a Key is in the turn that it's being created. The way to affect an older Key would be, as you described, to create a new Key which would go something like:

The Fall of Nowheresdom was not immediate, but came about as a result of growing corruption and the squandering of Nowheresdom's tax money, which left its military forces unprepared when the Horse Skull Tribes came pouring out of the Red Hills.

One thing I've also thought about that I should include is a cap on the benefit you can get from putting Keys in a new Key your creating. Otherwise, as the game goes on, it could get ridiculous.

[Owen]

I'm not so sure of the idea of a cap, but you might experiment with other ways of controlling the degree of benefit gained.  I'd consider placing a limit on direct dependencies of a key (things mentioned specifically in it), but perhaps working in indirect dependencies (dependencies of the dependencies) in somehow.

[Bret Gillan]

Hey Owen!

My idea isn't to cap the number of Keys that can be included, but just the total benefit that one can gain from using them in Key creation - for example, capping it at 10. You can have 40 (!) Keys in the Key your creating, but in order for someone else to Meddle the most they will ever have to pay is 10 Tokens.

Also, I've thought about the idea of dependencies of dependencies, and I'm concerned that it might be cumbersome or complicated to track.