Gods and Such

[masqueradeball]

A while back David Berg posted a thread about generating challenges for an RPG that were organic and not based on the player whim. I think the goal of that post was to create a system where the game world would change and grow organically over time and that challenges would arise naturally. The conversation sort of hit a speed bump when the question of prep-time ran head long into the problem of consistency because creating a way to chart real world phenomenon (weather, economics, etc...) is just too intensive for most table top RPG play.

While thinking about another thread a solution popped into my head. In a fantasy setting, you could use the gods, their moods and their interactions as a way to generate conflict. Like say the god of the Orc's is grumpy so he starts the Orcs to war which gives power to the god of War who then uses his new power against the god of Leadership who then is wounded so an anarchist movement starts up, etc... and all of this stuff is stuff the players could discover and respond to.

Any ideas on how to create a system for all this and how you would approach it?

[Rich F]

Planescape had some ideas that tie in with this, as does Unknown Armies with their Avatars.  You could maybe even look at Deadlands as an idea of how regions reflect gods and vice versa.  Priests and / or avatars would be important, be could be ignored if you had some kind of divination / prophecy so you can connect with the goings on in the celestial sphere.

The other way to play would be to give each player a god, as well as an adventurer, and swap between the scenes.  My feeling is that the interaction of  the god's should be played as some kind of soap opera with the emphasis on their relationships, but that may just be because I've had my head buried in TSOY recently

[masqueradeball]

My emphasis is more on using gods as ways to generate content for play. The idea would be that because God X was doing Y that this would be happening in the world. Those events would then be the who-what-where of play. What I'm looking for, I guess, is a mechanical way to handle these godly interactions and what types of events they should generate.
The whole point of this would be to create an organic internally consistent event generator that kept play interesting but that was divorced from PC or GM plot fiat/control.

[Rich F]

So you are essentially looking for an event generator, the god thing is just colour.  You don't want it to be, or at least appear to be, random, but be the outworking of a number of inputs - some kind of calculation or computer program, is that correct, broadly speaking?

[theMonk]

Greek Mythology (among others) is packed with stories of god's interacting (for good and bad) with mortals.  In that case, gods become grouped into factions, each working against one another for power and prestige. Also, certain cities might have a patron god looking after it, while opposing god's are influencing others against that city (the story of Troy, for example).  At any rate, if you are looking for an event generator, you might consider looking at the Greek myths to get ideas.

I hope that's helpful.

--William
Imperium Chronicles

[masqueradeball]

Rich, exactly. The god thing is less "just color" and more away to fulfill some specific player desire (namely, complete in game internal consistency) with manageable abstraction. The idea is that by using the gods, who are "real" forces in the game world, as a model for how in-game content is generated, you could maintain in-game physics/causality/etc... and still have a manageable system of content generation.

[masqueradeball]

I think actually making the whole game set in a (mostly) realistically rendered Greek world where the gods would be the behind the scenes motivating sources would work quite well, but the question is still "How do you represent this mechanically?"

[Velcanthus]

I think actually making the whole game set in a (mostly) realistically rendered Greek world where the gods would be the behind the scenes motivating sources would work quite well, but the question is still "How do you represent this mechanically?"

I think that the interaction between player and game is best modeled as a dialogue. The game offers the player a story and the player chooses whether or not they accept it. The default is non-acceptance. Once the story has been chosen, then the action unfolds consequentially. The player's choices based on those consequences is what drives the story forward. If they don't, of themselves, generate tension, then the effects of those choices may. The tension builds until a climax is achieved, and then resolved. Then the cycle starts again with the game offering the player another story.

With respect to using gods to rationalise story, this is your proverbial 'deus ex machina'. It is certainly one way of looking at it, but I wonder if it's necessary to limit your field of influence to deities. Stories can be found as readily in the squabbles of mortals at an individual level on up to the great affairs of states.

I think that it is possible to develop a syntax to model the interaction between background groups with their own agenda. On the one hand, conflicts between these behind-the-scene forces could be handled in a kind of paper-beats-rock-beats-scissors-beats-paper way. On the other, weighted randomisers could do the job: paper-beats-rock = 70%, paper-beats-scissors = 10%,  and so on.

The problem is not in implementation so much as it is in whether or not it's worth doing. The first method must model what is reasonable, and that means that it must be largely predictable. That degree of reasonableness means that the pattern could be easily spotted by players. The down side with weighted randomisers is that they generate results that don't make sense. They are, after all, random.

If you want to automate the generation of story, weighted randomisers will not work. They require too much reinterpretation from a human. It seems to me that the paper-beats-rock-beats-scissors-beats-paper method will work. However, it's a story factory, and will not produce A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'd be surprised if it could get as good as The House at Pooh Corner.

[masqueradeball]

Well, Velcanthus, I don't neccessarily disagree with your opinion. If you were trying to write a novel by rolling D6's and recording the results, you'd probably get a pretty bad novel. Still, this idea is a proposed to solution to problems made by actual people with a preference for 100% organic and consistent world strucure, one in which the GM does not taylor content to the players. To call exploration of such a world a "story" in anything but the losest sense might be stretching the word, but I think placing a value judgement on this approach to play isn't neccessary. In short, I do think its worth it to create a content generation system that is consistent with in-game world realities. I do think using godly interaction as a way to abstract this is a valid and viable approah, and I would like to discuss implementation on a mechanical level.

As far as your rock-paper-scissors things, I don't really see what you mean. Could you please explain?

But one point I have to disagree with you on: A House on Pooh Corner kicks way more ass than a Midsummer Night's Dream (smiles).

Thanks for the input.

[Velcanthus]

As far as your rock-paper-scissors things, I don't really see what you mean. Could you please explain?

It's where a conflict is resolved conditionally, depending on the nature of the participants. Let us say that the participants are Eris and Eos. Eris wishes to incite a group of Corinthians to rebellion and a life of piracy, whereas Eos wishes to spread peace and harmony on the city.

Because of some property of Eris', she wins the conflict. It could be that she is generally more powerful than Eos. It could be that causing strife is specifically within her sphere of interest. Spreading peace is something Eos could do but nevertheless has this less impact outside her sphere of the dawn, say.

Whatever the metric you use to test the condition, the result is discrete. Eris causes the Corinthians to rebel, assuming either logic.

It means that behaviour can be reasonable. Eos, knowing that she cannot influence the entire group, might in response, focus on an individual in the hopes of creating a hero for her cause.

[masqueradeball]

Cool... thanks for the input

[Grinning Moon]

Grey Ranks seems to do what you're after quite well by using queue cards. The cards essentially frame the scene for the players, and they participate within said scene. Somewhat similarly, a project of mine that's on the backburner uses a booklet that players flip through in a guidedly random sort of way (they are directed to flip to a broad, color-coded section in the book and read the scenario, which all players then play through. Depending on how the scene goes, the book directs players to a different section, until the game is finally concluded).


...Of course, Grey Ranks used this system to strongly stress it's rather grim theme of inevitability, while my project uses it to stress the theme of a rapidly crumbling world. What are you hoping to do with a content generator? I honestly think that such 'generators' are so restrictive and linear in nature that they must have an extremely good justification for being used, rather than the flexibility to be be 'slapped-on' as an ordinary system.

[masqueradeball]

I haven't played Grey Ranks so correct me if I'm wrong, but it generates theme content generated for the players? Right? What I'm looking for a content generator that generates facts about a fantasy world independent of the players that they can then, through pure avatar-ism (where the players only tool for effecting the game is their character's in-game actions), react to and change. The feel of the game is relatively irrelevant at this point in the conversation.

What I'm looking to discuss is suggestions and ideas for world-content generation using the outlines above and restated throughout this post that do (or heck, do not) use the gods as a form of abstraction.