Kester Pelagius started an interesting thread, Is religion really that much of a mystery?, which inspired this one rather by accident. Jack Spencer Jr., an avowed atheist, posted what I found to be a highly offensive declaration of the nineteenth century evolution of religion idea (a time at which evolution was so popular a theory that every field had to find a way to apply it to itself) that I was eager to object; and when Reverend Daegmorgan, a known Pagan, objected, I, an identified Christian, was ready to say Amen--and then Ron, quite rightly, killed that discussion before I got there. I read the rest of the thread with interest.

But then, Jack and Raven had started something in the back of my head which is still brewing, and I'm wondering if it would help the religion discussions at all to put it forward. Jack thinks that religion is about man inventing explanations for what he doesn't understand. Raven thinks that man is discovering something of a spiritual reality that is there. I think that God is revealing truth to man. Each of us has very different attitudes about religion because of that; but that's not the point here. The point is that all of those methods, and maybe another, could be used to create realistic religions in the game world. After all, one of the best ways I've found to build a city, or a dungeon, is to go back to what was there before there was anything, who started it, what they built, who came and changed it and why, and how over the history of the world this place was expanded and altered to become what it is now. Why shouldn't that work for religion?

Let us start with Jack. We will sit down and think of our imaginary peoples. What are their hopes? What are their fears? Let's have them project those hopes and fears into anthropomorphic deities. The old pattern, as I recall (the evolution of religion as conceived in the nineteenth century), suggested that the earliest religion was animism, as primitive man started to think that all the things around him, from animals to plants to rocks and rivers, had a consciousness like himself, which he identified as a spirit, and so attempted to communicate with the spirits of these things. Over time, the spirits of the greater things--the sun, the sky, the river, the earth--became the greater spirits, and we evolved into polytheists. Polytheism then became henotheism, the belief that these other gods are real but that this people belongs to this one god (although Israel is cited for this, Philistia and other kingdoms of the age are probably better examples). Henotheism becomes monotheism, as the other spirits are discounted as not really gods, perhaps not really spirits (or it becomes pantheism, in which all the spirits are considered expressions of one spirit). If we take this as true in our game world, we can build a variety of different religions based on different starting points. Desert people are afraid of drought; river people are afraid of floods; northern people are afraid of cold. The fears might be earthquakes, volcanic eruption, ocean flooding--using this as a starting point, we create a religion that evolved from the feelings of people.

Reverend Daegmorgan doesn't think reality is like that. (Of course, I don't either, but we'll go with him next.) If I understand correctly, he sees these spiritual issues as undiscovered reality, aspects of our universe that we don't know. The process of developing religion is one of discovering what's really out there. We get it wrong sometimes, or we see the same thing in different ways. This, too, can be a developmental approach to creating religion. We establish a few core concepts of what the spiritual realities are, and then we start to explore how these, discovered in fragments, are understood by the people. Different people will understand the same things differently, in part because they have different physical realities to analogize it, in part because they're asking different questions based on their situations. Thus starting from a fundamental spiritual reality and then allowing that people have gotten glimpses of this and tried to fill in the gaps from what they knew, we again develop a set of varied religions.

My view is that there have been divine revelations, that is, from time to time God has given man a bit of information about what the supernatural realm is like. But I'm not thinking in terms of ongoing revelation, really--I'm thinking in terms of historic revelation, that at particularly moments in the past God or the gods gave the world some information about themselves. Religions then are built from these revelations. But not everyone got all the revelations. Some are still building from the first one, others got them all. Even between people with the same amount of revelation, there's a lot of disagreement. Part of that is that not everyone has this revelation written down, or written down the same way. Part of it is that whatever is written down, people have to try to figure out what it really meant, and there are disagreements about this. So again we are able to create a variety of religions, this time branching out from each other as they understand the revealed truths differently, and accept or reject new revelations, as well as apply what they know to the very different parts of the world they are in.

I said I could see a fourth approach. This is the idea of ongoing revelation. We have a world in which gods are real, and they speak to people. That always complicates the religion question (because it is so much more evident, and immediate revelation means few doctrinal arguments within the sect). But this can work, too. For one thing, different gods might have different ways of explaining reality to their people without actually lying about it--you can say "it's like this", and have it be "like" something very different from what another god said it was "like", and both be right, because you're trying to analogize things beyond human experience to things within human experience. It's also perfectly reasonable for a deity to refuse to answer your questions if he answered the same questions for your great-great-great-great-great grandfather; the man should have written them down, or at least told them to someone, and if in the passing of the tradition from generation to generation it gets distorted, that's not the point. So again, we can construct our world religions from how they formed.

I don't know that these are mutually exclusive views. In fact, I have no problem with seeing them as all real-world explanations for the variety of faiths in the real world--some evolved, some were discovered, some revealed. But the point of what I'm suggesting is that building religions in one or more of these ways, as an exercise in historical creation, might create more realistic and integrated religions.

Thoughts?

--M. J. Young

It sounds plausible, in terms of generating valid output, but I'm not sure its doable. We've stepped on a lot of toes and heard a lot of squeals already; I for example found Jacks analysis uncontroversial and Ravens counterpoint as offensive. I can't imagine that any believe would fail to be offended by my honestly held opinion of religion, which is why I have not discussed it publicly as yet.

I don't think I could play a Catholic without a How To manual, a serious precis, of Catholic dogma and praxis. But I cannot see how such a work could fail to be polemical. And I could certainly expound upon my vision, and how I see it accomodating the observed phenemonon, but again I cannot see how that would fail to be polemical.

IMO, the frailty of game religions occurs in large part becuase of the polemical implications of any serious exposition. I agree that fully following any one of the conflicting analyses would produce more plausible religions than not following any model, but it seems to me that player consent would be hard to obtain.

Awesome post, M. J. I think that idea could be applied to any creative venture, not just RPGs. I don't usually bother including religion in any of my RPGs, but such an approach would be really useful for writing fiction.

Gareth, I think that the problem is not as overwhelming as you make it sound. Maybe it is if you want to accurately play a catholic priest... but for creating a religion you don't have to do that. Most role-playing entities are not as complex as their real counterparts - they're stylized (and perhapse idealized) representations of them. A game religion doesn't have to be as vast and complex as a real world religion. It only needs to have the appearance of realism. If, based on real world perceptions, we accept that such a religion *could* exist in the imagined reality, then that is sufficient for causality. (IMO, this entire discussion is a matter of causality. If it isn't, D&D religion works just fine. :)

M. J. Young wrote: Jack thinks that religion is about man inventing explanations for what he doesn't understand.

The same thing brewing in the back of MJ's head started brewing in the back of mine, I just didn't jump on it yet. Let's assume the various approaches to religion are all valid starting points for reference.

In doing so, we must also remember that each of these starting points will color our resultant religions according to it. However, I'm not sure the real question is how to go about making a "realistic" religion, but rather, how to give religion meaning in a game.

Not actual religious meaning, but meaning in its importance to the players. After all, we can sit and talk all day about how something should be important to a character given this or given that about their culture or society or background...but ultimately, if the player doesn't invest in the idea, the idea is meaningless and has no impact.

M. J. Young wrote: Raven thinks that man is discovering something of a spiritual reality that is there.

contracycle wrote: I for example found Jacks analysis uncontroversial and Ravens counterpoint as offensive.

don't think I could play a Catholic without a How To manual, a serious precis, of Catholic dogma and praxis. But I cannot see how such a work could fail to be polemical. And I could certainly expound upon my vision, and how I see it accomodating the observed phenemonon, but again I cannot see how that would fail to be polemical.

greyorm wrote: I just realized that one also has to be careful to avoid the "power tools" syndrome of D&D...the importance and meaning have to come from the religion itself or the importance of the religion itself, not from the powers and abilities it grants (ie: a cleric's ability to heal and etc).

John Kim wrote: I think what you are saying is that you want to avoid having a "religious" character be purely economically motivated -- i.e. "I think we should spare his life because otherwise I might lose my powers" rather than "because it is the right thing to do".

Valamir wrote:

John Kim wrote: I think what you are saying is that you want to avoid having a "religious" character be purely economically motivated -- i.e. "I think we should spare his life because otherwise I might lose my powers" rather than "because it is the right thing to do".

I would argue that for most of religious history that the former is likely the exact motivation a real worshiper would have. "If I do this Ba'al will be pissed off and make all my goats barren...so I guess I won't do it".

This would be what I called a "mechanical" religion in another thread.

John Kim wrote: Beyond this, there is a huge difference between the historical results of sin (which were subtle to nonexistant depending on your belief) and a game mechanic which tangibly shows it as a reliable factor.

I'll try to make my point again, here. It's related to the idea found in Sorcerer & Sword that it may be better to begin with no map, and create things as we come across them. I very muuch believe that this applies to religions in RPGs. That is, just like I feel that one wastes a lot of time writing up portions of a fantasy world that will never be used, only to find the players wandering into uncharted portions of that world, religions are also so complex. As such, one can use the "historical" method described above to create very good religions. We can make them all day long. The problem is that we cannot make them "complete". And to the extent that we attempt to we will be wasting much time. Players will ignore much of he detail created, and will ask questions that as yet have no answers.

So my policy is the same for both these things, nowadays. Instead of making it up beforehand, have mechanics set up to cause the religions necessary (such that they are) to pop up and become detailed as needed. There are a few obvious choices. One is to just wing things as a GM. Difficult but some people seem to be able to pull it off. Yes, even for things like religions. Better, however, is to co-opt the players. This ensures that they will be interested in the results, and makes the GM's life easier.

So, if you want, for instance a game in which the institutions of religion were well defined, you could allow the players director stance power to create such things, and, further, reward them for doing it well.

Again, I can envision other methods of "virally" producing such necessary data. I'll leave it for people to discover, but they would involve doing things like using the results of otherwise unrelated resolutions to be incorporated into the religions portrayed (somewhat like Walt's FitM example in the other thread, but perhaps more mechanical handling involved). And I'm sure others can come up with even better methods.

Paladin does it in chargen. And the game being deceloped on this forum is showing a lot of promise as well. Look to the already extant work for guidance.

Mike

greyorm wrote:
A thought struck me while reading John's post, specifically the text quoted above. That thought was: the game mechanics do not necessarily have to reflect the actual workings of the world, only the character's perception of them.

That is, when a given individual believes in something, they tend to gather evidence in support of that belief and view circumstances in a light such that the events verify the belief -- whether or not the belief is true is irrelevant to this -- that it seems to be to the individual is, however.

Hi Mike,

If I blew past your point before, I'm sorry. What you wrote above is great. It really nails what I was trying to get at in earlier posts: That with religion we really get a chance to crack open our imaginations as we make it up as we go along. It's completely contrary to the "Build it from the outside so we know everything" crew, and presumes that religion is a mystery to be discovered as you go. (This may not have been your intent, but its what I've taken from it.)

This might run counter to the cliches of what "non-religious" people think of religious people ("religious people want certainty, religious people are done making the hard choices") but in fact, at least looking at M.J.s essays, you find that the work with religious devotion only opens up new questions and avenues of exploration. In my view, true faith, like true scientific inquiry, always to expore further.

Thus, your model (parrallel to the S&Sword geography model) really nails a lot of it for me. You start with a few details, and improvise the "logic" of myth, ritual and so on. Now, whether you do so with the logic of an anthropologist who doesn't give a rats ass about god, or of a poet modelled after Robert Graves is up to you -- but this process seems the best starting point I've heard so far.

Thanks,
Christopher

Umm - why would you want to do such a thing? What is the point of building mechanics which are about false internal perceptions?

Christopher Kubasik wrote: You start with a few details, and improvise the "logic" of myth, ritual and so on.

Actually, I don't think I disagree with you. I don't know yet what religious elements I would want in rules yet... I'm working on that.... but you're right. There'd be rules.

But this way of looking at things, building as you go, is what I would want the rules to be about. Remember, in almost all my posts I've been pushing not for "modelling" religions, but for cracking out heads out of dry presumptions of the way things are. (I pushed for Puppetland, for cryin' out loud.) So yes, at this point, it's just color. But give me some time, pelase. ; ) This is the best entry point I've seen so far, and what I want to build on.

Christophe

One problem that worries Christopher is, if I understand correctly, that PCs have a nasty habit of wandering away from the stuff we GMs have spent days working up. On a related note, there is the point that if we GMs write up enormous tomes on how a given religion actually works (in whatever sense), the players won't read it or internalize it.

I think the number of complex and at times heated debates about religion here strongly indicate that "taking religion seriously" in an RPG is something that will take a lot of emotional and creative energy, from players and GMs. If your players don't give a damn, and don't want to deal with religion in their characters, then devoting enormous effort to designing the things is indeed wasted effort. And if that's the case, you might as well come up with a more-or-less elegant "color" way to represent religion, since the players won't look terribly closely at the details.

At the same time, the fact that so many of us are willing to argue at great length about religion in RPGs suggests to me that there are players out there who would be interested in taking it seriously. For those players, a game-world in which religion was an extremely important factor, even a dominant one, would not be out of line. You would certainly have to tell them this in advance, and give them lots of good material to work with, but then the game contract would include their really trying to play their religous characters as religious.

Seems to me as though such a game-world would be well worth exploring. You could spend enormous amounts of time developing really complex and plausible religions (which is not as hard as it sounds --- no really), and then let the PCs run wild. They would stumble across things, think of things, and agonize about things, and this would lead to you to make those same religions even more sophisticated and intricate. And eventually you'd have a world in which the religions were absolutely 100% fantasy, but they would also be entirely "real" in whatever sense.

If you ask me, mechanizing any of this is just going to drag things away from what matters. Let the players decide what sort of activities are sinful (within some relatively clear code), and encourage them to agonize about them. What're the mechanics for? If they want to play religious characters, because the game-world and the campaign highlights that and they have agreed to give it a go, then they'll do all the encouraging and incentive-work that's necessary.

Surely this is a big principle at the Forge: if you are up-front and direct about religion being central to the Premise, and the players are totally cool with that, then you can to a significant degree leave it to them to keep it so. If you have to force people to be religious, it's probably not worth it, as it'll only get into fights about "real" religion.

Hi chleric,

Just so no one gets confused about what I'm concerned about, I delight in players wandering away from what the GM planned. (In essence, I don't think the GM should "plan" that much -- prep, yes, plan, no.) You can see this in my writing from the Interactive Toolkit, and everything I write here.

So, in responding to Mike above, it wasn't a concern about the player wandering away, it was, "How do we help the players wander more?"

This has been one of the thrusts of this whole discussion for me across all the threads.

To answer your point about "mechanics" -- which you touched on elegantly in the other thread about your Ars Magica game -- I too share your reluctance to turn every "religious" element into a die modifier... But that's not been my focus. My focus has been on the act of Fabulist Imagination. The rules I'm talking about (or, being asked to consider by the Forge's actual designers, of which I don't think I am), are the mechanics of rewards for Fabulist play. That's what matters to me. Faith, whatever. Yes faith, no faith. What matters to me is genuine wierdness. Honest to god, poetic, heartfelt, makes sense in the soul if not in the lab, wierdness. I want the players on the toes to be creative and strange and playing along the lines of people getting off on making up stories that are not nutty-random-events, but actual tales of wonder.

That's where I'd be handing out the whatchamacallem points.

Now, I think Sorcerer could work well for this. I believe Hero Wars (aka Hero Quest) could work well for this. I suspect in a more mundane but really-all-the-more-cool-for-it-way Riddle of Steel could work for this (I think if you tweak the SAs correctly, the players would be focused on really cool Fabulist play). I think Puppetland demands this.

Again (and this is not slight to anyone who's been involved in these big, literate and enganging threads), my agenda hasn't been about recreating religion, or socities with religion, or whatnot. It's been about engendering the sensibility found in religious tales -- which is a completely different thing.

So for me, rules about focusing on the acts of religion are too narrow. Acts of poetic creativity are getting closer to what I was shooting for lo' those many years ago back in Inphobia.

Take care,
Christopher

Chris,

First, I'm glad I was clearer here. I probably came off as dismissive in the other post, so it's no surprise that it didn't make sense to anyone.

Christopher Kubasik wrote:
Just so no one gets confused about what I'm concerned about, I delight in players wandering away from what the GM planned. (In essence, I don't think the GM should "plan" that much -- prep, yes, plan, no.) You can see this in my writing from the Interactive Toolkit, and everything I write here.

My focus has been on the act of Fabulist Imagination. The rules I'm talking about (or, being asked to consider by the Forge's actual designers, of which I don't think I am), are the mechanics of rewards for Fabulist play. That's what matters to me. Faith, whatever. Yes faith, no faith. What matters to me is genuine wierdness. Honest to god, poetic, heartfelt, makes sense in the soul if not in the lab, wierdness. I want the players on the toes to be creative and strange and playing along the lines of people getting off on making up stories that are not nutty-random-events, but actual tales of wonder.

That's where I'd be handing out the whatchamacallem points.

Now, I think Sorcerer could work well for this. I believe Hero Wars (aka Hero Quest) could work well for this. I suspect in a more mundane but really-all-the-more-cool-for-it-way Riddle of Steel could work for this (I think if you tweak the SAs correctly, the players would be focused on really cool Fabulist play). I think Puppetland demands this.

So for me, rules about focusing on the acts of religion are too narrow. Acts of poetic creativity are getting closer to what I was shooting for lo' those many years ago back in Inphobia.

contracycle wrote:

greyorm wrote:
A thought struck me while reading John's post, specifically the text quoted above. That thought was: the game mechanics do not necessarily have to reflect the actual workings of the world, only the character's perception of them.

Umm - why would you want to do such a thing? What is the point of building mechanics which are about false internal perceptions? The only purpose I see in mechanics is the resolution of conflict, and if someone is seeing what they want to see, there is no conflict. The use of mechanics to support a perception instead of a shared space seems pointless to me; this might imply different mechanics for each character depending on their belief structure.

But it seems to me the scenario implicitly assumes a certain quantity of objectivity - if our characters are emergency workers, then usually that ER room or whatevr will be objectively true, real, and the weirdness cast against it. But if the whole universe is weird, then so must the ER room...

If nothing is iobjective, if everything is how you will it, then where is conflict, desire, challenge? After all, the very existance of opponents may itself be a hallucination. I don't understand why I, as a player, would care about characters in such a world.

contracycle wrote: If nothing is iobjective, if everything is how you will it, then where is conflict, desire, challenge? After all, the very existance of opponents may itself be a hallucination. I don't understand why I, as a player, would care about characters in such a world.

I don't understand why I, as a player, would care about characters in such a world.

The only purpose I see in mechanics is the resolution of conflict,...

Resolution systems are methods for group agreement regarding what happens in the imaginary game world.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:
Probably the same reason why an author cares about a character in a story he is writing. In that instance, it is completely and purely as the author wills it, yet the author can still care about the character, and it may be best if he does because if he doesn't, why should we?

The conflict, desire and challenge could come from the player himself. Like a writer, we could create a character, preferably one we care about, and then bring adversity to that character.

M. J. Young wrote:
I don't know that these are mutually exclusive views. In fact, I have no problem with seeing them as all real-world explanations for the variety of faiths in the real world--some evolved, some were discovered, some revealed. But the point of what I'm suggesting is that building religions in one or more of these ways, as an exercise in historical creation, might create more realistic and integrated religions.

Thoughts?

--M. J. Young