Game WISH #64
This week, we discuss that Olde Tyme Religion.
Name three gods or religions that have appeared in games you?ve played in. Were they good, bad, or indifferent? What made them so?
#1 goes back to Ye Olden Days, when Dorothea and I were mere lasses. In our regular D & D game–AKA Munchkinfest 91 (92? Help me out, D.)–one of the gods became enamoured with Dorothea’s character. She got some pretty good writing out of it, and rather a lot of plot, but in the end, I think it wrecked what little was left of the game balance. If memory serves, the DM took great delight in meddling with our characters in various ways. It felt like he was trying to run us through a preset script, rather than letting the game develop, and he made great use of divine intervention to wrench things into his preferred direction.
#2 is the complete opposite–in Doug’s invented world, the one with Null–you can see the effects of the gods’ actions, but unless you’re an extremely high-powered clerical type, you never see the gods themselves. This, I think, is how it ought to be. In Null, like in the Old Testament, having a god’s personal attention can cause a heck of a lot of disruption in your life.
#3 also goes to Doug. Without going into screens and screens of detail, in a recent game, he put his own delicious spin on the Judeo-Christian creation myth with a twist of reincarnation. (Major credit goes to Dave F. for his perfomance in the unexpected starring role in the ending chapter of that one.) This one has to win Best Ever GM Use of Religion in Roleplaying, at least in my experience.
Having talked about others’ use of religion in roleplaying, I’ll just hijack the question briefly and talk about my own methods. Unless I am running a game that’s deliberately myth-heavy (such as the upcoming Fimbulwinter) I tend to follow Doug’s example in #2 above. Even in Fimbulwinter, I don’t know yet how much the players will actually see of any of the gods. I tend to avoid divine intervention/deus ex machina as in #1 above, probably because of that very experience. In the unlikely event that I ever come up with an idea as good as #3, I will probably expire from the sheer delight of it, and no one will ever know. (See below.)
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