Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Digital Hellhound]

I have a bit of a god game itch. For now, I've come in the hopes of getting some discussion going on about the whole genre.

So, the humble god game. We have these Lords of Creation, Godhoods, Age of Fires, many RTDs, et cetera. I'm just wondering if y'all have any new ideas for god games out there, something to shake up the formula. And otherwise; how much freedom do you think god games should have? You've got the Godhood-alikes which are mainly communal creative writing exercises, and then the more structured and mechanics-based god games which might even have (*gasp*) a chance of failure when doing your godly business. Is the 'blank canvas' set-up better or worse than the defined/semi-defined world? Other questions that don't come to mind right now?

Pantheon had god-to-god combat and conflict, but the way it was implemented was a mess. In a Godhood-like, it's preferable to settle combats in advance/during in OOC in a way that adds to the world and the gods, but I understand the need for a competitive edge and game-ness in these things. So, uh, anyone have any good ideas for dealing with player combat in god games? Pantheon had some attempt at giving stats and strengths to gods based on the amount of Acts they put into things, but that snowballed totally out of control and things got, at least from my point of view, seriously unfun time to time.

One twist, with godly combat, I had is introducing clear NPC antagonist gods, beings, etc., that act on the world and the players whether they want it or not, but that's already taking a lot of the godly freedom that makes god games so appealing. You'd need some mechanics here, I think, so it's not just 'well, the giant crab god eats you, sorry, GM fiat'.

More specifically on Godhoods/Age of Fires: these games are, as said, communal creative writing exercises more than real games (very few mechanics, if at all), and I've been thinking that the format doesn't need to limit itself to god games. I have vague memories of talking with Fniff about this. That discussion involved... pirates? Hell if I know. The problem is, I think, that in god games the Act happens because, well, you're a god - but if you were a nation or a bunch of people, or so, it feels like you'd need to justify it a hell of a lot more. With just normal people with normal limitations, the micro scale could be problematic. Creativity is obviously limited without being able to do everything a god can.

So. Things. Let's talk gods.

[Rolepgeek]

Just make godly combat impossible. They can't tussle godo-e-godo; they have to use minions and followers. Make it a function of that.

That's what I tried to do, at least, in (Un)Holy Powers.

Speaking of which, I want to try it again, but I'm not sure how to go about solving the whole Pantheon dilemma.

[IronyOwl]

So, the humble god game. We have these Lords of Creation, Godhoods, Age of Fires, many RTDs, et cetera. I'm just wondering if y'all have any new ideas for god games out there, something to shake up the formula.

As what I believe is the resident grandmaster on experimental, often failed god game RTDs, all I can say is [Maniacal Laughter Intensifies].

Really you'd have to be more specific; I tend to look at god games the same way as most other games, so that question's a bit like "any new ideas for gangster games" for me.

However, as a prominent example, I guess I'm willing to share a brilliant idea I had that sadly didn't pan out as intended.

Spoiler: Divine Flesh RTD (click to show/hide)

Standard god game wink wink nothing will go wrong hue everything will be suspiciously perfectly normal mwahahahaha. Players should know ahead of time that something is up, but not what.

So the game starts and everyone tries to create things, but there's a problem. Everything they create disintegrates immediately. They try to create a ball of fire, it flares up and then dies out. They try to create a planet, it forms and then crumbles to dust. If there's any remnants, they're not useful.

So after some experimentation, and possibly aided by the title, they're likely to eventually discover the secret- they have to use parts of themselves to make creations real. Bleeding themselves into a sun creates a permanent sun, and so on. Naturally, the part(s) used affects the outcome. Problem- this is not free. They can't just keep ripping scales off and then regrowing them any more than they can handwave off chopping off their own hands over and over again.

Solution- this isn't limited to their parts. If they can gank another player and rip something off of them, they can form it into a creation. Cue exactly what you'd expect.

Hidden salvation- this conservation of existence has a loophole. Living things can multiply and grow without needing more godflesh than was required to make them, meaning they increase the overall amount of substance available in the universe. Oh, and the conversion principle works both ways- gods can devour their own or others' creations to restore or empower themselves.

This is going to be a happy universe.

I loved this idea to death, but the problem was that god games are supposed to be about creation, whereas this would likely have that paranoid Perplexicon-ish gankfest quality to it. I got the feeling nobody would find out about the living things loophole until they were the last fat deity in existence, attempting to create things because... well... might as well, right? And then at some point they realize they could have just made life instead of eating each other. Haha... oops.

Possible solutions include telling them about some aspects ahead of time, which is less fun but more fun than a concept that doesn't work, and trying to rework the gibbing thing to be relatively difficult. Maybe if each god consists of 100 Points and you only rip off as much of them as you beat their roll by on a d6, godly ganking just isn't viable... which defeats a lot of the point. Maybe some kind of defender's advantage, so you have to wait for them to be distracted... but that just makes numbers auto-win.

I'm sure there's a way to make a game about a bunch of grim deities demanding sacrifice and dreaming of the utter consumption of nonbelievers, and in a way that's really interesting and not just dark, but I'm not sure what it is.

And otherwise; how much freedom do you think god games should have? You've got the Godhood-alikes which are mainly communal creative writing exercises, and then the more structured and mechanics-based god games which might even have (*gasp*) a chance of failure when doing your godly business. Is the 'blank canvas' set-up better or worse than the defined/semi-defined world? Other questions that don't come to mind right now?

I'm hideously biased on this, but I tend to find even communal writing exercises work better when there's some unpredictability or outside direction. That's one of the reasons writing exercises often have specific prompts- to encourage people to explore the hand they've been given, which isn't necessarily a hand they'd ever draw on purpose.

Same thing with blank canvas vs defined starting world. It sounds bizarre and I don't prefer it, but my honest experience has been that players like having things already around to discover and take inspiration from, even when they're playing reality-warping entities with the power to create all of existence. If you want to compromise, you might consider having a starting world/star system/etc, and then let players abandon it to forge their own nightmarish hell or poke around in it looking for things that interest them as they see fit.

Pantheon had god-to-god combat and conflict, but the way it was implemented was a mess. In a Godhood-like, it's preferable to settle combats in advance/during in OOC in a way that adds to the world and the gods, but I understand the need for a competitive edge and game-ness in these things. So, uh, anyone have any good ideas for dealing with player combat in god games? Pantheon had some attempt at giving stats and strengths to gods based on the amount of Acts they put into things, but that snowballed totally out of control and things got, at least from my point of view, seriously unfun time to time.

One twist, with godly combat, I had is introducing clear NPC antagonist gods, beings, etc., that act on the world and the players whether they want it or not, but that's already taking a lot of the godly freedom that makes god games so appealing. You'd need some mechanics here, I think, so it's not just 'well, the giant crab god eats you, sorry, GM fiat'.

I'm at a peculiar loss here, because I'm not familiar with what Godhood&Co disputes tend to look like or be about. In god game RTDs, where the basic mechanics, if not the actual effects, of combat are pretty straightforward, I tend to find players very seldom have cause to fight each other directly. More often it's conflict over one player trying to push an asteroid into a planet and another trying to stop them, but even that's pretty rare.

Mechanically, though, you should ask yourself what you want the possible outcomes to be. If one god should "win" and one should "lose," an official coinflip will do the trick. If you need more granular and/or specific outcomes, you should base the system off of that. Obviously there's still room for creative writing on the specifics.

More specifically on Godhoods/Age of Fires: these games are, as said, communal creative writing exercises more than real games (very few mechanics, if at all), and I've been thinking that the format doesn't need to limit itself to god games. I have vague memories of talking with Fniff about this. That discussion involved... pirates? Hell if I know. The problem is, I think, that in god games the Act happens because, well, you're a god - but if you were a nation or a bunch of people, or so, it feels like you'd need to justify it a hell of a lot more. With just normal people with normal limitations, the micro scale could be problematic. Creativity is obviously limited without being able to do everything a god can.

My thing on god games being regular games does swing both ways, so I'd agree on paper that there's nothing stopping you. I'd also agree that the power and subject matter of god games probably carries it quite a bit further than most other concepts could go, however. If I were to recommend a test subject, I'd say highly cinematic monster hunters or maybe dueling mages- something where you can produce interesting things despite focusing on a handful of static characters.

So. Things. Let's talk gods.

Yaaaaaaaay.

Just make godly combat impossible. They can't tussle godo-e-godo; they have to use minions and followers. Make it a function of that.

But then that needs a resolution mechanic, as does "I change this" versus "I stop him from changing that" style scuffles.

Speaking of which, I want to try it again, but I'm not sure how to go about solving the whole Pantheon dilemma.

What dilemma was that?

[Fniff]

I came up with a concept for a Godhood I might do after I'm done with my one.

This Godhood takes place after an apocalypse. Humanity is destroyed utterly, the earth is a barren rock, etc. The players play as spirits of concepts that have managed to stay on after the apocalypse. Thing is, acts aren't handed out. They come from wellsprings in the landscape that are like oases in a massive desert. Whatever player is control of the wellspring gets a steady supply of acts. There is not enough wellsprings to satisfy all players at once. This is basically blending Godhood with a strategy game, which I find interesting but probably needs work. A lot of godhood games have little to no player conflict in them, which I think is a missed opportunity. Of course, this needs a proper resolution mechanic.

Also, I think a game like this could use multiple types of act. My thoughts? There could be two types of "energy". There's Creation, which allow you to do/make stuff and Destruction, which allows you to unmake stuff.

[Rolepgeek]

I just used logic and all for 'resolution' activity.

Also, I meant the dilemma in that there should be downsides and upsides to being in a Pantheon, such that several smaller, weaker gods have better chances by forming a pantheon together, whereas most really powerful gods are better off on their own.

[Digital Hellhound]

@Irony: How the communal creative writingness of a Godhood works is that all the players do their Acts, where they write a long-ish scene where they control all the characters, their actions, etc. There's usually no rolls needed, but the further consequences of the Act are left open. The GM then writes an update post for everyone, where these consequences are described, new things and problems introduced, and so forth. The GM is the leading storyteller, essentially, and the element of unpredictability and outside direction.

I like Divine Flesh, anyway. Sacrificing body parts and senses (and concepts - get rid of love, creativity, satisfaction) is the best source of godly creation.

Godhood-likes rarely have direct conflict, actually. I've always thought the way to resolve them was in advance, with both participants talking out an outcome of max fun, then just focusing on writing the most sweet-ass combat scene possible. I remember this happening maybe once. Then there's battles between creations and followers, which the GM dealt with however they wanted.

Pantheon, on the other hand, focused for a semi-large part on god-to-god combat. There were no gentlemen's agreements here - you lose, you get eaten for the power inside you. Coinflip would be even more unfair than the Act-weighed GM fiat used there. I don't think anyone had a problem with outcomes of follower/creation scraps, but the godly ones were very final in most cases.

[sjm9876]

Yeah, Pantheon combat was...... something of a mess.

Perhaps you could have 'death' make a god inactive for a few rounds, at which point they return with a couple of bonus acts as compensation, making godkilling something of a strategic move rather than blanket benefit.

Fluff it as them returning to the fabric of creation and coming back refreshed or something.

Maybe give each combatant a 'strength' of 1d6+acts spent (with bonuses for good plans/descriptions) and compare, and the loser is knocked out of the game for a number of rounds = difference (or half), but comes back with that same number of acts.

[Harry Baldman]

Speaking of the "blank slate" vs. "ready-made universe" thing in creation-style god games, I don't really see the point of starting with a blank slate in a god game, given how 99% of the time what players will want to create is the Earth and the Sun, basically (with variations that they might as well add after the fact), and having to go through those bits is incredibly tedious, to say the least, given how Earth is, if not in theory, then at least in practice the only thing players (being creatures of limited time, creativity and dedication) can make that has a chance of not being perilously boring and lacking in variation while still remaining something people can relate to.

A very important problem in most, if not all blank-slate god games that I've played is, I feel, that nothing people create really does anything and there's no sense of progression, and little or no sense of large scale. Everything's either a single-biome planet, a single species of creature (including the frequently found Space Lifeforms Without Physiological Needs That Don't Do Anything, the invariable result of somebody putting the cart before the horse in the life creation business), a single-hat civilization or something in that vein, which is a very large problem with godly actions in that sort of game.

Personally, I'd prefer it if gods in blank slate games (or in ready-made universe games where the universe is very immature) felt more immense, and the timescales far larger - for instance, in the very beginning, a god gets three actions, and that's what happens for a billion years or so, as the gods are feeling leisurely and are awakening from slumber. Then, as more and more life appears, the timescales grow shorter to correspond with evolution, and eventually slow down to five thousand years per turn at about the Neolithic period, and then gradually down to one thousand years at modern levels of technology. So what would happen is that civilization as a whole eventually starts becoming radically different with each turn, and gods would need to adapt to the much faster-moving ways of the beings they created. Or, you know, forbid them to change through divine intervention (such as creating the Altered and making humanity band together into a loose technophobic union of planet-states) and then slowly mold them to their liking, depending on what rate of progress they prefer. And also have there be NPC gods, who will be creating the alien races of the universe if nobody else steps up to the plate. Or not, and have all alien races descend from the civilizations of Earth.

Alternatively, and this is a game idea I had, have a game where seven gods on the bottom rungs of a divine hierarchy create a portal to a different universe that has no gods, and whose current inhabitants have absolutely no idea what a god even is. And then they have to set themselves up, and after a while even ward off their asshole divine superiors. Kind of like a divine colonization game.

[Mesa]

I had two game ideas, one of which can't really be run by someone other than me (not because I think I'm a great GM but because I'm the only person who really understands the universe of that game well enough to make a game about it).

It's a dungeon crawler suggestion game...That takes place on a PC.
The idea is that it could be made on a virtual machine (lots of screenshots would be involved), and each folder would represent a new room, and files could be...things. Or monsters. Or NPCs. The player would be controlling a text/image file (that contains info like stats, skills and inventory) and moving from folder to folder, killing other enemies in some as-yet undecided manner.

Basically: AdventurOS as a suggestion game.

I haven't figured out the details of it yet, but it sounds like an at-least-decent idea.

An ASCII/otherwise-illustrated fortress-building suggestion game that takes place in my Gun Francisco universe.
You are in charge of a group of humans/birds/frogs that have just conquered a city/a bunker/something else and now your job is to manage this new outpost while defending yourself from other factions and the nasty mutant animals that roam the wasteland.

Should shit hit the fan, you can, probably, evacuate your settlement using your initial vehicle(s) and move elsewhere. Or die horribly. And start elsewhere.

It could be helpful for me to help develop the GF world better and maybe for once I could make a game that I don't abanadon within minutes.

Anyone want to see either of those games? (Assuming I don't inevitably procrastinate and forget about it, but the fact I'm still doing Gun Francisco things is a feat in its own right. Plus I'm almost done with school now.)

[Empiricist]

What if the gods started off sealed in both a functional sense and a meta sense? As in, in their default, fully sealed state, they can't do anything major but still do have a reasonable degree of influence, players can temporarily unseal their god to a specified degree, allowing them to bypass their usual limitations and possibly the opposing actions of other gods, however, this also results in the player's control over the god being decreased and the god becoming more meta-aware. Whilst this control loss and meta-awareness will be reset at the end of the round, it does possess a degree of risk as the god may not perform the action satisfactorily, or at all. Or they may instead omit or add details to suit themselves.

Gods would have various affinities, personalities and quirks known only to the GM which influence how they act. For example, a more antagonistic god may start opposing the actions of other gods without being ordered to or tamper with their acts to add a more asshole side to them, whilst a more paranoid god may, even when unsealed to a relatively low degree, become suspicious and set measures to reduce or otherwise interfere with their player's control over them. It's up to the players to find these out and take them into consideration.

Of course, the ultimate risk is that a god breaks free of the player's control altogether, becoming a powerful entity that completely ignores the fourth wall, they can be resealed by other players, but it will be a troublesome matter: a certain degree of divine power is required to reseal them, this means that multiple gods are required, with a lower quantity required the less sealed each of those gods are. Needless to say, the rogue god would be aware of that and will attempt to bargain with players to maximize the time it spends unsealed and thus the amount of time it has to screw over it's own player. Not to mention that the resealing players may decide to implement a few "additional features" into the seal to further their own cause.

Finally a god may implant it's will into an object or the world itself, the scale and/or magnitude varying with the unsealment degree. These could manifest as a river suddenly changing it's nature to suit the nature of the god as soon as enough developments take place around it to make it difficult to simply reset or a trigger that causes an event to happen when some criteria are met.

For example, say a seemingly-obedient trickster god with an affinity for death is unsealed to a high degree to create a new, magical construction material. It may decide to create the most inexpensive yet reliable and versatile material it can except adding the detail that when it is proliferated enough, it becomes highly and indefinitely radioactive. If the players aren't aware of the god's nature, the material may be used for centuries, being used as the standard building material for humanity before suddenly killing off most of the human race and rendering most cities uninhabitable when they all start to spontaneously emit radiation.

In such a system, god-killing wouldn't be necessary as a source of conflict, the tendency for disasters to spiral out of control due to unsealing would suffice as a source of problems for the players. Players wouldn't need to have a lethal option to deal with other players who oppose them constantly, they could instead just overpower them by temporarily unsealing their god to a greater degree as a calculated risk, or goading them into losing control of their god and helping reseal it but adding measures that prevent them from interfering as much as they used to.

[Xantalos]

I enjoy that idea,if only for the sense that it'd likely end up with players coordinating with each other against their own characters.

[Digital Hellhound]

@HB: 'Divine colonization', huh? I can imagine the old superiors being stickers for their own form and own rules, and when the new world becomes worthy of their notice, they start going all 'I demand all living beings are made in my image, destroy these misshapen creatures!'. Soon you'll be dumping your god-tea back into the portal.

You could throw in (different, strange) native gods in the new world the players will also have to deal with, first (overcome them, unite with them, co-exist with them...). But maybe that's getting too RL-colonization-ish.

[Parsely]

It's a dungeon crawler suggestion game...That takes place on a PC.
The idea is that it could be made on a virtual machine (lots of screenshots would be involved), and each folder would represent a new room, and files could be...things. Or monsters. Or NPCs. The player would be controlling a text/image file (that contains info like stats, skills and inventory) and moving from folder to folder, killing other enemies in some as-yet undecided manner.

An ASCII/otherwise-illustrated fortress-building suggestion game that takes place in my Gun Francisco universe.
You are in charge of a group of humans/birds/frogs that have just conquered a city/a bunker/something else and now your job is to manage this new outpost while defending yourself from other factions and the nasty mutant animals that roam the wasteland.

I'm not really interested in anything that isn't sci-fi, but that dungeon crawler one sounds neat. The pathing would be fun.

Code: [Select]

-dungeon 2 entrance
>doorway
 -corridor
  -player
  -goblin
  -goblin
>doorway
>doorway


[flabort]

Empiricist, I'd definitely play that.
I'd RUN it if I didn't have so many irons in the fire already.

[monk12]

Ooh, I think Empiricist won the god game discussion. That idea's awesome.