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Post by Vulash on Mar 7, 2016 21:23:51 GMT
I'll admit I haven't had a chance to read through every post in detail, but I want to pose a simplistic question to the original point (sorry to derail the deep conversation!)
What happens when the power hungry archmage starts a cult dedicated to himself? I'm thinking of something on the Vecna scale - if truly believes he was born to embody some ideal, say death, and convinces enough other people to also believe he embodies that - does he gain some amount of godhood? I'm asking to Friar's point about how it doesn't ultimately matter unless it's directly involved in the campaign's storyline.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2016 21:52:33 GMT
By all means, get inspired by ASOIAF, but knowing whether or not those gods are real is irrelevant because it's not an interactive medium. The author tells us exactly as much as we need to know. We're free to speculate, but it doesn't even matter until the author tells us that it does. Players in a TRPG are collaborative story tellers, and deserve to know the narrative elements they have to work with in order to make informed decisions about character creation and development. That includes as much metaphysical and cosmological information as the GM is willing to divulge (which should be all of it, IMO).
Second, interventionism does not automatically mean the gods are running amok on the mortal plane, it just means they will attempt to further their own agendas using the tools available to them. That's logical. Mortals don't have to understand or even be aware of this sort of maneuvering for there to be interventionism, and I think the vast majority of settings benefit from some kind of constraint or barrier on the gods' ability to express their power on the mortal plane.
Back to the OP - to answer your question, the only problem or conflict I foresee is player investment with their own character. I would notify my players that at some point the gods will change from forces of nature to sapient beings. You don't need to be specific about how or when it happens, just that there will be a paradigm shift in the relationship between gods and mortals. It would be interesting to see if any players preference for divine-magic wielding classes changes with the transition.
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Post by dmskreed on Mar 11, 2016 19:53:48 GMT
By all means, get inspired by ASOIAF, but knowing whether or not those gods are real is irrelevant because it's not an interactive medium. The author tells us exactly as much as we need to know. We're free to speculate, but it doesn't even matter until the author tells us that it does. Players in a TRPG are collaborative story tellers, and deserve to know the narrative elements they have to work with in order to make informed decisions about character creation and development. That includes as much metaphysical and cosmological information as the GM is willing to divulge (which should be all of it, IMO). This is a topic of great interest to me though maybe this tangent would be better discussed outside the context of this thread. How does this work in the ASOIAF TRPG, I wonder? I'm assuming they dont stray too far from the lore spelled out in the books but havent really looked into the game. The narrative elements players have at their disposal don't need to be comprehensive. In fact, to the extent that a certain amount of player knowledge is bound to trickle down to the character, I think knowing more than necessary about the unfiltered history of the world works to the detriment of the setting and sometimes the story. On the level of the character, especially in a typical fantasy setting (swords, elves, not getting killed or having your farm torched by goblins and the like), what someone "knows" is going to be very largely dependent on what they "believe." Belief is going to be something that varies greatly from culture to culture, race to race and even between environments (a human who lives in and relies on the fertility of a river's floodplain will have a much different worldview & set of beliefs than a human born into a nomadic tribe of hunter/gatherers). I have trouble reconciling the idea so much about the history of the world is so widely known by people who are constantly looking over their shoulder for the next threat to their existence. As a caveat; I'm looking at this theoretical world as a setting, creation story, timeline and cosmology that will host a number of short to moderate length campaigns scattered over a period of hundreds or even thousands of human lifespans (which is, for me, the single most interesting and appealing concept I've taken from the podcast). So I'm envisioning how these pieces may fit together at a given point in that timeline, and what constraints may be put in place given that history. Why cant you play a Human Cleric of Ilmater for this campaign? Because Humans don't exist yet at this point in time and the only races that do exist follow versions of this handful of deities. But dont worry... this should only take 1-3 sessions. We can play a campaign with humans after we wrap this one up.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2016 21:25:03 GMT
From what I gather, the ASOIAF RPG doesn't provide for magic-using "classes," divine or arcane. The actual existence or nonexistence of gods remains unimportant in that system.
I agree the narrative elements don't need to be comprehensive, but the more you provide, the more you empower players. Will they metagame this knowledge? To some degree, yes, but metagaming itself isn't a problem (until it's a problem, but that's a much longer conversation), and there are plausible reasons for characters arriving at certain beliefs, even ones that miraculously arrive at the truth of the cosmological foundation.
It's a matter of trusting the players with the knowledge. I feel that if a GM doesn't trust his players with that information, it speaks more about him than it does about his players. Moreover, I think the extent to which players can abuse this information to have a real impact on the game is fairly limited, and more likely to produce an interesting story (e.g. Vulash's example of the cult) than to have a detrimental effect. If your actual experience has been contrary to this, I'm curious to hear examples, but I suspect you're speaking more from a position of concern than injury.
For what it's worth, I do have a line in the cosmological treatise for my own setting that the information contained in the document is not common knowledge. However, I'm not going to worry much about how a character got this information if he talks about it or makes decisions based on it unless it's so wildly out of character that it demands explanation. Even then, I'm pretty permissive with allowing the explanation. The characters have entire lives before their adventuring careers, with potentially thousands of hours of conversation, introspection, study, etc... to inform their beliefs.
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Post by dmskreed on Mar 11, 2016 22:43:07 GMT
In candor... 99% of my experience as a DM has been running public games and published adventures set in the Forgotten Realms (a setting I knew almost nothing about before I started). So, you're right. My issue is more one of concern than injury. Though I have fairly recently had a drop in player (using a borrowed character) stand up and blurt information about a big bad (Zuggtmoy) the other 6 people at my table, all regulars (who'd been role playing and exploring and letting information come to them organically) had no direct knowledge of. Whether that influenced their decision to march in and attack that big bad the following week (without the blurter present), I cant say...
Give me a table of players I know and have experience playing with and I might be a little more amenable to giving them access to my world's Rosetta Stone, but I also tend to feel like (putting myself on the player side of the table) having those little A-Ha! moments where pieces start to fit together and you realize a character you played months earlier is now either an NPC or a relevant historical figure in the world sounds like a lot of fun. I dont mind (as a player) knowing less now if it means having fun twists and surprises down the line.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 13, 2016 6:02:51 GMT
Public play is a very different beast! I was an Adventurer's League DM for D&D Expeditions for about a year, so I understand how that experience informs your perspective.
I'm not clear what you mean by a borrowed character? Was he playing one of the regular's PCs while the regular player was absent? In any case, it's probably not even relevant to the players anymore, but you could explain that outburst as a bit of madness induced by another demon prince hostile to Zuggtmoy. As I wrote earlier, you can justify a lot of metagame knowledge with a little creative thinking. It's only abusive when you (and the other players) decide it is.
I hope you do get a chance to run a private game. While I think my experience running public games improved my skill in GMing, I'm glad I dropped out of the program.
Regarding those A-ha! moments, it absolutely can be a great experience. It can also be a miserable one. The same can be said of any surprise, really, and it's a calculated risk the GM should handle with care. Obviously I'm not advocating for no surprises ever, but I do have a strong opinion on how and where those surprises appear, and I can summarize it as this: they belong in the plot, not the setting.
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Post by dmskreed on Mar 14, 2016 17:39:07 GMT
Hindsight is 20/20... I generally think of some interesting/creative way to address those problem moments after concluding the game for the night. Or, in this case... week's after the fact. That's a good thought. I probably would have spun it for the other PCs that the character that guy was playing had begun sputtering madness similar to what they'd been seeing from NPCs infected by Zuggtmoy's spores and that they felt uneasy about him as a result.
The borrowed character: Basically, the player showed up without his character sheet. Another player who'd recently switched over to a lower level home brew campaign lent him a Tier 2 character sheet so he could sit in at my table. I mentioned that to illustrate that (as far as the player was concerned) this new character wouldnt have learned of Zuggtmoy's presence in the underdark at that point in the story, and CERTAINLY wouldn't have had the amount of detail he shared regardless.
Thankfully... a player volunteered to step up and take over DM duties for a while, so I'm on a break from those published campaigns and can start focusing on my own material.
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Post by Lexurium on Apr 4, 2016 14:19:00 GMT
I've toyed a bit with the idea of thought-form gods, for my first campaign, but ultimately decided it would be too convoluted without changing mechanics I still am not too comfortable with. I think the biggest issue here, and ultimately what sets a thought-form world apart, is anthropomorphising the gods. Let me explain:
In a world where a celestial presence is presented through celestial creatures, these creatures have a name. Be they the God-dragon Bahamut or the spider-demon-goddess Lolth, they have a name, a body, a backstory, a presence. They are, for all intents and purposes, real and tangible. It is through their very own will that celestial magic is manifest on the material plane.
In a world with thought-forms as gods, the celestial presence has no body, nothing to anthropomorphise. The wind requires no name, and neither does spring, so what is it that makes the celestial magic manifest? What is it that creates the miracles? It is the power of thought itself, the idea that all power comes intrinsically from sentient beings.
A very good and interesting use of this idea exists within the Warhammer 40K lore centered around the Orks. All Orks in that universe have, to some extent, a psychic connection to the rest of its species. Thus, a belief held widely enough and fervently enough comes to pass, for reference; “Red ones go Fasta!”. Applying the same logic to a Fantasy-world removes the need for an embodied deity, simply the act of believing something will happen will make it come to pass. So long as enough people believe.
Now, this is not to be taken as a system which is easily manipulated. An idea can not be planted willingly and take the strength of a true belief. This safeguards the system from the creation of new thought-forms, but it also brings a detriment to the cleric class. A cleric all of a sudden becomes entirely useless on his own. If a cleric, in this system, is not surrounded by believers, then he is powerless. This is where the mechanic comes in. Of course this can be disregarded and the mechanics of the system be kept intact, but then the entire idea is relegated to flavor texts.
In an attempt to sum up: If a thought-form celestial is supposed to differ from celestial creatures, the power-base of the celestial must shift from a will-based form to a form of psychic storms.
Hopefully this does not seem like the ramblings of a lunatic. [Oh, and first post! So exciting!]
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2016 20:08:44 GMT
Lexurium, welcome to the forums! I'm not sure how you draw the conclusion that the cleric must be powerless if not surrounded by believers. We're talking magic and metaphysics here, so constraining the source of his power with conventional space is an arbitrary choice. If the author of a setting with thoughtform gods prefers that divine magic users draw their power directly from the minds of other people, there's nothing wrong with that decision. But it's not the only one. In my metaphysical apparatus, which uses something very similar to thoughtform gods, mortal consciousness creates substance in the astral plane. It is this substance that divine magic users wield. That is, they're not absorbing the power of belief from people around them. Their beliefs go to a sort of repository, and the process of casting divine magic taps into that. There's no real limitation on distance here, because the bridge between the magic user and his power source transcends physical space. Let's say beliefs are money. In your version, priests go around mugging people. In mine, people put their cash in a bank. Then the banker helps himself to their cash. F'in bankers, right? Also, I'm not clear what you mean about configuring a thoughtform god as a "form of psychic storms." Maybe you could elaborate. In any case, I've significantly rewritten the document I posted earlier, wherein I describe the cosmology of my homebrew. Here's a re-link for those interested: cosmology
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Post by robosnake on Apr 5, 2016 3:11:32 GMT
Hey, So I've been working on this idea for my Game, and it's that there are forces that people attribute godhood too, and worship, and pray to, and seem to get results from, but these forces are nothing more than the collective belief in an idea or philosophy that's been held for generations. Like traditional gods, the more believers, the stronger the power of the "God" Thoughtform, also similarly, the longer this "God" has been worshiped, the more powerful. Unlike traditional gods, these God Thoughtforms lack personal identity or intelligence - They don't have agendas. They're very much mystical forces of nature - If you Honestly and Sincerely pray to the Harvest God during the growing season, you will have a larger harvest. Some races in my world know the true nature of the Gods and are not bothered by the fact they aren't "real" - They just view it as a mystery or something beyond mortal understanding. Other races do believe the gods are just like us - Personalities, Plans, Chosen people, etc. --- Later down the road in my game, after the initial campaign, its possible that a group will try to "awaken" the gods, to bestow intelligence and personality upon them, but the consequences of this will be unpredictable and will set the stage for a campaign where the PCs have to deal with the fallout of the Gods becoming sentient. What comes to mind for you when you hear this? Any problems or conflicts I'd have to be aware of? What I think about as I read this is artificial intelligence. There's the semi-intelligent tech we have now, like Siri or Google algorithms and so on, and there is the huge question of what will happen when these systems achieve a more human-like intelligent, with goals and self-awareness and the ability to change their own code, etc. It could be interesting to view divine magic, and maybe arcane too, as a kind of advanced technology - tested and developed to the point of being highly predictable, so much so that every fireball is about the same size and every magic missile hits. But what happens when these various systems become self-aware? Do you have a Skynet moment when magic turns on humanity? This might be a huge needless detour with regard to your setting, but I think the idea is cool.
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Post by Lexurium on Apr 5, 2016 7:24:51 GMT
Thanks nevvur! I’ve read some of your posts and they are always enlightening.
I must admit that I hadn’t read your cosmology earlier, but it is indeed an impressive body of work with several interesting implications. I particularly love the Old Ways and the way the entirety of the planes are based on dreamscapes, so much fun to be had there!
The problem I see with gods as thought-forms is an individual’s ability to change the world around him, as through metaphysical magic. The essence of the problem being, if one individual’s belief is strong enough to have a real-world effect, then why are not all individuals magicians? You solve this problem with extreme finesse by your introduction of the Drigen and access to the repository of Beliefs. I, however, attempt not to solve the problem.
This is why I bring up the concept of psychic storms. While one individual cannot muster the strength of belief to change the world, a group of people could. This power would not be siphoned off into a storage as much as tapped into and barely controlled in the instant. Your own metaphor about stealing bankers is surprisingly accurate in this instance, but it does not go quite far enough. In a psychic storm world, the power would always be there, latent, in any major gathering of peoples. Large cities would create their own microcosms of beliefs and affect the landscape around them for miles. The gathering of such immense psychic power would cause random happenings of a magical nature all of the time if not properly managed, kind of like a constant field of wild magic by a sorcerer.
This is brought on by the fact that the energy cannot be stored, which is why I likened it to a storm, an uncontrollable force of nature always looking for an outlet. The problem I run into here, and probably why I decided not to go further with this idea, is that it more or less makes the astral planes an impossibility, and even the ethereal plane would be such a raging storm around larger populations that travel through it would be extremely risky.
Also, a central concept here is anthropomorphising the gods. Even in your Cosmology the gods have names and seeming goals, but these stem from the fact that there actually IS a repository of stored belief in the astral planes. In a world such as I imagine, the randomness of the magical activity would cause a religious construct more similar to superstitious belief than any actual pantheon of god-like creatures. Probably extremely dogmatic beliefs centred around strict codes of conduct, physical ceremonies and large sacrifices to “appease the powers that be”, but now I’m getting derailed again.
Finally I just want to say, once again, that I am completely in love with your idea and I’m planning to steal it at a future date. I do hope I didn’t come across as meaning that my solution was the only one, only that it has completely different implications. Both as a flavor and mechanically.
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lemiel14n3
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Post by lemiel14n3 on Sept 29, 2016 15:13:41 GMT
This makes me think of the fantasy premise behind the coldfire series, that monsters existed as a creation of our collective subconscious and ritual had power because everybody could invest in their belief of the process. In that world, the church held immense power by encouraging the worship of the faithful and then harnessing that energy as a mass of pure light. One question would be, does the church know that their gods are amalgams? Because if so, that changes the dynamic of how the church functions, and the roles of Paladins and Clerics. Either clerics are dupes, sent out to foster worship and prove that the gods have purpose; or they're willing participants in the ruse, collecting worship to fuel their powers. Similarly are paladins active defenders of the faith, or agents sent out to crush disbelievers that risk toppling the whole enterprise? Can people take this energy into themselves and become "true" gods? Does this energy have an opposite? Do evil thoughts and deeds generate devils?
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