What rpg religion "makes more sense" to you?

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 8:42 pm

( totally ripping off this idea here from danbuter )

So, what rpg game/setting has the better treatment on religion, or just feel more interesting, for you ?

For me its Glorantha by a wide margin. Cults of Prax is still the gold standard on how to make religion feel organic, game-relevant and totally exciting at the same time.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 8:47 pm

is it really a religion if there is, technically, no need for faith because you have proof?

the universal brotherhood from shadowrun made a bit more sense to me than anything else i have encountered as of so far . .

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 8:51 pm

"Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman." -Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett

"Worship me and you'll get these awesome powers" seems to make perfect sense to me

So far none of my players have tried clerics and gods haven't come up in my games, so I can't contribute. That said, I'll be watching this topic as it could be interesting.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 9:01 pm

Stahlseele wrote:is it really a religion if there is, technically, no need for faith because you have proof?

This is a larger issue that has been debated forever and will continue to be.

The most definite statement I can make on this is "Not necessarily." Look at cargo cults. Or more personally, Buddhists. I always like to say that I'm "religious but not spiritual."

The best RPG religions are ones that seem "organic"- not straight analogues of IRL religions, but ones created using the same principles by which we have come to understand how they work.

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 9:12 pm

What if the question was, "What god or pantheon in an RPG makes the most sense for people to worship?"

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 11:59 pm

Stahlseele wrote:is it really a religion if there is, technically, no need for faith because you have proof?

If you mean proof on the existence of god, well, any believer you ask here in real life will tell you he has proof of his god existence. But if by proof you mean concrete knowledge of the ending place of your soul, like most settings of D&D do, then I agree, it doesnt make much sense.

the universal brotherhood from shadowrun made a bit more sense to me than anything else i have encountered as of so far . .

UB was indeed awesome, but it always felt more like a fraternity or something than an actual religion to me. Did the UB had any actual body of myths and rituals, etc ?

By the way, the Planescape factions always felt like good "religions" to me, ironically even better the average treatment we see on the topic - they have actual rituals and myths, clear hierarchical structures, sacred places, etc and perhaps the most important: beliefs that actually drive the players actions and goals. Contrast this with the average D&D religion which is a mere excuse for cleric spells, and its easy to see the difference.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 12:00 am

Shall we just cut to the point in this conversation where we talk about how "Good Gods" are portrayed as somewhere in between powerless, idiotic, or cruel and as such no one makes sense to worship.

It's just a mild variant of the anti-theist argument about how God cannot be omniscient, benevolent, and all powerful if evil exists. It is impossible. He can be any two of the three but not all three. The same is basically true for RPG gods. If a figure is infinitely more powerful than you and supposedly shares your goals and your goals have still not been met then that guy is clearly not worth your efforts to support.

To make any sense at all the gods either have to be not that big a deal individually, not able to intervene with worldly affairs, or have selfish rather than cooperative motives. Anything else leaves everyone asking why team white-hat won't put down the idiot ball.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 12:49 am

Eberron probably has my favourite treatment of religion. You can worship whatever you want, and corrupt clerics are just as powerful as faithful ones.

Atmo · Post by **Atmo** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 1:47 am

Tentaculism.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 2:29 am

radthemad4 wrote:What if the question was, "What god or pantheon in an RPG makes the most sense for people to worship?"

The one that encourages you to keep doing what you were going to do anyway, and rewards you for it. So if you were always going to smash undead, you may as well sign up to the church of Lathander and get some perks for all that undead-smashing. If you want to be a colossal ass-hat that everybody hates, but would like to make that tax-deductible, go Christian.

I can't actually think of any reason why you would ever choose a Chaos God of Warhammer though, because it never works out for you. You don't get to go "I want to keep being violent, Khorne's Legion will pay for my armour", you instead start vomiting blood, light up like a beacon of "purge me with fire", and get possessed/eaten by a daemon.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 2:37 am

Dnd gods aren't assumed to be all-powerful.

I've always played it as the gods don't act much directly on the material plane because there are other gods who would interefere. Some because they're enemies, others because they're trying to keep the balance, and yet others just for the lulz.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 2:51 am

In Nexus, the temple of Stleb is a rather straightforward religion. He's a 100-meter long maggot mainly worshiped by vampires, but he's contracted a PR firm to expand his market share. They've got him a talkshow on an interdimensional cable channel, and begun marketing him to mercenaries and adventurers. In exchange for offerings of cash and blood and small displays of allegiance his priests bestow magical boons and spiritual services to his followers, very much a quid pro quo deity, and he accepts payments in installments and even extends credit to long-time worshipers.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 3:04 am

silva wrote:
the universal brotherhood from shadowrun made a bit more sense to me than anything else i have encountered as of so far . .
UB was indeed awesome, but it always felt more like a fraternity or something than an actual religion to me. Did the UB had any actual body of myths and rituals, etc ?

As I understand it, the UB is a lot like Scientology or old mystery religions, in that their beliefs and practices are actually secrets and only church members are supposed to know what they are. However, unlike Scientology, an important step in progressing to the higher levels is getting your soul fed to an insect spirit or mind-controlled by one, so it managed to actually stay secret. Anyone at the lower levels is told some vague bullshit about the essential unity of all metahuman kind instead of anything concrete.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:37 am

What I find an interesting idea:

The gods believe in things. They believe in concepts. War, love, conquest, Good (TM), Death (TM), elves, goblins, etc.

So I guess you'd find the god who you feel is working at something worthwhile and go for it.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 9:38 am

deanruel87 wrote:Shall we just cut to the point in this conversation where we talk about how "Good Gods" are portrayed as somewhere in between powerless, idiotic, or cruel and as such no one makes sense to worship.

Thats the Problem with the alignment System not with the goods.
D&D took greek gods and labeled some of them good...

Not working.

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 12:58 pm

Im with Korwin here. I dont remember seeing "goodie-goodie" gods outside D&D, which leads me to believe its indeed a problem of the alignment system ( besides partially explaining the particular bad treatment D&D always gave to religion ).

Also, dont know if its just coincidence, but rpgs that make religion game-relevant seem to treat the matter well (see Runequest and Pendragon, for example).

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 2:54 pm

I'd say best is to go with a pantheon system.
Deities are basically overpowered thugs who can ruin your day especially within the confines of their portfolio. So pay them off with tithe, sacrifice or prayer. If you feel you have some sort of relationship or rapport with a particular deity you could preferentially patronize them, maybe commit some sort of ritual to make them your patron deity.

It seems like this is the typical vanilla D&D religious system. Problem it is that it is also tied to the horrible alignment system. Once you remove alignment everything gets so much better.

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 3:44 pm

erik wrote:I'd say best is to go with a pantheon system.
Deities are basically overpowered thugs who can ruin your day especially within the confines of their portfolio. So pay them off with tithe, sacrifice or prayer. If you feel you have some sort of relationship or rapport with a particular deity you could preferentially patronize them, maybe commit some sort of ritual to make them your patron deity.

It seems like this is the typical vanilla D&D religious system.

Is it really ? I always had the impression that the "default D&D religious system" is null ( except if you are a cleric, then it is an excuse for divine spells ).

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:16 pm

Ancient History wrote:In Nexus, the temple of Stleb is a rather straightforward religion. He's a 100-meter long maggot mainly worshiped by vampires, but he's contracted a PR firm to expand his market share. They've got him a talkshow on an interdimensional cable channel, and begun marketing him to mercenaries and adventurers. In exchange for offerings of cash and blood and small displays of allegiance his priests bestow magical boons and spiritual services to his followers, very much a quid pro quo deity, and he accepts payments in installments and even extends credit to long-time worshipers.

I do really like Stleb too. I'm considering putting him in my D&D game.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:26 pm

I haven't seen any active Deity in any game that makes sense.
Never seen any satisfying answer to the basic questions.
Questions like: what can a deity do, what are its motivations, why does it care about random shmucks yet not kill shmucks that annoy it.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 5:22 pm

I once played in a "cleric game", where the setting conceit was that the gods were fairly interventionist and anyone who got about level four without levels in cleric would take multiclassing XP penalties. I was a cultist of a god of catastrophe, another player followed a trio of justice gods, and the last one worshiped Nothing. To this day I'm not sure if he worshiped the god of nothing, the concept of nothing, or was an atheist.

Anyways, we got sent to a town because entire buildings were vanishing. Justice-guy was there because the church wanted something done about it, nothing-guy was there because he received a cryptic message from an unknown source, and I was there because dammit towns are supposed to be destroyed by fire and explosions. The only direct divine intervention that wound up being called for was resolving intraparty conflict by instructing my guy to put fighting justice-guy on hold, and later a roll on yea olde artifact catastrophe tables as my reward for doing something really, really stupid.

Never seen any satisfying answer to the basic questions.
Questions like: what can a deity do, what are its motivations, why does it care about random shmucks yet not kill shmucks that annoy it.

Eh, there's several reasonable answers to those, although what they can do exactly is often fairly undefined.

I think my favorite answer to why they're non-interventionist is from the Fall From Heaven mod for civilization, and several similar ideas. Basically, in the distant past they did have it out in a huge brawl across creation, but then they realized they were going to destroy everything if they kept it up and agreed to a deal where they wouldn't intervene directly except as a proportional counter to someone breaking the deal. They largely operate by proxy because letting things escalate means everyone loses. Though in the backstory, the god of Winter totally manifested on the mortal plane, so the god of Nature showed up to fight him... and died. Sending in someone else would escalate matters, so the good gods arranged for a mortal to make Godslayer and stab him right in the face, which took.

malak · Post by **malak** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 5:32 pm

I'm currently running a campaign based on 'Better Than Any Man' by James Raggi.

It's set during the thirty years war in 1631 in Germany, and the religions are appropriately Catholicism, Lutheranism, Zwingli- and Calvinism, and 'other' (Moslems, Jews, etc).

The great thing about this is that first off, everyone has a basic idea what each of the gods/religions is about. Most of the history of the last 1000 years in Europe was strongly shaped by Religion, and the players know about it already.

It's 'in the so-called wedding of Magdeburg, the city was damaged badly by the Holy Roman Empire, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered. The carnage was so bad that magdeburgization became the verb for total destruction, rape and pillaging for centuries'. The players' know about Magdeburg, they know about the catholic church and they can even read wikipedia after the session if they want more details.

It's my first campaign in a 'fantasy-version of a real place'-world, but it's going great and it player involvement in the story is great, just because it's so much stuff they can relate to. A witch-hunting LE cleric is just so much better if he is an actual catholic and prays the actual lord's prayer.

So the best treatment of religion for an RPG is taken from the real world.

On a side note: Better than any man is the best adventure.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 5:33 pm

I wonder if the best way to come up with a set of gods for your campaign is to entirely have it be player-directed... if any players are clerics, have them write up (in-character) who their god is and what the worship is like. Even starting with one god or pantheon, by the time you add heresy, schism, syncretism, and all the other good stuff you have more than enough to play with. Other players could come up things by dint of background stuff like "raised in orphanage run by monks of God X" or "wanted for murder of pilgrims to shrine of God Y". While the gods you get this way might not be as diverse or fantastical as if you came up with a list a priori, it might play better and be more internally consistent, since real religion doesn't always make sense from an external perspective.

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 6:41 pm

Thinking more about it, I think there are 2 axis on making religion "make sense" in games:

1. The Concept:

The religion design proper. Its nature, beliefs, myths, dogmas, rituals, etc. Here the most important thing is that the whole thing feels organic. And for this to work, I suspect some sociological questions should be observed, like the non-proofness (or at least ambiguity ) on the divine, non-unidimensional gods, etc. Even if the religion is alien, its important that it entices more or less similar behaviours on its followers as we see real religions do. Dont matter how detailed your religion is, if the whole thing feels artificial, its dead weight.

2. The In-Game Treatment.

No matter how perfect the point 1 above is, if the religion is pushed to the periphery or made irrelevant gaming-wise, its dead weight too. So its of utmost importance to make religion game-relevant. We can break this point in 2 aspects:

a) Fiction-wise: Making religion present in the campaigns and adventures and permeating the characters everyday environment. This means using religion as color, plot devices, hooks for campaigns, motivations and personal goals for the characters, etc.

b) Rules-wise: factoring religion in the mechanics, from subtle flags and ability modifiers, to whole reward systems for proper behavior, or anything between.

Ironically, D&D seems to fail on all those fronts - conceptually its religions sound artificial and cardboardy, mainly because of its reliance on the "alignments" concept (which may be the epithome of artificiality itself), and its treatment is poor, with religion being pushed to the game periphery most of times or given the character of a artificial construct (for granting cleric spells) when its not. In fact, I cannot think of a single other fantasy game that manages to be worst than D&D in this respect.

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 10:52 pm

Just stmbled wih this nice article on the matter. Its worth the read.

The Gaming Den

What rpg religion "makes more sense" to you?

What rpg religion "makes more sense" to you?

Re: What rpg religion "makes more sense" to you?