Politics, Religion, and SotA

*Ducks a tomato*

So...these are always fun topics, but bear with me for a second.

In a game scenario, these topics have been used pretty widely to establish factions in the game. In UO it was Lord British vs. Lord Blackthorne at some point, then I think it grew to Minax, the Council of Mages, True Britannians and Shadowlords. Religion I've only seen used as a faction in Medieval Total War, but it made for some interesting decisions and alliances. Other fictitious religions have found their way into games in an unofficial sense for some time now, usually as just part of the backstory rather than something that actually influence gameplay.

I think it would stand to reason that in this world, you have some that believe the prophecies being revealed are good for New Brittania and some who believe they are harmful. Some would do all they could to see them come true, others would do all they could to see they fail. So what if these factions actually helped shape the game based on what real players decided to do in their framework? One interesting concept that was pretty badly done in Star Wars Galaxies was Rebel Vs. Empire on a server level contest. Depending on which side one, certain things would unfold. I say it was badly done because SWG in general was badly done...but I loved the Role Playing possibilities in that idea.

Thoughts...

 

Yea, there is a basic assumption that there will be different cultures with different politics and reliegion and that they won't like eachother. Just like any other game.

 

Personally, I'm hoping that the "in game" religion and factions are kept to a minimum. They should give us, the players, the tools to express beliefs and use them to form our own RP equivalents. I will always drive the point home that players should be dictating what is happening in the game, not the game itself. The game is the sandbox, the things we can do (the mechanics) are the sand, and we are the force that makes the sandcastles.

 

It would be great to see the results from the player majority help influence the overall direction of the game, but since the game is just as much about sleuthing/investigating as it is about roll playing, I wonder how much influence we can have over this story.

 

That's the point. There is a background story, there is a scripted story that is being played out in 5 chapters of Shroud of the Avatar, but then there is the living story influenced by the players. The background is the setting, the scripted story is something for us to do, and neither should have to much bearing on the narrative the players create on their own.

 

Yeah sounds good! check my thread in gen discussion about clerics and paladins of the Light (or Darkness) i think it would be good to incorporate that type of stuff to game i mean the world was destroyed some years ago cataclysm etc.. people from all walks of likfe are going to cling to one god or another or cling to nothing at all in hopes of a better world.

 

I think the emphasis has always been more simply on virtues than on religions in Ultima? Don't remember there ever being a religious "system". Most religious systems in games are pretty unidimensional and silly anyway and it would be preferable not to have them!

 

I have always enjoyed worlds where magic is influenced by gods, and it's not just some elemental force devoid of any relationship to a higher power. DragonLance pulled this off very well, the three minor gods (of magic) granting the bulk of magical power, and the three major gods (of Good, Neutral, and Evil) granting the more clerical (true believer wisdom based) powers. Of course, the gods in DragonLance were also a part of the solar system - each one being a star or a moon or an entire constellation, depending on the power and importanance of the god. So should something happen to one of the gods, the skyline would change. This might include the absence of a star, or the sighting of a new planet, what have you.

But the key for me was that you had to use magic by playing by the rules, and the gods set the rules. So if you wanted healing powers, you had to follow one of the major gods (although there were of course exceptions to this) and be a servant to whatever it was they cared about. This helped give structure to roleplaying and storytelling and I have seen nothing of the released lore and conversations from RG and Tracy to suggest this won't be the case (to some degree) in SotA. Although the cleric type powers have not been discussed, and that's something I would really like to see seperated from the other magical powers of SotA.

 

I don't think we are in disagreement, what I am mainly getting at (to use your illustration) is that now that the players have built these sandcastles, how does the basic story of the sandbox change or slightly alter? So its not that players don't get to dictate what happens in the game at all, on the contrary it is that the players actions have to a degree changed the direction of the game based on the choices they have made.

 

Religions were not prevalent in UO, but Political parties and ambitions certainly were:

So you have four distinct factions here, each with its own purposes and ends. And instead of just being a side story, what if the world we played in reflected what actually happened when these four forces clashed over a period of time. I used the word "religion" here because of the story revealed to us thus far and its references to prophecy. In a world recovering from a cataclysmic event that no one can quite remember you will have a lot of people saying to avoid prophecy altogether, that maybe fulfilling these prophecies is what caused our mess in the first place. Others will want to follow the prophecies to their full extent, while others will merely want to profit on whatever other people are trying to accomplish.

 

Yeah, I agree - it's about human/magical beings divided into political factions. It is unclear as to what sense prophecy is being used as prophecy can take many forms - including non-religious ones, as they are most commonly used today.