Kevin's Watch

Oooh, shiny. Recycled deities. I always felt like Erd never got enough face time. I'm sure I can adapt him to an Idols metaphor. And if Jove is around too, maybe we can form some kind of temporary alliance.

You know, before I'm forced to destory her utterly.

Jove wasn't the goddess of earth.
She was the goddess of wealth and trade.
She traveled the earth.
Hence, she walked all over you.
hehehehe.

Lest anyone think I've forgotten this, I'm planning to flesh out a few things this weekend then look at setting things moving. Just got to stop myself procrastinating by reading articles about things people do to avoid working.

God I hate working on this map. Hate it. Just don't think the game will work without one.

Edit: Ugh, it just looks terrible. Awful.

This is how the map looks right now. I scrapped large portions and went over again in a different style; it's still very basic and very bare. I'm not sure it really gives enough impression of size, either. The City fits into a smaller area than that covered by the label, btw - it's all on the island.

Looks fine to me. It's a good deal better than my maps were before Av took over.

It's slowly getting better. I still think the text and some of the icons are making the place look smaller than it should.

To see just how far this map has come, here's my first attempt:

Map v0

And here's the current version:

Map vWhatever

I am still not sure if those villages will stay on the final map.

One last point I would like feedback on. How do you all feel about the Defeat criteria I used? Do you think it might be too easy/hard to defeat another player?

Taking a step back to story stuff (instead of rules mechanics), if all of your followers die... you're gone. If all but one of your followers die, and that one is really zealous... you might be unable to act (even give commands) but you would still exist somehow. And if that follower managed to convince others of your true godliness, and they began to believe... it might be possible for you to resume action.

Honestly, it might be possible for some whiney-ass emo kid, generations after all of your followers had died, to dig up some writings and start believing in you anyway. But that would really be a new idol based on what that whiney emo kid thought you were like, not really you anymore.

Taking that back to the game mechanic part... how many actual followers does it take to have 1 faith unit, or whatever they're called? And as a game master, are you declaring that such a number, while still receiving communications from its idol, would stop believing in the reality of its god? My answer to that would be "no". If you're still able to communicate with your followers, then they should continue believing in you as long as there's enough belief to allow you to communicate. It might not be fun to play, at that point, but I'd say that you don't NECESSARILY cease to exist that way. Unless you're declaring so for gameplay reasons and not "this is how reality would flow" reasons.

I find it really hard to answer until I see the game in action. To be safe, though, I'd recommend keeping a few failsafes up your sleeve, some global event that would bring players back in if the last player, say, couldn't reach the Heart in a set number of moves (the only thing worse than an easy victory being a stalemate). I'm thinking something like a cataclysm that would eliminate everyone and make the field fallow for a couple generations.

Goat, I can see your point there about being able to come back. I guess what I worried about a little was the likelihood that a player could repeatedly drop down to 1 then recover and never actually drop out. Could be that the option of killing their followers balances that enough.

And Syl, I'll definately bear that kind of thing in mind.

So, we already know where the City of Angels is? Isn't that where the heart of the main god is?

What are the lighthouse things?

Those are the Towers of the Faithless, the first defence.

I'm Murrin wrote:Goat, I can see your point there about being able to come back. I guess what I worried about a little was the likelihood that a player could repeatedly drop down to 1 then recover and never actually drop out. Could be that the option of killing their followers balances that enough.

More than that, consider the liklihood that such a player would be interested in continuing to play that character.

Option 1) the character isn't interested in winning, and is finding pleasure in playing another style that is fine with communication only. You probably don't want to nuke the character then.

Option 2) the player is interested in winning, and being so puny would likely cause me to suicide the character and roll up a new one, just to have a fighting chance. (Plus, getting curb-stomped that hard probably demonstrates that the initial character idea wasn't a viable winner. So the player would hopefully resolve the moral conflict for you.)

Oh, and there's one other thing that won't be in the official rules but should be understood: The GM's name is Murrin. The GM does not exist in-game. There is no character representing the GM that the players can refer to. Other GMs may have taken the immersion-breaking GM-insertion that arose first in Pantheon and embraced it and made it part of the game, but it just isn't appropriate in this setting.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of [Syl Emo] as having had the GM be in the game, and then only on Acro 2.0, where it made sense to.

The rest of us just get by with NPCs.

AllFather has been in-game, on the rare occasion.

Yeah, Xar was the exception. Even though he didn't exactly want to.

Tha'ts my point. People started talking about "the allfather" in-game during Pantheon 2, when there really wasn't a place for it (it was mostly Creator doing it, IIRC). It became so prevalent, though, that Xar had to just go along with it, and eventually made it part of the story.