But doesn't this world building (because I do believe this IS world building) inform the way you play the various clergy that the players may meet? When the players have questions about these religions, does it not inform the dialogue that you present to them?
I don't see how this would constrict or limit creativity, as some have posed.
I hope it's OK if I take this in two stages.
First, about limits - which means, for the sake of discussion, I'll treat what I did as worldbuilding even though I don't think it is (that'll be the second stage). I don't think what I wrote up limits
my creativity. It does limit the creativity of my players, should one of them want to play a priest, theologian etc of one of these religions - eg if what I wrote down is (both at the table, and in the fiction) canonical, then the player is not free to have his/her PC truthfully contradict it.
Is that a problem? Not far upthread [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] posted something about this - I can't remember his words, but I glossed it as
fidelity to setting - and so I can restate the question as, "Is a constraint which requires the players to be true to the setting a problem?" I think some RPGers answer this question "No" (for them), and I tend to answer "Yes" (for me). (I've put in the brackets because, presumably, no one is worried about what other players at other tables prefer - we're talking about how we want to do it at our tables.)
I suspect my tastes are minority ones. But I also suspect perhaps not quite as minority as one might think just looking at the preponderance of setting material in RPG publishing.
There is also nuance, which is also relevant. For instance, upthread - again in the discussion with [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] - I distinguished different types or "degrees"/"levels" of fidelity to setting. I'm currently GMing and playing in Burning Wheel games set in GH. I have a stack of GH material (original folio, original boxed set, FtA boxed set, the Roger E Moore reboot, the 3E reboot). My GM has some maps and notes he downloaded onto a tablet from some wiki hosted by I-don't-know-who. But we both use the setting in much the same way: it establishes general geography, gives us some names for stuff (like places, some important personages, etc), gives us some tropes (Suel mages, hidden pyramids in the Bright Desert, etc), and the like.
This doesn't limit the sort of creativity we want to exercise in play, because in fact it gives us ways of describing the moves we want to make. For instance, there is a well-established pulp-type, S&S-type trope of "desert tribesmen" (think anything from Conan through Tintin through Lawrence of Arabia). So when my GM's PC (playing in my game) was stuck in the Bright Desert he wanted to find some desert folk to help him. But he didn't declare his action in the generic terms "This is a S&S-ish game, and desert tribesmen are a S&S trope, so I want to meet some." Rather, he said "Everyone knows that Suel Nomads are thick as thieves in the Bright Desert: I want to make a Circles check to meet some."
This is an example of high-level worldbuilding enhancing the play experience, and facilitating creativity, by establishing a vocabulary in which genre-relevant, fun and trope-y moves can be made using a vocabulary and a set of shared conceptions established by the world building.
But to work it also depends on some further things: the
player needs to know the stuff (so it can't be that the presence of Suel nomads in the Bright Desert is a secret reserved to the GM); and it depends on the worldbuilding being high-level. Too much granularity - eg the GM has plotted the location of every Suel encampment in the Desert - and then instead of a pithy action declaration with the goal of establishing a fun, trope-y moment, we get a hexcrawl to find the hex where the GM established a nomad camp, which wasn't what the player was looking for at all!
The same sort of thing could come up in relation to theology. My PC (in my GM's game) is a knight of a holy order, and has a modest rank in Doctrine skill. In due course I'm probably going to want to make up doctrine for my god, and do stuff with it. I wouldn't be that impressed if, at that point, my GM pointed me to something he'd written up which already spelled out all the doctrines of my god, leaving me with no room to play my own conception of my character.
Which takes me to the second stage: why I think my theology document is not worldbuilding. I'll copy and sblock-paste a little bit, which will (I hope) help explain this:
[sblock]In CY 260 a young thinker and cleric of Allitur in these new lands wrote a treatise on government. Pholtus called his work
The Theocracy. In that work he argued that rule should be by those with the best knowledge of the just and the god, and that these were those who contemplated it daily, ie the clergy. The bishops are to be appointed by the Supreme Prelate (who, knowing the good, is best able to judge the worth of potential appointees), and in turn, on the death of the Supreme Prelate, elect a successor from their number (for as a college they certainly have the capacity to know which of them is most meritorious). Pholtus also wrote on the nature of justice, arguing that that behaviour is just which is in accordance with the law. The law, in turn, is that which is eternal and necessary, ie the rational relations holding between the forms. These relations are able to be known by pondering those forms, which in turn can be known by looking to the essences of the empirical objects that are their copies. Thus, the law is imminent in the world. The heavenly bodies are exemplars of this - eternal and divine law in action. Justice, authority and punishment are likewise aspects of the imminent law. . . .
Theologically, the ideas promulgated by Trithereon are developments of the ideas set forth in
The Theocracy. In reflecting on Pholtus's injunction to discover the forms, and the relations between them, by studying the real objects which copy them, Trithereon objected that essences are not in fact properties of objects, but rather of mortal concepts, which mortals then apply to objects when they think and talk (this pragmatic idea has its origins in other philosophers of Aerdy, whose influence had travelled into Nyrond and Urnst). Trithereon then argued that, as it is the concepts of mortal thinkers that give real structure to the world, so mortal thinkers are the highest worldly thing. The divinity, in turn, is that thing that created mortals that is outside the empirical world. Thus, concluded Trithereon, no individual, in so far as they are a user of concepts and thus a shaper of the world, is subject to any mortal government but their own.
This radical doctrine has been accepted by few (and certainly by no figures of authority) in its totality. The two natural responses have been to deny the status of the peasantry as thinkers, or (by the more liberal) to maintain that the peasantry, by their own executive act, have subordinated themselves to the government of their superiors. Nevertheless, it was influential in generating unrest in the County, and establishing such feelings on an intellectual basis, and it certainly had some influence on Nyrond's eventual decision (in CY 450) to withdraw its troops from Urnst.[/sblock]
Now I'm talking about a campaign that ran from 1990 to the end of 1997, so recollection is inevitably hazy. But theological questions of this sort simply didn't come up in that game. And the stuff that I wrote doesn't really make any difference to how the clergy are presented, as it is already grounded in the basic presentation of these deities in the GM materials (eg Pholtus's clergy are LN and stern; Tritherion is CG and preaches freedom; St Cuthbert clocks people on the head with a cudgel if he thinks they're being too intellectualist; etc). The staff in the sblock is just something that ended up being for my own amusement.
A later campaign with the same group
did integrate metaphysical/theological questions (about the relationship between divine promises, karma, freedom and obligation) into play. But precisely because of that, it wouldn't have worked for me to just read out answers to the questions from something I wrote up unilaterally. The PCs in that game included a warrior monk; a martial arts monk of a rather intellectualist order; a fox in human form who had once been a ruler of an animal kingdom, but had broken certain laws and hence been sent down to earth as punishment; a middle-class warrior who was courting a noble dragon against the wishes of her sea lord and storm lord parents; and a younger cousin of a once-great house that had fallen on hard times but was trying to reestablish itself, who ended up outdoing his more prominent older cousin (also a PC) in marrying a wizard whom he rescued, and with her establishing a family line that (as was narrated in the "endgame" denouement of the campaign) ended up being the key to ensuring certain dangerous entities remained trapped in the voidal realm beyond time and space.
All those players had something to say about the metaphysical questions I mentioned, and views about how they should be resolved. This was the stuff - not the only stuff, but one important component of the stuff - of play.
I hope this example als helps illustrate of why I think that, if the GH theology I wrote up
had crossed over in to worldbuilding (because that sort of stuff actually had come up in play), then it would probably have had an unhappy limiting effect.
