Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9598399" data-attributes="member: 7045072">That's an awful lot of religious gooblygook for an RPG book that doesn't seem to have any impact on play.Secondly it sounds fundamentally uninteresting - afraid to be interesting even.  Sure there's Crystal Dragon Jesus and HIS followers fight with demon god of the abortion ladies ... but do we have to make it so boring? Super Good v. Pervert Evil. Yawn. I'd say it's morality for slow 8-year olds, but then the text gets too pervy for 8-year olds. Why do people with the political stance of this author always jump to pervy stuff in their RPG books? I don't want to sit around the table and talk about that kinda thing with my players - who does?I'm all for sacking temples in my RPGs but giving moral certainty to players hacking up priests on the altar and stealing the candlesticks for XP is some 1920's blather. Plus it's poor game design for an RPG. Heck it's not even very medieval - there's so many interesting, gameable things about medieval Christianity ... this ain't it.  Leave these things open, let in ambiguity because, all politics aside (and there's absolutely a ton of politics in this argel-bargel, which is unavoidable) ambiguity provides options and player choice.  Don't tell me about the spiritual meaning of every Crystal Dragon Jesus hat, give me new spells, or stat up those hats for when my PCs steal them.  Don't just say "evil abortion witches are bad." I want a demon witch baby class and spell lists because as bad as they might or might not be the option should be there. Having evil is fine, but make it seductive evil. This is especially true if one is a Christian or wants Christian themes ... The Temptation of Christ is pretty much core Christian myth. From a designer standpoint evil is seductive because what RPGs still do better then video games is respond to player choice and allow the unexpected.  9 out of 10 players might not want to sell their souls to a devil for actual in game benefit, but give them the choice and make it tempting (in my experience it's been more like 1 in 5 refuse and usually then only to try to cheat on the deal). So while I don't like the politics here (but mostly based on this dude's social media), what I'm seeing makes me very doubtful of the design. This all sounds very 90's RPG and old VtM books are easy to find if I want to read edge-lord fluff about religion.  One can be interesting with religion and Christian themes even. 1984's Dragonraid always sounded fascinating with its scriptural spell casting, and Dogs in the Vineyard actually manages supernatural good and evil battling over souls in a compelling way. Pendragon has also always handled these themes well.</blockquote>

Verification