Favorite "Homeric" RPG or Setting

[SJB]

Yeah, D&D alignment isn't really a thing we can apply to Honeric gods and heroes.

Quite the contrary in my view!

I’m pretty sure that Michael Moorcock was influenced by Robert Graves’s tendentious masterpiece The Greek Myths. That in turn was based on a century of scholarship that wrestled with the problem of evil in the classics. It’s still a very live debate with the passage quoted often at issue.

The estimable Roger G-S long since made the case (tongue-in-cheek) for taking Gygax at his word.

E. Gary Gygax, Social Psychologist

For my 100th post please allow me to cross the streams of my professional and hobby lives. Gygax's view of values and morality, Players' H...

rolesrules.blogspot.com

Of course, there’s no right or wrong gaming answer here.

 

[Aldarc]

Quite the contrary in my view!

I don't see the need to shove alignment where it isn't needed or wanted, especially if the OP said that they think is worth applying.

I’m pretty sure that Michael Moorcock was influenced by Robert Graves’s tendentious masterpiece The Greek Myths. That in turn was based on a century of scholarship that wrestled with the problem of evil in the classics. It’s still a very live debate with the passage quoted often at issue.

None of this demonstrates that Alignment is something worth applying to Homeric gods and heroes in roleplaying. It simply means that modern scholars have struggled with reconciling pre-modern values, virtues, and moral codes with their own.

The estimable Roger G-S long since made the case (tongue-in-cheek) for taking Gxgax at his word.

E. Gary Gygax, Social Psychologist

For my 100th post please allow me to cross the streams of my professional and hobby lives. Gygax's view of values and morality, Players' H...

rolesrules.blogspot.com

There is no need to turn Gygax's dubious morality into pseudo-science.

 

[aia_2]

Hear me out on this one:

The key Homeric elements are:

1. Heroic warrior culture.
2. Civilisation based on city states (points of light).
3. Society based on maritime interchange, including violent plundering.
4. Immanent deity.

It i may amend these points, i'd rather put them in a different order (assuming them from the most important down):
1. Deities with a deep and strong background (founded over centuries of myths) fighting among factions
2. Immanent deities (namely, one of the battlegrounds of their fight is the human world and humans are tools to reach their goals to their eyes)
3. Heroic warrior culture and strong tradition of lore and myths (where this culture drains its strenght)

...the social and economic features of ancient Greece were important but not in the light of this analysis...

 

[SJB]

It i may amend these points, i'd rather put them in a different order (assuming them from the most important down):
1. Deities with a deep and strong background (founded over centuries of myths) fighting among factions
2. Immanent deities (namely, one of the battlegrounds of their fight is the human world and humans are tools to reach their goals to their eyes)
3. Heroic warrior culture and strong tradition of lore and myths (where this culture drains its strenght)

...the social and economic features of ancient Greece were important but not in the light of this analysis...

Amend away! I was thinking of the socio-economic in the context of porting Homeric Greece into Beowulf. That game is based around the heroes sailing from quest to quest. It struck me that what works for Baltic/Irish Sea/North Atlantic could be re-skinned for Aegean/Mediterranean.

 

[pemerton]

A challenge for Homeric RPGing is how to handle the gods. In traditional D&D-ish RPGing the GM has a lot of authority over the gods; in a setting where the gods intervene a lot, that creates a risk of heavily GM-driven or even railroaded play.

A real strength of Agon is how it handles this, distributing authority over brining the gods into the fiction, and hence resolution, across players and GM.

 

[Reynard]

A challenge for Homeric RPGing is how to handle the gods. In traditional D&D-ish RPGing the GM has a lot of authority over the gods; in a setting where the gods intervene a lot, that creates a risk of heavily GM-driven or even railroaded play.

A real strength of Agon is how it handles this, distributing authority over brining the gods into the fiction, and hence resolution, across players and GM.

I was actually thinking about this in relation to D&D, and I thought a cleric subclass called "Blessed" or "Favored" could be an interesting take. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, a lot of gifts the gods bestow upon their favorites sound quite a lot like spells. So what if there was a subclass where essentially the PLAYER in the guise of the god still had spells to.use but the CHARACTER wasn't casting them. It would be an action economy nightmare of course, but it might be interesting.

 

[ThrorII]

Mutants & Masterminds?

Mazes & Minotaurs

 

[pemerton]

I was actually thinking about this in relation to D&D, and I thought a cleric subclass called "Blessed" or "Favored" could be an interesting take. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, a lot of gifts the gods bestow upon their favorites sound quite a lot like spells. So what if there was a subclass where essentially the PLAYER in the guise of the god still had spells to.use but the CHARACTER wasn't casting them. It would be an action economy nightmare of course, but it might be interesting.

Agon is mechanically much lighter than D&D, although it has some intricate elements (if you know Marvel Heroic RP, there are some resemblances at a high level, in terms of players spending resources to build their dice pools, with the result of the pool being "keep the best two", and all checks being opposed ones).

For players, they can invoke a Bond with a god (add a d12 to their pool) or Divine Favour (add a d4 to their pool that adds to their best two dice). Divine Favour requires that the action be within the god's sphere. The rules are explicit that the player has the final word here (and also that table consensus should be typical).

Each island begins with Signs of the Gods, which are oracles/omens that the players have to interpret. There is no correct interpretation - rather, the players, via their interpretation, set their own "success conditions" for how they relate to the gods. (And of course a good island is designed so that you can't please all the gods all the time.) When the PCs leave the island, the GM discusses with them how they pleased and angered the gods, and this is all marked on a chart (the Vault of Heaven). Pleasing the gods both (i) replenishes Divine Favour and (ii) brings the campaign towards an end, as when a certain number of constellations are filled (by pleasing the same god three times) the PCs reach their homeland. And angering a god accrues Wrath, which gives the GM a bonus die to put into their pool when they roll to oppose the PCs.

It's a nice design because it uses the notorious fickleness of the gods as the fictional overlay for a nice distribution of authority between players and GM over how resources are accrued and spent by the players.

 

[aia_2]

I was actually thinking about this in relation to D&D, and I thought a cleric subclass called "Blessed" or "Favored" could be an interesting take. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, a lot of gifts the gods bestow upon their favorites sound quite a lot like spells. So what if there was a subclass where essentially the PLAYER in the guise of the god still had spells to.use but the CHARACTER wasn't casting them. It would be an action economy nightmare of course, but it might be interesting.

I know nothing about Agon but i know pretty well the homeric setting... It is really hard to use a character in such a setting without any "externality" coming from a god... It might be worth thinking to have an homeric game where the characters are lesser gods or demigods, the game could be more manageable considering then that the gods are NPC interacting with the characters.

 

[Aldarc]

I was actually thinking about this in relation to D&D, and I thought a cleric subclass called "Blessed" or "Favored" could be an interesting take. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, a lot of gifts the gods bestow upon their favorites sound quite a lot like spells. So what if there was a subclass where essentially the PLAYER in the guise of the god still had spells to.use but the CHARACTER wasn't casting them. It would be an action economy nightmare of course, but it might be interesting.

Have you checked out the Magic the Gathering setting Theros for D&D 5e? Players can get divine benefits based on their "piety" score.