Newsgroups: rec.games.frp,rec.games.frp.misc,alt.pub.dragons-inn,rec.games.frp.dnd From: Rannou@siegfried.vlsi.polymtl.ca (Patrick Rannou) Subject: Re: RE:Creating Gods -> Addendum Message-ID: References: <107o4lINNm28@matt.ksu.ksu.edu> <1992Jun1.150413.1023@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1992 01:26:56 GMT In article <1992Jun2.143742.1001@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> mark@trillian.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning) writes: I was asked in e-mail the question that, basically, "In your system, wouldn't the people just tend to switch between the gods and thus make them quickly increase in power?" I thought it warranted an answer here as well as in e-mail. Basically, the answer is no. If god A has five followers and god B has three but one of the followers of god A leaves A and goes to B, then A looses as many eps as he had gained. While god B gains the number of eps. Now, in Simulacron I, this would be 1000eps. But that is because in Simulacron I 1000eps is quite a large number of eps. In D&D this would be somewhere around 100,000eps or maybe 1,000,000eps. I don't know - since I don't play D&D or AD&D and have no idea how many eps it takes to reach a given level. Also, since (and this may have changed since I played D&D back in 1978) D&D isn't a skill based system - you have no way of allocating the eps out to the various skills. At any rate, that is the answer to the question which was asked. I also told the person that the reason gods are jealous gods is because if someone decides to leave them the god would much rather kill the follower (and thus retain the eps) than to let them go to another god. Hmmm.. I see a problem coming. If a god retains the ep for a dead follower, then over the course of a few millenia this god becomes incredibly powerful. Since a dead follower can't switch god, then the older a god gets, the more powerful he is, no? Then, even tough he loses all of his current followers, he still retains the eps from all those he killed (one hope with reason) in the past, or what? I think it's "or what", but I would like some more precisions... Why? Well, how do you think you would feel if an undead creature sucked out enough eps from your character to lower your character by say, five levels? I know I'd be kind of miffed and I'd do anything I could think of (even kill the creature if possible) to prevent such a thing from happening. The same holds true of the gods. This is also why the gods have fights. Some god starts taking followers away from another god and soon you have a war starting. Ciao. I can see why a god would kill a follower to PREVENT my followers from perceiving that they could just all decide to switch to another god, thus protecting my eps at the sacrifice of the tiny amount of eps that was in that particular character I just killed, but anything else is uncromprehensible to me without further clarifications. Or maybe the eps from dead followers "dissolves over a long period of time", following a 1/(exponential) curve: some of it dissolves very fast, but then it dissolves slower and slower, until you get to be a tiny tiny god any adventurer can kill off and you get to live like that for near eternity... THAT is wrse than death! (Oh, by the way, when a god DO die, what happen to it? Does it have a soul like a human? I a human in your game has a soul, where does it go after death? If it goes to the god powerbase, then when the god dies, what happens to all these souls? etc... I.E. do you make your game work in a "oblivion" (when the soul is destroyed, you're DEAD. That's FINAL.), in a "recycling" (the energy in the soul goes back to the prime plane, and you effectively get reincarnation), or in a "eternal" (the soul will always go somewhere, say to the "gods of gods", or whatever) mode ??? Does the game mechanics allow for these 3 modes to exist/coexist ??? Need to know. Paradak.