Questions About Gods, The Devout, Atheism, RPM and Religious Rituals

[Minuteman37]

Hi SJGames! I have a few question concerning religions in RPGs.

Question One: How do you go about role playing a a religious person? Most of the time when I see people playing cleric type characters it's just a way to gain power without suffering the character restrictions involved with being a wizard type character.

Question Two: As an Atheist I view the world in a secular fashion that forgoes any sort of supernatural force and I have a hard time picturing a setting with actual active deities that A want to have relationships with a significant number of the populous and B, are able and willing to provide tangible support that would be useful to an adventuring party while still resembling an historical period in any but the most superficial level.

Question Three: I'm looking for mechanical systems to represent divine magic in a medieval setting and after having experience with Divine favor and Finding it too powerful to really give to any sizable portion of a religious population. Since then I've had the idea of using RPM for divine magic. Common priests would just lack any sort of magery and the ritual adept advantage, but even then there still doing demonstrably supernatral things that can indeed assist PCs.

[smurf]

You ensure that there are disadvantages that need to be played in order to gain powers. Must pray, must eat a certain diet etc.

"No Vegan diet, No Vegan Powers" Vegan Police (Scott Pilgrim vs the World)

I'm also an atheist and I suppose you are going to have to suspend your 'disbelief'. Terry Prachet disc world series had several, is what humourous, gods.

There are a few ways of doing clerical powers. With some form of ritual magic but if you want them to go all 'Tim' you may want to use Powers with the clerical limitation.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by smurf

You ensure that there are disadvantages that need to be played in order to gain powers. Must pray, must eat a certain diet etc.

"No Vegan diet, No Vegan Powers" Vegan Police (Scott Pilgrim vs the World)

Oh no I understand restrictions that should be placed on players who are part of a certain faith, I'm more talking about things you can't really make a player do without just playing his character for him. Like for example wouldn't someone blessed with great world changing power by an omnipotent, omniscient deity who has some sort of heaven equivalent be proselytizing left and right? I'm sure if the flying spaghetti Monster gave me a few level of divine favor and a duty lax enough that I have the freedom to go grave robbing on a consistent bases you couldn't get me to shut up about how great the guy was.

Originally Posted by smurf

I'm also an atheist and I suppose you are going to have to suspend your 'disbelief'. Terry Prachet disc world series had several, is what humourous, gods.

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

Question One: How do you go about role playing a a religious person?

The way I usually do it is that the religion is what provides the character's interpretation of the world. This is similar to the way that people with very strong political or philosophical beliefs tend to view everything in ways that accord with their beliefs. Playing religion as having a similar kind of effect on characters' behaviour is an approximation, but as someone who doesn't really understand religious feelings, it's something I can do, and it seems to work for game purposes, at least a bit.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

Question One: How do you go about role playing a a religious person? Most of the time when I see people playing cleric type characters it's just a way to gain power without suffering the character restrictions involved with being a wizard type character.

That's because they're playing D&D.

Question Two: As an Atheist I view the world in a secular fashion that forgoes any sort of supernatural force and I have a hard time picturing a setting with actual active deities that A want to have relationships with a significant number of the populous and B, are able and willing to provide tangible support that would be useful to an adventuring party while still resembling an historical period in any but the most superficial level.

I bet that's not true. Do you ever "knock on wood?" When someone gets frustrated with their computer and start to attack their monitor, do you find that incomprehensible? Do you ever beg your car to just start on a cold Sunday morning? Or would you find someone who did so mentally certifiable?

We personify forces all the time. If you start to collect those personifications into a single world-view, you begin to see how magical thinking works. There's a way you should talk to your car on a cold Sunday morning, and there is a proper way you can punish your computer for misbehaving, and so on.

But you're also, I expect, an ethical person, and you believe particular things. Perhaps you believe in social justice, affirmative action and in sustainable development. Perhaps you believe in individual responsibility, freedom of opportunity and that regulation inevitably slides into tyranny. Or perhaps you believe that we've lost our way, thrown away too many traditions and you believe in bringing those back. Or perhaps you believe that we're chained to our past and we need to shed those shackles so we can finally enter a technological utopia, unfettered by previous prejudices.

Whatever morality you subscribe to, you probably have a lot of reasons as to why. You believe that it is real, and that it is important. You may or may not spam your facebook feed with tracts about it, but if some kid asked you what the most important things to know where, you'd have a few aphorisms to offer him, things like "In the end, everyone is equal, and we're all together in this struggle to keep the world alive," or "In the end, you need to be a strong adult that others can learn that they can rely on," or "The clothes make the man," or whatever.

You're also a member of a community, certainly the GURPS community. You know our canon (the GURPS books), a who's who of forumites and GURPS writers, and you know a variety of campaigns. You also know, more-or-less, what topics are verboten, or where to tread carefully, and what topics have already been discussed to death.

The "real" cleric is often a mixture of all three of these. He is someone well-versed in the esoteric elements of the supernatural world-view. But more importantly, he is a leader in his community, and he is an activist in regards to his morality (which is generally a widely held morality in the context of his community). He is a leader and an activist, a man who guides people onto the right and proper path.

There is a reason many religious types argue that atheism is, itself, a religion. What they mean is not that atheists believe in a ridiculous supernatural world view (well, they do often mean that, but they don't JUST mean that). They mean that atheists subscribe to a particular world-view, community and often a morality (one heavily focused on rationality) and that they often proselytize these views. That is, if I asked you, in your opinion, if I should go to church or not, you would probably say that I shouldn't, and have many well-thought-out reasons why I should not. You might have some passages from some persuasive Richard Dawkins book to better explain a finer point. You would be able to tell me how to live my life.

That's what a cleric does.

Question Three: I'm looking for mechanical systems to represent divine magic in a medieval setting and after having experience with Divine favor and Finding it too powerful to really give to any sizable portion of a religious population. Since then I've had the idea of using RPM for divine magic. Common priests would just lack any sort of magery and the ritual adept advantage, but even then there still doing demonstrably supernatral things that can indeed assist PCs.

Traditionally, the results of faith are either very subtle and common, or rare and spectacular. Moses can part the Red Sea, but you can expect to have a small coincidence protect you. These usually go together, and Divine Favor actually reflects this pretty nicely.

[Minuteman37]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I bet that's not true.

You bet what's not true? I'm not understanding were your coming from with this statement in fact I'm unsure what "that" even means in the context of your post.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

Oh no I understand restrictions that should be placed on players who are part of a certain faith, I'm more talking about things you can't really make a player do without just playing his character for him. Like for example wouldn't someone blessed with great world changing power by an omnipotent, omniscient deity who has some sort of heaven equivalent be proselytizing left and right? I'm sure if the flying spaghetti Monster gave me a few level of divine favor and a duty lax enough that I have the freedom to go grave robbing on a consistent bases you couldn't get me to shut up about how great the guy was.

Pay less attention to the particular supernatural world-view and more to the community and the moral/ethical elements, but especially the community.

Imagine for a moment a catholic priest that slept with hookers and gambled and got totally drunk several times a week. He would face a huge backlash from his community. A basketball player who does that might see soe complaints, but most people expect rock stars or athletes to act that way. People expect priests to be a paragon of their chosen morality, though. In fact, you often see this in political debates: The political left, in the US, loves to play "gotcha" on the political right with moral questions because the political right seems to hold itself to a higher (religious) moral standard. I have seen the same in reverse when it comes to scientific/rational standards, like if a Democrat donor is found to be an anti-vaxer, pundits on the right will smirk about the Democrats being "the reality-based party" and really play up this anti-vaxer thing in a way that the left couldn't do for the American right. Why? "Hypocrisy."

The way to "make someone play their religious character right" is to surround them with a community that looks to them for moral leadership. Even if you're an atheist, you've certainly seen things like this among activists, or even among atheists (an atheist who didn't believe in evolution and argued that the world was flat would probably be more reviled by atheists than a Christian who argued the same, because there's more to being atheist in most atheist communities than just not believing in God).

The reason most D&D clerics don't come across as very religious is that D&D characters are typically murder hobos. The cleric never has to stand for his moral judgment, never faces inspection by his community, never has to guide others. He just hits monsters on the head with a mace and casts a healing spell on the fighter.

The "community" part is a bit hard, perhaps, to draw a parallel to, though. Atheists don't typically meet once a week to discuss being an atheist. They might have some forums that they frequent, or a reddit board where they talk, but they might not. They might just decide they don't believe in God and that's that. This is becoming more true of many things: We have less connection than we used to, and this is especially true if you compare us to, for example, medieval Europe. The village or the tribe or the neighborhood, was vastly more important then than it is now. If you've been to church regularly, you might understand it better, but it's worth reading up on some literature regarding the communal nature of most religions. I'm listening to a podcast on religions in the ancient mediterranean, and it often returns to this point. The reason heresy is such a big deal isn't because People Are Wrong About The Bible, but because they threaten the community that the faithful are trying to build.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

You bet what's not true? I'm not understanding were your coming from with this statement in fact I'm unsure what "that" even means in the context of your post.

Your difficulty understanding a supernatural world-view. On a certain level, a supernatural world-view is just how people perceive the world. It's an artifact of the mind. You can think of it as an intellectual equivalent to an optical illusion. You have the processing software to see a face on a paper, or on a mountain, or in the surface of the moon. Likewise, people have the capacity to see human traits behind the random events in their life.

Given this, if you see human-like agency behind, say, a storm striking, then you can negotiate with that human-like agency (just like you can negotiate with people). Given that people today believe this, and that we're definitely in a historical period, you can extrapolate what a historical period would look like.

[Minuteman37]

So I suppose to foster religious roleplay in my players I need to submerge them into there religion as a social institution and not just character background? I getting the impression this is one of those things were as a GM I get out of it what I put into it. Correct?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Minuteman37

So I suppose to foster religious roleplay in my players I need to submerge them into there religion as a social institution and not just character background? I getting the impression this is one of those things were as a GM I get out of it what I put into it. Correct?

That's my experience, yes. Most people who complain that D&D "lacks role-playing" are usually complaining about a lack of a social context. If you have a game where people will slaughter monsters without stopping to ask whether those monsters are good or bad or how they are motivated probably do so because how those monsters are motivated doesn't matter. The game itself treats them as stat-block loot-piñatas. Likewise, if nobody cares that your half-elven warrior is, in fact, the lost prince of his realm, it might be because this will never actually impact the game.

If you were running a Game of Thrones knock-off, however, monsters stop being loot-piñatas and you're more worried about how those monsters impact your local political context, and stumbling across the lost prince of the Elven realm is a really big deal.

Likewise, if you want the cultural, social and moral context of religion to matter, you need to actually make them impact the players, mechanically, in the game. Your game needs to be more about killing monsters and taking their stuff.

(That's not to say that killing monsters and taking their stuff is badwrongfun, it's just the wrong approach if you want to create deep discussions about religious philosophy, or whatever)