@VecMerry Christmas back to you! Winter's touch is staved off by your kind words.
I think we should all take this time, spend Christmas with our loved ones or however you'd like, and then come back reinvigorated and ready for whatever lies ahead.
Pah, in my case I say that there's no rest for the wicked. Over the next ten or so days I need to iron out the thoughts swirling around in my head and commit to writing some semblance of the new RP's intro and mechanics.
Currently I'm sold on the ideas of the Spheres (and with it, the tone, theme, and overall 'mood' that I'll try to set) and on the idea of moving all CS stuff onto a wiki. The prestige, MP, leveling/holy site, and timescale things are now standing at the forefront of things to address.
Alright. Rambling time!
I actually found this part to be a tad too gamey for the style we ended up going for. It was thematic to keep technological advancement for Teknall and co, but the arguments we had smacked of avoiding players playing to win the game rather than telling stories. Closely guarded technological advantage is the go-to way to justify steamrolling half a world map in the space of two or three posts. I would propose going about it a different way for next time. I have two ideas:
1. We can keep the technological aesthetic in the hands of the GM and the turns. Rather than civilizations independently discovering things or being bestowed the knowledge by their gods, we can have the setting epoch displayed on the new turn posts, thus dictating what is widespread in the world now. We can start off in the stone age (or the bronze age because that might be more fun tbh) and advance as the turn pace requires. Exceptions can be made for one-off blessings, for example a god bestowing a limited collection of steel weapons for a devoted century of soldiers or something.
2. We pick a technological age for the setting and stick with it. I'm not saying we should make the entirety of Galbar stuck in the feudal age for thousands of years ala Middle Earth, but it may help us stay consistent to what we want to explore.
There are downsides to each here for sure. You can probably tell what the tradeoffs are without me laying them out.
Another problem still present is relative timescale. We had people dealing with mortals and civilizations growing at vastly different paces, which cause the progression of years to come to a massive screeching slowdown in the latter turns of MkII. The stop-gap solution of having a time window in the new turn posts certainly helped, but it didn't make the slow paced stories speed up any. One way to deal with this could be to cram together solutions 1 and 2 above in a way; The opening turns of the game could be reserved for long-term story stuff on the god and civilization level to establish mythology and early creations. As the turns progress, the time window advances less and narrows until its chugging along at a much more mortal pace in a technological age that we don't mind sticking around in for a while. There, we can explore mortal-scale stories and have the godly events happen at a similar pace. If we want to jazz things up, we can vote to do a timeskip of eighty or more years and work with a new era. We could narratively contrive such skips as a temporary period of peace decreed by the Bossman of the Spheres.
I find myself quite opposed to number 2. One of the most fascinating things to explore in these settings are the advancement of civilizations and the inherent struggle between man and nature, technology and progress versus magic and ancient tradition.
Number 1 makes a lot of sense, but the compromise you suggest resonates very well with me. What if I expand your general notion of technological epochs into something even more overarching, perhaps called Ages? I'm thinking that each Age could be perhaps 1-4 turns (unless we decide to have Ages supersede numbered turns altogether!) and have a general theme, a timescale, and a variable amount of MP handed out. For instance, the very first turn or two might be the Age of Creation, then there could be the Age of Myth, Dawn of Civilization, Age of Legend, etc.
Aside from just having cool names and giving me the ability to set timescales ahead of time so that everyone can plan accordingly, I'm thinking it might be interesting to say that the Age of Creation will span ten million years (that's if we want to use geological timescales; it could well be something like fifty days, if we want to be more Biblical) and that all gods get 10MP; however, this MP can't be used to create mortals or level up. And I liked how in Godspeed a holy site was useless unless it had mortal worshipers caring for it, which discourages using the initial 10MP for a holy site. This way, instead of starting with a measly 4MP in keeping with Divinus tradition and using it to level up, everyone will get a relatively hefty chunk so that they can make numerous largescale changes to the surface of Galbar and/or do things with the Sphere of their choice.
The Age of Myth might then span 3 or 4 turns, open up the possibility of creating heroes and life (albeit not civilizations; we're talking dragons and monsters and the sort), and grant a bit less MP.
I think it makes sense to frontload a lot of the MP into earlier turns, since when we have no creations we should be creating a lot of things. As it is, you get loads of MP in later turns once you've already got loads of creations, and that doesn't make much sense because your attention is probably best spent on writing about your preexisting creations more than on just making loads more that don't get developed.
Thoughts on Ages?
Also, I liked that Godspeed discouraged the hording of MP by making it to where you level up by
using a certain amount of MP to actually create things, rather than saving up MP to buy the next level. However, the net effect of that was that there was that everybody was always more or less the same level unless they stalled and carried a lot of MP over turns or invested an extraordinary amount into holy sites (which had MP caps to reduce such a thing). So since everybody was always more or less the same level, what was the point of levels? They didn't act as a useful power comparison between gods since everyone was about the same level; I think the only answer for their usefulness was that they helped determine MP income for future turns and gave us thresholds for the points at which gods were permitted to get additional domains and portfolios.
None of that seems necessary; I'm considering the possibility of abolishing god levels altogether. Kill the useless numbers, y'know. Might generation would then be universally determined by the Age, and perhaps it could be further increased on an individual level by holy sites and/or grants from Mr. Architect (read: plot purposes).
Thoughts on levels and MP generation? [@everyone]
