@shylarah G'day! Welcome to the disfunctional family that is the story of our pantheon.
I see you are another of those strange creatures who puts two spaces after periods as if you're on a typewriter >.>
(No judgement here. Kho has a system of line breaks that I have yet to decipher.)
As I don't exactly know what a deity rp is, I'm not certain why that would imply a lot of chars. And upon reading the rest of the replies, I think it's...you're playing gods, of course, but you also have allowed them free reign. Interesting. I've played a couple gods, but generally they are limited, and don't take center stage. Though there was that one time we let a ritual to create one finish...and then the one time my char turned two people into one deity by accident....
Sprawling worlds are great. The rp that just finished for the evening has been around for three years, the group in some form for far longer -- since before I found them, in fact. We have nations and individuals and deities and religions, though this campaign the gods are less involved than the last one set 200 years earlier in the same world. ^.^ But they never went about creating things at the drop of a hat.
The idea of creating new chars whenever and just constantly writing collaborative fiction appeals to me. Honestly, it's what I go for with my rps in general. I'm not sure how this would differ so much from my general rp as I have always been happy to shift focus, let people head offscreen, skip uninteresting intervals (or overly risque ones!), and I often play multiple characters, though there is usually a solid story throughout the thing. [...]
tl;dr: This is basically a big set of collaborative stories, not a single adventure or even much of a game.Okay, so, Divinus is a 'diety' RP only insofar as our main cast are gods that play an active part in the world. It doesn't imply a lot of characters per se, it simply allows people to write at the level of gods, heroes, mortals, or otherwise with some transfer between. Versatility! A better description for it would be a sandbox RP where you can add to it or reasonably interact with anything in the world. We've got demigods, we've got heroes, we've got regular-ass people, and we've even got monsters. One neat thing is that our history is so early that any new nations that you want to write and develop are essentially established from scratch. There is still a lot of undefined land on our primary planet of Galbar alone.
The big thing to understand is that just about everyone here (by coincidence or otherwise) is not really playing for the D&D-esque goal of levelling up their character to be powerful for the sake of powerful goals. I believe we're all here because we like making cool stories. It's the prime -- if tacit -- directive behind almost all decisions made. That's not to say that you can't do the same thing in a tabletop RPG, just that it's the greater focus here. I think that was what you were describing, but just about everyone has reins on their own story threads and the unexpected stuff crops up when they collide with one another, rather than a GM contriving something to throw a spanner in the works. It's unpredictable, in an incredibly fun way.
It gets especially fun to pick up an element that another player has created and throw your own touches in. The main race on Galbar is one I created, and their early development was heavily influenced by the actions of the gods around them. I wrote short one-off posts describing those events from the eyes of the race with some disposable characters and that was picked up by other players when they made new characters from that race. It's great!
Beyond that, it's not quite like regular RPs and mechanics-heavy tabletop RPGs because the limit on doing things is constrained by only two mechanics; might points and levels. With might and levels, we're limited on just how much we can get away with as well as having an objective measure when weighing up two powerful things. This has come in especially useful when some players have either used their extra knowledge of physics and materials or simply their imagination to develop what would be considered in other games as an I win button. Here, might is the bottom line. We can be indulgent as we like about detail, but it's all flavour compared to the might used. Of course, artistic licence is encouraged to bend the might rules, especially for the sake of the prime directive above. Hell, we had upwards of six avatars of gods fighting against one other avatar but stretched it out for the sake of fun. The GMs here are the arbitrators if all else fails.
There are some ancillary established rules, but those don't interfere too much either and are broken all the time.
Feel free to stick around. I warn you, if you lurk too much, you might accidentally convince yourself to join in with a new demigod, hero, or something ;)