Dynamic Deity Populated Pantheon

[Legacy_henesua]

               For over a month I have been working on a new PW with some old friends. When working on my home brewed world, Arnheim, I enjoyed making use of The Krit's Dynamic Deity Populated Pantheon, so I am doing this again with the second coming of the Vives PW.

I have already rewritten a bit of the DDPP system for small extensions such as integration with all "religious classes" and adding a few small features like relationships between religons, but now I am on the verge of a major rewrite. The largest limitation of DDPP for what I am planning is that it doesn't work with a database.

In order to be truly dynamic, you need the ability for religions to rise and fall and evolve in real time without DM or builder interediaries to make it real. I want to code into this system the ability for players to invent new religions, and rather than have DMs and builders be the gate keepers deciding which religions are successful or not we will tracking a religions followers. We have yet to make a chart relating numbers of followers with different "power levels" for a religion so that this can be scripted, but I'm working on it.  Just as I did with Arnheim, all religious classes will have the ability in their class radial menu to attempt to convert others to their religion, and our database tracks followers of each religion.

I tell you all that in order to ask if anyone else out there has modified DDPP to use a DB rather than scripted initialization and local data. If so I'd appreciate hearing your experience so that I can learn from it.

A general discussion about the system is also welcomed. I am tempted to do a complete rewrite and so any discussion about it will be a great help to me.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 30 septembre 2013 - 10:42 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_ffbj]

               In the general discussion arena: I would make it so newer religions would be cults of existing religions.
For example they could focus on a particular aspect or lesser deity of their parent realigion.  There are plenty of examples in relation to our own world religions, to glean from, while at the same time establishing the undergirding philosophical outlook of the cult.  Using a mechanism such as current size and popularity of a religion as one criteria for which religions are most subject to cults forming, or even being allowed.  I would not let just any yahoo create their own religion for instance, though high level religious types could acquire cultist followers who were fanatically loyal for example.  Good luck with the rewrite.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               Cults:
I handled that in Arnheim with a new property of a religion: Parent. I used this to define the relationships between the 11 cults within "The Faith". This was enabled by defining a common parent "The Faith" and then linking all the cults to it. Doing this was easy since I was designing it all. How I enable cults to crop up dynamically I have not yet worked out, because it would require the founder of the religion to accurately define it. But if I decouple certain things from each religion such as Gods, Prophets, Taboos and core beliefs, I might be able to use those properties to parse which parent religion contains the cult. Anyway... still working on it, but I have the core property to make it work: parenthood.

With regards to controlling whether a cult can form or whether a PC can invent a religion, I won't be putting in hard limits. I prefer to model a system with tradeoffs for making particular choices and to see what balance that establishes. Since any yahoo in the real world can start a cult if they are charismatic enough, I look forward to seeing how this plays out in game.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

I am jotting down a few more notes for interested parties describing how I am evolving DDPP on my current project

 

- Instead of deities, each entry in the database represents a religion. each deity instead is an element of a deities list/collection.

- each religion has a new "deities" property which can include any number of deities from the deities list.

- there are a few types of religions (each of which is currently both a base religion, and  a "type" property of a religion - until i figure out which approach is better):

• Atheism: this religion type is antithetical to the divine, and thus any character loses powers gained by their religious class if they take on this belief. The point of this category is that the creature's cosmology rejects divine power. Its not a matter of disbelieving in the existence of divine beings (although this is possible and exemplified by New Atheism in the real world), but the core of atheism is the rejection of any divine influence upon your life.


• Animism: belief that the divine is inseparable from the world itself and everything in it.


• Polytheism: belief that the gods are the source of all divine power. all gods are believed to have divine power, although some are favored over others.


• Monotheism: belief in a single source of all divine power, which is personified in a divine being.


• Mysticism: belief that faith itself is a path to the divine. what the divine is varies per belief system.

- new "parent" property. so far this is just one parent per child while each parent can have multiple children, but I am starting to see the problems that object oriented systems pose when setting up a data structure, and not sure what to do about this in the long run. At present, the parent of a religion is considered "general" relative to the child, and the child is considered "specific" to the parent. Thus you can have cults inside of broader faiths, and yet they still are recognized as part of the same over all religion. This also allows for you to create a folk religion which no priests follow, and the pure religion which the priests follow, and thus the level of devotion held by a peasant can be measured based on whether they follow the folk religion, or the pure core of the religion. In general the system works great for religions which nest inside one another, but some religions do not work this way while still being related to one another. I may need a different property for related religions (example 1: judaism, christianity, islam are all related with similar prophets, general cosmology, and a chain of decent in history, but each stands completely independently from one another. example 2: Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic are parallel sects which each tried to dominate one another until they evolved in to independent religions with lots of similarities)

- new "enemies" property which is a collection of all other religions that are considered enemies of the religion. Enmity is not necessary reciprocal.

- new "priests" property which is a collection of all religious classes which may gain divine power from this religion.

 

I am considering a "leader type" property which would define which classes are recognized as leaders in the religion, but I'll probably leave this sort of thing to my "groups" system.