Tuesday 9 October 2001

Pic of the day: With all due respect for the Virtues, Ultima IX Ascension may not be the best (only the prettiest) attempt at ...

Roleplaying religion

I'm not talking about the general hypocrisy which is so often associated with established religion. No, no. I'm talking about role-playing games, and the way they deal with religion. Frankly, I think there is room for lots of improvement.

I mean, you have the AD&D style role-playing with its clerics, who for some reason can't use edged weapons but who think it's perfectly OK to bash someone's head in with a heavy mace. They pray to some unrealistic deity for spells, and that's pretty much it. I'll leave this sorry parody of priesthood alone, giving it all the comment it deserves.

Then there's this newfangled theological role-playing game, In Nomine, where people play angels or demons vying for supremacy over mankind. But this again is too far from the human experience. How about a game based loosely on a real religion?

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The closest I have seen is the computer role-playing game Darklands, from MicroProse. Unlike most such games, it is not based on a tolkienesque Middle-Earth brimming with orcs and elves and halflings. Instead, it is based on late medieval Germany. And instead of magic, there is religion. The playing characters call upon saints to perform miracles or strengthen them in their fight. This is a truly intriguing system, which I shall describe in some more detail.

The power of religion in Darklands rests upon saints, and the ability of the character to call upon them for aid. There are two components needed to succeed in such a call: Virtue and divine favor. Virtue is long-term, divine favor is short-term.

Virtue can be won through years of religious living (during character creation) or through deeds of great sacrifice for the faith. Such actions could be a major donation of money, or escorting pilgrims, or fighting against armed witches and demons. (Conversely, I suppose you can destroy your virtue by decidedly ungodly actions, though I never tried.) Virtue decides which saints you can call upon, once you know them. (You need to study the lives of saints in libraries to get to know them, and finding these writings is a challenge in itself.) Each saint is associated with a minimum virtue. If you don't have that, forget about it. The more virtue you have in excess of this minimum, the less it will cost you in divine favor to place a call.

Divine favor is the currency of Darklands miracles. To get saintly aid, you have to put on the table some part of your divine favor. This is to say, Heaven does not look kindly to people who always ask for miracles and don't do anything to deserve them. This status of deserving is measured as a divine favor level from 0 to 99. The more of it you invest in one single prayer, the greater the chance that it will be answered. But the divine favor is boosted by your excess virtue, that is, the virtue that exceeds the minimum for this particular saint. Say your virtue is 50% and the saint requires 30%. You will then have 20 percentage points of free divine favor to invest in that spell, plus whatever your current status is.

Divine favor is spent on prayer, but regained slowly through day to day living. Fully replenishing your divine favor may take weeks, though, if you've spent it all. Luckily there are ways to get more. In the wilderness, you could take a day off to pray. A deeply religious person can get quite a bit of divine favor this way. In cities, you may attend church. Depending on the church, you can typically attend two masses a day, in some churches three. Since the mass is in Latin, knowledge of this language will help you squeeze more out of each mass. You may also do penance, or make lesser donations.

Of course, this is based on how people at the time viewed Roman Catholic faith, and probably even then it's a bit unfair. But at least it takes religion sort of seriously as an important part of life.

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I could propose some interesting additions to this. I'd like to see "living sacrifices", such as fasting and celibacy, generate divine favor (or religious mana, if you will). In real life it isn't quite that simple, of course. You can't just pick your own sacrifices. Your deity will choose those for you, and picking another will simply not have the effect. But for role playing reasons, this would have to be made into fixed rules. For instance, if you role-played a Jew, abstaining from pork would be positive, and eating pork would lose you lots of points. For a Christian, there would be no effect. (Well, actually there are some Christian groups, I think among Adventists, that also avoid pork.) Similarly, a Hindu would have to abstain from beef. There could be "make your own religion" kits that let you choose a number of dietary and other rules. Kind of like New Age, I guess.

And let us not forget temptations! I have a feeling that religious games developers, if there are any, would balk at this. But temptations are so essential! There should at the very least be skimpily clad members of an appropriate sex, depending on the player character. If the character lingers around, you'd see his or her resistance bar start to slide ... before you know it, the Heavenly Power Points start to drop precariously, as the clothing grows skimpier and skimpier ...

Of course, in real life there are lots of other temptations that may be at least as relevant, but not all of them are so eminently suited for computer graphics!

Of course, the theological implications alone would be staggering; I don't think we could ever make such a role playing game. But it would certainly add a new meaning to loading a saved character!