John's Scion Resources: Blog

In your hero and demigod games how often did your PC's have face to face conversations with the god's (in avatar form of course).

Not too much actually. Thats something I intentionally changed though. First game they were led around by gods pretty often(but not as often as they'd like), but I scaled it back from there. And the more recent games have little to no god intervention. There are a lot of story reasons for that, but the story reasons are because I wanted to do some games working with very limited god interaction to contrast the other games.

I prefer limited god interaction because, the pcs have a bit more free will, and it solves a couple logical problems that crop up.

If the gods are able to just avatar down and do stuff on earth, why arent they solving this BS they are sending us on.

If the gods are able to come to earth, but have loyalty/valor/etc why arent they saving us all the time, protecting us, keeping us out of danger.

There are very good parental reasons for all those things, but imagining gods constantly rolling against their virtues to not come down and save their children seems horrible.

You can see the trouble this can cause in our current god game. If a kid is in trouble, their parent is rushing off to save them and abandoning their job. Its not that I dont like that sometimes, but if its there all the time, player death seems impossible. Or worse them impossible, it seems only possible if the ST decides that the god was "too busy" or all their friends were also "too busy".

And even then it seems like, as a god, saving kids for other gods just seems like the political thing to do. "Hey, I saved your only flesh and blood that you have loyalty to protect. You owe me weregild."

So because of those reasons, I wanted to play in a couple games with more limited/very limited god interaction. This has gone fairly well so far, and I think when the metaplot cracks open more it will go even better(lot of exciting things in the near/far future through meta plot for both games).

However it has caused some difficulties. The pcs and players have less guidance, they have to make their own decisions more, and when there is a disagreement, it can often get pretty rough. Without a god giving direct demands there is much more room for the pcs to interpret their goals or deeds differently. It can get a little muddy and murky.

Sometimes this is good, it lets the pcs be more in charge of their own destiny and decisions.

Sometimes it can be bad, boring pc arguments and such that are just lame(for me to watch, im sure there is some character growth there that is important).

Rarely, its very bad and has players at each others throat or at mine and it can cause a mess.

But, I run different games because I want to learn things, or test things, or have a great story to tell. Something that, I feel, needs to be told, and for the moment this is what Ive been going with.


That was a lot of rambling, let me sum up.

First 2 games Hero - Lots of god interaction

Demigod - Even more god interaction(this led to many gods dying before or in ragnarok)

Second 2 games - Middle amount of god interaction. Gods are there at the start of stories and then gone.

Third 2 games - Minimal god interaction. After visitiation they dont see their parents again, or maybe see them once. They run into other gods, MAYBE, once per story.