subplotkudzu | Christian Role Playing Games

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Christian Role Playing Games

I was reading a review of the new book Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh that suggested the Christian/Evangelical subculture had its own "Christian" versions of everything in popular entertainment (including, intriguingly enough, Christian Techno, which is somehow more Christian than regular old Techno despite neither having words...). Given the generally understood animus that the Christian subcluture has shown towards RPGs I wondered what the current state of Christian RPGs was - had it expanded beyond the Dragonraid game that was so widely panned in the 80's?

Apparently so - a quick Google search turned up several extant Christian RPGs, including one, Holy Lands, that I'm considering downloading to see what the mechanics are like. There's nothing inherently wrong with the premise - defending the medieval church from the demons, devils and sorcerers that want to destroy it, a nicely meaty time period and premise for a sword &sorcery game - though it scores some negative points by billing itself as THE Christian Roleplaying Game. I'm still miffed at Champions being THE Superhero RPG, so don't get me started. But the mechanics could stink and the message might be delivered with a sledgehammer, and I really don't have the time right now to read through it in any event.

More interesting was this essay from a long term GM and Evangelical Christian. I find it sad that in order to discuss gaming with his target audience (other Evangelicals) he has to start with three paragraphs laying out his religious bona fides, and a fourth discussing his education, lest anyone think he's not walking the Walk. Much of the rest of the essay is the standard counter argument against the aforementioned Christian animus towards RPGs, written from someone inside the tent. He then discusses the real "problems" with RPGs:

1) that they take up time and effort that might be better used to advance Christ's mission in other ways (though this is true of any hobby, and the author thinks he has done significant good through his gaming);

2) that the Church has ceded the ground to the enemy (the knee jerk anti-gaming attitude of Chrisitan means that most Gamers have never really encountered Christian, which limits their paths to salvation. Cambias, I'm sure, will have some comment on this.);

3) and, the oddest of all to me, so I have to quote it directly. "like most games--all those which use dice or cards--Dungeons & Dragons(tm) assumes that dice and cards fall in a random pattern along statistically predictable probabilities. It is extremely difficult for us to deal with this assumption. The question of whether dice and cards fall at random or are divinely controlled is far beyond the scope of this article, but the answer goes directly to the nature of the sovereignty of God. Christians who play such games should grapple with the issue and form an opinion about it."

HUH? I can accept that the first two concerns are about how someone who is totally committed to Christ's mission on earth has to balance their time and efforts, and has to be willing to reach out to everyone. I might not agree with you, but you are clearly thinking deeply about your faith and I can respect that. But for grappling with questions of dice mechanics, Dude, it's math. It's lines like this that make me question everything else in your article, and fear that accepting your religious worldview will mean that I too will struggle with statistics because it might muddy my view of God.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Consider that Einstein himself is famously quoted as saying that "God does not play dice with the universe." (Though that had as much to do with his personal dislike/discomfort with the uncertainty of quantum theory.)

Some believe in a watchmaker god, who merely crafted the Creation in all its precision and wonder and then set it in motion to follow its own rules without further intervention. Others, however, believe that not a sparrow falls, nor an electron changes orbits, unless it is somehow part of the Lord's ineffable divine plan.

OK, so God clearly planned for me to Crit against that Orc. It's entirely possible for God to know the outcome of the session and the players to not, as that's what Omniscent means. Why should I be grappling with a major issue here?

I can only speculate, but maybe the author worries that some people of Insufficiently Strong Faith are or might be disturbed by the very notion of completely random events.

Hence my head-scratching "Huh?" Ah well, nothing to be done for it.

And Max Planck said "Albert, stop telling God what to do."

I always loved that quote.

-Chris Tavares

At least some anthropologists have seemed to believe that premodern societies don't have the concept of "probability" or "randomness" in the form that mathematics has given expression to. If you throw the dice, and they come up 111 or 666, that's the result of a god's will. Consider the technical meaning of sortilege, for example.

You and I might accept that if someone we know gets incurable cancer, that's just bad luck—disease strikes people randomly. But in a sufficiently strongly theistic worldview, people getting cancer is the will of God, or of a god. This isn't necessarily the naive theistic view that God inflicted cancer on you because you had sinned. But neither is it necessarily just the literalist claim that we have mortality, suffering, and disease because of Adam's sin, and it could as well happen to anyone as to anyone else. In between those two grounds, one might suppose that God has a purpose in giving cancer to a certain person—whether because that will set them on a path to spiritual growth, or because the impact on other people will be for the better, for example.

Being an omnipotent and omniscient GM, God cannot roll the dice. He knows, before he picks them up, exactly how they're going to land if he throws them. Nothing is random to him. So he is ultimately constrained to be a narrativist, rather than a gamist or a simulationist.

Being an omnipotent and omniscient GM, God cannot roll the dice. He knows, before he picks them up, exactly how they're going to land if he throws them. Nothing is random to him. So he is ultimately constrained to be a narrativist, rather than a gamist or a simulationist.

I think the concept of the Trinity prevents this from being airtight. In order for them to be distinguishable, each Person of the Trinity has some attributes that the others lack, or at least that They choose not to use. Jesus' dual nature seems to be lacking or at least is not necessarily used by the Father or the Holy Spirit. Ergo, the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence may be relaxed in regard to God's role as Gamemaster.

Even if all Godly attributes are Always On and Persistent, God is still free to assign a lack of causality or ultimate influence to certain actions. In the same way, He is free to houserule that the outcome of future decisions is undefined, and so not properly in the scope of omniscience, similar to the George Burns _Oh God_ movies.

I believe that's heterodox on at least a couple of points. For one, Jesus as the Son was wholly God and did have divine omniscience; in fact, technically, the Son is the Logos, or God's infinite knowledge of himself and his own actions—so the Son doesn't just have omniscience, he is omniscience personified. Jesus as the man who was born, lived, and died might be a different story. Apparently there's debate over whether God downloaded his omniscience into that human body and brain. For another, the phrase "future actions" is meaningless with respect to God. God is not in time; past, present, and future are simultaneously present to him, just as a brilliant musician might simultaneously grasp the opening phrases of a symphony and the final chord.

Jesus as the man who was born, lived, and died might be a different story.

Yes, it's Jesus the incarnate man (Who is still God, of course) I referred to.

God is not in time; past, present, and future are simultaneously present to him

Again, unless He wishes not to be, as in the case of the fleshy Jesus.

I believe that the Book of Job can be considered an exercise in simulationism on the part of God, where Job is tested to see if he will curse God given sufficient misfortune. This can also be considered gamist from the POV of Satan and the Sons of God, who are seem to be doing all they can to achieve the goal, including nagging the ref over previous rulings.

First I'd have to look up sortilege, as it's too early for memory to work. Aaah, making whisky. No, not that one, the other one.

The thing that I'm having problems processing is not that for a sufficiently strongly theistic worldview everything is an aspect of the will of God. That's an easy enough concept. What I don't get is the idea that people with that worldview would then not be comfortable with rolling dice in a game. For the non-theistic worldview it's probability; for the theistic one it's divining Gods will. Either way the games don't know before the roll if their action is going to succeed, and after the roll they do. So the dice serve the same purpose in the game. So where's the big moral quandry? Is it just that it's irksome that the people who wrote the game don't lay out the theistic worldview in the rulebook when discussing dice?

Admittedly, this is just the game design issue - I admit to not being able to wrap my brain around this worldview, but since it overlaps almost completely with the probability one (sure, it might appear random, but God has a plan for everything and, to quote Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China, "you weren't put on this Earth to 'Get It'") it had never occured to me that it produced such concern. I understand why in the "why do people suffer", "why does Cancer exist" and other major issues, but not to the "why do people roll dice?" The author talks about Christians shying away from any competition that is not entirely skill based because of the theological implications of the "random" aspect of the dice and that it might make them doubt their faith or show hubris by prying into the will of God or something. That just enters the "Note to self: religion freaky" stage.

Oh, one other bit - God might be forced to be a Narrativist (lovely line, BTW), but the GM isn't, since said GM doesn't know the outcome of the dice any more than anyone else. Given that, the idea that this even becomes an issue is a strange thing.

Remember the Central Casting books? After reading the boxed text in the third one, Heroes Now, I decided not to buy them. That said, there was a lot of useful stuff in those books!

Edited 2008-05-07 15:57 (UTC)

I remember hearing something about them, but if memory serves the controversy was limited to the "sexual disorders" table. Was the supplement line intended to be inherently Christian/Evangelical or was there just an issue with that one table in regards to sexual identity issues?

Okay, I recently looked at this one again. It's the table, the text right before the table, and the text at the beginning doing stating the authors' position in such a manner as to get my hackles up. It looks consistent, you understand, but I'm one of those fashionable modern liberals the authors look down upon. I think they also equate positions like mine (where I don't have problems with a lot of stuff they think is wrong) with considering all religions, behaviors, and moral choices to be equally valid.

Oh, they also use the term "Judeo-Christian" while making it very clear that they support Christian values. It is unfair of me, but this gets my back up, probably because I'm Jewish by birth.

When I used the Central Casting books years ago, I was working with a friend who owned them on the never-materialized Time Commandos game, and the sf book helped us come up with some cool villains, one of whom felt a lot like Servalan from Blake's 7.

Hrm. But they weren't marketed as a "Christian Roleplaying Game" or anything of the sort, right? Just that they contained a lot of the author's personal religious views written into them?

I'm honestly not sure how that falls in what I'm looking at. It's interesting certainly, made moreso by the general statements I've seen that the materials in the book are really quite good. It's good to see the book competing in the broader marketplace rather than aiming for the niche market, even if the items in the niche market might be more interesting as examples of type.

After all, if Holy Land is a high quality game why isn't it more openly available through, say, DriveThruRPG? After all, the PDF is a free download, albeit one protected by a password security.

None of the Central Casting books were marked at Christian rpgs. Heroes Now was explicitly intended for general use, but with full disclosure of the authors' biases.

If the goal of Holy Lands is to promote Christianity, then I would expect to see some attempt to disseminate it beyond those who are already Christian. OTOH, one of its goals is to fight for those born into Christianity by providing an rpg that promotes Christian values, correct? I'm not saying one can't do both, but it may be hard to do both equally well. Also, I don't know how much the author or authors know about the rpg markets.

And, of course, I don't know if the author(s) or publisher(s) have attempted to market it elsewhere. I wouldn't expect DriveThruRPG to turn it down, but it is a distant possibility.

Well, according to what I've gleaned from Rapture Ready the goals of the Christian subculture are both to advertise Christianity to the unconverted (so the WWJD T-Shirts are the equivalent of the Nike swoosh) and to provide their youth with a suitably Christian alternative to the corrupting influence of consumer culture and mass media. That does mean that they're serving two masters.

I suspect, but can't proove, that the Holy Land game's lack of broader dissemination means that it's aiming more for the latter than the former, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be a good game apart from that. I find it hard to beleive that people interested in RPGs can't have some awareness of the larger RPG market, but I suppose it's entirely possible.

I might arrange to get a copy of the game and review it for an upcoming issue of A&E. As a free download all it would take is some time, which is in short supply at the moment. Unless you want to do it, since you're, well, better at that sort of thing than I am. And I'm lazy.

Also behind in the reviewing (and should widen the job search, of course).

Oh, sure, be all rational. I'll likely end up doing it msyelf in the next month or two, once I get past this weekends Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw game.

Since you name-checked me, I guess I have to say something.

(Full disclosure: I'm an atheist, but I probably sympathize more with Christians than with a lot of the a-hole atheists one encounters.)

I think #2 point is actually a pretty accurate and interesting one. To a large extent, Christians _have_ basically written off the gamer community. They don't do outreach to any noticeable extent. They seem to prefer confrontation using the secular arm to try to ban gaming, or to simply disregard it. No bridge-building.

I recall once at an SF/Gaming convention, the Sunday morning programming was disrupted by a kind of evangelical strafing run by members of some prayer group which met in the same hotel. They felt it necessary to march through the gaming and program areas of the geek convention singing hymns loudly and clapping. Number of converts made: 0. Percentage of atheists and disbelievers confirmed in their beliefs that evangelicals are a bunch of ignorant busybodies: 100.

Maybe some church should start a "gamer outreach" program. Send out members to the local game stores to join the groups there and demonstrate that christians aren't all ignorant busybodies. Sounds like the kind of thing the Catholic church might be interested in.

That said, point #3 makes my brain hurt. Okay, if rolling dice isn't random because everything is God's will, then isn't this a way to tell what God wants? Which means if I roll a critical hit in a D&D battle, it isn't random chance but clear proof that GOD HIMSELF wants that imaginary orc dead! How could any church argue against an activity which puts players in touch with the divine so directly?

Cambias

I think the original article author would agree with you on point #2. I also don't think it will get much traction in the wider Evangelical audience. The more I look into Holy Lands the more it seems to be presented as an "Acceptable Christian Substitute" to D&D, so that once you start playing this you don't have to play all those other, secular games.

Which is a shame, really. It's not like there aren't games in the market right now that have moral codes built into them on some level, and there have been for some time. If it's got good mechanics and presentation it could probably do well. But that doesn't appear to be the goal.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Christian Role Playing Games

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