Christian Role Playing Games

[subplotkudzu]

 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. 

Comments

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

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.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

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.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

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!

[(Anonymous)]

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