War in the Heavens, early days, help needed

[Daniel36]

If I were you, I would create pre-designed template terms. Keep them short so that within these templates, players have the freedom to interpret them, but give them something to work with. Not many people have enough creativity to just come up with an answer to your questions.

For example - What behaviour does your (I would say your instead of this) religion encourage?
Violence - Subjugation - Healing - Cloning - Sharing - Stuff like this, to give the players at least a bit of a handle. They can still come up with ways to use this behaviour like violence can mean torture, or violence to non-believers, or alien races, or even themselves, but it's easier for them if you have templates.

And if you are going to use these questions, then it is •What external factors affect (with an a instead of an e) the religion?

[gtroc]

If I were you, I would create pre-designed template terms. Keep them short so that within these templates, players have the freedom to interpret them, but give them something to work with. Not many people have enough creativity to just come up with an answer to your questions.

For example - What behaviour does your (I would say your instead of this) religion encourage?
Violence - Subjugation - Healing - Cloning - Sharing - Stuff like this, to give the players at least a bit of a handle. They can still come up with ways to use this behaviour like violence can mean torture, or violence to non-believers, or alien races, or even themselves, but it's easier for them if you have templates.

And if you are going to use these questions, then it is •What external factors affect (with an a instead of an e) the religion?

thanks for the thoughts. I hadn't thought to use this for the players to answer...though I think I could do this, now that you bring it up. Mostly I was just going to use these questions as a guide so that my religions would all touch on similar basis. I think I could put this into an appendix or something so that, should they want to the players could create their own. I like the idea of template terms. have to think on that. maybe even a random chart for deciding on new culture's faith.

thanks for the correction on the whole affect/effect business. I usually get it right,but it is not always easy.

[gtroc]

A quick aside, how many aspects should a religion have? how many should be able to be selected by the players for their characters?

[Daniel36]

Depends if you want to apply bonuses and penalties to aspects... If not, then as many as they want. If you do, give them, I dunno, two free aspects and another two at a payout that for each "bonus" aspect you also need to choose a "penalty" aspect. This way it is kept organized.

[gtroc]

I had a friend of mine look through my game notes. She said to me that it was rambling and wandering o the point that it was hard to understand anything I was attempting to bring across. I reread my posts, I have the feeling that she is right. So I ask, are there any out there who could give me advice on organizing my thoughts. Any tips and tricks to making a coherent game related posts/notes. Thank you.


Jake

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jake,

The best advice I can give you about that is to play the game with some other people, and pay strict attention to what you tell them, in what order, from the very start of organizing the game as well as when you sit down at the table. Then basically transcribe that, exactly that, onto the page, to create your outline for your text.

However, I should also stress that there is a difference between simply writing your rules down as you design and playtest them, and writing a text which is intended to serve as a product for someone else to use. Far too often, people designing RPGs are working on the latter long before they should. It's possible that your reader was thinking in terms of such a document. If so, then I'd ignore the comment and continue to work on the design draft which is your personal playtesting tool, and save writing a text for others to read for later, when it makes sense to work on that.

Best, Ron