Thursday, August 1, 2019

My Life As A Gamer: Religion - Of Course It's Done Wrong

The RPG Pundit talks religion in tabletop RPGs. Chances are you are doing it wrong.

Most people in gaming don't get religion at all, even if they are nominally religious, because they never spent any time thinking through how a religion operates. This is not just confined to Christianity. Authentic Judaism, Islam, Shinto, etc. all operate under different paradigms and therefore manifest different systems of behaviors, beliefs, and institutions through which that paradigm becomes a culture- and from that culture comes the basis for conflict, and therefore of both true RPG gameplay as well as storytelling.

Instead, religion in gaming is actually treated as nothing more than a drag outfit for the powers that a Cleric (or whatever your healbot is called) possesses, if it's at all different from being a Magic-User at all. It's rather sad, because (a) it's both very close to how most pagan religions work and (b) still manages to be complete wrong about how it works.

This is because our contemporary world--East and West alike--is so divorced from any concept of the sacred that it comes as no surprise that religion in gaming is nothing more than an excuse for superpowers. Without that sense of the sacred, religion in gaming cannot and will not be played properly.

Side Note: Stop using the Cleric class as a generic priest. It's Van Hellsing as a Templar; it's an explicitly Christian archetype. Other religions don't get there from here. For most pagan priests and cult leaders, the Magic-User is your huckleberry. That's because "priest" does not equal "healbot" outside of gaming, and then only in D&D and those like it (e.g. WOW); it's almost a strain of Mech Piloting, where you treat a class as a robot chassis with a core loadout.

1 comment:

  1. I'm not familiar with D&D but rules for this were laid down for RuneQuest by Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin forty years ago.

    Interesting to see this RPG Pundit come to the same conclusions.

    ReplyDelete

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