Playing God Gets Boring

[RPG Post]

Playing God Gets Boring

I have no idea if (a) God exists, but if he/she/it did and was omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent there would be no surprises and no challenges and no equals for God. Playing such a character in a role-playing game, long term, would be tedious. Maybe not for the described deity, but for humans... most of us get restless.

Even knowing God is omni-everything, Satan apparently thought it would be better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, so he exercised some sort of illusion of free-will. An illusion since the outcome had already happened and was known. Which means Satan doesn't come out looking very good in the issue. Or with the whole Job thing. I mean it was sort of obvious who had not only stacked the deck but created the deck in the first place.

But from a role-playing point of view, Satan is the interesting one. He has at least one flaw, hubris, and a lot of rules, restrictions and weaknesses. Playing God is playing the Sims while playing Satan, now that's a meaty role.

Superheros and the Quest for Divinity

In most role-playing games, your character develops skills over time. Levels, ranks, skills, whatever, there is a learning framework and your character improves. These improvements lead to more and more powerful characters, with what as the eventual outcome? In D&D 4th edition the characters hit level 30 and retire, having become demigods or wandering mystics, legends to be told and reworked throughout history. There can still be challenges but the challenges become enough to disrupt the lives of all the common folk, even their cities and continents so the rules end the game there.

For superheroes, the quest to become more powerful is fraught with dangers. Does the power corrupt? Does the power lessen your ability to identify with mortals, as Dr. Manhattan found? Does the collateral damage you cause in fighting ever more powerful villains drag you down into a mire of regret and disillusionment? If your character is not exceedingly dim, she or he will be faced with these questions. But what if you become Superman without the Kryptonite allergy, without his vulnerability to magic and you maintain your sanity and your quest for truth, goodness and the American way? What's left for your character?

The physical world may not challenge you. But sometimes the flaw is not a vulnerability, it is a tragic personality flaw: hamartia Aristotle called it. It is a blind spot, a root of a bad decision, the one part of a character's intellectual and emotional life that leads to his or her downfall. Satan's hubris, Oedipus's ignorance, Pandora's curiosity (though that one is not truly fair.) Sometimes it's a choice that is forced upon the character, save X or Y but not both. The repercussions of a bad choice can haunt your character forever, changing his or her (or its) behavior.

Flaws are what make one a hero. But suppose your character is just too damn powerful. What can the GM do, or what can you do? Introduce or magnify some previously untapped vein of weakness. For instance:

Suppose God Did Not Like Pickles

Now we have something to role-play. I imagine pickles would become more popular and available than Kryptonite in Superman's universe. Suddenly every malefactor is finding pickles, whole dens of iniquity smell of vinegar and dill. The Sweet Gherkin Demon begins prowling about Heaven's Gates, relishing (ha) the naughty thrills of exposing God to his least favorite creation. And this is just something to annoy God, not like the Seven Daggers of Megiddo are to the antichrist. If pickles were a barrier to the all seeing eye then sinners would wear dill suits.

All of this to say that your character is best served by some weaknesses. It's more interesting. It's more fun to play. And it gives the rest of the universe something to strive for. Society might rebuild around the weakness. Certainly every villain and transdimensional horror is searching for your “pickle.”

[Mr Fox]

Funny you should mention that.

In the Long March, a game I ran on this site for about three years, the 'villians' were a group of nearly omnipotent beings known as the Watchers. I based them on the idea of what would I do if I had the powers of a nova? Well, I'd develop more, but of course I wouldn't have any tragic flaw like kryptonite or pickles. But what would the ultimate end state be if a nova was smart enough to avoid 10 taint while reaching Quantum 10?

The conclusion that I came to was that eventually they would run into the ultimate flaw. Boredom. If you are omnipotent and can create your own custom universes, what then? You spend a few million years playing, but eventually it becomes a fight for survival. Stave off the boredom or suicide. So that is what the Watchers did, even to the point of playing with the inhabitants of entire universes. They set up situations just to see what would happen and they would live the parts by blocking off their own powers and memories in order to have genuine 'experiences' again.

What had been to me an intellectual 'what if' scenario came across to my players as a horror story. "You mean these omnipotent beings toy with entire universes just for fun!?!"

Not for fun, but because the ultimate enemy for the omnipotent is Ennui.