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[Praetorian]

Having been involved with (and been responsible for) several iterations of a vaguely infamous gaming lineage, I have been reticent at restarting the cold corpse.

For those who don't know, Deus Ex Machina has been running in various forms since 1999, about deific characters trying to run a world. With ideas about inter-godly politics and interactions with believers, it was intended as a sort of "god mode" RP, with elements of lose strategy.

However, both myself and other SCs fell victim to lack of foresight, limitations on plot (how do you motivate a god?!) and (when i was younger) self insert characters to drive elements.

I want to get away from that and see if such a game can be resurrected but with a different slant. In addition, I want to try to break my streak of games that I have been unable to finish / been inspired to continue / had player apathy. Unfinished because of RL (overseas deployments do that to you...), inspiration because players don't immerse themselves or I can't expand enough, and apathy due to SCs biggest problem of players who join, are active for a month, then vanish because of RL / their own apathy.

Beyond the yammering: the concept is as follows.

Players are "new deities", insofar they have either come into being or have ascended from another plane of existence (soul / spiritual enlightenment / sorcery) but instead of Elysian fields or a lake of brimstone, they find a strangely shifting clerk-office environment.

The Celestial Bureaucracy.

The game would start with these new gods being "interviewed" for their positions (Can the god of war really cut it in conflict resolution matters? etc) via designing and monitoring several tasks (individual, public threads).

After successfully completing the "interview", they are brought together in a meeting room to discuss the matter of an abandoned world: the gods have gone / died and the Bureaucracy is moving in to reposses / audit / rennovate.

This is where the story proper kicks in. I envisage it being handled with the personal threads being the gods own efforts in various parts of the world (it's size I'm still pondering: a mythical nation / city or disparate worlds for each god)

In a weird way, I see the characters being almost OOC / IC. Simillar to the way that in thesecretdm's Across The Stars, where the players have helped sculpt the world, so would the players design and decide the layout... but IN CHARACTER as the gods. Secondary characters would be (potentially) heroes who serve a god, acting as the physical "pawn" on the world, thus alowing for "human" interaction.

And from there we would have the politicing, the power grabs etc, as gods vied to be the ones with the most influence... whilst still trying to show progress to the Celestial Bureaucracy, who would grant aid / favour to the gods, both as a group or as individuals, depending on the projects.

It's a bare concept, but I have a framework idea. Just wanting to see if this concept is worthy of a decent swansong? Something to do it justice.

[Vagus]

Nice idea, but I don't quite see it working as an RP.

Would the GM incarnate the Celestial Bureaucracy? Would there be an orientation on the projects they encourage or just a general approval of divine scope, godly arrogance... Would they/it remain neutral between evil cruel realistic gods and idealistical naive ones?
But it would be fun if it did impose some special goals from time to time...
The CB part would require meetings, planning, memos, coffee breaks, awful bureaucracy, small minded support characters (by the GM?)...

Without clear limits to the god interactions, to the influence of one in the domain of the other, to the powers/identity of each gods, it could fall apart easily. The way a god could interact with its world would have to be pretty well defined for it to be fun to play. if it's too lax, I don't see the players avoiding using easy shortcuts.

The structure does not allow to play an omnipotent god (for the world concerned), but could that be the 'reward'?

I can't wait to see some putative gods' CV.

[thesecretdm]

Why, thank you for the shout out, Prae. 

I would definitely be interested in seeing a title like this take off -- it has a great deal of potential -- but I don't think I personally have the capability to invest in it as a cast member...at least not at this time.

There is a great opportunity to play up the conflicts BETWEEN players in this type of setting, which is both the concept's greatest strength and greatest weakness, obviously.  PVP conflicts tend to get old real fast, and can kill an experience.  Sure, the characters in question are all immortals, but even without the chance of death, egos can be bruised, players can be offended, and all the fun can go missing.  The GM would just have to work hard to counterbalance the dangers of PVP -- playing up the benefits of the conflicts while preventing things from getting out of hand.

It would be fun though to watch a pantheon working together to shape or reshape a world, while plotting and manipulating and scheming to gain the upper hand over their kin; some working more overtly than others.  They would undoubtedly even use the inhabitants of the world against one another in the process, the same way the Greek Gods played with and used classical heroic mortals to satisfy their own ends.

I assume the Gods would draw some amount of power from worshipers...with power waxing and waning dependent on how many or how few the number of worshippers were...sort of similar to the old video game "Populous"; would eliminating a god's worshippers also eliminate the god?

And there would also be the underlying story -- the whole bit about WHAT happened to the original gods of this world...and the WHY.  Would this new pantheon also be at risk?  Are there things the Celestial Bureaucracy knows but aren't telling the new gods?

Hmm...I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this thread...good luck, should you choose to re-launch this title.

[Praetorian]

Indeed, the "omnipotence" was what killed the first few iterations. That and overt interferences in the other gods schemes... along the lines of "yes, well, I killed you pawn so your entire Machiavellian plot falls apart". God modding from godly characters, who'd have thought it!

This time I want to set power levels (so they are more very powerful localised spirits) and set tasks to narrow the scope of interactions.

The CB would be moderated by the GM, setting tasks for the groups and for the individuals. And they would be neutral: evil needs to flourish as much as good to enable progress etc that sort of philosophy.

And the believe infrastructure was attempted prior, but wasn't quite worked out. It would require "tiers": so, encouraging population growth is good but so is encouraging the "level" of belief. Rather than total freeform, a certain "strategy" element would be required.

And thesecretDM has hit the nail on the head with the plot ideas: sort of like the tasks are the "plot of the week" with the behind the scenes factors being the "arc" for the game.

Ultimately, this would be character driven but the "deific" aspects would require limits, basically being spirit "mages" until they progressed.

The main focus would be on the interactions and for private grudges etc.

So, any other feedback.