On Catholic Gaming

In an earlier post, I mentioned about some of the challenges of being a faithful Roman Catholic engaged in fantasy role play gaming. Since the process involves visualization and moral decision making, it is easily turned into a grooming process to evil ends. There are clues that the process has been hijacked and there are safeguards to prevent that from occurring.One of the first clues of a nefarious process is the goal of the game, the telos. This includes the general goal (accumulate gold? become a god?) as well as the particular goal (free a kingdom from a curse). 

It is obviously morally hazardous when a successful evening involves sacking a village of innocent farmers and burning the town temple to the ground while beheading the lawful good priests. An interesting discussion arises if the temple is instead devoted to a demonic entity and how the fate of the priests in that case is to be decided…and executed. A related point, and one I struggle to find a reasonable answer for in the Auran Empire as well as Waterdeep, is what makes one deity good and another evil.

 

Jade Emperor

For Catholics, characters that avoid High Theology in the game are the easiest to play without getting into moral quandaries. Fighters and mages are the easiest to maintain a moral compass without having to constantly reference in game deities. Depending on the rogue, it can be more or less difficult with bards being the easiest and assassins being the hardest. Clerics create immediate problems given the divine nature of their spell casting. Some variants exist that are less problematic, druid and shaman, as they reference nonspecific entities generally accepted as good: life and family. Clerics devoted to any one specific god run into the aforementioned problem: What makes this god good and that god evil?

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Zeus just Zeusing

    This was a problem I intuited when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons around 1978. I knew enough Greek and Roman myth to know the gods being presented as good (e.g. Zeus) were really marginal characters who I would be hard pressed to a buy a used car from. Maybe it was my general lack of creativity but one of my first characters ever created was a freshly minted cleric named Polpol. Lawful good in outlook and generally cheerful in disposition, he set about raising altars to The Unknown God in the otherwise unremarkable world in which he found himself. He didn’t really set out to do anything disruptive to the milieu, but the oracular dice would not let him die. Weekend after weekend he would participate in gaming groups and epic adventures and he just would not die. As he approached godlike tier level (somewhere around 60), he and another character, The Dwarf, were plucked before the Overlords.

    In retrospect, I recognize now that the dungeon master’s religious background must have colored how he viewed divinities such that he had created a system for players to become divinized and create worlds of their own…which would in turn generate new divinities. The Overlords were creators of the petty gods known to men as Thor or Ares.

    Again, setting the stage, here was the avatar of an 11-year-old boy being put on trial by the avatars of the dungeon master, a perhaps 19- or 20-year-old college kid. The other defendant was the avatar of another maybe 19-year-old young man. The outcome of the examination was one of two things: divinization or obliteration from the multiverse.

    The Dwarf was called first. A pearl of great price was required of him: a word of wisdom. I do not remember how he answered because both of us were stunned. What could either of us say that would impress the gods? The Dwarf said something that sounded like it came off a fortune cookie. We sat waiting for a moment…he was accepted into the realm of the gods!

Where the magic began!

    

    I was now in the docket. Clearly a powerful moment (I remember it to this day), I was indignant that this character I had spent years developing now faced arbitrary oblivion. And to try to run him in one of the myriad games at the Griffon Bookstore as a way of bypassing the judgment would result in being banned from any of the games. This was serious stuff!

    I looked at my hands with my cheeks flushed and said that the judge of my wisdom is the same judge in whose hands each of you Overlords sit. “He made your Overlords and their Overlords. Do with me what you will.”

 Silence for what seemed an eternity. “You are handed a Flail of Power. Welcome, Overlord.”

    Dramatic moments can have lifelong impact and shape young personalities, so it is incumbent on game masters to always have this in mind. Over time, even older players will be shaped by the circumstances and events encountered in the game. Stealing or killing anything, except for hunting or in self-defense, should be uncommon occurrences. If either is a routine part of the game or necessary for character advancement, the game presents a moral hazard that needs to be recognized and opposed if played.

One way of avoiding this hazard is to make the enemy horrifically evil. This is a strength of the Call of Cthulhu system, perhaps not coincidentally based off Runequest mechanics. In CoC, anyone cooperating or collaborating with Evil will eventually become insane and cease to be a player character. Even attempting to use evil tools for good ends will result in insanity and enslavement to Elder Gods. This is perhaps the best way to address the problem.

Illustration by Murray Groat. There is no way I am this clever!

    One problem with this approach, particularly combined with kill and plunder advancement mechanics, is the focus remains on Evil in the game. The hazard is particularly present for the game master who must envision what the evil forces are doing in order to set up the game. He or she then must direct the actions of the evil forces so that good is thwarted. It is difficult in such settings to not find oneself rooting for the bad guys to win…they are your creations after all! This is a moral hazard for the game master and needs to be considered in scenario construction.

    Avoiding these hazards is most easily done in adventure scenarios oriented towards exploration and discovery. Combat is factored in with perhaps attacking pirates or ravenous wolves while most of the game is spent revealing the new land or forgotten temple. Movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark typify this kind of scenario. Good clean fun for the whole family!

    A slight variant of exploration and discovery is investigation. The player characters in Call of Cthulhu are in fact called Investigators and it sets the stage well for why particular characters are in the game. This is a fairly easy hook to use for moving the story forward with what needs investigating being the focus of the game. Also important is the individual characters motivations for participating in the investigation. This is perhaps the most significant challenge in that ensuring wholesome motivations is key to maintaining a wholesome game.

    Another scenario that lends itself to wholesome play is the classic rescue mission. Whether a damsel in distress, a parent, or a child, the basic orientation of this game would be recovery and righting a wrong. It may involve slaying a dragon…or something more suitable to low level characters without arrows of slaying. One of the challenges in this scenario is ensuring good triumphs and evil is defeated in such a way that it is not totally left to chance nor programmed to render individual decision making meaningless.

Punished Mandonio Terkinos, known as Breakspear

    If asked for a personal favorite, mine would be the redemption story. A current game in which I am playing had a nonplayer character introduced, the brigand leader Inthorn. I think it was intended to be a more or less throwaway random encounter which blossomed into the central part of the campaign. His backstory was as a Lawful General in the Auran Empire who had retired as a hero. Somehow a curse befell him, his alignment changed to Chaotic, and he began a very successful life of brigandage. Trying to obtain a remove curse scroll and successfully apply it is an ongoing story line that continues to evolve.

    Hopefully these musings will help inform wholesome gaming. I am sure there is more to be said on the topic but this blog post has already grown far larger than originally intended!

Your thoughts?