From: Steven E Barnes (akuma@netcom.com)
Date: Sat 04 Dec 1993 - 09:52:12 EET
>From: watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk (Colin Watson)
>Subject: Divination
>
>>I think the gods are very aware of the concept of time.
>
>Yes, they are aware of the concept of Time (with a capital "T"; ie. mortal
>Time which was the result of the Compromise) but they have no practical
>experience of it.
This is where I disagree. I interpret mortals as having a limited perception of reality. The gods, while also bound by Time, are not so limited. In otherwords, the gods can understand the time-reference of a mortal, since it is merely a subset of godly perception.
>>Before Time, they had free action. To
>>save the world, they grudgingly accepted to give this up. I might even say
>>that all of the God Plane is bound to a timeline now too, but I'll probably
>>catch plenty of flak for it.
>
>Well, I was under the impression that in GodTime the gods have free-will
>to do anything within their power. eg. Humakt can chop you up if he feels
>like it.
My understanding (which is not based on any official info) is that the gods have no free will; thus the need for mortal heroes. The only way Humakt could chop you up is if you cross one of his paths on the Heroplane (i.e. oppose an event that Humakt performed during Godtime). Of course, one interpretation of such an encounter is that you are meeting a shadow of Humakt, or perhaps a Humakt worshipper who is also heroquesting, rather than encountering the god himself.
>>The way I see it, your god knows these things about you, and not much
>>else:
>>* what you tell him through prayer
>>* what others say about you through prayer
>>* interactions you've had during ceremonies, or heroquests
>>* (roughly) how often you call upon him for rune magic
>
>Exactly how often you will ever call on him for rune magic for your
>whole existance (even for the Time you haven't experienced yet).
Even the gods are limited by time. This is quite clear, at least in the RQ2 material. He simply cannot know future events, even ones relating to his worshippers. This also creates the problem of foreknowledge for the GM. By your interpretation, I can ask my god how much magic I have / will cast for him for all Time. What happens if the character then dies the next game? (I suppose you can weasel out of it by claiming the existance of multiple incarnations... still, the correct sequence of questions and events could create a paradox.)
>I considered a similar argument myself and it seems valid enough to me.
>If you want to give the gods an implicit understanding of "now" for the
>purposes of Divination then that's fair enough. However it gives diviners
>access to a *huge* amount of information which could have potentially
>catastrophic effects on a scenario (in my group this is known as a "Scenario
>Knackerer"). There isn't much excuse for it failing either, so watch out!
When dealing with a diety, you are always contacting him at a fixed
time frame. In the games our GM runs, we have met dieties from a time
before we started worshiping him. Of course, the diety usually recognizes
that you are one of his worshippers, although he doesn't know anything
about you yet. Using this interpretation, divination contacts the diety
at a fixed time time reference, which we generally refer to as "now".
This is important, by the way, since a god such as Nysalor cannot be
contacted thru worship or Divination, since he is dead. You cannot
contact Nysalor, except thru heroquests. By your interpretation,
the current state of a diety is irrelevant, since you are contacting
him in Godtime (clearly, Arkat didn't remove Gbaji from all Time,
As far as destroying scenarios, I don't think we have ever managed to do that yet (thru divination that is). Our GM generally limits the information available to a god based on his sphere of influence. In addition, our enemies often take precautions to limit the information we can learn. For example, a group of assasins killed a Lunar priest, and it took a hell of a lot of work to track them down, even though we used all kinds of Reconstruction and Divination spells (and they didn't even use Divination Block).
-steve
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