Godbound General

Let us speak of Godbound.

What have your pantheons of Godbound being doing recently?

In a span of seven months, our own party of two level 3 Godbound transformed Patria (an expy of the Roman Empire) into a nearly-post-scarcity sci-fi utopia full of magitech metropolises. Magical potential is extremely high in the populace, everyone is well-educated and savvy in the information age, everyone is immune to disease and poison, and and terrifyingly strong guardian automatons and hardened magitech gear supplement the army .

We gamed the Influence, Dominion, cult Problem, and downtime rules such that we had a grand total of 126 Dominion and 8 Influence to work with. It helped that we had been saving up five celestial shards for exactly this, and that our GM was on the lenient side. We had eliminated the Mundus Wards and sources of resistances standing in our way, and so we pushed through a total of of four nation-scale Impossible changes with the help of our celestial shards.

I haven't actually had the opportunity to play, just write up characters (because autism). It seems like a pretty cool game, though.

How did your PCs deal with the ubiquitous slave trade in Patria and the ongoing war with Dulimbai, out of curiosity?

Slavery fell to the wayside with the massive leap in magic and technology. For example, between fields augmented by Unending Abundance (from an artifact) and sci-fi agricultural technology, far fewer slaves were needed to tend the fields.

We used our remaining Influence to erect all over the capital region a large quantity of free schools for the slaves and former slaves, where they could be educated in a variety of disciplines covering engineering, magic, science, and technology. There is still some resistance to this from the patricians, who feel it to be unduly empowering the slaves and former slaves, but we can sort that out quickly enough.

Dulimbai has only one Godbound to its name, and their technological and magical improvements have been marginal. However, that Godbound has apparently managed to summon an absurdly powerful god-dragon from the Far Realms, and that dragon stands to single-handedly win the war.

Other current events at the moment include:

• The Patrian military has grown resentful of how much power the bureaucracy now has.

• A growing faction in the Bright Republic's Grand Council wants to absorb Patria now that the area is brimming with rectified magical law; a faction within that faction wants to directly move the Bright Republic's government and populace into Patria.

• The Vissian city-states are being united by the Order of Redactors, whose idealistic faction has at last won, under the leadership of a potent Godbound assassin. He wants to create a "United Federation of Nations" and sees Patria as a potential problem.

• In the Kasirutan Archipelago, a major hero is gathering minor heroes and eldritches, and looking for people like herself to form an "Adventurers' Union."

• The Atheocracy of Lom is being guided by its angelic puppet masters to begin plans for either world domination, or dragging Arcem into hell via old Din technology.

We are only four sessions into the game, and we started at level 1.

Also, to combat Dulimbai's new god-dragon, we are supposed to find a legendary godwalker deep within the Bleak Reach that can counter said god-dragon's power.

I can safely say that our game is atypical for Godbound campaigns. Our GM has been extremely lenient and generous so far; and the two players have been flagrantly gaming and abusing the Influence, Dominion, cult Problem, and downtime rules.

Dead thread?

Dead.

I like this game, but there isn't much to discuss.

Crunch-light games might be easier to actually play, but unpopular games don't get a lot of actual play, so discussions of unpopular games tend to need a lot of crunch for people to discuss them at any length. We've had some talk about the way this game works, and whether Sword doesn't work without a movement power, and how you can rain down unanswerable carnage on people with the right collection of Gifts, but those discussions are done. Nothing new to discuss.

Compare that to Exalted (because everyone compares this game to Exalted, with varying degrees of accuracy), which also isn't that popular compared to the games that see the most actual play. It's got a massive backlog of rules and setting books, and the character creation options from just the first book are, frankly, absurdly crunchy. Also badly written some places but not others, which makes the game more popular because people can spend time discussing their interpretation of the rules without despairing of the entire thing. Exalted discussion is also pretty dead (again, if no one actually plays the damn thing then there's not much to talk about based on one book and you end up rehashing old arguments), but there are a lot more threads for Exalted than Godbound.

I'd open a discussion about Godbound itself, but I don't have anything to talk about related to the system. I think it's good. I've read it. Haven't played it.

My group has been playing for four sessions so far, and we have encountered so many gaping holes in the system that we have concluded it to be only slightly better than Exalted 3e.

Much of it has been covered in previous threads: the way the combat metagame boils down to "alpha strike while tearing down defenses or else be eaten alive by overpowered monster attacks," how the faction system is nonsensical bunk, how easy it is to game Influence/Dominion, how mandatory automatic hit gifts are (plenty of misses at lower levels without them), how Banner of Passion and other "targets all lesser foes in sight" are stupidly strong and trivialize entire armies of lesser foes to the point wherein Mob-slaying gifts are sidelined, how many gifts/invocations are missing critical details that balance them (e.g. Auspice of the Divine King and Summon the Black Iron Servitor), how days of downtime can be utterly broken by miracling up certain Words (e.g. Knowledge) non-stop while more personal-scale characters (e.g. Bow and Sword) are stuck twiddling their thumbs, etc.

The Alacrity/Passion/Sword player alongside me was very salty when they realized that during downtime, in addition to spending Influence and Dominion, my character could spam Knowledge miracles to learn everything there was to learn about the campaign's plotlines at hand.

Outside of my own group, I have also been in contact with two players and another GM who have each been involved in their own Godbound games for several sessions now. All of them have been disappointed by the lack of robust rules. The other GM (not mine) has been overwhelmed by how the GM guidelines of the book are massive walls of text that help construct an adventure, but ultimately say little on how to actually adjudicate various applications of divine power.

I suppose everyone in my group and the other groups are more accustomed to more tightly-written RPGs (less Pathfinder, more PbtA and Legends of the Wulin). Godbound is a mess.

My character has the words Night/Deception/Passion. I have 8 dominion and 6XP, how do I in the shortest amount of time make myself combat-worthy or have someone else capable of it for me?

A. Spam Deception and Passion's mass mind control gifts to enthrall people to fight for you. Conviction of Error (greater), Impenetrable Deceit (greater), and Banner of Passion (lesser) on lesser foes are all good candidates.

B. Get one of your party members to nonlethally subdue a powerful enemy. Then, while they are unconscious, equip medium armor (-4 Spirit) onto them, and spam Deception and Passion's single-target mind control gifts on them. Fashioning a Friend (lesser) and Snuff the Heart's Candle (lesser) are good candidates.

C. Take Divine Wrath and/or Corona of Fury.

D. Have the party pool together Influence to create a lean, mean, fighting machine using the rules in page 131:

>Powerful creatures can be made as individuals. If the Godbound restricts themselves to making no more than one creature at a time, they can build major supernatural entities with hit dice equal to 5 plus twice their level, one attack for every three levels they have, one action per round for every five levels they have, and straight damage equal to 1d8 per attack. These creatures have Effort equal to the creator's level and one appropriate lesser gift per three levels. Fractional character levels are rounded up.

>Such creatures might be made from nothing or be imbued champions. Each one costs 8 Dominion to create. Innately loyal entities are less potent; halve their creator's effective level for purposes of determining its stats if it is created to be obedient.

If it dies, who cares? Decommit the Influence and make a new one.

In this particular thread, I would like to point out how silly Godbound cult abuse can get.

>Cults with so many requirements and sacrifices that the believers can hardly function without direct divine oversight have Problems equal to three-quarters of the action die, rounded up, but grant an extra three points per month. Such cult factions are likely to need their patron to actually get anything done, and can explode into chaos if they suddenly get a few more Problem points from some cause.

This sounds like a high-risk, high-reward option, right?

It is not. It is low/medium-risk, high-reward.

+3 Dominion per month is a *massive* amount of Dominion during strings of downtime. If ever the cult is about to fall apart due to accruing extra Problems, all a Godbound must do is spend a small amount of Dominion to solve the new Problems (remember that adding Features with Influence/Dominion creates new Problems, but solving preexisting Problems does not), and still have a sizeable net profit from the overworked cult.

It is not as if you want your cult to actually do anything risky or dangerous anyway; that is a job for the other factions you influence, ingratiate yourself to, or assume command of.

This is less viable by the time the cult grows to Power 3 or 4, because fixing their new Problems with Dominion will be more costly. Earlier on though, it is absolutely the best way to rack up large amounts of Dominion during downtime.

>It's got a massive backlog of rules and setting books, and the character creation options from just the first book are, frankly, absurdly crunchy.
3e only has one book man. Crunchy? Yes, backlog? No.

I am that Alacrity/Passion/Sword player and I must say that while some of those problems stem from our GM being rather lenient, others are very viable. Particularly that part about downtime. Knowledge Word has some Gifts that require daily Effort commitment... which is a complete non-issue if you have, say, a week of free time. And that's even if you have to use Miracles to use them. That makes downtime focused-characters VERY effective, especially if you have Dominion and shards stockpiled. That leads to a situation where utility focused Godbound have much greater influence on actually shaping the world and narrative while the martial Words can just hit dudes really hard. Which, I guess, makes sense, because if you specialize in personal combat then that's the thing you are good at but the daily commitment is much more serious issue for you. Also, most serious enemies can kill you pretty easily with a bit of bad luck so if you want to be good at combat you have to invest in it.

Overall, the game is kinda fun but I am not sure I really like the flow of it.

Godbound could really use a more disciplined, iron-fisted, hard-coded, "No, if you have downtime and you are spending Influence and Dominion, you cannot also use your Effort each day to spam utility Word miracles" rule.

I have no idea why Godbound's Effort is both scene-based (narrative time unit) and day-based (in-game time unit). Day-based Effort is completely broken when used to spam miracles during downtime on top of Influence and Dominion, and more personal-scale Words can abuse this far less than utility Words, so it is not even internally balanced within a party.

>Also, most serious enemies can kill you pretty easily with a bit of bad luck so if you want to be good at combat you have to invest in it.

To clarify this point, "good at combat" means "able to alpha strike, shut down enemy defenses, and take them out before they can even act."

Allowing a major supernatural enemy to actually act can easily spell the death of a Godbound who does not have the luxury of Nine Iron Walls. Even then, Nine Iron Walls is insufficient against the non-physical attacks many enemies (e.g. eldritches) can bring to bear.

When supernatural enemies are involved in a battle, Godbound quickly devolves into rocket tag.

>Dead thread?

No point in it. There's only about a half dozen Godbound players on Veeky Forums and we don't have the energy to compete with 2hu's relentless autism.

When Colette eventually moves on to shitting on a new game, we might be able to have a functioning /gbg/ but until then, no real point discussing it.

>Compete
What

You say that but you could at least say something about, I dunno, Godbound's Dominion system and how it compares to Exalted's higher end social charms and Sorcerous Workings system. 2hu isn't some kind of boogeyman.

I think he's lumping in the previous edition's books, which I suppose would be fair if you were specifically describing a backlog of 'lore', if it weren't for the fact that the lore gets tossed out the window at the whims of whatever hobo they have developing the line at any given moment.
What Exalted is for is something that got warped by it coming out just as rpg.net became a place for people who don't actually play games but like to talk about them anyway. It therefore became one of their big items to talk about, and absolutely none of the discussions reflected the game as it actually ran, just as crazy people on the internet wanted it to run. Then, White Wolf, not giving three shits, hired some of these crazy people to make the game, and things came to a full unplayable circle.
So, you have a giant horde of people talking about a now-unplayable game.
Conversely, nobody talks about Godbound because most of the people interested in it are playing it instead.

3e exalted is playable though.

That's a very hot opinion but I've seen E3 games.

>PbtA

?

Powered by the Apocalypse. Games made using Apocalypse World game engine and, more importantly, philosophy. Moves, playbooks, clocks etc.

I prefer the guidelines of Exalted 3e's sorcerous workings over the much longer yet much vaguer and wishy-washy guidelines of Godbound's Influence and Dominion subsystem.

>during downtime, in addition to spending Influence and Dominion, my character could spam Knowledge miracles to learn everything there was to learn about the campaign's plotlines at hand

Isn't the offscreen use of powers during downtime already represented by Influence? I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to be able to do that.

So, what would I build if I never want to die ever? Endurance seems fun, and there's a Word of Blood that Crawford made that would also combo well with it, I think.

Influence and Dominion are indeed supposed to be off-screen work, but the book never comes out and says "You cannot also spend Effort on miracles and gifts while you are committing Influence and expending Dominion during downtime."

If you think about it, it would be fairly strange if characters could maintain their Influence commitments while in the middle of a days-long dungeon crawl in a shard of Heaven while also expending Effort day after day, yet when they arrive back in the mortal world in a calm situation, they suddenly cannot use their Effort during their downtime.

If the rules are actually supposed to bar off gifts, miracles, and Efforts during downtime, then that should actually be explicitly stated. Godbound is a 243-page book, and yet much of the word count is ambiguously-written walls of text that ultimately say very little.

Maybe just say you can only use one or so miracles per down time and a Gift only once? Still keeps Knowledge/Time/Fate Godbound in a comfortable spot where they can set things up, but cannot completely kill the game?

Also sounds like your GM was way too lenient with this shit. I would've come down on it early.

You are, in every thread, thrice the annoyance the avatarfag is.

I am actually more annoyed by the anti-2hu brigade who shit on every thread he shows up in than by his autism.

As for Godbound, I'm still struggling to come up with a decent character. I'm more interested in making a social/utility character, and there are an awful lot of options. I was planning on using Luck for my main offensive capability, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

>You are, in every thread, thrice the annoyance the avatarfag is.

no u