On the seventh page of the thread Nikolaj Rising, Nikolaj wrote
It once again proves that no system, however good it is, can substitute or even correctly emulate the true working of the Spirit or the spiritual life.I certainly agree that no game system can do that; but that's ultimately because it cannot be formalized into a rationally predictable formula.
The thing about Christian prayer is that it seems really to come down to what it is God wants to do; but it is more complicated than that, because it seems at least sometimes that it comes down to what we advise God to do. That is, some of the greatest prayer warriors in scripture and out (Moses virtually leaps to mind) argue with God, telling God what God has to do for God's sake. That's the power of petitionary prayer, that it asks or even tells God what to do, and God does it. It seems that that has to be part of the equation, because if we're talking about asking God to do what God was going to do anyway, we're playing some sort of mind game with ourselves--like screaming at the television or movie screen to tell the characters what to do, knowing full well that the characters are going to do what they do without our input, one way or the other. In order for prayer to matter, it must be that at least sometimes God does what we ask precisely because we ask.
At the same time, we also know that God does not always do what we ask when and how we expect. Many have lost faith in God because God did not do what they told him to do--from did not give the bicycle we wanted to did not save our mother's life. He does not always answer prayers.
So we fall into the trap of thinking that God answers the prayers of the good people, the people who are holiest, most righteous, most moral. This, though, is completely contrary to the concept of the gospel. We do not make ourselves more pleasing to God by what we do; we are pleasing to God because we trust Him. So then we think that the person who trusts God most fully--who has the strongest faith--is the one whose prayers are answered; and suddenly we have turned faith into a work, something you have to do well enough to get your answers.
The truth of the matter is that God answers our prayers because we asked and in His view it would be the best thing for us, others, and Himself. In some sense we serve as God's advisers when we pray, telling Him what we think He should do, and then getting His answer. It has nothing to do with how good or righteous we are, and nothing to do with how strong our faith is. It has to do with His grace, His willingness to do the best thing for us, and His wisdom in understanding what that best thing would be.
The only way that can be done in a game is for there to be a character who is God. Unfortunately, this character has to know what is going to happen, and has to understand the other characters better than they understand themselves, so as to be able to predict what impact the various possible answers are likely to have. I don't know that; I cannot run a non-player character who does.
Games all look for ways around this. Some fall back on a works righteousness system, whereby doing good increases your prayer power and doing bad reduces it. Some give you so many points to use, as if you could use this much grace and then you've run out of it. Multiverser, though, avoids those pitfalls. We treat each prayer individually, and roll for them individually. At the same time, we assume that the prayer that involves three hours of kneeling prostrate in the presence of God is a more serious request and more likely to be answered than the one tossed off in a quick phrase as you walk into the dangerous situation in which you are hoping for protection. Thus we use probabilities based on multiple factors: how big a miracle do you want, and how much of yourself are you investing in the request?
I wish I could devise a magic system for a game that was based entirely on grace, but it would ultimately come to referee fiat: did I as referee believe that God would grant this request or not? It then becomes my grace, and absent guidelines it becomes the grace of each individual referee.
The referee is then caught by the reality that God does not seem to answer anyone's prayers all the time, and that some people would say God has never answered any of their prayers. It becomes a matter of personal opinion, based on what this particular referee believes God would do--and if this particular referee happens not to believe in God, or to believe that God does not often answer prayers, you'll get a very different result from the referee who believes God always answers all but the most outrageous requests.
So you can't systematize what God will do and be realistic about it. It would be very like trying to create a system to predict what you will do next, and we can't do that, either.
I often think that God has a hand on the dice, though, such that relatively improbable prayers are sometimes granted and relatively likely ones sometimes fail, and that's better for the player and the character and the game, because ultimately I'm not entirely persuaded that dice mechanics are truly random.
--M. J. Young
