Cantr II Discussion Forum

Its seems to me that your characters religion is just another run of the mill Cantr religion. I don’t know for sure because I don’t know it IC but that’s what I think so far from what I’ve read on the forum.

These are from other topics but instead of getting those ones off topic I decided to start a new topic where it will be in place.

Nalaris wrote:Zhan's beginning to be annoyed by the local communities narrow mind. They refuse to accept his religion.

Nalaris wrote:I'd hate for my characters entire religion to be brushed off like that. Since his religion is non militant it'd be impossible for him to practice what he preaches and force pointy objects through iron shields at the same time. People don't believe me, but that's because they either purely don't understand the religions concepts or think I've been inhaling cow fumes.

If you want your religion to catch on you need to ask yourself a few things.

-Does it offer anything that people don't already have on their own?
Doing good things means nothing, anyone can do that why should they join a religion to do it?

-Does you character have a good reason to follow that religion?
Personal testimony is a much better persuader than just presenting your beliefs and saying BELIEVE NOW. I suggest you wander your character around a bit and find out want problems people in your area have. Then try to develop a religion after you have experience.

-Does it appeal to the players?
They control the characters, a player would prefer to have a character in a strange cult that stays interesting than a generic "Worship Holy Jolie, he made us all" religion that goes nowhere slowly.

-Can you somehow get a holy war going?
Seriously "Worship Holy Jolie OR DIE" and having the means to back that up will get you a lot more converts than, "Holy Jolie wants us to be nice" will.


I'm sure you can get help out of some of those even if you don't have a run of the mill religion.

http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=172
If you haven't read this yet, its a good place to find out what other people have seen/done with religion in Cantr.

Or I could breach the capital rule and have Zhan be reborn as a new Cantr character after he dies...straight up until banning, that'd get tons of believers!

Really, thanks for the advice. And technically, the religion is Zhan's (or Alra's, as he would say). Nalaris doesn't even know it exists.

I was using your forum name, not your other character's because I knew it would get your attention. So since you brought it up in the forum, you probably technically should know.

As for your CR breach religion idea, It would be really funny if you spawned on a completely different island and tried to convince them that died and was respawned. Matter of fact, you can do that part right now .

I'm actually surprised there's never been a Cantrian religion that believes in reincarnation. Not saying that you'd actually remember your privious lives, but it just makes sense, even from an IC viewpoint - characters spawn out of the very ground that previous chars were buried in.

As for Cantrian religions in general, most of them just get a from me, as well as my characters. Now, there are a few that actually build off of concepts that already exist in the game in a halfway believable way that I could see myself going for, but the ones that a character would never come up with and are either obviously invented by the player out of whole cloth or directly imported from real life religions just get on my nerves. "The Great Mother Goddess that watches over us all", etc.

What's a mother? For that matter, what's a goddess? And the religions (or just societies) where the founder also writes all these notes describing their mystical visions, makes up some random titles for the highly ranked members and Tolkienish names for all the gods and goddesses, and so on, are the ones that really annoy me.

I wish we'd see more basic religions, formed from a characters' experiences and perceptions of how the world works, that grow and develop naturally over time, rather than the typical thing where a newspawn just starts spouting about some elaborate fantasy their player made up and then gets mad when no one believes them. The thing is, regardless of the religion they subscribe to, most people would agree that their could be miraculous or at least unexplained things that happen in real life - in Cantr everyone knows for a fact that they don't. Cantrians are very practical, and any character that claims they've experienced a vision or whatever is known right away for a liar, who can either be told to shut up, ignored, or, occasionally, played along with, even though both the prophet and the follower realize how ridiculous the whole thing is.

(And I'm not specifically trying to take a jab at Nelaris here, I've never even seen any of his characters. Just some thoughts on Cantrian religions in general and why IMO they rarely work...)

I've already encountered two places where the basic seed of religion is starting realistically, in much the same way you're speaking of. Both are based on the characters actual in-game experiences. Both also are very much in their infancy and the characters who're starting the path aren't really sure yet what things mean. One is nearly what you could call a religion, although that character hasn't revealed much of what they think except to a few of us, and still not nearly all of it, as they're trying to be sure before they share it.

The other involves reincarnation actually, although the character isn't sure what any of it means or even use that name. There's a feeling of having had previous lives, hints of images and names, although nothing concrete, and massive deja vu (relative to places especially) at times. It could evolve into some sort of religious thing also, or the character could finally decide it's all craziness, decide they're crazy themselves, etc.

Edit: As for miraculous or unexplained events, I'd imagine what we see as game updates would be viewed by the characters that way. New items or animals suddenly appearing, rules of interaction changing, etc. would basically be like our laws of physics suddenly working differently or a new, previously unseen species suddenly existing in abundance. The mechanics of the game to us are the character's physical laws, and even minor changes would appear to them as extremely strange and without a visible cause.

Yeah, I know there are some lame ones out there, Lumin. I'm guilty of that myself. But the character that penned those myths is pushing 45 by now, so if I had it to do over again it'd probably be better. I'm going to stick with it and try to incorporate some more relevant concepts, but to change the entire fabric of what I've made just isn't the way I play.

It's not like I'm not offering anything, either. I've got a room full of cots and healing foods for hurt characters, but nobody seems even remotely interested. I think part of it is my fault, and the other part the lack of interest in the town. The whole place is just completely lazy.

I don’t think you need to rely on OOC type info to create the supernatural, it may be harder to do, but IC prophesies could work just as well as long as they are vague and RPed right. And you’d have to be sensitive to what’s going on in the town. If the town has just killed off some type of animal. Say that the next great age of that town will come when the animal comes back. And when that animal does come back, make your character get hyperactive. Make little accomplishments in the town seem like the start of something BIG.

Brainstorming about these things makes me want to try my hand at IC religion. If only any of my characters were in a position to do it.

Oh well, I’ve got a character who, if things keep going the way they are going, will start laying the foundation for IC science. Application wise its pretty much the same thing except that it might be more readily accepted by the players. Unless they make their characters get hung up on RL science and call what my character says a bunch of baloney. But I’m going to let that hinge on IC experiences, not just what I want.

I'd love to see more IG cultural things. Art is cumbersome, and there are a ton of poets out there. But I think that religion as even a minor part of IG life would add that much more to the game. IRL, even non-believers encounter religious people on a day-to-day basis, and it's tough to imagine a world without it.

The reason that I've made no notes about the religion yet is because I'm trying to find as many In Game nuances to exploit for the sake of the religion (who do you think magically makes us twenty years old? The dirt?).

Not trying to make anyone mad but, the religions in the real world aren't really based off of natural observances.

I mean... when lightning strikes, people used to say it was Zeus getting angry and throwing lighting bolts around.

When people want to explain how humans were created they say that God molded them out of dirt.


Are these logical interpretations? Perhaps. But they are quite zany to an objective person. So why should we expect Cantr religion to be any less zany?

I have a character who is involved with a religion that has fancy titles for its leaders and has a godly Father figure. Why should you be annoyed by such a religion? The fancy titles give the semblance of order to those who worship the religion, making it seem more legit. The godly father figure fits just as well as anything. Since the religion my character is in tries to create a guidance system much like a parent, it stands to reason that a Father figure would be acceptable.

That may seem like a lame rationalization to you... but then again, any religion seems that way after a lot of thought.

It's a tough thing to get a religion going in cantr, because the players understand the "metaphysics" of the game. They know what happens to a character when it dies. They know who created Cantr and why. They already know the meaning of their character's lives. Religion offers nothing to the players and so they don't see the point of having their characters get into it.

So you have to make a religion appealing in different ways. You need those fancy titles. You need a zany idea that players can buy into just to see what fun can happen from it. You need a religion that entertains, because after all, this is a game and we're here for the entertainment value. So I applaud all those visionaries out there who are trying to put religion into cantr. Keep trying, and maybe one or two of them will stick.

AoM wrote:It's a tough thing to get a religion going in cantr, because the players understand the "metaphysics" of the game. They know what happens to a character when it dies. They know who created Cantr and why. They already know the meaning of their character's lives. Religion offers nothing to the players and so they don't see the point of having their characters get into it.

Nick from the other thread wrote:Religion is difficult to have in Cantr, because everybody knows the answers that religious people seek.

I agree to a point with the first, but only on a semantic level. The second I disagree with (one of the few times I'll disagree with Nick from what I've seen so far) only because "everybody" doesn't say "all the players."

Sure, all the players know. But to tie this into yet a third thread, a really good RPer would play his/her character to not know these things, unless I've missed something somewhere. The characters have no clue, only the players know. Possibly this is another decent test for good RP - characters who are seeking the "meaning of life" through science or religion or whatever in spite of the player controlling them knowing all the answers. Very difficult to do without slipping up at some point and bringing in outside knowledge or saying/doing something that the character wouldn't unless they knew the answers.

Ok, I’m pulling a Jos here and nitpicking apart some quotes. Forgive me for my long windedness.

AoM wrote:Not trying to make anyone mad but, the religions in the real world aren't really based off of natural observances.

I mean... when lightning strikes, people used to say it was Zeus getting angry and throwing lighting bolts around.

When people want to explain how humans were created they say that God molded them out of dirt

Religion is a connection between the natural and the supernatural. It explains what people don’t understand which may be natural occurrences.

AoM wrote:Are these logical interpretations? Perhaps. But they are quite zany to an objective person. So why should we expect Cantr religion to be any less zany?

First of all I don’t think it’s possible to be objective when talking about religion. You either believe it or you don’t . So the ideas would sound zany to somebody who thinks differently, but that doesn’t make them objective.
And secondly I don’t see why Cantr religions need to seem zany to outside observers who don’t believe that religion.

AoM wrote:I have a character who is involved with a religion that has fancy titles for its leaders and has a godly Father figure. Why should you be annoyed by such a religion? The fancy titles give the semblance of order to those who worship the religion, making it seem more legit. The godly father figure fits just as well as anything. Since the religion my character is in tries to create a guidance system much like a parent, it stands to reason that a Father figure would be acceptable.

That may seem like a lame rationalization to you... but then again, any religion seems that way after a lot of thought.

Fancy titles and Father Figures only seem legit from an OOC prespective IC titles usually don't have that much weight and they don't even have fathers to base a father figure on. Why do you need fancy titles and a godly Father figure when you can worship carrots? After all they keep you alive, they grow on their own, you don’t need to eat nearly as much of them as you would need to eat potatoes, you don’t need to cook them in any way. That’s just one example of how you could build a religion in game without using a lot of OOC ideas like fancy titles and prophets, or taking advantage of the changing system. (I’m not saying theses are wrong, just overused.)

I think a religion would work much better in Cantr if it starts simple and builds from there.

AoM wrote:It's a tough thing to get a religion going in cantr, because the players understand the "metaphysics" of the game. They know what happens to a character when it dies. They know who created Cantr and why. They already know the meaning of their character's lives. Religion offers nothing to the players and so they don't see the point of having their characters get into it.

Exactly, If you want a religion to be successful you need to be creative in making it appealing to the players. And a good way of doing this is to make it suppressive. Back on the carrot idea, you could wage war on the spinach eaters two towns over because their food cannot be whole if it heals and feeds, that’s unnatural and can’t be tolerated.

AoM wrote:So you have to make a religion appealing in different ways. You need those fancy titles. You need a zany idea that players can buy into just to see what fun can happen from it. You need a religion that entertains, because after all, this is a game and we're here for the entertainment value. So I applaud all those visionaries out there who are trying to put religion into cantr. Keep trying, and maybe one or two of them will stick.

Your not going to find the solution from doing the same old thing again and again. Try from a new angle. I don’t think importing religions from real life is being visionary at all.

Plus a religion that worships carrots would be pretty entertaining too, especially if it’s taken seriously by the characters.

Torch wrote:Sure, all the players know. But to tie this into yet a third thread, a really good RPer would play his/her character to not know these things, unless I've missed something somewhere. The characters have no clue, only the players know. Possibly this is another decent test for good RP - characters who are seeking the "meaning of life" through science or religion or whatever in spite of the player controlling them knowing all the answers. Very difficult to do without slipping up at some point and bringing in outside knowledge or saying/doing something that the character wouldn't unless they knew the answers.

Agreed, but with the wiki and the forums and all, its leaves it up to the player to define what is going to far, and most don’t even think about it when they slip, they just figure it’s something their character would know, like how to talk and build a bone knife. Or that they should build a claymore instead of a saber if they have everything they need.

I just thought I'd put this thread back to the front.

Mafia Salad wrote:
-Can you somehow get a holy war going?
Seriously "Worship Holy Jolie OR DIE" and having the means to back that up will get you a lot more converts than, "Holy Jolie wants us to be nice" will.

Nobody can back it up because no powerful person will comprimise their own authority to follow some nothing religion.

Also, nobody will join a religion if it offers them nothing, like you said. What religion offers is explanation. Explain things that are not explained by the game (How was the world and animals and things created? Ect.)

It has to offer things like this.

And to start a religion, don't be overly morality preaching. Nobody will listen to some idiot nut who comes out of nowhere and starts telling people what they should do.

"You must follow the code of the Shula Shula or you shall be punished by the Devine."

"Oh yeah? If you don't shut up, you'll be punished by me. How's that sound, you madman fuc.k?"

See what I'm saying?

I'm going to start a religion that worships the holy metal iron, and gives some out to its followers at ceremonies and religious holidays. That ought to get some believers.

For iron, cold iron, is the master of them all!

Sav