Pantheons - an experiment in metagaming.

[Burnsaber]

O yeah. The King as 1st and Queen as 2nd thing was a bit sexist, sorry about that, it was late when I typed that post. It's pretty easy to fix, thought. The players in the team decide whenever the pantheon is pathriachal or matriarchal, or to be blunt, whetever the King position is the 1st or 2nd in the given pantheon. This could result in more politicing within the pantheon. Or if things get awesome enough, even betrayal when a powerful nation switches sides because the vote put him in second place.

There is a problem if you just allow any players just make up a pantheon from any gods. How do you prevent the top six nations just going in and forming the "winning" pantheon? Note that I'm talking about nations, because just think about it. Let's say that top six nations is composed from two separate pantheons. Why wouldn't these nations just ditch their former pantheons and weaker allies and form a "top 6" pantheon? Even if one of the players in the "top 6" pantheon gets eliminated, they'll likely just assimiliate the new top 6 nation to replace the fallen one.

Remember that according to Gregstrom, the idea was not to make a team game. But rather, the alliences are formed in-game. Also, Greg made the point about a one god being in several pantheons, this would of course reguire the pantheons being secret, only to be revealed in a winning position. This could make it rather hard to know which pantheon is winning and make the "gang the leader" tactic guite hard to implement.

[rdonj]

What if everyone was in several, randomized pantheons at the start of the game? Say, each player is in 3 pantheons of 5 players. And whenever someone from a pantheon is killed, the strongest person in the game who isn't in that pantheon, is considered to be a part of it. This could get some weird situations though, and is somewhat away from the direction a lot of you are talking about.