Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know how much I appreciate your writings. You may not get the traffic of a Perez Hilton, but please keep doing what you’re doing. This is the kind of stuff that the Internet was promised to foster.

The thing about incidental rolls, though, is that it’s worth considering not having them. If the dice hit the table, twists and conditions should be possible outcomes. If it’s not worth twists and conditions, either let them succeed automatically or deny it altogether.

I don’t completely agree with you that the GM’s Turn is “only two rolls”. I allow my players a few incidental tests during the GM’s Turn, but of course try to keep things on track with just two main obstacles (and their associated twists and conditions). This gives them more opportunity to earn checks for the Players Turn, and more opportunity to dig themselves into deeper holes.

If you’re listening to Mouse Guard AP podcasts, you might want to search for The Myth Weavers. Theirs The Walking Eye’s are probably the best Mouse Guard AP podcasts I’ve found.

So here’s my question. What if you were to regard God as some sort of state of perfection rather than a person, of which everyone is – at some level of consciousness – aware. So, more God as conscience than God as omniscient angry parent. And the end “reward” then, would be living in a world where that potential perfection is made a reality. Obviously no one can be good all the time, even if they WANT to be good all the time, but maybe morailty in this situation would be based on desire: desire to mold your actions to the potential perfection. And the “punishment” would also be of your choice: living in a world where people don’t desire to do “good” things (instead of being condemned to eternal torture because you didn’t believe the big man in the sky was really there).

I guess specifically in terms of the Christian divine contract morality system, couldn’t you say that everyone exists with the capacity to know what true good is, and to want to conform to that, or to choose to ignore it. I would say (and I know a lot of Christians would disagree with this) that whether or not you identify your desire for good as motivated by God or as motivated by a social contract, that good is ultimately the same thing.

In terms of your first point, that human interpretation of divine will changes over time, what if instead that was viewed as people’s responses to their innate sense of goodness being worked out in different ways in different situations. Perhaps society as a whole is over time being slowly shaped to more closely resemble a world that desires good?

And as for the carrot vs. stick situation, I totally agree that denial of reward is the same as a punishment. So what if the “denial of reward” only ever happened when someone didn’t want the reward (which would be to live in a world where perfection of action was achieveable), which would manifest itself, I guess, in someone acting only for self-gain.

Anyways, that’s just my initial reaction to this. I would love it if anyone could point out flaws in my thinking because a lot of the time when I try to work out thoughts like this I end up confusing and/or contradicting myself :)