# Playing God tags: #game/rpg/playing-god ![[Playing God (cover).jpg]] Here you are, a guide to puppeteering the cosmos. Try not to smite yourself in the process. In **Playing God**, you and your fellow players assume the roles of deities, fresh-faced or ancient, tasked with the trivial job of creating, managing, or utterly wrecking the multiverse. This tabletop roleplaying game positions you as a fallible, squabbling god prone to the same petty weaknesses as the mortals you lord over. You'll build your own campaign setting from the ground up, wonder by wonder, creating realities, birthing peoples, and establishing a mythology that you can later use for other games, assuming your creation survives your divine meddling. The game accommodates any number of players and can be run with or without a Game Master, because who needs a neutral arbiter when you can have pure, unadulterated divine chaos? Your power, a fluctuating sum of your historical deeds (History) and the fleeting adoration of your worshipers (Devotion), determines your rank in the celestial hierarchy and how many universe-altering "wonders" you can perform each age. The core mechanics of **Playing God** eschew traditional dice for a standard 52-card deck of playing cards, which the game rather dramatically calls the Deck of Fate. This deck governs two primary functions: resolving battles and injecting random, often calamitous, events into the game. When the time for diplomacy ends and your divine avatars must clash, battles are resolved with a simple card game. Combatants each draw five cards, revealing the first one. Based on your divine rank—from a lowly demigod to a greater god—you receive a number of "moves" to secretly peek at your face-down cards or discard and redraw them. After this strategic manipulation, you either commit to the fight or withdraw, suffering a minor blow to your ego (and History score). Those who remain reveal their hands, and the player with the single highest card wins the engagement. The Deck of Fate also serves as an optional system to simulate the maddening unpredictability of mortals and the universe at large. Once any god manages to acquire worshipers, each player must draw a card from this deck at the end of every age. Each of the 52 cards corresponds to a unique event, from a "False Prophet" turning your followers against you to "Realities Collide," smashing two planes of existence together. You must follow the card's directive, for better or worse, introducing an element of cosmic chance that even a deity cannot fully control. ## References - [DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524460/playing-god)