I initially read this game a couple weeks ago, and I've been marinating my thoughts for a while. This is all based on just reading the game, not playing it, so do bear that in mind.
My initial impression of We Are Gods is, a fair bit of confusion, if I'm being entirely honest. I am a fan of god games. I've been on a consistent Nobilis kick lately, I've enjoyed Exalted despite its many faults, etcetera. Both mechanically and conceptually, the concept has a lot of potential to explore. But, both of those games are born with strong visions of who they are. Nobilis is a game of urban fantasy politicking and reshaping the world to suit your own philosophical and aesthetic tastes, and it frames both the content of the world and its mechanics around that. Exalted is a game of scrappy underdog gods skilled at a variety of different fields trying to leverage their specialties and the abilities they give to overcome literally impossible odds and help save the world. And both of those are, really, reductive framings, each game has a fair bit more to their conception of what being a god means and lets you do.
In We Are Gods, the examples highlight efforts like trying to haggle with a shopkeeper to get a discount on a purchase, sensing an upcoming ambush on the road, picking someone's pocket without being spotted, etcetera. These are interspersed among some higher-power, world-changing examples, but these are where the focus lies, and that's not just true of the writing. The game's mechanics scale numerically as you level up, gaining one point to a favored skill and another to a skill group to be assigned as you see fit. The idea being that, more cosmic actions have orders of magnitude larger target numbers, and thus become doable as you advance in progression. However, the progression itself enters the realm of "make it up to taste as you go along" very quickly, meaning, on a mechanical level, if I were to run or play this, by the time anything actually semi-godlike even on the level of a starting Exalted character were happening, I would be making up the game on my own.
None of the game's expectations or advice seem to really be equipped to handle those larger-scale actions, too. Under the Knowledge skill examples, it proposes designing a device to reverse entropy. What would that then do to the world, in terms of ability to reshape things and limits on that? What would that do to a god of entropy? No idea. The game isn't particularly focused on that sort of thing.
What the game does seem to be focused on, for the most part, is, D&D-style adventuring. Note the examples I mentioned above. The concerns are things like spotting ambushes, discerning people's intentions, squeezing a bit more money out of loot. In D&D, these are all trying to compose a specific fantasy of being an adventurer trying to make it in a lifestyle where those tasks are what determines your success or survival. When We Are Gods proposes exhaustion and starvation as optional rules, it seems to read to me as much the same way, but that's not what the game told me it was. Is this a world where gods are struggling adventurers, even as their power grows beyond what the game has mechanical support for beyond "figure out the numbers yourself"? I really don't know, but that seems to be where the writing is pointing me, which feels dissonant.
The combat is probably the most glaring examples of this. One of the examples of escalation seems to be directing towards a conceptual treadmill to maintain that ragtag-adventurer play all throughout. "Fighting a slime at lvl 1 billion probably isn’t going to be as satisfying as it was back at lvl 1. However, fighting a slime the size of a nebula might make for a more interesting encounter." The players are still doing the same sorts of things, but the numbers have gotten larger. The reason the haggling-with-a-shopkeeper example springs to mind is that it comes about when the player has a notional 100,000 in the stat at hand, as an example of critical failures being relevant. My question is - why is that coming up at all? Why is the game about fighting slimes, whatever level I'm at? And if it's not, I don't have very clear guidance what it is about. It does seem to be centralized on combat, in that combat has more mechanics than anything else (again, the parallels to D&D manifest), but that brings me to one of the biggest complaints I have with the combat system.
Characters in We Are Gods cannot be meaningfully eliminated. When damaged, they can go down, and then will pop back up either immediately or next round.
On its own, this is fine. It's actually rather interesting! Permanent unit elimination is a concept that, in a lot of ways, has been holding game design back as people feel obliged to adhere to it. This does a good job of decentralizing damage as a meaningful interaction mode, for the enemies at least. In a vacuum, this has potential.
But, then. How do they win?
In Lancer, a game about mech combat (and a few other things), each fight comes with a "sitrep" - an objective you need to fulfill to win. Control zones to capture, hostages to rescue and move back to the escape zone, hidden targets to search for, etcetera. If your group has gone all-in on damaging targets and focuses only on that, you lose in Lancer, not because it eschews unit elimination, but because it doesn't matter how many mechs are destroyed, if the time runs out and your objective isn't complete, you have lost.
Lancer is the sort of game that could exist in a form without people being taken out of the fight through damage. It doesn't do that, but that's the infrastructure that could let it be so.
We Are Gods seems to conceptualize fights as slugfests, in how it's written. Which means, without anything for the enemies to really hope for, they can't win. And, similarly, that means it's in the players' best interests to play as safely as possible, expending no resources and taking few risks, to beat up whatever they're fighting. The combat turns entirely into busywork, rather than anything that meaningfully changes the direction of the story. Which is odd in its own right, but made worse by the combat mechanics themselves. Every action is freeformed, proposed to the GM and then adjudicated what it can do on the fly. Since every character takes two actions, the GM thus has to make arbitration decisions equal to double the number of units on the field, each round. And those enemy actions don't matter, in particular. Do they constrain a PC? Do they deal damage? Well, it hardly matters, does it? The inevitable outcome is the enemies get chipped away and the PCs don't. The more time and effort is spent, the more that's wasted.
I could try to conceptualize my own sitrep-like system. If I were to run this, I'd feel obliged to, so as to make combat meaningful in its own right. Give enemies goals and the PCs the ability to strain to stop them, that sort of thing. But, then, that's me having to invent my own way things work. Similarly. When the numbers get high and the game's scaling just tells me to wing it, and the PCs are taking the sort of actions that actually sound like a god doing things... it's still on me to figure out what that means. The game provides very little guidance beyond a roll mechanic that tells me to eyeball its target numbers. The game of We Are Gods doesn't seem to actually contain any support or ideas for how to satisfyingly play a god, it gestures in that direction and tells me to figure it out.
The simplest conclusion is that I've misunderstood the presentation - that this is a game about gritty adventurers a la D&D, the numbers just get higher for their aesthetic appeal. If that's the case, honestly, I'm not sure what this game has to offer that D&D doesn't. But, if that's not the case, all of these design decisions seem to be going in a contrary direction to that fantasy. At best, I can say that "punching them in the face probably won't stop them" feels true to the ideal of a god - but, then, why make punching-in-the-face a mode of the game at all?
I'd be curious to hear what the design priorities and logic behind this game was, because, I'm rather confused by a fair few of the choices made.
