Anyone remember black and white? Where you can play a god and be either good or evil, as well as the fact you control the world indirectly? Well I was remained of it last night and a weird/controversial idea popped into to my head. What would happen if the player character was not a god but a Prophet? Travelling around converting people to your religion by performing miracles, passing religious laws, interpreting signs and deciding how to deal with unbelievers and heretics whether it be by turning the other cheek or in sighting holy wars. The npcs would decided what is proper in your religion by not just what you say but what you do. So if you attack regularly attack unbelievers then your followers would follow suit and attack unbelievers. Or if you only fish then your followers also only eat fish.

An interesting concept..

Would the goal of the game be to gain followers, as would be in an election-simulation game? Or would it be closer to B&W where gaining followers would be a tool to be used in completion of other goals.

Have you looked up the definition for a prophet yet? And there is a game like that thats out already, its called "Bible Adventures", lol! It would be a good idea for a game if you could play as a prophet in a game and like be able to see what your enemies are going to do next or see things way on down the storyline or something. Kinda like Prince of Persia does with the whole reverse time thing.

I once had a similar game idea based on David Eddings books.

What if there were good prophecies, and evil prophecies, and you had to try to set up things so that the good prophecies would come true (making sure the guy who's supposed to start up a royal line doesn't die, for instance) while the evil guys run around trying to make their prophecies come true. Also, if one side can figure out what the other side's prophecies are based on their actions, they can try to thwart the other side's prophecies.

It could theoretically have a lot of replay value, if you have a large variety of prophecies and only some are used for each game, AND if failing to make one of your prophecies come true/failing to thwart an enemy prophecy didn't instantly end the game. The idea would be to have more of your prophecies succeed than the enemy's prophecies, within a certain amount of time, but which ones actually happened would affect the world in some meaningful way so the endgame world state could theoretically be hugely varied.

TechnoGoth, your idea could make a good game if it was made right.

Of course, a game like that would need a good storyline. Why would someone want to play as a prophet? Because they can! Perhaps a game about a prophet would work good if it was something like Fable where you have complete freedom in a world and you can have full exploration.

Perhaps you can get some ideas from the alien prophets in Halo 2.