ehhhhh I don't think mechanics are a bad thing so long as they're intuitive and cover bases. The whole tabletop genre is based on them, and you can still run tabletop RPGs in an easy lighthearted way.

There is such a thing as being too free-form. With a few guidelines on what's possible, supplemented if necessary by flavour on why, problems like 'creating a galaxy with 1 MP' should cease to exist, and processes like 'my god has fought a bunch of battles, he should be stronger than before' become much easier to quantify and resolve.

I think the Divinus secret to success has always been Might counts and summaries. In a genre where there are effectively no limits at all on what's possible, giving the players ways to clearly understand the shape and magnitude of their own wacky shit makes everything so much smoother, and being able to have a bunch of people do wacky shit at once is the absolute heart of a deity game.

...We can absolutely ditch concealment/detection, though. And the entire creation of the universe montage. Among other things.

[quote=@Cyclone]
Is Fate even necessary? I’ve always thought Fate and Invictus were really gimmicky and needless.
[/quote]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw[/youtube]

[hider=i'm dehydrated]
Fate isn't, I think I made it invisible to Jvan because I couldn't think of a use for it.

I'm divided on whether we need the Amul/Invictus flavour for 'hey let's do a plot stimulus' or 'oh fuck, we screwed up and need to fix something' moments. On the surface, no, there's really no need for them to be there. 

On the other hand, a god roleplay is sort of lacking in any variables outside the collective control of the characters (unless they screw up really badly or something). If any kind of intervention needs to happen, there's no background for the GMs to tweak. If they didn't leave some NPC factor as a caveat, the gods need to act in the interest of gameplay rather than character. 

For examples other than the Godkiller or future plot stimuli we're working on, most of our births and deaths involved plot contrivance. We pulled it off well because you're all amazing, but we were still writing character to plot rather than plot to character, which shouldn't be a necessity. It also left newborn demigods really reliant on parentposting. 

It might be that the characters are most free to just be themselves when gameplay problems can be resolved, if necessary, without having to tug at the stories people were busy writing for them. Then again, it might also be that the Fate's Right Hand system is a terrible way of doing it. It's certainly the easiest way out.

Additionally, any mechanics that aren't completely behind the scenes are 'that's just the way it is' in-character without at least a hint of context for [i]why[/i] the god world is how it is. A cheesy mystery is more fun than a somewhat arbitrary blank slate.

There's also the cool factor, which is immeasurable.
[/hider]