Personally, I consider post order to be like chess: if your finger isn't on the chess piece (If you have finished your post), then the chess piece is moved. Though, we should probably wait until Caesar gives the lowdown.
So far, I've always run the Godhood series by this principle. Once someone wrote something, it was done. There was no going back (exceptions are possible, of course, like if the act in question was clearly a violation of one of the rules or beyond the power of that particular deity) and the next post could, indeed, be a reaction on the previous. Like all rules of the game this too may be reconsidered. The 'rules' are there to make the game fun (and easier to keep going).
Yeah but what's stopping me from now adding on an additional action to counter yours. And then you adding another action to counter mine...
I am. If a thing like that would occur, I would step in. After all, I take ultimate control of the mortals in the game for this very reason. They get to make their own decisions. When a mortal is sent two conflicting visions, for instance, he will ultimately choose between them, or act differently. They may even decide not to act at all and a vision can be fruitless. Until a mortal has actually acted on the things that influenced him during a turn, there is nothing to counter.
Imagine a man named Bob. We both get one chance to tell him what we prefer. You tell Bob to take a right turn. I tell Bob to take a left turn. Done. Until he's made a decision, we have nothing else to add. You can not counter the mortal's decisions before he's made them.
And if the last person to post their turn gets to counter the actions of others while they can't in turn do the same, it promotes an attitude where no one actually wants to post first because it punishes them.
This is a strong and central concern here, and I'll get to answering it later in this post.
Anyway, I don't really see why waiting until the update would prevent countering other people's actions but if we are doing things that way, I suppose I'll post my counter - counter action some time tomorrow.
I don't think that you are really sincerely representing your view here, so I'll skip replying directly to this part. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Indeed. Chess matches/games solve this by shouting at the player to get a move on. 
No, no- That's how you solve problems with slow game moderators and posters.
Sorry, I did a slightly poor job of expressing my view. I didn't really mean that all our actions have to happen at the same time in game so much as I meant that the order of us posting shouldn't influence it. The actual order of our actions in my opinion should be determined when the GM writes the post because he's the one actually writing about us performing our actions and what consequences or results they have.
That's the strong concern I labelled earlier. On one hand, the approach you label is different from how we've run the game until now, and being able to act upon one another's act fits the theme of a pantheon of various gods, who may have conflicting interests, very well. On the other hand, I see that you are trying to take away the concerns with being the first to act, for the good of the game and how well it runs.
Personally, if I imagine a group of people who are each trying to achieve certain distinct goals (which may conflict), I see them thinking ahead. Yes, making the first move might prove to be a disadvantage. But countering someone else's move costs you your resources, and may very well not be worth it. It may even cost you more of your resources to counter their move than it cost them to instigate it in the first place.
I would like to clarify the following things:
- The gods you play are
not omniscient. They see where their servants are, and learn of things as their people do. If you know the Black and White series of games, imagine a circle of influence around your main places of worship. You may learn and act outside it, but only if the person or city in question is significant enough for your god to know about them.
- If something happens in distant lands, it takes time for it to reach the 'ears' of the god you play.
- Actions can most certainly be covert (most visions are!), and you can not act on that which of you do not know.
- Sometimes the effects of an act are immediate, and sometimes they take some time. This should be clear by virtue of the act itself. For instance, if a volcano erupts after the actions of one god, everyone should know of it and be able to act on it in the same turn. If a god blesses several people with a blessing they may pass on to their descendents, the other gods would not know until the next turn (unless there is really good reason for them to learn about it right away).
- Acting late is not necessarily acting well. Acting well may be to act covertly, or to predict your opponents. You all know who still has his or her godly juice and who doesn't. You also know who is in peril and who is not. And to solve this problem, I'll be stricter on the deadlines for posts too (unless almost everyone agrees to move a deadline so someone can post). If you postpone for too long, you can't post. You may even not act at all out of fear of the other gods, but that is an act by itself, as you are saving your Essence. Live the character, and respect their tactical decisions.
Now, I would like to get to this actual case. I'll write a new post about that. Feel free to comment on what I just wrote. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I write like I'm high on crack and I make zero sense.
I do, at the very least, want to find a fair solution and principle to keep acting on for the rest of the game.
