Chained Souls: Design Goals

I'm participating in the Two Games One Name RPG Contest. I'm excited as I was able to get the title Chained Souls, which I was really hoping for. My constraint is "requires input from family members", but I'm not sure what to make of that yet. I may just ignore it for now, but I'll keep it in mind as I go through the design. I have until November 22nd to complete the game. We'll see how it goes.

Chained Souls will be about Christians who struggle with their attachment to the world. These attachments are character attributes and are called Chains to go with the game name. Stats will be based on the parts of humans: body, soul, and spirit. At least the soul I'll probably break up into it's parts: mind, emotion, and will. If there's any evolution of the character it will be the process of transforming the soul.

I want the game to be a sort of statement through play, so I'll need mechanics that reinforce that. I'm not trying to model any kind of reality. I'd like that to be clear to the readers/players in some way too. I'll want a good mix of success and failure just to provide a contrast. Too much of one or the other is boring or disconcerting. A slow path of success and transformation is probably best. I don't think I want a GM, as then he would essentially be playing the Enemy, which seems against the goal and focus of the game. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to deal with scene framing and stuff without one. In a sense it'll be good, as I'd like every scene to be directly related to the Chains, or possibly also divine experiences. Probably to represent how much divinity is worked into the characters each stat will have a worldly and divine portion, with the dice split between them. Divine dice may be better in some way to help achieve positive feedback loops. Probably just use d6 for dice, as lots of other games use piles of d6, and they're 'normal' dice, so it shouldn't be an issue to have them. Multiple colors may be good for divine and worldly dice.

I think the mechanics should pretty much completely determine how the characters choose to act with respect to the Chains, the conflict between choosing the world and choosing God. Will there be any game element to it? Very possibly not.

There will definitely be a lot of Bible verses in the final text, both to support and explain the stuff that I'm talking about as being the content and focus of the game. I'll need to choose a translation that's in the public domain. I know the King James is available, but it's a tad dated at this point and may not be the best translation for some of the stuff I'm talking about. King James Version, American Standard Version, and World English Bible all look like options right now.