Reconciling the massive failures of 'good' gods.

[K]

The problem with that is that heroic fantasy settings also often want people to have a wide variety of locales to travel without it being a year-long round trip. So they have to shrink the map. Though sometimes it becomes utterly ridiculous like in Dragonlance.

Fantasy writing in general doesn't seem to do multi-cultural that well, so they tend to stick to the "one nation, one culture" ideal. The problem is that to have exotic people to meet/fight/fvck and new places to visit, you need to jam it all into a small area.

Push the fantasy slider a little further and you have use gates and teleportation and airships to have a more reasonable map, but building better multi-cultural settings is also a solution.

Fantasy settings tend to just be simplified. Simple morals, simple culture, simple conflicts.... simple everything. I mean, DnD writes up a whole new MM entries for every lizard man they meet rather than just write up different lizard man cultures..... I mean, races are cultures in DnD, which is actually pretty racist in my opinion, and saying "all elves can use longswords" is the same as saying "all Jews are cheap, get a +2 bonus to Appraise checks" or "all blacks are criminals with large penises, get +2 to Intimidate checks."

Making multi-cultural, multi-ethnic settings would solve any number of problems in fantasy settings, with lame maps being only one of those problems.

[Mask_De_H]

But K, we do get +2 to penis length and Intimidate checks...

And that's a pretty big logical leap between "Elves are trained in using swords because they're speshul" and "Jews are cheap and Black people rape, pillage, and steal" innit?

[K]

But K, we do get +2 to penis length and Intimidate checks...

And that's a pretty big logical leap between "Elves are trained in using swords because they're speshul" and "Jews are cheap and Black people rape, pillage, and steal" innit?

Not a leap at all. "All elves can use swords" is the same as "all Asians are good at math" or "all Mexicans know how to steal a car."

Now, purely biological stuff is fine. For example, low-light vision is fine for races because your eyes are physically different, but assuming all members of a race have some specific specialized training is just racist. Heck, even assuming all members of a specific culture have some specific training is pretty racist on par with "All Japanese people know karate."

DnD was written a relatively few years after schools in the South had to be force-integrated at gunpoint. It's not surprising that racist ideas are incorporated into it, or that they still persist.

[For Valor]

Well, K, it's like you said. Everything's simple, because simple is easy to understand and doesn't require huge numbers of 500-page books filled to the brim with cultural this-and-thats. Hell, the only reason games in D&D never advance in technology or change languages dynamically is because no one wants to have to map that shit out (first they spoke Algonquian here, and then they split up to form these dialects. This branch will break off unless the PC's intervene. If they don't, it'll become Navajo, and if they do, a re-integration will occur that blends Navajo with German and Indonesian.)

heh... Navajo with German. "Ich bin tʼááłáʼí kawan! Ich bin tʼááłáʼí kawan!!"

---

A simple solution for the deities' problem is the limiter power module. Each deity has a pool of divine power equal to his/her number of followers, and can expend that power every once in a while to do certain things that they're interested in. However, if Heironeous decides to nuke some country, he leaves himself wide open to a variety of his opponents to come in and kick his divine ass (up in the Gods' Realm by... doing God stuff... or down on earth by blasting away his cities and all).

Speaking of which... now I want to make a game where the players are Gods that vie for control over a world that acts on its own (armies move according to the DM, but players fight each other with their limited resources and some cards or something...)

[K]

Well, K, it's like you said. Everything's simple, because simple is easy to understand and doesn't require huge numbers of 500-page books filled to the brim with cultural this-and-thats. Hell, the only reason games in D&D never advance in technology or change languages dynamically is because no one wants to have to map that shit out (first they spoke Algonquian here, and then they split up to form these dialects. This branch will break off unless the PC's intervene. If they don't, it'll become Navajo, and if they do, a re-integration will occur that blends Navajo with German and Indonesian.)

heh... Navajo with German. "Ich bin tʼááłáʼí kawan! Ich bin tʼááłáʼí kawan!!"

You don't need to write a anthropology text to write something that makes sense. I mean, most sourcebooks blow page space on sample characters for a single PrC or detail completely useless locations, so blowing a page per culture for 4-5 cultures for a major nation wouldn't be a waste of anyone's time.

And as a bonus, you'd get a setting that made sense.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Lets say that you are going for a Dominions-style approach to gods, and they are all generally CR 14 - 20 NPCs, geographical features, or structures on the Material Plane. What things do you need to keep in mind compared to a typical D&D set-up?

The most obvious things that stand out is a re-orientation of the power scales. Balors don't exist, or if they do still have a role as something lesser than demon lords they probably need to get modified into something around CR 12. You could seriously take a Gelugon's stat block and just use that for the King of Winter threatening team White Hat, though some spheres and plot powers might enhance it fairly well.

Vertical character advancement is going to need to be considerably more limited, so horizontal advancement through the acquisition of free spheres or whatever is probably worthy of consideration.

Clerics and cultists will see significantly less disparity between themselves and the stuff they worship for power. The King of Winter might be able to build castles of ice and illusion to trap his foes with mere minutes of work, but he'll still be killed if someone shoves him into a pool of holy water, and it will take months of work by his worshippers to get him a new body so he can start kicking ass in person again. Sufficiently powerful high priests could stand a decent chance of taking out their patrons in fair fights.

Any thoughts? What sort of political situation would a world likely see with divine beings scaled down to this level?

[Username17]

If you were actually going for a full Dominions style setup, you could totally have Balors and other Pretender level bad asses as things that can be summoned. It's a high end ritual and when the damn thing shows up it's going to be rather ambivalent as it could very plausibly make a bid for world domination on its own rather than kowtowing to some established Pretender god.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

WotC's (pre-DnD buyout) book, The Primal Order, attempts to put a system in place to allow god-level gaming. I wasn't particularly impressed, but it is there. There's also Ascension; I haven't read it.

[Blicero]

Sorry for the vague thread-hacking, but does anyone have a good website link(s) that gives the populations of assorted countries throughout the history of humanity? It would also be awesome if that site or another one had statistics like the proportion of people living in towns and cities and how that grew over time, and the sizes of the biggest cities of each invidual time period.

As a sort of backburner project, I've been trying to rewrite Eberron to make it at least slightly more plausible, and one of the things I'd like to address is the exponentially smaller populations of all its nations compared to their European equivalents at, say 1700 or 1800.

[K]

If you were actually going for a full Dominions style setup, you could totally have Balors and other Pretender level bad asses as things that can be summoned. It's a high end ritual and when the damn thing shows up it's going to be rather ambivalent as it could very plausibly make a bid for world domination on its own rather than kowtowing to some established Pretender god.

-Username17

Going full-on Dominions would mean that the whole "gods grant spells" component has to go. Under this model powerful spellcasters worship gods to get access to god-specific bonuses, but the "god" can just be any powerful being who has assembled a following and thus are getting special powers from those followers.

So there are balors who are just generals in the Blood War or high-end mooks for demon lords, and then there are the balors who are the force behind a cult and have extra power to toss around because of that fact.

[Username17]

I would be totally OK with that. Replacing Clerics full stop with thematic casters makes a lot of sense to me.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

I would be totally OK with that. Replacing Clerics full stop with thematic casters makes a lot of sense to me.

-Username17

I am 100% behind this.

[mean_liar]

I would be totally OK with that. Replacing Clerics full stop with thematic casters makes a lot of sense to me.

-Username17

This is a decent idea, but its extension is to wonder what system or setting exists such that Frank would ever endorse its gods' existence at all.

Your atheism makes sense in the real world, but I wonder about its universal applicability in every game world.

[Crissa]

Well, those are gods. In previous versions, you could find gods at any level over 10 and at varied levels. You could kill them, if you could get through their followers or meet them face to face.

This really isn't far from that.

-Crissa

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I have an entire 1E adventure series that honestly expected you to kill lolth, grab a handful of her panties, then leave.

[Username17]

I would be totally OK with that. Replacing Clerics full stop with thematic casters makes a lot of sense to me.

-Username17

This is a decent idea, but its extension is to wonder what system or setting exists such that Frank would ever endorse its gods' existence at all.

Your atheism makes sense in the real world, but I wonder about its universal applicability in every game world.

I don't even know what you are talking about.

If there are gods, then no one would be an atheist. Or "atheist" would mean something completely different - like someone who didn't know any of the gods or someone who fought against the gods or maybe just someone who chose to not take sides among the gods. But that doesn't settle the issue of what the gods are or what they do.

The Christian/Muslim conception of a god is basically stupid and people who believe in it are stupid. You can't have a being without limits to its own power. That doesn't even make sense. If it can make a change that it can't undo then there is a limit to its power. If it can't make a change that it can't undo, then there is still a limit to its power. That is a binary fucking question, no matter what the answer is that there is a limit to the damn thing's power (no matter how big or inconceivable or irrelevant that limit may be). But even setting aside the laughable hyperbole that apologists engage in on a regular basis, the facts also remain that having something that is merely essentially omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent is still wholly incompatible with a world where babies get cholera.

So even assuming for the moment that we have gods in the world, we're nonetheless left with gods who have entirely comprehensible limits on what they are capable of doing, observing, and understanding. And that means that in the world of D&D that they have stats. They might be very high stats, and indeed doubtless are. But they are stats nonetheless. And in D&D if you can stat it, you can kill it.

Which means that Clerics pretty much don't make any fucking sense at all if they are supposed to be getting their god damned class features as granted powers directly or meaningfully from some god or another, because if you keep playing into epic levels your Cleric will indeed sooner or later be better than the god that they started praying to. And that's totally fine if your gods are giant volcano serpents and shit who preside as the heads of state of church organizations. No one gets upset over the fact that lots of people, even within the Branch Davidians, could totally beat the shit out of David Koresh in a bar fight.

It's entirely unnecessary and even undesirable for priestesses to justify their personal power by somehow siphoning off some fragment of Lloth's personal power. Tiamat can just be the national bird of Chaos while her church continues about doing various rituals to her. There can even be some point to all that. Maybe as a goddess, prayers to Tiamat and rituals endorsed by Tiamat subtly shape the world to be more Tiamat-friendly somehow. But clerics of Tiamat should have their own magic, and not try to justify their power by having Tiamat give it to them.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

The Christian/Muslim conception of a god is basically stupid and people who believe in it are stupid. You can't have a being without limits to its own power. That doesn't even make sense. If it can make a change that it can't undo then there is a limit to its power. If it can't make a change that it can't undo, then there is still a limit to its power. That is a binary fucking question, no matter what the answer is that there is a limit to the damn thing's power (no matter how big or inconceivable or irrelevant that limit may be).

Wow, I can't understand why everyone doesn't come here for your theological insights.

[Crissa]

I don't see why we don't want the mechanism of clerics being able to have all their powers turn off when their patron is displeased.

-Crissa

[Zak]

I don't see why we don't want the mechanism of clerics being able to have all their powers turn off when their patron is displeased.

-Crissa

I don't see why we would want that. Sure, one more thing to empower the GM, just what we need.

Playing a weirdo praying to a powerful being should not force you to double check on all decisions in the fear your GM might decide your god is displeased and invalidate your character. Meanwhile the wizard and the sorcerer save kittens and noone takes away their power because of it.

[mean_liar]

But that doesn't settle the issue of what the gods are or what they do.

...Clerics pretty much don't make any fucking sense at all if they are supposed to be getting their god damned class features as granted powers directly or meaningfully from some god or another, because if you keep playing into epic levels your Cleric will indeed sooner or later be better than the god that they started praying to.

...clerics of Tiamat should have their own magic, and not try to justify their power by having Tiamat give it to them.

This is the concept that I was driving at. You seriously cannot imagine a sensible world in which there are gods that grant powers?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Gods are not living beings in any normal sense, but are anthropomorphized representations of metaphysical concepts. An example: The God of Knowledge exists only so long as knowledge itself does - it isn't there as a free-thinking entity who happens to have stolen/earned/been anointed with the portfolio of knowledge, but rather it's only a representation of knowledge itself. It exists for it's own edification or exaltation, expanding knowledge where it can, but it's still not really a mortal in any sense, and killing it is basically impossible without burning every book or somehow transforming mortal concepts of knowledge into something different (such as conflating knowledge with secrets, changing the God of Knowledge into something different to mirror the popular understanding of what knowledge actually is).

2. Gods are different from mortals. Perhaps they were made of the same stuff of the universe itself and you can destroy them only as easily as you can destroy space, or time or the planes. There is something amazing and wonderful about mortals that the gods are envious of (such as limiting Epic capabilities to mortals alone, and/or only mortals can exist indefinitely outside a "home" plane, and/or mortals can exercise their full power without regard to planar location, etc), but the converse is also true: gods are a lineage or species unto themselves, and they are the only conduits of divine power in the universe. They need powerful mortals to act on their behalf to further their schemes and plots.


There's nothing wrong with saying that clerics can be thematic casters and they don't/shouldn't need gods for a Dominion-style setting. But it's just a complete failure of imagination to say that clerics "don't make sense" if they're deriving their power from gods.

That's where my comment on your atheism originated from. You appear to have great difficulty in imaging a fantasy setting god that isn't a Wizard of Oz-style, "big voice small body" sort.

[hogarth]

There's nothing wrong with saying that clerics can be thematic casters and they don't/shouldn't need gods for a Dominion-style setting. But it's just a complete failure of imagination to say that clerics "don't make sense" if they're deriving their power from gods.

I've given up posting on threads where Frank discusses religion or alignment or economics because of this.

[Username17]

This is the concept that I was driving at. You seriously cannot imagine a sensible world in which there are gods that grant powers?

That is straight up not what I said. I said that it made no sense for Clerics to get their powers from gods. Because Clerics are a player character type and can keep leveling until they themselves become surpass gods.

Angels and Demons, being fixed points in the power continuum could totally justify themselves in terms of powers granted from a god. Heck, you could even have a system where the amount of outsider power that a god can grant is based on how many worshipers they have, thus making religious ceremony entirely reasonable. Even really powerful stuff like Solars could plausibly be the result of direct infusion from an even more powerful divine entity. But if you play a Cleric long enough, you will eventually be called upon to go to the house of Llolth, or Vecna, or Tiamat, or Bane, or Set, or whoever, and smash their face in.

Clerics can't be justified as a "portion of a god's power" because in the long run the Clerics will be more powerful than the gods whose power they are supposedly some fraction of.

There's nothing wrong with saying that clerics can be thematic casters and they don't/shouldn't need gods for a Dominion-style setting. But it's just a complete failure of imagination to say that clerics "don't make sense" if they're deriving their power from gods.

I've given up posting on threads where Frank discusses religion or alignment or economics because of this.

Unfortunately, you obviously haven't. You just gave up trying to make a convincing argument and now just passive aggressively troll these threads. We' all be much happier if you actually stopped posting.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Then clerics should get the same treatment as martial characters. They either get some phlebtonium that completely changes their original flavor, they should be forced to schtup some other power source after a certain point (such as drawing power directly from the universe), or they should immediately have to trade in all of their levels for demigod.

The difference between clerics and martial characters obviously being that clerics have a longer shelf life than the latter, but you play clerics under the assumption that the fundamental basis for the class will go obsolete sooner or later.

[mean_liar]

I said that it made no sense for Clerics to get their powers from gods. Because Clerics are a player character type and can keep leveling until they themselves become surpass gods.

...

Clerics can't be justified as a "portion of a god's power" because in the long run the Clerics will be more powerful than the gods whose power they are supposedly some fraction of.

So there is no possible justification allowing for a cleric to act as a lens or catalyst for divine power, some way to convert a deity's power into work, or that a mortal could simply have something unique and wonderful to them that a god could not?

Interesting conclusion.

[K]

I said that it made no sense for Clerics to get their powers from gods. Because Clerics are a player character type and can keep leveling until they themselves become surpass gods.

...

Clerics can't be justified as a "portion of a god's power" because in the long run the Clerics will be more powerful than the gods whose power they are supposedly some fraction of.

So there is no possible justification allowing for a cleric to act as a lens or catalyst for divine power, some way to convert a deity's power into work, or that a mortal could simply have something unique and wonderful to them that a god could not?

Interesting conclusion.

When we talk about Dominion's style gods, do you know what we are talking about?