Core Principle: Your Alignment System is Dumb

[Username17]

Really the only mitigating factor is supposed to be that if you end up judged wanting by the Good forces and end up a peon, at least your bosses are Good. So as a crap covered farmer, if you dedicate yourself to the right Good flavors your afterlife is more of the same - except you are guaranteed a local baron with a G on his character sheet who presumably won't rape your wife.

Where it falls down is how a lot of the afterlives on the Good side are pretty horrific. Getting turned into grass or lamp fixtures and shit. Or getting killed and eaten over and over again at random intervals. The "you get to stay a crap covered farmer, just in Bytopia" afterlife is actually the good one.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

As a DM, you need to be creating a setting anyway, since the PMP is very nearly completely undefined (unless you're using Forgotten Realms or whatever, in which case the cosmology is usually different anyway). Why not just change the way the gods work? Coming up with a pantheon is no harder than coming up with a city.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Since practically every single pantheon ever created for a heroic fantasy setting falls into the exact same traps FrankTrollman outline, I'm going to say that no, it's not that easy. The most sense a pantheon has ever made in a TTRPG is in Exalted and that's only because the setting makes no bones about the fact that the Gods are petulant, putrid morons more interested in shooting celestrial crack than helping anyone.

[Chamomile]

The actual solution has been brought up a couple of times in this thread: The gods are opposed by other gods, and just because they can only answer a fraction of the prayers sent to them doesn't mean sending the prayer isn't worth a shot.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That doesn't actually solve the problem of evil. It just at the very best prevents Bahamut from looking like a dick. If anything that only makes the setting even more grimdark because the best anyone can hope for even with Buddha, Jesus, Prometheus, Anansi, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster doing their utmost is a hellish death spiral.

Secondly it still has the same problem of there being worshipers of evil or neutral gods. It's not like Hextor Bane doesn't get any prayers shot his way even by the good guys; floating that as a solution at all betrays a Judeo-Christian bias. Hell, that proposal just makes things worse for Team Good because Team Bad can just indoctrinate or force people to pray for the religions that they like like in real life. In fact now that I think about it the idea of Gods getting extra power from their worshipers only makes things that much worse. This situation not only strongly encourages an Old Testament-style religious genocide from Team Good in order to weaken Team Evil but also makes it the morally correct decision. Grim to the fucking dark.

[Grek]

Since practically every single pantheon ever created for a heroic fantasy setting falls into the exact same traps FrankTrollman outline, I'm going to say that no, it's not that easy. The most sense a pantheon has ever made in a TTRPG is in Exalted and that's only because the setting makes no bones about the fact that the Gods are petulant, putrid morons more interested in shooting celestrial crack than helping anyone.

Here's one that doesn't:

In this setting, there are no outer planes of any description. Instead, angels live at higher altitudes and demons live at lower altitudes. People are able to physically travel to Mount Celestia on foot and, if they are able to survive climbing it, will then be physically located in a peaceful paradise with neither death nor suffering for as long as they stay there. Similarly, demons can climb out of cracks in the earth that lead down to Hell and, if they survive the climb up those cliffs, they get to live on Earth, which, compared to Hell, is essentially paradise.

By default, everyone wants to go upwards and trying to help people go upwards towards paradise makes you a Good Person. There's one hitch, though. Beings native to the lower regions have diets that cannot be supported by the resources of the upper realms. Your average demon requires several pounds of meat daily not to starve to death and whenever demonkind invades Earth in any degree of force, they quickly devour all of the animals, then the people, then either start in on eachother like they did in Hell, or go rampaging into a nearby country to eat that. Likewise, people from Earth need food that is hard to grow on top of a mountain and impossible to grow while you live on a cloud.

Additionally, travelling to the lower regions means that you forfit the benefits of living up in the Good lands, causing you to age faster (or at all), grow sick and be suceptable to death. Coming down to help mortals directly, (or rescue demons from Hell) requires a huge personal sacrifice on the part of the angels in addition to the risks of being killed.

The result of that is that helping a demon come to Earth is morally questionable, and that trying to personally get to Celestia without a good reason will lead to the angels justly turning you aside at the gate. It also means that angels, and the gods of Good, are generally willing to help mortals out, thwart demonic invasions and try to improve conditions for people as long as it doesn't mean that they have to descend and hurt themselves to do so.

The pantheon has the following people in it:

The Sun King is the the Neutral Good god of plant life and the dude responsible for the physical Sun shining. Back during the early days of humanity, this is the dude that descended down to the lands below carrying the first seeds and taught people how to farm. He's also the creator of medicine. He gets the domains of Good, Sun, Healing, Travel, Plants and Community.

The Master Builder is Lawful Neutral god of industry, artifice, knowledge and construction. He regularly grants divine revealations to mortalkind, showing them how to build bridges, aquaducts, steam engines, walls, towers, lamps and constructs. Also the dude responsable for the invention of writing. He gets domains of Law, Creation, Artifice, Knowledge, Protection and Rune.

The Queen of the Gates is a Chaotic Neutral goddess of summoners, binders and magician-kings and the only one that goes against the established tradition of not helping people in lower realms try to get into higher realms. Instead, she teaches people how to summon a select few demons out of Hell and swear them to binding oaths that keep them from eating her worshipers. She gets domains of Chaos, Magic, Rune, Charm, Nobility and Knowledge.

The Trickster is the True Neutral god of wild beasts, storms, darkness and most aspects of the natural world that the Sun King isn't in charge of. While is the one that is responsible both for wolves eating your sheet and hailstones ruining your crop, he is also the one responsible for you shooting that dear and for the rain that made your crop grow in the first place. He has domains of Trickery, Weather, Madness, Animal, Darkness and Destruction.

The Demon Lord is the Chaotic Evil god of demonkind and is sorely put off by the fact that his followers lives down in Hell where everything is eleven flavors of horrible. He's the one that is in charge of the periodic demonic invasions of the mortal world and constantly tries to tempt mortals of all types into summoning demons into the mortal world. He gets domains of Evil, Chaos, Trickery, Travel, Strength and War.

The Lawgiver is the Lawful Good goddess that first gave a code of laws to mortalkind. Among these laws were old classics like "Thou shalt not kill.", "Thou shalt not steal." and "Thou shalt not consort with demons." as well as a bunch of practical, if somewhat less obvious laws about what sorts of food that the righteous should eat and what sort of clothes they should wear. She has the domains of Law, Good, Repose, Community, Nobility and Rune.

The Infernal Empress is the Lawful Evil goddess of demonic pacts, who encourages her demonic servants to remain in Hell in exchange for periodic sacrifices of blood and flesh from the mortal realms that feed those servants. She is also, incidentally, the Goddess of the four elements and is able to create air, water, earth and fire in abundance for demon and man alike. She has the domains of Law, Liberation, Evil Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

The Holy Crusader is the Chaotic Good goddess of wars and battles, who is one of the few Good gods to regularly manifest in the mortal realm to personally do battle with demonkind. She also grants wisdom and sage advice to her appointed generals so that she doesn't have to go down so often and slowly waste away by doing so. She has the domains of Good, Chaos, Knowledge, War, Strength and Glory.

The Bone Snake is the Neutral Evil god of death and necromancy. It is a genderless serpent that seeks to poison the upper world, slay the living and unite the world in undeath so that it can storm the gates of Celestia, strike low the gods of Good and remake the cosmos into necropolis fit to house all that has ever lived in eternal darkness and undeath. It has domains of Evil, Death, War, Scalykind, Destruction and Darkness.

[Gx1080]

So, can't we just agree that the Good and Evil axis is stupid and remove it, and that Medieval Fantasy is grimdark, without another 19+ page thread?

[tzor]

Since practically every single pantheon ever created for a heroic fantasy setting falls into the exact same traps FrankTrollman outline, I'm going to say that no, it's not that easy.

I'm going to have to agree here. It's not easy at all. In fact I think we have a built in conflict of interest in design. If you look at a pantheon your first question is "what makes god A different from god B?" The answer, at least from a classical sense is the god's shtick. (Zeus is like all thunderbolts, Neptune is into the water thing and Hermies delivers flowers oh wait that's not it.) This generally becomes co-equal with alignment and that's a general problem because no one designs the shtick with alignment primarily in mind. Most pantheon examples don't even barely fit into the alignment system (really what alignment was Zeus, or Thor ... it's vague at best and never constant). Yet these are supposed to be exemplars of their alignment.

The alignment system practically calls for dualism and the only solution is to tell it point out "no." The whole alignment system really works when there is asymetry, when one is clearly not the same as the other side.

Thus it makes sense to have specific evil beings, because evil is all about the promotion of the self at the expense of others. It doesn't make sense in the other direction because good is about the promotion of others at the expense of the self. That is not to say greater beings of good cannot have shticks, but they are "middle men" at best and those shticks have to be in perfect accord with the alignment. Once you get into the diety level, alignment has to be the defining factor alone.

[Chamomile]

Lago, you make the assumption that dark age poverty is how things must have been for the past thousand years. It could just be that the setting takes place in the world's darkest hour, i.e. the time when you most need heroes to tip the balance back in favor of Good. It could also just be that actually things are not that bad. There is no law that says all the peasants must be starving. Food was not abundant in the real middle ages, but neither were manticores.

[FatR]

Lago, you make the assumption that dark age poverty is how things must have been for the past thousand years. It could just be that the setting takes place in the world's darkest hour, i.e. the time when you most need heroes to tip the balance back in favor of Good. It could also just be that actually things are not that bad. There is no law that says all the peasants must be starving. Food was not abundant in the real middle ages, but neither were manticores.

Depends on what part of "real middle ages" we're talking about. The only constant bad part was the weakness of food storage/distribution system, so even thriving regions could be threatened with famine after more than one year of bad harvests. Otherwise, there were times and places when bread entirely made from actual rye was a bit of a luxury, and there were times and places where eating meat only three times per week was considering a mark of crushing powerty. And looking at technology/culture levels and shit, generic DnD (or Greyhawk/FR in other words) mostly apes the latter, not the former.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Since practically every single pantheon ever created for a heroic fantasy setting falls into the exact same traps FrankTrollman outline, I'm going to say that no, it's not that easy. The most sense a pantheon has ever made in a TTRPG is in Exalted and that's only because the setting makes no bones about the fact that the Gods are petulant, putrid morons more interested in shooting celestrial crack than helping anyone.

Here's one that doesn't:

In this setting, there are no outer planes of any description. Instead, angels live at higher altitudes and demons live at lower altitudes. People are able to physically travel to Mount Celestia on foot and, if they are able to survive climbing it, will then be physically located in a peaceful paradise with neither death nor suffering for as long as they stay there. Similarly, demons can climb out of cracks in the earth that lead down to Hell and, if they survive the climb up those cliffs, they get to live on Earth, which, compared to Hell, is essentially paradise.

By default, everyone wants to go upwards and trying to help people go upwards towards paradise makes you a Good Person. There's one hitch, though. Beings native to the lower regions have diets that cannot be supported by the resources of the upper realms. Your average demon requires several pounds of meat daily not to starve to death and whenever demonkind invades Earth in any degree of force, they quickly devour all of the animals, then the people, then either start in on eachother like they did in Hell, or go rampaging into a nearby country to eat that. Likewise, people from Earth need food that is hard to grow on top of a mountain and impossible to grow while you live on a cloud.

Additionally, travelling to the lower regions means that you forfit the benefits of living up in the Good lands, causing you to age faster (or at all), grow sick and be suceptable to death. Coming down to help mortals directly, (or rescue demons from Hell) requires a huge personal sacrifice on the part of the angels in addition to the risks of being killed.

The result of that is that helping a demon come to Earth is morally questionable, and that trying to personally get to Celestia without a good reason will lead to the angels justly turning you aside at the gate. It also means that angels, and the gods of Good, are generally willing to help mortals out, thwart demonic invasions and try to improve conditions for people as long as it doesn't mean that they have to descend and hurt themselves to do so.

The pantheon has the following people in it:

The Sun King is the the Neutral Good god of plant life and the dude responsible for the physical Sun shining. Back during the early days of humanity, this is the dude that descended down to the lands below carrying the first seeds and taught people how to farm. He's also the creator of medicine. He gets the domains of Good, Sun, Healing, Travel, Plants and Community.

The Master Builder is Lawful Neutral god of industry, artifice, knowledge and construction. He regularly grants divine revealations to mortalkind, showing them how to build bridges, aquaducts, steam engines, walls, towers, lamps and constructs. Also the dude responsable for the invention of writing. He gets domains of Law, Creation, Artifice, Knowledge, Protection and Rune.

The Queen of the Gates is a Chaotic Neutral goddess of summoners, binders and magician-kings and the only one that goes against the established tradition of not helping people in lower realms try to get into higher realms. Instead, she teaches people how to summon a select few demons out of Hell and swear them to binding oaths that keep them from eating her worshipers. She gets domains of Chaos, Magic, Rune, Charm, Nobility and Knowledge.

The Trickster is the True Neutral god of wild beasts, storms, darkness and most aspects of the natural world that the Sun King isn't in charge of. While is the one that is responsible both for wolves eating your sheet and hailstones ruining your crop, he is also the one responsible for you shooting that dear and for the rain that made your crop grow in the first place. He has domains of Trickery, Weather, Madness, Animal, Darkness and Destruction.

The Demon Lord is the Chaotic Evil god of demonkind and is sorely put off by the fact that his followers lives down in Hell where everything is eleven flavors of horrible. He's the one that is in charge of the periodic demonic invasions of the mortal world and constantly tries to tempt mortals of all types into summoning demons into the mortal world. He gets domains of Evil, Chaos, Trickery, Travel, Strength and War.

The Lawgiver is the Lawful Good goddess that first gave a code of laws to mortalkind. Among these laws were old classics like "Thou shalt not kill.", "Thou shalt not steal." and "Thou shalt not consort with demons." as well as a bunch of practical, if somewhat less obvious laws about what sorts of food that the righteous should eat and what sort of clothes they should wear. She has the domains of Law, Good, Repose, Community, Nobility and Rune.

The Infernal Empress is the Lawful Evil goddess of demonic pacts, who encourages her demonic servants to remain in Hell in exchange for periodic sacrifices of blood and flesh from the mortal realms that feed those servants. She is also, incidentally, the Goddess of the four elements and is able to create air, water, earth and fire in abundance for demon and man alike. She has the domains of Law, Liberation, Evil Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

The Holy Crusader is the Chaotic Good goddess of wars and battles, who is one of the few Good gods to regularly manifest in the mortal realm to personally do battle with demonkind. She also grants wisdom and sage advice to her appointed generals so that she doesn't have to go down so often and slowly waste away by doing so. She has the domains of Good, Chaos, Knowledge, War, Strength and Glory.

The Bone Snake is the Neutral Evil god of death and necromancy. It is a genderless serpent that seeks to poison the upper world, slay the living and unite the world in undeath so that it can storm the gates of Celestia, strike low the gods of Good and remake the cosmos into necropolis fit to house all that has ever lived in eternal darkness and undeath. It has domains of Evil, Death, War, Scalykind, Destruction and Darkness.

You made a thread about this setting before, right? Interesting. What are some major things PCs on team white-hat could work towards accomplishing? Having played Terraria a bunch, I'm getting this really neat vision of a floating balloon-city with greenhouses aimed at combining the best sides of the mid- and upper world.

[Grek]

I have not made a thread about said setting before. I made it up less than 12 hours ago to prove a point about it not being difficult to have a conflicted pantheon where it isn't obvious who's the real bad guys.

[fectin]

Since practically every single pantheon ever created for a heroic fantasy setting falls into the exact same traps FrankTrollman outline, I'm going to say that no, it's not that easy. The most sense a pantheon has ever made in a TTRPG is in Exalted and that's only because the setting makes no bones about the fact that the Gods are petulant, putrid morons more interested in shooting celestrial crack than helping anyone.

Here's one that doesn't:

In this setting, there are no outer planes of any description. Instead, angels live at higher altitudes and demons live at lower altitudes. People are able to physically travel to Mount Celestia on foot and, if they are able to survive climbing it, will then be physically located in a peaceful paradise with neither death nor suffering for as long as they stay there. Similarly, demons can climb out of cracks in the earth that lead down to Hell and, if they survive the climb up those cliffs, they get to live on Earth, which, compared to Hell, is essentially paradise.

By default, everyone wants to go upwards and trying to help people go upwards towards paradise makes you a Good Person. There's one hitch, though. Beings native to the lower regions have diets that cannot be supported by the resources of the upper realms. Your average demon requires several pounds of meat daily not to starve to death and whenever demonkind invades Earth in any degree of force, they quickly devour all of the animals, then the people, then either start in on eachother like they did in Hell, or go rampaging into a nearby country to eat that. Likewise, people from Earth need food that is hard to grow on top of a mountain and impossible to grow while you live on a cloud.

Additionally, travelling to the lower regions means that you forfit the benefits of living up in the Good lands, causing you to age faster (or at all), grow sick and be suceptable to death. Coming down to help mortals directly, (or rescue demons from Hell) requires a huge personal sacrifice on the part of the angels in addition to the risks of being killed.

The result of that is that helping a demon come to Earth is morally questionable, and that trying to personally get to Celestia without a good reason will lead to the angels justly turning you aside at the gate. It also means that angels, and the gods of Good, are generally willing to help mortals out, thwart demonic invasions and try to improve conditions for people as long as it doesn't mean that they have to descend and hurt themselves to do so.

The pantheon has the following people in it:

The Sun King is the the Neutral Good god of plant life and the dude responsible for the physical Sun shining. Back during the early days of humanity, this is the dude that descended down to the lands below carrying the first seeds and taught people how to farm. He's also the creator of medicine. He gets the domains of Good, Sun, Healing, Travel, Plants and Community.

The Master Builder is Lawful Neutral god of industry, artifice, knowledge and construction. He regularly grants divine revealations to mortalkind, showing them how to build bridges, aquaducts, steam engines, walls, towers, lamps and constructs. Also the dude responsable for the invention of writing. He gets domains of Law, Creation, Artifice, Knowledge, Protection and Rune.

The Queen of the Gates is a Chaotic Neutral goddess of summoners, binders and magician-kings and the only one that goes against the established tradition of not helping people in lower realms try to get into higher realms. Instead, she teaches people how to summon a select few demons out of Hell and swear them to binding oaths that keep them from eating her worshipers. She gets domains of Chaos, Magic, Rune, Charm, Nobility and Knowledge.

The Trickster is the True Neutral god of wild beasts, storms, darkness and most aspects of the natural world that the Sun King isn't in charge of. While is the one that is responsible both for wolves eating your sheet and hailstones ruining your crop, he is also the one responsible for you shooting that dear and for the rain that made your crop grow in the first place. He has domains of Trickery, Weather, Madness, Animal, Darkness and Destruction.

The Demon Lord is the Chaotic Evil god of demonkind and is sorely put off by the fact that his followers lives down in Hell where everything is eleven flavors of horrible. He's the one that is in charge of the periodic demonic invasions of the mortal world and constantly tries to tempt mortals of all types into summoning demons into the mortal world. He gets domains of Evil, Chaos, Trickery, Travel, Strength and War.

The Lawgiver is the Lawful Good goddess that first gave a code of laws to mortalkind. Among these laws were old classics like "Thou shalt not kill.", "Thou shalt not steal." and "Thou shalt not consort with demons." as well as a bunch of practical, if somewhat less obvious laws about what sorts of food that the righteous should eat and what sort of clothes they should wear. She has the domains of Law, Good, Repose, Community, Nobility and Rune.

The Infernal Empress is the Lawful Evil goddess of demonic pacts, who encourages her demonic servants to remain in Hell in exchange for periodic sacrifices of blood and flesh from the mortal realms that feed those servants. She is also, incidentally, the Goddess of the four elements and is able to create air, water, earth and fire in abundance for demon and man alike. She has the domains of Law, Liberation, Evil Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

The Holy Crusader is the Chaotic Good goddess of wars and battles, who is one of the few Good gods to regularly manifest in the mortal realm to personally do battle with demonkind. She also grants wisdom and sage advice to her appointed generals so that she doesn't have to go down so often and slowly waste away by doing so. She has the domains of Good, Chaos, Knowledge, War, Strength and Glory.

The Bone Snake is the Neutral Evil god of death and necromancy. It is a genderless serpent that seeks to poison the upper world, slay the living and unite the world in undeath so that it can storm the gates of Celestia, strike low the gods of Good and remake the cosmos into necropolis fit to house all that has ever lived in eternal darkness and undeath. It has domains of Evil, Death, War, Scalykind, Destruction and Darkness.

You made a thread about this setting before, right? Interesting. What are some major things PCs on team white-hat could work towards accomplishing? Having played Terraria a bunch, I'm getting this really neat vision of a floating balloon-city with greenhouses aimed at combining the best sides of the mid- and upper world.

I think you're thinking of Orion's setting. there's a couple posts in IMOI by him, tagged with [OCS]. Most relevant is:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52127

[Stubbazubba]

One way around the deity's supposed ineptitude or the problems with the balancing issue is to simply say that whatever god/gods are good are inherently selfless, wise people with a very good perspective; they realize that illness, famine, hardship, injury, and even death, while unpleasant and truly bitter, are not the ultimate evils in life. Selfishness is their enemy, not discomfort. Mortal life is full of both good experiences and bad, that we learn to cherish the good and comfort those who are going through bad times, and to learn compassion for others and sympathy when we go through bad times ourselves. The good deities, then, allow bad things to happen to bring us closer to them. Preventing all pain and loss would make us all selfish and ignorant, not prudent, wise, and selfless, which is the essence of "goodness."

Now, there are those who embrace evil, who believe in inflicting pain and suffering for personal gain, and these perpetrators must be stopped, but it is not in the good deities' best interests to solve it themselves; it is better to instruct followers like Paladins and Clerics to do it, that they learn to sacrifice in the struggle of good against evil, and become closer to inheriting their deific powers. The idea that Heaven is not a place of endless comfort and downright selfish indulgence, but inner peace, compassion, and liberty balanced by discipline, is far more consistent with what is exemplified by paragons of good both IRL and in-game.

There is a war in the after-life, and the only way for good to increase it's number of angels is to draw from those mortals who have already proven themselves to be utterly selfless. Evil can only draw from those who have sought power and pleasure to the point of extreme selfishness, those who enjoy the suffering of others and inflict pain on others for the pleasure of it, and not for any earthly goal. Or something like that. So normally selfish merchants are not demon-quality souls, neither are Well-Intentioned Extremists, etc. The causing of suffering is not in and of itself evil, it is the purpose behind it.

A person's soul, then, is a kind of radio receptor. There are basically two frequencies; the impulse to do a selfless deed comes to us from the good gods, and the impulse to do a selfish deed comes to us from the evil gods. Which one a man or woman chooses to follow then defines whether or not he is a good or evil person. Most go back and forth, obviously, and it requires a consistent effort to follow one or the other to really draw close to the deities, to gain their aid in certain things, or to receive blessings of power from them.

If a person prays to the good gods, the good gods can send that plea to a soul which has been refined towards goodness through consistent selflessness, who can attempt to help out of compassion for the suffering. So it is useful to pray to the gods, so that they can better coordinate your rescue. Sometimes the collected prayers of the faithful good will overcome a certain threshold and allow the good deities to intervene directly. Evil does not get a free move just because good has been exercised en masse here, if the evil deities want to intervene directly, they'll have to get their followers to worship en masse, which can be tricky when everyone on their side is inherently selfish. Well, even more selfish than the average human being.

The problems listed in this thread with the D&D morality and pantheon is really just that fantasy authors combined Judeo-Christian morality with a pagan pantheon. You can have good god(s) and evil god(s), you can have gods with schticks, but you can't then make them both the same gods. At least, not without running into these problems.

There could be two layers to your mythology, wherein the first layer was made up of the "schtick" gods, who ran the world, organized and governed nature, weather, fire, air, etc., etc., and then the second layer would be the "good" and "evil" ones, who were the progenitors of mankind and both sought to raise up more good/evil deities like unto themselves from the souls of mankind, but because mankind is a mixed breed of good and evil, their souls must be refined one way or another in order to qualify for godhood either way. The good and evil gods make alliances or deals with the schtick gods on a regular basis, but there is no inherent morality to the schtick gods, they're as independent as humans are, spirits who are simply not involved in the conflict of good vs. evil. Those humans who die without having gone either to the good or evil side probably go to them, either to be apprenticed in the arts of nature for eternity or to be reincarnated somehow, something along those lines.

[tzor]

When I designed a campaign world I generally work on two general principles; these principles generally drive the system to a somewhat acceptable if not perfect result.

There is no "God" - there is only the multiverse: The multiverse is and the four notions of good/evil/law and chaos are inbulit into the multiverse. Who made the multiverse? Why the multiverse made itself! Not even the gods are powerful enough to mess with the fundamental core of the multiverse. In fact the opposite is true; the multiverse pwns everyone. It's very nature forces the ungood from the lands of extreeme good; forces the unevil from the lands of extreeme evil etc. Since the extreeme ends of the multiverse is where all the real power is found, wishy washy gods tend to be pushed towards the wishy washy areas of mediocre powers.

Belief molds the god. I also call this the "god trap" and why no sane person would ever want to be a god. Not quite "lathe of heaven" stuff, but close enough. The basic argument is that there are two pillars of a god's power; alignment and followers. I've already mentioned the problems with alignment (if you want the good power you need to be "good" as the multiverse thinks good should be). With followers, the problem is that their collective understanding of who you are becomes who you are. Free will? You lost that the moment you crossed past the demigod state (which is also why there are no "evil gods" although reall kick ass evil demigods are often called gods because if you don't they rip your soul out from you).

Not that it matters much becaus the average person will almost never see a god. The average adventurer will almost never see a god, and the average PC may or may not see a god depending on how nasty a mood I am in. Glance through all the classical D&D spells; most of them involve lesser beings at best.

But a result of this is that all gods are to some degree inept because their believers (not their followers; different notion; you can not like a god but if you think he is a certain way you have an influence on that being; evey orc's hatred and bigotry towrds elves in effect molds Correllion, and vice versa; every elf's hatred towards orcs molds Grumlesh) are inept.

This in turn is represented by the old saying: Gods are the dreams of men; men are the dreams of gods.

[Grek]

The good deities, then, allow bad things to happen to bring us closer to them. Preventing all pain and loss would make us all selfish and ignorant, not prudent, wise, and selfless, which is the essence of "goodness."

This does not answer the Problem of Evil. If the "good" gods allow mortals to suffer, they are evil for the relevant value of evil, regardless of their motives and justifications for doing so. You shouldn't worship such a god because it does not have your best intrests in mind. It wants to screw you over in order to serve abstract goals that you personally don't care about. It is only "good" because you labeled them as good and defined their position to be right, regardless of any actual moral judgement that would make sense for the hypothetical people involved to render.

[Stubbazubba]

The good deities, then, allow bad things to happen to bring us closer to them. Preventing all pain and loss would make us all selfish and ignorant, not prudent, wise, and selfless, which is the essence of "goodness."

If the "good" gods allow mortals to suffer, they are evil for the relevant value of evil, regardless of their motives and justifications for doing so. You shouldn't worship such a god because it does not have your best intrests in mind.

Says the toddler when put in time out, yes, or when getting his kindergarten immunizations.

This is an inanely simplistic view of "morality," and demanding that your mythology represent good and evil as such is only going to lead to stupid conclusions like are already widely available. Of course good and evil will have abstract goals, because good and evil are innately abstract things. To try to simplify good and evil all the way down to "comfort" and "pain" would be ridiculous.

The good gods realize that all mortal suffering is temporary; it's the effect it has on their growth into better, wiser, more selfless people or into worse, more ignorant, selfish people that matters, just as any parent disciplines their child to allow for growth understands. The good gods have a bigger perspective about it than just what is happening now. Individual, family, and societal progress and selflessness are the good gods' goals, be it in life or after-life, and the only reason it is upset is because of the presence of the evil gods.

[Grek]

[quote="Stubbazubba]
Says the toddler when put in time out, yes, or when getting his kindergarten immunizations.
[/quote]
No. This is what the theist says when they see that the Gods allow murder, disease, famine and genocide to go on, not because they cannot stop it from happening, but because they refuse to in order to "teach us a lesson" about selflessness and the power of friendship.

After a certain degree of badness is reached, refusing to prevent bad things from happening to your children (or worshipers) in order to teach them a lesson about selflessness stops being a learning experience and starts being Evil with a capital E. Genocide is well beyond that point. Even murder is beyond that point. You don't let your kid get hit by a car just so that he'll know to look both ways next time.

The good gods realize that all mortal suffering is temporary; it's the effect it has on their growth into better, wiser, more selfless people or into worse, more ignorant, selfish people that matters, just as any parent disciplines their child to allow for growth understands. The good gods have a bigger perspective about it than just what is happening now. Individual, family, and societal progress and selflessness are the good gods' goals, be it in life or after-life, and the only reason it is upset is because of the presence of the evil gods.

This is almost certainly false. Unless your campaign setting specifically says that the world is constantly getting better and the people in it are getting becoming more and more selfless with each passing generation, then the Gods that advocate such a policy are Evil. They are allowing objectively bad things to happen, despite being able to prevent them, in order to teach a lesson that is not being taught and would be of only questionable merit in the first place.

After a certain point, more harm does not mean more learning. If benevolent gods are real and powerful, they should be preventing anything worse than a broken leg, because allowing anything worse to happen is letting people get fucked for no good reason. Having a drought ruin your farm doesn't teach you anything besides "The weather will occasionally fuck me and my crops for no good reason. I should prepare for that before it happens again."

And that is completely aside from the issue that the Good gods would be better served by directly punishing killers, theives and other bad people, rather than letting everyone suffer due to things that are completely outside their control, or, at best, only marginally within their ability to influence.

To put it to a point, the gods you described are either too stupid to do what they actually want, or too evil to want anything remotely close to what humans want. In either case, acting based on what they say to do is a terrible idea.

[souran]

Wow, this whole discussion has become stunningly convoluted.

What alignment really is freaking STAGE NOTES. Its a shorthand for how a particular character is likely to act. In this way it acts as a combination of philosophical outlook, psychological profile, and story motivation all rolled into a single thing.

The problem is that when you try and build this into a coherent system of morality and ethics or then when you try and build a believable system of religion on it it simply fails right out of the gate.

Frank likes to talk about team Evil being more inclusive than team good. Except that its bullshit, because team evil can't even agree that it is a team. Not caring what race your slaves, victims or cannon fodder are is not inclusive.

Lago's repeated attempts to show that the players should use less violence are also bullshit. If Lago wants the game to be played like 80's G.I. Joe cartoons where nobody actually gets hurt then there is nothing stoping him from doing so. However, we also don't normally consider people who fought the Nazis or killed nazi soulders in war to be evil or to not have been good because they didn't "seek the redemption" of these nazi soldiers even though as human beings we would assume that they were in fact redeemable.

Trying to turn these alignment systems into a system of religion just gets crazy.

The deities are gods of various things, but religions are systems of belief. Neutral and good deities are understandable. In that its possible to see why people might revere them. But the polytheistic religions that have actually existed tended to not lead to revering one dieties and snubbing the rest, the appropriate worship of the whole pantheon is how people actually behaved. Only the Eberon campaign setting even seems to acknowledge this at all.

Worship of evil dieties only makes sense if those deities threaten the populace unless they recieve worship or if they offer some sort of power or other inticement. Even an evil person doesn't worship a mad chatoic evil dieity without enticement. They would worship good dieties and hope for forgiveness in the afterlife as they are likely to give it.

Making a pantheon is just adding another cast of recurring characters to your game. Alignment should have less to do with it than the portfolios of the dieties and their goals.

[PoliteNewb]

Wow, this whole discussion has become stunningly convoluted.

What alignment really is freaking STAGE NOTES. Its a shorthand for how a particular character is likely to act. In this way it acts as a combination of philosophical outlook, psychological profile, and story motivation all rolled into a single thing.

The problem is that when you try and build this into a coherent system of morality and ethics or then when you try and build a believable system of religion on it it simply fails right out of the gate.

Frank likes to talk about team Evil being more inclusive than team good. Except that its bullshit, because team evil can't even agree that it is a team. Not caring what race your slaves, victims or cannon fodder are is not inclusive.

Lago's repeated attempts to show that the players should use less violence are also bullshit. If Lago wants the game to be played like 80's G.I. Joe cartoons where nobody actually gets hurt then there is nothing stoping him from doing so. However, we also don't normally consider people who fought the Nazis or killed nazi soulders in war to be evil or to not have been good because they didn't "seek the redemption" of these nazi soldiers even though as human beings we would assume that they were in fact redeemable.

Trying to turn these alignment systems into a system of religion just gets crazy.

The deities are gods of various things, but religions are systems of belief. Neutral and good deities are understandable. In that its possible to see why people might revere them. But the polytheistic religions that have actually existed tended to not lead to revering one dieties and snubbing the rest, the appropriate worship of the whole pantheon is how people actually behaved. Only the Eberon campaign setting even seems to acknowledge this at all.

Worship of evil dieties only makes sense if those deities threaten the populace unless they recieve worship or if they offer some sort of power or other inticement. Even an evil person doesn't worship a mad chatoic evil dieity without enticement. They would worship good dieties and hope for forgiveness in the afterlife as they are likely to give it.

Making a pantheon is just adding another cast of recurring characters to your game. Alignment should have less to do with it than the portfolios of the dieties and their goals.

This is the sanest thing that has been said in the whole thread.

[Chamomile]

Souran's post is entirely accurate but doesn't actually fully resolve the dillemma at hand. The dillemma being "how can we say that the gods are moral if Hobgoblin slave pits are a thing?" The argument that the gods actually are doing the very best thing possible for humanity is actually one that you can make, because assuming you chuck the idiocy about turning pious peasants into celestial door handles, all bad things vanish into irrelevance in the face of infinity. I don't care how much suffering goes on while you physically exist on the PMP, in terms of an actual afterlife we know beyond any shadow of a doubt exists because people come back from it regularly, any negative number plus infinity equals positive infinity levels of happiness. So if the ends is to increase the total number of souls that ends up in eternal bliss instead of eternal torment by just one (and we'll go ahead and count all the evil dictators who end up as Balors as eternal bliss, but there's still plenty of Lemures to go around), then any amount of transient PMP suffering is mathematically a price you'd be willing to pay.

The only tricky part in this setup is figuring out why the PMP is important at all, but there's plenty of easy solutions to that. I hope I don't have to go into them here.

[JDSorenson]

Seems to me that the best answer is to de-couple the Gods from the idea of actual morality.

Take a page from real world myths, wherein the gods are conniving, self-centered assholes that people swear fealty to for the mere reason that they are cosmically powerful entities that can fuck people's shit up when displeased.

Instead of having team "good" and team "evil", make them gods of "thing", where "thing" has both a white side AND a darkside, and said god is the ultimate embodiment of "thing".

So Dwarfor, the god of blacksmiths is in essence the god of making tools, horseshoes, and prosthetic legs for tiny tim, but also the god of making siege engines and torture devices. He's the Lockheed Martin of gods.

Likewise, Jezebeela is the goddess of "love" which means pure, honest, devoted love, and also crazed, jealous, lustful love.

Now you take clerics and other clergy action figures, and instead of having them decide "I'm going to worship GOOD. Now here's a copper to go by sweets and make sure you look both ways before crossing the street children!" or "I'm going to worship evil! EVIL! Meahahaha...my loans have ludicrously high interest rates! Take that society!" you actually have gods that promote and worship "thing" and fall somewhere on either the benign side, or the malignant side.

[souran]

Alignment should probably play LESS role in the game than it does now.

Really, alignment should be a hidden property, like Level. The Characters/NPCs do not know what "level" they are because those mechanics cannot be a visible property to them or the game becomes self parody. Similarly, spells that let you detect alignment should be changed to let you detect a thing that would make more sense to characters like lies, intent, allegiance etc.

If alignment didn't have mechanical interaction with the game it could actually be treated like what it is a shorthand that lets everybody understand how a character is likely to act. If it didn't act mechanically with the rules we could honestly say that no mater how strange the system was we don't really care.

As for dieties themselves, making them moral does have require actually thinking about cosmology. IF the dieities need faithful followers to act in the mortal realm and they need worship or they cease to be that gives them a reason to do stuff. However, it would also imply that they should be extremly active. Unless doing godly stuff requires realtime/real effort. So if your Sun God actually rides a chariot of flame across the sky each day then he is seriously doing that. And the reason hobgoblin slave pits exist is because Grummesh "only rewards the strong" and corellion doesn't end them in the pmp because he wants to fight the actual essense of grummesh who only exists in the clestene realm or whatever. Dieties fighitng in the PMP creates a lot of distruction and achieves very little because they cannot be killed there.

The thing is that even with all the material that existed for 2e and 3e on gods how they worked was never really explained instead it was always incomplete, inconsistant, and occasionallly incoherent. It was a set up that allowed the players to sort of fight evil gods but left the "are they really dead/what would that mean" part in the hands of the DM to improvise.

[JDSorenson]

You could always operate under the assumption that the gods aren't actually omnipotent and are bound by some form of celestial law, thus cannot overtly affect events on the PMP. Perhaps they are barred from leaving their personal demense, and are forced to act through agents such as angels, devils, clerics, couriers, litigators, insurance agents, etc.

[K]

I've always preferred gods as characters. I mean, cut all this Christian BS where everyone goes to a special heaven for their god and the gods care about whether you are naughty or nice.

Make one place for the dead. You go there.

Make the gods alien and concerned with their own plots. Mortals come to their attention because they are useful. Bhaal doesn't care if you are the best assassin in the world... he just cares that he can expend a small amount of power to get you to murder someone he'd have to spend more power to murder himself.

Priests are not direct conduits of divine power, but people who have contacted a god and pledged services for bits of magic lore.

Gods don't care if you are good or evil.... they care that you keep up your end of the deal.