...Huh, turns out this thread never showed up for me as having new replies until today, so I missed a bunch of stuff.
JonSetanta wrote: ↑Tue Nov 02, 2021 12:24 am
Emerald wrote: ↑Mon Nov 01, 2021 11:31 pm
So to me, all of these intentionally-dickish DMs are really more of an edge case than anything to be overly worried about in practice.
Don't know if you blocked me or not, but figured I'd throw in a perception on the matter.
Roughly
half of all DMs I've played with have been this "edge case". Maybe it's the region I'm in, maybe it's just because these DMs are the ones lacking players for their group FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, but the old TGD Trope comes to mind; No Gaming Is Better Than Bad Gaming.
I didn't block you, it just looks from the timestamps like I was writing up my reply when you posted yours and I didn't see it, sorry about that.
As far as how edge-case-y Gygaxian DMs are, I'm guessing it's probably a regional or social-circle thing. My experience mirrors Prak's, in that the actual D&D players I know or have interacted with a lot have either not mentioned running into adversarial DMs or have quickly dealt with any they ran into by switching DMs or leaving the group or whatever.
Maybe it's because I've generally lived in areas with healthy gaming scenes so bad DMs couldn't hold groups hostage or rely on players being desperate to play, maybe it's because I've always found games through friends so I haven't had to deal with rando internet groups, who knows. Either way, I guess I'll consider myself lucky for dodging a lot of bullets on that front.
nockermensch wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 4:40 am
As an Atheist (tips Fedora) I don't like actual gods in my games.
See, I tend to like actual gods and religions and divine politicking and such in my D&D games
because I'm an atheist, since I feel the whole point of fantasy settings is that you can play through plotlines and scenarios which don't or can't exist in real life.
"What would a world look like if there were gods that existed and weren't giant cosmic assholes, churches that weren't corrupt as all get-out, and religious leaders and holy champions who weren't hypocritical as fuck?" is, to me, on basically the same level as "What would a world look like if dragons and elves and other beings with thousand-plus-year lifespans were a thing?" or "What would a world look like if there was a magical revolution instead of a technological revolution?" or the like.
"Gods" who aren't actually gods but are merely sapient energy blobs/beings with advanced technology impersonating gods to fool primitives/powerful aliens with delusions of grandeur/etc. are something I associate more with sci-fi settings, because those generally try to stay at least somewhat grounded in reality and eschew the mystical (and if a given setting does have mystical stuff it's usually more sci-fantasy like Star Wars) and so non-supernatural explanations fit those better.
I dunno, maybe that's just me, but either way I find the difference in perspective interesting.
nockermensch wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 4:40 am
Now, people inside the multiverse
believe in all sorts of things, and in places filled with magic, belief has substance. More pratically, borrowing from RL occultists, what happens is that ideas manifest in the astral plane as "thought constructs", which are usually of a feeble and temporary nature (incidentally explaining in-universe how Detect Thoughts work). But if a large group of people focuses long and hard enough on an idea, you end up with
something big, strong and durable, called egregores. Gods, as I write them, are a common kind of egregore.
*snip rest of explanation*
This actually sounds fairly similar to the way I generally explain gods in my games. Spoilered for length and/or people not caring:
The way I have it is that gods are composed of three parts, Persona (the immortal thing with a mind and goals and stuff that can manifest a physical and spiritual form), Portfolio (the thing they're the god of, as well as everything associated with it like how "fire" is associated with passion, hearth and home, etc., which includes their domains and awareness of it in the world and so forth), and Perception (all of the beliefs, myths, religions, etc. around the god, essentially the same kind of thought construct/conceptual entity stuff you mentioned but writ large).
Gods don't necessarily arise from worship, but worship does affect them, and quite strongly, since those beliefs make up as large a part of them as their "self" does. So if a ton of mortals started buying into the Pelor The Burning Hate heresy then Pelor might find himself being angry all the time, wanting to smite people at the slightest excuse, wearing edgier robes, and so on, but if suddenly everyone stopped believing in Pelor he wouldn't necessarily die (at least not immediately) because he's not just incarnate belief.
This separation in parts is how a god can have avatars (they basically divvy up their Persona into separate chunks that are still tied to the same Perception and Portfolio), how gods can have different aspects (they can divvy up their Perception and Portfolio in a similar way), how gods can trade portfolios around (because gods aren't super tightly tied to their portfolios and their Persona and Perception can ground them if parts of their Portfolio change), how heresies can exist in a setting where gods are real and actually talk to their priests (a god who wants to change has to shift their Perception somehow and so they might start or at least fail to stop various heresies in the way a mortal might try out a new hobby or change jobs), how mortals can ascend to godhood (they basically become the Persona of a new god, or a god they're replacing), and so on.
This means, naturally, that there are three different ways to kill a god: you can slay the Persona (though that leaves the other two parts up for grabs and so the god might be replaced or its mojo absorbed soon enough), you can wipe out its worshipers and remove knowledge of its existence until its Perception withers away or is irreparably damaged, or you can steal all of its Portfolios (or destroy them, where their portfolios are things like "this particular city" or "this particular creature type" that can in fact be totally destroyed), which map nicely to the traditional kill-a-god plots of "stab god in face in its divine realm" and "wipe out cult to god so it can't interact with the world anymore" and "wrest divine spark from god to ascend yourself."
This setup also helps provide a single lens through which to view various disparate D&D setting concepts: souls are basically pure Personas, Outer Planes are basically pure Perceptions, the raw mechanistic sources of power that arcane alignment spells and archivists and so forth tap into are basically pure Portfolios, the abstract divine forces that empower paladins/druids/concept clerics/etc. are a merged Portfolio+Perception with no guiding Persona, demon princes/archdevils/archomentals/etc. have a Persona and a Portfolio (the plane they embody and rule) but no Perception to shape them (innately, though a given being can also be a god, like how Lolth is both a demon prince and a god), and vestiges and ancestor spirits and other "like Outsiders, but with no game stats" things have a Persona (if only barely) and a Perception but lack the Portfolio that would give them full-on divine power.
(And no, the fact that gods are all tripartite beings wasn't based on the Christian trinity or anything, it's based on the fact that I assume Planescape as a background setting for all of my games and the Rule of Three and Unity of Rings are overarching principles there...but a Christian friend to whom I explained the system briefly thought I was talking about real-world gods and trying to claim either that Jesus was an ascended mortal who killed and replaced Yahweh and stole his portfolio or that "Yahweh" was just an old term for a non-sapient ball o' power that Jesus-the-Persona and Holy-Spirit-the-Perception used to do their godly deeds, which I found quite amusing while it lasted.)
So really, it seems like the main differences between our two approaches is that (A) in my setup you can actually kill a god via face-stabbing (though often only temporarily) while in yours you can only do that to the avatars, and (B) in my setup gods can predate mortal beliefs about them while in yours they are solely created through mortal belief. Kinda funny how we came at the issue from essentially opposite directions and ended up in nearly the same place.
Hicks wrote: ↑Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:17 pm
In the lore that nobody cares about, my game used 6 gods.
*snip explanation*
Six gods. Or be a cleric of a concept.
Seems like a pretty good setup, if overly traditional. (Why do so few people switch it up so e.g. you have a moon god with a sun goddess, or the fire god gets to be the life-and-goodness one because cooking and "the flame of life" and such while the air god is the death-and-evil one because storms and sky burials, or the like? Those poor elements, always getting typecast.)
I do like settings like this one, where you have a small set of 3 to 9 recognizable and memorable gods to which you allocate all the alignment/elemental/season/celestial object/etc. stuff and they cover essentially everything in existence between them, for its economy of lore; I prefer settings with more gods so you have room for multiple pantheons, minor/local gods, and other interesting wrinkles in the divine milieu, but if you're trying to just get the gods out of the way and keep them in the background, the small and elegant solution works just fine.