Reconciling the massive failures of 'good' gods.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So Frank brought this up in his 'Your Alignment Sucks' thread but I think this should be split off because it's a major issue that can be easily fixed, unlike the other stuff in his thread.

While people do like inserting powerful gods who can rock shit into their fantasy (they provide a convenient and massive mythology and help make a world more authentic) the fact of the matter is that people don't like classic jackass gods like the Greek pantheon or the Exalted gods. Or rather, they like the jackass gods as long as those jackass gods aren't fucking up their shit.

Fair enough. So that the solution to all this was to insert 'good' gods into the setting. Anyone with half a brain or moral fibre should feel extreme ambivalence at about working for any god not named Hades or Prometheus (the former of which had his own evil shit, just not as much), but when you're working for Bahamut or 4th Edition Pelor you can actually feel good about it. I mean, Ioun supports building free libraries and universal literacy which is a laudable goal.

The only problem is... why is the Heroic Fantasyverse such a shithole? I expect a certain amount of shittiness inherent in any setting as violent as the D&D campaign setting, but this shithole goes above and beyond the call of dooty (:hehehe:) Why are people still using feudalism? Why isn't Ioun distributing scrolls of 'Ultimate Crop Yield' that he personally researched? Why won't Pelor roll down and go 'look, here's how you kickstart the green revolution'?

• The gods aren't actually good, they're just jackasses. Which creates disillusionment and grimdark and a lot of people don't like that.
• The gods are extremely ignorant and can't think of a better way of life for their subjects. This ignorance heads straight into Grey's Law territory considering how awful their ignorance is and is just as bad as the first problem.
• The gods aren't actually all that powerful and/or can't interact with the setting directly. This is straight up the Yahweh-problem, creating dissonance between their feats and their current powers. Oh, sure, Demeter could single-handedly create a year-wide harvest around the fucking world (she needs to do something this special, otherwise no one would remember her name), but she couldn't do that today even if she wanted to. That's lame and contrived.
• The Voltaire solution. The gods somehow 'know' that this is the best world to live in and if they accelerated sapient happiness and progress it would backfire horribly--some kind of bullshit Malthusian crisis or the gnomes develop the atom bomb or whatever. But this just makes the setting all of the more hopeless and grimdark, because this is the best of all possible worlds.
• The Balance of Good And Evil. For some reason, having balance is more important than freeing slaves or feeding children. Some authors will have some stupid side effect towards having 'good' overwhelm evil, but most will just axiomatically state that the Balance is uber-important in of itself. Lame.

That sucks monkey fuck, but I've seen fantasy settings use all of the above shit.

The bottom two are considerably better IMO but are considerably rarer.

• A New Day Is Dawning. Things used to suck hardcore but the Good Gods broke their imprisonment or they got a clue or they won Ragnarok or whatever. The thousand-year cycle of people tilling the soil on a 1500 calories a day is about to come to an end, because RIGHT NOW Carl Glittergold is giving out Miracle Seeds for free in the town square and Kord is threatening to personally come down and lop off the head of the Emperor if he doesn't free all of the slaves and hold elections open to everyone.
• Life Is Good, Depending On Where You Live. Gods, rather than having dominion over the whole realm, only have control over specific geographic areas. So the places where Avandra or Pelor or Prometheus (or some combination of the above) are dominant, life is actually pretty sweet. It's just in the places where Hextor or Gruumsh are dominant are the places that suck balls.
  
  The problems with this is that is starts to raise the question why the 'good' realms aren't curbstomping the 'bad' realms. They have more educated, better fed, happier, and less diseased people (and more of them, too). There's no reason why they shouldn't be easily overcoming the 'bad' lands unless there's some massive advantage the 'bad' gods get on their home turf. This really isn't a solution more than a setup; either the good gods are slowly willing after all and then your campaign setting will look like A New Day Is Dawning, or the good and evil gods are at some kind of stalemate and you have hopeless grimdark anyway. It's just that only half of the people live in abject misery now. An improvement, but not that much.
• Evil Is Winning. It's not a total route like in, say, WH40K but they did win pretty hardcore. They did some shit like dethrone the head Good God, they have more people on their side, they have some Ultra Artifact, whatever. The point is that the Good Gods really do realize what a shithole the world is and keeping it in medieval stasis is the absolute best that they can do. Bahamut is personally fucking pissed that the biggest lizardman tribe is practicing child sacrifice, but Tiamat will intercept him and whup his ass if he tries to intervene. Erathis has tried really, really hard to pass down the secrets of sewage systems to the people living in cities but Papa Nurgle is just around the corner to bribe the Guildmasters to forget about the whole project and spend the money on hookers and blow.

Now, the third one sounds just like 'the gods aren't as powerful as you think' but it has a key difference in it. The point is that they are powerful, but they need the help of powerful mortals to push them over the top. The heroes' goal in this instance is to try to convince the lizardman tribes to abandon the vile practice with Diplomacy or a Blood Oath while Bahamut is wrestling Tiamat in a losing struggle before she beats him. Or their goal is to kick the corrupt guild out of the city and build the sewers themselves after getting a vision from Ioun. So evil Wins, but they only won by a margin of 1 to 10%. Your mortal heroes can make up the difference.

The third paradigm also means either making heroes much more powerful and setting-affecting than they were in 4th Edition D&D or eliminating the idea of Hell being able to undo decades worth of heroics by releasing a single Balor into a populated town. Whichever.

Of course the three biggest things fantasy writers could do to alleviate this problem in the first place are to A) stop idolizing poverty. B) stop idolizing Tolkein. C) stop idolizing ubermensch. This may be an utterly impossible task, in hindsight.

[Psychic Robot]

The Entente: The good gods and the evil gods are all powerful beyond measure, but they are evenly matched against one another. For every sickly man that Pelor heals, Nerull can cripple another; for every villain that St. Cuthbert smites, Hextor can raise up another to wreak havoc. Thus, the gods have an agreement: they will not directly interfere within the mortal realm, instead empowering their followers to do their will.

The Ends and Means: The good gods realize that if they were to save the mortal realm from themselves--ending famine, curing diseases, punishing the wicked--the mortal realm would eventually become a utopia. In doing so, the mortal races would gradually drift away from the gods because they have no need for them. The good gods cannot impose their will on others (as they are good) and refuse to do evil to make humanity dependent upon them. Thus, their power weakens considerably, allowing the evil gods to force humans to worship them (as they have no moral compunctions against doing so). In the end, the world is plunged into terrible chaos because the evil gods get all the power.

Darwinism: The gods are all Objectivists.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Entente: The good gods and the evil gods are all powerful beyond measure, but they are evenly matched against one another. For every sickly man that Pelor heals, Nerull can cripple another; for every villain that St. Cuthbert smites, Hextor can raise up another to wreak havoc. Thus, the gods have an agreement: they will not directly interfere within the mortal realm, instead empowering their followers to do their will.

This is just like the Evil Wins scenario I mentioned, because the status quo of heroic fantasy tends to guzzle turds. Yeah, the landscape may not be some smoldering blightfest with wights running everywhere, but I won't actually call 'Living in Medieval Europe, But Worse' anything like a positive outcome. If that's the best Good can do then that's that, but I despise the idea of selling this fact of life as anything other than an unmitigated tragedy and the slow death spiral of civilization.

The Ends and Means: The good gods realize that if they were to save the mortal realm from themselves--ending famine, curing diseases, punishing the wicked--the mortal realm would eventually become a utopia. In doing so, the mortal races would gradually drift away from the gods because they have no need for them.

This recycles back into the Gods Are Jackasses problem. They're not actually good. The 'good gods' are insanely jealous douchebags who can't deal with the thought of people not worshiping them to the point where they're willing to implement a mass poverty/torture program to keep the praise coming.

It's a retarded way to go about doing things anyway, too, because if we actually did have gods going about implementing health care programs and forcing nobles to send some of their wealth back to the peasantry people would worship them out of gratitude, even thousands of years later when they're colonizing other planets and there's no way that they would need them.

Darwinism: The gods are all Objectivists.

This makes the Good Gods double-jackasses.

[Psychic Robot]

This recycles back into the Gods Are Jackasses problem. They're not actually good. The 'good gods' are insanely jealous douchebags who can't deal with the thought of people not worshiping them to the point where they're willing to implement a mass poverty/torture program to keep the praise coming.

You misunderstand. The gods don't fix the world because fixing the world will lead to its annihilation--the evil gods will destroy everything when they gain all the worship/power.

This makes the Good Gods double-jackasses.

It sure does.

[K]

I once read a fantasy novel where Good had won the war and banished the evil gods and started whitewashing all the evil people, causing the world to begin to sublimate into pure light due to lack of evil. So it was up to the last few evil people to band together and save the world.

Personally, I've always been fond of the Dominions storyline where various gods are competing to rule the world and have their philosophy and magic envelop the world.

It always made sense to me to continue that idea to its logical conclusion so that if a god ever won that war, the world would be dominated and warped by the magic of the god and become what we know of as a plane. I mean, each layer of the Abyss is an actual place infused with the morals of something evil and chaotic as well as various magics... it makes sense that it was once the personal influence of some being.

As to why the gods don't act to feed the hungry and right wrongs, I always liked the Populous model where gods get power from worshipers and acting in the world costs that power. I mean, the big gods have no problem creating the occasional volcano as long as they understand that they are going to be powerless to affect the world until their batteries recharge (making their own holdings vulnerable to the actions of other hostile gods).

These are just my favorite and most workable models. Omnipotent gods may make the Christians happy, but it makes no sense that an omnipotent god does nothing or little to help their worshipers. I mean, even in a world where gods have demonstrable power, atheism is a rational choice when the best you can hope for is to be subsumed into the plane of your favorite god.

Basically, the only way that gods are even remotely worth your time is if they are limited in power, but you promote them so that you just might get repayment in the form of a tiny deity-appropriate miracle now and then. That means that your choice of gods is really just a reflection of your choice in miracles, and not a moral choice at all. By that logic, a good person might worship an evil God of Plague or something so that he might be spared from disease or his enemies get the clap.

Personally, fantasy literature and games would do really well if they ignored Christianity as a model completely and stole more pages out of a pantheon religious model like Hinduism.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You misunderstand. The gods don't fix the world because fixing the world will lead to its annihilation--the evil gods will destroy everything when they gain all the worship/power.

That doesn't make any fucking sense. So after the people forget about the Good Gods who made their life better (which already doesn't make any sense), instead of just forgetting to pray altogether they go and worship the people who continually fought to make their lives worse?

I once read a fantasy novel where Good had won the war and banished the evil gods and started whitewashing all the evil people, causing the world to begin to sublimate into pure light due to lack of evil. So it was up to the last few evil people to band together and save the world.

Which is that bullshit Balance of Good And Evil garbage again.

As to why the gods don't act to feed the hungry and right wrongs, I always liked the Populous model where gods get power from worshipers and acting in the world costs that power. I mean, the big gods have no problem creating the occasional volcano as long as they understand that they are going to be powerless to affect the world until their batteries recharge (making their own holdings vulnerable to the actions of other hostile gods).

The biggest things that a Good God can do is provide motivation and knowledge. The God of Civilization doesn't personally have to purify Paris's water, he just needs to tell the king that he needs to build a sewer system right now or he's smiting his naughty ass. Bahamut could make everything better for everyone right this second by telling his avatar to create a celestial bank with all of the money personally backed by him.

[Psychic Robot]

That doesn't make any fucking sense. So after the people forget about the Good Gods who made their life better (which already doesn't make any sense), instead of just forgetting to pray altogether they go and worship the people who continually fought to make their lives worse?

Yes. Because once humanity enters a utopia, they have no troubles, no need for gods. Give it twenty or so generations and all the upstarts youngsters will only vaguely recall the names of the deities their plucky ancestors used to venerate. Since the good gods are good, they aren't going to force everyone to worship them or cause harm to enter the world. Then, all of a sudden, the evil gods show up and demand that everyone worship them. Shit hits the fan, bodies hit the floor, and then the world is royally fucked. Maybe at that time someone will revive the worship of the good gods, but until then, the evil gods have triumphed and things are worse off than they were before the good gods fixed everything.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The evil gods that weren't being worshipped suddenly roll on in and threaten to hurt people if they aren't being worshipped? WHAT? How are they getting this power to threaten people if they aren't being worshipped?

Secondly, why would people forget the lives of people who made their lives immeasurably better? People fucking remember the names of petty politicians in the real world from centuries back and they didn't even do better. Moreover, if the stakes were as bad as 'forget to worship a good god and evil gets a kitten' then why the fuck wouldn't the people still worship the good gods even after they built a utopia? It'd just be the same as any other kind of preventative ritual like bathing or eating healthy or exercising.

The only reason why people would do the second one is if they forgot en masse 'oh, yeah, I need to throw Avandra a prayer otherwise the forces of evil will get strong and our society will collapse'. In other words, they would have to become fucking retarded.

[Psychic Robot]

Hmm. You're probably right. I keep forgetting this is D&D land, where the gods pop in every so often just to fiddle with things.

[K]

As to why the gods don't act to feed the hungry and right wrongs, I always liked the Populous model where gods get power from worshipers and acting in the world costs that power. I mean, the big gods have no problem creating the occasional volcano as long as they understand that they are going to be powerless to affect the world until their batteries recharge (making their own holdings vulnerable to the actions of other hostile gods).

The biggest things that a Good God can do is provide motivation and knowledge. The God of Civilization doesn't personally have to purify Paris's water, he just needs to tell the king that he needs to build a sewer system right now or he's smiting his naughty ass. Bahamut could make everything better for everyone right this second by telling his avatar to create a celestial bank with all of the money personally backed by him.

Well, under the limited power model then doing either of those things costs real amounts of power from a finite pool.

So manifesting to a king in an appropriately impressive form and commanding him costs power. I mean, sending a dream or telepathic message means the king will probably think some wizard is messing with him so the god would have to use all the bells and whistles to convince the king (and probably the court too since undertaking a major civil project and draining the treasury is not something the king can do alone).

Creating banks with the appropriate guards and wards and physical buildings to stop wizards and demons and enemy gods would be a major act of power..... making a volcano would seem child's play in comparison.

The limited power model means that the god has to make the choice to recruit a champion to fight an enemy god OR tell a king to engage in basic sanitation. He's got limited amounts of power to fight enemy gods and promote his religion, so anything he does above and beyond that is a drain on his own power and he's risking his own existence.

Under omnipotent power models, then the gods are all douches for not creating utopia right now. Under limited power models, then you can forgive the gods for hording their power for things they consider truly important.

[Korwin]

I like this setup for Good and Bad Gods.

Short description:
The gods are so powerfull they would destroy the world if they would battle directly.
So they use Proxy's and faith is the a currency they use to determine how much power the Proxy's get for something.
(Not shure at the moment for what exactly.)

[magnuskn]

Just asking, but where does the "1500 kalories per day" thing come from? It may have been true in our medieval times, but is there any indication that D&D peasants live the exact same way?[/i]

[Grek]

Alternate acceptable model: All deities are of limited power, but the Good gods are much, much more powerful individually than any Evil deity. The forces of Evil, however, outnumber the forces of Good. The Good gods, rather than spreading out their blessings equally to everyone and then having the forces of evil turn up and screw things up as soon as they turn their backs, generally just pick a small region and heap all their blessings on the people there. These divinely sponsered regions then go on to be the capitals of kingdoms and life is sweet there, but the rest of the world has to be protected by the local fuedal lord appointed by the divinely appointed king or on heros.

This differs from the "Life Is Good, Depending On Where You Live" idea in the OP, as there usually aren't any kingdoms sponsered by Evil and ruled by evil dudes. These get taken out pretty much as soon as people catch wind of whatever bad things they're doing. Instead, there's a constant insurgency of evil trying to topple the forces of justice.

[A Man In Black]

The Magic Goes Away: The gods used to be able to make year-long harvests, create volcanoes, etc. but they can't any more. Empowering clerics and maintaining their own realms/outsiders is all they can do any more, except when they do because of plot devices or burning the reserves or whatever.

[Wulf]

The gods are bonded to their planes, or perhaps even are the planes themselves. They can't directly intervene in our material world ,cause they have no body (spiritual entities). They can, however, influence the world indirectly, creating avatars (costly), through inspiration (dreams, prophecy, signs), gaining champions etc.

The material world is on the intersection of all the main planes. The world (also a plane actually) and other planes influence eachother. If people start using more fire or revere fire ,that will be a boost for the plane of fire, etc.

As a god is his plane, he is only omnipotent on his own plane, making attacks on a god's plane rather suicidal for other gods. So the way to do battle is through the material plane who is on the intersection of all the planes. However, destruction of a plane might have dire consequence for the material world as it is the intersection of all planes.

[mean_liar]

With multiple entities with extreme amounts of power, I can't see a setting in which the Prime Material coherently exists while allowing deities to wander and do their deity thing. If it did, then the world wouldn't just be good gods making crops bountiful, it would be the god of plagues making all the air toxic and the god of the earth crushing things with mountains and the god of war endlessly inspiring armies and killing them and and and.

To me, the only real way to have a coherent world is if the gods are necessarily removed from it. My personal setting's cosmology assumes that the current Prime is the 4th iteration, with each previous iteration being destroyed by interplanar warfare spilling out and then being resolved by some form of cosmic reshaping (first the setting's Titanomachy destroys the world, then the god's enforced neutrality following their destruction of the place, then the epic spells and epic proxy battles blasting the place to pieces and subsequent limitation on granting of their effects).

Really, the problem isn't just the gods. There's a host of world-destroying things that have to be resolved to get you to a world in which adventurers aren't living in a wasteland or paradise.

[Josh_Kablack]

I suppose this one is a subtype of "limited power", but you could go with

The prophecies and oracles are misinterpreted by mortals

[Thymos]

How the hell are you using the word objectivist?

From what I understand all it means is that there are truths.

[Blicero]

How the hell are you using the word objectivist?

From what I understand all it means is that there are truths.

They're using it in the Randian, "Rape is good" sense. The libertarians that hate other libertarians for not being libertarian enough.

[Psychic Robot]

How the hell are you using the word objectivist?

From what I understand all it means is that there are truths.

You must be new here.

[Username17]

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will deplete the local fisheries.

The fact is that the knowledge required to make vaccines and steam engines and combine harvesters an crap isn't that hard to impart. Entirely mortal people teach that shit to each new generation without the use of any divine anything on a daily basis. So one of the first assumptions you pretty much have to make is that the gods - good an bad alike - are basically ignorant savages. The reason they don't tell you about the germ theory of disease or how to build a suspension bridge is that they seriously don't know.

Trying to come up with a power rationing model where it is somehow beyond the scope of Ioun to tell people about the scientific method simply lacks credibility. I mean fuck, if he can tell anyone about anything at any point in the history of the world - he could give that one out. Because it just snowballs. That's how progress works. So you pretty much have to posit that neither he nor any other go of any alignment is any more knowledgeable than a random philosopher of their time.

-Username17

[Blicero]

That's why I honestly like the Eberron approach where the gods are more or less nonexistant. People do things in their names, but they don't do things themselves. It's up to priests and other characters do decide what the Word of Dol Arrah actually is and then spread it. The closest you'll get to talking to the Sovereign Host is by summoning a solar and asking what it thinks from its totally heavenly point of view.

As people have ennumerated on this board many many times, Eberron did a huge number of things wrong. But the way it handled religion was something it did really well.

[mean_liar]

There still needs to be a recognition of a timeline. The idea that a civilization must be at its peak - FTL travel, transhumanism, whatever else - or else the gods are "ignorant savages" is just (unsurprisingly) reductionist bullshit.

"How does civilization advance?" is a legit question, but the answer need not be "they're all ignorant savages". A god of knowledge might actually be prevented from imparting that knowledge for the same reason that the god of plagues can't cover the earth in a life-ending plague, or the reason that the god of fire can't toss meteors around: gods can only have limited interaction with their worshippers and mortals are expected to advance under their own powers.

You could take the idea and run with it. A god of knowledge gives out the great secrets of engineering and science, and within a few generations some small backwoods country has industrial technology, and everyone that uses that tech is worshipping the god in some way. Forces against that god turn into raging luddites. The technology itself becomes a threat to most every other god as the god of agriculture becomes irrelevant due to herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers and farming equipment. The god of earth is pushed aside and the strip-mining begins. And so on. You'd have some gods siding with the tech - gods of wealth or industry, gods of healing - and others just using it for their own good - gods of destruction and war.

But with gods fueling it, things will rapidly get out of control and you eventually end up with the same problem: the place gets burnt to the fucking ground, or it's a paradise with no tension and hence no (high fantasy) story to tell. Or maybe it does work out and you have Shadowrun, with gods. That could be a possibility.

So coming up with a reason why civilizations are at their current tech level is integral to deciding the role of the gods, the answer need not be "ignorant savages": it could also be detente (to prevent possible catastrophe), or a lesson learned (following a catastrophe).

[norms29]

I'm actually intrigued by the question of how Objectivist Gods would act.

I suppose the most important question is whether the patheon sees themselves as a government (theft, vandalism and anyother infringment on property rights punishable by lightning bolt) or as individuals just like mortals ("I prayeth to thy for help" "why? what have you done for me?").

also whether they are also giving out moral commandments in the more traditional style as well. I'm not sure I can even imagine a society where being generous or charitable is viewed as something that requires justification to be acceptable rather than something inherantly praiseworthy

[Thymos]

I was using the word objectivism in this sense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivit ... bjectivism.

You'll have to forgive me, I got a bachelors in philosophy and it was analytic (and honestly I have no interest in Ayn Rand).