null wrote:Look, confrontational tone aside, my point is that 'testing ground' dungeons lack a kind of plot quality control. You are, at a basic level, having the designers kill off people that are useful to them. Thats just dumb, in a very 'Evil Overlord' list kind of way. It also, in D&D terms, means rogues are 'most worthy' of anything. You aren't actually measuring any sense of worth other than 'can you get through a dungeon'.
That's actually pretty accurate on several points. Maybe I'm contaminated by reading Discworld, but I've gotten used to the ideas that deities often do things that aren't very logical. Or they simply don't care for individual worshippers and instead focus on the group.
As an extreme example, if one of Pelor's followers tries to get through this hypothetical dungeon and traps onto the spike pad, he's not going to miss this one person very much. This feels like this is something Frank would say, but I doubt Pelor's going to get very excited about losing a hundred worshippers over a period of years. Or even a thousand. He's probably been in wars that cost him more than that in a couple of weeks.
It makes him sound callous and uncaring, which he's not-- he just has millions of worshippers he has to think of before he can get too worked up over his average cleric or paladin getting killed trying to make a name for himself and earn some celestial cred (which maybe be a counter-productively cynical way of viewing Pelor's relationship with his servants).
But, at the same time, if one of those paladins or clerics or a group of Pelorites together take it upon themselves to go hunt down a randomly-opening demiplane, pass the tests of logic, strength, and probably something about alignment and morals cooked up by the DM, and claim an artifact in the name of Pelor...
I'd imagine the Big Guy would take notice of them and let the radiance of his eyes and the sparkle of his teeth shine upon them when it's appropriate, whether it's letting them have his favor to meet the prereqs for a PrC or a comfy spot in the afterlife.
And I'd imagine the gods in general don't mind they lose two or ten adventurers a year to this place. They lose worshippers all the time. It's just the Good gods try to arrange things so it doesn't happen that much, whereas the Evil gods simply don't care or encourage it.
WARNING! TANGENT!Come to think of it, being an adherent of an Evil god is probably a lot like being a Death Eater in the Harry Potter series (maybe a vice-versa would be appropriate in that statement?). You're serving something you acknowledge to be greater than yourself, but it won't hesitate to betray or abandon you if you cease to be useful. And no matter how much you really do believe that you really are the special one, the chosen one above all the rabble, you're still just a tool and will be kept as long as you remain useful.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
