[Phil Swift Voice] "THAT'S A LOTTA GODS"--The planes sure seem crowded...

[Dogbert]

there's a big difference between "the bargain between deity and cleric is that so long as the cleric serves the deity's interest the cleric gets to keep his powers" (what's implied by the various Codes of Conduct in 3e and the flavor text in both 2e and 3e) and "gods are capricious jerks who can take away even a completely loyal cleric's powers whenever they feel like it" (the way it might work under a dickish DM)

3E was a fluke and will not happen again.

DnD is Gygaxian by default. GMs are not only allowed by the book to be anti-player, they're encouraged. The DM is assumed to be a PoS by default. Not only that, 5E went the extra mile and went from merely saying "when a rule has two or more possible interpretations, always take the one more detrimental to the players" to explicitly going Ass World in the writeup. Furthermore, whenever a new book makes an expansion/revision on a game concept or rules, said revision is always for the worse.

I know 5E made it a design objective to destroy the very concept of standards, but discussions cannot ever take place if not from a common place. "How I do things at my particular table" is not a common reference, the contents of the books are.

[Prak]

While that may be the case with the "creative" direction of 5e, I feel like the player community growing up around 5e is... not carrying that forward. I can't say with any authority that the majority of players of 5e don't carry forward that philosophy, but it does feel like the players who are more mtp/"lets all just make a fun story" are making strong strides in the sort of ...culture cold war that D&D exists in.

I may not love 5e, and I may not even particularly like Critical Role or the other big Let's Plays due to the DMing styles and the characters played, but I do have some hope that while WotC tries to burn D&D's credibility to the ground around them, the players who are more interested in just having fun in imaginary worlds with their friends and down for chaotic shenanigans are changing the culture of the D&D community.

[Dogbert]

but it does feel like the players who are more mtp/"lets all just make a fun story" are making strong strides in the sort of ...culture cold war that D&D exists in.

DnD tv shows are as much evidence of progress as Biden (i.e, both are just TV, not the way actual things work). Having said that... yes, I'd have to be an idiot to ignore tv's power as a propaganda tool, but if there is some pro-player progress in some corner of the planet (not mine, though, I'm not seeing it), that progress is due to those shows' influence, not the other way around.

The only reason we don't see "red side" dnd shows with Gygaxian neckbeards spitting on the players' faces and making them cry and walk out is because neckbeards are more often than not fugly deplorables and thus not quite marketable.

[Prak]

Sorry, I understand talking about Dimension20 and Critical Role made it sound like they're my basis for my judgement. But I'm actually given that impression by interacting with 5e players online, whether that be discord, reddit, tumblr, or whatever. Now, granted, this is somewhat self-selecting, and gygaxian assholes still exist, but it seems like in general things are getting more chill. If mtp rules are the price I have to pay for DMs who won't take an adversarial role towards the players, I'll accept that cost.

[Prak]

(stuff about egregores etc)

Ok, so, first, thank you for giving me a term for the way I see "gods" as an actual person in the real world (belief is... irrelevant to me, but when I think about "gods," it is very similar to the idea of egregores) and the knowledge that this is an extent type of occultism that I can read more about.

But also, that's overall a really interesting way to handle gods, and even allows for stories where the PCs are put into the position of gods and have to deal with the expectations of worshippers, which don't necessarily have to be high level. Between this and a game I'm watching on twitch, I'm starting to think of a follow up adventure for a non-greyhawk game I'm working on where the characters happen across a small tribe of goblins or something who, for whatever reason, believe the PCs are their gods. And that can just be a thing, without saying "ok, for this adventure, you're all level 28" or whatever.

[JonSetanta]

Reminds me of the episodes of Konosuba when the group goes to a hot spring town filled with worshippers of Eris, and everyone is shoving pamphlets in their faces.

[Hicks]

In the lore that nobody cares about, my game used 6 gods. There once were like millions of smaller gods, but they all went to a huge party that ended in a drunken brawl and basically all of them died except 2, who were in the other room making out. IMC, when a god dies, it ends the thing the god was a god of... so when the old god of fire died and all heat ended in the universe...
Anyway. Those 2 gods had 4 kids and divided up the domains in the PHB amongst them.

The Arbiter (Law, Death, Earth) and Pandora (Chaos, Water, ect) were the first fraternal twins.
The second pair of siblings was Ariel (Air, plants, animals, good) and Loki (Fire, Evil, ect)

And that's it.

Oh and the Father gets the Sun sphere and the Mother gets the travel (moon) sphere, cuz I'm a hack ~♡

Six gods. Or be a cleric of a concept.

[Thaluikhain]

Do they have approximately equal amount of clerics, so you can roll a d6 to see which god a random cleric worships?

[Emerald]

...Huh, turns out this thread never showed up for me as having new replies until today, so I missed a bunch of stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[OgreBattle]

Was there Arnesonian DM'ing in early D&D as something different?

[Zaranthan]

I've always vastly preferred settings with gods that can be counted on your fingers. If you tell me your world has thirty gods, all I hear is "you will never be able to identify holy symbols or recognize scripture unless I just tell you."

[deaddmwalking]

I've always vastly preferred settings with gods that can be counted on your fingers. If you tell me your world has thirty gods, all I hear is "you will never be able to identify holy symbols or recognize scripture unless I just tell you."

I'm not going to argue that you aren't entitled to your preference, but I think that having dozens or hundreds of gods is fine, but that a specific dominant culture should probably only have a few (or one). If you're campaigning in Fantasy-Renaissance-Italy, having references to the 'old-Roman-Gods' (and cults) is a good thing, and it's okay that there may be a lot of them. The important thing is that you can clearly distinguish between an 'important now' god and a 'not-generally important, but may be relevant later' god.

Ie, in a typical fantasy setting, the human culture has a dozen gods, and it's not a problem that the elves, dwarves, goblins, and lizardfolk also have a dozen gods; most of the time you're just going to say 'this appears to depict a Duergar god' and leave it at that. If distinguishing between two particular Duergar gods is important (maybe because worshippers of one could be an ally and the worshippers of the other are all KoS), that information will be revealed during the course of the campaign so it's not important to do a deep dive in the various demihuman religious traditions before you start the game.

In most campaigns I'm part of, we do a quick 'here are the gods that are most important locally', and then talk about less popular but still potentially [edit] relevant [/edit] religious traditions. In the current campaign I'm a player in we had 3 religions described in a page; one monotheistic, one ancestor based, and one 'old polytheistic'. In the one page hierarchy, general beliefs and common phrases were all covered (as well as name-checking some of the important old gods). It's pretty easy to grok the religious differences (and cultural associations) when someone says 'by the light' versus 'by the ancestors'.

[erik]

I just set up a 3e hex crawl as a backup campaign for friends so that our DM can take a break whenever he needs to and for my setting I just told em clerics and folks worship whatever they want, deities, pantheon, monster, volcano, an idealized spiked chain (in our old games Spiked Chain was a homebrew deity with the war domain and their namesake was their divine weapon), etc. and mechanically it is as though they worship the domains/portfolios. People don’t know for sure if their deities are real. Contact other plane and the like gets answers from something somewhere but whether it is collective knowledge or elder beings is an open question.

[OgreBattle]

D&D God stories kinda feel like dealing with the "CEO of Spiders" "Board of Lawful Evil", killing the CEO and taking their position so prayer / stocks flow

[JonSetanta]

Emerald, ah my assumption, apologies.

Yes it probably is regional differences.


I had a discussion on a Facebook group a month ago about "Atheism, Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Polytheism/Pantheon worship" that naturally turned into a flamewar about 20 times over, but I did glean an idea from it.

Individual beliefs affect divine power from an active perspective in that a character takes a level in "I pray to Pelor for magic", they get spells from said belief as a mechanical benefit, and pretty much do... Whatever with it.

But if a target is deliberately in disbelief of the existence of any pantheon, they should IMHO get some bonus to saves against divine magic or perhaps lessened effect from the results of a successful save, and as a side effect also receive little to no benefit from divine boons and healing.

Belief in a rival pantheon or God would NOT have this effect as doing so essentially accepts divine influence even antagonistically.

In numeric terms this, for Atheists, could be as little as +2 to all saves against divine magic or as much as half or no damage on successful saves (and no "on a successful save, do X effect"), as well as half or no Cure Wounds benefit and 50% chance of a divine buff simply failing.

A friend joked years ago about the Erik the Viking scene in which the Christian character, disbelieving the entire Norse afterlife, treated the gate to Valhalla as nonexistent, while to everyone else it was a complete physical barrier.

Optional, but interesting dynamic concerning faith or lack thereof.

[deaddmwalking]

Faith is not a measured attribute. If someone says their character is an atheist, but they have some doubt, should they get any resistance to divine magic? Even if you disbelieve in gods, all gods, you can't deny that magic exists and people claim they get divine gifts from deities. Pretending that healing magic doesn't exist makes you a moron; pretending that the source is NOT divine beings when, objectively, the setting says that it is, makes you wrong.

Of course, the savvy player will continually reject the existence of god, then find their belief when they want to appeal for divine aid (like healing), then reject the existence of the gods again. That's not even unrealistic - lots of people change their belief in the divine over the course of their lifetime. Ultimately, you're just inviting the GM to decide whether someone is REALLY atheist, and that puts you firmly in dick DM land, whether that was your intention or not.

[erik]

Agreed, that model is pretty problematic.

A vastly better "rejection of divine" model would be a pretty simple pathfinder trait.

Disbeliever
As a person who rejects covenants with gods, your belief is strong enough to repel divine spells.

Benefit: You gain a +2 trait bonus on saving throws against divine spells, but you must make a saving throw even when that magic is beneficial to you.

[Emerald]

Was there Arnesonian DM'ing in early D&D as something different?

There was, kind of, though it wasn't called such. It was a much more free-flowing style where numbers and player knowledge and skill were de-emphasized (the kind of game where instead of the DM saying "the goblin stabs you for 6 damage" he just says "the goblin stabs you mightily" and tracks your HP for you behind the screen), sci-fi mixed freely with fantasy mixed freely with horror, theater of the mind and wilderness adventures were preferred over grid-counting and dungeon-crawling, and so forth.

A lot of the differences between Blackmoor (Arneson's home setting) and Mystara (Moldvay's home setting, inspired by and later incorporating Blackmoor) on the one hand and Greyhawk (Gygax's home setting) on the other, and between BECMI (closer to "classic Arneson" in nature) and AD&D (Gygax's spin on D&D without any input from Arneson), illustrate the general differences in their respective styles.

This article, about how Arneson isn't given enough credit for the invention of D&D compared to Gygax (whether you agree with the conclusions or not), has some snippets in the middle about how Arneson used to DM the very first games, and it's a style he continued and that others picked up later on. There are articles about Arneson's and Gygax's styles in early Polyhedron and Dragon magazines, too, though finding them can be a pain.

I'm not going to argue that you aren't entitled to your preference, but I think that having dozens or hundreds of gods is fine, but that a specific dominant culture should probably only have a few (or one). If you're campaigning in Fantasy-Renaissance-Italy, having references to the 'old-Roman-Gods' (and cults) is a good thing, and it's okay that there may be a lot of them. The important thing is that you can clearly distinguish between an 'important now' god and a 'not-generally important, but may be relevant later' god.

Agreed. This is illustrated nicely by Game of Thrones, in which you have (A) the Faith of the Seven, which is very well-fleshed out and embedded in society, and readers who care can name all of the titles and spheres of influence of the Seven Gods; (B) the Faith of R'hllor, which is a fairly niche faith but, again, anyone who cares can remember the weird spelling, recall some titles, list some major quotes and tenets of the faith, name the Great Other, and so forth; and (C) a ton of other local faiths that nobody care about and that come up maybe once or twice in passing and then don't really matter again. The world as a whole has dozens and dozens of gods, but readers only really need to keep track of eight of them.

I think three major religions you expect your players to care about with no more than a dozen gods/saints/etc. each (with 3-5 being a better number per religion unless the players know them well or they're a major focus of the game) is a good upper bound.

Whether it's the monotheistic + ancestor worship + polytheistic setup you mention here, the civilized pantheon + fire pantheon + nature pantheon setup I mentioned in a post upthread, a game set in mythical Earth using the 12 Olympians + the 8 or 9 main Egyptian gods + the 9ish Aesir anyone cares about, or similar, I think three groups of gods is a good sweet spot where you can draw nice religious contrasts between three pairs of faiths instead of having religious monocultures or a bland "our/good gods" vs. "their/evil gods" dichotomy, and when you have 5 to 10 gods that gives you enough room to have a core of main gods to cover the main needs of each group plus the fun and useful outliers like Dionysus the God of Partying or Heimdall the God of Idris Elba Is A Badass and so forth for occasional dashes of flavor or the more oddball PC clerics.

Individual beliefs affect divine power from an active perspective in that a character takes a level in "I pray to Pelor for magic", they get spells from said belief as a mechanical benefit, and pretty much do... Whatever with it.

But if a target is deliberately in disbelief of the existence of any pantheon, they should IMHO get some bonus to saves against divine magic or perhaps lessened effect from the results of a successful save, and as a side effect also receive little to no benefit from divine boons and healing.

Faith is not a measured attribute. If someone says their character is an atheist, but they have some doubt, should they get any resistance to divine magic? Even if you disbelieve in gods, all gods, you can't deny that magic exists and people claim they get divine gifts from deities. Pretending that healing magic doesn't exist makes you a moron; pretending that the source is NOT divine beings when, objectively, the setting says that it is, makes you wrong.

The big question here is what one means by "atheism" in a setting in which the gods verifiably exist, grant divine magic, smite people who rob their temples, and so on.

Flatly disbelieving in the gods in such a scenario is, as DDM notes, irrational (though not necessarily a bad character concept at a meta level; in a more lighthearted and casual game, playing an "atheist" who is acknowledged to be as wrong in-setting as a flat-earther is out-of-setting could be fun), but something equivalent to the Athar works quite well.

The Athar are "atheists" in the style of Captain Kirk or Captain America (who meet beings claiming to be gods on a regular basis but treat them as merely powerful space aliens) who basically say "So Pelor can heal people and blast undead with holy fire and grant magic to other people, big deal, any 20th-level wizard can wish someone back to life and burn tons of undead and cast spells through a raven using imbue familiar with spell ability, that doesn't mean he deserves worship for it--and if he needs worship to pull all his fancy tricks, then pshaw, that makes him weaker than the wizard, who can do everything on his own!"

In such a case, having D&D "atheists" gain resistance to divine magic not on the basis of "I don't think Pelor is a thing" but rather on the basis of "I think Pelor is nothing more than an angel with delusions of grandeur, and I'mma counter your fundamental belief in his righteousness that lets you channel divine magic with my fundamental belief that he's a tosser who doesn't deserve worship," similar to the trait erik mentioned, would be more consistent. It also wouldn't require someone to flip-flop on their "belief" based on whether they need healing, because the character can be totally happy to accept healing from a Pelorite cleric in the same way they'd happily accept a buff spell from the party wizard while still thinking Pelor is a delusional egomaniac.

[JonSetanta]

I rationalized the RPG expression "belief shapes divine existence" in an opposite stance that "disbelief has quantifiable negating effects", because such individuals are literally believing to not believe.

I had forgotten about the Athar, but that is very similar to my suggestion that an anti-divine-to-the-point-of-causing-and-cancelling-physical-effects really should be an option without a feat or class tax.

Likewise, as I posted about two or so years ago or more, every pious character should get some kind of magic benefit regardless of class, making D&D more like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup where the person "does X thing as often as possible to appease the deity" gets Piety points to spend on spells.
It's not a daily resource like true Cleric class abilities, as a god of Destroy All Undead would only grant Piety for, well, destroying undead, which then grants thematic Destroy Undead spells (level-appropriate of course) to then go and do the thing as nauseam.