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daremetoidareyo
2015-02-19, 08:03 PM
I'm writing an economics essay about non-market valuation.

There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful. Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat. They can only have their plans foiled.

I need a source that isn't a forum that explains clearly why it is a bad idea to stat powerful entities. This is nearly impossible to search for with the terms that I'm using in my google fu.

Thanks guys.

Milodiah
2015-02-19, 08:12 PM
You might consider looking for the same advice in sources geared more towards fantasy authors as well.

Deophaun
2015-02-19, 08:17 PM
Freakonomics has a chapter on what happened when a school started charging parents for not picking up their kids immediately after school. It's the same idea: once you put a number to something, it becomes a legitimate transaction to those willing to pay, or a legitimate opponent to those willing to fight.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-19, 08:17 PM
Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat.Piffle.

Uranus was castrated and overthrown by Saturn, who was in turn dismembered and overthrown by Jupiter; Balder was killed by a mistletoe dart; Cthulhu took a steamship to the face and went down; the invincible Devil In Iron was killed by Conan with the starmetal dagger he found; Orcus used that killing word to slay his way across the pantheon as Tenebrous before he himself was laid low, and Mishka the Wolf-Spider was imprisoned in the Rod of Seven Parts by the Wind Dukes of Aaqa; gods and devils and Cthulhoid abominations are absolutely able to be defeated or even killed.


Thanks guys.You're welcome.

daremetoidareyo
2015-02-19, 08:35 PM
Piffle.
Uranus was castrated and overthrown by Saturn, who was in turn dismembered and overthrown by Jupiter; Balder was killed by a mistletoe dart; Cthulhu took a steamship to the face and went down; the invincible Devil In Iron was killed by Conan with the starmetal dagger he found; Orcus used that killing word to slay his way across the pantheon as Tenebrous before he himself was laid low, and Mishka the Wolf-Spider was imprisoned in the Rod of Seven Parts by the Wind Dukes of Aaqa; gods and devils and Cthulhoid abominations are absolutely able to be defeated or even killed.

You're welcome.

The scale of power in RPGs has gone up and up to the point where mortals can face down gods. Some gamers favor the verisimilitude of having things beyond the effects of direct action. Those gamers opinions, in some sort of internet form is what I'm after, not a rebuttle to that preference. I don't care that gods can defeat each other, or that humans can use mcguffins to defeat things more powerful than themselves. I need to capture the essence of the idea that numerical representation lends a mental framework for people to manipulate a concept. This is a potent analog for the essay I'm writing.



Freakonomics has a chapter on what happened when a school started charging parents for not picking up their kids immediately after school. It's the same idea: once you put a number to something, it becomes a legitimate transaction to those willing to pay, or a legitimate opponent to those willing to fight.

Thank you. I'll grab that for an example as well. I really want the god/cthulu analogy because we still, as humans, have a totemic regard for nature, you know, by being bound to it as animals.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-19, 08:43 PM
The scale of power in RPGs has gone up and up to the point where mortals can face down gods.Except where it hasn't. Lolth's first writeup had her statted with no more than 60 hp.


Some gamers favor the verisimilitude of having things beyond the effects of direct action.Don't kid a kidder; that's a play preference, but it's not a matter of verisimilitude.


Those gamers opinions, in some sort of internet form is what I'm after, not a rebuttle to that preference.Fair enough; I'm just saying that it's hardly universal.


I don't care that gods can defeat each other, or that humans can use mcguffins to defeat things more powerful than themselves.If you want, I can dig up other examples where neither of these is the case.

And fact of the matter is, sometimes you play gods. That's half the point for Nobilis, Scion, Exalted, and Mythender. Fighting and defeating gods is not outside the wheelhouse of tabletop gaming.

Flickerdart
2015-02-19, 09:04 PM
I need a source that isn't a forum that explains clearly why it is a bad idea to stat powerful entities.
Anything that has no stats has to be interacted with on the GM's whim - the player characters no longer have tools for dealing with it directly, and it goes from NPC to GM-ersatz. It's such a simple concept that you're not going to find a "source" beyond perhaps an article on something else entirely obliquely referencing it. You might have some luck searching for write-ups about the Lady of Pain, since she's a canonical "rocks fall" in disguise.

Brookshw
2015-02-19, 09:16 PM
You may want to look into discussions surrounding the Lady of Pain on these forums. Also I'd point you to Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, some of his comments regarding logical interactions are quite interesting and I suspect relevant to what your trying to explore.

Anywho, once the thing has stats it has a prescribed value, it can be understood, manipulated, is relate-able, can be reasoned with, and possibly overcome if such is your goal. It, in essence, creates restrictions on potential where as the undefined remains infinite. The opportunity cost of defining such a thing is massive, it will never be anything other than what it's been confined to. It takes something that should be unrelate-able and reduces it to the mundane. It's kind of like if a worm hole suddenly opened in your living room. Is it more interesting as an open ended question of where it goes, another planet, some other dimension perhaps, or does it lose all of it's mystery if you know it leads to the bathroom at the Starbucks down the street.

You might want to send a PM with the question to Afroakuma, he'd probably have some interesting opinions to share with you.

I'd be curious to read your essay when your done if you're at all willing to share it.

oudeis
2015-02-19, 09:34 PM
Piffle.

Uranus was castrated and overthrown by Saturn, who was in turn dismembered and overthrown by Jupiter; Balder was killed by a mistletoe dart; Cthulhu took a steamship to the face and went down; the invincible Devil In Iron was killed by Conan with the starmetal dagger he found; Orcus used that killing word to slay his way across the pantheon as Tenebrous before he himself was laid low, and Mishka the Wolf-Spider was imprisoned in the Rod of Seven Parts by the Wind Dukes of Aaqa; gods and devils and Cthulhoid abominations are absolutely able to be defeated or even killed.

You're welcome.Struggles between gods hardly translate to mortals' ability to contend with divine beings. Bellerephon was thrown from Pegasus when he tried to fly to Olympus. Arachne was turned into a spider when she dared compare her weavings to Athena's. Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Prometheus, among many others, were condemned to eternal punishment for defying the will of the Olympeans. I'm sure others could cite myths from many cultures that provide explicit detail about what happened to mortals foolish enough to challenge, anger, annoy, or just draw the wrong sort of attention from the Gods. Using examples from pulp authors and D&D game lore hardly counts as authoritative citations; if you like I could list counter examples. Oh, and Cthulhu? Not a god, and he reformed and went back to sleep.

You're welcome.


Except where it hasn't. Lolth's first writeup had her statted with no more than 60 hp.And an AC that made her almost unhittable, even by high-level characters with buffs and magic weapons, and 70% magic resistance, and every psionic skill in addition to a bargeload of points to use them. Also not a god.


Don't kid a kidder; that's a play preference, but it's not a matter of verisimilitude. And what, pray tell, would be? In the absence of definitive proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, mythology and folklore are the closest we have to canonical examples of Divine interaction. Take a look at early D&D material and tell me that the designers weren't drawing on historical faiths.


Fair enough; I'm just saying that it's hardly universal.Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.

Ravens_cry
2015-02-19, 09:34 PM
Honestly, I would say it depends on what gods are in the 'verse. If they are quasi-personified forces of natures, or even fictional, yeah, stats matters not. If they are basically someone powerful who said 'I am a god!' and lots of people agreed, or lots of people said 'they/that are/is a god!' then stats are more than appropriate, with a lot of wiggle room in between. I personally favour the former approach, but whatever fits the tone and stories you are trying to tell.

Flickerdart
2015-02-19, 09:38 PM
Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.
You seem to have a remarkably low opinion of the players of Exalted.

A Tad Insane
2015-02-19, 09:50 PM
The easiest way to explain it is if you give a god one million hp, someone else can make a character with two million hp

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-19, 09:55 PM
Struggles between gods hardly translate to mortals' ability to contend with divine beings.Sure it does.


Arachne was turned into a spider when she dared compare her weavings to Athena's.Arachne failing her saving throw against Baleful Polymorph doesn't indicate anything more than that Athena can be pretty darn petty and spiteful.


Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Prometheus, among many others, were condemned to eternal punishment for defying the will of the Olympeans.So? No one who fought Ares in hand-to-hand combat in The Iliad got turned into a tree for it - not even Diomedes, who beat him.


I'm sure others could cite myths from many cultures that provide explicit detail about what happened to mortals foolish enough to challenge, anger, annoy, or just draw the wrong sort of attention from the Gods.It doesn't matter if there are a billion losses, one victory is enough to prove the gods are not unbeatable.


Using examples from pulp authors and D&D game lore hardly counts as authoritative citations…When we're specifically talking about statting gods in the context of tabletop RPGs? It's absolutely authoritative. Howard was a direct inspiration for D&D.


Oh, and Cthulhu? Not a god…Yet still an example listed multiple times by the OP, even in his most recent post.


and he reformed and went back to sleepThey may not have put him down permanently, but they still beat him.

Jormengand
2015-02-19, 10:07 PM
Relevant:


Arael, The Overdeity
Before you stands a being of pure power. The creature that stands before you could not be anything but the ruler of the gods. Even standing near it allows you a sense of its awesome might, and you instantly decide that fighting such a creature would be madness, even for another deity. A closer look shows the form of an archetypal humanoid, the very essence of what it means to be a sapient being. It has no wings and yet it flies, it has no mouth and yet it speaks, neither eyes nor ears and yet it knows all.

You poor bastard, you.

Fighting Arael:

You lose.

afroakuma
2015-02-19, 10:14 PM
Relevant

...no, that's not at all relevant to a question regarding non-forum sources.

Jormengand
2015-02-19, 10:19 PM
...no, that's not at all relevant to a question regarding non-forum sources.

It was a joke. It was meant to be mildly amusing. I apologise if it didn't amuse you.

daremetoidareyo
2015-02-19, 10:26 PM
You may want to look into discussions surrounding the Lady of Pain on these forums. Also I'd point you to Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, some of his comments regarding logical interactions are quite interesting and I suspect relevant to what your trying to explore.

Anywho, once the thing has stats it has a prescribed value, it can be understood, manipulated, is relate-able, can be reasoned with, and possibly overcome if such is your goal. It, in essence, creates restrictions on potential where as the undefined remains infinite. The opportunity cost of defining such a thing is massive, it will never be anything other than what it's been confined to. It takes something that should be unrelate-able and reduces it to the mundane. It's kind of like if a worm hole suddenly opened in your living room. Is it more interesting as an open ended question of where it goes, another planet, some other dimension perhaps, or does it lose all of it's mystery if you know it leads to the bathroom at the Starbucks down the street.

You might want to send a PM with the question to Afroakuma, he'd probably have some interesting opinions to share with you.

I'd be curious to read your essay when your done if you're at all willing to share it.]

You pretty much nailed the key component of knowledge is power. My essay is specifically about non-market evaluation of nature: i.e. economic value of scenic beauty, remoteness, instrinsic value, non-endangered noncommercial species. Applying numbers to these aesthetics would in turn make them manipulable, except in this case, the PCs are Multimillionaire developers, and the statblock has been published by environmental economists. I will totally PM afroakuma about LOP. I forgot about her. I'm sure there is some articulate stuff around about it.

The reason I write this essay is for mental purchase of another wild idea I have been planning on using for my second of 3 papers for a phd: What happens when you use non-market evaluation tools designed for natural resources and apply them interpersonally. What is the extra value of being perceived as white, straight, male, whatever? The problem, the ethical problem, that I see in chasing down that academic inquiry is that it has internet viral potential. If the American public knows that the average male person of color would pay $54 dollars a month for society to treat them statistically the same as a white person, or that the average white person would accept $150 a month to be treated without privilege, there are big ramifications.

So I want to fully explore what the ethical implications of piercing the veil with numbers to see if I am comfortable attempting to publish a study that will lead people to start treating each others with monetarily prescribed values. Imagine how people in real life would manipulate that information, it gives me serious pause, and I may need to rethink my major second paper. I don't any corporate, racist, or ignoramus pun puns misusing cthulu's statblock as a firmament for interpersonal injustice. Exploring this concept with natural resources will definitely help me refine whether or not I want to be on that road: Like Paizo deciding to stat up the Schmady of hurt for its new installment of Realityscape.


TheCountAlucard

It seems that you are getting a lot of flack about your personal opinions about how to roleplay. I'm sorry that the forum got all agressive with you about it.


...no, that's not at all relevant to a question regarding non-forum sources.

Since you're here, man. Have you got any skivvy on the lady of pain stat block conundrum? It doesn't need to be a super fancy source, it just needs to articulate why the LOP is far more potent an entity without a statblock to evaluate her on.

unseenmage
2015-02-19, 10:28 PM
My takeaway from this discussion thus far is that 'To Stat, Or Not To Stat?' is a choice. Or at least is based on context.

For those who desire unbeatable godlike entities they will leave those entities unstatted or make the stats subject to DM whim.
For those who desire beatable godlike entities they will provide stats which could be fair or unfair approximations of 'nearly unbeatable'.

And in both of the above context is a big deal, for Exalted you play gods but don't beat Primordials (IIRC, its been a while). For D&D 3.5 you play mortals who could achieve godhood if the narrative allows and/or if ELH is available.



For the OP, consider the context and perspective of your examples. Correlation doesn't always equal causality. Perspective/context matters.

Xefas
2015-02-19, 10:32 PM
Relevant:


Arael, The Overdeity
Before you stands a being of pure power. The creature that stands before you could not be anything but the ruler of the gods. Even standing near it allows you a sense of its awesome might, and you instantly decide that fighting such a creature would be madness, even for another deity. A closer look shows the form of an archetypal humanoid, the very essence of what it means to be a sapient being. It has no wings and yet it flies, it has no mouth and yet it speaks, neither eyes nor ears and yet it knows all.

You poor bastard, you.

Fighting Arael:

You lose.

Man, this guy goes down like a chump against the Exalted. They already have perfect defenses against "You lose", "No, you just lose", and "You just lose, there is no ability that can prevent you from losing, no not even then" effects. And you haven't even given this guy defenses to stand against their own "You just lose, there is no ability that can prevent you from losing, no not even then" effects. :smalltongue:

daremetoidareyo
2015-02-19, 10:35 PM
My takeaway from this discussion thus far is that 'To Stat, Or Not To Stat?' is a choice. Or at least is based on context.

For those who desire unbeatable godlike entities they will leave those entities unstatted or make the stats subject to DM whim.
For those who desire beatable godlike entities they will provide stats which could be fair or unfair approximations of 'nearly unbeatable'.

And in both of the above context is a big deal, for Exalted you play gods but don't beat Primordials (IIRC, its been a while). For D&D 3.5 you play mortals who could achieve godhood if the narrative allows and/or if ELH is available.



For the OP, consider the context and perspective of your examples. Correlation doesn't always equal causality. Perspective/context matters.

Dude, I just want a linkable source, preferably non-forum, for the part of the debate that supports not giving statblocks for the supermystical. I am totally agnostic as to a play preference, but I acknowledge there are those who have them, with well reasoned arguments as to why... Which is what I'm looking for.

unseenmage
2015-02-19, 10:43 PM
Dude, I just want a linkable source, preferably non-forum, for the part of the debate that supports not giving statblocks for the supermystical. I am totally agnostic as to a play preference, but I acknowledge there are those who have them, with well reasoned arguments as to why... Which is what I'm looking for.
Should have probably put that in your OP Title then. As it stands the topic kind of begs for interpretation.


Edit: You ninja-ed your explanation of what you're actually asking so I'll elaborate on my response some. Feel free to ignore if I've misunderstood your aims.
Consider too the context of the audience for the numbers you're looking at. Sure the $ amounts could be relevant for a statistical study but that doesn't necessarily mean the average Joe could pay to be treated differently.
Now I'm not saying someone couldn't intentionally confuse the issue and convince Joe that was the case. That's an entirely different, Fox News-ish, issue.

Generating the numbers in context and using them in ways they're not meant to be used seem to me to be two different problems. There are committees who need to know what species are more endangered than others so they can spend their sparse budgets on the species most critical to their ecosystems, saving a apex predator sometimes saves an entire ecological niche.
If a media source misleadingly uses those numbers to say the less impactful species are intentionally being left to die, say as a political gambit to justify moving money from logging in a region over to conservation, pressuring the committee to drop the scary apex predator and save the frog (who would have been saved by the preservation of the apex predator anyway) that's a different problem from having those numbers generated in the first place.

It's kind of like the argument against bomb research or viral research. The assumption is that these things can only be used to kill. The reality is that they can also save lives.
I'm of the opinion that no knowledge is inherently bad or wrong. It is in the use of that knowledge that right and wrong, good and bad, are revealed. Atomic powered powerplants are useful. Atomic powered bombs less so.

Power, and by extension knowledge, isn't inherently good or bad. Its the use or abuse of power which should be judged.

Chronos
2015-02-19, 11:07 PM
For what it's worth, Fingolfin was what in D&D terms would be called a mortal, and Morgoth was what would be called a god, and yet Fingolfin was at least able to permanently maim Morgoth before getting squished.

BWR
2015-02-20, 02:13 AM
Since you're here, man. Have you got any skivvy on the lady of pain stat block conundrum? It doesn't need to be a super fancy source, it just needs to articulate why the LOP is far more potent an entity without a statblock to evaluate her on.

What conundrum? Gods and other powerful beings like certain demon lords, the Lady, etc. weren't stat'ed in 2e because in those days they were supposed to be beyond the rules of the game. They were left unstat'ed because they were flavor and a plot device, not something the PCs were intended to ever directly interact or contest with. The Lady was meant to be flavor and a brief explanation why Sigil was neutral ground, given a short list of known deeds (or at least deeds ascribed to her) and a few known action triggers with results, and left at that. If the DM wanted more to be done, s/he was free to invent some rules for interaction. If the DM wanted the Lady to be untouchable, s/he wouldn't have to contend with "but the stats say we should be able to".

johnbragg
2015-02-20, 02:28 AM
What conundrum? Gods and other powerful beings like certain demon lords, the Lady, etc. weren't stat'ed in 2e because in those days they were supposed to be beyond the rules of the game.

2E book Deities and Demigods statted out the gods of various pantheons. Mostly historical, I don't remember if they statted out the gods of Oerth or Faerun.

Wait, I just remembered--they statted out the gods' physical avatars, which could be killed/destroyed, subject to the limitations on destroying creatures with at-will access to divine magic.

Knaight
2015-02-20, 02:51 AM
The scale of power in RPGs has gone up and up to the point where mortals can face down gods. Some gamers favor the verisimilitude of having things beyond the effects of direct action.

This is just factually incorrect. The very first RPG was D&D, in which characters grew dramatically more powerful, were assumed to start as already highly competent people, and which explicitly featured a bunch of mechanics involving getting huge numbers of followers. Tons of more recent stuff operates at a far lower scale of power than early D&D.

Arbane
2015-02-20, 03:17 AM
And an AC that made her almost unhittable, even by high-level characters with buffs and magic weapons, and 70% magic resistance, and every psionic skill in addition to a bargeload of points to use them. Also not a god.

She was worshipped by the drow, that's god enough. And the whole point of the module was to find and kill Lolth. The mere fact that it 'should' be impossible has never stopped any PCs I've heard of.


And what, pray tell, would be? In the absence of definitive proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, mythology and folklore are the closest we have to canonical examples of Divine interaction. Take a look at early D&D material and tell me that the designers weren't drawing on historical faiths.

AND sword and sorcery fiction, AND high-fantasy fiction, AND pop culture, AND....


Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.

As was said earlier, the Exalted and Mythender players are laughing at you now.

And I'm pretty sure there's a Norse myth about a farmer who took Odin hostage and threatened to kill him, but it's been a long time and I'm blanking on the details. The Greek gods have already been mentioned.


And in both of the above context is a big deal, for Exalted you play gods but don't beat Primordials (IIRC, its been a while). For D&D 3.5 you play mortals who could achieve godhood if the narrative allows and/or if ELH is available.

Exalted aren't gods, they're humans with god-like powers. (Becoming a god would actually be a significant step DOWN in power for some Exalted.)
I'm pretty sure fighting the Ebon Dragon is a possible endgame in Return of the Scarlet Empress.

Arcades
2015-02-20, 04:41 AM
I really don't understand why you guys are coming up with examples of "mortals killing a god".

Yeah, history is full of mortals challenging and ,in some rare case, beating a deity.

But really what is a god? Looking at Oxford dictionaries (at the non monotheistic kind of god)
(god) (In certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes;

That kind of thing can be accomplished by a a medium level spellcaster in D&D. A 20 level character would actually have powers comparable to most ancient gods. On the other way a monotheistic god is a:
the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.
A being like that cannot simply be statted, and if it can't be statted it can't be killed (without GM fiat).

Anyway OP, I found something that could really interest you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_British


One of the most famous attributes of Lord British is that he is almost invincible. In every Ultima game in which he has appeared, he is designed to be almost impervious to a player's character predations. However, there are ways for a player thinking outside the box to assassinate him.[6]

This phenomenon is the origin of the Lord British Postulate which states: "If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."[7] Virtually every MMO game displays numerous instances of this, with players attempting to kill (or, in the case of friendly NPCs, cause the death of) virtually every NPC or monster, howsoever powerful, meek, friendly, or ethereal.

Ashtagon
2015-02-20, 04:43 AM
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LordBritishPostulate

You're welcome.

M Placeholder
2015-02-20, 05:41 AM
They may not have put him down permanently, but they still beat him.

Thats what he wants you to think:smalltongue:

I've noticed the name Lady of Pain in this thread, and its worth mentioning that aside from ruling the Cage, nobody knows that much about her dread majesty, and she ain't telling any berks. She could be a representation of Sigil, a computer programme, Monte Cook, or Six Squirrels with a ring of levitation and a cloak. The only interaction any PC's or NPC's should have with her is if she is sending them to the mazes or flaying the sods.

goto124
2015-02-20, 05:43 AM
So er... why did OP want to stat out the god again?

Thrawn4
2015-02-20, 07:35 AM
Extra Credits did something on not statting Cthulhu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DyRxlvM9VM

EDIT:

You probably prefer a more reputable source. Have a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a more in-depth analysis of incomparable values:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/
Values, such as liberty and equality, are sometimes said to be incommensurable in the sense that their value cannot be reduced to a common measure. The possibility of value incommensurability is thought to raise deep questions about practical reason and rational choice as well as related questions concerning topics as diverse as akrasia, moral dilemmas, the plausibility of utilitarianism, and the foundations of liberalism. This entry outlines answers in the contemporary literature to these questions, starting with questions about the nature and possibility of value incommensurability.

Brookshw
2015-02-20, 08:23 AM
OP: Thanks for the elaboration, I think I have a better idea of what you're looking for (I hope). As I mentioned, you may want to look into Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. Another option could be to look into the rationalism and empiricism debates which have some relevance to the topic in so far as a statted god is on some level a projection of the rationalist side while unstatted gods which can only be understood through encounters work as a reasonable parallel for the empiricism views. Oddly there might be some interesting discussion in books on Aesthetics in art, if you have any interest I'd be happy to check my records, I think Gombrich could be relevant.

Or maybe discussions on unkillable (http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-terrifying-unkillable-video-game-enemies.php) video (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HopelessBossFight) game creatures would help? Or, though it's a bit of a stretch, simply cheating in video games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_video_games).

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-20, 09:15 AM
Last post on this thread before I go to bed…

If killing gods is impossible, we can't have the story of Old Man Henderson, and that cannot be permitted. :smalltongue:

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-20, 09:16 AM
The easiest way to explain it is if you give a god one million hp, someone else can make a character with two million hp

This rarely follows from the actual rules. In fact, at least in 3.x D&D, you can stat a god to be entirely invincible to all non-gods and then play the god in a way that prevents any other gods from arising... accidentally. The possibility is pretty well hidden in the obscure rules text of Deities and Demigods, but it's there.

There's also the fact that only the GM can, by default, choose to play a god, and the mechanics that reliably allow for low-level characters to ascend are spread across multiple books and limited to a couple of items and abilities. And a moderately powerful god can pretty easily make it so that there's no Pazuzu, no Sarrukhs and no infinite wishes.

supergoji18
2015-02-20, 09:44 AM
The Internet is an amazing place. Only here can a discussion about where to find a good reference for an essay turn into a heated debate about whether gods should have stats.

Well, might as well add my two cents.

It all depends on what the intended feel is. If gods are meant to be the supreme forces of the universe/personifications of its components whom are so far above everything else they are incomprehensible to even the most powerful and long lived cosmic beings, then they should not have stats. Example: Marvel's cosmic beings who are so powerful and mysterious their full powers are completely incomprehensible, and the only times they have ever been defeated by a mortal was when said mortal wielded some McGuffin so absurdly powerful that it turns anyone who wields it into a cosmic being themself.

If gods are meant to be "like us but bigger," they should have stats. Example: Norse Mythology, where gods dying was not only possible but was an important part of an end of the world prophecy. To a lesser extent, the Olympians of Classical Mythology, while clearly above all other forms of life (asside from the even older gods), are still flawed and still able to experience things like pain (IIRC, there was one myth where a god was burned by candle wax and fled in pain. Don't remember the name of the myth, but it did involve Aphrodite and her son).

Forgotten Realms gods should have stats IMO. Divinity in this setting is as fluid as water and gods rise and fall as regularly as flies. Plus, there's the whole "you need worshipers to live" issue which pretty much makes them the mortal's b****es.

johnbragg
2015-02-20, 10:47 AM
Since the thread has completely drifted into the mechanics of deicide in D&D...

... I personally favor the Roman approach.* When the Romans were sufficiently fed up with adherents of a certain god or set of gods, they went in and decimated (or worse) the population, razed the main temple(s) and the city it was in for good measure, and scattered the rest of the population throughout the empire. If gods derive their power from their worshippers, then to kill a god it is necessary to deprive him/her/it of worshippers, either directly by the sword or indirectly by breaking the communal bonds of worship.

The Carthaginians gave the Romans no trouble after the Third Punic War, and the Hebrews/Isrealites/Judeans/Jews gave them no trouble after the Third Roman-Jewish War. I'd say killing a god in D&D would require the same scale of effort.

(Even this would only reduce the god to Divine Rank 0, or maybe even not that far. But if you've wiped out the priestly heirarchy and broken the psychic connection between the god and the worshippers, the god himheritself is basically just a high-CR monster, a different flavor of demon or devil venerated by secretive, scheming cultists.)

* EDIT: Whoa, just re-read. Please read "I personally favor" to mean "If asked as a DM how a god could be killed I would respond thusly" not "This was awesome and kewl."

spineyrequiem
2015-02-20, 01:11 PM
Arachne was turned into a spider when she dared compare her weavings to Athena's.

Original story's much less pleasant than this. They have a contest and Arachne weaves a tapestry about what an unpleasant chap Zeus is. When Athena loses, she fills Arachne with guilt about insulting the gods, so Arachne runs off and hangs herself. Athena finds the body and turns her into a spider as an act of mercy, so she can weave all her life, though mortals will destroy her work without a thought.

Eldan
2015-02-20, 02:31 PM
Since the thread has completely drifted into the mechanics of deicide in D&D...

... I personally favor the Roman approach.* When the Romans were sufficiently fed up with adherents of a certain god or set of gods, they went in and decimated (or worse) the population, razed the main temple(s) and the city it was in for good measure, and scattered the rest of the population throughout the empire. If gods derive their power from their worshippers, then to kill a god it is necessary to deprive him/her/it of worshippers, either directly by the sword or indirectly by breaking the communal bonds of worship.

The Carthaginians gave the Romans no trouble after the Third Punic War, and the Hebrews/Isrealites/Judeans/Jews gave them no trouble after the Third Roman-Jewish War. I'd say killing a god in D&D would require the same scale of effort.

(Even this would only reduce the god to Divine Rank 0, or maybe even not that far. But if you've wiped out the priestly heirarchy and broken the psychic connection between the god and the worshippers, the god himheritself is basically just a high-CR monster, a different flavor of demon or devil venerated by secretive, scheming cultists.)

* EDIT: Whoa, just re-read. Please read "I personally favor" to mean "If asked as a DM how a god could be killed I would respond thusly" not "This was awesome and kewl."

Alternatively, evocatio, the other Roman approach.

You send your priests to stand in front of the enemy city and promise their god that Rome will build him a more magnificient temple than he has now if he forsakes the enemy.

Why kill if you can ally?

johnbragg
2015-02-20, 03:18 PM
Alternatively, evocatio, the other Roman approach.

You send your priests to stand in front of the enemy city and promise their god that Rome will build him a more magnificient temple than he has now if he forsakes the enemy.

Why kill if you can ally?

That was the usual Roman policy. Carthage and the Jews were the two exceptions.

But the topic was the mechanics of deicide in D&D gaming. And I'd argue/fiat that bringing down a god requires destroying the religion that supports the god(s).

How Christians fit into that policy at various times I will not discuss, because of forum policies on discussion of real-world religion.

TheThan
2015-02-20, 04:15 PM
The spoony One has something on this subject (http://spoonyexperiment.com/counter-monkey/counter-monkey-if-you-stat-it-they-will-kill-it/). (this is part two of a rather epic rant, but it’s the relevant part.)

Segev
2015-02-20, 04:51 PM
You pretty much nailed the key component of knowledge is power. My own personal interpretation on it is related to the concept that names have power. In my studies of neural networks, I have had more than a passing interest in how human minds tend to grasp and learn concepts. I have found, anecdotally, that when I learn a new word that defines a concept I had previously grasped but not been able to define in a single word, I start to see more and more examples of that concept in things that I had previously missed. I start to make connections and evaluations, and find more and more places to use that word.

It tends to greatly increase my understanding of that concept and many things related to it, to the point of forming relations in my mind which I had been unable to make before.

This has led me to tend to think that fiction writers who want to make a profound and wise being are making a huge mistake when they have said being scoff, "You humans and your need to name things. Why can't they just be what they are?"

The truth is, in naming it, we gain the ability to not just better understand it, but to appreciate it better. To recognize it as distinct from other things, and thus tell that the pattern of colors is actually our mother's face, and not just part of a background swirl of wallpaper.

Giving things numeric representation, making them modeled in mathematics, does something similar. It allows us to evaluate something which we previously could not comprehend in relative terms to something else.



What is the extra value of being perceived as white, straight, male, whatever? The problem, the ethical problem, that I see in chasing down that academic inquiry is that it has internet viral potential. If the American public knows that the average male person of color would pay $54 dollars a month for society to treat them statistically the same as a white person, or that the average white person would accept $150 a month to be treated without privilege, there are big ramifications. This one's going to be very, very difficult to do meaningfully. The reason is that you have to define, very specifically, what differences people will experience for being treated with or without "privilege." And the inherent nature of the argument is that people do not consciously perceive the way their biases create and grant this privilege.

Tell a white guy that you're giving him $150 to treat him without privilege, and he'll insist that he's being treated worse than that black woman that you've paid nothing to. That you're inventing abuse to heap on him to justify the $150. Tell a black guy that the $47 you've charged him to treat him with "white privilege" is earning him equal treatment, and he'll still look at any situation with the suspicion that he's not enjoying the same privilege as that white guy who got paid $150 not to get the privilege the black guy supposedly bought.

To assign a value to something, to quantify it, you must also be able to qualify it. That is, identify its specific qualities. You can run a bidding system to determine the value of a good or service iff that good or service is explicitly defined. You may not be able to tell if it's because it's "beautiful" or useful or "cool;" you can just tell that somebody was willing to pay $X for it.

But if you cannot identify the specifics of the good or service, you cannot really say your quantization of it is valid.

Let's say you paid me $150 to do without my alleged "white male privilege" for 1 day.

You've assigned a value to it. Presumably, if I agree to it, I'm agreeing that is the proper value for the privileges I apparently enjoy for my sex and skin color.

But how do you specifically define the privileges I will fail to enjoy?

Because the quantization of their value is meaningless if agreement cannot be reached as to what they are, and specifically how they manifest in every situation.

An example of quallifiable (though not necessarily believably doable, today) approaches would be to pay me $150 to appear to all the world as a black woman for the specified time period. (The obvious troubles start with just how unconvincingly I'd pull such a charade off; one would have to hypothesize that the charade is achieved by Sufficiently Advanced Technology, or by Functional Magic.)

The reason this is the point we'd have to go to is just simply that we probably couldn't agree on what privileges I do enjoy for my sex and skin color. I'm sure people can agree to a degree that advantages exist...but what they are, and where PRECISELY they'd show up and how they'd manifest?

You're tackling more than just quantization of value of these with your proposed paper. You're going to have to tackle qualification of these things.

I wish you luck, sir; it's a fascinating concept, but I am unsure how to really broach it.

Yora
2015-02-21, 12:54 PM
https://40.media.tumblr.com/66a2fd2e2f6f1ea4f064e8d77a3597dc/tumblr_mhytki1YHq1qfbemzo1_500.jpg

Eric Tolle
2015-02-21, 07:22 PM
In my experience over the last three decades of gaming, 99% of the time when a GM refuses to stat a god, and makes it an actual presence in the game, it means a simple thing: the GM is telling you HE is the god of the game, and want's his bots licked. I.E.: "I am the GAWD of this game! I wear the VIKING HAT! And you will shut up and LISTEN TO EVERY GODDAMN THING I SAY!"

Seriously: you've dropped into the game something that can't be killed, can't be defeated, can't even be looked at crosseyed without turning the PC into a tree. The only option the players have is total submission. Why the hell am I supposed to be interested? Why should I hang around when you've turned the rpg into a game of solitaire?

Seriously, in nearly every case I've seen, putting an omnipotent, invulnerable god into the gameplay means at best the scenario is going to take a turn for the seriously annoying, and more likely, the game suddenly ends or becomes a pointless exercise in "GM may I?".

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-21, 07:29 PM
There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful. Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat. They can only have their plans foiled.
Translation: Lazy GMs who like to railroad

This basically all boils down to "Don't stat the gods, otherwise your players will fight them."

The question is, "Why shouldn't they fight gods?"

What's wrong with the players fighting the gods? Sounds to me like a meager attempt to preserve railroading fodder.

oudeis
2015-02-21, 09:14 PM
Don't mistake bad GMing for a bad idea. Using a God as the ultimate DMPC is the ultimate act of munchkining but it has no real bearing on the question. Inserting Gods as direct actors in a game is just as misguided as assigning numerical values to them. Indeed, I think the one implies the other: if Deities aren't in-game agents they don't need stats. If the time comes for/when a god to have personal interaction with the characters, and that's IF, it needs to be within very limited circumstances and with precisely-defined effects, for example:


the campaign is in the final stretch and the players are badly off-course
they somehow missed the vital clue or the obvious Item of Great Power left in plain sight that they will need to defeat the final boss
the dice have been cruel and and bad luck has put them far behind where they should be
a powerful or pivotal character is no longer in the game due to death or player absence
it was always planned that the characters would meet their god/gods/patrons/whatever and the GM has plotted and circumscribed Divine involvement within narrow limits
the players are just completely lost
it would be an extremely cool but minimally-impactive cutscene

goto124
2015-02-21, 10:29 PM
Sounds like you first have to figure out why the god is making an appearance to the PCs at all. Then figure out if it's bad DMing. If not, think if the players are supposed to be able to kill it.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-21, 10:30 PM
My first game session of Exalted, the god of the city we'd arrived in came up to us, and my brawler character clotheslined him.

In other words, it met none of the conditions you just tried to impose on me.

So please, oudeis, cut the dictating of how I and my table are supposed to use gods in the games we play.

oudeis
2015-02-21, 10:55 PM
There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful. Be they gods or cthulu, one should never publish a stat block, because the nature of their entities and power is that they cannot be defeated in combat. They can only have their plans foiled.


My first game session of Exalted, the god of the city we'd arrived in came up to us, and my brawler character clotheslined him.

In other words, it met none of the conditions you just tried to impose on me.

So please, oudeis, cut the dictating of how I and my table are supposed to use gods in the games we play.

From the official description (http://theonyxpath.com/exalted/) of Exalted:


Exalted is a fantasy roleplaying game intended for 2-8 players. It is set in the mythic prehistory of the world, a time when gods still walked openly among men, the world was flat, and the restless dead roamed on moonless nights. Players take the role on the Exalted, heroic men and women granted blessings of power by the mightiest of the gods. The Exalted can slay gods with their blades and arrows, leap across vast canyons, master ancient and miraculous sorcery, endure the burning heat of the desert or the killing cold of the tundra with only their natural resilience, and outwit demons using their razor wit.

Using the Exalted core rulebook, players are able to take on the role of the Solar Exalted, mightiest among the ranks of the Chosen. The Solars were once rulers of the world, but were betrayed and banished for many centuries. Now their power has come back into the world, imbuing men and women with divine might. They are stalked by the Wyld Hunt and feared by gods and men for their incomparable power, which will only grow in the fullness of time. Will your characters attempt to rebuild the glories of ages past, or remake the world according to a new vision? Will your power save the world—or destroy it?

Exalted draws inspiration from three primary sources. Pulp fantasy such as the works of Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, Michael Moorcock, and Tanith Lee provide the underpinnings of the game’s style, while classical epics such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms are sources of inspiration for the game’s scope and sophistication. Finally, Exalted draws stylistic touches from modern anime and manga to lend an active, high-power, high-energy feel to the Exalted and their supernatural allies and enemies.So you're citing a game about characters explicitly stated and created to wield divine power to kill gods as a basis for how all other games should treat Divine beings?

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play. You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.

SiuiS
2015-02-21, 11:02 PM
Because stats are limits.

JusticeZero
2015-02-21, 11:26 PM
Didn't one of the Deadlands core books say that about one of its garystu types?

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-22, 12:05 AM
Because stats are limits.
Why can't gods have limits?

Flickerdart
2015-02-22, 12:22 AM
Why can't gods have limits?
Because that encourages PCs to swing above their station, and you can't let them get too uppity or they'll start having ideas.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-22, 12:29 AM
Because that encourages PCs to swing above their station, and you can't let them get too uppity or they'll start having ideas. Ideas are how group fantasy is done. If you don't want them getting ideas, get rid of your players and replace them with rocks. The only reason for players to not be able to take down gods is so the GM can heavy hand players with them.

Flickerdart
2015-02-22, 12:31 AM
Ideas are how group fantasy is done. If you don't want them getting ideas, get rid of your players and replace them with rocks. The only reason for players to not be able to take down gods is so the GM can heavy hand players with them.
Rocks cannot be expected to scrape and bow to the GM's wisdom and glory in a sufficiently satisfactory manner. After all, where's the fun in putting someone in their place when they'd never left it to begin with?

Knaight
2015-02-22, 12:37 AM
Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play. You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.

Right, because the power level of the game and the amount of roleplaying done in it are somehow related. For instance, Mythender, a game explicitly about trying to preserve your humanity while becoming something that isn't really a human - a game where you can become a god and it's a loss condition - obviously is less geared towards role playing than a straightforward dungeon crawler where those crawling the dungeons aren't powerful.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-22, 01:00 AM
Don't mistake bad GMing for a bad idea. Using a God as the ultimate DMPC is the ultimate act of munchkining but it has no real bearing on the question. Inserting Gods as direct actors in a game is just as misguided as assigning numerical values to them. Unless of course, that's the plot line that people want to run, because the idea of mortals overcoming gods is refreshing slap in the face to the annoying trope of the gods' onmipotence.

Here, rebut yourself:

Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play.

Arbane
2015-02-22, 02:08 AM
Unless of course, that's the plot line that people want to run, because the idea of mortals overcoming gods is refreshing slap in the face to the annoying trope of the gods' onmipotence.


Too true. Sometimes you just want to punch Elminister in the face, then beat Cthulhu to death with his own tentacles. :smallbiggrin:

daremetoidareyo
2015-02-22, 02:19 AM
My own personal interpretation on it is related to the concept that names have power. In my studies of neural networks, I have had more than a passing interest in how human minds tend to grasp and learn concepts. I have found, anecdotally, that when I learn a new word that defines a concept I had previously grasped but not been able to define in a single word, I start to see more and more examples of that concept in things that I had previously missed. I start to make connections and evaluations, and find more and more places to use that word.

It tends to greatly increase my understanding of that concept and many things related to it, to the point of forming relations in my mind which I had been unable to make before.

This has led me to tend to think that fiction writers who want to make a profound and wise being are making a huge mistake when they have said being scoff, "You humans and your need to name things. Why can't they just be what they are?"

The truth is, in naming it, we gain the ability to not just better understand it, but to appreciate it better. To recognize it as distinct from other things, and thus tell that the pattern of colors is actually our mother's face, and not just part of a background swirl of wallpaper.

Giving things numeric representation, making them modeled in mathematics, does something similar. It allows us to evaluate something which we previously could not comprehend in relative terms to something else.


This one's going to be very, very difficult to do meaningfully. The reason is that you have to define, very specifically, what differences people will experience for being treated with or without "privilege." And the inherent nature of the argument is that people do not consciously perceive the way their biases create and grant this privilege.

Tell a white guy that you're giving him $150 to treat him without privilege, and he'll insist that he's being treated worse than that black woman that you've paid nothing to. That you're inventing abuse to heap on him to justify the $150. Tell a black guy that the $47 you've charged him to treat him with "white privilege" is earning him equal treatment, and he'll still look at any situation with the suspicion that he's not enjoying the same privilege as that white guy who got paid $150 not to get the privilege the black guy supposedly bought.

To assign a value to something, to quantify it, you must also be able to qualify it. That is, identify its specific qualities. You can run a bidding system to determine the value of a good or service iff that good or service is explicitly defined. You may not be able to tell if it's because it's "beautiful" or useful or "cool;" you can just tell that somebody was willing to pay $X for it.

But if you cannot identify the specifics of the good or service, you cannot really say your quantization of it is valid.

Let's say you paid me $150 to do without my alleged "white male privilege" for 1 day.

You've assigned a value to it. Presumably, if I agree to it, I'm agreeing that is the proper value for the privileges I apparently enjoy for my sex and skin color.

But how do you specifically define the privileges I will fail to enjoy?

Because the quantization of their value is meaningless if agreement cannot be reached as to what they are, and specifically how they manifest in every situation.

An example of quallifiable (though not necessarily believably doable, today) approaches would be to pay me $150 to appear to all the world as a black woman for the specified time period. (The obvious troubles start with just how unconvincingly I'd pull such a charade off; one would have to hypothesize that the charade is achieved by Sufficiently Advanced Technology, or by Functional Magic.)

The reason this is the point we'd have to go to is just simply that we probably couldn't agree on what privileges I do enjoy for my sex and skin color. I'm sure people can agree to a degree that advantages exist...but what they are, and where PRECISELY they'd show up and how they'd manifest?

You're tackling more than just quantization of value of these with your proposed paper. You're going to have to tackle qualification of these things.

I wish you luck, sir; it's a fascinating concept, but I am unsure how to really broach it.
Pay company to identify mailing addresses of people in a region to sample. Send out mailer inviting them to take online survey, and give them designed qualtrics survey.

Self identify your race.

Would you be willing to accept $xx.xx to have a x% reduction in the chance of being pulled over.

Would you be willing to accept $ xx.xx to have a x% reduction in the chance of your child of graduating college? Where the xx.xx is from a randomly number generation program, and the percentages being pulled from Department of Justice/Education/Census stats. Piece together the revealed preference from performance stats from a menu. Willingness To Pay for the non-privileged classes/ WTA for privileged.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 03:11 AM
From the official description (http://theonyxpath.com/exalted/) of Exalted:Yet you somehow missed or glossed over literally the first words. I'll go ahead and repeat them for you.


Exalted is a fantasy roleplaying game…
So please, quit stumbling over yourself in your rush to tell everyone about how I value optimization and rollplay over atmosphere and roleplay, because obviously that's not true.


So you're citing a game about characters explicitly stated and created to wield divine power to kill gods as a basis for how all other games should treat Divine beings?Of course not! I'm the one providing examples of why your uses of "all," "always," and "never" are just plain incorrect!


Please, quit the dictating of how roleplayers are supposed to use gods in the games they play.I have yet to dictate to a single person that they must run stories in this way. That's on you, bro.


You and and the other Super Saiyans from the Merry Old Land of Oz can play whatever games you want however you want.And we do, thanks.

icefractal
2015-02-22, 04:57 AM
Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.ಠ_ಠ
Oh yes, the mature players would obviously understand that it is an insult to put any sort of limits or bounds on the DM's power-trip the gods. Truly, the essence of maturity is unquestioning supplication to your superiors. Ideas such as player agency or shared creative power are the province of disreputable hooligans. [/sarcasm]

I was going into this thread with an open attitude, prepared to take the OP's premise that unstatted gods were a desirable thing at face value. But your combination of badwrongfun-declaring and unwarranted condescension is just too much. Being thrust about by forces you can't hope to challenge is one playstyle. It's not a superior one, and it's not a superior world-view.

Gavran
2015-02-22, 05:52 AM
Guys - please can we:

1: Stop having a conversation that is totally off-topic, yes the name of the thread makes it sound like advice, but it is just a name. The thread is not about whether or not you should stat gods, or kill gods, or become gods, it's about finding a decent source for the idea that if you don't want to kill gods you shouldn't stat them.

2: Stop assuming the worst in each other, accept the absolute fact that some people like Exalted levels of power all the time and some people would never enjoy that and some people are in between, and stop pretending that anyone is telling anyone else how to play, how they do play, or even making value judgements on the playstyles that they aren't actually ascribing to anyone? One person said that someone who is focused on immersion won't try to kill gods, where someone who doesn't care about immersion but does enjoy optimizing might. If you somehow missed that Exalted was not the game being talked about, that's on you. As for all those who like to kill gods in Exalted and elsewhere, good for you! Nobody is telling you that you can't [except maybe in games they're DMing].

Just because this is not a D&D forum doesn't mean a thread or a poster can't be specifically talking about D&D. Your posts used to make me want to try Exalted someday, TheCountAlucard, but right now I feel like you're literally only posting in this thread to be contrary because you're frustrated that people don't specify when they're talking about things that are either in D&D or very similar to the way they are in D&D. I can sympathize with frustration that your preferred game(s) aren't as popular, and I don't object to them being brought up when it contributes to the discussion - but taking offense because someone, in casual conversation, fails to say "except in a game like Exalted which has a drastically different setting than the most common games do, or a setting like Shadowrun where there are no gods*, or a game like Call of Cthulhu where gods really means incomprehensible aliens..." is just... petty.

Frankly, if in Exalted there are "city gods" who are weaklings compared to brand new Solars, that game is apparently abusing the hell out of the word "god" anyway. It's one thing to overtake gods, and I was previously under the impression that Exalted PCs had some spark of divinity and had an endgame of becoming the most powerful of the gods - but if your aspirations are "rule the world again" and you're bullying [I]anything called a god, then really you might as well stop saying gods and start saying "Lords" or something and avoid this entire debacle. Gods are frequently** omnipotent (with the exception that other omnipotent beings can compete with them, and in fantasy often limited to a sphere of influence). That doesn't mean there can't be exceptions, or entire settings that are exceptions, but personally I feel like when you've stripped the power level down to "guy that gets clotheslined" and sphere of influence to "a city", you're being sort of disingenuous still using the word god.

*I think? I've never actually played Shadowrun, but I've never seen anyone mention gods. It's not impossible given the magic/fantasy elements, I just figure I'd have heard if it were a thing. Insert some other "no gods" setting if you prefer.

**Yes, I preemptively qualified this with frequently. No, I'd have been much happier if I didn't have to, because this forum is a place where I would like to feel as if I am conversing with friends who wouldn't jump at the chance to say "but this one specific case says you're wrong!" instead of recognizing my general sentiment. No, I am not saying there is anything wrong with the cases where mortals, or PCs, can contest gods. Only that they are less common and thus shouldn't be assumed as default.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 06:28 AM
Stop having a conversation that is totally off-topic, yes the name of the thread makes it sound like advice, but it is just a name. The thread is not about whether or not you should stat gods, or kill gods, or become gods, it's about finding a decent source for the idea that if you don't want to kill gods you shouldn't stat them.No, in the OP's post, it's to find arguments which say that statting gods is never a good idea.


2: Stop assuming the worst in each other, accept the absolute fact that some people like Exalted levels of power all the time and some people would never enjoy that and some people are in between, and stop pretending that anyone is telling anyone else how to play, how they do play, or even making value judgements on the playstyles that they aren't actually ascribing to anyone?Not to sound childish, but he started it. Literally. It's in the opening post and everything.


There is a premise, well known to RPG players who value atmosphere and roleplay, over optimization and rollplay, where you never make stats for the obviously powerful.Meaning that if I reject this premise, I don't value atmosphere or roleplaying, or at least prioritize optimization over both.
Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.So apparently I'm a munchkin and/or fanfic writer for my heinous failures.


If you somehow missed that Exalted was not the game being talked about, that's on you.My statement is irrespective of Exalted. It really is!


Nobody is telling you that you can't [except maybe in games they're DMing].But they are calling us rollplayers for it.


Just because this is not a D&D forum doesn't mean a thread or a poster can't be specifically talking about D&D.I specifically used D&D references, multiple times.


Your posts used to make me want to try Exalted someday, TheCountAlucard, but right now I feel like you're literally only posting in this thread to be contrary because you're frustrated that people don't specify when they're talking about things that are either in D&D or very similar to the way they are in D&D.I enjoy being contrary, but my dog in this race is rejecting the premise that I'm only interested in optimization and not atmosphere or roleplay if I want to take on the gods, and the assertion that statting and/or fighting the gods themselves is never acceptable.


I can sympathize with frustration that your preferred game(s) aren't as popular…I'm not frustrated about that; in fact, it's the #1 gameline on the Onyx Path boards in terms of sheer discussion.


…but taking offense because someone, in casual conversation, fails to say "except in a game like Exalted which has a drastically different setting than the most common games do, or a setting like Shadowrun where there are no gods*, or a game like Call of Cthulhu where gods really means incomprehensible aliens..." is just... petty.That's not in the slightest what I've taken offense to; additionally, the OP specifically, repeatedly mentioned Cthulhu by name.


Frankly, if in Exalted there are "city gods" who are weaklings compared to brand new Solars, that game is apparently abusing the hell out of the word "god" anyway.Alternatively, people are seriously over-hyping the word today; gods are superhuman beings or spirits who receive worship and have supernatural power, and Exalted's gods fit that to a "T."

I'll reference the Iliad again - not only does Diomedes force Ares to retreat in a fight, but Achilles kills enough men to piss off the river god for choking his river off with the sheer amount of corpses, and tries (and, importantly, fails) to murder Achilles for it.


Gods are frequently** omnipotent (with the exception that other omnipotent beings can compete with them, and in fantasy often limited to a sphere of influence).The gods of the Exalted setting are puissant indeed - even an experienced Solar may never be able to throw mountains and boil a sea with his hateful gaze like a behemoth… but he'll be able to fight him, and may even win.


but personally I feel like when you've stripped… sphere of influence to "a city", you're being sort of disingenuous still using the word god.Tell that to the ancients - they had gods for cities, rivers, fields, and individual grains of rice long before Exalted did.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 09:25 AM
Allow me to expand somewhat (even though I've probably expanded enough)…


I was previously under the impression that Exalted PCs had some spark of divinity and had an endgame of becoming the most powerful of the gods…The endgame for Exalted is whatever the legends the people of the following ages tell of the deeds of the Exalted in the final time of heroes and miracles. You might become the strongest martial artist in the world, and found a style that lasts for a thousand generations; you might negotiate peace between the mortal men of Creation and the inchoate Fair Folk beyond the borders of the shaped world; you could repair the shattered towers of Chiaroscuro and build the Delzhan hordes into a glorious empire that can weather the Realm's civil war; you might smash down the pillar of Heaven and overthrow the gods themselves with blood and fire and long-lost sorcery; it could even be that you stop the mighty wheel of reincarnation itself, and plunge all the world into the gulf of Oblivion (though in that case you'll likely be unable to have anyone left to share that story 'round the campfire :smallamused:).

The tagline is, "What legends will they tell of your deeds?"


…but if your aspirations are "rule the world again" and you're bullying anything called a god, then really you might as well stop saying gods and start saying "Lords" or something and avoid this entire debacle.You're going to have to come into conflict with the gods at some point - the entire system of Heaven's bureaucracy is corrupt, and there are more than a few that like being able to extort mortals for worship, and thus be happy to see you dead.


Gods are frequently** omnipotent (with the exception that other omnipotent beings can compete with them, and in fantasy often limited to a sphere of influence).In my experience with both RPGs and mythology, this is mostly* untrue; gods are almost certainly mighty beyond mortal ability, possibly even beyond mortal ken, but only a very few indeed go so far as to explicate omnipotence.

I mentioned the Greek pantheon before, let me try an example from the Norse pantheon: Thor has two magic goats that pull his chariot; when he breaks camp, he cooks and eats his goats, and then resurrects them in the morning, with the loyal goats regenerating from the bones to pull his chariot when he's ready to go again.

However, one night he's receiving hospitality from a mortal family, and so permits them to munch on some goat, and one of the unknowing mortal cracks open the bones for that tasty goat-marrow, screwing Thor out of his ride.

If Thor was omnipotent, he could just not care and make his goats walk anyway, cracked bones or no. Or just materialize new goats from the air. Or not bother with cooking the goats in the first place, because why does an omnipotent being need to eat? Or even just not bother with traveling at all and instead teleport from place to place.

*See? I, too, allow for exceptions.


…personally I feel like when you've stripped the power level down to "guy that gets clotheslined" and sphere of influence to "a city", you're being sort of disingenuous still using the word god.I'm gonna go ahead and share some more about what happened.

1) The god was not there to fight us; if he had been, I suspect my brawler would have been at a distinct tactical disadvantage.
2) I doubt the blow from my character's mighty thews did so much as a single point of damage to the spirit.
3) Even if my guy'd somehow beaten the god's physical body to death, it wouldn't have "killed" him in a permanent fashion.
4) The gods of Heaven in Exalted do consider the gods of the terrestrial sphere to be lesser creatures, though most mortals don't care to differentiate when either can lay a blight on your fields when you displease them.


I think? I've never actually played Shadowrun, but I've never seen anyone mention gods.The world of Shadowrun has gods in the same sense that the real world does: a lot of people believe and believe in a bunch of different things that may or may not be true.


Your posts used to make me want to try Exalted someday, TheCountAlucard…That all said, I do hope you give it a try someday. It was a load of fun even when it was an incoherent mess helmed by an awful ST, and I have every reason to suspect that the new edition will be a shining diamond of playability in the rough that is the Storyteller system

Knaight
2015-02-22, 01:15 PM
Stop assuming the worst in each other, accept the absolute fact that some people like Exalted levels of power all the time and some people would never enjoy that and some people are in between, and stop pretending that anyone is telling anyone else how to play, how they do play, or even making value judgements on the playstyles that they aren't actually ascribing to anyone? One person said that someone who is focused on immersion won't try to kill gods, where someone who doesn't care about immersion but does enjoy optimizing might.
No, one person said that statting gods at all was in the purview of "rollplayers", called everyone who favors high power games munchkins, and spent the entire thread being smugly superior because their games had a lower power level. It's a load of obnoxious BS, and I say that as someone who generally favors systems in which characters are far more down to earth than they are in even D&D.


Frankly, if in Exalted there are "city gods" who are weaklings compared to brand new Solars, that game is apparently abusing the hell out of the word "god" anyway. It's one thing to overtake gods, and I was previously under the impression that Exalted PCs had some spark of divinity and had an endgame of becoming the most powerful of the gods - but if your aspirations are "rule the world again" and you're bullying [I]anything called a god, then really you might as well stop saying gods and start saying "Lords" or something and avoid this entire debacle. Gods are frequently** omnipotent (with the exception that other omnipotent beings can compete with them, and in fantasy often limited to a sphere of influence). That doesn't mean there can't be exceptions, or entire settings that are exceptions, but personally I feel like when you've stripped the power level down to "guy that gets clotheslined" and sphere of influence to "a city", you're being sort of disingenuous still using the word god.
If by "abusing the hell out of the word 'god'" you mean using the word pretty much exactly how it gets used for just about anything polytheistic, then sure. The ancient world was full of people who believed in city gods, and animistic belief systems frequently get smaller still.

Gavran
2015-02-22, 06:54 PM
Well, I'd argue that the OP and the other guy were really just saying that at their preferred power level, beating gods should be out of the question for anyone who values verisimilitude. My first post comes off a lot more "on their side" than I'd have liked it to though, the munckinry/fanfiction comment is probably the single least friendly one in the thread. That's what I'm really trying to get at and really all I should've said - I'd just like everyone to assume the best of each other.

As for the general discussion of gods and such... uh...

At this point I'm being completely off-topic myself but I can't help but ask: I can think of cities who claimed a god as their patron, though none of the examples I'm thinking of have that god's sphere limited to the city. But forget that, you've got to give me a source on that god of a grain of rice thing, because I'm generally into mythologies and that just sounds weird (in the fascinating way.)

I've probably made obvious that my own preferred power level is beneath that of god-slaying, and in D&D I frankly can't see the appeal at all - but that was part of the appeal with what I'd heard about Exalted, largely from you. A game that's built on the premise of just being bananas powerful seems like it could be a novel roleplaying experience if nothing else. If I implied "but now I never will [try Exalted]!" or anything like that with the rest of my post, I didn't mean to.

McStabbington
2015-02-22, 07:33 PM
Well, in WoD, ther are things considerably less powerful than a God whose powers are explicitly set at "plot device". Caine and the other Antediluvians are weak enough that they can't get out from under God's curse, but are largely considered to be unbeatable by any PC's unless the Storyteller explicitly decides otherwise.

And it is that last proviso that I think really resolves the issue. If the storyteller decides on the story, and a logical consequence of that story is that a) a god would logically be the BBEG, and b) it's not a shoot the shaggy dog story where the PC's are doomed from the start, then by extension the gods need to be statted. But if it's not supposed to be killable, then don't allow your players the chance to make it bleed.

Knaight
2015-02-22, 07:45 PM
Well, in WoD, ther are things considerably less powerful than a God whose powers are explicitly set at "plot device". Caine and the other Antediluvians are weak enough that they can't get out from under God's curse, but are largely considered to be unbeatable by any PC's unless the Storyteller explicitly decides otherwise.

And it is that last proviso that I think really resolves the issue. If the storyteller decides on the story, and a logical consequence of that story is that a) a god would logically be the BBEG, and b) it's not a shoot the shaggy dog story where the PC's are doomed from the start, then by extension the gods need to be statted. But if it's not supposed to be killable, then don't allow your players the chance to make it bleed.

Stats aren't just there for combat interactions, it answers questions about a wide variety of things. Can the PCs hide things from the god? Can they find information it hid? Can they move better than it in some way? Can they perform a craft better in some way (I'm pretty sure Arachne could have matched the weaving skill of every greek deity not named Athena). Can they get away with a lie? Can they detect when the god is lying?

All of those could involve stats of some sort. The stats aren't just there for if things can be killed.

Citrakayah
2015-02-22, 08:23 PM
Among munchkins and people who write too much fanfiction, perhaps. The rest of us understand that if you mess with entities that can create whole worlds or even just whole races, your punishment will be as unimaginable as their powers.

Not really. Even if you out-Cthulhu Cthulhu and have gods that are basically aspects of reality, you can still destroy, or create them. IRL, we've been doing it by accident. We created writing, and electronics, and plastics, and buildings... And we drove dozens of species extinct and don't even know all of them.

Even if you don't get that specific, what happens to the god of elves if the elves go extinct, even if you can't personally kill him? What happens to a goddess of the hunt if people starting relying solely on agriculture? Or to a whale god if you kill all the whales?

Also, the type of power that is needed by an entity that can "create whole worlds or even just whole races" isn't really all that unimaginable. There's a specific 9th level spell that can create another plane (not a hunk of rock with life on it, another freaking universe), and ordinary technology can create new races, given the Dungeons and Dragons definition of it. Heck, we've been doing it for thousands of years--what do you call dogs?

I have a campaign specifically about messing with the fundamental aspects of reality--the PCs are currently on the path towards stopping the very embodiment of all fire from turning the planet into a reflection of the Elemental Plane of Fire--but it isn't munckiny, given that about half of the sessions have been spent without a single combat action.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 08:44 PM
Stats aren't just there for combat interactions, it answers questions about a wide variety of things. Can the PCs hide things from the god? Can they find information it hid? Can they move better than it in some way? Can they perform a craft better in some way (I'm pretty sure Arachne could have matched the weaving skill of every greek deity not named Athena). Can they get away with a lie? Can they detect when the god is lying?

All of those could involve stats of some sort. The stats aren't just there for if things can be killed.Yeah, it's unfortunately presented as the case in quite a few games that statblocks are only important when you're trying to kill something. :smallsigh:

Lord Raziere
2015-02-22, 08:51 PM
depends on the setting.

DnD? don't stat them, because they are at least planet killers in my head-canon. a PC can't stand against a thing that kills planets or greater, not even Exalted, not in my game/head/whatever

Exalted? stat them, because the "gods" are name for certain bureaucrats made out of energy tied to a big computer in the sky, are more like kami spirits and therefore are no guarantee to be powerful at all.

really, Exalted players are comparing apples to oranges. they think that just because their PC can totally obliterate their oranges easily that it has anything to do with them taking on DnD's apples with any hope of success.

an Exalted god meeting a DnD God would be an ant meeting godzilla: the celestial bureaucrat quickly gets crushed underfoot. they are not comparable, and I wouldn't play Exalted to be a godslayer because it makes godslaying such an easy relatively-street level thing to achieve, that its meaningless. give me a fight against a planet-killing deity any day.

Flickerdart
2015-02-22, 08:53 PM
DnD? don't stat them, because they are at least planet killers in my head-canon. a PC can't stand against a thing that kills planets or greater
it's a shame the actual books disagree with you, though.

Lord Raziere
2015-02-22, 09:00 PM
it's a shame the actual books disagree with you, though.

statted gods you mean.

my gods are not statted. therefore they are unlimited.

*looks them up*

still, they are pretty powerful. I'd just say the PC's lose anyways. unless its a part of the plot, god-killing is a no-no. its just not wise.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 09:12 PM
Raziere, your presentation of Exalted is at best inaccurate and outdated, and at worst poisonously so. Recall for a moment that one of the goals of the new edition is to make fights more exciting (including making a given splat's victory over another far less inevitable, to the extent that even mortals have the possibility of overthrowing the champions of the gods); do you think that's easily reconciled with gods being something you can easily, boringly put down?

Additionally, just because a given god is a low-level functionary in a giant bureaucracy of spirits* doesn't mean he's not overwhelmingly powerful compared to pretty much any mortal who faces him down on the field of battle.

The only D&D classes that an equally-invested Exalt would pale in comparison to would be your typical Tier 1 casters, and even then only at high levels, and even D&D gods don't have an easy time beating those. A Warlock can make touch attacks, but he can't hit an AC of "No." A Fighter can wear the heaviest armor in the game, but he gets hit when a deity rolls "Yes." An Exalt can and does succeed at both of these feats.



*if you want to call them living matrices of energy or whatever, that's fine and all (okay no, really it's not, it's absolutely silly), but the game calls them gods first and foremost, and they don't live in a giant computer anymore than you or I do.

Arbane
2015-02-22, 09:12 PM
Is anyone else being reminded of 3rd Ed Durkon talking with 4th Ed Durkon in Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales?

Lord Raziere
2015-02-22, 09:30 PM
Raziere, your presentation of Exalted is at best inaccurate and outdated, and at worst poisonously so. Recall for a moment that one of the goals of the new edition is to make fights more exciting (including making a given splat's victory over another far less inevitable, to the extent that even mortals have the possibility of overthrowing the champions of the gods); do you think that's easily reconciled with gods being something you can easily, boringly put down?

Additionally, just because a given god is a low-level functionary in a giant bureaucracy of spirits* doesn't mean he's not overwhelmingly powerful compared to pretty much any mortal who faces him down on the field of battle.


*if you want to call them living matrices of energy or whatever, that's fine and all (okay no, really it's not, it's absolutely silly), but the game calls them gods first and foremost, and they don't live in a giant computer anymore than you or I do.

Ugh. I'm too tired for this nonsense.

its still apples and oranges. the two things, the two kinds of gods your talking about, they are nowhere each other in power, your acting as if they're the same when they are not, its just common sense. :smallsigh:

you can kill your bureau-gods all you want however you want, just don't act as if that somehow gives the Exalted the ability to kill greater gods by themselves, the Primordial thing was a team effort, so your Mr. Solar McGodslayer will just get owned by a DnD God alone, because they aren't actually that powerful, the devs themselves have said they are powering down the setting from hypothetical destroying the world antics, so please, stop this, its just tiresome.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 09:42 PM
I can think of cities who claimed a god as their patron, though none of the examples I'm thinking of have that god's sphere limited to the city.To be fair, city-gods in Exalted can easily have powers beyond the city itself as well - many gods have been promoted or demoted across the bureaucracy in a fashion that leaves them with a handful of powers suited to their old purviews (Amoth City-Smiter was the god of Tumbled Ruins, but was promoted into the position of god of Bribery, but he's still got a fair amount of influence over tumbled ruins; Ahlat was previously just the god of Cattle, but now he's the god of Cattle and Southern Warfare), or have power over a god under him in the heirarchy (and can thus push him to do things the city god might not personally be capable of), or master an esoteric supernatural martial art, or learn sorcery.


But forget that, you've got to give me a source on that god of a grain of rice thing, because I'm generally into mythologies and that just sounds weird (in the fascinating way.)I do believe it's Shinto-based, where the idea is that absolutely everything, every physical object, has a god who oversees it. Rocks and rivers and trees and fields and swords, all the way down to yes, individual grains of rice.


I've probably made obvious that my own preferred power level is beneath that of god-slaying, and in D&D I frankly can't see the appeal at all - but that was part of the appeal with what I'd heard about Exalted, largely from you. A game that's built on the premise of just being bananas powerful seems like it could be a novel roleplaying experience if nothing else. If I implied "but now I never will [try Exalted]!" or anything like that with the rest of my post, I didn't mean to.It was your use of the past tense, i.e., "your posts used to make me want to play Exalted, but now..."

As for not wanting to get into god-slaying... don't, then. You don't have to get into that if you don't want to, any more than you have to get into bureacracy actions or crafting or learning the surgeon's art. And if it so happens that you ever do end up on the bad side of a lesser divinity, just call him a "spirit." :smalltongue:

________________________________________

Raziere, just because you can make unlimited-power deities in your head that happen to use the rules of the D&D system doesn't mean D&D's gods are any more expected to be able to annihilate planes of existence by themselves either.

If you want, I can make an unlimited-power deity for the Exalted system, too. :smallwink:

Exalted doesn't have planet-busters by default because there's only one planet in the setting, and without it, the setting's a lot more boring. Master Roshi could destroy the moon casually in one combat turn in Dragon Ball both because the series was comedic in nature and because they could always just wish it back into existence; neither of these is the case for Exalted, because they want your epic actions of destruction to actually be epic and more importantly, meaningful.

Also, Raziere, when they said the power was being scaled back, I'm assuming it was in the broad sense of "characters of different power levels (whatever that means) can still meaningfully participate in a combat to the extent that dicing them out won't be a boring exercise in futility." Volcano gods will probably still have powers related to their volcanoes in ways that mortals do not; furthermore, if you come across a Shadow of the Colossus-style behemoth, it will almost certainly still be able to uproot a hillock and heave it at your character, and that will almost certainly be a thing you can dodge.

McStabbington
2015-02-22, 10:05 PM
Stats aren't just there for combat interactions, it answers questions about a wide variety of things. Can the PCs hide things from the god? Can they find information it hid? Can they move better than it in some way? Can they perform a craft better in some way (I'm pretty sure Arachne could have matched the weaving skill of every greek deity not named Athena). Can they get away with a lie? Can they detect when the god is lying?

All of those could involve stats of some sort. The stats aren't just there for if things can be killed.

I don't disagree with any of this, largely because it is entirely my point as well. You seem hung up on the "killing" part; if it makes it easier for you, I'll amend my statement to divide gods in games to "defeatable" and "undefeatable". You don't have to kill a god to defeat him, but if the plot either requires that the god can't be beaten, or that it would stray from the purpose of the story to try, then you do not under any circumstance stat the god. The principle is very simple, if the god is statted, it can bleed figuratively or literally, and if it can bleed, you bet your sweet bippy that there will be some player out there crazy or foolish enough to derail your campaign in the quest to try and kill it.

Flickerdart
2015-02-22, 10:12 PM
I don't disagree with any of this, largely because it is entirely my point as well. You seem hung up on the "killing" part; if it makes it easier for you, I'll amend my statement to divide gods in games to "defeatable" and "undefeatable". You don't have to kill a god to defeat him, but if the plot either requires that the god can't be beaten, or that it would stray from the purpose of the story to try, then you do not under any circumstance stat the god. The principle is very simple, if the god is statted, it can bleed figuratively or literally, and if it can bleed, you bet your sweet bippy that there will be some player out there crazy or foolish enough to derail your campaign in the quest to try and kill it.
This presupposes that there is a grand Story to which the player characters must be slaves. If your storytelling isn't compelling enough for the PCs to want to kill Big Bad Evil Guy, and even killing a random side god is more interesting, it's all on you.

Lord Raziere
2015-02-22, 10:22 PM
________________________________________

Raziere, just because you can make unlimited-power deities in your head that happen to use the rules of the D&D system doesn't mean D&D's gods are any more expected to be able to annihilate planes of existence by themselves either.

If you want, I can make an unlimited-power deity for the Exalted system, too. :smallwink:

Exalted doesn't have planet-busters by default because there's only one planet in the setting, and without it, the setting's a lot more boring. Master Roshi could destroy the moon casually in one combat turn in Dragon Ball both because the series was comedic in nature and because they could always just wish it back into existence; neither of these is the case for Exalted, because they want your epic actions of destruction to actually be epic and more importantly, meaningful.

Also, Raziere, when they said the power was being scaled back, I'm assuming it was in the broad sense of "characters of different power levels (whatever that means) can still meaningfully participate in a combat to the extent that dicing them out won't be a boring exercise in futility." Volcano gods will probably still have powers related to their volcanoes, and if you come across a Shadow of the Colossus-style behemoth, it will almost certainly still be able to uproot a hillock and heave it at your character, and that will almost certainly be a thing you can dodge.

look, just because Exalted uses pretty prose and some mythic tropes, or as an army defeated the Primordials 5000 years ago, doesn't mean they're powerful enough to take on DnD Gods themselves. apples and freaking oranges, they are two different kinds of fantasy your comparing here, you cant just expect killing one to automatically mean you can kill another, thats just logic, there are too many differences involved. Quit acting as if Exalted can beat everything. I'm getting sick of that attitude, I'm just getting tired of people acting as if anything is unstoppable ever and- well I won't go on, because that would be a tired rant thats going off topic, but I'm sick of it.

and an epic act of destruction isn't so if its being scaled DOWN. and I think destroying a planet is really meaningful in my opinion, it means I destroyed all life on it. it means I Am Become Death, Destroyer Of Worlds-Literally. Exalted can't say that.

Citrakayah
2015-02-22, 10:32 PM
Which setting?

And which gods?

Flickerdart
2015-02-22, 10:34 PM
look, just because Exalted uses pretty prose and some mythic tropes, or as an army defeated the Primordials 5000 years ago, doesn't mean they're powerful enough to take on DnD Gods themselves
D&D gods are actually quite weak, on the cosmic scale of things. Yes, you keep talking about your imaginary ones, but those aren't D&D gods, they're your gods.

Lord Raziere
2015-02-22, 11:04 PM
D&D gods are actually quite weak, on the cosmic scale of things. Yes, you keep talking about your imaginary ones, but those aren't D&D gods, they're your gods.

......

screw it, I hate both DnD and Exalted, they're both disappointments, power-wise. I'm out.

Citrakayah
2015-02-22, 11:18 PM
......

screw it, I hate both DnD and Exalted, they're both disappointments, power-wise. I'm out.

Eh wha?

I'm rather confused now...

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 11:40 PM
Well, that was an interesting argument to read. Anyway...

I think what stats a god has should be entirely dictated by the needs of your setting. If they never directly interact with mortals, then their stat block should consist of their name, their domain, who follows them, and who opposes them. If they do interact directly with mortals, then they need interaction stats. My personal preference here is that a god should be near unbeatable within their domain, but beatable outside it. Whether their defeat means death or retreat entirely depends on the setting.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 12:51 AM
And see, Twin, now that's reasonable. :smallsmile:

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 01:09 AM
look, just because Exalted uses pretty prose and some mythic tropes, or as an army defeated the Primordials 5000 years ago, doesn't mean they're powerful enough to take on DnD Gods themselves. apples and freaking oranges, they are two different kinds of fantasy your comparing here…Since you said you're "out," I guess it's irrelevant now, but I was going to ask if Pelor or Nerrul from Deities and Demigods fit my "powerful but not YHWH" apple-gods, or your "casual planet-buster" orange-gods, because a fight with either of them is more likely to result in spammed quickened Disintegrate spells than destroyed planes of existence.

Guess the point is moot.


You cant just expect killing one to automatically mean you can kill another, thats just logic…Apples are not oranges. Oranges are not apples. Both are fruit. That's just logic.


there are too many differences involved.Yeah, one's orange and citrus-y, while with the other, every time I try and spell it out on my iPhone, autocorrect wants to capitalize the first letter.


Quit acting as if Exalted can beat everything.That's not my soapbox, and I do wish people would stop trying to place me on it.


I'm getting sick of that attitude, I'm just getting tired of people acting as if anything is unstoppable ever and- well I won't go on, because that would be a tired rant thats going off topic, but I'm sick of it.As awesome as it would look on a business card, I am not TheCountAlucard, Exalted Apologist and Champion of the Champions of the Gods.


it means I Am Become Death, Destroyer Of Worlds-Literally. Exalted can't say that.Sure it can - the problem is, it can only say it once. If you destroy the world, the game's over, so if it's something you do trivially, the game won't last one session, which is not conducive to fun.

ST: "You start out in Chiaroscuro-"
Raziere: "I destroy the world, laughing maniacally."
ST: "Guess that's it, then."

But again, moot point.

Arbane
2015-02-23, 01:28 AM
and an epic act of destruction isn't so if its being scaled DOWN. and I think destroying a planet is really meaningful in my opinion, it means I destroyed all life on it. it means I Am Become Death, Destroyer Of Worlds-Literally. Exalted can't say that.

Actually, you CAN. Some players figured a combination of charms that would allow an Essence 7 Exalted to kill every living thing in Creation that doesn't have a perfect defense. It's called the "Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick." Admittedly, Essence 7 is going to be hard to get without massive powergaming or a multi-century-long campaign.

Actually physically destroying Creation is also at least theoretically possible, and there's at least two factions actively working on it in the setting.



Sure it can - the problem is, it can only say it once. If you destroy the world, the game's over, so if it's something you do trivially, the game won't last one session, which is not conducive to fun.

ST: "You start out in Chiaroscuro-"
Raziere: "I destroy the world, laughing maniacally."
ST: "Guess that's it, then."

But again, moot point.

You can also destroy the world (or at least, kill everyone on it) in Nobilis. This will anger a whoooole lot of entities even more powerful than the player-characters, though.

goto124
2015-02-23, 02:10 AM
Do we have to stat gods a bit if the PCs Diplomance them?

Belial_the_Leveler
2015-02-23, 06:45 AM
Reason is irrelevant before the human desire to stat everything.
Things comparable to DnD gods we have stats for include;

1) Nukes. Level city in one blow with weapon launched from a continent away.

2) Meteors. 800 billion tons moving at 20 miles/second = crater the size of Texas. Also, bye bye sunlight, seasons and civilization for at least a decade.

3) Jupiter (the planet). It has storms larger than Earth, some of which have existed for centuries. Impact with it would barely annoy it but would break Earth like an egg dropped down from a skyscraper.

4) The sun. Nuclear furnace with high enough energy output to burn all life from Earth a thousand times in one second. Its mere presence created the planets in this system from condensed interstellar dust and gas and the light it gives off provides energy to all life on Earth.






So why can't you put stats to gods? Because they're powerful? Most fantasy gods aren't nearly powerful enough to destroy a planet. Because you can't interact with them? We can't interact with the sun either. Because they're nigh-incomprehensible forces of nature? The sun powers all such forces on our world and we've statted it already. Because knowing about them will make you go mad with the revelation? We known with absolute certainty that we'll die, that all we were or will be will be gone and nothing we could do will stop it, that our civilization is ultimately both irrelevant and insignificant. And we've only become slightly delusional from it - why would far less scary revelations even bother us?

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 07:56 AM
So why can't you put stats to gods? Because they're powerful? Most fantasy gods aren't nearly powerful enough to destroy a planet. Because you can't interact with them? We can't interact with the sun either. Because they're nigh-incomprehensible forces of nature? The sun powers all such forces on our world and we've statted it already. Because knowing about them will make you go mad with the revelation? We known with absolute certainty that we'll die, that all we were or will be will be gone and nothing we could do will stop it, that our civilization is ultimately both irrelevant and insignificant. And we've only become slightly delusional from it - why would far less scary revelations even bother us?

Because stating a god derails the kind of story that a group might want to tell.

If you are intent on playing a campaign in which gods get killed, that's cool. But it should be a campaign setting switch, agreed on by all beforehand. Other examples of campaign setting switches are gunpowder weapons and PC mortality.

johnbragg
2015-02-23, 08:50 AM
Reason is irrelevant before the human desire to stat everything.
Things comparable to DnD gods we have stats for include;

1) Nukes. Level city in one blow with weapon launched from a continent away.


Depends on whether the nuke is optimized for blast radius (one-megaton city-busters), or for overcoming hardness/DR (smaller nukes designed for accuracy to take out hardened targets). Also if the nuke is optimized to fit as many warheads as possible on a single missile.

(Something we rediscovered in running scenarios in the first few years after 9/11 is that "duck and cover" does matter with a "small" (Hiroshima-sized) nuke and you're 5-20 miles away.)

Back on topic, I disagree with your approach relative to most fantasy settings. We have detailed physical information on the sun, which is awesome for us. But that makes the sun a bad analogy. My first rule of fantasy settings is that what people believe (believed) to be true more or less IS true. (Magic is mind over matter, and millions of commoner minds can do magic just as much as high-level wizards can. Slow but sure.)

So your Greek-expy civilization believes that the sun is carried across the sky by Helios and his chariot. This is more or less true.

The deep goblins believe that the sun is Karilan Laretsian's butthole, constantly farting out burning rays of sunshine. Somehow, this is also more or less true.

The secret knowledge, (DC 25 check) is that both and all explanations are more or less false, or more exactly irrelevant. What keeps the sun rising and setting and shining is the mutual agreement by uncounted hordes of minds that it does so.

I'm still working on a subsystem for how you stat that.

Flickerdart
2015-02-23, 10:32 AM
If you are intent on playing a campaign in which gods get killed, that's cool. But it should be a campaign setting switch, agreed on by all beforehand. Other examples of campaign setting switches are gunpowder weapons and PC mortality.
What if you want to steal something from a god? Hide something from a god? Lie to a god? Sneak past a god? None of these involve fighting the god, and some don't even involve engaging the god.

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 10:44 AM
What if you want to steal something from a god? Hide something from a god? Lie to a god? Sneak past a god? None of these involve fighting the god, and some don't even involve engaging the god.

I'm cool with that, although whether that is even theoretically possible does of course depend on the nature of divinity.

Is Thor's hammer really stealable when he can teleport it to his hand as easily as you breathe? The issue isn't so much whether you can do it, but whether the deity cares enough to stop you, and whether you can even get to his domain in the first place.

For ants, we are gods. We can crush them at a whim. If they steal food from our kitchens, we can set traps and seal up the holes. The question for the ants is, how much do we care.

Flickerdart
2015-02-23, 11:45 AM
I'm cool with that, although whether that is even theoretically possible does of course depend on the nature of divinity.

Is Thor's hammer really stealable when he can teleport it to his hand as easily as you breathe? The issue isn't so much whether you can do it, but whether the deity cares enough to stop you, and whether you can even get to his domain in the first place.
The question is exactly "can you do it" - even Thor can only call back his hammer once he notices it's been stolen, and there are plenty of gods who are not so closely connected to their weapon. Steal Loki's staff, and he has no special ability to take it back from you beyond blowing your head up and looting it off your corpse.



For ants, we are gods. We can crush them at a whim. If they steal food from our kitchens, we can set traps and seal up the holes. The question for the ants is, how much do we care.
An ant can bite or sting us (people have died from ant poison), or sneak by us undetected. Certainly, for all our strength, we cannot hear an ant crawling in the darkness.

BWR
2015-02-23, 12:28 PM
Is Thor's hammer really stealable when he can teleport it to his hand as easily as you breathe?

Well, if you've read Ţrymskviđa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Erymskvi%C3%B0a)...

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 01:41 PM
For ants, we are gods.Gonna stop ya right there. First and foremost, no, we're not, because they don't worship us.


If they steal food from our kitchens......odds are good that we won't even notice unless they do it en masse. One ant can steal as much sugar from my cabinet as she can carry, as many times as she cares to make the trip in her lifetime, and as long as she's not bringing her thousand sisters, I'll never be aware of it.


An ant can bite or sting us (people have died from ant poison), or sneak by us undetected. Certainly, for all our strength, we cannot hear an ant crawling in the darkness.The sheer number of places they can go is also very much beyond us. I have no more ability to traverse the gap between two floor tiles than the ant has to set the DVR to record Gravity Falls.

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 02:19 PM
In no partucualr order...

Sure, ants don't worship us (that we know of). otoh, we don't worship Cthulhu, yet Lovecraft he is popularly described as a god. And not every god needs to be worshipped to exist in any case. That too is a campaign setting option (Mystara's gods need no worship).

And yes, ants that have poison and can deliver a nasty sting to us exist. But In a conversation that is about ants without further specification, it is normal to take it as normal ants of the common or garden variety (ie. generally harmless unless you fall in a vat containing billions of them). Pointing out that such ants exist is like entering a commoner vs. cat conve4rsation and noting that sabre tooth tigers are also cats.

Flickerdart
2015-02-23, 02:52 PM
And yes, ants that have poison and can deliver a nasty sting to us exist. But In a conversation that is about ants without further specification, it is normal to take it as normal ants of the common or garden variety (ie. generally harmless unless you fall in a vat containing billions of them). Pointing out that such ants exist is like entering a commoner vs. cat conve4rsation and noting that sabre tooth tigers are also cats.
The poison has nothing to do with the argument being made - even garden ants are incredibly stealthy, and yet the unstatted gods people seem to want to say "nope, if you're an ant and you happen to be in the vicinity of a human, you die as soon as the human wants you dead, no save, roll a new ant."

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 02:57 PM
The poison has nothing to do with the argument being made - even garden ants are incredibly stealthy, and yet the unstatted gods people seem to want to say "nope, if you're an ant and you happen to be in the vicinity of a human, you die as soon as the human wants you dead, no save, roll a new ant."

No, it's more like, "You'll die as soon as the godhuman spots you and cares enough to want you dead." That's not saying stealth is impossible; it's saying that stealth is pretty much essential if you want to do anything liable to annoy the godhuman.

icefractal
2015-02-23, 03:09 PM
If stealth is possible, that means you are using at least partial stats - what senses the god has, how good it is at noticing people, what kind of after-the-fact divination it has access to.

Also I think there should be distinction between "the gods don't need stats, because you aren't interacting with them" (as in your more down to earth settings, and also Eberron), and "the gods are beyond stats, you auto-lose". I have no issue at all with the former. I have no inherent issue with the latter, but it does sometimes indicate the DM using the gods as ego-waving.

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 03:33 PM
If stealth is possible, that means you are using at least partial stats - what senses the god has, how good it is at noticing people, what kind of after-the-fact divination it has access to.

Or it means I am letting the god do whatever the plot says would be most interesting.

Toe to toe, if a god wants you dead in a setting where gods are order of magnitude above humans, you're toast. That doesn't mean you can't sneak around them to get what you want. And it doesn't mean sneaking around them needs to be stated. It means the GM decides if it works based on what the plot demands.

The point is, even in settings where the gods are nigh unstatable, it is still possible to have interesting encounters involving them, even though they would generally work best as forces of nature rather than guys down the bar in such a setting.

And no, this doesn't even mean that the god is a M. Sue. The first fictional "god" I created did not even realise he had any kind of divine spark at all. He just thought it was perfectly unremarkable that he could create worlds by willing it, and wasn't entirely sure why no one else ever did. Later on, he even lost the memory (though not the ability) that he had this power.

Belial_the_Leveler
2015-02-23, 03:50 PM
Let's change this argument a bit;


Or it means I am letting the 20th level caster BBEG do whatever the plot says would be most interesting.

Toe to toe, if a 20th level caster BBEG wants your 5th level character dead in a setting where 20th level caster BBEGs are order of magnitude above 5th level characters, you're toast. And just because they have way higher stats doesn't mean you can't sneak around them to get what you want. It means the GM decides if it works based on what the plot demands.

The point is, in settings where the 20th level caster BBEGs are very stattable, it is both possible to have interesting encounters involving them where they would generally work best as forces of nature as well as encounters with them as guys down the bar when you're high level yourself. But you lose the second option if they're unstattable instead.

In short, settings with stattable 20th level caster BBEGs have more options, satisfy a broader player demographic, than settings where they're unstattable.

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 04:05 PM
Well, when you change my words like, that, I obviously have no choice except to ragequit the thread in a fit of hubris.

Flickerdart
2015-02-23, 04:51 PM
And it doesn't mean sneaking around them needs to be stated. It means the GM decides if it works based on what the plot demands.
Then why bother rolling dice at all?

SoC175
2015-02-23, 04:54 PM
Struggles between gods hardly translate to mortals' ability to contend with divine beings. Bellerephon was thrown from Pegasus when he tried to fly to Olympus. Arachne was turned into a spider when she dared compare her weavings to Athena's. Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Prometheus, among many others, were condemned to eternal punishment for defying the will of the Olympeans. I'm sure others could cite myths from many cultures that provide explicit detail about what happened to mortals foolish enough to challenge, anger, annoy, or just draw the wrong sort of attention from the Gods. On the other hand olympean deities were wounded, hurt and driven of the battlefield by mortals during the Trojan war

And an AC that made her almost unhittable, even by high-level characters with buffs and magic weapons, Actually not that hard. AC couldn't escape THAC0 that easily in 1e. Lolth somehow just had a serious lack of hitpoints, while other deity with hardly worse AC than her had triple the hp she had

2E book Deities and Demigods statted out the gods of various pantheons. That was AD&D 1e, in AD&D 2e they were statless

Ashtagon
2015-02-23, 04:59 PM
Then why bother rolling dice at all?

Too late. I've already ragequit this thread.

Flickerdart
2015-02-23, 05:52 PM
Too late. I've already ragequit this thread.
I roll to disbelieve.

Belial_the_Leveler
2015-02-23, 06:26 PM
The point was that the exact same reasons you have not to stat something (at least those presented in that post) can be applied to any high enough level difference, not just mortals vs gods. And since the game has that much of a difference between power levels already effectively statted...





The only reason I see in not statting gods is work requirement vs quality. If statting a broader range of beings drops the overall quality of the game because you didn't have time/money/playtesters to do a good job, then it would be best to narrow your focus. It's not that it can't be done. It's that it's a bigger workload a company can't or won't afford.


I mean, it took Tolkien decades to plot a world with gradual progression from lowly Hobbits to mighty Valar in a way that an elf warrior could duel Morgoth the Dark Enemy himself and not be immediately snuffed out. And most ppl aren't Tolkien.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 07:39 PM
otoh, we don't worship Cthulhu, yet Lovecraft he is popularly described as a god.Are you a reader of Lovecraft? The Call of Cthulhu is about unraveling the mystery behind a strange cult that worships a monstrous eldritch god.


And not every god needs to be worshipped to exist in any case. That too is a campaign setting option (Mystara's gods need no worship).Not talking about campaign settings' definitions of god, I'm talking about our definition of it.


And yes, ants that have poison and can deliver a nasty sting to us exist. But In a conversation that is about ants without further specification, it is normal to take it as normal ants of the common or garden variety (ie. generally harmless unless you fall in a vat containing billions of them). Pointing out that such ants exist is like entering a commoner vs. cat conve4rsation and noting that sabre tooth tigers are also cats.Actually, it's not, because saber-toothed tigers never existed. Other varieties of saber-toothed cats did. Also it's "commoner vs. housecat," of which the saber-toothed cats were obviously not a category.

Regardless, it doesn't even take special kinds of ants to kill you if you're rendered helpless on their hill.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-23, 07:51 PM
Regardless, it doesn't even take special kinds of ants to kill you if you're rendered helpless on their hill. And all it takes in a minmaxer to stat an ant of the common variety that could even if you weren't helpless.


This boils down to two perspective. In one the gods are distance beings, clockmakers who grant the additional prayer and shape events. They subscribe to the trope of godly omnipotence in legend, and their gods are either GMPCs or largely absent. In the other, gods are NPCs like the rest. And like the rest, players can kill them.

OP and the former don't want the latter heathens to have any fun. Because for some reason "stating gods" is bad roleplaying.

Gavran
2015-02-23, 08:04 PM
And all it takes in a minmaxer to stat an ant of the common variety that could even if you weren't helpless.


This boils down to two perspective. In one the gods are distance beings, clockmakers who grant the additional prayer and shape events. They subscribe to the trope of godly omnipotence in legend, and their gods are either GMPCs or largely absent. In the other, gods are NPCs like the rest. And like the rest, players can kill them.

OP and the former don't want the latter heathens to have any fun. Because for some reason "stating gods" is bad roleplaying.

Saying unstatted gods are GMPCs is 100% as disingenuous as saying godslayers are munchkins.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-23, 08:55 PM
Saying unstatted gods are GMPCs is 100% as disingenuous as saying godslayers are munchkins. What presence would a god serve who was neither absent, nor used for purely cinematic purposes? If the response to "I attack the god." Is not determined in the fashion of chance, how is that god not a GMPC? How is the result not railroading?

If the god's role in events is indirect (my point about absences and clockmakers), then they are merely a part of the setting. I've no problem with their use that way. There are systems predicted on this. I have a problem with the claim that its somehow "better" that way. It is merely another flavor to campaign, but it is not superior form.

Knaight
2015-02-23, 08:58 PM
What presence would a god serve who was neither absent, nor used for purely cinematic purposes? If the response to "I attack the god." Is not determined in the fashion of chance, how is that god not a GMPC? How is the result not railroading?

There's a point past which there are way too many NPCs in play which meet a criterion for it to be a good one for GMPC. This is one of those - the interactions aren't rules governed, but for the entity to count as a GMPC it needs to basically be a PC, which it easily could fall short of. If the result isn't predetermined (and the absence of rules by no means implies that it is predetermined) it isn't railroading.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-23, 09:05 PM
If the result isn't predetermined (and the absence of rules by no means implies that it is predetermined) it isn't railroading. If the player has no means of determine the result, the result is predetermined. Doesn't matter if the GM made the result up on the spot. If the player cannot exert agency, the player's actions have been determined for them.

And it is not that I have a problem with it. In a horror game, the imperviousness of an opponent adds dread to an encounter. A campaign devoid of active gods is a nice break with form. But it is by no means a universally superior approach to deities. This is fantasy. Slaying big monsters is as much a part of the experience as anything.

goto124
2015-02-23, 09:51 PM
It would be easy to fall into the overshadowing NPC trap with a god. Question is, how not to?

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-23, 09:55 PM
It would be easy to fall into the overshadowing NPC trap with a god. Question is, how not to?
Don't put gods in your campaign until the players have done something truly worth their notice.

Don't make gods physically present until players are strong enough to challenge them. That is, if you choose to make them present at all.

Gavran
2015-02-24, 12:19 AM
What presence would a god serve who was neither absent, nor used for purely cinematic purposes? If the response to "I attack the god." Is not determined in the fashion of chance, how is that god not a GMPC? How is the result not railroading?

In the same way that "I hurl a rock at the sun" 'Okay, nothing happens' isn't railroading. A god is just as capable of being an NPC as every single other NPC is. Is it one that the GM should take extra care to consider? Perhaps - they do (in this scenario) hold a lot of power - but that doesn't mean it is a GMPC.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-24, 01:17 AM
In the same way that "I hurl a rock at the sun" 'Okay, nothing happens' isn't railroading. A god is just as capable of being an NPC as every single other NPC is. Is it one that the GM should take extra care to consider? Perhaps - they do (in this scenario) hold a lot of power - but that doesn't mean it is a GMPC. But what if I hurl antimatter at the sun? The base assumption that players versus gods is rocks versus sun is what I dislike here. And just because something's hopeless, doesn't mean mechanics shouldn't exist. Least you could do is give your players an illusion of control.

It's not that it's bad. It has its place. I just questioned the implication by some that it's somehow superior roleplaying. It depends what you're roleplaying.

Gavran
2015-02-24, 02:41 AM
They subscribe to the trope of godly omnipotence in legend, and their gods are either GMPCs or largely absent.


But what if I hurl antimatter at the sun? The base assumption that players versus gods is rocks versus sun is what I dislike here. And just because something's hopeless, doesn't mean mechanics shouldn't exist. Least you could do is give your players an illusion of control.

It's not that it's bad. It has its place. I just questioned the implication by some that it's somehow superior roleplaying. It depends what you're roleplaying.

I refer specifically to this quote,

They subscribe to the trope of godly omnipotence in legend, and their gods are either GMPCs or largely absent.
it is your own assumption that the gods are omnipotent, and if they are, then they are "absent or GMPCs." My argument is that you're being very disingenuous with that statement. Of course not every game has to have gods that powerful, but it is very possible to have active gods at that level who are simply powerful NPCs.

Coincidentally if you're "throwing antimatter" in a fantasy game I'd say it's extremely unlikely anything other than munchkinry is going on. Not an important point, but if you're the kind of player (and I'm not saying you are) who pretends something like the Fabricate spell can create something like antimatter and that they can then use it as a weapon - you've pretty much discarded the game's narrative in order to play out a power fantasy. Which isn't necessarily bad, but one should be honest with themselves in that case and maybe not tilt at "you said I'm not a roleplayer" windmills so much.

I fully disagree with your assertion that mechanics for hopeless tasks should exist. That wastes the designers' time, the players' time, and as you even say - by giving them a false sense of anything - deceives them. There's nothing wrong with a limited scope, and knowing one's place within it.

Belial_the_Leveler
2015-02-24, 03:25 AM
"I hurl a rock at the sun"
Where "rock" means "moon" and "hurl" means "really throw anything, with 300 strength, at a speed of 150 million kilometers per round".


This is actually possible by 24th level, depending on build.

snowblizz
2015-02-24, 05:57 AM
In the interest of the original discussion I'd like to bring up the inverse of the OP thought, because it is probably relevant. Unless this thread has degenerated into a slugfest of people who make their favourite system or way of playing look bad by their own actions. Just saying.

Essentially: "Don't stat the babies." the following posts are by the Giant and provide some insightful thoughts of the other end of the "statting" scale.
Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=16152989#post16152989)
Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=16153403#post16153403)
and here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=16153483#post16153483)

Quotes courtesy of the Giant Index, (it's bananarific).

goto124
2015-02-24, 06:03 AM
When a mortal hurls a moon at the sun, the god FINALLY appears and asks her, 'what and why are you doing that?'

Knaight
2015-02-24, 10:07 AM
If the player has no means of determine the result, the result is predetermined. Doesn't matter if the GM made the result up on the spot. If the player cannot exert agency, the player's actions have been determined for them.

Mechanical interaction is not the only way to exert agency. Something like the effects of non-mechanically represented dialog is ultimately resolved by the GM, but if they're resolving it fairly and thus what the players say actually has an effect on the result, no railroading happened. By contrast, if the result will be the same regardless then railroading is probably in effect.

Flickerdart
2015-02-24, 10:25 AM
Mechanical interaction is not the only way to exert agency. Something like the effects of non-mechanically represented dialog is ultimately resolved by the GM, but if they're resolving it fairly and thus what the players say actually has an effect on the result, no railroading happened. By contrast, if the result will be the same regardless then railroading is probably in effect.
That's not really what agency is - the outcome is still completely up to the GM, even if they decide that the thing you wanted happens. Calling it agency would be like calling a monarchic succession an "election" just because you like the guy that now wears the crown.

Knaight
2015-02-24, 10:43 AM
That's not really what agency is - the outcome is still completely up to the GM, even if they decide that the thing you wanted happens. Calling it agency would be like calling a monarchic succession an "election" just because you like the guy that now wears the crown.

You've still created the outcome there, even if it went through a third party first - which is what it's going to do anyways most of the time, with the third party of dice used instead. It's more like calling a monarchic succession indicative of the will of the people when there was an attempted military coup which failed due to a populist movement.

Flickerdart
2015-02-24, 10:46 AM
No, you didn't create the outcome, the DM decided that the outcome you wanted will happen. The dice are not the same thing because they are impartial, and your modifiers play a significant effect on what happens. Having a +30 in Diplomacy won't help you convince your DM that the god should be convinced, but mechanically it should.

Knaight
2015-02-24, 11:04 AM
No, you didn't create the outcome, the DM decided that the outcome you wanted will happen. The dice are not the same thing because they are impartial, and your modifiers play a significant effect on what happens. Having a +30 in Diplomacy won't help you convince your DM that the god should be convinced, but mechanically it should.

Assuming that the system uses quantified stats for social skills to begin with, which isn't necessarily the case. The issue there isn't a loss of agency in the present, it's that a game resource was effectively removed from the game after you'd already invested character resources in it. As for the difference with the dice being that they are impartial and affected by the modifiers, it's not that substantive. Provided the GM isn't railroading and doesn't have the entity in question as a GMPC, they probably are impartial. The way you play the character is effectively a modifier, and it has a huge effect on what happens.

Morty
2015-02-24, 11:48 AM
Looks like this thread has spent five pages arguing about a rather irrelevant question, starting from an entirely too narrow premise. Saying that it's "never" a good idea to give rules and attributes to deities is absolutely incorrect. Like everything else in a game world, they're given stats if they're relevant. If they're not, then there's no point.

If you play in a generic DnD fantasy-land and engage in dungeon crawling, nation-building or fighting evil warlords without being high-level, who the gods are and what they can do is an academic question, because they're not directly involved in whatever you're doing. If the GM does decide to have a deity step in directly, they should be very careful about it, lest they take away agency from the characters. Because in such a setting, it takes a very powerful mortal to oppose direct divine intervention. Which is why deities act through their mortal priesthoods and divine servants.

It's a different situation if the PCs are powerful enough to directly contend with their setting's gods, or the setting's definition of "god" includes lesser deities that even mere mortals can interact with, if not on even footing. Or both.

What it boils down to is whether the gods are actors in the story, who can be engaged and opposed, or simply elements of the setting, like gravity or global politics. Which is determined by how we define the term "god" and what the capabilities of the player characters are. If you take a deity-as-setting-element and make it an actor, you run the risk of making the PCs feel like single units in a divine game of Civilization.

Flickerdart
2015-02-24, 12:15 PM
Provided the GM isn't railroading and doesn't have the entity in question as a GMPC, they probably are impartial.
After reading these boards for all these years, I have absolutely no reason to assume this is the case.

Segev
2015-02-24, 04:59 PM
A point that has occurred to me reading this thread is that "don't stat gods" is usually stated with the UNstated assumption that stats are combat stats.

This isn't surprising; games typically have highly-detailed combat systems and little else that is as well-developed. This is due in no small part to the origins of tabletop gaming and the fact that combat's modeling assumptions are well-established and accepted, so the technology to model them is older than any other gaming rule technology.

This occurred to me as I thought about the accusation that GMs only use "unstatted" gods when they want to railroad. The assertion was made that gods of that sort showing up means the players have no option but to kowtow, and that therefore there is no reason to introduce such things save to force the PCs along a certain path.

It led me to think about what you can do, as a PC, in the face of a character, creature, or god which is so powerful - due to stats or not - that you literally cannot threaten them (or at least you literally have a chance of threatening them so miniscule that it will end the same way 999999999 times out of one more than that.)

What you can do, if the GM isn't just dictating what you will do, is try to talk to it, or to act in a manner which will please it, and influence it to do something you'd like to see happen (or at least not do something you wouldn't like to see happen). If the GM doesn't ahve this pre-plotted - "do this or suffer, and nothing you say other than 'okay' or 'screw it, I'll suffer' matters" - then it comes down to convincing the GM that your character's actions propitiate the deity or whatever it is and convince it to act in a manner beneficial to the players' goals.

This is, essentially, no different than any other situation where combat is, for whatever reason, not an option.

So even if the god is untouchable in terms of combat mechanics, if the system had well-developed social mechanics or even well-developed "influence the gods through prayer and propitiation" mechanics, it would be meaningful to stat the god in those terms while still leaving it a god.

You would want to hedge the god against being trivially deceived or manipulated, but you'd want to make appealing to the god's nature and convincing it (by hook or crook...though more likely by hook since one doesn't want gods to come off as easily duped) a viable option.


So perhaps "don't stat gods" really isn't about not statting them, per se, and is more about not making them physically murderable. Perhaps the issue lies in the system not supporting the area of gaming that the god SHOULD be interacted within: that of social interaction. What is commonly called "RP" but is really no more or less RP than combat...it just usually has weaker or no mechanics associated.

Knaight
2015-02-24, 05:35 PM
After reading these boards for all these years, I have absolutely no reason to assume this is the case.

In my experience playing with GMs who don't suck, impartiality to at least a pretty high degree (if not perfect impartiality) is routine. Sure, it breaks down horribly for terrible GMs, but even unpracticed, mediocre GMs can generally be decently impartial.

Flickerdart
2015-02-24, 05:37 PM
In my experience playing with GMs who don't suck, impartiality to at least a pretty high degree (if not perfect impartiality) is routine. Sure, it breaks down horribly for terrible GMs, but even unpracticed, mediocre GMs can generally be decently impartial.
By comparison, the dice are perfectly impartial, constantly. And when they displease you, you can put them in the microwave.

Segev
2015-02-24, 05:42 PM
By comparison, the dice are perfectly impartial, constantly. And when they displease you, you can put them in the microwave.

The GM of the Rifts game I'm in drowns them in gin if they displease her. Or if anybody else touches them.

Knaight
2015-02-24, 06:05 PM
By comparison, the dice are perfectly impartial, constantly. And when they displease you, you can put them in the microwave.

Sure, but if you're in a situation where you're rolling the dice, you're in a situation where the GM can have already affected how hard the rolls need to be in a bunch of different ways. The dice don't actually remove GM influence in any real way, at best they remove GM favoritism.

Belial_the_Leveler
2015-02-24, 08:14 PM
Yes, the DM can affect how hard something is even when you're rolling dice. But you do see the roll results thus they can't arbitrarily change the difficulty or arbitrarily make it too high without you knowing about it and calling them on it.



BTW, this pic is relevant to the discussion:
http://36.media.tumblr.com/00eaf0475d0d85f1567a248943df3d45/tumblr_nabb3p36le1tjzi7vo1_500.jpg




That guy right there? It's the guy who chooses to fight the dark god, one on one, without trickery, knowing he cannot win, even after other gods warn him against it. He's got a brass pair so large its gravitational pull threatens to swallow entire other settings if they leave their gods unstatted!:smallbiggrin:

Geostationary
2015-02-25, 03:21 AM
In my experience playing with GMs who don't suck, impartiality to at least a pretty high degree (if not perfect impartiality) is routine. Sure, it breaks down horribly for terrible GMs, but even unpracticed, mediocre GMs can generally be decently impartial.

A better question that's also entirely off-topic: is impartiality actually a desirable trait in your GM? What does that even mean?

PairO'Dice Lost
2015-02-25, 01:11 PM
A better question that's also entirely off-topic: is impartiality actually a desirable trait in your GM? What does that even mean?

In this scenario "impartiality" usually means two things, first that the DM is not going out of his way to steer the campaign in a particular direction, whether against the PCs (railroading, DMPCs, aiming for TPKs and other "killer DM" stuff) or for them (making PCs' choices always be the right one in multiple-choice situations, fudging to avoid killing PCs, lots of excess treasure and other "Monty Haul DM" stuff), and second that the DM is not treating a particular PC or player differently from the others, whether for good ("DM's girlfriend" problem) or ill ("That damn dirty munchkin! I'll show him!").

So yes, impartiality is definitely a highly desirable trait. Losing no matter what you do or winning no matter what you do (or merely noticing that the DM is nudging things in that direction) both make the game less fun for many people, and favoring or screwing over a particular player engenders resentment in them and/or the rest of the party depending on the situation. Impartiality is the best for the social dynamic, and there's a very good reason that the 1e DMG frequently refers to the DM as the "referee" or "judge" but never as the "director" or even "god".

goto124
2015-02-25, 08:36 PM
I probably would prefer a mostly impartial DM with a slight nudge towards favoring the group of players as a whole. And then again, I'm a softie.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-25, 10:37 PM
I refer specifically to this quote, it is your own assumption that the gods are omnipotent, and if they are, then they are "absent or GMPCs." My argument is that you're being very disingenuous with that statement. Of course not every game has to have gods that powerful, but it is very possible to have active gods at that level who are simply powerful NPCs. May I refer you back to said quote? Notably the second part you edited off:
In the other, gods are NPCs like the rest. Where I say exactly what you said! Congratulations! You're in latter group!

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 10:09 AM
A better question that's also entirely off-topic: is impartiality actually a desirable trait in your GM? What does that even mean?

PairO'Dice Lost gave a good explanation of what it means and why it is desireable. I'll note that it is possible to built a game around the assumption of a partial GM, but it becomes a very different game from the original D&D model and requires a different group dynamic to work properly. One way is for the GM to be wholly antagonistic, but in that case, the power of the GM is typically cut dramatically. (For example, the GM doesn't have the final word - that's left either to the dice, or group vote, or some other mechanic.) Another is to really make the GM a director or even in-game God (I've actually helped translate an indie supplement to D&D which does just this), put this cuts at player power and requires they place more trust in the GM.

Segev
2015-02-26, 10:30 AM
Hero Quest was the first really solid game I saw where the GM-figure was wholly anatagonistic. "Zargon," as he was called, was trying to kill the other players, and he controlled the monsters and revealed the dungeon layout on the board. But the dungeons are fully statted already, and he's just placing them according to rules. He chooses monster strategies, but only in response to player actions. He is highly constrained in what he can and cannot do.

There are more modern versions of this, from the D&D-branded Ravenloft board game to one simply called Descent, which are board games with pre-designed dungeon levels and simply-designed characters with specified powers. The players tend to have a lot of control over HOW the dungeon is revealed, as their choices in what to explore controls in large part how much the GM has to work with. The GM still has a lot of tools he can exploit, but they are designed as one might in an asymmetric but rules-governed game, rather than as one might expect a more traditional TTRPG.

They're fun games. Great for some couple-hours-of-dungeon-crawling play. Not nearly as customizable as TTRPGs, but still a lot of fun.

Flickerdart
2015-02-26, 11:18 AM
Hero Quest was the first really solid game I saw where the GM-figure was wholly anatagonistic. "Zargon," as he was called, was trying to kill the other players, and he controlled the monsters and revealed the dungeon layout on the board. But the dungeons are fully statted already, and he's just placing them according to rules. He chooses monster strategies, but only in response to player actions. He is highly constrained in what he can and cannot do.

There are more modern versions of this, from the D&D-branded Ravenloft board game to one simply called Descent, which are board games with pre-designed dungeon levels and simply-designed characters with specified powers. The players tend to have a lot of control over HOW the dungeon is revealed, as their choices in what to explore controls in large part how much the GM has to work with. The GM still has a lot of tools he can exploit, but they are designed as one might in an asymmetric but rules-governed game, rather than as one might expect a more traditional TTRPG.

They're fun games. Great for some couple-hours-of-dungeon-crawling play. Not nearly as customizable as TTRPGs, but still a lot of fun.
That's very interesting. I wonder how D&D would play if there were (effective) rules for the DM in place...

Knaight
2015-02-26, 11:26 AM
That's very interesting. I wonder how D&D would play if there were (effective) rules for the DM in place...

I'd imagine it ends up closer to Dungeon World, given that part of what DW does is the explicit list of DM moves.

Flickerdart
2015-02-26, 11:30 AM
I'd imagine it ends up closer to Dungeon World, given that part of what DW does is the explicit list of DM moves.
I don't mean explicit so much as things like a CR system that makes sense and the DM being required to send CR-appropriate challenges, and provide specific player-requested items in loot or stores. Not so much new things as things that most people already do in some way or another, but codified to prevent abuse and avoid instilling the whole mentality of "the DM is the ubergod and players should cower before his mighty screen."

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 11:44 AM
The specific rules a GM has to follow are somewhat besides the point - those could be anything. But in order for the rules to really work, you'll need some way to enforce them. One way to do it would be to split the role of the referee from GM's duties to someone who doesn't actually play any characters, and is there for the sole purpose of monitoring the usage of rules. (The logical conclusion would be to have an actual security personnel present to throw out any player, including the GM, for any rules breaches, similar to how internet forums have moderators with the ability to ban people.)

But while that closes doors for abuse in one place, it opens new ones elsewhere. There's a certain minimal level of trust and responsibility that you will always need for the game to work, and trying to lessen it past that point will just move it around. Or, to paraphrase a certain OSR blogger, you might not like depending on a single person not being a prick, but if the alternative depends on four to eight not being pricks, it's not going to work any better.

Knaight
2015-02-26, 11:49 AM
The specific rules a GM has to follow are somewhat besides the point - those could be anything. But in order for the rules to really work, you'll need some way to enforce them. One way to do it would be to split the role of the referee from GM's duties to someone who doesn't actually play any characters, and is there for the sole purpose of monitoring the usage of rules. (The logical conclusion would be to have an actual security personnel present to throw out any player, including the GM, for any rules breaches, similar to how internet forums have moderators with the ability to ban people.)

You don't need a way to enforce them any more than you need a way to enforce board game rules. If people are using the rules wrong they'll get called on it, and generally that's that. On the off chance they're actually cheating it gets a bit more difficult, but that's no different than with any other sort of game.

Talakeal
2015-02-26, 12:43 PM
My campaign setting is more or less animistic. Almost everything has a spirit, and any spirit can grant a few minor blessings and miracles to those who choose to worship it. Any spirit with a clergy can be called a "god". Most are no stronger than a human.

The fifteen strongest spirits, those who are in change or a whole aspect of reality, are called deities and the closest to true polytheistic gods.

In their true form these deities are unfathomably vast and incomprehensible to mortals. They are vast matrixes of energy that regulate reality on a subtle level below most people's comprehension. They do not have thoughts or desires like those of men, and though they are incredibly powerful their power is subtle, slow, and far reaching. They manipulate probability rather than simply changing reality on a whim, that would be antithetical to their nature.

Each deity also has a "godhead" or an "incarnation". These are like your familiar deities: big guys in the sky with magical powers. These incarnations are, within their domain, more powerful than the strongest mortal. They can still be beaten, however, if a very skilled mortal challenges them and either gets lucky or simply wants it more. Outside of their area of specialty they are as competent as the very best of mortals. They can perform awesome miracles, including the above mentioned "planet busting"*, but other spirits, including mortal souls, have a sort of "home field advantage" and the potential to resist their effects if they overstep their domain.

An incarnation can be killed by mortals. Doing so is not a simple task. Even the greatest mortal warrior will fail to defeat them singlehandedly without miraculous luck or absolutely brilliant tactics. Even for an entire party of max power PCs they are an incredibly challenging fight. If an incarnation is killed they do not truly die, after a period of time the deity to which they are attached will regenerate them. How long this takes depends on the nature of the world, the god of war will reincarnate faster during a period of strife and global conflict than in peace time. Likewise the incarnation will be subtly different each time, for example Ares, Mars, Thor, Morrigan, and others are all different incarnations of the same war god.

To permanently kill a god is possible, but EXTREMELY difficulty. To do it one would need to achieve these three steps in quick succession:

1: Kill the god's incarnation (by far the easiest of the three)
2: Make the god's legacy forgotten (wiping out their worshippers and somehow getting people to stop telling legends of their deeds)
3: Destroy that which the god represents. For some gods that represent physical objects such as a city this is merely extremely difficulty, for those that represent a concept or an aspect of nature this is all but impossible.


*: The demon god of destruction actually destroyed the Elemental Plane of Earth at some point in the setting's history, the asteroid belt which can be seen in the sky above the campaign world is all that is left of it.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 02:06 PM
You don't need a way to enforce them any more than you need a way to enforce board game rules. If people are using the rules wrong they'll get called on it, and generally that's that. On the off chance they're actually cheating it gets a bit more difficult, but that's no different than with any other sort of game.

Lots of more complex board and card games do have a special player or a referee with extra control over the game - the banker in monopoly, for example - and even more add one when things get sufficiently serious (official and unofficial tournaments). So yes, not any different from other sorts of games. :smallwink: It depends on how much you want to stress fair play and how much you (don't) trust other players.

icefractal
2015-02-26, 04:45 PM
I don't mean explicit so much as things like a CR system that makes sense and the DM being required to send CR-appropriate challenges, and provide specific player-requested items in loot or stores. Not so much new things as things that most people already do in some way or another, but codified to prevent abuse and avoid instilling the whole mentality of "the DM is the ubergod and players should cower before his mighty screen."Organized Play is pretty much that. Opposition and rewards are determined by the module; the DM has some wiggle room, but not that much.

You'll notice that most Organized Play has very strict char-gen rules, compared to a normal campaigns; lots of stuff banned or restricted. That's the side effect of locking the DM into place. In a normal campaign, the solution to "PC is very good at handling single melee-only foes" is "use some different foes when you want more challenge". In OP, the solution is "nerf Crane Style to almost worthless".

Flickerdart
2015-02-26, 05:25 PM
Organized Play is pretty much that. Opposition and rewards are determined by the module; the DM has some wiggle room, but not that much.

You'll notice that most Organized Play has very strict char-gen rules, compared to a normal campaigns; lots of stuff banned or restricted. That's the side effect of locking the DM into place. In a normal campaign, the solution to "PC is very good at handling single melee-only foes" is "use some different foes when you want more challenge". In OP, the solution is "nerf Crane Style to almost worthless".
That's going too far the other way, I think - part of the fun in being a DM is coming up with zany creatures to throw at the PCs (half-dragon gelatinous cube monks, why not) and designing amusing dungeons (put said cubes at the bottom of a 300ft tall pit of despair), but as-is the DMG provides very little in terms of guidelines and you end up accidentally murdering the party with "CR-appropriate" foes or having them trounce your super speshul plot NPC, then getting mad and breaking out the god mode.

icefractal
2015-02-26, 05:44 PM
That's going too far the other way, I think - part of the fun in being a DM is coming up with zany creatures to throw at the PCs (half-dragon gelatinous cube monks, why not) and designing amusing dungeons (put said cubes at the bottom of a 300ft tall pit of despair), but as-is the DMG provides very little in terms of guidelines and you end up accidentally murdering the party with "CR-appropriate" foes or having them trounce your super speshul plot NPC, then getting mad and breaking out the god mode.Oh, I totally agree. But I don't know if CR can be that accurate. I think that a monster contains so many variables, each of which is affected by not only the monster's other variables but also those of the party, that a truly accurate evaluation ahead of time is impossible. A couple points to support that:

1) HERO system - HERO has a very detailed set of rules for valuing abilities, refined over the course of several editions. Despite that, the point cost of a foe is an almost useless metric for judging challenge. Comparing the 'core' combat stats to those of the party is more accurate, but still can fail for foes with unusual abilities.

2) D&D 4E - In order for "CR X" to mean something, having PCs of "level X" needs to also mean something. 4E took a serious stab at making that true. In the process, they had to reduce the concept space for mechanics considerably. Even then, party composition still has enough effect that you can't rely on monster level blindly.

This can be alleviated a bit by making your monsters more "titanium handgun" than "glass cannon" in design. If they turn out to be a cake walk, they might still live long enough to call for reinforcements. And if it goes the other way, the PCs will have time to GTFO. Going too defense-oriented can make the fight a dull grind though, so there's a tricky balance there.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 06:15 PM
I was going to mention 4e too, but icefractal beat me to it. The key point is to make math of the system very transparent to players, or at least the GM. A lot of systems go the other way, using really uintuitive or hard-to-read systems for their random number generation or some such.

I'd give special mention to Noitahovi. Even though it uses a dice pool mechanic which makes counting the exact probabilities a pain in the ass, the system scales up and down very well and it's easy to tell when a challenge is even - just match the amount of dice and successes required! Its concept space is also really large, at it allows players a lot of freedom to describe and dictate, but it's something of a double-edged sword. All conflicts proceed in the same manner and only very roughly relate to what's happening in the game, so you have to rely on the players to keep coming up with new ideas and content. If you want to move past the default setting, your players need to be experienced in stuff that's usually in the GM's domain. Of course, that's sort of the point; high-level play in Noitahovi very much is about defeating the gods and taking their place, or transcending space and time or some such thing. If the players aren't up to describing spiritual acid trips, it's not going to work.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 06:22 PM
By far the best balancing factor in an encounter is the environment. GMs not using the environment as a concept in combat are weighing down those CRs. There are reasons for the "favorable/unfavorable circumstance" and terrain rules in many games and they are often underutilized.

Also many CRs can be returned to balance by the addition of the element of mystery.

Once paralyzed an entire group during a session with just a cannon down a dark hallway. Simply because they couldn't figure out what was killing their conjurations and hirelings.

There's also the whole "GM playing mobs like PCs" thing. Good way to put the reigns on a juggernaut party is to play the monsters like you ARE trying to kill them.

These are reasons I tend to look suspiciously upon GMs who put unstated, unkillable gods in their campaigns. Reeks a bit heavy handed to me. Lest we made it to cap-levels, why does such a being care about us? There are less lazy, more subtle ways to GM.

Barring systems where such deities are givens, of course.