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View Full Version : Why the aversion to impossiblity?



MonkeySage
2017-01-08, 02:08 AM
There are two basic groups of deities in my setting. Regular gods have character sheets, and under very specific conditions, they could be killed... but it's not easy.

Then there are Elder Gods... Elder Gods are true immortals; I intentionally leave them unstatted, because they are not meant to be killable. They never were.

In my experience, players do not like being told that something is impossible.

Some players, you tell them "this thing cannot be killed", and the response you get is "watch me".

The results are... predictable and sometimes funny... and sometimes kinda sad.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-08, 02:23 AM
There are systems that actually explicitly state certain things. For example, Deadlands had a character I believe named Stone who could not be killed. The rules specifically said so. In the Vampire games, should you face Caine, any time you try to do something against him the game specifically has 2 words: You lose.

You lose to Caine, end of story.

It's been asked if a nuke can take out Cthulu. Answer: No. It just makes him pissed off and radioactive.

There is plenty of "No." in pencil and paper gaming, just certain systems don't make it explicit. However, the problem with impossible is the idea that it could be limiting and even railroading. D&D and other games tend to encourage thinking outside the box and having a DM willing to play along, but there is a place for impossible.

To quote (or possibly paraphrase) Eddie Izzard: "There is such a thing as impossible. For example, it is impossible to eat the Himalayas. How do I know? Try it."

Make certain things impossible, but try to limit your impossibilities, and make sure it's for a reason beyond controlling how your players complete an objective.

Inspector Valin
2017-01-08, 02:50 AM
Yeah, this is very much genre dependant. The issue is that D&D sits on kinda a broad in the middle sorta genre place as it's supposed to let you run almost any fantasy game.

Speaking as an Exalted fan, who feels 'nothing is impossible' should be line one in the core book, impossible things can get frustrating. A villain I just can't kill fits in horror as an intimidating threat. In fantasy? It's doable but it can easily get obnoxious. Why can't I kill Caine? Because he's stronger than -you- me? Ok, but there's more of us. Or we're down for a tough fight. 'You just don't have a chance' robs us of agency and makes our character sheets worthless.

Now, it can work with enough setting justification. In some genres, like C'thulhu mythos stuff, it's even expected. But if their unkillable status isn't very well justified, it gets frustrating IMO.

Taking your example and analysing it a little, why can't elder gods be killed when regular gods can be? Is there some inherent difference; like regular gods ascended to their position, while elders are anthromorphic personifications? Living representations of their domain? (Death, Time, War etc. .. )

MonkeySage
2017-01-08, 03:01 AM
Well, aside from the fact that Elder Gods are true immortals, there's a physical difference between a regular god and an elder god.

Dolaran, the God of Valor, is an angel that ascended to his position at some point, and became the chief god of his pantheon. Technically, he's just a very powerful angel.

Iboia, the Sun God, was created as the sun god; his physical form is literally the sun itself.

Iboia is one of the weaker Elder Gods.

Rionis is the setting's God of Time, and one of the most powerful beings in my setting; he doesn't really have a physical form, though he sometimes appears as a small child, on the very rare occasion that he has dealings with mortals. He can just as easily make himself look like a lovecraftian monstrocity.

NichG
2017-01-08, 03:17 AM
Well, it seems like an odd situation to have come up at all. Why are you telling the player about this greater deity?

Consider if you had a player and they said 'I'm such a great optimizer, I can make a character that even the GM can't kill, see, look!'. Wouldn't that make you, as GM, become defensive or feel the need to prove them wrong? If you say 'look, I put this thing in the setting that you can't kill' you're basically calling out the player or trying to make a show of dominance over them. The natural instinctual reaction to that is for them to fight back.

Also, there's the aspect that making it a character rather than something else implies that its interactable in a meaningful way. That is to say, players (usually) don't complain about not being able to kill the sun, or gravity, or 'the concept of primogeniture', or other unkillable things. But if you gave gravity a humanoid body and a face and a personality and had it play favorites, players would implicitly expect that you're giving it those human characteristics in order to make it approachable - to make it so that it can be interacted with, manipulated, controlled, bargained with, or killed. When you give it a face and then deny those modes of interaction, at best it will feel frustrating and pointless. At worse, it can feel like the real reason you gave it a characterization was to make it your avatar in the game - basically, so that you could go on a power trip.

Inspector Valin
2017-01-08, 03:19 AM
Ok, let's leave the term 'true immortal' aside for a second. Their physical forms, or lack of forms, prevent them from being harmed.

Ok. Can they be thwarted? Can other magic trump theirs? Could you imprison the god of time in a glass clock? If you're in a cave to do what you want, are you beyond the sun gods reach?

Normally I'd describe this as the baseline in D&D, the gods are on a different scale to you... but if other gods can be engaged with, why not the elders? Even if you can't kill them, that doesn't automagically stop them having mechanical representation. If they're flat out unopposeable then why bother with letting players into this area at all?

MonkeySage
2017-01-08, 03:30 AM
Basically, it was a player that wanted to create a godslayer, after I told him of a separate campaign in which the Time God featured; not as a hero, but more as a kind of guardian. The Time God exists for many purposes, and one of them is to maintain a cosmic balance. The player said he wanted to kill this time god, and I tried to explain the problem with that...

The choice to make this kind of divine hierarchy was sort of based on settings with similar situations.

These Elder Gods can't be killed, but they can be opposed in other ways. Meanwhile, having a family of deities that can be killed gives me story telling opportunities. One campaign I ran was based on the idea of fighting against a deity and, optionally, finding some way to kill it.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-01-08, 03:39 AM
Looks like... you're out of time.

Elder gods should only be killable if you can deliver a good one-liner first.

Esprit15
2017-01-08, 03:49 AM
Why does the player want to kill the embodiment if time?

MonkeySage
2017-01-08, 03:56 AM
He has judged the Deity as incompetent in one of his roles within the setting, and believes that another should take that deity's place. The role of keeping cosmic balance by preventing a particular regular deity from reaching full power.

Elder Gods mainly serve as plot devices, when they feature at all. The basis of one of my campaigns is that this regular deity effectively got back one of its "fingers". The Time God was the one that "dismembered" this deity in the first place, but didn't kill it.

NichG
2017-01-08, 05:45 AM
Well, if its something your player spontaneously decided to pursue on their own, it's on them to come up with a workable plan.

Satinavian
2017-01-08, 07:57 AM
If something is impossible, there should be reasons why it is impossible. If those reasons don't apply anymore, it becomes possible.


Other than that it is perfectly fine to say "Doing X is so far outside the scope of the games that the rules don't cover it. There are no stats for it. If you want to do that, you have to use a new game system or it gets only narrated and handwaved."

Inspector Valin
2017-01-08, 08:02 AM
I think saying it's impossible is a little... disheartening. Perhaps it's worth thinking about the anthropomorphic personification line of reasoning? Rionis isn't just the God of Time, even if that's the title mortals give him, he is time. If you kill him, you have by extension destroyed the concept of time: not really a positive thing for anyone in the universe except really strange and specific eldrich abominations. You can thwart him, fight him and his goals, try to take over his role of keeping cosmic balance amongst the gods... but killing him? Even if you could pull it off, you're just dooming everyone.

Cluedrew
2017-01-08, 08:32 AM
I think the aversion to impossibility has several causes.

First off its not fun. Not by itself at least. Trying to do something and being endlessly meet with failure is... most likely to be frustrating. If the path goes no where why have it? I would ague stating up front really says "that path is not there" but other people don't seem to see it that way. There seems to be this assumption that if we can get into a fight with it than we have a chance of winning.

Second because of railroading. Even if you are not, depending on your history with the player they may be worried that you are with this.

I'm sure there are good ways to approach impossible things and including them in a game. For instance I think some people respond better when they come to the conclusion on their own. So if someone wants to kill the god of time, instead of saying that its impossible ask they how they intend to do that. If they have enough information to conclude that they can't, you have done your job. That's my experience on the matter.

tomandtish
2017-01-08, 09:58 AM
Well, the first question is if you (as a GM) even want to try and follow this. If you aren’t on board with the idea, there’s no real point since you wouldn’t be having fun either. Politely explain to your player that the elder gods are there for background/plot flavor only.

If you do want to follow this idea, it is important to remember:

Victory does NOT have to mean defeat in combat.

You could run something as follows: The elder gods are as much personifications as beings. The Time God IS Time. As long as he is doing his job properly, he is functionally invincible. But supposed he was tricked into creating a paradox. This would cause an inherent conflict that his nature could not sustain. At that point the power leaves and moves to the next suitable vessel (presumably the god your PC wants).

Setting up that paradox could be the basis for an epic level campaign.

I’ll never say there’s not a way to win. But winning doesn’t (and shouldn’t) always mean a stand-up fight. And winning might take a while (maybe even a whole campaign).

Delicious Taffy
2017-01-08, 10:01 AM
In my experience, telling a player something simply can't be done, even if only for now, causes them to think something has been taken away from them. This applies even when nothing was offered to begin with, or they randomly came up with something based on some abstract interpretation of an unimportant sentence.

For example, I made the mistake of telling my last party that there was someone fixing up a cart in the village they'd just arrived at, and they immediately decided it absolutely must have something valuable in it, which they were definitely meant to steal. I rolled with it and said the cart was full of large crates with platinum bars in them, and the players assumed it was unguarded. Telling them that it was, in fact, guarded by several heavily-armed royal knights on horseback earned me dirty looks and frustrated sights, along with an accusation-poorly-disguised-as-a-question of deliberately trying to kill them unprovoked. They remained convinced that they could lift the entirety of the haul, even as they were split up (of their own volition), chased down, and explicitly told that they simply didn't have the carry capacity to take everything, yes, even with their Bag of Holding.

This might be skewed, however, because this is the only sort of behavior my group has exhibited, so far.

halfeye
2017-01-08, 11:59 AM
The main reason is probably that if something is impossible, there is something that can't be done, which may only be tangential to the thing that is obviously impossible. Examples of this could be found in real world politics.

John Longarrow
2017-01-08, 12:11 PM
I don't think I've ever had to tell someone they couldn't do something. I've asked "How" often and also pointed out when rules don't work the way they think. At the table I've let people figure out that the rules don't allow for something the way they think it would and even let them know someone else doesn't have their answer.

As to killing an immortal god, I'd be "OK" and leave it at that. I'd let the player then try to figure out everything involved with killing the god. If their character can't find the right info and I hadn't planned on the players ever encountering said deity they won't be able to find out what they need.

cobaltstarfire
2017-01-08, 12:25 PM
The elder gods being un-killable doesn't make defeat impossible, it makes them un-killable. Not the same thing, and definitely not a shutting down of the player agency if they can still have a hand in some sorts of outcomes.

I can see where it might become a problem if nothing can oppose any of these gods in any way, but I personally have no problem with there being some things which are impossible within a story or world.

Maybe it's because one of the longer run games I played in was run by an older DM, where some "fights" are best to run from or talk your way out of, those ones seemed the most interesting in their own way because of the impossibility or danger involved if we as players messed up.

icefractal
2017-01-08, 03:19 PM
IME, it's not the "impossible" part, per se. Very few players will complain if you say things like "No, you can't drink the entire sea. Or do a running jump into orbit. Or kick a mountain so hard it shatters into sand." It's the invincible NPC part.

Omnipotent NPCs that come down and slum it with the PCs are an idea that I think most GMs come up with at some point. Heck, I've done it myself. It sounds like so much fun, and hey, they're just there for comic effect / plot stuff, they're not fighting the PCs, so no harm no foul, right? But most of the time, they're only fun for the GM; from the player side they're usually annoying and feel like the GM is having a power trip at your expense.

I'm not saying they can never be used - the GM is a player too, and deserves to have fun also. But use them very sparingly, and don't use them to make the PCs look stupid.

It doesn't sound like that's the direct reason in this case, since the topic came up outside of gameplay, but it could be the player making assumptions based off past GMs.

Vitruviansquid
2017-01-08, 03:31 PM
People are averse to impossibility because a long time ago, they were told the practical idea "railroading, which is where the GM gives you the illusion of agency, but really planned for exactly whatever to happen to you, is bad." And this was fine and dandy for dealing with the issue that was presented at that time.

But then people started to take this "NO RAILROADING!!!" rule as a commandment. If you see something that smacks of "railroady" they start to think of it as bad without thinking about the whys and limits of why that rule existed in the first place.

So now if some players figure out there's anything that gets rid of their agency, they will have a problem with it.



The very idea that you have gods, and they weren't godly enough so now you have to invent another layer of even godlier gods...

Segev
2017-01-08, 03:40 PM
In my experience, "impossible" is something to which players are averse for one of two reasons:

1) It's like showing a stereotypical bull a red flag; it's a challenge saying, "If you can prove this assertion wrong, it marks your character as a great being." It's almost setting up a victory condition just by being an "impossible" one.

2) It is used to railroad and bully. Usually, players and their characters don't determine that they are going to "do the impossible" unless that seems like a way to achieve goals of theirs. For instance, if the "god of time" is being an impartial entity that keeps time moving, and the "god of gravity" is likewise being impartial, enforcing the law of gravity as it applies evenly to everybody, it's unlikely that the players will have reason to go after them. Why bother, when they can try to use the laws of those forces as well as anybody else, and thus achieve what they want within them? It's only when these "gods" are set up in an antagonistic sense that their "impossible to defeat" nature become galling. It's telling the players, "You can't actually win, and you had better do it the way I'm puppetting the NPCs to force you to or they'll make you pay, and there's nothing you can do about it." Even if that's not the intended message, it's often what comes across.

Winter_Wolf
2017-01-08, 04:24 PM
I suppose it's all in the wording. I have deities, they have avatars, they can be "decaffeinated".* And then there are those things which make up the fabric of the universe. You'd literally have to unmake and remake reality to get rid of them. While this would surely be an epic adventure, I have neither the time nor inclination to invest that much time and effort into creating said epic adventure. Functionally impossible, but really I just present it as, "too much work to really do it justice."


*Go watch the Lethal Weapon movies. At least first and second.

oxybe
2017-01-08, 04:45 PM
Partially because Impossible isn't fun and a the end of the day we're all playing to have a good time.

We want something that's challenging but in the realm of possible and being told "X is impossible" is a downer.

Partially (and this is the really big part, not the small but still significant part mentioned up top), D&D is largely a game about larger then life people doing larger then life stuff.

In a game where you're normal guys, just your average Kevins & Steves on the street, yes punching out KORMORGORMAR THE VILE, GOD OF PUNGENT SMELLS would be an impossibility.

But in D&D your characters aren't just Kevin and Steve. They're Khe'veen the Wise and Steveworth the Bold. Their day job is to do the impossible. Where your Joe-average Kevin and Steve would be part of the masses running away from the goblins, bugbears, ogres and the dreaded Fanged Claw-Beast of Urx, Khe'veen and Steveworth strap on their backpacks, grab their magical staff and sword, look knowingly at each other and go "It's a living!" with a sarcastic shrug & a laugh track in the background and go towards those nasties.

Possibly while The Rembrandts plays you off.

D&D is a game about magical elven princesses riding unicorns shooting rainbows at tentacled poop-monsters.

D&D is a game where a halfling riding a dinosaur fights a werewolf on top of a magical train while an airship flies by for a broadside cannonade.

D&D is a game where death is a mere speedbump later in your career.

D&D is a game where these larger then life heroes bump head with even larger then life villains in over-the-top scenarios.

D&D flaunts the impossible constantly because D&D characters are impossible entities in themselves.

Telling a D&D character something is impossible is kinda boring. Let them try! Make a quest out of it! The player is actively telling you "This is a thing I'm interested in pursuing" so why not work with that to tell an awesome story?

veti
2017-01-08, 05:58 PM
I'll add my voice to "Don't tell them it's impossible, just ask them what they're doing. Then tell them what the result/effect is."

You can tell them "everyone believes this is impossible", because that's just a challenge. Some of those things, and even you may be surprised by which ones, will turn out to be possible after all, it's just a matter of ingenuity. But it's the player who has to provide the ingenuity. You are under no obligation to ensure that there is a way.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-08, 06:16 PM
D&D flaunts the impossible constantly because D&D characters are impossible entities in themselves.

Telling a D&D character something is impossible is kinda boring. Let them try! Make a quest out of it! The player is actively telling you "This is a thing I'm interested in pursuing" so why not work with that to tell an awesome story?

*Except when you want to play a good monstrous race, or a fighter/rogue that doesn't suck, or when the paladin does a stupid, or when someone plays a Monk or a Samurai, or when you want to play Tome of Battle and the DM dismisses as for "being for weeaboos", or when you want to be a Psion and the DM dismisses as "overpowered compared to wizards", or any drow character, or when your class doesn't contribute to an optimal team in tactical combat, or whenever the DM feels like restricting magic items for a "low magic campaign" while ignoring wizards, or whenever the DM restricts things to core so you can't play what you want at all.

Hell of a fine print to miss. People are perfectly fine with the death of cosmological deities, yet whenever you want a simple orc fighter to join in to kill one with his bare fists, suddenly everyone is like or implies "no thats impossible, all orcs are evil and Drizzt like characters are played out, and fighters should be realistic so screw you." They seem really fine with impossibility there.

Hawkstar
2017-01-08, 06:21 PM
Is "Good Orcs are Impossible" something you're having issues with in real-world games, or just cross-thread posting?

Mr Beer
2017-01-08, 06:25 PM
As said above, unkillable gods shouldn't be a problem unless said gods are turning up to thwart the PCs with a wave of their unkillable hands. Then it gets frustrating. If they're just in the background somewhere, like the Moon, big deal.

oxybe
2017-01-08, 06:36 PM
*Except when you want to play a good monstrous race, or a fighter/rogue that doesn't suck, or when the paladin does a stupid, or when someone plays a Monk or a Samurai, or when you want to play Tome of Battle and the DM dismisses as for "being for weeaboos", or when you want to be a Psion and the DM dismisses as "overpowered compared to wizards", or any drow character, or when your class doesn't contribute to an optimal team in tactical combat, or whenever the DM feels like restricting magic items for a "low magic campaign" while ignoring wizards, or whenever the DM restricts things to core so you can't play what you want at all.

Hell of a fine print to miss. People are perfectly fine with the death of cosmological deities, yet whenever you want a simple orc fighter to join in to kill one with his bare fists, suddenly everyone is like or implies "no thats impossible, all orcs are evil and Drizzt like characters are played out, and fighters should be realistic so screw you." They seem really fine with impossibility there.

realistic wizard vs realistic ogre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw

John Longarrow
2017-01-08, 06:49 PM
*Except when you want to play a good monstrous race, or a fighter/rogue that doesn't suck, or when the paladin does a stupid, or when someone plays a Monk or a Samurai, or when you want to play Tome of Battle and the DM dismisses as for "being for weeaboos", or when you want to be a Psion and the DM dismisses as "overpowered compared to wizards", or any drow character, or when your class doesn't contribute to an optimal team in tactical combat, or whenever the DM feels like restricting magic items for a "low magic campaign" while ignoring wizards, or whenever the DM restricts things to core so you can't play what you want at all.

Hell of a fine print to miss. People are perfectly fine with the death of cosmological deities, yet whenever you want a simple orc fighter to join in to kill one with his bare fists, suddenly everyone is like or implies "no thats impossible, all orcs are evil and Drizzt like characters are played out, and fighters should be realistic so screw you." They seem really fine with impossibility there.

Sounds like you've had some bad experiences with DMs. At my table there are some books I don't include, but that's mostly because I'm not too familiar with the rules and have enough on my plate that I'm not planning to include them. This isn't me saying "Impossible" though, its "Hey, I don't include that because I'm not up for running that". Its a very OOC thing though.

Beleriphon
2017-01-08, 06:52 PM
I think the aversion is that the players don't like be told no, and its akin to "Rocks fall everybody dies".

The better method is to go with Doctor Strange's solution to Dormamu in the movie. He can't win through might, but he can win through guile.

GrayDeath
2017-01-10, 03:17 PM
Many said it already, but as a DM who both once fell for the "too much is impossible" routine AND has "one of those Players" in my most frequent group

Do not tell them impossible. Tell them its really really REALLY hard (otherwise why hasn`t anybody done it yet?).
In the unlikely case your player comes up with an unforeseeable increadibly well thought out borderline Cosmic Plan: let him succeed.
Otherwise, tell them how he is shut down (and how permanently).

Much less "But WHY??" and much more "OK, sucks....next time I`ll aim lower".

kyoryu
2017-01-10, 03:38 PM
If something is impossible, then rather than just say that, I prefer to tell players the requirements to make something possible, if that makes sense.

Forum Explorer
2017-01-10, 04:18 PM
There are two kinds of impossibility I think.

1. Stuff like, 'You can't eat the Moon". It's nonsensical and people accept that you can not consume an inedible object a million times larger then yourself.

2. And "They are invincible, you can't win". Which comes off more as a challenge.

For the latter, if I'm challenged on that (the whole BUT WHY??), I simply reply, "I've set things up such that I can't even imagine a way you'd be able to successfully kill them. Come up with something I haven't thought of and we'll talk about it."

kyoryu
2017-01-10, 04:33 PM
Even for "you can't eat the moon" -

"Well, for one, you can't get there and survive. Secondly, you can't digest that material, and where would it go when you excrete it? Thirdly, your ability to consume matter of any sort is about a couple of pounds a day, which is nowhere near enough to consume the moon before you actually died of old age."

While it's a ludicrous example, this is the kind of thing I mean by stating the requirements. In a fantasy setting, if someone really really really wanted to eat the moon, you've given them an insane path to accomplishing that task, which is usually better than just saying "no" flat out.

Instead of telling them "it's impossible", tell them *why* it's impossible.

Forum Explorer
2017-01-10, 05:33 PM
Even for "you can't eat the moon" -

"Well, for one, you can't get there and survive. Secondly, you can't digest that material, and where would it go when you excrete it? Thirdly, your ability to consume matter of any sort is about a couple of pounds a day, which is nowhere near enough to consume the moon before you actually died of old age."

While it's a ludicrous example, this is the kind of thing I mean by stating the requirements. In a fantasy setting, if someone really really really wanted to eat the moon, you've given them an insane path to accomplishing that task, which is usually better than just saying "no" flat out.

Instead of telling them "it's impossible", tell them *why* it's impossible.

Well maybe it's because the nonsensical ones have obvious reasons why it's impossible then. Most people don't need it spelled out to them on why it's impossible to eat the moon. But why should it be impossible to kill the God of Time when I can kill the God of Clocks? And that's where the problem comes in.

kyoryu
2017-01-10, 05:52 PM
Well maybe it's because the nonsensical ones have obvious reasons why it's impossible then. Most people don't need it spelled out to them on why it's impossible to eat the moon. But why should it be impossible to kill the God of Time when I can kill the God of Clocks? And that's where the problem comes in.

That's my point. It's using it as an example of what to do even in less obvious cases.

So why *is it* impossible to kill the God of Time? Or, to put it a different way, what would be required to kill the God of Time?

Forum Explorer
2017-01-10, 07:29 PM
That's my point. It's using it as an example of what to do even in less obvious cases.

So why *is it* impossible to kill the God of Time? Or, to put it a different way, what would be required to kill the God of Time?

To make it clear, I'm not disagreeing with you in any way.


If I wanted an invincible God of Time? I'd say it's because they can switch you with any you at any point in the time stream. So in order to kill them, you must have always been stronger then them. Even when you were a baby. Even right after you fought a BBEG. Because if you try and fight them, that's when the God of Time will choose to fight you.

veti
2017-01-10, 07:41 PM
It is totally possible to eat the moon, if your name is Galactus. Or if the moon is in fact a cheese wheel no bigger than a football. Or if you can change reality so that one of these conditions becomes true, even if it's not the case right now.

By all means tell players "There's no obvious way to do that". Or "That would generally be considered impossible". But when it comes to something like eating the moon, the only reasonable response is "and how are you going to do that?"

Because you can never rule out the possibility that they've thought of an answer that you haven't.

Knaight
2017-01-10, 08:02 PM
Consider if you had a player and they said 'I'm such a great optimizer, I can make a character that even the GM can't kill, see, look!'. Wouldn't that make you, as GM, become defensive or feel the need to prove them wrong? If you say 'look, I put this thing in the setting that you can't kill' you're basically calling out the player or trying to make a show of dominance over them. The natural instinctual reaction to that is for them to fight back.

Unless you're doing that within an inherently competitive system, this doesn't make a bunch of sense. One of these versions is putting forth the claim that the player has such rules mastery that they can out-optimize the GM despite the GM having a substantial advantage. The other one is acknowledging that the set of resources a GM has access to includes things outside of player access.

NichG
2017-01-10, 08:42 PM
If I wanted an invincible God of Time? I'd say it's because they can switch you with any you at any point in the time stream. So in order to kill them, you must have always been stronger then them. Even when you were a baby. Even right after you fought a BBEG. Because if you try and fight them, that's when the God of Time will choose to fight you.


To me, this doesn't read as anywhere near impossible. You're describing a person with a single powerful trick, but that's actually quite a vulnerable position.

For example, in a setting with Elder Evils, this would be (relatively speaking) trivial to beat just by bearing and raising a child for the purpose under the influence of one of the Elder Evils that blocks divine sense. The child only emerges when they are strong enough to survive the attacks of the god. Alternately, without requiring setting details to go your way, you get the God of Time to kill himself or make suboptimal decisions leading to him not using his time swap ability intelligently via psychological manipulation or corrupting the things he cares about. Or you trick him into fighting another god at the same power scale.

If it could kill itself or has to exert powers on its own behalf to avoid dying, it's not 'impossible' to kill.

This goes to the danger of DMs using words like 'impossible' to describe things, if what they really mean is 'I can't see how you could do it'.


Unless you're doing that within an inherently competitive system, this doesn't make a bunch of sense. One of these versions is putting forth the claim that the player has such rules mastery that they can out-optimize the GM despite the GM having a substantial advantage. The other one is acknowledging that the set of resources a GM has access to includes things outside of player access.

It's the social dynamics, not the system. If someone chooses to vocalize this kind of claim, it's a show of dominance. Emotionally, even if the other person can't really 'win', they're going to be primed to think to themselves 'how can I fight back?' rather than, say, 'how can I cooperate with this person so that we both have fun?'. So the system can be cooperative, but if players/GM behave in a way that suggests they're being competitive, then things can get hostile. It doesn't even matter what was really meant by it, it's the perceived intent.

That's not to say that the second a GM says 'it's impossible' everyone at the table will suddenly rebel and make Old Man Henderson or PunPun, but if you notice players having 'an aversion to something', often the way the GM handles things contributes as much to that as the thing itself.

Zale
2017-01-10, 08:55 PM
It's not so much impossibility as it is the lack of any statistics at all.

In my mind, the purpose of having game-rules is to allow the players to have power to interact with the setting.

Let's say I want to climb something.

In a freeform roleplay, I may or may not be able to climb things based on how persuasive I am and if the other players agree. If consensus can't be reached, the story fractures into bits as each person denies the reality of the other's actions.

In a game with rules from climbing, I just interact with climbing via the rules. In a D&D based game, I'd say, "I want to climb that."; the DM would tell me to roll, and if I rolled high enough then I would be successful. There's no real argument to be had here.

The reason that's important is because it states that my character has the capacities listed on my sheet. Those capacities are the only way my character can interact with the world with certainty.

I, as a player, can totally convince the DM to let me do things that my character can't actually do-

-but otherwise this is all I got.

By presenting a being without any statistics at all, you remove all of the ways my character has to interact with that being.

It's not just that they can't fight that being, they can't sneak away from them, or persuade them to do anything, or use magic to understand them- because the being doesn't interact with the game rules at all.

It turns the scene with the being into what's effectively a scripted cutscene. I, as a player, can try to do things to interact with the being, but my character can't really do anything with any mechanical weight.

To go back to the climbing example, it would be like if my character is a world-class mountaineer, but the DM introduces a mountain that's -by fiat- impossible to climb.

Tl;dr: It's kind of frustrating because it completely bypasses that the agreed upon rules that are the foundation of the game we are play.

It's alright to have things that only have specific ways to interact with them mechanically: You can't stab a blizzard to death, but that doesn't mean characters don't have ways of meaningfully interacting with what's going on. They can make use of items, or skills, or magic in a way that allows them to survive or otherwise deal with blizzard.

I'm perfectly fine with gods who are like phenomenon or events- things you have to avoid or endure rather than creatures you can fight.

Knaight
2017-01-10, 09:10 PM
It's the social dynamics, not the system. If someone chooses to vocalize this kind of claim, it's a show of dominance. Emotionally, even if the other person can't really 'win', they're going to be primed to think to themselves 'how can I fight back?' rather than, say, 'how can I cooperate with this person so that we both have fun?'. So the system can be cooperative, but if players/GM behave in a way that suggests they're being competitive, then things can get hostile. It doesn't even matter what was really meant by it, it's the perceived intent.

Some of these are still likely to be responded to with an "oh yeah?" while others are responded to with a "no [crap]". Outside a gaming scenario it's the difference between saying something like "I can outrun all of you" and "I can drive faster than any of you can run". If it's the first, people who are good runners might want to put it to the test. In the second, why bother?

Forum Explorer
2017-01-10, 09:24 PM
It is totally possible to eat the moon, if your name is Galactus. Or if the moon is in fact a cheese wheel no bigger than a football. Or if you can change reality so that one of these conditions becomes true, even if it's not the case right now.

By all means tell players "There's no obvious way to do that". Or "That would generally be considered impossible". But when it comes to something like eating the moon, the only reasonable response is "and how are you going to do that?"

Because you can never rule out the possibility that they've thought of an answer that you haven't.

Context matters when I make the statement. I'm not going to say it if turning the moon into a ball of cheese is possible. Or if they happen to be a planet eating demi-god.

And yes, that was even my stance on when I say that's impossible to my players.


To me, this doesn't read as anywhere near impossible. You're describing a person with a single powerful trick, but that's actually quite a vulnerable position.

For example, in a setting with Elder Evils, this would be (relatively speaking) trivial to beat just by bearing and raising a child for the purpose under the influence of one of the Elder Evils that blocks divine sense. The child only emerges when they are strong enough to survive the attacks of the god. Alternately, without requiring setting details to go your way, you get the God of Time to kill himself or make suboptimal decisions leading to him not using his time swap ability intelligently via psychological manipulation or corrupting the things he cares about. Or you trick him into fighting another god at the same power scale.

If it could kill itself or has to exert powers on its own behalf to avoid dying, it's not 'impossible' to kill.

This goes to the danger of DMs using words like 'impossible' to describe things, if what they really mean is 'I can't see how you could do it'.


Context matters. If it's a setting where things like Elder Evils are running around, or the Gods are able and willing to kill each other, then I won't say it's impossible in the first place. The Time God is a very simple and thus flawed example. Please do not get into a whole, 'well what if you tried this?' mind set. It's not a well fleshed out example, and I have no desire to run a hypothetical, 'I design an impossible challenge, and let's see if you can think of a way to beat it.'


But yes, that's what I flat out said above. If a player asks me why something is impossible, I literally tell them 'I can't see how you could do it.' If they come up with something to surprise me, that's great! But I will have thought it out before I say it's impossible and I don't use the word lightly.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-10, 11:27 PM
Part of it comes down to having a good reason for why it's impossible.

Part of it comes down to presenting alternatives so that players don't feel stonewalled.

In the setting I've been working on, the "old gods" are older than the current universe, and are effectively the "souls" of the universe. They're like self-aware forces of nature, or energy. And like energy or gravity or time, they can't be destroyed. However, like energy/mass, they can be captured, or maybe even changed into another form.

RazorChain
2017-01-10, 11:53 PM
It's not so much impossibility as it is the lack of any statistics at all.

In my mind, the purpose of having game-rules is to allow the players to have power to interact with the setting.

Let's say I want to climb something.

In a freeform roleplay, I may or may not be able to climb things based on how persuasive I am and if the other players agree. If consensus can't be reached, the story fractures into bits as each person denies the reality of the other's actions.

In a game with rules from climbing, I just interact with climbing via the rules. In a D&D based game, I'd say, "I want to climb that."; the DM would tell me to roll, and if I rolled high enough then I would be successful. There's no real argument to be had here.

The reason that's important is because it states that my character has the capacities listed on my sheet. Those capacities are the only way my character can interact with the world with certainty.

I, as a player, can totally convince the DM to let me do things that my character can't actually do-

-but otherwise this is all I got.

By presenting a being without any statistics at all, you remove all of the ways my character has to interact with that being.

It's not just that they can't fight that being, they can't sneak away from them, or persuade them to do anything, or use magic to understand them- because the being doesn't interact with the game rules at all.

It turns the scene with the being into what's effectively a scripted cutscene. I, as a player, can try to do things to interact with the being, but my character can't really do anything with any mechanical weight.

To go back to the climbing example, it would be like if my character is a world-class mountaineer, but the DM introduces a mountain that's -by fiat- impossible to climb.

Tl;dr: It's kind of frustrating because it completely bypasses that the agreed upon rules that are the foundation of the game we are play.

It's alright to have things that only have specific ways to interact with them mechanically: You can't stab a blizzard to death, but that doesn't mean characters don't have ways of meaningfully interacting with what's going on. They can make use of items, or skills, or magic in a way that allows them to survive or otherwise deal with blizzard.

I'm perfectly fine with gods who are like phenomenon or events- things you have to avoid or endure rather than creatures you can fight.


So what you are saying in my low powered, gritty realistic medieval fantasy I have to go give God some stats in case the PC's want to interact with him/her mechanically?

So if the PC's cant interact with something mechanically then they are robbed of agency? So if one PC wants to hump a tree I have to give the tree some stats and make up some rules? Else the tree can't be humped?

Yukitsu
2017-01-11, 12:22 AM
I think if you're doing a gritty realistic setting, finding God should be the first and most interesting puzzle which frankly, I think would make an interesting campaign pretext. It'd almost be like Don Quixote if written by a Russian.

RazorChain
2017-01-11, 01:00 AM
I think if you're doing a gritty realistic setting, finding God should be the first and most interesting puzzle which frankly, I think would make an interesting campaign pretext. It'd almost be like Don Quixote if written by a Russian.

I think that campaign would be something like this



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVj0ZTS4WF4

NichG
2017-01-11, 02:01 AM
So what you are saying in my low powered, gritty realistic medieval fantasy I have to go give God some stats in case the PC's want to interact with him/her mechanically?

So if the PC's cant interact with something mechanically then they are robbed of agency? So if one PC wants to hump a tree I have to give the tree some stats and make up some rules? Else the tree can't be humped?

He's saying that probably in that case, God shouldn't show up and start doing stuff to get in the PCs way.

Dragonexx
2017-01-11, 03:08 AM
In any roleplaying game, people like to make choices that matter. Throwing invincible, all-powerful NPCs in their way ****s on all of that. You might think it amusing, but to them it's just you waving your **** in their face. Non of their choices matter because nothing they can do will affect this person.

Note, I don't mind having powerful cosmic beings in a setting, but they have to stay in the far background.

GloatingSwine
2017-01-11, 03:48 AM
But in D&D your characters aren't just Kevin and Steve. They're Khe'veen the Wise and Steveworth the Bold. Their day job is to do the impossible. Where your Joe-average Kevin and Steve would be part of the masses running away from the goblins, bugbears, ogres and the dreaded Fanged Claw-Beast of Urx, Khe'veen and Steveworth strap on their backpacks, grab their magical staff and sword, look knowingly at each other and go "It's a living!" with a sarcastic shrug & a laugh track in the background and go towards those nasties.

Possibly while The Rembrandts plays you off.

D&D is a game about magical elven princesses riding unicorns shooting rainbows at tentacled poop-monsters.

D&D is a game where a halfling riding a dinosaur fights a werewolf on top of a magical train while an airship flies by for a broadside cannonade.

D&D is a game where death is a mere speedbump later in your career.

D&D is a game where these larger then life heroes bump head with even larger then life villains in over-the-top scenarios.

D&D flaunts the impossible constantly because D&D characters are impossible entities in themselves.


And in D&D your characters lose if they try and take on the Lady of Pain.

The Lady of Pain is exactly what the OP is talking about, unstatted, a "you lose" encounter if you anger her, you die instantly with no recourse to your character sheet if so much as her shadow falls on you, etc.

You can totally have those type of beings in D&D, but they have to be like the Lady of Pain, enigmatic and unfathomable in their motives and actions, not NPCs.

Zale
2017-01-11, 04:46 AM
So what you are saying in my low powered, gritty realistic medieval fantasy I have to go give God some stats in case the PC's want to interact with him/her mechanically?

So if the PC's cant interact with something mechanically then they are robbed of agency? So if one PC wants to hump a tree I have to give the tree some stats and make up some rules? Else the tree can't be humped?


He's saying that probably in that case, God shouldn't show up and start doing stuff to get in the PCs way.

Basically, what NichG said, but I'll elaborate:

I think things should have attributes or mechanics as it is relevant to the story and genre you are trying to present.

In the case of a gritty, realistic medieval fantasy, there's probably not going to be much in the way of magic or deific intervention; as such there's no point in supplying mechanics to interact with the divine.

If the gods function like in, for a D&D example, Eberron, where they're so distant that no one is sure if they're real or not, then there's no reason to give them game statistics because they're never going to show up and do anything.

I should probably elaborate on what I mean by 'mechanically interact' as well. When I say that I mean that players should be able to leverage their skills or capacities to have some impact on things that show up and impact them.

In some games, like Exalted or Mythender, this might mean beating up to gods and taking their stuff.

In others, it might mean being able to conduct rituals that appease or seal away ancient, angry gods.

In others it might just mean being able to talk to the gods and convincing, or tricking, or bribing them to leave you alone.


And in D&D your characters lose if they try and take on the Lady of Pain.

The Lady of Pain is exactly what the OP is talking about, unstatted, a "you lose" encounter if you anger her, you die instantly with no recourse to your character sheet if so much as her shadow falls on you, etc.

You can totally have those type of beings in D&D, but they have to be like the Lady of Pain, enigmatic and unfathomable in their motives and actions, not NPCs.

I actually like the Lady of Pain despite her being a statless entity because she exists to facilitate a particular story; because she's fairly consistent.

She exists entirely to explain how Sigil can exist; why there isn't constant fighting to claim it. It's so that you can have a place where beings of antithetical cosmic energies are forced to work out their differences with heated debate rather than bloody combat.

She's the anthropic principle of the entire city and setting.

And as long as you avoid the well known checklist of Things What Anger Her Serenity, then you won't have any problems with her.

A nice quote (http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-lady-of-pain.html):


Bluntly put, as far as a Planescape campaign's concerned, the Lady of Pain's little more than an icon that crystallizes the mood of the campaign setting. Player characters should never deal with her. She doesn't give out missions, she never grants powers to anyone, and they can't rob her temples because she hasn't got any. If she ever does make an appearance, it should be simply to reinforce the wonder and mystery of the whole place.

Players aren't supposed to interact with her all; unless they set the city on fire or try to do something that's on the list of Things That Are Known To Anger Her, then you should never have a problem.

She's there for ambiance. You're supposed to interact with her by not interacting with her at all; by appreciating the setting she makes possible.

oxybe
2017-01-11, 05:09 AM
And in D&D your characters lose if they try and take on the Lady of Pain.

The Lady of Pain is exactly what the OP is talking about, unstatted, a "you lose" encounter if you anger her, you die instantly with no recourse to your character sheet if so much as her shadow falls on you, etc.

You can totally have those type of beings in D&D, but they have to be like the Lady of Pain, enigmatic and unfathomable in their motives and actions, not NPCs.

I don't really care for Sigil as a setting/backdrop... But if you throw her in the path of the PCs you are directly invoking Checkov's Gun principal, which for me is infinitely more important then a setting's cannon (which as far as i'm concerned can be shot right out of the device it shares a name with): you've put a thing on the scene and drew attention to it, people will invariably want to interact with it or see it interacted with in a meaningful manner, if it doesn't you've wasted people's attention and time.

Unless it's satire or something of the sort, at which point it needs to be done well and those DMs are few and far between. I know I'm not one that can do it well in the best of times.

If you don't want people to interact with a thing or want to see the thing interacted with in any meaningful manner, you don't put it in the scenery.

If I were to run Sigil, one of two things would happen:

A) The player never run into the lady because I never mention her
B) If they do run into her, it's because I expect them to want to interact with her which means potentially besting her in some fashion because that's a much better story to be part of then...

C) LoP arrives, i narrate a bunch of stuff that the players likely won't care for since it doesn't affect their characters' lives and then leaves/smotes them because they were picking their nose with the wrong finger or refuses to kowtow the line as I shove them around with her actions that are negatively affecting them.

SpoonR
2017-01-11, 10:02 AM
Training. Especially in D&D (published adventures, but they're in storage right now), impossible frequently implies "going here/doing this would break the adventure."

Then there's the D&D tradition of killing gods and taking their stuff. See immortals rules (gold box I think), Raven Queen, the Forgotten Realms gods that are ascended mortals. It becomes why Harlequin is disliked in Shadowrun. "various NPCs" did "impossible thing", so why can't the PCs?

Personally, if I had a player like that, the immortal folks would never interact with the world. They always work through killable agents/avatars/etc because they are ineffable (unef?). Never interacting with the entity makes it much less likely a player would think of trying to slay that god.

Or if you want to run with it, one of Exalted's proverbs "Give the PCs a golden shovel, then sit back and watch them dig themselves into a hole." In this case; okay, you assembled the ten pieces of the artifact, did the crazy ritual in the volcano to summon and bind TIME for 5 rounds, and blew through ITS' defenses and killed IT in that time. Congratulations. As IT dies, IT falls slower and slower, and then everything stops. Everything is now frozen in time, except things from the Far Realm that are invading Mechanicsburg. If you kill the embodiment of the SUN, congratulations wiping out everyone who can't farm in the Underdark.

Jay R
2017-01-11, 11:04 AM
One reason for player pushback against the "impossible" comes from the fact that we don't believe it. In an original D&D convention tourney in 1976, with 6th level characters, there was a 134 hit die monster.

No, that is not a typo. The hydra had one hundred thirty four heads. The tournament organizers had set it as a trap for any group stupid enough to try to fight a 134-hd monster.

We killed it.

Winter_Wolf
2017-01-11, 11:22 AM
Well you know what they say, the line between bravery and stupidity is success.

Or maybe "they" don't say that.

Segev
2017-01-11, 11:27 AM
The Lady of Pain tends to be accepted, I think, because not only is she like a force of nature in her power, but in her inscrutability. She is not something that can be weaponized against you, and she doesn't take interest in the PCs in the manner of an entity they might feel a need to "best." She's like a sandstorm in the desert or an onrushing fire or flood: something to be navigated around and avoided.

A lot of the example "impossible to beat" gods in this thread are similarly "force of nature" types. Players tend to balk at this impossibility only when their anthropomorphic traits are played up over their "natural force" traits. Have them act more like human-ish NPCs than implacable and uncaring forces of nature, and players will perceive them more as characters (and thus things they should be able to interact with and influence, somehow) than as impersonal forces ("Why punch a blizzard?").

Red Fel
2017-01-11, 02:56 PM
I think the big problem isn't that you have True Immortals, but that you have True Immortals that PCs can point to and say, "That. That thing over there. I see that thing. I can touch that thing. I'mma kill it."

With sufficient force, you can destroy pretty much anything. Level a mountain. Obliterate a continent. Sunder a planet. Explode a star. But those things which aren't physical can't truly be destroyed. You can't kill gravity, or love, or time.

That's what your Elder Gods need to be. As soon as you have a physical being that can stand in front of a PC, you're inviting the conflict. While, yes, as has been mentioned, some games explicitly label certain NPCs as "off limits," or "you lose," the general rule is that if you can stand in front of it, you can kill it. That's why not only is the Lady of Pain not statted, but generally, PCs won't ever actually encounter her. Oh, they might feel her influence - mess around in Sigil and get Mazed - but they're probably never going to meet her face to face. So the whole "You can't kill her" thing becomes moot - she's less a person and more an intangible but omnipresent force.

That's how you need to treat your True Immortals - beings so transcendent that they are felt, but never encountered in person.

Then, if you have a PC who says, "I want to kill the god of time," you can say, "Go ahead." There's no person standing before him to kill, simply an intangible all-encompassing force. He can go seeking, travel to the heavens and hells, but he'll never find a person to kill. Then, if you want to go truly epic on him, you can give him an epilogue where he eventually dies of old age - and rather than him finding the god of time, time finds him.

The classics work, is what I'm saying.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-11, 03:30 PM
You can't kill gravity, or love, or time.

(Emphasis mine)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Civilization_VI_cover_art.jpg

Klara Meison
2017-01-11, 05:12 PM
Why are you telling them those gods can't be killed? Why are you even telling them they exist?

Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-11, 05:19 PM
Why are you telling them those gods can't be killed? Why are you even telling them they exist?

Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.

First, this isn't a narrative, it's an RPG.

Second, depth and atmosphere of setting are still important even in fiction -- it's a poor poor world indeed that limits details to directly advancing or detailing the plot.

E: Third, as pointed out below, if the game isn't a railroad or "come along for the story as told by the GM" game, the players need enough detail to decide what they're going to do, how they're going to handle challenges, etc, and to establish the context their characters come from.

PersonMan
2017-01-11, 05:45 PM
Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.

This is very much a playstyle/personal preference matter. Whether I'm playing in a premade setting or a homebrew one, I prefer if things are fleshed out more than absolutely necessary to go from start to finish. This puts a lot of unnecessary details into the narrative; sure, character A's chat with NPC F isn't going to be important in the long run, so in theory it's a violation of conservation of detail...but it's fun, even if one can only weakly justify it as a scene that allows character A to be fleshed out more or show a personality trait.

There are also medium-based differences. In a PbP, there's no such thing as 'wasting some of the valuable 2 hours we have to game on unnecessary details'; unless you go really deep into writing irrelevant stuff, you can write a lot more 'extra' stuff without a problem. In a game at a real-world table, you may have significant time constraints that lead you to want to cut out anything not important.

Jay R
2017-01-11, 05:46 PM
If I had a player who wanted to kill the god of time, I would point out that that there would be no more sessions afterward, since without time, there is no "afterward".

flond
2017-01-11, 06:22 PM
While obviously not true in all cases...I also think there's something of a matter of...fairness about this sometimes.

Like, if there's a mighty god that I can't probably kill, but in the struggle of god against god will probably die...that's, it may still be a problem, but it also might not depending on how its used.

If however, you anthropomorphize some forces of the universe AND because lets be honest, it is the rare setting which is entirely pleasant say "These people help make the world as screwed up as it is, and will never get comeuppance, from anyone, ever." that can rankle.

Knaight
2017-01-11, 07:26 PM
Why are you telling them those gods can't be killed? Why are you even telling them they exist?

Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.

Seeing as the "plot" is the sort of thing that has player input in all but the most railroad of games, this is more like the author having details that don't end up in the book than including irrelevant details in a published narrative. Authors having details not in a book happens all the time. Plus, campaigns tend to be long, and conservation of detail is one of those things that matters a lot more in short form.

Âmesang
2017-01-11, 08:07 PM
I find I actually like "impossibilities" 'cause I can totally see there being creatures and abilities that are so far beyond what characters are capable of that they're unlikely to ever reach it (though I suppose that's where "epic level" comes in). I mean I just don't see a party of adventures "causally" challenging Lord Ao, the Lady of Pain, the Serpent, or the Dark Powers of Ravenloft… not unless the whole purpose of the campaign is to pull a Vecna.

Actually that's why I would love to try and run the Age of Worms adventure path and integrate it with Return to the Ghost Tower of Inverness, Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, DUNGEON Magazine's Maure Castle, and the Oerth Journal add-on, Warlock's Walk—all of those adventures contain artifacts centered around rediscovering the "Power Magic" of the Suel Imperium, a possible variant of "epic spells," thus allowing such magic to be accessible… for a much larger, plot-based prerequisite than "ability to cast 9th-level spells, 24 ranks in Knowledge (arcana/nature/or religion), and 24 ranks in Spellcraft."

If you want that power you've really got to earn it. :smallamused:

Though speaking of the Lady of Pain I've also toyed with the idea of printing out actual mazes to have players complete in the off-chance they get on her bad side; I don't think that'd go over too well, but I want the punishment to be more than just "make an Intelligence check to see if you find your way out." I guess I like her and Lord Ao and the others because there's always a bigger fish… and they're the biggest fish—just because you have phenomenal cosmic powers or can sunder mountains with your rage doesn't mean there won't be someone around to take you down a peg if necessary. After all even evil characters (at least the relatively intelligence, wise, or charismatic ones capable of long-term planning) can behave themselves if the situation requires it.

(Of course just because something seems or even may be impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't try to overcome it anyway. That's why I liked Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods because even after becoming a "Super Saiyan God" Goku still didn't beat Lord Beerus… but it gave him a new goal to achieve.)


There are two kinds of impossibility I think.

1. Stuff like, 'You can't eat the Moon". It's nonsensical and people accept that you can not consume an inedible object a million times larger then yourself.

Even for "you can't eat the moon" -

"Well, for one, you can't get there and survive. Secondly, you can't digest that material, and where would it go when you excrete it? Thirdly, your ability to consume matter of any sort is about a couple of pounds a day, which is nowhere near enough to consume the moon before you actually died of old age."
Not with that attitude. :smalltongue:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.drunkduck.com/users/Renee%20Katz/comics/The_Nineteenth_Century_Industrialist/web/moon_is_cheese.png (http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_Nineteenth_Century_Industrialist/)
Though it does remind me of a problem I have with the 3rd Edition update to SPELLJAMMER® from DUNGEON Magazine #92/POLYHEDRON #151: you can't use greater teleport for interplanetary travel—despite having no limit on range—but you can use air walk or fly if you can make those spells last long enough or cast 'em enough… even though most planets are millions of miles away from each other. Oh, but gate and plane shift lets you go from planet-to-planet even though they don't work between two points on the same plane. Unless I missed something I think I'd house-rule that greater teleport can be used between planets within the same "crystal sphere," so you could go between Oerth and Borka within Greyspace, but could not go from Oerth to Toril since the latter is in Realmspace, a different "crystal sphere"/material plane altogether. Likewise, plane shift/gate would not allow for interplanetary travel between worlds within the same "sphere," but would be acceptable between different "spheres." Of course greater teleport still has a weight limit (even with portable holes), so if you want to transport tons of cargo you'd likely still need a spelljammer.

Jay R
2017-01-11, 09:53 PM
Why are you telling them those gods can't be killed? Why are you even telling them they exist?

Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.

You assume a single plot, with no possible deviations, which the DM already knows from beginning to end, and that can exist without knowledge of the history and land around those locations. I don't design my world that way.

In my world, there are lots of details in all directions, some of which are tied to potential plots the DM knows well, some of which are connected to potential storylines that might get written if the players show an interest, and some of which are simply the result of trying to create a world.

In my current game, there is a forest to the east I haven't graphed out yet, and won't, if they don't go east. I know it contains the Palace Under the Hill, a lost tribe of 8-foot tall dwarves, centaurs, and an old abandoned strip mine. I know a fair amount about the dwarves, a little about the palace, and nothing at all about the strip mine or the centaurs, except some of the the history that caused them to be there. I know exactly what the mountains around the strip mine and the dwarves is like, because they are patterned after a place I know in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

I have a carefully worked out set of mutually incompatible pantheons, complete with a few intentional inconsistencies and incompletions. That gives me enough to work with. The players will not be able to kill any of the gods. But except for praying for clerical spells, they will never get a chance to interact with them at all.

RazorChain
2017-01-11, 10:31 PM
Basically, what NichG said, but I'll elaborate:

I think things should have attributes or mechanics as it is relevant to the story and genre you are trying to present.

In the case of a gritty, realistic medieval fantasy, there's probably not going to be much in the way of magic or deific intervention; as such there's no point in supplying mechanics to interact with the divine.

If the gods function like in, for a D&D example, Eberron, where they're so distant that no one is sure if they're real or not, then there's no reason to give them game statistics because they're never going to show up and do anything.

I should probably elaborate on what I mean by 'mechanically interact' as well. When I say that I mean that players should be able to leverage their skills or capacities to have some impact on things that show up and impact them.

In some games, like Exalted or Mythender, this might mean beating up to gods and taking their stuff.

In others, it might mean being able to conduct rituals that appease or seal away ancient, angry gods.

In others it might just mean being able to talk to the gods and convincing, or tricking, or bribing them to leave you alone.



The problem with Roleplaying games are they aren't stories and you can't treat them as stories. A story is a by product of how the game evolves and often doesn't make a good narrative unless heavily edited.

But what is presented in RPG's is Setting. Just because something exists in the setting doesn't make it so that the PC's are able to kill it or even interact with it. Now some Rpg's focus on violence and therefore if something exists therefore the PC's must be able somehow to kill it. In Exalted you play reborn Godslayers and the celestial bureaucracy has a whole lot of gods to kill, so it's maybe not the best system to bring up about the absurdity of godslaying. Lot of systems are low powered and there PC's aren't lining up to kill gods...I mean when I was playing Call of Chtulhu I never tried to make a godslayer to kill the elder or outer gods, even though I knew of them.

There will always exist limitations and impossibilities within the realities of most settings...most players just don't get bothered about it.

NichG
2017-01-11, 11:15 PM
The problem with Roleplaying games are they aren't stories and you can't treat them as stories. A story is a by product of how the game evolves and often doesn't make a good narrative unless heavily edited.

But what is presented in RPG's is Setting. Just because something exists in the setting doesn't make it so that the PC's are able to kill it or even interact with it. Now some Rpg's focus on violence and therefore if something exists therefore the PC's must be able somehow to kill it. In Exalted you play reborn Godslayers and the celestial bureaucracy has a whole lot of gods to kill, so it's maybe not the best system to bring up about the absurdity of godslaying. Lot of systems are low powered and there PC's aren't lining up to kill gods...I mean when I was playing Call of Chtulhu I never tried to make a godslayer to kill the elder or outer gods, even though I knew of them.

There will always exist limitations and impossibilities within the realities of most settings...most players just don't get bothered about it.

Relative power levels aren't a limitation or impossibility, it's just a challenge. I can't personally punch through steel, but that doesn't mean 'putting a hole in this sheet of steel' is impossible for me - I can go to a steel mill and borrow their equipment, I can use a tool, etc. 60000 years ago it would have been impossible for humans, now it's relatively trivial, and its not the personal physical might of the individual humans which has changed - its knowledge and planning and assembled resources and the advance of technology and so on. It was impossible for a human, but not impossible for humans.

So when you say 'you can't personally walk up and punch out Cthulhu' that doesn't communicate 'Cthulhu is impossible for you to do anything about', it communicates 'it's time to be clever' or 'it's time to hatch a grand plan'. And you get stuff like Old Man Henderson as a result.

'Impossible' is for things which are nonsensical, non-interactable, or fundamentally inaccessible. When you use it for something less than that, it's just a challenge.

Segev
2017-01-12, 10:09 AM
Though speaking of the Lady of Pain I've also toyed with the idea of printing out actual mazes to have players complete in the off-chance they get on her bad side; I don't think that'd go over too well, but I want the punishment to be more than just "make an Intelligence check to see if you find your way out."

If I remember correctly, the Lady's Mazes are not the maze spell. They don't have "make an int check to escape" as how they're beaten. They are much more diabolical traps than that. Generally speaking, the only way out is not only extremely well-hidden, but is tailored both to the crime that got you Mazed in the first place and to your own proclivities and preferences such that you have to tacitly admit you were in the wrong in a fundamental way while also enduring something you find personally horrifically repugnant or have to give up something that is personally idyllic and the core of your heart's desire.

The SIMPLEST Maze might be an endless tavern floating on a sea of the most delicious wine, with tap-room after tap-room of exotic liquors. No non-alcoholic drink of any sort to be found. The man cast in here was drunkenly boasting of his sexual prowess and mentioned the Lady as one of his conquests.

The way out is to search the lacerating corals that grow ever thicker as one swims deeper in the ocean of wine, as the wine turns to ever-more-alcoholic vinegar, until you find the portal hidden in its depths. This portal's key is total sobriety.

Âmesang
2017-01-12, 10:28 AM
That would certainly make things a lot more interesting; though it makes me think I would have to make up such mazes well ahead of time. :smalleek:

Segev
2017-01-12, 11:00 AM
That would certainly make things a lot more interesting; though it makes me think I would have to make up such mazes well ahead of time. :smalleek:

You probably would, yeah. If you wanted to have them on hand for the party (which, really, are the only ones you'll need on-demand), I'd come up with a generic "exit condition" for each PC that plays on a personality trait or proclivity of the character. Something they'd be averse to or something they'd not want to give up that they'd have to.

Then have a few ideas for environments and such to entrap.

Mix and match environment to exit for custom Mazes relating the sin that got them Mazed to the character's personal weaknesses.

And maybe have one or two "exit conditions" for the whole party.

NichG
2017-01-12, 11:11 AM
I'd tend to avoid Mazing PCs or even considering that as something likely to happen during a campaign. If I'm running Planescape, I reserve the Lady strictly for things which threaten Sigil as a whole, and when that happens I want to portray very decisive actions. Mazing is 'this person will be needed later', flaying is 'this person will not be needed later', but neither is something I'd use in a way that feels personal or like there's an entity with a shred of compassion using it to teach a lesson to someone or communicate with someone. That invites too much of a view of the Lady as an entity rather than an impersonal force.

I did run a PS campaign where the party figured out a good surmise as to what the Lady probably was, but even then they didn't interact with her at all to get to that point - it was purely a player-driven leap of logic based on things totally unrelated to Sigil which the party found out (they found an entity that was imprisoned by belief, figured out why, and connected the dots).

Flickerdart
2017-01-12, 12:06 PM
This might be a framing problem. Saying 'elder god' conveys the message of 'god, but elderer than normal." It's a mere quantitative change, and thus insufficient to express what you seem to want to express.

You've got an elder god of time? There is no of. You've got Time, the elder god. You want to kill him? How would you even do that? He is not merely in charge of Time, he is Time - everything exists within him, his only physical form is the history of everything that has been, is, and will be. The concept of "death" simply does not apply to an elder god. The reason the PCs can't kill it is not because they are not strong enough.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-12, 12:29 PM
You want to kill him? How would you even do that?

I refer back to my Civilization 6 pic.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-12, 12:48 PM
I refer back to my Civilization 6 pic.

Drop a giant stone sphere on him?

kyoryu
2017-01-12, 12:49 PM
Drop a giant stone sphere on him?

Install Civilization on his computer.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-12, 12:51 PM
Install Civilization on his computer.

Well, that would devour Time...

Flickerdart
2017-01-12, 02:03 PM
Install Civilization on his computer.
You know what happens when and elder god plays Civilization? Here's a hint: you're living in it.

Red Fel
2017-01-12, 02:22 PM
You know what happens when and elder god plays Civilization? Here's a hint: you're living in it.

And Shift...5...6...

There we go.

halfeye
2017-01-12, 04:01 PM
Why are you telling them those gods can't be killed? Why are you even telling them they exist?

Conservation of detail. Unless it's relevant to the plot, it shouldn't be in the narrative.
Chekhov was writing about a medium (plays with actors) with a maximum timespan of about four hours. For a novel, or another medium which allows more elaboration, that limitation doesn't apply.

Flickerdart
2017-01-12, 04:03 PM
PCs typically have short attention spans, and will latch on the first thing you say.

DM: "The world of Fantasyplace is ruled over by the elder gods, who raised the three continents and endowed the seven kings with their right to rule. The first of-"
PCs: "Hang on, did he say elder gods? Let's murder 'em."

Yukitsu
2017-01-12, 04:10 PM
PCs typically have short attention spans, and will latch on the first thing you say.


That and most DMs are amateur writers at best, so a lot of the descriptive text isn't as interesting as a real novel anyway.

Talakeal
2017-01-12, 05:45 PM
So when you say 'you can't personally walk up and punch out Cthulhu' that doesn't communicate 'Cthulhu is impossible for you to do anything about', it communicates 'it's time to be clever' or 'it's time to hatch a grand plan'. And you get stuff like Old Man Henderson as a result.

Old Man Henderson is actually kind of the opposite case, he only succeeded because the GM decided to take away Hastur's invincibility through GM FIAT.

vasilidor
2017-01-12, 09:03 PM
It's been asked if a nuke can take out Cthulu. Answer: No. It just makes him pissed off and radioactive.



I don't know why people keep making cthulu out as an unbeatable monster. In the original story he was in he got taken out by a boat to the face.*opens complete work of H.P. Lovecraft, turns to call of cthulu* Johansen rams his ship into cthulu, who pops like a rotten egg (but smelling much worse) and sinks back into the sea. while it does say that cthulu pulls himself back together as he sinks, it makes it quite clear that its going to be awhile before he can even try again. While it may be beyond mortal means to completely kill cthulu, if you hit him hard enough (which may be accomplished with a late 19th century steamboat) he goes back to nap time. A modern warship, or nuke would do much the same.

Talakeal
2017-01-12, 09:29 PM
I don't know why people keep making cthulu out as an unbeatable monster. In the original story he was in he got taken out by a boat to the face.*opens complete work of H.P. Lovecraft, turns to call of cthulu* Johansen rams his ship into cthulu, who pops like a rotten egg (but smelling much worse) and sinks back into the sea. while it does say that cthulu pulls himself back together as he sinks, it makes it quite clear that its going to be awhile before he can even try again. While it may be beyond mortal means to completely kill cthulu, if you hit him hard enough (which may be accomplished with a late 19th century steamboat) he goes back to nap time. A modern warship, or nuke would do much the same.


My reading of the text is that Cthulhu simply turned incorporeal and allowed the ship to go right through him and then when the island sank again (for reasons unconnected to the ship) he went back to sleep with it.

"But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

....

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye."

Mr Beer
2017-01-12, 09:42 PM
I don't know why people keep making cthulu out as an unbeatable monster. In the original story he was in he got taken out by a boat to the face.*opens complete work of H.P. Lovecraft, turns to call of cthulu* Johansen rams his ship into cthulu, who pops like a rotten egg (but smelling much worse) and sinks back into the sea. while it does say that cthulu pulls himself back together as he sinks, it makes it quite clear that its going to be awhile before he can even try again. While it may be beyond mortal means to completely kill cthulu, if you hit him hard enough (which may be accomplished with a late 19th century steamboat) he goes back to nap time. A modern warship, or nuke would do much the same.

I agree with this. Cthulhu is not unbeatable at all. It's probably unkillable but as written would be easily defeatable with modern, man-portable weaponry.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-12, 09:59 PM
I don't know why people keep making cthulu out as an unbeatable monster. In the original story he was in he got taken out by a boat to the face.*opens complete work of H.P. Lovecraft, turns to call of cthulu* Johansen rams his ship into cthulu, who pops like a rotten egg (but smelling much worse) and sinks back into the sea. while it does say that cthulu pulls himself back together as he sinks, it makes it quite clear that its going to be awhile before he can even try again. While it may be beyond mortal means to completely kill cthulu, if you hit him hard enough (which may be accomplished with a late 19th century steamboat) he goes back to nap time. A modern warship, or nuke would do much the same.

Cthulhu is the weakest of Lovecraft's horrors though. Its only the prime example because all the other ones are even worse, so if they did something, Cthulhu would like small potatoes in comparison:
-Azathoth is Cthulhu's great-great-grandfather, and rules all of time and space.
-little lower down is Nyarlathotep, Azathoth's son who is a shapeshifter, pretty active and has many cults on Earth, is pretty cruel and evil, delights in spreading madness, and can use propaganda and deception just like humanity. Mostly because he is the Outer God's envoy.
-Yog-Sothoth is inseparable from time and space itself sees all knows all, and if you learn too much about him you go insane or court disaster

Hard to beat things that make you more insane and less able to fight them as you know more about them. especially when they are inextricably tied to all of reality as a facet of their natural existence for all eternity.

daniel_ream
2017-01-12, 11:04 PM
As a former classical studies student, I come at this from a different perspective. Ancient Greek (and to some extent Norse) myth is chock full of deities that are immortal and unkillable, anthropomorphizations of abstract concepts, who interfere in the lives of mortals all the time, and have the sensibilities of drunken adolescents. And it's awesome.

I find all of the talk of dominance and railroading awfully strange, to be honest. Sure, I saw that kind of thing when we were 14 and everyone was jockeying for alpha position at the table because we were insecure teenagers, but by the time we all graduated university we'd grown up enough to realize that creating conflict with the GM over irrelevant bits of setting lore was just wasting everyone's time.

For people who want playable mechanics for this sort of thing but still want unkillable gods, the now-all-but-forgotten The Primal Order[1] is the gold standard.


[1] Which I can't link to because low post count; GIYF

Dragonexx
2017-01-12, 11:12 PM
Yeah, but your forgetting that those aren't RPGs. What you have to remember is that what works in single author fiction doesn't necessarily work in a shared narrative. They're two different kinds of mediums.

A more apt comparison would be video games (and I feel that TTRPGs could take more inspiration from them) considering that they're both interactive media. If there was a boss or quest or level that was unbeatable no matter what people would get pissed.

NichG
2017-01-12, 11:23 PM
As a former classical studies student, I come at this from a different perspective. Ancient Greek (and to some extent Norse) myth is chock full of deities that are immortal and unkillable, anthropomorphizations of abstract concepts, who interfere in the lives of mortals all the time, and have the sensibilities of drunken adolescents. And it's awesome.

I find all of the talk of dominance and railroading awfully strange, to be honest. Sure, I saw that kind of thing when we were 14 and everyone was jockeying for alpha position at the table because we were insecure teenagers, but by the time we all graduated university we'd grown up enough to realize that creating conflict with the GM over irrelevant bits of setting lore was just wasting everyone's time.


Adults do it too, they're just more sophisticated (and/or passive-aggressive) about it, and are generally better at rationalizing and philosophizing to cover that emotional reaction. Rather than throwing a tantrum, they might just choose a character goal that is intended as a snub of what the GM is attempting to do with their unkillable, interfering, divines. Or they might just disconnect from the game and not take anything seriously ('yeah, yeah, sure, Apollo can do whatever, I'm ignoring him now'). Or they might come up with very indirect arguments about why they are unhappy with the game in general.

Mechalich
2017-01-12, 11:44 PM
Unkillable gods, or in fact unkillable anything isn't a problem. The problem is having unkillable and nigh-all-powerful entities that are capable of interacting with the setting in the same manner as the PCs.

Gods that exist and are aspects of the world's religions and are out there somewhere existing in a plane where they cannot directly influence the setting as just part of the lore. They function outside the playspace and the storyspace that the player characters - and generally NPCs - occupy. The Lady of Pain (even though she's not technically a god) is like this. She's a setting aspect and the list of things she can do is very limited and is mostly a set of capabilities to prevent complete destruction of the setting. She's a fiat mechanism that allows Planescape to exist, because if you get rid of her Sigil becomes a strategically decisive battlefield between all major outsider factions by the millions, and PC below epic level are totally irrelevant to all possible outcomes.

Gods that occupy the same playspace as the characters are problematic, because then why are you bothering? All problems are being addressed at the god's level of power, not your level of power and everything you can accomplish can be undone with lightning speed by beings who are orders of magnitude more powerful than you but take roughly the same type of actions. This is functionally the same problem that FR has with the Chosen of Mystra and certain other epic level casters.

oxybe
2017-01-13, 01:20 AM
I would actually argue that Greek gods potentially aren't immortal.

We know that they can be maimed and mutilated. Uranus got castrated by Chronus, after all.

However what we know about the greek gods are largely interpretations from a mortal's point of view.

We don't have Achilles's rendition of the Iliad or Odysseus's version of the Odyssey: we have Homer's.

We don't have Heracles' "HOW I PUNCHED A LION AND OTHER AWESOME ****". We have Peisander's.

I would argue that the Greek gods, were largely ageless entities with greater then mortal resistance, abilities and strength due to their supernatural nature. But they could be hurt and killed, though it would need special material, like the sickle Gaia gave to Chronus made of adamant.

So it would behoove them to give shows of strength and "prove" their immortal nature to the mortals so they wouldn't go about and try to stab Zeus for boinking everything in a rage. The greek gods were also largely "human". We see a lot about human nature and ourselves in them. They had human vices and wants and interacted with the populace, though often in disguise.

But like I said PCs by their nature, narrative or mechanic, aren't normal folks. I would argue(something I like doing) that they're closer to Achilles in scope and nature then Homer IMO. Your average greek farmer could not withstand the things a fighter could and I doubt you'd fear about your local senate member calling down earthquakes or shooting gouts of fire from their hands like a wizard could.

Like a Greek hero, they can come from mundane birth, but by their nature they aren't mundane.

A man of mundane birth, angered at the hubris of a god for impregnating his wife, kills her in his rage. He then goes down to tartarus and tears off an adamant bar from the gates of hell, fashions himself a rough spear by the fires of a volcano and hunts down the god, impaling them in the middle of a late night tryst, killing the disguised god and it's lover. The next morning, his rage subsiding, he realizes what he's done and tries to take his own life but the blood of the god has seeped into his own skin, rendering him invulnerable to his own sword. Seeing his makeshift spear lying in the corpses, he then takes his own life.

That sort of stuff makes for a better story then : A man of mundane birth, angered at the hubris of a god for impregnating his wife, kills her in his rage. He then hunts down the disguised god, attempts to stab him in the back while in the middle of a late night tryst. Lolwut goes the god, as he kills the man. ~Fin

Again: just because the gods can be killed doesn't mean it's an easy task. The story I wrote up still requires the guy to go down to the land of the dead, rip off a piece of supernatural metal from the very gates of hell, fashions himself a spear through abnormal means and hunts down a shapeshifting god in disguise, killing him in a moment of passion when his guard is down.

That's like... at least 5 adventures worth of material right there. Just from "I wanna kill that god".

Then again, what we know about the castration comes from the mortal Hesiod so YMMV. :smalltongue:

JoeJ
2017-01-13, 01:23 AM
Mutants & Masterminds uses the term "Power Level X" to describe NPCs that don't have stats, and are basically plot devices. There are two main types of PLX characters: mischievous imps (Mr. Mxyzptlk would be one example) and personifications of armageddon (Trigon the Terrible). There always has to be a way to defeat a PLX character, but that way is not through direct combat.

Used sparingly, this kind of opponent can force the PCs to think outside the box when they realize their primary abilities and tactics aren't working. Used too often (and the threshold here is pretty low) they tend to frustrate and annoy the players.

daniel_ream
2017-01-13, 02:26 AM
Adults do it too, they're just more sophisticated (and/or passive-aggressive) about it.

It's still immature behaviour, though, and adults that engage in it are behaving childishly. It's no different than that one guy who holds out to see what movie everyone else agrees to see on movie night, then declares he won't see that movie simply to prang up the consensus. Being a Jerk is Being a Jerk. No one has to put up with someone Being a Jerk.

(EDIT: I used a slightly stronger word than "Jerk", there, but the forum didn't like it so I've changed it so as not to break any rules.


Gods that occupy the same playspace as the characters are problematic, because then why are you bothering? All problems are being addressed at the god's level of power.

This is only true if the gods have the same motivations that mortals (well, the PCs) do. To use the Greek myths as an example, the gods meddle all the time in mortal affairs, they just do so in ways that are meaningful to them and to hell with what mortals think is important. I don't see any real difference between "a tidal wave caused by an undersea earthquake bears down on the PCs home city" and "angered by the king's hubris, Poseidon sinks Peiseiopolis beneath the waves".

If you're using the Greek gods as uber-powerful GMPCs, you're really, really doing it wrong.


However what we know about the greek gods are largely interpretations from a mortal's point of view. We don't have Achilles's rendition of the Iliad or Odysseus's version of the Odyssey: we have Homer's.

Yes, but if we're going to reject what's clearly stated in our extant textual sources in favour of making up whatever we want, then there's not much common ground for discussion. We may as well just play Scarred Lands, then; hey, Homer never says Chryses wasn't wearing +2 plate and carrying a Mace of Disruption. (C5, LN, don't ya know)


I would argue that the Greek gods [...] could be hurt and killed, though it would need special material, like the sickle Gaia gave to Chronus made of adamant.

Sure, if you want to. But you're just handwaving away the question of how immortal gods can interact entertainingly with PCs in a fantasy game by declaring that they aren't immortal.


Like a Greek hero, they can come from mundane birth, but by their nature they aren't mundane.

Point of order: by definition, a Greek hero is half-god.


That sort of stuff makes for a better story then : A man of mundane birth, angered at the hubris of a god for impregnating his wife, kills her in his rage. He then hunts down the disguised god, attempts to stab him in the back while in the middle of a late night tryst. Lolwut goes the god, as he kills the man.

Except this story is much more in keeping with Greek myth. It's a morality lesson about mortal hubris (point of order: by definition, gods cannot commit hubris, only mortals) and the self-destructive nature of vengeance (if you want to get all deconstructionist about it, you could say it's a myth that serves to reinforce the monarchical power structure by discouraging plebes from rising up against their rulers, even when transgressed against, but I digress). You merely need to add that the god in question seduced the man's wife because of the man's own disrespect for the gods and you've got a nice little fable.

NichG
2017-01-13, 04:56 AM
It's still immature behaviour, though, and adults that engage in it are behaving childishly. It's no different than that one guy who holds out to see what movie everyone else agrees to see on movie night, then declares he won't see that movie simply to prang up the consensus. Being a Jerk is Being a Jerk. No one has to put up with someone Being a Jerk.

(EDIT: I used a slightly stronger word than "Jerk", there, but the forum didn't like it so I've changed it so as not to break any rules.


You say that as if that means you don't have to take that behavior into account, or that it absolves you of actually thinking about how the things you say to others makes them feel. That is also immature. If there's a problem and you have the solution, just because someone else could solve it but chooses not to because of their own issues doesn't mean it's good for you to not solve it on your end.

Mechalich
2017-01-13, 07:26 AM
This is only true if the gods have the same motivations that mortals (well, the PCs) do. To use the Greek myths as an example, the gods meddle all the time in mortal affairs, they just do so in ways that are meaningful to them and to hell with what mortals think is important. I don't see any real difference between "a tidal wave caused by an undersea earthquake bears down on the PCs home city" and "angered by the king's hubris, Poseidon sinks Peiseiopolis beneath the waves".

If you're using the Greek gods as uber-powerful GMPCs, you're really, really doing it wrong.


If you run an adventure about a tidal wave about to swamp a city there's two possibilities. Either A. the PCs have the potential to stop it and the adventure is about them setting whatever complex mechanism is necessary into motion to do that and overcoming obstacles in their way, with of course the potential for failure. or B. the PCs have no power to stop this event and the adventure is about evacuation and dealing with a crisis and so on.

If you run option B and you don't run it by your players first, you're being a very lousy GM engaging in some serious railroading.

If the active agent behind the earthquake is a god and you run option A, then gods are part of the playspace because the PCs have the ability to challenge and thwart their plans and this works even if such capabilities are only available to PCs at the highest point on the functional power scale (20th level, etc.). An example of an game that allows for this is Exalted, in which the god of the sea can absolutely get angry and try to swamp an island and the PCs can totally go and find that god or goddess and beat them till they scream for mercy. If the agent behind the earthquake is a god and you run option B, then gods aren't part of the playspace and you're robbing the players of agency and you've declared that nothing they ever do will matter since it only takes divine whim to undo it.

This is a general problem that occurs any time you have functional agents with plot-device powers who can actively interfere in the setting. The Forgotten Realms has this problem - all the big players are epic level wizards/dragons/phaerrims (some of whom are explicitly chosen by deities) who can totally erase anything a party accomplishes with ease (especially if epic spellcasting comes into play). That's why so many FR campaigns houserule Elminster into the late Elminster. Planescape also has this problem - victory by force of arms is impossible in any significant struggle because all the major players have infinity outsiders to throw at any problem susceptible to hammering - and wrote into the setting an entirely new paradigm of philosophical struggle in order to compensate.

Playing as a half-god hero in a setting inspired by Greek mythology is great - if that sort of thing appeals to you I encourage you to try and kludge one of the Exalted editions into playability. Playing as an ordinary mortal in a setting inspired by Greek mythology is not so hot.

Knaight
2017-01-13, 11:35 AM
Yeah, but your forgetting that those aren't RPGs. What you have to remember is that what works in single author fiction doesn't necessarily work in a shared narrative. They're two different kinds of mediums.

Two different kinds of mediums with tons of overlap when it comes to the part about establishing setting, making believable characters, so on and so forth. Absent specific reasons why something wouldn't transfer well the whole "they're different mediums" argument is unconvincing.


If you run an adventure about a tidal wave about to swamp a city there's two possibilities. Either A. the PCs have the potential to stop it and the adventure is about them setting whatever complex mechanism is necessary into motion to do that and overcoming obstacles in their way, with of course the potential for failure. or B. the PCs have no power to stop this event and the adventure is about evacuation and dealing with a crisis and so on.

If you run option B and you don't run it by your players first, you're being a very lousy GM engaging in some serious railroading.
Yeah, no. It's one thing if you run option B when the PCs are people who should have measures to do real damage control (high end magic that controls weather, lots of mid-range magic to physically reinforce the coastline with lots and lots of walls, a massive spaceship with gravity controls, a city wide stasis field, mass teleportation that can move the entire city then move it back, whatever), and then you still run option B where they are all doomed to fail for no good reason. If the characters, and more importantly the setting doesn't have these things? Then a tidal wave is implicitly a situation where things in its path are doomed, and that's fine. It's a reasonable setting element, and there's still multiple ways to react to it. Helping with an evacuation is one, leaving early to get help is one, setting up temporary infrastructure for the refugees is one, and then there's the whole range of options where nothing heroic is done. That's a lot of options for an alleged railroad.

Parallels could be drawn with this and gods that are simultaneously invulnerable and highly interventionist*. There are lots of ways to interact with them, starting with making a point of staying low profile and not attracting attention - this is a core setting point in War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus, where the gods are invulnerable but also have a tendency to be fickle and short sighted, and as such nobody actually wants them showing up. There are a lot of interesting things that come out of that, and it makes the game better. There's constant risk management, where there are decisions made about doing something exceptional and highly effective that gets the attention of the gods or trying something a little less flashy and a little less effective that doesn't metaphorically blow your cover. It's a particular case, and it only really works because of a lot of the broader setting thematics, but it's also hardly the only functional implementation of interventionist invulnerable gods. Natural disaster like effects are another, where the gods do big things and you work around them.

With that said - all of this has heavy implications on game feel. If a game is generally about big heroes saving big things, both the natural disaster option B and the unkillable interventionist gods are out of place. That's a likely source of a lot of the hostility towards these ideas: D&D is the primary game in the hobby**, and the last few editions of D&D have generally been tailored to big heroes saving big things. Specific things D&D does are treated as default, and these would conflict with that. If the game is instead about a group of people dealing with more personal and quite possibly localized concerns in the shadow of a bigger world, these can both fit. I've played games in the shadow of the unkillable gods, and they've been more fun because of it. The only reason I haven't run them is because I generally find gods boring as characters, and leaving them as amorphous concepts in the distance that may or may not even exist makes the setting religious institutions (which I actually find interesting) more relevant.

*Not that anyone has actually suggested this - generally the gods suggested have been more in the vein of distant figures related to cosmological workings than actual characters. Still, Cthulhu kind of fits here, and I do have an example that fits this.

**I'm including Pathfinder here.

Segev
2017-01-13, 11:44 AM
It's worth noting that whether the tidal wave is A or B should be less the GM's overt decision, and more a question of what abilities the PCs have. The tidal wave DOES have stats, even if not "monster stats" in game-mechanical terms. IT has a height, a speed, a width and depth, and thus a volume of water (and mass/weight of water). It has a trajectory.

If PCs have abilities to affect significant quantities of the tidal wave's water, to change its path, to alter the terrain in such a way as to redirect, block, or channel it, then they can try and use them and the GM should adjudicate based on their best understanding of the interaction of game mechanics and simulated physics he can muster.

If they don't have abilities or don't think they do, then the party should try to do what it can for the "evacuate and rescue" scenario.

The trouble with "impossible to beat gods" is that they don't even have that much in the way of interactability. And so if they show up, being able to act without being acted upon at all, no matter what abilities the PCs might have, it gets frustrating. If it's a matter of PCs simply not being powerful enough, that's one thing. The frustration comes in when there's nothing the PCs can do at all.

If the tidal wave which they can't stop or redirect also actively throws out effects to make their efforts to evacuate equally futile, then it stops being a fun encounter, too.

Red Fel
2017-01-13, 12:23 PM
It's worth noting that whether the tidal wave is A or B should be less the GM's overt decision, and more a question of what abilities the PCs have. The tidal wave DOES have stats, even if not "monster stats" in game-mechanical terms. IT has a height, a speed, a width and depth, and thus a volume of water (and mass/weight of water). It has a trajectory.

If PCs have abilities to affect significant quantities of the tidal wave's water, to change its path, to alter the terrain in such a way as to redirect, block, or channel it, then they can try and use them and the GM should adjudicate based on their best understanding of the interaction of game mechanics and simulated physics he can muster.

If they don't have abilities or don't think they do, then the party should try to do what it can for the "evacuate and rescue" scenario.

The trouble with "impossible to beat gods" is that they don't even have that much in the way of interactability. And so if they show up, being able to act without being acted upon at all, no matter what abilities the PCs might have, it gets frustrating. If it's a matter of PCs simply not being powerful enough, that's one thing. The frustration comes in when there's nothing the PCs can do at all.

If the tidal wave which they can't stop or redirect also actively throws out effects to make their efforts to evacuate equally futile, then it stops being a fun encounter, too.

This. Think of "unkillable gods" as more like forces of nature - like a storm or tidal wave or earthquake - and it becomes more palatable to have them as unkillable, because there are still means of dealing with them.

Consider Marvel's Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. Early on, he was essentially presented as unkillable; the Fantastic Four had to defeat him by coming up with convincing reasons for him to leave, rather than by beating him with a fight. Later, this was changed to "killable, but it would be an incredibly bad idea," so the same logic applied. In either event, they had to persuade him to leave; either they blackmailed him with a dangerous object, or offered him a more desirable target, or tricked him into thinking they could stop him, or made him swear a binding oath to pass them by.

If you absolutely must make a truly immortal being physically present, that's how you present them. As a being with a tangible motive and objective, sufficiently quantifiable and comprehensible that they can be deterred, deviated, or dissuaded. Let your PCs be creative in coming up with ways to deal with them. But much like you can't kill a tidal wave or earthquake, you can't kill a being like this - you can either deviate their course, or get out of the way.

Knaight
2017-01-13, 01:08 PM
It's worth noting that whether the tidal wave is A or B should be less the GM's overt decision, and more a question of what abilities the PCs have. The tidal wave DOES have stats, even if not "monster stats" in game-mechanical terms. IT has a height, a speed, a width and depth, and thus a volume of water (and mass/weight of water). It has a trajectory.

Absolutely. Like I said, if you get a case B when there's player abilities that should push it into A, that's pretty dubious. There are a lot of games where it's going to be B though, starting with anything that's either straight historical, modern or in the borderline-historical-fiction fantasy subgenre. In that case, including a tidal wave at all means placing a case B, and by my reading that was what was being objected to - not just placing one that should be case A but isn't because all the things that should work don't for some reason.

Segev
2017-01-13, 01:17 PM
Absolutely. Like I said, if you get a case B when there's player abilities that should push it into A, that's pretty dubious. There are a lot of games where it's going to be B though, starting with anything that's either straight historical, modern or in the borderline-historical-fiction fantasy subgenre. In that case, including a tidal wave at all means placing a case B, and by my reading that was what was being objected to - not just placing one that should be case A but isn't because all the things that should work don't for some reason.

The objection tends to be based on perception, I think. "There is a tidal wave coming; what do you do?" is not telling the players, "You can't stop the tidal wave." Even if that happens to be true, it's just kind-of implicit in the PCs' abilities and what a tidal wave IS. The issue is that, when it's not a tidal wave, but "the god of time," it starts to feel different. There's a PERSON there. Why can't we punch him? Reason with him? Threaten him? Bargain with him? Plead with him?

If the untouchable god isn't presented as a person, but as an impersonal force, a lot of this goes away.

I think a significant part of it is when the tidal wave starts telling the PCs, "Do what I want or I swamp your village."

JoeJ
2017-01-13, 01:24 PM
I think the real problem is telling the players they can only do X. If instead you tell them they can do anything except Y they'll probably be much more willing to go along with it. So maybe the PCs can't kill the god of time, but they still have a chance to persuade, bribe, bluff, or somehow trick him into giving them what they want.

A.A.King
2017-01-13, 01:50 PM
As a former classical studies student, I come at this from a different perspective. Ancient Greek (and to some extent Norse) myth is chock full of deities that are immortal and unkillable, anthropomorphizations of abstract concepts, who interfere in the lives of mortals all the time, and have the sensibilities of drunken adolescents. And it's awesome.

I find all of the talk of dominance and railroading awfully strange, to be honest. Sure, I saw that kind of thing when we were 14 and everyone was jockeying for alpha position at the table because we were insecure teenagers, but by the time we all graduated university we'd grown up enough to realize that creating conflict with the GM over irrelevant bits of setting lore was just wasting everyone's time.

The Greek Gods are pretty much a prime example of doing "It's Impossible" badly in a RPG. They are great Gods for stories sure, but you can't rhyme or reason with them. If Zeus wants you, then there is no number high enough for you to role and nothing you can say to make him not want you. Interacting with Zeus is like playing one of those bad old video games, were a yes or no choice would be repeated over and over and over again until FINALLY you give in and click on the other option.

And when Zeus or Poseidon is railroading your game it's not fun to play anymore. Not because you aren't in "the alpha position" but because your choices and your actions become very irrelevant to the story. All the character of Odysseus wants to do after having played a long campaign already is to go home, he has max rank in Profession (Sailor), an incredibily high Wisdom stat and keeps rolling natural 20s, but is he allowed to go? No. Why? Because Poseidon said so, that's why. And there is no appeasing Poseidon either, no social interaction that will make him change his mind, no heroic quest that will make Poseidon forgive Odysseus. Poseidon hates the character of Odysseus and there is nothing the player can do about it. In fact, when he finally is allowed to go home that isn't because the player did something smart, no he was stuck on an island for up to 7 years (depending on which player tells the story), it is because another NPC God fixed it. Wow, great game guys. And when he gets home why is not recognised? Did Odysseus max out his disguise skill? No, the NPC God fixed it for him. How does Odysseus defeat the suitors, does the player come up with a cunning plan? No, his NPC wife from his backstory comes up with the plan which uses a very convenient deus ex machina that apparently only Odysseus can use. Yes, it's a good story but it doesn't make you feel like you really were the Smart Greek Hero you wanted to play because ultimately your decisions did not affect the outcome of the story.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-13, 02:14 PM
The Greek Gods are pretty much a prime example of doing "It's Impossible" badly in a RPG. They are great Gods for stories sure, but you can't rhyme or reason with them. If Zeus wants you, then there is no number high enough for you to role and nothing you can say to make him not want you. Interacting with Zeus is like playing one of those bad old video games, were a yes or no choice would be repeated over and over and over again until FINALLY you give in and click on the other option.

And when Zeus or Poseidon is railroading your game it's not fun to play anymore. Not because you aren't in "the alpha position" but because your choices and your actions become very irrelevant to the story. All the character of Odysseus wants to do after having played a long campaign already is to go home, he has max rank in Profession (Sailor), an incredibily high Wisdom stat and keeps rolling natural 20s, but is he allowed to go? No. Why? Because Poseidon said so, that's why. And there is no appeasing Poseidon either, no social interaction that will make him change his mind, no heroic quest that will make Poseidon forgive Odysseus. Poseidon hates the character of Odysseus and there is nothing the player can do about it. In fact, when he finally is allowed to go home that isn't because the player did something smart, no he was stuck on an island for up to 7 years (depending on which player tells the story), it is because another NPC God fixed it. Wow, great game guys. And when he gets home why is not recognised? Did Odysseus max out his disguise skill? No, the NPC God fixed it for him. How does Odysseus defeat the suitors, does the player come up with a cunning plan? No, his NPC wife from his backstory comes up with the plan which uses a very convenient deus ex machina that apparently only Odysseus can use. Yes, it's a good story but it doesn't make you feel like you really were the Smart Greek Hero you wanted to play because ultimately your decisions did not affect the outcome of the story.

Funny how that story turns out to have so much in common with a game run by a heavy-handed GM.

A classic example of "works as fiction in a certain genre and culture, absolutely a hard fail when used as the structure of an RPG campaign".

RPGs are not fictional works, they're something different that shares elements and concerns with fictional works.

Segev
2017-01-13, 06:16 PM
To be fair, Greek gods can be played well as antagonists who are stand-ins for forces of nature, or as implacable (but not quite omniscient) pursuers. But played poorly, yes, they're "the T-Rex that just happens to bar your way" whenever you try to get off the rails.

vasilidor
2017-01-13, 06:51 PM
I honestly do not get why some people like railroading, nor do i get why some people like having unbeatable forces in the game that cause "X" to happen no matter what you do.
*by unbeatable I mean things you cant get away from as well, because sometimes escape is victory itself.

Cluedrew
2017-01-13, 07:00 PM
Besides Darth Ultron (who has an unusually broad definition of railroading) I don't know anyone who actually supports railroading. Still I think the good type of impossible is not forcing X to happen, but making it so anything but X can happen.

"The BBEG will defeat you." is not interesting, "You cannot defeat the BBEG in combat." can be very interesting as the partly looks for alternate methods to get around the villains strength, or maybe even manages to fight them to a draw in some situation to buy time.

vasilidor
2017-01-13, 07:34 PM
I have played in multiple games where beating something in combat was not a possibility, or at least not direct combat. I also have a 50% success rate on dropping houses on BBEGs that cant be beat in such a manner (have only got to try it twice, in separate campaigns). sometimes it can be fun to have a game revolve around beating the monster, or god-thing; others it can be frustrating. all depending on the DM. in one game I played we quested to complete an artifact to fight the monster and that was a fun thing with lotsa combat and exploration and fact finding. in another with almost the exact same premise the game died because the DM did not want us to win at all (or so it seemed, had an aversion to characters solving problems with class abilities and in game skills). I think anything you put up in the characters path as an opponent needs to be some how beatable, even if the entire campaign is based around finding the way.

RazorChain
2017-01-13, 10:09 PM
I think it's a huge difference where the PC's want to beat something in the setting or beat something that belongs to a plot.

This of course varies wildly with power level of the game....If the player has a goal of beating a god and he's playing the Hulk then he just has to go pick a fight with Loki. If the player is playing an ex mercenary in a realistic medieval setting then this becomes and impossibility, just like having a child with rotten cheese, eating the moon, explode earth, conquer the entire galaxy, drink the whole ocean, fly with a tiny propellor on your hat etc.

daniel_ream
2017-01-14, 02:29 AM
And when Zeus or Poseidon is railroading your game it's not fun to play anymore. Not because you aren't in "the alpha position" but because your choices and your actions become very irrelevant to the story. All the character of Odysseus wants to do[...]

You're conflating what the character wants to do with what the player wants to do. Odysseus may want to go home after a long war away from his bride, but what Odysseus' player wants to do is an episodic island-hopping campaign of wild and fantastic adventures, which will wrap up with him getting home when the players get kind of bored with island-of-the-week and cap it off with a mundane (dramatic tonal opposition, don't know) return home adventure where he beats up his wife's suitors.

All the stuff you're describing is just the framing device for the campaign, and is no more railroading than "you all meet in a tavern" is.

Yukitsu
2017-01-14, 02:39 AM
To be fair, Odysseus was also the character that could have just followed the railroad and killed a sheep, but instead he cruised around the Aegean with his middle finger hanging out the side window blowing a raspberry at Poseidan the entire time.

NichG
2017-01-14, 04:28 AM
You're conflating what the character wants to do with what the player wants to do. Odysseus may want to go home after a long war away from his bride, but what Odysseus' player wants to do is an episodic island-hopping campaign of wild and fantastic adventures, which will wrap up with him getting home when the players get kind of bored with island-of-the-week and cap it off with a mundane (dramatic tonal opposition, don't know) return home adventure where he beats up his wife's suitors.

All the stuff you're describing is just the framing device for the campaign, and is no more railroading than "you all meet in a tavern" is.

If the DM is running this and Odysseus' player says 'okay, I'd like to figure out how to kill Poseidon' that may be an indication that they're kind of bored and want to go home.

A.A.King
2017-01-14, 07:56 AM
You're conflating what the character wants to do with what the player wants to do. Odysseus may want to go home after a long war away from his bride, but what Odysseus' player wants to do is an episodic island-hopping campaign of wild and fantastic adventures, which will wrap up with him getting home when the players get kind of bored with island-of-the-week and cap it off with a mundane (dramatic tonal opposition, don't know) return home adventure where he beats up his wife's suitors.

All the stuff you're describing is just the framing device for the campaign, and is no more railroading than "you all meet in a tavern" is.

The way I see it, the campaign started with the Trojan War and when the player thought it ended the GM was like: "No, POSEIDON B****!".

But even when we consider the Odyssee an independant campaign, and say that the GM and the player of Odysseus decided together on the plot of "Poseidon keeps me away from home" than Poseidon is still poorly handed because the character of Odysseus doesn't solve the problem. If a campaign starts with problem I as a player want to be ablw to fix it; if not directly by my characters hand than atleast by actively finding and personally convincing the someone who does. Instead you are left with a character who has no choice in where to go at the beginning and never solves the reason why he can't. And then I'm not even adressing the not-quite-a-god divine nymph Calypso who traps the character of Odysseus without giving him a choice (he didn't even have a chance to not encouter) and then he himself doesn't get to escape either a different God has to help.

If a god is your active enemy the player shoud be able to beat it; if not by killing (which I can understand) then by persuassion of by out-smarting. God Forces you to do X with NO chance to prevent ot stop X until other God fixes X for you is poor game design.

Jay R
2017-01-14, 12:58 PM
FIRST, decide what gods in your world represent.

If they are merely anthropomorphic simplifications of powers of nature far beyond any mortal's ability to contemplate, then no, of course the PCs can't really affect them.

If they are entities not limited to their bodies, like demons, then the PCs might be able to take all their hit points and banish them back to Olympus/Asgard/Shangri-La/Cori Celesti/Takama-ga-hara/ Hundred Acre Wood.

If they are merely extremely powerful beings fully describable by their stats, then it should be possible to kill them.

But the word "god" is ambiguous. Asking if they can be killed is liking asking how much a dog is likely to weigh, when you haven't determined if he is a Pekingese or a Great Dane.


Decide what they are in your universe, and only then can you begin to answer the question.

Cluedrew
2017-01-14, 01:49 PM
I feel the need to point out that although ... probably most of the Greek epics would make terrible campaign premises none of them are supposed to be. Odysseus might not be a lot of fun to play as, but does that matter when no one was ever supposed to play a game as Odysseus trying to go home?

Saying that it is bad game design is almost nonsensical when they are not games. I say almost because yes, they would be bad game design, but it is not really what they were going for. Not as far as I know.

To Jay R: The Hundred Acre Woods? Well that puts some children stories in a very different light.

JoeJ
2017-01-14, 02:16 PM
You also need to take into account prior expectations based on what the campaign has been like so far. If everything they've met has been a level-appropriate encounter, players will (rightfully) expect to be able to defeat whatever you throw at them. OTOH, if they're used to having to decide quickly whether to fight or negotiate/hide/run because they know they can't expect to defeat everybody, then they probably won't be as upset at meeting an unkillable being.

veti
2017-01-14, 05:07 PM
Funny how that story turns out to have so much in common with a game run by a heavy-handed GM.

A classic example of "works as fiction in a certain genre and culture, absolutely a hard fail when used as the structure of an RPG campaign".

RPGs are not fictional works, they're something different that shares elements and concerns with fictional works.

Seen as an RPG, Greek mythology is pretty much the archetype of railroading. "Futilely struggling against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy" is one of its most recurrent themes.

Norse mythology, not so much. "Ingenuity" and "defying superior power" will get you much further in Midgard than in Hellas.

Red Fel
2017-01-14, 10:58 PM
Seen as an RPG, Greek mythology is pretty much the archetype of railroading. "Futilely struggling against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy" is one of its most recurrent themes.

Norse mythology, not so much. "Ingenuity" and "defying superior power" will get you much further in Midgard than in Hellas.

I'm not so sure. One of the central themes of the Norse corpus is the fact that their fates - all of them, right down to the squirrel - are determined in advance. That's a big reason for things like Valhalla and all that.

Furthermore, "ingenuity" and "defying superior power" are Loki's thing. They're basically why he's hated - he's the nerd who hangs out with a bunch of jocks who mock and tease him, right up until they do something stupid and need him to bail them out. Which he does, and then they all drink and celebrate, and go back to mocking him.

Right up until they get thoroughly cheesed off, chain him up underground, and torture him for a few eons, until he breaks out and leads a war to make them all pay. All of which is foretold, because the Norse pantheon doesn't even bother to futilely struggle against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy.

RazorChain
2017-01-14, 11:48 PM
I'm not so sure. One of the central themes of the Norse corpus is the fact that their fates - all of them, right down to the squirrel - are determined in advance. That's a big reason for things like Valhalla and all that.

Furthermore, "ingenuity" and "defying superior power" are Loki's thing. They're basically why he's hated - he's the nerd who hangs out with a bunch of jocks who mock and tease him, right up until they do something stupid and need him to bail them out. Which he does, and then they all drink and celebrate, and go back to mocking him.

Right up until they get thoroughly cheesed off, chain him up underground, and torture him for a few eons, until he breaks out and leads a war to make them all pay. All of which is foretold, because the Norse pantheon doesn't even bother to futilely struggle against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy.

I really think you are forgetting Loki's penchant for trouble...it is usually not the Æsir who do somthing stupid but Loki who makes promises that he can't fulfill or just something idiotic of colossal proportions, like cutting off Sif's hair while she slept (Sif is Thor's wife). In Þrymskviða it is Heimdallur who suggests that Thor disguises himself as Freyja not Loki. It is Týr that offers his hand to bind Fenris. Of course in comparison to Thor then Loki is crafty but calling the other Æsir jocks is grossly stereotyping them.

Loki is hated because he brings about the death of Baldur....and when all things in the world cried about Baldur's death and he should have been released from Hel then it was Loki in the disguise of a Jötunn woman who refused to shed a tear for Baldur so he didn't get released

Not to forget that Loki is father to Hel, Jörmundgandr (The midgard serpent), and the Fenris Wolf. The Fenris wolf is fated to kill Odin, Jörmundgandr and Thor will kill each other and Hel will sail her boat Naglfari (made of the nails of dead men) to attack Ásgarð during Ragnarök.

So no Loki isn't a nerdy smart guy, he's a treacherous trickster and a envious troublemaker.

Zale
2017-01-15, 03:28 AM
Oh, wow, tons of great posts!


The problem with Roleplaying games are they aren't stories and you can't treat them as stories. A story is a by product of how the game evolves and often doesn't make a good narrative unless heavily edited.

But what is presented in RPG's is Setting. Just because something exists in the setting doesn't make it so that the PC's are able to kill it or even interact with it. Now some Rpg's focus on violence and therefore if something exists therefore the PC's must be able somehow to kill it. In Exalted you play reborn Godslayers and the celestial bureaucracy has a whole lot of gods to kill, so it's maybe not the best system to bring up about the absurdity of godslaying. Lot of systems are low powered and there PC's aren't lining up to kill gods...I mean when I was playing Call of Chtulhu I never tried to make a godslayer to kill the elder or outer gods, even though I knew of them.

There will always exist limitations and impossibilities within the realities of most settings...most players just don't get bothered about it.


I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, to be honest. I presented several options; combat was not a central feature of all of them.

You don't have to be able to kill the gods for players to be able to interact with them.

I would elaborate but I've already done that in earlier posts.


As a former classical studies student, I come at this from a different perspective. Ancient Greek (and to some extent Norse) myth is chock full of deities that are immortal and unkillable, anthropomorphizations of abstract concepts, who interfere in the lives of mortals all the time, and have the sensibilities of drunken adolescents. And it's awesome.

I find all of the talk of dominance and railroading awfully strange, to be honest. Sure, I saw that kind of thing when we were 14 and everyone was jockeying for alpha position at the table because we were insecure teenagers, but by the time we all graduated university we'd grown up enough to realize that creating conflict with the GM over irrelevant bits of setting lore was just wasting everyone's time.

For people who want playable mechanics for this sort of thing but still want unkillable gods, the now-all-but-forgotten The Primal Order[1] is the gold standard.


[1] Which I can't link to because low post count; GIYF

Oh, yes, you're unlikely to kill a Greek God, but mortals can -and did- wound them, or beat them, or trick them. Diomedes wounded Ares once such that the god retreated to mount Olympus. There was also a time when Heracles hit Hades with an arrow.

The gods can certainly be hurt, even if they can't be killed. And that can be enough to make them leave you be.

Not to mention there are a couple of times when the gods totally got outmatched by people. Half of the tellings of the Arachne story end with her actually beating Athena in a contest of skill; there's a few times when people actually manage to pull one over on the gods. Sisyphus managed it two or three times, even trapping Thanatos for a while.

What I'm getting at is that even if you can't kill a Greek-style god, that doesn't mean you can't interact with them in some way. Even if it's just blatant bribery. Give the Earthshaker enough wine and maybe he'll relent and let you go home to your wife.

As a side note, the Norse gods are not the best example of immortal. They all die. It's set in stone.


It's still immature behaviour, though, and adults that engage in it are behaving childishly. It's no different than that one guy who holds out to see what movie everyone else agrees to see on movie night, then declares he won't see that movie simply to prang up the consensus. Being a Jerk is Being a Jerk. No one has to put up with someone Being a Jerk.

(EDIT: I used a slightly stronger word than "Jerk", there, but the forum didn't like it so I've changed it so as not to break any rules.



This is only true if the gods have the same motivations that mortals (well, the PCs) do. To use the Greek myths as an example, the gods meddle all the time in mortal affairs, they just do so in ways that are meaningful to them and to hell with what mortals think is important. I don't see any real difference between "a tidal wave caused by an undersea earthquake bears down on the PCs home city" and "angered by the king's hubris, Poseidon sinks Peiseiopolis beneath the waves".


In one case, it's an impersonal force that functions without any purpose or malice. If the waves just happen because of a deterministic process of nature, then getting angry at them is like yelling at your clock for telling you what time it is.

However, if there's a mind behind it, then it's something that happened because someone decided it should.

It's the difference between your friend dying in a tragic accident; your friend dying in a tragic ''accident'' that someone deliberately caused.



It's worth noting that whether the tidal wave is A or B should be less the GM's overt decision, and more a question of what abilities the PCs have. The tidal wave DOES have stats, even if not "monster stats" in game-mechanical terms. IT has a height, a speed, a width and depth, and thus a volume of water (and mass/weight of water). It has a trajectory.

If PCs have abilities to affect significant quantities of the tidal wave's water, to change its path, to alter the terrain in such a way as to redirect, block, or channel it, then they can try and use them and the GM should adjudicate based on their best understanding of the interaction of game mechanics and simulated physics he can muster.

If they don't have abilities or don't think they do, then the party should try to do what it can for the "evacuate and rescue" scenario.

The trouble with "impossible to beat gods" is that they don't even have that much in the way of interactability. And so if they show up, being able to act without being acted upon at all, no matter what abilities the PCs might have, it gets frustrating. If it's a matter of PCs simply not being powerful enough, that's one thing. The frustration comes in when there's nothing the PCs can do at all.

If the tidal wave which they can't stop or redirect also actively throws out effects to make their efforts to evacuate equally futile, then it stops being a fun encounter, too.

This is exactly what I was trying to convey with my first post. Not all method of interaction work on different things. You wouldn't try to use diplomacy on the ocean, nor would you try to use your sailing prowess to solve an ancient riddle. Different problems mandate different solutions.



Besides Darth Ultron (who has an unusually broad definition of railroading) I don't know anyone who actually supports railroading. Still I think the good type of impossible is not forcing X to happen, but making it so anything but X can happen.

"The BBEG will defeat you." is not interesting, "You cannot defeat the BBEG in combat." can be very interesting as the partly looks for alternate methods to get around the villains strength, or maybe even manages to fight them to a draw in some situation to buy time.

This can work in some, but not all, games. In D&D derived games, combat is the central focus of the system. Everything else is for the most part an afterthought. In such a game, having someone be immune to the most detailed and relevant part of the system is incredibly frustrating. It means anyone focused on what is supposedly the central conceit of the game just has to sit and wait for the encounter to end, unable to meaningfully affect anything.


Seen as an RPG, Greek mythology is pretty much the archetype of railroading. "Futilely struggling against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy" is one of its most recurrent themes.

Norse mythology, not so much. "Ingenuity" and "defying superior power" will get you much further in Midgard than in Hellas.


I'm not so sure. One of the central themes of the Norse corpus is the fact that their fates - all of them, right down to the squirrel - are determined in advance. That's a big reason for things like Valhalla and all that.

Furthermore, "ingenuity" and "defying superior power" are Loki's thing. They're basically why he's hated - he's the nerd who hangs out with a bunch of jocks who mock and tease him, right up until they do something stupid and need him to bail them out. Which he does, and then they all drink and celebrate, and go back to mocking him.

Right up until they get thoroughly cheesed off, chain him up underground, and torture him for a few eons, until he breaks out and leads a war to make them all pay. All of which is foretold, because the Norse pantheon doesn't even bother to futilely struggle against fate/destiny/the power of prophecy.

While Red Fel hit the hammer on the head abut the stone certainty of fate in Norse mythos, I thought I'd expand with a non-god example. The epic of Arrow-Odd is saga written by an Icelander in the 13th century. It's about a man who was told by a Völva, a sort of seer, that he would be killed by his horse.

And she was completely right, in the end.

I had a fun time listening to a spoken rendition of it from the Myths and Legends podcast. It was an interesting generational story.

As a side note, Loki isn't quite so clear cut. Half of the problems he helps solve are directly his fault. He's kind of a spiteful jerk sometimes.

Loki is like fire. Nice to have around sometimes, super useful at times, but if not carefully watched he'll totally burn your house down.

And Odin isn't a dumb jock. He's a very smart jock with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and power. He's almost as bad as Loki at completely pointless antagonism and doing things that are not socially acceptable.

It's why they're blood-brothers!

Jay R
2017-01-15, 12:04 PM
To Jay R: The Hundred Acre Woods? Well that puts some children stories in a very different light.

Yes, well, I was trying to emphasize my point that you have to decide what the gods really are before you can answer questions about them.


"The BBEG will defeat you." is not interesting, "You cannot defeat the BBEG in combat." can be very interesting as the partly looks for alternate methods to get around the villains strength, or maybe even manages to fight them to a draw in some situation to buy time.

It's still not a good idea. Arachne successfully defeated Athena in a weaving contest.

So she was turned into a spider.

digiman619
2017-01-15, 05:03 PM
It's still not a good idea. Arachne successfully defeated Athena in a weaving contest.

So she was turned into a spider.

This is why I'd rather deal with the Aesir than one of the gods of Olympus; Asgarians have motivation, they act in a (more or less) reasonable manner. You could make a deal with one of them and (generally) expect them to hold up to their end. The Olympians (ESPECIALLY in the Greek Stories) were both fickle and petty; they were less aspects of nature and more bullies that forced prayer out of mortals.

Besides, you have a pretty good shot of getting to Valhalla and can generally expect to have a good time there, as opposed to the Underworld, where you can expect customized tortures unless you were one of the great heroes (and unless you were a demigod and/or one of the gods' pet projects, you didn't count).

Talakeal
2017-01-15, 07:04 PM
This is why I'd rather deal with the Aesir than one of the gods of Olympus; Asgarians have motivation, they act in a (more or less) reasonable manner. You could make a deal with one of them and (generally) expect them to hold up to their end. The Olympians (ESPECIALLY in the Greek Stories) were both fickle and petty; they were less aspects of nature and more bullies that forced prayer out of mortals.

Besides, you have a pretty good shot of getting to Valhalla and can generally expect to have a good time there, as opposed to the Underworld, where you can expect customized tortures unless you were one of the great heroes (and unless you were a demigod and/or one of the gods' pet projects, you didn't count).

There's a short story called Sorrow Acre that has a scene where a Scandinavian returns home after having been schooled in England. In England he learned about the various Greek myths and he is telling them to one of his Scandinavian friends. When he brings up the same point you just did his friend concludes that it is the presence of the Jotuns that keep the Norse gods honest. The Greek gods defeated the Titans long ago and locked them securely in Tartarus, while the Norse Gods still do battle with their giants.

Essentially, if you don't have an obvious outside enemy to fight against you will eventually find a way to turn friends into enemies; either by becoming corrupt with power, becoming paranoid and thinking your friends to be enemies, or simply inventing enemies and tilting at windmills.

daniel_ream
2017-01-15, 09:29 PM
Arachne successfully defeated Athena in a weaving contest. So she was turned into a spider.

No.

Arachne was turned into a spider because she bragged that she was better at weaving than Athene. That's why in some of the transcriptions she wins and some of the transcriptions she loses. It's irrelevant who wins. Arachne gets punished for her hubris.

That's why I keep saying that if you play the gods like uber-powerful GMPCs, you're doing it wrong. The Greek gods were capricious, but they weren't random. In the vast majority of the myths if someone gets punished by a god it's because they did something they knew damned well was likely to tick that god off.

It's no different than having speed limits on the highways in a modern urban RPG. If you decide that your PC is going to drive at 30 over, you don't get to whine when the state troopers pull you over. If you're playing a hero of Hellas, you don't get to complain if you get turned into a giant anus because you stood atop a hill and shouted "I could totally kick Ares' butt!"

Jay R
2017-01-16, 08:08 AM
No.

Arachne was turned into a spider because she bragged that she was better at weaving than Athene. That's why in some of the transcriptions she wins and some of the transcriptions she loses. It's irrelevant who wins. Arachne gets punished for her hubris.

Thank you for making my point so much better than I did. Wanting to defeat the gods is bad news.

Flickerdart
2017-01-16, 09:29 AM
If you're playing a hero of Hellas, you don't get to complain if you get turned into a giant anus because you stood atop a hill and shouted "I could totally kick Ares' butt!"
This is now my favourite sentence.

Zale
2017-01-16, 10:15 AM
No.

Arachne was turned into a spider because she bragged that she was better at weaving than Athene. That's why in some of the transcriptions she wins and some of the transcriptions she loses. It's irrelevant who wins. Arachne gets punished for her hubris.

That's why I keep saying that if you play the gods like uber-powerful GMPCs, you're doing it wrong. The Greek gods were capricious, but they weren't random. In the vast majority of the myths if someone gets punished by a god it's because they did something they knew damned well was likely to tick that god off.

It's no different than having speed limits on the highways in a modern urban RPG. If you decide that your PC is going to drive at 30 over, you don't get to whine when the state troopers pull you over. If you're playing a hero of Hellas, you don't get to complain if you get turned into a giant anus because you stood atop a hill and shouted "I could totally kick Ares' butt!"

As I understand it: the reason it's hubris to try and challenge the Greek Gods is because they've got a cosmic mandate to rule. They are the correct beings to be in charge; as such, threatening their authority is immoral by default.

This is true in the Greek mythos, but not necessarily universally true.

In some games, there's nothing saying that the gods are supposed to be unquestionable. I mean, beyond the obvious Exalted, even older editions of D&D have adventures focused towards killing evil gods.

Saying something like, "Sure we could kill Lloth because she's an objectively horrible being who causes nothing but suffering, but that wouldn't be right."

Which sounds.. strange?

(This is of course setting aside the fact that most of the Greek gods are capricous jerks who ruin lives for selfish reasons and, besides like two of them. If my players were to go, "Hey, Zale, these guys are complete jerks and horrible people, why aren't we trying to stop them," then I wouldn't exactly be able to tell them anything that isn't, "Because the gods will do horrible things to you for threatening their authority.")

Thank you for making my point so much better than I did. Wanting to defeat the gods is bad news.

I can understand this being a statement that's true for some games, but I can't see that being universally applicable.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-16, 10:21 AM
In the setting I'm (kinda) working on right now, the current deities were once human, but undertook a long set of tasks and schemes to eventually achieve apotheosis, so that they could defeat and imprison the elder gods.

And then they did their damnedest to pull the ladder up behind them.

hifidelity2
2017-01-16, 10:34 AM
There are two basic groups of deities in my setting. Regular gods have character sheets, and under very specific conditions, they could be killed... but it's not easy.

Then there are Elder Gods... Elder Gods are true immortals; I intentionally leave them unstatted, because they are not meant to be killable. They never were.

In my experience, players do not like being told that something is impossible.

Some players, you tell them "this thing cannot be killed", and the response you get is "watch me".

The results are... predictable and sometimes funny... and sometimes kinda sad.
I like having different classes of deity in my systems

However as a rule of thumb the more powerful the deity the less they interact with the mundane world (think a human being concerned with an ant in a field)

BUT while the party can’t kill an elder god they can thwart them in so far as it’s a minor god that is using the Elder Gods power so in reality they are thwarting the minor god

Beleriphon
2017-01-16, 11:12 AM
I'm of two minds on this one. At least as far as deities in D&D settings go. One is Eberron where finding and killing Onatar is impossible, because Onatar may not actually exist as a physical being, and if it does that being is on a plane that is so far removed from the material world that Onatar as well be impossible to kill. Forgotten Realms on the other hand, I can roll up and punch Cyric in the face if I'm a high enough level. They deities in Forgotten Realms aren't impossible to kill, just very, very difficult.

Jay R
2017-01-16, 03:53 PM
I can understand this being a statement that's true for some games, but I can't see that being universally applicable.

Agreed. I'm the one who said, "FIRST, decide what gods in your world represent."

daniel_ream
2017-01-16, 04:37 PM
As I understand it: the reason it's hubris to try and challenge the Greek Gods is because they've got a cosmic mandate to rule. They are the correct beings to be in charge; as such, threatening their authority is immoral by default.

Not really. That's the Divine Right of Kings concept bleeding backwards in history. It's hubris to disrespect the power of the gods because they will mess you up if you don't. Ancient greek society was fairly into the whole "might makes right" thing and no one is more mighty than the gods.


[...]adventures focused towards killing evil gods. Saying something like, "Sure we could kill Lloth because she's an objectively horrible being who causes nothing but suffering, but that wouldn't be right."

With some notable exceptions, most ancient pantheons don't have "evil" gods. The Greek pantheon certainly doesn't.


(This is of course setting aside the fact that most of the Greek gods are capricous jerks who ruin lives for selfish reasons)

What people tend to forget is that looking at the Greek gods through modern eyes is a mistake. All those tales of hubris and divine nemesis are moral fables intended to instruct proper behaviour for ancient Greeks. Those morals may look odd to us 3000 years on, but the Greek gods generally enforce the moral codes of contemporary Greek society; they're not as capricious as it seems.

NichG
2017-01-16, 06:34 PM
Seems like it modernizes pretty easily to a lesson of 'if you publically embarrass your boss, whether its right or not you still might get fired'.

I suppose the ancient version is more like 'if you're the captive of a warlord and challenge him to a game of stones and win, he can always still kill you anyhow and tell everyone he won'

veti
2017-01-16, 08:05 PM
Thank you for making my point so much better than I did. Wanting to defeat the gods is bad news.

That depends on what you mean by "defeat".

"Wanting to weave better than Athena" - okay, no sin in that.

"Bragging that you can weave better than Athena" - liable to attract attention.

"Refusing to thank Athena or any of the other gods for your gift of divine weaving, and instead openly jeering at Athena when she suggests, quite mildly, that it might be better if you did" - hello, welcome to your web.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-16, 09:06 PM
On the other hand, there's Medusa, who was transformed into the petrifyingly hideous monster by Athena for the "crime" of being raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple... and who according to the Romans, "rightly deserved that punishment".

RazorChain
2017-01-16, 09:20 PM
On the other hand, there's Medusa, who was transformed into the petrifyingly hideous monster by Athena for the "crime" of being raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple... and who according to the Romans, "rightly deserved that punishment".

Well now we're moving from Greek mythology to Roman mythology....because this is according to Ovid and you should say that Minerva changed her into monster :)



From Ovid's Metamorphoses

Beyond all others she
was famed for beauty, and the envious hope
of many suitors. Words would fail to tell
the glory of her hair, most wonderful
of all her charms—A friend declared to me
he saw its lovely splendour. Fame declares
the Sovereign of the Sea attained her love
in chaste Minerva's temple. While enraged
she turned her head away and held her shield
before her eyes. To punish that great crime
minerva changed the Gorgon's splendid hair
to serpents horrible. And now to strike
her foes with fear, she wears upon her breast
those awful vipers—creatures of her rage.

Cluedrew
2017-01-16, 09:22 PM
I think we can accept that the Greek gods are not exactly great role models by our modern standards. I'm not even sure if they were supposed to be role models back then or explanations as to why life was so unfair.

The Fury
2017-01-17, 04:46 PM
There's also the kind of "impossible" that existed in the SUE files. Where the players were told that something wasn't possible, were told why it wasn't and developed some kind of clever solution or workaround. Then the players were told why their solution doesn't work either-- middle school-level chemistry, modeling a tesseract or whatever is also impossible. The aversion to that kind of "impossible" is pretty understandable.

Godslaying is a weird topic for me. My more DM-baiting, trollish side gets it to a certain extent, though I think the kinds of players that try it are more about proving that they're better/smarter than the DM or whoever statted up that god in the first place. Though I wonder about what kind of campaign that sort of thing happens in-- I mean, is killing a god really the most interesting thing your character could be doing? Are there scads of other plot hooks that got ignored because someone wanted to give the goddess of magic what for? I've never actually been in a campaign where beating up gods was a thing so I really have no idea.

Cluedrew
2017-01-17, 05:08 PM
On the SUE Files: I have to agree that the impossible seen in the SUE files is a terrible kind of impossible. And it may be bad experience like that (hopefully to a lesser degree) that leaves behind an aversion for all impossibility. And of course lets not forget that at a higher level, there where a lot of things that were supposed to be possible but the players kept insisting on trying the one approach that obviously would not work.

On Godslaying: Besides being iconic in its own right, which I think it is for D&D but maybe not overall, I think it is a matter of scale. People seem to confuse scale with the actual quality of the story and so will try to make there characters as big and powerful as possible. Of course from a mechanical/challenge side this might not even be a mistake, but from a narrative side there is probably something more interesting for the character to be doing.

Jay R
2017-01-17, 08:30 PM
That depends on what you mean by "defeat".

"Wanting to weave better than Athena" - okay, no sin in that.

"Bragging that you can weave better than Athena" - liable to attract attention.

"Refusing to thank Athena or any of the other gods for your gift of divine weaving, and instead openly jeering at Athena when she suggests, quite mildly, that it might be better if you did" - hello, welcome to your web.

And which one sounds most like a PC?

Yukitsu
2017-01-18, 12:17 AM
And which one sounds most like a PC?

Heck, the last one sounds exactly like Odysseus.

vasilidor
2017-01-18, 06:50 PM
Actually, there were many a place and time in history where it was considered the woman's fault if she got raped; and in the times of ancient Greece yes it was considered her fault, pending the city state you were referring to. And the gods would punish such transgressions. this was done in places so that the males in power could not be held legally accountable and this is getting into real world politics isn't it?

In any case I disagree with calling the Greek gods good aligned in general and would describe Zeus' alignment as chaotic horny.

In the context of my own campaign the gods are super powerful supernatural entities. Most of them do not care one way or the other about the existence of mortal beings for the same reason we do not care about bacteria that live upon our arm (unless its making us sick). those few who do care enough to interact with lesser beings have motivations that can be understood by mortals up to a point. such as karshk, an evil deity of my own design that finds the existence of other entities to be offensive and wants them to regret that existence forever. Or I like using the Greek god hephastis and have his motivation be that he enjoys seeing the creativity and craftsmanship of others for why he interacts with others.

In general I design those entities as CR 30 for my pathfinder games, and I have a level cap of 20 for characters. Is it possible for mortals to beat them? yes. likely? absolutely not.

Segev
2017-01-19, 12:12 PM
The repeated references to Athena and Arachne make me wonder: If Arachne had honestly and sincerely thanked Athena for both the gift and the contest, but still (equally honestly) expressed part of the reason for how great her gratitude was that Athena had given her a gift of weaving superior to Athena's own, would she have still been in trouble?

Arachne has demonstrated that she is the better weaver. She expresses gratitude for Athena giving her the chance, and for the gift of being a better weaver than Athena. I wonder if this would still have gotten her cursed (for pointing out that she's better than Athena, even though she's thanking the goddess for making her so).

I like to think not; Athena, of the Greek gods, is one of the more reasonable ones. And probably would appreciate a student who could surpass her in a subject, if said student was properly grateful for the instruction (and not a "hah my former master is not as good as me!" sort).

Flickerdart
2017-01-19, 01:53 PM
Arachne has demonstrated that she is the better weaver. She expresses gratitude for Athena giving her the chance, and for the gift of being a better weaver than Athena. I wonder if this would still have gotten her cursed (for pointing out that she's better than Athena, even though she's thanking the goddess for making her so).

I like to think not; Athena, of the Greek gods, is one of the more reasonable ones. And probably would appreciate a student who could surpass her in a subject, if said student was properly grateful for the instruction (and not a "hah my former master is not as good as me!" sort).

She might have gotten a "promotion" to a demi-goddess, both as a reward and to soften the blow to Athena's pride.

Red Fel
2017-01-19, 03:19 PM
I like to think not; Athena, of the Greek gods, is one of the more reasonable ones. And probably would appreciate a student who could surpass her in a subject, if said student was properly grateful for the instruction (and not a "hah my former master is not as good as me!" sort).

"One of the more reasonable ones" among the Greek gods doesn't mean much.

This is the same Athena who, if memory serves, discovered the flute, attempted to play it, became embarrassed when she realized that doing so made her cheeks puff out, and discarded it, cursing whomever may next discover it. Because that's the response of a "more reasonable" deity.

Segev
2017-01-19, 03:23 PM
"One of the more reasonable ones" among the Greek gods doesn't mean much.Indeed. Hence the need for the qualifier "of the Greek gods" in the first place. :smallwink:


This is the same Athena who, if memory serves, discovered the flute, attempted to play it, became embarrassed when she realized that doing so made her cheeks puff out, and discarded it, cursing whomever may next discover it. Because that's the response of a "more reasonable" deity.

That's a new one to me. I don't believe I'm familiar with this myth.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-19, 03:26 PM
You know, I think it also pays to keep in mind that we have stories about these "characters" dating from prehistory to the Hellenistic era to their Roman versions to Christian-era, from a myriad of writers with all sorts of different viewpoints and purposes and agendas.

Flickerdart
2017-01-19, 03:30 PM
"One of the more reasonable ones" among the Greek gods doesn't mean much.

This is the same Athena who, if memory serves, discovered the flute, attempted to play it, became embarrassed when she realized that doing so made her cheeks puff out, and discarded it, cursing whomever may next discover it. Because that's the response of a "more reasonable" deity.

Amusingly, said flute took part in another mortal vs god challenge, between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas. Though the satyr would have lost anyway, as Apollo's victory trick owed to his choice of instrument.

Athena also blinded a guy just because she was bathing in a river and he happened to walk by, so she's just as petty as the other gods, yes.

Red Fel
2017-01-19, 03:32 PM
Amusingly, said flute took part in another mortal vs god challenge, between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas. Though the satyr would have lost anyway, as Apollo's victory trick owed to his choice of instrument.

Unless, of course, Apollo's victory trick was the result of Marsyas having been cursed by Athena for bothering to pick up a flute that made her cheeks look fat you guys stop laughing seriously it's not cool.

Because Greek predetermination was wonky that way.

Segev
2017-01-19, 03:38 PM
Unless, of course, Apollo's victory trick was the result of Marsyas having been cursed by Athena for bothering to pick up a flute that made her cheeks look fat you guys stop laughing seriously it's not cool.

Because Greek predetermination was wonky that way.

That really does sound more like Aphrodite than Athena. Not that I put it past any of the Greek goddesses.

Forum Explorer
2017-01-19, 03:52 PM
That really does sound more like Aphrodite than Athena. Not that I put it past any of the Greek goddesses.

Athena was a Virgin (with a capital V) Goddess. And they typically took that title seriously. I think Artemis had someone who saw her bathing turned into a stag and hunted down by wolves for example.

oudeis
2017-01-19, 03:54 PM
At least one version of the Arachne myth, and perhaps the best known, holds that she was turned into a spider because the tapestry she wove in the contest depicted the many vices and cruelties of the gods, particularly Zeus' lechery. The lesson she was taught? "Don't let your mouth/ego write checks that your ass can't cash".

Segev
2017-01-19, 04:00 PM
At least one version of the Arachne myth, and perhaps the best known, holds that she was turned into a spider because the tapestry she wove in the contest depicted the many vices and cruelties of the gods, particularly Zeus' lechery. The lesson she was taught? "Don't let your mouth/ego write checks that your ass can't cash".

And now I'm envisioning a modern-era myths-are-real story that explains the fall of the Greek gods as Arachne's plan for revenge having finally kicked off...about the time of the fall of the Roman empire. The Greek gods are imprisoned in a great cobweb tapestry, mirroring her contest-winning one and woven by her myriad children, that dangles over the pits of Tartarus. She also fears the Titans, however, and so has ensured that, while they can mock the gods in their prison, if they break free of Tartarus, they must go THROUGH the tapestry, freeing the gods as well.

Perhaps with hints, in the modern story, that the Titans are now ONLY sealed in by the tapestry.

oudeis
2017-01-19, 05:27 PM
And thus the name Arachne faded into myth, and its place rose one spoken only in fearful whispers, that inspired not pity, but dark terror of the Queen of the Demonweb Pits...

NichG
2017-01-19, 09:56 PM
Well, another reading of the Arachne thing: Athena has long since fallen into myth, but spiders are still weaving their webs. In the end, Arachne still won.

veti
2017-01-19, 10:07 PM
Athena was a Virgin (with a capital V) Goddess. And they typically took that title seriously. I think Artemis had someone who saw her bathing turned into a stag and hunted down by wolves for example.

Not quite. That wouldn't have been Ironic enough. Actaeon was himself a hunter, and when turned into a stag he was hunted down by his own hounds.

Because that's how the Olympians put mortals in their place: the punishment is not just brutal, but also cruel.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-20, 07:05 AM
Because that's how the Olympians put mortals in their place: the punishment is not just brutal, but also cruel.

Reminder: The Olympian gods were *****.

Telonius
2017-01-20, 07:15 AM
Why the aversion to impossibility?

You've got a game that encourages people to be Captain Kirk, and you're telling them they've found a Kobayashi Maru.

Flickerdart
2017-01-20, 12:31 PM
Why the aversion to impossibility?

You've got a game that encourages people to be Captain Kirk, and you're telling them they've found a Kobayashi Maru.

They didn't find the Kobayashi Maru. The Kobayashi Maru was presented as possible to the candidate, and only later turned out to be impossible. They found the Q - shown as omnipotent and unstoppable from the start.

Segev
2017-01-20, 12:32 PM
They didn't find the Kobayashi Maru. The Kobayashi Maru was presented as possible to the candidate, and only later turned out to be impossible. They found the Q - shown as omnipotent and unstoppable from the start.

Pshaw. You just need to find out what Guinan knows that let her intimidate him into recoiling from her odd gesture.

Flickerdart
2017-01-20, 02:55 PM
Pshaw. You just need to find out what Guinan knows that let her intimidate him into recoiling from her odd gesture.

Guinan knows what the true state of the universe should be, letting her see through Q's tricks. He is shocked when he understood this, because he expected Guinan to be a regular person. But in a fight, Q would win every time.

daniel_ream
2017-01-20, 06:14 PM
They found the Q - shown as omnipotent and unstoppable from the start.

That's a pretty apt example, as Star Trek, especially TOS, has always been more of a Greek morality play than SF. And Q is the Greek god figure.

And somehow manages to be a fun antagonist for the crew to interact with.

Red Fel
2017-01-21, 10:28 PM
They found the Q - shown as omnipotent and unstoppable from the start.

The thing with Q is that it was never about beating him - it was always about playing his game. He was omnipotent, yes, but not unstoppable. All you had to do was follow along and not disappoint him.

There's also the fact that Q was sympathetic to the protagonists - or, at least, to Picard - from the beginning. He liked Picard. Genuine fondness. And he wanted Picard to win. He still played his little game, with lethal consequences for failure, but he did so genuinely hoping that Picard would win in the end.

That's the point. If you must present an omnipotent and unstoppable immortal, there must still be a way to "defeat" him. Maybe it's diverting his wrath, a la Galactus, or maybe it's just entertaining his whims, a la Q.

Also, Guinan is a DMPC, and including her in your game is generally just a bit too railroad-y.

Segev
2017-01-21, 10:33 PM
The thing with Q is that it was never about beating him - it was always about playing his game. He was omnipotent, yes, but not unstoppable. All you had to do was follow along and not disappoint him.

There's also the fact that Q was sympathetic to the protagonists - or, at least, to Picard - from the beginning. He liked Picard. Genuine fondness. And he wanted Picard to win. He still played his little game, with lethal consequences for failure, but he did so genuinely hoping that Picard would win in the end.

That's the point. If you must present an omnipotent and unstoppable immortal, there must still be a way to "defeat" him. Maybe it's diverting his wrath, a la Galactus, or maybe it's just entertaining his whims, a la Q.

Also, Guinan is a DMPC, and including her in your game is generally just a bit too railroad-y.

Guinan wasn't a DMPC; she was an NPC oracle. Wesley was a DMPC. I don't loathe him the way many do; I found him entertaining when I was watching the show. But he definitely was the DM's PC.

daniel_ream
2017-01-21, 10:54 PM
Wesley was a DMPC. I don't loathe him the way many do; I found him entertaining when I was watching the show. But he definitely was the DM's PC.

Guess what Gene W. Roddenberry's middle name is.

NichG
2017-01-21, 11:15 PM
Also, Q's invulnerability lasted what, 2 episodes, before they had the 'Q becomes mortal' one. If anything, it was a commentary on the intrinsic injustice of power - first Q shows up invincible and accusing humanity of being insufficiently moral to be allowed into the universe. Then, next, he shows up stripped of his powers because of his own transgressions. And instead of taking revenge or using the opportunity to kill him, the Enterprise crew protects him at personal risk, finally helping Q become capable of self-sacrifice.

It's a fable about the moral superiority of mortals over gods. The opposite of Greek myth, in a way.

kyoryu
2017-01-22, 01:03 PM
Guess what Gene W. Roddenberry's middle name is.

Xavier?

Am I right?

daniel_ream
2017-01-22, 02:29 PM
No, that's Patrick Stewart.

Telok
2017-01-22, 05:34 PM
... even older editions of D&D have adventures focused towards killing evil gods...

As I recall Lolth was (in the adventure you're referencing, if it's the demonweb one that I recall) a demon lord, not an actual diety.

But really, some things in a game may well be simply impossible. In a Forgotten Realms game whacking gods is on the table by default, but that's not true in all settings. Likewise if I ever end up running a game in a setting inspired by Larry Niven's short stories "Not Long Before The End" and "The Magic Goes Away" it will be impossible to stop the use of magic from draining the world's mana, because that's the whole point of the setting (like in the real world, you can't make more of a resource by using that resource).

As for players... I dunno. Some people think that because it's a game that you can't tell them what they aren't capable of. Which is odd when they play a fighter and don't complain when you tell them that they can't use a wand or something.

Beleriphon
2017-01-23, 10:28 AM
As for players... I dunno. Some people think that because it's a game that you can't tell them what they aren't capable of. Which is odd when they play a fighter and don't complain when you tell them that they can't use a wand or something.

I think the difference is that the fighter not using wands is a character limit, and one the player has agreed to by choosing to play a fighter. That rule is well in the rules, so they had to know that in advance. Not being able to kill a deity can seem more like telling the player "Your idea is stupid, and you're stupid for having a stupid idea". It rankles most people if that's the message that comes across.

daniel_ream
2017-01-23, 11:10 AM
Not being able to kill a deity can seem more like telling the player "Your idea is stupid, and you're stupid for having a stupid idea". It rankles most people if that's the message that comes across.

I think that's more of a maturity problem than a message problem.

Outside of Moorcock, "not being able to kill a deity" is the default state.

Flickerdart
2017-01-23, 11:24 AM
The thing with Q is that it was never about beating him - it was always about playing his game. He was omnipotent, yes, but not unstoppable. All you had to do was follow along and not disappoint him.

There's also the fact that Q was sympathetic to the protagonists - or, at least, to Picard - from the beginning. He liked Picard. Genuine fondness. And he wanted Picard to win. He still played his little game, with lethal consequences for failure, but he did so genuinely hoping that Picard would win in the end.
That's literally the opposite of killing the god. Nobody that wants to kill gods will accept this.



That's the point. If you must present an omnipotent and unstoppable immortal, there must still be a way to "defeat" him. Maybe it's diverting his wrath, a la Galactus, or maybe it's just entertaining his whims, a la Q.

Not really. Let's wind back to the example of the Elder God of Time. He is omnipotent, unstoppable, and cannot be defeated. Because he is not meant to be interacted with. When PCs try to go out of their way to mess around with this kind of entity, the problem is that the entity is presented as one that can be messed around with. And the solution is to present it in the correct way.

Thrudd
2017-01-23, 12:03 PM
I would simply never comment on OOC knowledge of the setting. And do my best not to give the players more knowledge of the setting than their characters should have. If they find out there is an elder god, and want to challenge it, let them. You don't need to say "it's impossible". Just let them, in-character, research and learn that nobody has any idea of any way to challenge such a being. If they come up with some amazing plan that seems plausible, see how it plays out.

The mistake is in engaging with the players in meta-discussion of the setting and giving them OOC knowledge that they should be discovering via role playing and exploring your world.

Why not allow, as a capstone of your campaign, with the PCs at god-like levels themselves, for them to do something "impossible"? Not a straight up fight against a god, like "God of War", that's boring. But if they come up with some crazy awesome ideas using every resource available to god-level characters, why not see how it goes?

Segev
2017-01-23, 12:22 PM
Let's wind back to the example of the Elder God of Time. He is omnipotent, unstoppable, and cannot be defeated. Because he is not meant to be interacted with. When PCs try to go out of their way to mess around with this kind of entity, the problem is that the entity is presented as one that can be messed around with. And the solution is to present it in the correct way.

Thing is, players don't generally try to go out of their way to kill something that isn't relevant to them and their game. If this god of time isn't meant to be interacted with, then just don't bring him up. Don't hold him out there as an impossibility if he's not relevant as such.

Telok
2017-01-23, 02:41 PM
Thing is, players don't generally try to go out of their way to kill something that isn't relevant to them and their game. If this god of time isn't meant to be interacted with, then just don't bring him up. Don't hold him out there as an impossibility if he's not relevant as such.

What I've usually found to be the issue is that there's this list of gods for clerics to worship and get spells from, normally including hostile or evil gods. Then sometime during the game players get this weird itch after being harassed, attacked, countered, or killed ("I got better!") by a cleric of that god. Then about when someone gets Plane Shift/Wish/Miracle they decide that it's a grudge and want to travel the planes and off said deity.

The DM doesn't put a god/demi-god/godling/anthropomorphic personification in the players way to screw with them, the players choose to go screw with it. At least in my experience.

Segev
2017-01-23, 02:47 PM
What I've usually found to be the issue is that there's this list of gods for clerics to worship and get spells from, normally including hostile or evil gods. Then sometime during the game players get this weird itch after being harassed, attacked, countered, or killed ("I got better!") by a cleric of that god. Then about when someone gets Plane Shift/Wish/Miracle they decide that it's a grudge and want to travel the planes and off said deity.

The DM doesn't put a god/demi-god/godling/anthropomorphic personification in the players way to screw with them, the players choose to go screw with it. At least in my experience.

Most D&D gods aren't anthropomorphic personifications that are literally impossible to kill. Not in the sense that "killing time is impossible." There really is a god out there you can plane shift to his home dimension and walk up to and punch.

If the "personification" is really just this impersonal force, then it's that cleric you mentioned who's the real problem.

I'd just try to refocus the players on him as the BBEG or at least the proper target for vengeance.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-23, 03:39 PM
Perhaps the core issue there is the odd notion of "evil gods", especially evil gods with big organized religions and openly practicing temples.

Flickerdart
2017-01-23, 03:42 PM
Thing is, players don't generally try to go out of their way to kill something that isn't relevant to them and their game. If this god of time isn't meant to be interacted with, then just don't bring him up. Don't hold him out there as an impossibility if he's not relevant as such.

Like I said, it's all about how you introduce the being in the first place. There's nothing wrong with bringing up the fact that laws of nature are beings. You just have to make sure that your players understand that these beings are not there as mid-bosses. Especially if you are introducing them as a campaign plot thing and not just for background fluff.

Segev
2017-01-23, 04:17 PM
Perhaps the core issue there is the odd notion of "evil gods", especially evil gods with big organized religions and openly practicing temples.

In the real world, (almost) nobody thinks of themselves as "evil." Even the most depraved, vile cults will view their cause as either righteous, or as justified by "strength" or similar.

In many campaign settings (the elephant on this playground being D&D), "evil" is also its own "team," and something people who follow it equate openly with strength, cunning, power, etc. Those who view "evil" as just a label for "strength" and "good" as just a label for "weakness" will have little problem acknowledging that their god gives them an [Evil] aura for being his cleric, nor that Unholy energies are his purview. They view evil as just fine. Justified. After all, it's just the way things really are, and those weak fools who are good just can't accept it. They cling to a needy, whiny set of power and principles and let themselves be shackled away from USING their power to its utmost. Evil means you never have to say you're sorry for using your power how you want to.

daniel_ream
2017-01-23, 05:44 PM
Perhaps the core issue there is the odd notion of "evil gods", especially evil gods with big organized religions and openly practicing temples.

This. Very few pantheons had gods that were considered evil by the people who worshipped them. The Greeks didn't; Hades and Ares are not evil (although they tend to be the ones modern writers shoehorn into that role), and the titans are secured in Tartarus so they don't come into it.

Even Loki isn't really evil as much as Chaotic Crazy; he and Woden are drinking buddies.

Red Fel
2017-01-23, 08:29 PM
Alright, let me step in here. Aside from the act that, if memory serves, the original D&D conflict was Law vs Chaos, not Good vs Evil, there is an explanation for the concept of Evil gods, and it's a simple one.

Step one, replace the word Evil. It's an arbitrary term that's confusing for our purposes. We'll be using a different term for what it represents - let's call it, oh I don't know, random word, let's say Fel.

So what defines Fel? What classifies a being, god or mortal, as Fel? Fel means that you put yourself not only before others, but happily at their expense. Fel means that you value power, not just as a means to an end, but as an end unto itself. Fel means that you will stop at nothing to get whatever it is you want, even if it means tearing the world asunder to get it. Even then. Especially then.

When you express it in terms like that, you can wrap your brain around it. Heck, you could see, in a given setting, organized religions rising up around an admittedly Fel deity.

I use this example frequently, and will use it again - D&D gave us Hextor, an LE deity whose faith is openly practiced, and whose churches are actually welcome in some cities. Why? Because they promote strong military, encourage physical fitness, support a centralized local government, and crack down on crime and delinquency. All good things, right? So what if all that order and structure comes at the point of a sword - it makes the city stronger, the people stronger, the world a better place.

Get past the label, people.

Get Fel.

kyoryu
2017-01-23, 08:52 PM
... which is more or less what I said, just less sympathetically.

The word "evil" has too much baggage from bad movies. It doesn't mean sadistic. It doesn't mean "murder for the sake of lulz". At least, any useful definition of evil can't mean those things, because almost nobody would argue with those.

Hitler didn't think he was the bad guy. He thought he was doing what was good and necessary. He was just willing to stomp all over a whole lot of people to do so - and that's what made him evil - or Fel, if you prefer.

vasilidor
2017-01-23, 09:54 PM
I never liked the idea of natural forces as gods. in Greek mythology, and in Norse mythology the personification of natural forces were often giants. giants whom the gods warred with and conquered.
I have always preferred the Idea that the gods were things that were supernaturally strong enough to bend those forces to their will, same with the Titans and Giants.
fun fact: Ragnarok was writ by 13th century Christians, well as far as my own personal research goes. I will freely admit that I may be wrong.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-23, 10:15 PM
Alright, let me step in here. Aside from the act that, if memory serves, the original D&D conflict was Law vs Chaos, not Good vs Evil, there is an explanation for the concept of Evil gods, and it's a simple one.

Step one, replace the word Evil. It's an arbitrary term that's confusing for our purposes. We'll be using a different term for what it represents - let's call it, oh I don't know, random word, let's say Fel.

So what defines Fel? What classifies a being, god or mortal, as Fel? Fel means that you put yourself not only before others, but happily at their expense. Fel means that you value power, not just as a means to an end, but as an end unto itself. Fel means that you will stop at nothing to get whatever it is you want, even if it means tearing the world asunder to get it. Even then. Especially then.

When you express it in terms like that, you can wrap your brain around it. Heck, you could see, in a given setting, organized religions rising up around an admittedly Fel deity.

I use this example frequently, and will use it again - D&D gave us Hextor, an LE deity whose faith is openly practiced, and whose churches are actually welcome in some cities. Why? Because they promote strong military, encourage physical fitness, support a centralized local government, and crack down on crime and delinquency. All good things, right? So what if all that order and structure comes at the point of a sword - it makes the city stronger, the people stronger, the world a better place.

Get past the label, people.

Get Fel.


... which is more or less what I said, just less sympathetically.

The word "evil" has too much baggage from bad movies. It doesn't mean sadistic. It doesn't mean "murder for the sake of lulz". At least, any useful definition of evil can't mean those things, because almost nobody would argue with those.

Hitler didn't think he was the bad guy. He thought he was doing what was good and necessary. He was just willing to stomp all over a whole lot of people to do so - and that's what made him evil - or Fel, if you prefer.


All of which reads more like an argument against Alignment in general, and in favor of moral nuance and ambiguous gods, than it does just about "evil gods".

Milo v3
2017-01-23, 10:22 PM
When you can be evil for using skeletons to build a city or save orphans, it probably isn't hard for evil religions to come up for excuses on why them being "evil" isn't such a severe thing.

Telok
2017-01-24, 01:16 AM
Most D&D gods aren't anthropomorphic personifications that are literally impossible to kill. Not in the sense that "killing time is impossible." There really is a god out there you can plane shift to his home dimension and walk up to and punch.

If the "personification" is really just this impersonal force, then it's that cleric you mentioned who's the real problem.

I'd just try to refocus the players on him as the BBEG or at least the proper target for vengeance.

Well now here's a thing, going into a god's home and punching it isn't in all the settings or games. In D&D's FR, yes, gods get offed by fighters with artifact swords and anyone who gets spells better than wish/miracle. In other games and even in other D&D settings that often isn't true.

But you get people assuming that it's true all over the place just because it's true in one place. Or they decide that they should always be able to fight anything with a decent chance of winning because it was a rule in one game they played.

Impossibilities aren't always the DM just negating player agency, some games have actual limits that characters can't exceed. They may be mechanical rules, or parts of the setting, or just limits that the players chose whether they thought about it or not.

Hawkstar
2017-01-24, 01:35 AM
Or "Sure, this god may be Evil, but if I worship him, he may spare me from a terrible terrible death, and maybe grant me supreme power one day!"

SaintRidley
2017-01-24, 03:18 AM
Eh, I'm generally fine with impossible to kill deities in games. It's not the kind of mountain that scratches my itch as a player. As a DM, I think letting them be interesting puzzles to work around can be a good thing even.

I'm currently running a game. The PCs are level 3, but they've already seen from afar one of the more powerful entities of the setting - Tiamat as a dracolich. The reason Tiamat is a dracolich? Because she, and all the other gods, were killed a few thousand years ago after a new goddess ascended (majorly powerful demilich). Anywhats, this demilich goddess killed all the other gods, only interacts directly with the world to destroy anyone who dares worship her, and has otherwise spent the entire time since the quelling of the gods entangling herself with the very fabric of magic itself. It's cause some major changes (namely, magic is not reacting positively and is going completely wild).

I've statted out this goddess, not because I expect a direct fight against her, but as more of a just in case that's how the players decide to take it. By my eye, she'll be pretty much impossible to take down given the major buffs over the standard Demlich she has, but it's theoretically conceivable the PCs could take her down in a straight fight if they tried. They seem like they probably won't do that, though. They're currently finding the earliest clues about what's happening with magic, and if it occurs to them to stop their world being a hellscape by eliminating the goddess, they'll probably find a better, less direct way of going about it. Probably by destroying magic itself.



Or "Sure, this god may be Evil, but if I worship him, he may spare me from a terrible terrible death, and maybe grant me supreme power one day!"

Or you can worship Sithrak. If you've noticed that life is cruel and insensible, it may come as a comfort to know that when you die Sithrak will torture you forever, whether you were good or not. The lack of responsibility is quite liberating. So stay alive as long as possible. Nothing you do can make Sithrak angry. Sithrak was angry already.

Segev
2017-01-24, 10:40 AM
Technically, Red Fel and kyoryu's arguments aren't against alignment being a thing. They're just against the notion that people who worship evil gods view it as a negative thing. "Evil," while matching up pretty nicely with the real world's modern Western conception of the term, carries slightly different baggage in D&D. And, presumably, any other setting which has self-proclaimed evil powers-that-be out there.

Red Fel's reframing it to a totally random, off-the-cuff (but admittedly cool-sounding) word isn't meant to say "alignment is meaningless." It's meant to illustrate that people who follow it don't view "evil" the same way we do, IRL. Sure, those who adhere to Good will view it pretty much just as we do; we share Good's moral code (regardless of whether we live up to it), as a general rule. Or, rather, those who are Good have a moral code written to mesh as closely as possible with ours.

To an extent, this is a reflection of "Everybody thinks they're the good guys:" we happen to share broad strokes morals with the writers of D&D's alignments, and lo and behold, they wrote our shared morals as "Good." (I could go into deeper philosophical discussions about the idea that "good" actually is objective IRL, but that's well beyond the scope of this thread.)

Long story short: Alignment is still a useful concept for some games, and in broad strokes matches what we expect it to. Just recall that just as IRL nobody thinks they're "the bad guy," those who are openly and proudly evil in the fictional setting don't view "evil" as a condemnation. To them, it is synonymous with "strength" and/or "freedom."

Flickerdart
2017-01-24, 11:56 AM
It's not that hard to come up with a very plausible, functional society that is nevertheless Evil at its core.

The SRD defines Evil as such: "Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

And the Evil alignments as such: A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others not according to their actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. A chaotic evil character does whatever his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do. He is hot-tempered, vicious, arbitrarily violent, and unpredictable. If he is simply out for whatever he can get, he is ruthless and brutal.

So how might people in an evil society not see themselves as the baddies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU)?

In a resource-scarce environment, an Evil society thrives. They take what they need from the world. Evil scales well - resources are distributed based on how well you can hold on to them, so you can have as much or as little bureaucracy as you want. Evil is the force that keeps chaos at bay, the force that keeps law and order from overextending its reach. An evil society is not afraid to rise up against their masters if they believe it's in their interests to do so. Evil societies are resistant to external influences.

Evil is the alignment of extremes - there's no better friend than an Evil friend, and no worse enemy than an Evil enemy. A Good friend might die for you, but an Evil friend will kill for you, and at the end of the day you'd rather not be a friend down.

halfeye
2017-01-24, 01:16 PM
It's not that hard to come up with a very plausible, functional society that is nevertheless Evil at its core.

The SRD defines Evil as such: "Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

And the Evil alignments as such: A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others not according to their actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. A chaotic evil character does whatever his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do. He is hot-tempered, vicious, arbitrarily violent, and unpredictable. If he is simply out for whatever he can get, he is ruthless and brutal.

So how might people in an evil society not see themselves as the baddies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU)?

In a resource-scarce environment, an Evil society thrives. They take what they need from the world. Evil scales well - resources are distributed based on how well you can hold on to them, so you can have as much or as little bureaucracy as you want. Evil is the force that keeps chaos at bay, the force that keeps law and order from overextending its reach. An evil society is not afraid to rise up against their masters if they believe it's in their interests to do so. Evil societies are resistant to external influences.

Evil is the alignment of extremes - there's no better friend than an Evil friend, and no worse enemy than an Evil enemy. A Good friend might die for you, but an Evil friend will kill for you, and at the end of the day you'd rather not be a friend down.
On the other hand, everybody is the good guy in their own eyes. It's just that everybody has different eyes. What is seen as good in one culture is seen as evil in another. It's relativity again, this time cultural relativity, and there is no cultural aether or absolute rest.

kyoryu
2017-01-24, 02:33 PM
So how might people in an evil society not see themselves as the baddies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU)?

Other people are suckers.

If they didn't want it stolen, they should have had it locked up better.

They were asking for it.

Survival of the fittest - you're helping out by culling the weak.

I needed it more than they did.

They deserved it because of <slight>.

It's for the greater good.

The list of rationalizations is endless.

Zale
2017-01-24, 02:34 PM
Or you can worship Sithrak. If you've noticed that life is cruel and insensible, it may come as a comfort to know that when you die Sithrak will torture you forever, whether you were good or not. The lack of responsibility is quite liberating. So stay alive as long as possible. Nothing you do can make Sithrak angry. Sithrak was angry already.

http://i.imgur.com/ebEwKlR.jpg

Oh and the source of this is a incredibly NSFW comic called Oglaf. This panel is safe for work; I even removed the one part that had swearing.

Flickerdart
2017-01-24, 03:21 PM
On the other hand, everybody is the good guy in their own eyes. It's just that everybody has different eyes. What is seen as good in one culture is seen as evil in another. It's relativity again, this time cultural relativity, and there is no cultural aether or absolute rest.

That's sort of my point.

Dire Roc
2017-01-26, 04:56 PM
*Except when you want to play a good monstrous race, or a fighter/rogue that doesn't suck, or when the paladin does a stupid, or when someone plays a Monk or a Samurai, or when you want to play Tome of Battle and the DM dismisses as for "being for weeaboos", or when you want to be a Psion and the DM dismisses as "overpowered compared to wizards", or any drow character, or when your class doesn't contribute to an optimal team in tactical combat, or whenever the DM feels like restricting magic items for a "low magic campaign" while ignoring wizards, or whenever the DM restricts things to core so you can't play what you want at all.

Hell of a fine print to miss. People are perfectly fine with the death of cosmological deities, yet whenever you want a simple orc fighter to join in to kill one with his bare fists, suddenly everyone is like or implies "no thats impossible, all orcs are evil and Drizzt like characters are played out, and fighters should be realistic so screw you." They seem really fine with impossibility there.

A fighter shouldn't be able to kill a deity with his fists? Who is better for it? Do you expect a wizard to be able to outmagic someone who powers hundreds or thousands of spells for their clerics each day? No, these deific types are tied to concepts, to identities, if you want to stop one you'll need a stronger concept and identity. Magic is too weak and nebulous to hold itself together for such a thing, and a sword? Do you think a piece of metal hammered by an ordinary, unheroic smith and then infused by fickle magics is up to this sort of test? There is only one thing that can be certain enough for this task, the body a warrior has spent a lifetime refining, honing and learning every component and capability of. A sword can fail, but a fighter knows the place and power of his own fists, nothing can make him doubt that. The great thinker Descartes once said, "I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I'm gonna go punch out Hextor." And he took enough power from his might and knowledge to shape the universe to move about the systems that bear his name. You say, "how could a half-orc fighter slay a deity with their bare fists?" I say how could anyone else ever hope to?

This post sponsored by the Association for Martials Having Nice Things (AMHNT).

Flickerdart
2017-01-26, 05:16 PM
A sword can fail, but a fighter knows the place and power of his own fists, nothing can make him doubt that.
And then he remembers that he didn't take Improved Unarmed Strike, and gets squished.

Segev
2017-01-26, 05:22 PM
And then he remembers that he didn't take Improved Unarmed Strike, and gets squished.

Nah, "Fists" is what he named his weapon of choice. (It's a warhammer that is stylized like a pair of fists for each head.)

Newtonsolo313
2017-01-26, 05:53 PM
Nah, "Fists" is what he named his weapon of choice. (It's a warhammer that is stylized like a pair of fists for each head.)

Of course the reason the heads look like iron fists is because it was forged using the remnants of a particularly large steel golem

oudeis
2017-01-26, 07:29 PM
The fist is his... no, that doesn't work

No- the hammer is his...ah, whatever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7bdr6fjg-k)

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-26, 07:58 PM
This. Very few pantheons had gods that were considered evil by the people who worshipped them. The Greeks didn't; Hades and Ares are not evil (although they tend to be the ones modern writers shoehorn into that role), and the titans are secured in Tartarus so they don't come into it.

Even Loki isn't really evil as much as Chaotic Crazy; he and Woden are drinking buddies.

And those gods which were considered "evilish" by the people who believed in that religion in which the deity featured, were more propitiated and appeased, than they were venerated.

daniel_ream
2017-01-26, 10:07 PM
You say, "how could a half-orc fighter slay a deity with their bare fists?" I say how could anyone else ever hope to?

It is, after all, over 9,000.