PDA

View Full Version : D&D gods, don't want them to be too active or too inactive, how to find the balance?



Scalenex
2018-05-05, 01:55 AM
Futurama Excerpt from “Godfellas”

God Entity: Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.
Bender: Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money.
God Entity: Yes, if you make it look like an electrical thing. When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

This is interesting theoretical theology for the fictional seemingly agnostic dominated setting that is Futurama, but I’m not sure this works in a world with spell casting clerics and planeshifting angels and demons.

So I’m working on creating a mythology from the ground up all the way from the creation of the universe by nine deities (the Nine) to the “present,” your standard D&D/Pathfinder medieval-esque setting with magic and swords and elves and dragons.
I created a bunch of myths. I explain the seasons, the sun and moon, I explain free will, I explain the origin of agriculture, art, and all the aspects of civilization, the tides, the creation of the first dragons, humans, elves, orcs, and a bunch of other stuff. I had a lot of fun doing it.

To create a fiction RPG setting I have two regular ways the Nine. They impact the world through their divine spellcasters, empowering clerics, favored souls, paladins, druids, etc. They also have their spirit minions, aka Outsiders.
My concern is if the gods are too active there isn’t much room for PCs or protagonists to do much. If the gods are too inactive the basis of my setting which is based on the interactions and conflicts of nine gods holding the nine traditional alignments LG, LE, LN, CG, CN, CE, NG, TN, NE then their past actions make no sense (where they created a bunch of big miracles, new races, natural forces etc).

I am a big fan of Rick Riordan and his fictionalized views of Greek/Roman gods (and others). On some level the powerful gods of his series are limited by the needs of the plot, BUT Rick Riordan (and other writers) come up with in-universe justifications need to be consistent or your readers/players will see that your gods are as strong or weak only as the plot demands and see sloppy railroad tracks.

Lack of Knowledge

Futurama Excerpt from “Godfellas”
Bender: So do you know I'm going to do something before I do it?
God Entity: Yes.
Bender: What if I do something else?
God Entity: Then I don't know that.

From Justice League Dark
John Constantine: Point is, even deities can get it wrong. It's how we got the appendix, Neanderthals and Reality TV.

The biggest limitation to a fictional deity is not knowing everything that is going on, not knowing everything that is going to happen, and not knowing the best way to solve problems. That’s easy enough, but deities have minions to report to them and divine sight/senses of some sort.

That’s a good start but I feel like I need more.

Ironclad rules

Rick Riordan has vaguely defined but omnipresent ancient rules that the gods cannot do certain things. A little too vague for me to copy this.

The Order of the Stick has a bunch of ironclad rules that constrain the gods. The most obvious two are that when not working through clerics they cannot manipulate the world directly outside of their bailiwick and they cannot manipulate the world directly outside their continent. Southern Gods in the South, etc.
I cannot copy the land thing for my world because my gods are the gods of the whole universe, not of one continent.
The bailiwick thing is a bit harder for me because my backstory has deities trying to eat out of the basket of the official domain of the other gods all the time. I have a sun goddess that has primary domain over fire, but one of her sisters partially usurped her position by placing herself as the hearth goddess. Another tries to spite her sister by invoking fire in religious rituals as much as possible.

What are the best ways to put in unbreakable ironclad rules that make sense and are logically consistent on seemingly all-powerful gods?

The gods sometimes limit themselves

Going back to Rick Riordan’s fictional depictions of the Greek Olympians. Sometimes the Fates or “ancient rules” keep the Olympians from using their full power. Sometimes they do so out of restraint or social pressures. When Hermes asked Percy Jackson to find his missing staff he asked “Now you are going to explain why you a god, need me a mortal to get this for you.”

Hermes didn’t want to get it himself because 1) he didn’t want to too much collateral damage “We cannot destroy Manhattan every time Aphrodite misplaces her hair brush” and 2) he didn’t want to make it obvious to the other Olympians that he lost his staff.

In my friend’s fictional pantheon has one living “evil” god and over a dozen “good” ones. The rebel god has almost as many supernaturally empowered magic users as all the others combined because the non-rebel gods are afraid of overstepping their bounds and doing lots of collateral damage (their track record for trying big divine fixes is poor) so they don’t want to take risks. They only empower priests who show phenomenal discipline. The rebel god believes in risk taking and gives out supernatural power like candy.

I like that, a fantasy world should have something along the lines of a cosmological good and cosmological evil and you need your setting to have some conflict, some danger, and some hope.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot room for this where some gods are restrained and some are not. Since I have one god for each of the nine alignments and they are all pretty much equal to each other in power, they have a dis-incentive to show much restraint. “You know [my worst enemy] isn’t going to show restraint!”
I do have a little bit of social pressure but not much. If one of the Nine oversteps his/her bounds against another, than my True Neutral deity will stop his long inaction and smack them down. My True Neutral deity is not the strongest, but he can ally with any of the Nine’s other rivals at the drop of a hat, also since he doesn’t act as much as the others, when he does act he has more power to wield when he does.

For smaller infractions they can lose faith with their allies. My Lawful Good deity is trying to win over the Neutral Good and Lawful Neutral deities. The Lawful Neutral deity is trying to win over both the Lawful Evil and Lawful Good deities.
Still since my pantheon is so opposed to each other, social pressure can only go so far.

(Meta)-Physical Limitations

So I have the general notion that every time one of the Nine creates a spiritual service, empowers a favored soul or warlock, distributes spells to a cleric, or works a miracle they diminish their power at least temporarily. I just don’t know by how much and how to create limitations.

It probably be counterproductive to say empowering a Favored Soul (permanently) to take 537 times the power of giving a 10th cleric their daily spell allotment once but it would be good to have a general idea of what sort of limits the fictional gods have for consistency.

If the gods have finite power, where do they get their power from? Do they get their power from their living worshippers? Their dead worshippers’ souls? The ambient energy of the universe? Something else?
If they get power from worshippers do fearful and loving worshippers give the god the same “fix.” What is more important, time or intensity? Does a lengthy three hour worship service performed by rote by a bored worshipper provide the same energy as a two minute improvised very emotional and desperate prayers? Can a single mortal provide sustenance to several gods or does only their favorite/most feared god get their energy.

I don’t wanna!

Another limitation is that the gods don’t want to get involved with mortal matters they deem beneath them.
This can seem pretty petty and inconsistent if the gods gain or lose interest at the drop of a hat.


Anyway, how do you all balance divine activity and inactivity. Did I miss any good limiting factors?

JoeJ
2018-05-05, 02:18 AM
Think about how much you want your PCs - not the mortal world in general but PCs specifically - to interact directly with the gods. If they're not going to be involved with each other on a regular basis, you really don't need any justification for their level of involvement.

The gods are under no obligation to explain themselves, after all, and they're probably not extremely eager to share whatever limitations they have. And at least part of the time and attention is probably spent dealing with matters that they couldn't explain to beings of merely human intelligence, even if they wanted to.

PersonMan
2018-05-05, 02:39 AM
If the gods are too inactive the basis of my setting which is based on the interactions and conflicts of nine gods holding the nine traditional alignments LG, LE, LN, CG, CN, CE, NG, TN, NE.

I think you forgot the "then" part of your "if, then" here.


Ironclad rules

What are the best ways to put in unbreakable ironclad rules that make sense and are logically consistent on seemingly all-powerful gods?

I think a better way to make hard rules work is to make them technically breakable. Let's say you don't want deities sending in super-powerful avatars in mortal form to decide conflicts in their favor - rather than making some hard rule saying "deities can't send down avatars", you can decide that creating or 'deploying' an avatar requires some absurd level of invested power, similarly to how a direct miracle is incredibly expensive compared to giving the power to a cleric to do it in the deity's stead.

This can also work to explain a shift in how things are done, from the past to the present - before, there was enough non-invested power at the fingertips of each deity to allow for this sort of thing (maybe shifting portfolios or stealing areas of influence fall under the same category), but now every single one just has too many "investments" tying them down. Sort of like if in the old days, they all had piles of cash, but now they all own real estate; in order to really put all their power to use, they need to make sacrifices elsewhere, and potentially unravel decades or centuries of work.

So, it isn't impossible for the LG deity to decide enough is enough, let's send down an avatar to deal with this orc horde, it'd just require turning off half of their holy relics, disempowering most of their clerics and potentially weakening the very fabric of LG-dom for a while.


The gods sometimes limit themselves

I like that, a fantasy world should have something along the lines of a cosmological good and cosmological evil and you need your setting to have some conflict, some danger, and some hope.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot room for this where some gods are restrained and some are not. Since I have one god for each of the nine alignments and they are all pretty much equal to each other in power, they have a dis-incentive to show much restraint. “You know [my worst enemy] isn’t going to show restraint!”
I do have a little bit of social pressure but not much. If one of the Nine oversteps his/her bounds against another, than my True Neutral deity will stop his long inaction and smack them down. My True Neutral deity is not the strongest, but he can ally with any of the Nine’s other rivals at the drop of a hat, also since he doesn’t act as much as the others, when he does act he has more power to wield when he does.

For smaller infractions they can lose faith with their allies. My Lawful Good deity is trying to win over the Neutral Good and Lawful Neutral deities. The Lawful Neutral deity is trying to win over both the Lawful Evil and Lawful Good deities.
Still since my pantheon is so opposed to each other, social pressure can only go so far.

A common idea I've seen is something like MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction here - coming into play. Sure, the LG deity is opposed to the CE one, but both know that throwing down the gauntlet, pulling up their sleeves and wading into the mortal world to fight is a horrible idea because they'll expend their strength, turn everyone else against them (since deity-level combat is likely to have collateral damage to the tune of "oh oops, there goes that city that the LN deity really liked, now I have a new enemy") and potentially lead to the two fighting deities going home only to find that their portfolios have been partitioned between other, less fight-happy deities.

Similarly, the current conflict could end up as a cold war. Yes, the LG deity and the CE one really want to destroy each other, and maybe NG and CN have an old grudge they'd like to settle, but acting against another deity in any meaningful or decisive manner requires a massive effort against a heavily entrenched enemy. And unless every deity has exactly one enemy, this basically becomes suicide - sure, if LG attacks CE, things may go well at first, until CN walks over and starts grabbing all of LG's things while they're defenseless.


(Meta)-Physical Limitations

So I have the general notion that every time one of the Nine creates a spiritual service, empowers a favored soul or warlock, distributes spells to a cleric, or works a miracle they diminish their power at least temporarily. I just don’t know by how much and how to create limitations.

It probably be counterproductive to say empowering a Favored Soul (permanently) to take 537 times the power of giving a 10th cleric their daily spell allotment once but it would be good to have a general idea of what sort of limits the fictional gods have for consistency.

If the gods have finite power, where do they get their power from? Do they get their power from their living worshippers? Their dead worshippers’ souls? The ambient energy of the universe? Something else?
If they get power from worshippers do fearful and loving worshippers give the god the same “fix.” What is more important, time or intensity? Does a lengthy three hour worship service performed by rote by a bored worshipper provide the same energy as a two minute improvised very emotional and desperate prayers? Can a single mortal provide sustenance to several gods or does only their favorite/most feared god get their energy.

I ran with the "major energy costs" above, which sort of falls under this as well.

In terms of power sources, I'd make it a mix of things and not entirely clear. Does having the position of Capitalcity's patron deity strengthen the LG deity, or is it just all the sacrifices and praying done there that does it? Do followers feed their deity in death, or in life? Or both? I'd put in hints of different answers, and make it a theological debate - one where no deity is super keen on giving away the answers (potentially because they don't know, either) on how the mechanics of divinity function. Especially if all divinity means is just "I have more than 1 billion Soul Points in my account" and is potentially reachable by a mortal who tries hard enough.


Anyway, how do you all balance divine activity and inactivity. Did I miss any good limiting factors?

Personally, I either go for rather inactive deities (to the point where the difference between a cleric of the God of Cities and one who gains power from their belief in the City Legal Code is hard to see, apart from social status and whatnot) or ones that are involved in a mix of the things I mentioned above. In the distant past, it was possible for deities to slug it out on the mountains of the mortal realm (that's where that oddly-shaped lake came from, by the way - the God of Law fell there after being struck by the God of Conflict), but now doing so is a horrible idea for the same reason that war in a modern world can be; you have too much to lose, little to gain, and if you escalate you can be sure that everyone is going to get involved, you're going to lose almost everything even if you win, and you can't hope for more than coinflip odds of survival.

So instead deities try to work against their enemies by servants and subtle manipulations.

martixy
2018-05-05, 04:32 AM
TL;DR, but...

It's really quite simple:
Are your gods abstract entities or beings with wants and desires?

I'll skip "abstract", because that doesn't make them terribly interesting and go straight for the more active role.

In that case, for the universe to exist in a state conducive to the pursuit of more than one god's portfolio means there exists some balance. This balance means that the gods wouldn't be able to apply anything more than a light touch anyway, cuz they would be too busy keeping the status quo on their own power-level rather than bothering with the lower rungs(e.g. mortals).

And there's your answer.

Think of it as the anthropic principle of science, but applied to D&D.

Scalenex
2018-05-05, 05:31 AM
I think you forgot the "then" part of your "if, then" here.

Oops! 1000 pardons.

If the gods are too inactive the basis of my setting which is based on the interactions and conflicts of nine gods holding the nine traditional alignments LG, LE, LN, CG, CN, CE, NG, TN, NE then their past actions make no sense (where they created a bunch of big miracles, new races, natural forces etc).
I edited OP

gkathellar
2018-05-05, 08:24 AM
I've always been fond of these factors.

The Powers are pieces of a delicate balance in which direct action beyond the scope of their portfolio and worshippers very rapidly becomes a very bad idea. When Hextor sends an aspect to cause trouble, he is doing something very noticeable and opening the door to all kinds of interference from the other Powers, planar exemplars, and really anybody else who can or does take offense to make a similar show of force. More escalation means more interested parties which means you basically never run out of "yeah well I stalemate you like XYZ," until eventually an Overdeity just smacks you for being an idiot. Gods prefer to act indirectly because their rivals and enemies may not notice the full extent of what they're doing and they may actually get away with things.
Gods embody concepts, ideas, and things, and this means those things need to exist even without them. If Erythnul shows up for every lunatic slaughter, what is he the god of again? Himself? Rather, Erythnul keeps track of every lunatic slaughter, works in his own way to cause more of them, and even shows up when there's an opportunity to do so. Even the Powers of good have a priority interest in the proliferation of their portfolio in the worlds where they work, if only because their portfolios are good things that improve the worlds where they're propagated. Too much divine action results in too little mortal action, and that doesn't work out for beings who are formed of abstracts and powered by prayer.
A corollary of the above two points, divine conflicts are really difficult to win decisively. Two gods hacking away at each other endlessly generally doesn't go anywhere. What does work, at least in theory? Changes in the landscape of the mortal world. Stealing worshipers. Spreading the faith. Etc

Gods do take big fancy actions, when they can. But insofar as there's a balance of power, there's a balance of power, and everybody has competing interests.

Corneel
2018-05-05, 08:29 AM
Do ut des

And my interpretation of it: the gods can't do anything for free, they need payment in the form of sacrifice.

Pleh
2018-05-05, 09:14 AM
I like your reference to futurama. I think you really have something with the "light touch" balance described there.

I'd take the "I don't wanna" method of limiting the gods, but I think what that method is missing is to add what these gods DO want to do.

For the light touch balance to matter, there has to be some objective that gets ruined if mortals become too dependent on gods or if they lose all hope and belief in the gods. These gods must be somehow concerned in the long term development of these mortals, perhaps like raising children.

Beleriphon
2018-05-06, 09:34 AM
There's a few ways to approach your questions. There's the Eberron method where the deities are either 1) abstract power sources like the Silver Flame or the Blood of Vol or 2) deities that may or may not actually exist (nobody ever talks to Aureon, not even the creatures like Solars outsiders that claim to serve him).

Another thought is that deities created the universe. They are the sources, the clock makers after a fashion. However the universe can and does function just fine without their direct input. Much like a massive complex clock they can change the way it works by breaking it and rebuilding it, stopping it and changing the parts, or the hardest part is keeping it going while also making changes at the same time. The last option is the hardest way to make changes and requires the most effort on a deities part but it is the one that they prefer because they put all the effort into building the universe so they'd prefer to break things along the way.

The ability to make changes without direct action is using clerics to change the way people view the world, appeasing prayer (say by stopping sea storms for sailors, or ensuring a good harvest by sending the right amount of gentle rain and the right weather), or if they want to make a big impression sending an exarch (that is to say a powerful divine servant).

So in the long run deities can make direct, powerful and massive changes to the universe should they choose to do so, but run the risk of causing irreparable damage so they prefer to act through agents. Even an evil god of slaughter doesn't want to blow up the universe completely (I'm assume you don't have a deity that breaks the fourth wall anyways), since that means no more things they like are happening. They recognize that for their own needs there has to be some base level of stability, and would actively work with the other deities if something threatened the existence of the universe (lets say the Far Realm or some equivalent)



I like your reference to Futurama. I think you really have something with the "light touch" balance described there.

I'd take the "I don't wanna" method of limiting the gods, but I think what that method is missing is to add what these gods DO want to do.

For the light touch balance to matter, there has to be some objective that gets ruined if mortals become too dependent on gods or if they lose all hope and belief in the gods. These gods must be somehow concerned in the long term development of these mortals, perhaps like raising children.

What do deities want? At the base level they want stability in their own spheres of influence. The deity of nature wants nature to at the very least not be encroached upon any more that is already has, and will work against a deity that supports civilization or cities or whatever if that deity pushes to hard again them.

Pleh
2018-05-06, 10:43 AM
What do deities want? At the base level they want stability in their own spheres of influence. The deity of nature wants nature to at the very least not be encroached upon any more that is already has, and will work against a deity that supports civilization or cities or whatever if that deity pushes to hard again them.

If planning an encounter with goblins, why just stick to the basics? You can add class levels, give them magic items, throw in a bugbear, etc. No reason to stick to the trivially simple solution when you can dig as deep into the subject as you want.

My post was meant to lead us to consider the possible complexity and intrigue of asking what deities might want, not default to bog standard tropes.

The Glyphstone
2018-05-06, 10:58 AM
It's definitely an interesting question, and one I've had to poke at myself while writing my own perpetually half-baked world cosmology. My personal complicating factor involves another Riordan trope, the idea that the 'gods' can only show a fraction of their true power to a mortal without destroying them/driving them insane; in my specific case, there are dozens of 'gods' mortals know+worship, with the same tiny handful of cosmic-grade entities behind all of them (and not even the same one, as who fuels which god can change behind the scenes from time to time).

At a surface level, my excuse was primarily the 'limits themselves' sort. My cosmic entities are powerful enough that exerting their full strength causes damage to the structure of reality, weakening the barriers that prevent Far Realms-esque horrors from flooding through and eating everything. I've toyed with meta-physical limitations of the 'God Needs Prayer Badly' flavor, but could never really make up my mind for much the same reasons you've listed.

Scalenex
2018-05-06, 11:17 PM
Think about how much you want your PCs - not the mortal world in general but PCs specifically - to interact directly with the gods. If they're not going to be involved with each other on a regular basis, you really don't need any justification for their level of involvement.

The gods are under no obligation to explain themselves, after all, and they're probably not extremely eager to share whatever limitations they have. And at least part of the time and attention is probably spent dealing with matters that they couldn't explain to beings of merely human intelligence, even if they wanted to.

The gods are under no obligation to explain themselves but I feel like me as the Storyteller/DM should be able to understand what is going on.

I guess the gods are above human intelligence, but I still want them to be human enough to be relateable on some level. Like a lot of fictional takes on various gods.




I think a better way to make hard rules work is to make them technically breakable. Let's say you don't want deities sending in super-powerful avatars in mortal form to decide conflicts in their favor - rather than making some hard rule saying "deities can't send down avatars", you can decide that creating or 'deploying' an avatar requires some absurd level of invested power, similarly to how a direct miracle is incredibly expensive compared to giving the power to a cleric to do it in the deity's stead.

I like this.


This can also work to explain a shift in how things are done, from the past to the present - before, there was enough non-invested power at the fingertips of each deity to allow for this sort of thing (maybe shifting portfolios or stealing areas of influence fall under the same category), but now every single one just has too many "investments" tying them down. Sort of like if in the old days, they all had piles of cash, but now they all own real estate; in order to really put all their power to use, they need to make sacrifices elsewhere, and potentially unravel decades or centuries of work.

So, it isn't impossible for the LG deity to decide enough is enough, let's send down an avatar to deal with this orc horde, it'd just require turning off half of their holy relics, disempowering most of their clerics and potentially weakening the very fabric of LG-dom for a while.

That's a good idea. I like your investments metaphor a lot. It will also give me a foundation to work on for my Unmakings. So the Nine took over from their evil progenitor who basically farmed souls to eat them. The Nine let Dragons rule the world for an age. The Dragons started mutually assured destruction through massive wars before a Dragon Queen's crazy gambit to harness the elemental power of the world accidentally unleashed a million elementals who tore up the world in a four way battle (fire versus water versus air versus earth) and killed 95% of the Dragons and everything else. The First Unmaking.

Then the Nine created Elves to take over from the Dragons. The Elves started mutually assured destruction through massive wars before an Elf king's crazy gambit tried to seize godhood for himself and accidentally unleashed a million soul sucking minions of the fallen god Turoch who killed 95% of the Elves and everything else. The Second Unmaking.

Now the Nine created humans to take over.

Your real estate metaphor helps me explain why the gods were relatively helpless during the Unmakings. They lost their real estate and weren't able to cash in it's full value, so they couldn't use their full might to stop the disasters. Basically the best they could do was shore up the infrastructure of the world enough to prevent total destruction and make metaphorical Noah's Ark type arrangements for their favorite mortals.


A common idea I've seen is something like MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction here - coming into play. Sure, the LG deity is opposed to the CE one, but both know that throwing down the gauntlet, pulling up their sleeves and wading into the mortal world to fight is a horrible idea because they'll expend their strength, turn everyone else against them (since deity-level combat is likely to have collateral damage to the tune of "oh oops, there goes that city that the LN deity really liked, now I have a new enemy") and potentially lead to the two fighting deities going home only to find that their portfolios have been partitioned between other, less fight-happy deities.

Good idea.


Similarly, the current conflict could end up as a cold war. Yes, the LG deity and the CE one really want to destroy each other, and maybe NG and CN have an old grudge they'd like to settle, but acting against another deity in any meaningful or decisive manner requires a massive effort against a heavily entrenched enemy. And unless every deity has exactly one enemy, this basically becomes suicide - sure, if LG attacks CE, things may go well at first, until CN walks over and starts grabbing all of LG's things while they're defenseless.

That works too and helps me develop more depth. Sure the Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil gods want to destroy each other and the Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil gods fantasize about imprisoning the other but all of the gods have grouses with the others. Even similar ones.

Though not everyone wants the utter defeat of their rival. The Neutral Good and Neutral Evil goddesses are fighting almost entirely on the realm of mortals. The Neutral Evil goddess wants her sister to suffer from watching her worshipers suffer. The Neutral Good goddess wants to convert the Neutral Evil goddesses' worshipers to her own.



I ran with the "major energy costs" above, which sort of falls under this as well.

In terms of power sources, I'd make it a mix of things and not entirely clear. Does having the position of Capitalcity's patron deity strengthen the LG deity, or is it just all the sacrifices and praying done there that does it? Do followers feed their deity in death, or in life? Or both? I'd put in hints of different answers, and make it a theological debate - one where no deity is super keen on giving away the answers (potentially because they don't know, either) on how the mechanics of divinity function. Especially if all divinity means is just "I have more than 1 billion Soul Points in my account" and is potentially reachable by a mortal who tries hard enough.

That's an interesting idea for a mortal attaining godhood by getting worshipers. I was running with a different angle. After defeating the original progenitor god, the Nine each crafted a weapon or tool out of the corpse of their progenitor. They barely used more than half the progenitor god's body to craft into weapons or tools. Some have theorized that a mortal could attain godhood by crafting a divine weapon or tool. I guess your way makes more sense but I needed a hubris way that could almost destroy the universe.

Your stuff is great Person Man. I hope you beat Triangle Man.



Personally, I either go for rather inactive deities (to the point where the difference between a cleric of the God of Cities and one who gains power from their belief in the City Legal Code is hard to see, apart from social status and whatnot) or ones that are involved in a mix of the things I mentioned above. In the distant past, it was possible for deities to slug it out on the mountains of the mortal realm (that's where that oddly-shaped lake came from, by the way - the God of Law fell there after being struck by the God of Conflict), but now doing so is a horrible idea for the same reason that war in a modern world can be; you have too much to lose, little to gain, and if you escalate you can be sure that everyone is going to get involved, you're going to lose almost everything even if you win, and you can't hope for more than coinflip odds of survival.

So instead deities try to work against their enemies by servants and subtle manipulations.

This is well thought out, but I'm not sure I can use this blurb. I only have nine deities. The Nine are almost all everything gods, even if they have specialities so having a god of city codes would be difficult. I had the idea of the Nine making babies and the younger gods have more specialized divine portfolios, but I wanted to stick with Nine to keep things simple. It's good brainstorming though.


TL;DR, but...

It's really quite simple:
Are your gods abstract entities or beings with wants and desires?

I'll skip "abstract", because that doesn't make them terribly interesting and go straight for the more active role.

Agreed, abstract in my opinion is not as fun. They generally want to gain worshipers, annoy or weaken their rivals, and espouse their values (which are not exclusive to their alignment but are closely tied to it).


In that case, for the universe to exist in a state conducive to the pursuit of more than one god's portfolio means there exists some balance. This balance means that the gods wouldn't be able to apply anything more than a light touch anyway, cuz they would be too busy keeping the status quo on their own power-level rather than bothering with the lower rungs(e.g. mortals).

And there's your answer.

Think of it as the anthropic principle of science, but applied to D&D.

That's a good answer. Similar to what Person Man came up with.


I've always been fond of these factors.

The Powers are pieces of a delicate balance in which direct action beyond the scope of their portfolio and worshippers very rapidly becomes a very bad idea. When Hextor sends an aspect to cause trouble, he is doing something very noticeable and opening the door to all kinds of interference from the other Powers, planar exemplars, and really anybody else who can or does take offense to make a similar show of force. More escalation means more interested parties which means you basically never run out of "yeah well I stalemate you like XYZ," until eventually an Overdeity just smacks you for being an idiot. Gods prefer to act indirectly because their rivals and enemies may not notice the full extent of what they're doing and they may actually get away with things.

My over deity is dead. But I guess his dead essence spawns minions which are rumored to be able to kill the Nine and certainly can weaken them, so that constrains them. I'm vaguely pondering adding some elemental gods but that'll be a topic by itself.


Gods embody concepts, ideas, and things, and this means those things need to exist even without them. If Erythnul shows up for every lunatic slaughter, what is he the god of again? Himself? Rather, Erythnul keeps track of every lunatic slaughter, works in his own way to cause more of them, and even shows up when there's an opportunity to do so. Even the Powers of good have a priority interest in the proliferation of their portfolio in the worlds where they work, if only because their portfolios are good things that improve the worlds where they're propagated. Too much divine action results in too little mortal action, and that doesn't work out for beings who are formed of abstracts and powered by prayer.
A corollary of the above two points, divine conflicts are really difficult to win decisively. Two gods hacking away at each other endlessly generally doesn't go anywhere. What does work, at least in theory? Changes in the landscape of the mortal world. Stealing worshipers. Spreading the faith. Etc

Gods do take big fancy actions, when they can. But insofar as there's a balance of power, there's a balance of power, and everybody has competing interests.

I never thought of a slaughter deity comitting slaughter weakening his hold on slaughter. I like your metaphysics!


Do ut des

And my interpretation of it: the gods can't do anything for free, they need payment in the form of sacrifice.

This fits with the D&D cosmology. In some way, clerics and druids live their lives as sacrifices to the gods. It can probably be expanded loosely to let non-clerics call upon the gods (with mixed results) through sacrifices.


I like your reference to futurama. I think you really have something with the "light touch" balance described there.

I'd take the "I don't wanna" method of limiting the gods, but I think what that method is missing is to add what these gods DO want to do.

For the light touch balance to matter, there has to be some objective that gets ruined if mortals become too dependent on gods or if they lose all hope and belief in the gods. These gods must be somehow concerned in the long term development of these mortals, perhaps like raising children.

I figure some of the deities do look on mortals as their children though some prefer a different term than "children." Even if their feelings aren't maternalistic or paternalistic they do see mortals as building blocks to expand on.
.


There's a few ways to approach your questions. There's the Eberron method where the deities are either 1) abstract power sources like the Silver Flame or the Blood of Vol or 2) deities that may or may not actually exist (nobody ever talks to Aureon, not even the creatures like Solars outsiders that claim to serve him).

Reasonable, but not the direction I'm going with.


Another thought is that deities created the universe. They are the sources, the clock makers after a fashion. However the universe can and does function just fine without their direct input. Much like a massive complex clock they can change the way it works by breaking it and rebuilding it, stopping it and changing the parts, or the hardest part is keeping it going while also making changes at the same time. The last option is the hardest way to make changes and requires the most effort on a deities part but it is the one that they prefer because they put all the effort into building the universe so they'd prefer to break things along the way.

Good metaphor. I need to figure out how to use this as a baseline to continue with. Since my Nine deities inherited/stole the universe from their created than greatly expanded adding new amenities such as the sun, moon, agriculture and what not.


The ability to make changes without direct action is using clerics to change the way people view the world, appeasing prayer (say by stopping sea storms for sailors, or ensuring a good harvest by sending the right amount of gentle rain and the right weather), or if they want to make a big impression sending an exarch (that is to say a powerful divine servant).

That's another thing I'm dancing around exarchs though I call them spirits. Extra planar outsiders. Some I plan to lift straight from the Monsters Manual, some I plan to modify a bit, some I'm working on creating from scratch. I figure these divine servants would come in a wide variety of power levels, I just need to figure out how common to make them.

I figured spirits would have a wide variety of rules but I came up with two basic types. Deogenic spirits (may come up with a less nerdy, Latin name) are spirits that are born from a tiny piece of one of the gods. The gods themselves have very broad portfolios with many aspects to their personalities but their deogenic spirits have very narrow portfolios. They generally do one thing, or a small number of related things. Protect one area, heal people the god likes, issue prophecies, etc. The second type of spirits I'm calling exemplars. These are the souls of deceased mortals one of the Nine decided to empower with divine energy. I figure exemplars and deogenic spirits wouldn't necessarily be more or less powerful than each other (that's what Challenge Ratings are for) but exemplars would be more creative, more multifaceted, more able to make autonomous decisions and act as major characters, be they allies, mentors, or major villains. Deogenic spirits would basically be random encounters or red shirts.


So in the long run deities can make direct, powerful and massive changes to the universe should they choose to do so, but run the risk of causing irreparable damage so they prefer to act through agents. Even an evil god of slaughter doesn't want to blow up the universe completely (I'm assume you don't have a deity that breaks the fourth wall anyways), since that means no more things they like are happening. They recognize that for their own needs there has to be some base level of stability, and would actively work with the other deities if something threatened the existence of the universe (lets say the Far Realm or some equivalent)

None of my gods want to destroy the universe, no. Two out of three of the Evil gods would be willing to turn the universe into a burned out ruin if they could somehow guarantee they were the one ruling over the ruins, but they won't try that without some guarantee of success. All the Nine fear that if the world gets destroyed their old progenitor might be resurrected and all nine of them agree they don't want that since that would probably kill them all.


What do deities want? At the base level they want stability in their own spheres of influence. The deity of nature wants nature to at the very least not be encroached upon any more that is already has, and will work against a deity that supports civilization or cities or whatever if that deity pushes to hard again them.

Agreed in concept. But in this case my Nature god is also my agriculture god, so he is kind of at war with himself on the civilization thing.


If planning an encounter with goblins, why just stick to the basics? You can add class levels, give them magic items, throw in a bugbear, etc. No reason to stick to the trivially simple solution when you can dig as deep into the subject as you want.

My post was meant to lead us to consider the possible complexity and intrigue of asking what deities might want, not default to bog standard tropes.

I'm not sure I understand your goblin metaphor here.


It's definitely an interesting question, and one I've had to poke at myself while writing my own perpetually half-baked world cosmology. My personal complicating factor involves another Riordan trope, the idea that the 'gods' can only show a fraction of their true power to a mortal without destroying them/driving them insane; in my specific case, there are dozens of 'gods' mortals know+worship, with the same tiny handful of cosmic-grade entities behind all of them (and not even the same one, as who fuels which god can change behind the scenes from time to time).

I really like the Riordan trope of the sight of their true power destroying mortals but that only works in Riordan's universe. For all their squabbles the Greek Olympians of that metaverse on the same side, they are family members. The last thing I want to do is give my Chaotic Evil and Lawful Good deities an instant kill button to obliterate their enemies followers. Though I can use the basic concept of their unrestrained power causing unwanted collateral damage.


At a surface level, my excuse was primarily the 'limits themselves' sort. My cosmic entities are powerful enough that exerting their full strength causes damage to the structure of reality, weakening the barriers that prevent Far Realms-esque horrors from flooding through and eating everything. I've toyed with meta-physical limitations of the 'God Needs Prayer Badly' flavor, but could never really make up my mind for much the same reasons you've listed.

Which is exactly what you covered! Excellent. IN this case I call Far Realms-esque horrors "Void Demons."



I think I got enough to work with so I can come up with good meta explanations beyond "the plot demands it" to expand or contract divine meddling.

Darth Ultron
2018-05-06, 11:34 PM
Well, based on the bulk ton of fiction over the years, I do it this way:

1. Mortals will never understand what gods and cosmic beings ''really'' do and can only really understand the tip of the iceberg.
2. The multiverse has rules built into it that says what will or won't happen, and some of them are created and put their for some reason or another.
3. The gods, and others, have over time made a great many pacts, agreements, treaties and so forth for infinite time. So there is quite a load of this in the multiverse.
4. Gods, despite alliances, are all out for themselves. They look for any way to increase their power, that does not risk what they have already.
5. The Gods must avoid most direct action as they are literally Giants in a Playground. Even a slight action by a god can blow up a whole kingdom, and more then that take out a whole world.
6.A god can't put too much time/effort/energy into any one thing as they must always maintain their sphere, support their faithful and most of all watch their own backs.
7.A god gets power from all their faithful, living and dead. They have to keep careful watch on this flow of power.
8.At any one time a god is doing a dozen things at once, so they can't overly focus on one thing.
9.Gods play the long game of eternity. They will take 1,000 to build a single thing.
10.Gods have to be careful to keep their faithful vaguely worshiping them, and not just asking for orders.

Pleh
2018-05-07, 12:32 PM
I'm not sure I understand your goblin metaphor here.

Well, here:


1. Mortals will never understand what gods and cosmic beings ''really'' do and can only really understand the tip of the iceberg.

This is clearly a cop out from actually giving deities personal motivation. It's justified, but a little too easy, imo. Same as bog standard vanilla goblin encounters. The fact that goblins have been done to death is actually good reason to do some extra work with them to make their encounters more complex.

The "unknowable deities" is an overused trope that mostly is used to avoid having to do any work rather than benefit the setting. I'm trying to suggest adding character to these beings and working from the ground up to justify their actions.

Erythnul is a good example, but Nerull is a better one. What does Nerull want? Death to all mortals? All those souls would go to their respective afterlife (he doesn't get to keep what he kills), so that's just booting mortals out of the material plane. How does he profit? Is it the suffering and anguish of the dying? He's the god of death, not the god of anguish and suffering (maybe those as well, but the #1 is supposed to be death).

If he kills all mortal life, does his power go away now that there is no one left to die? That would make him a god of balance, needing to keep a particular rate of death, not too little or too much. But it feels to me to detract from how mortals fear to utter his name because attracting his attention is like jumping in front of a moving train. To keep his character of being the murdering god, I'd want him killing at every opportunity. A god of death concerned with keeping life from extinction just feels to me like it's just the "black" component of the divine rainbow. Such deities have no ambition beyond maintaining status quo, which is boring and bland to me. If he's a god of death, let him go all in on it.

Let Nerull's power come from absence of life rather than loss of life. Everywhere he goes he is motivated to destroy as much life as possible. For him, a sterile universe is one he has under his absolute control. Booting all mortals to their afterlives might not give him souls or worshipers, but it gives him huge power over the material plane. He is a god of the apocalyptic wasteland and that's what he wants the world to look like (or, at least for my thought experiment version of him).

Erythnal, being god of slaughter, actually IS concerned with loss of life rather merely its absence. This means he wants a world trapped in endless bloodshed and turmoil. Unlike Nerull, who is cold and calculating like a cosmic assassin, Erythnal is spontaneous and half crazy, so he might not be thinking very far into the future. If Nerull asks him to help snuff out all life in the material plane, probably Erythnal rejects him. But if Nerull proposes a war to end the world, Erythnal might not be able to resist carnage of that magnitude, blinded to the possibility of fading out of existence thereafter. Maybe to him the thrill of that climax might be worth the cost.

These are just examples of what I think of when I'm creating god motivations. For me, the divine motive has to be logical in isolation as well as in the social dynamics of the pantheon. When I see a pantheon of gods built solely to be equal and opposing alignments, they just look less like they're in command of a domain of reality (except by coincidence) and more like they're placeholders in the cosmic wheel.

Beleriphon
2018-05-07, 12:42 PM
My over deity is dead. But I guess his dead essence spawns minions which are rumored to be able to kill the Nine and certainly can weaken them, so that constrains them. I'm vaguely pondering adding some elemental gods but that'll be a topic by itself.



That's another thing I'm dancing around exarchs though I call them spirits. Extra planar outsiders. Some I plan to lift straight from the Monsters Manual, some I plan to modify a bit, some I'm working on creating from scratch. I figure these divine servants would come in a wide variety of power levels, I just need to figure out how common to make them.

I figured spirits would have a wide variety of rules but I came up with two basic types. Deogenic spirits (may come up with a less nerdy, Latin name) are spirits that are born from a tiny piece of one of the gods. The gods themselves have very broad portfolios with many aspects to their personalities but their deogenic spirits have very narrow portfolios. They generally do one thing, or a small number of related things. Protect one area, heal people the god likes, issue prophecies, etc. The second type of spirits I'm calling exemplars. These are the souls of deceased mortals one of the Nine decided to empower with divine energy. I figure exemplars and deogenic spirits wouldn't necessarily be more or less powerful than each other (that's what Challenge Ratings are for) but exemplars would be more creative, more multifaceted, more able to make autonomous decisions and act as major characters, be they allies, mentors, or major villains. Deogenic spirits would basically be random encounters or red shirts.

Sounds like D&D outsiders and exarchs. To use a pretty clear example that is exactly what I think you're going for Fzoul Chembryl (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Fzoul_Chembryl) was Bane's high priest and upon his death was elevated to a divine status and immense supernatural power. Basically Fzoul isn't a deity per se, but possesses at least some of the reality altering abilities of a true deity. For those types of creatures/characters you might want to look exemplars being granted control of a very specific aspect of their patron's sphere of influence, lets say trees or cacti from a nature deity.


None of my gods want to destroy the universe, no. Two out of three of the Evil gods would be willing to turn the universe into a burned out ruin if they could somehow guarantee they were the one ruling over the ruins, but they won't try that without some guarantee of success. All the Nine fear that if the world gets destroyed their old progenitor might be resurrected and all nine of them agree they don't want that since that would probably kill them all.

Certainly in line with what I was thinking as far as what they might actively want.

PairO'Dice Lost
2018-05-07, 03:29 PM
One way to view the non-interaction issue is to think of your campaign setting as an absolutely huge, nine-player free-for-all game of Starcraft 2, and since we're talking about gods who can intervene directly if they want to, let's give them the calldowns and hero units from Co-Op mode, too. (Substitute in another RTS of choice if you prefer, the metaphor still works.)

In the beginning of the game, everyone starts on equal footing with the same set of resources and no alliances. Each player has just a handful of workers and shortly thereafter a handful of combat units, so micromanagement is easy--send this probe to build this building, send that marine to scout that plateau, and so on--and they can sit there watching their cooldown counters tick down and their mineral counter tick up to build units and use powers at the perfect time.

Eventually everyone has scouted everyone else and knows what the others are doing, and it's time to make some plans. The Good gods have a non-aggression pact, the Lawful gods plan out a complex strategy over chat, the N god and the CN god make a secret deal, and so on, and everyone starts building their army. Players can still micromanage units, but when you have four groups of units doing four different things in four different places, you have to pay attention to four different scenarios and quickly switch between them, so your attention and control suffers. You can't necessarily perfectly time your buildings anymore, just queue up units and upgrades and hope things are done in time. And the gods are dealing with thousands of "units," then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and more rather than just 200, so the problem is vastly amplified.

Later still, resources and access begin to become an issue. The Evil gods have expanded quite a bit, greedily grabbing more minerals and gas; the Lawful gods have built an interlocking defensive line preventing enemies from getting into their territory. Each god can still take out any other god, but it requires expending lots of resources and focusing attention there, which detracts from everything else they're planning. And of course each god is part of multiple groups, so they're juggling priorities as well.

When one god attacks another's base, it's tempting for both to send in the hero units and unload all the calldowns. But if the defender uses all of that power now, then they're screwed if the attack is a feint, the attacker has a second wave, the attacker has an ally coming from a different direction, and the like, and if the attacker uses all of that power now then their base is vulnerable to a counterattack from the defender and/or the defender's allies while the attacker is distracted. So each player saves up that power until the very last second, and maybe doesn't use it at all if the attack isn't bad enough.

When the late game rolls around and all nine players are still in the game, you have what you have and that's it. Minerals are depleted, upgrades are at their maximum, and if a player loses an army there's no guarantee they can rebuild it to full strength--or even build more units at all. From tossing scouts away for information to sending large assault waves to carefully shepherding small armies, the game slows down and each player becomes more tentative. Any clash could be the one that tips the scales, and no one wants to be the one who loses that key battle.

And at that point, with resources drained and unit numbers static, the only renewable resource is the energy that caster and hero units have, so the players will keep the closest eye on them. (Calldown energy is still a thing, but saving that for a last-ditch defense is more important than ever.) It's not that zealots, zerglings, and marines aren't important, exactly, but losing one high templar, swarm host, or raven is a much bigger hit than a handful of weaker units. So the game simmers down into a cold war and the players settle in for the long haul.


So the gods hesitate to interact directly because of split attention and an unwillingness to expend divine power and leave themselves vulnerable, they were more active before because their attention and resources were much less limited, and they prefer to act through divine casters because empowering them is much easier and less resource-intensive than using power directly.

Kelb_Panthera
2018-05-09, 02:34 AM
I actually found the (slightly disturbing) answer to this in the mass of lore surrounding the cannon D&D 3.5 Great Wheel cosmology. Since that's the cosmology I use (with slight modification), that's the answer I'll give.

It's just good old MAD.

For any of the gods to hold their power, the blood war must continue. If the demons win, they overrun and devour everything. If the devils win, they conquer even the gods with the power they were granted by -half- of the gods in the Pact Primeval near the beginning of time. For the status quo in the lower planes to be maintained, enough souls have to continue to be converted to devils to hold the endless tide of demons at bay.

At the same time, the gods all need to gather and hold worshippers to fuel their own power which is near directly proportional to their flock.

Now, the gods -could- go directly to war with one another. There's no metaphysical force or overdeity stopping them. If they did so, however, their conflicting forces and personal might would utterly lay waste to the material plane and the overwhelming majority of mortals would be crushed underfoot. This would leave the gods' power severely depleted, no matter who ultimately wins, and the devils way behind the 8-ball with the sudden, drastic reduction in troop production. It would leave everything on the verge of a horrific, demonic Armageddon if, somehow, they managed to avoid plunging headlong into it.

Consequently, all parties invested keep their hands well back from the prime itself (other than the devils who are -strictly- bound by their agreement with the gods). Instead they act through proxies and their respective religions. They send signs and heralds simply because they can't -afford- to act more directly. The cosmic machinery that sustains them all is too delicate to do otherwise.

Occasionally you get a destruction deity with a wild hair up his butt and you get a "save the world from the mad god" campaign but otherwise the necessary tension keeps it all precariously together.

Glorthindel
2018-05-09, 05:15 AM
Personally, I feel a lot of it can be answered by just having the gods operate on a different timescale to humankind.

The gods have existed for millennia. What is a week, even a year, to a being who has existed for several hundred thousand years? To them, a year could pass in what would seem like an hour or a minute to a human. It is like a Human examining the lifespan of an a nest of ants or bees. A god takes a long weekend off for a bit of R&R or to romance another diety, and by the time he has gone back to paying attention, every Human that was alive when he last looked is dead. Certainly the gods can get involved for a few hours (like us if a serious event requires swift attention), but they can't and wont want to maintain the level of full attention, constantly keeping track of the tiny insects running around at what would be an exhausting pace to them.

JoeJ
2018-05-09, 10:15 PM
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. Maybe the universe doesn't have an autopilot. The gods are actively involved in the day-to-day minutia of keeping the world going and if they take too much time away from that rain won't fall where it's supposed to, plants won't grow, the sun will stop mid-journey, things will stop dying, etc. Basically, the god have to spend most of their time just keeping the world going.

Knightofvictory
2018-05-12, 10:06 AM
I do a combination of these, based on various mythologies and other fantasys:

1. The gods have lost their admin privileges. Through powerful creation magic, once the world got to a certain point, the gods collectively closed the door on the universe, and while they can watch it though the windows, and speak to their followers (maybe send outsiders, messengers, miracles) they can't get in. Worshipers are the gods hands and fingers, despite creating everything, they can no longer edit the world themselves.

2. The world is a chessboard. The gods all collectively play the game they have agreed to, and stick to the rules, mostly. They move their clerics around strategically like pieces, and may only directly intervene in the world when certain conditions are met (praying for spells, the moon hits a certain phase in a holy place, etc.) Any god could come in and flip the table, cheat and smash all the pieces they don't like, but then the other gods won't play with them any more (maybe the others collectively kill or imprison gods that don't follow the rules).

3. The world is a stage. Gods find their creation to be a great source of amusement and/or comfort. They don't want to do everything for their followers, because they want to see their creations grow and thrive based on their own wisdom. Helping their follows do everything ruins the drama, makes their people weak and entitled, etc. The gods take pride when their followers succeed on their own with just a nudge, while doing the whole holy quest thing for them kills all the suspense and bores the gods.