5e Godhood is Mandatory

[BerzerkerUnit]

So this is a homebrew campaign concept. I’ll be fleshing it out for my players when my Contest of Royalty is complete.

Here’s the ultrashort gist:
Players are heroes on the road to godhood. They are stuck in a time loop and have to “answer prayers” to advance the plot. Answering a prayer can be “flagged” as the new “save point” or left in flux. Failure can undo many successes, dice/Fate makes it impossible to perfectly replicate previous successes. The only hitch is they retain all the XP/levels they acquired from their previous run.

I think this is almost a Dnd roguelike?

Plot:
The current gods are old. The Divine is supposed to work in concert with Fate to “make the universe happen.” This is accomplished at its most basic level by helping mortals manifest their desires. That means answering prayers. Sometimes answering a prayer will have unintended consequences, so you can roll it back by deliberately failing someone else. Rolling back costs time, some degrees of success, etc. To those that have done it for eons, it’s exhausting and they’re passing on the mantle so they can go to some far shore.

The PCs are level 3 when it begins. Heroes by any measure and wake up in a timeloop. They have to convince this adult black dragon to move since it’s poisoning the land. This is an insurmountable challenge when they start, but after a few failures they’ll discover certain information they can use to negotiate with the dragon.

They can choose to set their first flag when the dragon departs. From there they can travel, no matter where they go key NPCs have motivations, some good, some evil. Eventually they’ll discover “the Hate” a pantheon of apostate god candidates that think mortals are crap and the world should burn. They reveal that reboots “consume time’s candle at both ends” and they endeavor to burn out the universe.

The PCs have no idea these reboots are happening, so it’s added motivation to set more flags and keep the universe chugging along.

However, they are growing more powerful, gaining enemies in their own right, enemies that can gum up their prayer answering.

in some cases, answering a prayer “perfectly” creates problems they may want to go fix later. So it makes players think about how to monkey’s paw the NPCs.

Example: a guy wants them to kill all the goblins in an old fort. They do, then that guy moves in a bunch of mercs and stages a coup. So maybe the players reboot, kill all the goblins, but animate them and hide the zombies and skeletons so when the mercs set up shop they get ambushed making the coup fail.

Or maybe they just send a message with a warning about the coup and the mercenary base location.

Any thoughts?

[Garfunion]

I’m a bit confused with what you what to do with this idea.
Let’s me see what I can understand.

•The universe is like a candle burning at both ends.
•The “good” gods are retiring and have chosen the PCs to take their place.
•But the PCs need to answer a dozen or so prayers to help extend the life of the universe. •After doing this they can one day become the new gods.
•However there is an “evil” god group trying to reduce the life span of the universe.
•The PCs have a way to travel back in time to a certain way point.
•Doing so will cost the players something.


I will say this right now if the players have to actually go through the combat of killing goblins over and over again I think the players will burn out before the PCs.

[Anymage]

Agreeing with Garfunion. Having to Groundhog Day certain fights sounds like it would be just as much fun as living through the Groundhog Day loop was in the movie.

There's a core of a cool idea here if you were to have a system that worked better with it. Fights would have to be handwaved a lot more easily, since this is fundamentally a time travel game where you try not to spend too much universe power save scumming or having to undo monkey paw problems. But since combats and similar encounters are so core to D&D and take up so much table time, having to keep redoing things with progressively buffer characters sounds like it would be putting a lot of time and attention on things that are tangential to the core ideas.

[BerzerkerUnit]

Just did a level 14 one shot for this campaign idea.
Used Max HP for major enemies, normal for adds
Highlights:
Encounter 1: Demilich and harengon mage.
Round one: Demilich comes out and screams. Paladin goes down to 0, attempts 1&2.

Attempt 1- round 3, Wizard’s simulacrum gets undone when lair action antimagic field is centered on it.

Attempt 2 is a hard won success, players immediately move to brute forcing exploration and trigger 4 spell runes for fireballs and lightning bolts. Wizard decides to wipe party forcing a start from square 1 to preserve the simulacrum.

Attempt 3- honest to god strategy is employed and witchknight absolutely dominates demilich. I think they took no damage.

Encounter 2- Fire Giant Mummy Lord, mummies and Gelatinous cube.
Round 1: Mummies obliterated.
Round 3: Cube nerfs Wizard hard after mummies are obliterated and mummy lord almost wiped out.

Round 5: mechanized sarcophagus transforms into stonegolem, collects remains of mummy lord, puts them back together and returns to start position.

Players wisely steal Canopic jars and destroy the organs.

There were two more possible encounters and a couple of treasures. The Dragon was being attacked by Mindflayers, of players interfere dragon would give them the key allowing access to another treasure vault without further battle. Since they skipped it the dragon would later show up as a brain dragon from fizban’s.

I had a ton of fun running it, I had two players so one grew frustrated in the middle because their stuff kept getting blown up. When they got to reset that hard won 2nd attempt, they sent the simulacrum out of the room before it hit the fan, buffed their ally to prevent another round 1 drop, and the fight was cake. They even used the AMF against the Demilich, preventing its actions and legendaries for a round.

Then used what they’d learned to navigate the trapped doors. It was good.

[BerzerkerUnit]

Agreeing with Garfunion. Having to Groundhog Day certain fights sounds like it would be just as much fun as living through the Groundhog Day loop was in the movie.

There's a core of a cool idea here if you were to have a system that worked better with it. Fights would have to be handwaved a lot more easily, since this is fundamentally a time travel game where you try not to spend too much universe power save scumming or having to undo monkey paw problems. But since combats and similar encounters are so core to D&D and take up so much table time, having to keep redoing things with progressively buffer characters sounds like it would be putting a lot of time and attention on things that are tangential to the core ideas.

I had a player say there needed to be a way to abbreviate fights they’d won, and I can’t disagree more. The fights aren’t puzzles with one solution, and creatures don’t follow scripts though patterns will emerge: round 1 is likely to be same actions depending on initiative order, but after that, variables spiral out of control. The game is about using what’s present and what you brought to make the best of it, and if you did well but could do better, you have the option of wiping and trying to no-scope 360 it at the risk of the dice going against you.

And this is part of what the PCs struggle is about.

One solution: you keep some NPC weenie alive through the fight and then drag them around forcing them to pray for survival. Every time they survive, you can set a new save. If you don’t like the result, you kill them. It’s harder, but it prevents you from having to redo multiple fights. It also makes you an absolute monster, but maybe as a god you are beyond that sort of thing (you’re not).

When the Wizard opted to ace the unconscious Paladin and blow himself up to reboot for a 3rd try, it was the kind of thing that explained why pantheons are filled with internecine squabbling.

Altogether, it worked pretty well this time. I think it will work even better starting at lower level, allowing PCs to invest in the world and its people, and experience things a little differently. Like building up that habit of using information gained later to avoid or easily overcome a challenge. Example: some ambushes are only challenging bc they’re ambushes. A fireball into “the abandoned camp” will probably end a fight before it begins.