What Was Girard Draketooth's Issue With the 12?

[Lacuna Caster]

Not necessarily. Gods themselves aren't making grand gestures that would cause people to worship them directly. Like Roy said, he figured as long as he didn't actively offend the gods, they'd leave him alone. I can see that being a not-uncommon method of thinking.

My point is that either the setting would not work this way, and if it is being asserted to work this way then the setting doesn't make a lot of sense. The Gods have every reason to incentivise mortals to worship them directly, both before and after death, because otherwise they go hungry and die.

And what makes you think that's Thor and not Tyr or Dvalin?

I don't know. Maybe 33% of dwarves each do worship those deities, or maybe we can just toss it on the pile of "things that don't make sense about the setting".

Damn, one would almost expect them to check whether the applicants are LG. Maybe with some sort of lengthy review process going over their life or something.

Yes, that's my point. People are arguing that 'being lawful good' is enough to get you into heaven even without faith in a specific deity, but being LG by itself is clearly not good enough. It would be perfectly possible for the Gods to just tell their devas to turn away the faithless if that system was to their advantage.

Or maybe that society more closely resemble the 21st century secular societies than you think? You are blaming the comic for not being something it has no interest in being, you understand that?

All criticisms of a story are in some sense requests for a different story. This isn't a rebuttal of criticism.

I realise that there are always going to be some creaky elements when a relatively light and playful comic narrative gets shoehorned into a larger epic fantasy world, but this doesn't mean critics aren't entitled to point out the creakiness.

[hamishspence]

For all the reasons I went over before. You can love them or hate them, but they still pull the strings of the Celestial Bureaucracy and to a large extent decide who counts as naughty or nice. (The argument that Being Lawful Good is enough to permit entrance to Celestia is clearly false, for example, or the Astral Devas would just be waving everyone who pings LG past the pearly gates.)

People are arguing that 'being lawful good' is enough to get you into heaven even without faith in a specific deity, but being LG by itself is clearly not good enough.

That's not about "whether a character pings" - that's about whether the character's true alignment matches "the alignment they wrote on their character sheet", metaphorically speaking.

Roy genuinely believes he is "truly Lawful Good" - the review is an assessment to see whether Roy's belief is correct.

[Lacuna Caster]

That's not about "whether a character pings" - that's about whether the character's true alignment matches "the alignment they wrote on their character sheet", metaphorically speaking.

If you want to discern someone's true alignment, you use Detect X spells. Either that true alignment is decided by the underlying forces of the universe and the devas' post-mortem assessment is superfluous, or alignment is being decided by the celestial bureaucracy and continuously updated over a person's lifetime, in which case there's no need to rehash the work once the person is dead. The only purpose of the pre-afterlife interview would be to kick people out (or let people in) for reasons other than their alignment.

[hamishspence]

If you want to discern someone's true alignment, you use Detect X spells.

Not necessarily. Detect spells can give wrong answers. For undead, for example. Regardless of a ghost's actual alignment, it will detect as Evil.

The only purpose of the pre-afterlife interview would be to kick people out (or let people in) for reasons other than their alignment.

The Giant actually stated that "to see Roy's true alignment" was what the review was for:

There are only 17 Outer Planes; Roy's alignment would have to match one of them, because you can't not have an alignment. The deva only got "first look" because Lawful Good was the alignment Roy declared himself to be. It was his goal, and the review was to see if he had really met that goal. If he didn't, that would mean he actually had some other alignment, in which case the powers-that-be on that plane would have been happy to have him. Generally speaking, a character who really is alignment X on the inside will be admitted to plane X with no problems, except in certain special circumstances (Eugene, for example).

[Fyraltari]

The Gods have every reason to incentivise mortals to worship them directly, both before and after death, because otherwise they go hungry and die.

And given that there are mortals who do worship them, then they most likely do. Else why would those mortals worship the gods?

I don't know. Maybe 33% of dwarves each do worship those deities, or maybe we can just toss it on the pile of "things that don't make sense about the setting".

Why wouldn't it make sense? "Thor is popular among the dwarves because he told them how not to be tortured forever" makes plenty of sense.

Yes, that's my point. People are arguing that 'being lawful good' is enough to get you into heaven even without faith in a specific deity, but being LG by itself is clearly not good enough.

How is that "clearly" not good enough when the whole point of Roy's interview was to check whether he was Loyal Good?

It would be perfectly possible for the Gods to just tell their devas to turn away the faithless if that system was to their advantage.

The gods didn't design the afterlives' system. The faithless aren't sent to them in the first place.

All criticisms of a story are in some sense requests for a different story. This isn't a rebuttal of criticism.

Right, but you are stating that the comic makes no sense for failing to adress your assumptions about things the comic doesn't even try to explore. It's one thing to complain that the economy in A Song of Ice and Fire makes no sense whatsoever, it's another to ask how Superman can lift planets when his muscles are about as developped as a bodybuilder's.
Edit: Superman isn't a good example since there are no good answers to that. A better one would be "How could Sherlock Holmes not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the opposite, that makes no sense!" There are ways Holmes could have never been taught that, but the books don't explain it, because Conan Doyle wasn't writing about Holmes' school days.

[Dion]

The Gods have every reason to incentivise mortals to worship them directly, both before and after death, because otherwise they go hungry and die.

And apparently they also have reasons not to provide those incentives.

It boils down to you saying “given very limited set of rules I know about, the correct way for the gods to min-max their power levels is to do a specific thing”, and then complaining when the thing isn’t shown in the comic.

Maybe there are other rules you don’t know about.

Maybe the gods don’t care to min-max.

Maybe the gods do the thing you say, and you don’t see it?

I feel like you’re picking on things with incredibly limited information, and jumping to conclusions without evidence.

[Lacuna Caster]

And given that there are mortals who do worship them, then they most likely do. Else why would those mortals worship the gods?

{scrubbed} My beef is not with whatever percentage of mortals do worship Gods, it's with why the Gods would tolerate anyone not worshipping them when harvesting worship was the whole point of creating the world in the first place.

Not necessarily. Detect spells can give wrong answers. For undead, for example. Regardless of a ghost's actual alignment, it will detect as Evil.

Then use whatever epic-level magic was installed to allow Eugene to scry at will on the material plane to create a Perfect And Infallible Actual True Alignment Detector. (In a sense this is what the planes already are, since souls already intrinsically gravitate toward whichever plane their soul is most attuned to, which makes the whole setup doubly redundant.)

This is not a universe where subjective moral judgments count for much (or where self-deception is even really sustainable.) You either take extra damage from smite evil or you don't, the well-intentioned extremists are not immune to this. Paladins either lose their powers or they don't, regardless of how much conviction in the justice of their actions they might hold (as has been pointed out extensively.) Monks and Barbarians and Druids and Clerics face alignment restrictions, and they suffer damage from Dictum or Word of Chaos as appropriate. Their opinions on the topic do not matter except to the extent that opinion may drive behaviour that accords with a given true alignment.

The Giant actually stated that "to see Roy's true alignment" was what the review was for:

I am aware of why the author wrote the scene. I am pointing out this is totally superfluous within the context of D&D's pre-existing metaphysical framework. Either the work of review was already done, or it never needed doing in the first place.

[Dion]

it's with why the Gods would tolerate anyone not worshipping them when harvesting worship was the whole point of creating the world in the first place.

They seem to get the worship they need now; if they’re getting what they need, why would they do all the extra work you suggest they should do?

I don’t think the “maximize shareholder value at any cost” idea you seem to promote has any utility beyond a very limited set of capital markets.

Since the gods don’t seem to exist on a stock exchange, then I don’t think any of your ideas apply.

[Lacuna Caster]

They seem to get the worship they need now; if they’re getting what they need, why would they do all the extra work you suggest they should do?

To jockey for relative position, to have more divine calories with which to benefit their mortal followers and clerics, and just possibly to incentivise mortals doing all the stuff they regard as the correct thing to do.

Right, but you are stating that the comic makes no sense for failing to adress your assumptions about things the comic doesn't even try to explore. It's one thing to complain that the economy in A Song of Ice and Fire makes no sense whatsoever, it's another to ask how Superman can lift planets when his muscles are about as developed as a bodybuilder's...

I am not demanding that Rich Burlew bring his work to a screeching halt, go back and spend fifteen years rewriting his opus to conform with ]{scrubbed}, any more than I would demand that George RR Martin go back and rewrite his opus to conform with Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. But if GRRM (or his TV series adaptation) were to depict characters travelling with suspicious rapidity around several enormous continents in ways that appeared to be impossible in earlier books and chapters, I would expect that criticisms to this effect would be noted as valid and legitimate and not dismissed with facile tautologies, even if it's too late to do much about it now.

.

[Fyraltari]

{scrub the post, scrub the quote}

{scrubbed}

My beef is not with whatever percentage of mortals do worship Gods, it's with why the Gods would tolerate anyone not worshipping them when harvesting worship was the whole point of creating the world in the first place.

Because they already have enough and it's not worth the extra effort. Because the faithless souls power up Cosmic Forces of Good, Evil, Chaos and Law and the assorted Outsiders and the Gods think it's better to those around. Because their anti-Snarl rules prevent them from acting to directly on the Material Plane. Because the Good gods don't want to and the Neutral gods think it'd be bad PR. Because having a large group of non believers to potentially rally to their cause mean the other gods are less likely to try to convert their flock. Because the faith has to be genuine to count and some people just won't ever be fit to worship the gods. Pick however many reasons you like.

Then use whatever epic-level magic was installed to allow Eugene to scry at will on the material plane to create a Perfect And Infallible Actual True Alignment Detector.

That's probably how they got the data the Deva is analysing.

[woweedd]

{scrub the post, scrub the quote} My beef is not with whatever percentage of mortals do worship Gods, it's with why the Gods would tolerate anyone not worshipping them when harvesting worship was the whole point of creating the world in the first place.


Then use whatever epic-level magic was installed to allow Eugene to scry at will on the material plane to create a Perfect And Infallible Actual True Alignment Detector. (In a sense this is what the planes already are, since souls already intrinsically gravitate toward whichever plane their soul is most attuned to, which makes the whole setup doubly redundant.)

This is not a universe where subjective moral judgments count for much (or where self-deception is even really sustainable.) You either take extra damage from smite evil or you don't, the well-intentioned extremists are not immune to this. Paladins either lose their powers or they don't, regardless of how much conviction in the justice of their actions they might hold (as has been pointed out extensively.) Monks and Barbarians and Druids and Clerics face alignment restrictions, and they suffer damage from Dictum or Word of Chaos as appropriate. Their opinions on the topic do not matter except to the extent that opinion may drive behaviour that accords with a given true alignment.


I am aware of why the author wrote the scene. I am pointing out this is totally superfluous within the context of D&D's pre-existing metaphysical framework. Either the work of review was already done, or it never needed doing in the first place.

Yes, it would be stupid if that was the case, if Detect Alignment was all you really needed to determine someone's true nature. So, logically, we can conclude it is in fact, not. That, or you're asserting that you, rando ono the Internet, know this system then the people who have, in-universe, been running it for literal millenia. In general, I find critiques of the nature
And, as for why they don't...My assumption was that faithless souls DO power the Gods, they jsut power all the Gods, of whatever plane they're on, rather then powered one and only one. And, being as not all Gods are Hel, it's entirely possible some of them decide that jealously guarding their own power like that is something they shouldn't do, either because they want their ally gods to get power too, or because it'll piss off other Gods. Hel kinda gives a skewed view, but not all Gods are concerned solely and entirely with their own power and nothing else.

[Dion]

I would expect that criticisms to this effect would be noted as valid and legitimate ...

But it is invalid.

Nobody’s enjoyment of OotS hinges on whether or not the gods min-max their builds like a bunch of middle school D&D dice rollers.

Criticism that the gods don’t min-max isn’t addressing anything that the author or or the readers care about.

[hamishspence]

My assumption was that faithless souls DO power the Gods, they jsut power all the Gods, of whatever plane they're on, rather then powered one and only one.

As was mentioned here:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1144.html

mortals are capable of contributing 4 things "to the gods and the cosmos" - worship is only one of them.

Roy has contributed 1 of the 3 things he can contribute in life - by "knowing the gods exist".

[Precure]

My point is that either the setting would not work this way, and if it is being asserted to work this way then the setting doesn't make a lot of sense. The Gods have every reason to incentivise mortals to worship them directly, both before and after death, because otherwise they go hungry and die.

Look, I'm not going to engage with you if you're not making a good-faith effort to acknowledge the point here. My beef is not with whatever percentage of mortals do worship Gods, it's with why the Gods would tolerate anyone not worshipping them when harvesting worship was the whole point of creating the world in the first place.

But what are you expecting them to do? As long as there is free will, there has to be people who doesn't care about the gods.

[Lacuna Caster]

Because they already have enough and it's not worth the extra effort.

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

Because the faithless souls power up Cosmic Forces of Good, Evil, Chaos and Law and the assorted Outsiders and the Gods think it's better to those around. Because their anti-Snarl rules prevent them from acting to directly on the Material Plane. Because the Good gods don't want to and the Neutral gods think it'd be bad PR. Because having a large group of non believers to potentially rally to their cause mean the other gods are less likely to try to convert their flock. Because the faith has to be genuine to count and some people just won't ever be fit to worship the gods...

It is incoherent to argue that some people will be outright impossible to convert and that the Gods need to make special provisions to ensure that the faithless exist. (In any case, that's more the situation with Belkar than Roy.)

Pick however many reasons you like.

...No. I don't think I will. Because it's not my job to rewrite the author's story to make sense.

Yes, it would be stupid if that was the case, if Detect Alignment was all you really needed to determine someone's true nature. So, logically, we can conclude it is in fact, not...

Maybe you think D&D is a stupid setting, or a stupid game, or a stupid set of metaphysical assumptions. I can see arguments for it. Nevertheless, this is in fact how it works in a D&D setting, and you can't really extricate that from OOTS without rendering it unrecognisable.

[Dion]

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

Yawn. Sounds like effort, and probably reduces the gods enjoyment of being gods.

Ugh. Who wants to min-max like that all the time? So tiresome. Not me, if I was a god.

And it’s not like being a god is some cutthroat libertarian market where only the most ruthless profit motivated gods survive. There’s super high barriers to entry, and they have a monopoly on it. They can be inefficient without repercussions.

It’s not like they have a bunch of taxi medallions and Uber is going to eat their lunch. They’re *gods*.

[hamishspence]

Hel's malnutrition (from having to subsist on Belief without Worship or Dedication) may be something the gods haven't encountered before, to this extent.

[Lacuna Caster]

Yawn. Sounds like effort, and probably reduces the gods enjoyment of being gods.

Ugh. Who wants to min-max like that all the time? So tiresome.

I'm sure the task of surviving on accumulated belief over millions of years gets pretty tiresome, yes. Nevertheless, you either do this at least as well as your competitors or you cease to exist.

[Dion]

. Nevertheless, you either do this at least as well as your competitors or you cease to exist.

Citation needed.

[hamishspence]

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

Perhaps The Book prevents them from doing it. The deva tells Roy that his "lack of piety" isn't an issue:


https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0490.html


so why would the gods necessarily be able to rewrite The Book?

[Mic_128]

My point is that either the setting would not work this way, and if it is being asserted to work this way then the setting doesn't make a lot of sense. The Gods have every reason to incentivise mortals to worship them directly, both before and after death, because otherwise they go hungry and die.

I need to eat things or I'll go hungry and die. That doesn't mean I go around eating non-stop, or butchering every animal I see for sustenance.

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

And I'm sure when people get resurrected and word starts going around that the Gods are going to screw everyone out of a fair afterlife because they didn't worship them, that there would be no negative repercussions to that. Mortals are very sensible creatures, after all.

[Fyraltari]

I am not demanding that Rich Burlew bring his work to a screeching halt, go back and spend fifteen years rewriting his opus to conform with {scrub the post, scrub the quote}, any more than I would demand that George RR Martin go back and rewrite his opus to conform with Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. But if GRRM (or his TV series adaptation) were to depict characters travelling with suspicious rapidity around several enormous continents in ways that appeared to be impossible in earlier books and chapters, I would expect that criticisms to this effect would be noted as valid and legitimate and not dismissed with facile tautologies, even if it's too late to do much about it now.

I am confused, are you saying that the comic used to present the gods as furiously persecuting the faithless and then it stopped at some point? Because if so, where? And if not, I don't see what that example has to do with anything.

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

THEY DON'T RUN THE MOUNTAIN!

It is incoherent to argue that some people will be outright impossible to convert and that the Gods need to make special provisions to ensure that the faithless exist. (In any case, that's more the situation with Belkar than Roy.)

The gods aren't making provisions for the faithless, what are you talking about?

...No. I don't think I will. Because it's not my job to rewrite the author's story to make sense.

Okay, you see this? This is your problem. You think the story doesn't make sense if it doesn't adresses the topics you want it toto even though the story has never been about those topics. Worldbuilding isn't the focus of this comic, it has no obligation to explain itself in details to you. The things are the way they are because the story needs them to be so and there are no reasons for them to be otherwise. You are seeing problems that aren't in the comic and dismissing the splutions because they aren't in the comic.

[Precure]

What extra effort? All they have to do is tell their devas to kick out the faithless or shunt them off to the Economy Class side of the mountain.

I doubt that the good aligned gods would like that.

[Peelee]

It really isn't, given that if you need to be honourable anyway you might as well worship the deity that most consistently rewards honour.

Only by your reasoning, which the comic is not abiding by. They need to be honorable to escape Hel's default claim. That's it. That's all. Piety does not enter into the equation, and is a wholly separate issue. I get that you think it should, but it doesn't, so they don't need to worship a god as long as they're at it.

And, to boot, there's no reason to think that Thor rewards honor more than a y other northern God. Again, he was just the on me who helped them out by spilling the beans.

[Lacuna Caster]

I am confused, are you saying that the comic used to present the gods as furiously persecuting the faithless and then it stopped at some point? Because if so, where...
...Okay, you see this? This is your problem. You think the story doesn't make sense if it doesn't adresses the topics you want it toto even though the story has never been about those topics. Worldbuilding isn't the focus of this comic...

This may have been true up to the point where a particular aspect of worldbuilding- Hel's pact regarding the fate of dwarven souls and how this would shape society- was made into an extremely prominent and plot-critical story element. At that point you can no longer claim that world-building is unimportant to OOTS or really even separable from core character development. (I mean, the general tolerance of the faithless would have been odd regardless and it wouldn't be incorrect to point this out, but after Durkon's arc the observation becomes lot less nitpicky.)

I need to eat things or I'll go hungry and die. That doesn't mean I go around eating non-stop, or butchering every animal I see for sustenance.

There are limits to how much food I can usefully consume. There is no apparent limit to how powerful Gods can get (or Hel's storyline makes no sense.)

And I'm sure when people get resurrected and word starts going around that the Gods are going to screw everyone out of a fair afterlife because they didn't worship them, that there would be no negative repercussions to that. Mortals are very sensible creatures, after all.

Perhaps The Book prevents them from doing it... ...why would the gods necessarily be able to rewrite The Book?

There wouldn't be an issue regarding mortal expectations being disappointed if the afterlife was configured in favour of the pious to begin with, which is what I'm contending would be a lot more likely. But even so, what are the mortals going to do after a given world gets wiped out? They're clearly capable of working out new arrangements, or Hel's storyline makes no sense.

[Dion]

There is no apparent limit to how powerful Gods can get (or Hel's storyline makes no sense.).

And we see Hel plans to get powerful with no worshippers.

So your hypothesis about how the world works is falsified.

Your theory has been proven wrong.

[Ionathus]

It's not letting me Quote it, but this is a statement from Rich in the "After vs Life" thread, back during the Godsmoot when people were saying that the afterlife doesn't make 100% logical sense and people would be expected to act drastically differently because of it: the quote feels very relevant to the direction this thread has taken.

What it comes down to is that the existence of a known, provable, observable, game-able afterlife system of any sort—OOTS version, D&D version, or any other type—would so thoroughly change human behavior in the living world as to render all of society and personal interaction unrecognizable to us, the real people reading the story. It is in any author's interest, therefore, to not think too much about it, lest these sorts of questions overwhelm whatever actual relatable human story they want to tell. Maybe if that sort exploration is the point of the work, that would make sense, but for anything else? The only reasonable option is to handwave it and get on with the work of telling a good tale.

[Lacuna Caster]

And, to boot, there's no reason to think that Thor rewards honor more than a y other northern God. Again, he was just the on me who helped them out by spilling the beans.

I think I touched on this already.

It's not letting me Quote it, but this is a statement from Rich in the "After vs Life" thread, back during the Godsmoot when people were saying that the afterlife doesn't make 100% logical sense and people would be expected to act drastically differently because of it: the quote feels very relevant to the direction this thread has taken.

This appears to be a tacit admission that the setting doesn't actually make sense and the author has just chosen not to care about it. That's his prerogative, but it is not an argument that the setting is in fact coherent.

[hamishspence]

"That D&D has certain flaws that should be criticised" is one of the main reasons the story exists in the first place.

[Mic_128]

There are limits to how much food I can usefully consume. There is no apparent limit to how powerful Gods can get (or Hel's storyline makes no sense.)

They simply might not care about getting 'stronger'. They appear to be happy enough with their current positions, from what we've seen, with the exception of the Dark One, and Hel, after Loki's bet and Thor's "cheating".

Or, heck, we know there's a huge amount of rules governing what the Gods can and can't do, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those rules was to intentionally take a step back and let the mortals worship who they want to worship (lest they start warning over souls and cause a snarl) and if that means some can choose to worship no one, so be it.