Divine Intervention 1: Halp!
The gods are real. That’s a problem. Allow me to explain.
You see, when you’re gaming in a setting where literal divine intervention is possible, you’re gaming with a plot hole. Just imagine that you’re a 10th level cleric of Good God. This week’s goblin army is steamrolling its way towards the defenseless City of Orphaned Puppies, and so you do what clerics do best. You fall to your knees and you pray. Unfortunately, the dice forsake you. Nothing miraculous appears to save Lord Puppington, and the city’s valiant defenders are overcome.
How do you justify this narratively?
If you’re a 5e type cleric, you might look to your class feature:
Divine Intervention
You can call on your deity to intervene on your behalf when your need is great. Imploring your deity’s aid requires you to use your action. Describe the assistance you seek, and roll percentile dice. If you roll a number equal to or lower than your cleric level, your deity intervenes.
There’s a clear interaction metaphor here. The greater your clerical devotion, the greater your chance of receiving aid. And that makes a lot of sense if you think about it for precisely zero seconds.
You don’t have to be Marcus Aurelius to spot some issues. Should a goodly god want to save those puppies, surely it doesn’t matter how devout I happen to be? Or is it simply that my piety acts like a transceiver, and I need more divine juice to get through to God’s landline? Maybe there is some kind of divine mandate against helping out all willy nilly in the mortal realm? Perhaps there are other clerics that need help more than me at that moment (though I can’t imagine anything more important than the City of Orphaned Puppies). Or maybe evil deities are preventing my god bro from helping out? Or what if my deity needs a divine smoke break between miracles?
Of course there are explanations for this business. But the fact of the matter is that you kind of have to pick one. Because the old IRL conundrum of “why do bad things happen?” is doubly pressing when the gods are canonically real.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we brainstorm a few reasons for absent gods? Why don’t they interfere all the dang time? What’s your favorite explanation for this biz? Give us your best apologia down in the comments!
In my setting, a large swath of the pantheon was killed by a mysterious entity known only as the “Dreaming Worm”. The survivors – deities, titans, spirits and fiends alike – had to work together so they could keep the multiverse working close to design specifications.
This required a lot of negotiation, though; the pantheon cannot afford a godswar when they’re so badly understaffed, and everyone is at least a little worried about stepping on the wrong toes and sparking off a conflict.
Basically, the pantheon has a hands-off policy in the sense they don’t casually manifest or intervene unless called upon by mortals capable of evoking and channeling their power. They may still scheme behind the scenes, and avatars do walk the worlds, but the battles are fought by mortals and on the mortal plane. If a mortal needs their patron’s help but can’t channel the energies they need, then they’re out of luck… unless they’re willing and prepared to burn themselves out in the process.
I’ve run this a couple different ways, like good and evil deities having a mutual ‘no direct interference’ agreement, gods being too removed from mortal affairs to really interfere, or gods being mostly dead.
However, I recently read an isekai light novel series (no spoilers past volume 13 please if you recognize the series), which had one god who was pretty active and who would step in when big problems arose. However, his boss, the most senior god, was a self-proclaimed evil gid who only cared about her own amusement. So she’d often tell the good god to ‘just sit this one out’ if she believed it’d be more amusing to let the mortals struggle and try to fix things themselves. Which was like 90% of the time.
And honestly, isn’t the above true for every ttrpg setting? There always is a god more powerful than all others, by whose word reality changes, and who only cares about their own amusement (well, hopefully also that of the other players, but you get my point). Obviously, this won’t work for every setting, but if you don’t have one were the world needs to be 100% serious and consistent, just introduce the cleric asking for intervention to the evil upper god ‘DM’, who tells them ‘nah, that wouldn’t be as fun. Now go and struggle for my amusement <3'
I know that Golarion does it by if the Good Gods directly interfere so do the Evil Gods, and keeping it down to mortal servants keeps the world intact. This is helped by the fact that the most powerful deity is so completely Neutral that even the faction she hates most is still alive.
I’ve used this rule even when not playing in Golarion. 🙂
We once had fun using that in a campaign with some (consensual) intra-party antagonism. The gunslinger had earned a favor from Iomedae, but when she tried to use it against my gunslinger servant of Nocticula, Iomedae denied the request because a direct interference would upset the balance. Then later, when the gunslinger allied with Shax to defeat the inquisitor’s ambush, she called her favor again – except this time it actually worked, because a deity had manifested personally and Iomedae was free to act in retaliation (and smite Shax).
Moral of the story, what is usually used as an excuse to keep divine powers out of the action can, occasionally, turn into a critical plot point at a climactic moment.
If you bail morons out of problems they themselves caused they wont learn a lesson. Also looking at many of our mythologies, do you want them to really interviene? Even Gods of DnD have a habbit of making a mess, or at least a mountain of corpses when they interact with mortal world.
Alternatively, they are not omnipotent, many old gods weren’t. So theres a limit on how many they can aid at a given time if they can at all. Why else would there be separation with Domains? In cases like that, maybe you should worship a better god, may I suggest Tyr? Law, War and all that good stuff. Best god in Faerun, 10/10… also twice as manly as Thor.
Yay! Another supporter of Tyr. 90% of my characters either pray to him or Athena.
Old Yahweh really screwed this up for everyone by setting an unreasonable standard of all-loving and all-powerful. Back in the bad old days, gods could be limited by jurisdiction, maybe you were in the wrong place for them to help, maybe they don’t have power over that thing, maybe they have beef with another god who’s stopping them from helping in these particular circumstances, maybe they’re just having a snit because you didn’t sound sufficiently enthusiastic when you thanked them for existing the other week, maybe they aren’t aware of what’s happening or they’re busy with something even more important (the Elminster defence). Or you can just go for the old copout of the gods not wanting to meddle in purely mortal affairs for the sake of “free will”. Hell, maybe your enemies are also devout servants of the same god and your prayers are cancelling each other out.
Because this is why they have clerics in the first place… so that they *don’t* need to involve themselves. They’re away in their own realm, and acting directly in the material realm is costly in power, maybe even unsafe as it exposes them to the schemes of their rivals. Better to instead empower trusted mortal servants and champions… diverting a small portion of the power received from their worshipers is easy and safe.
Of course, there’s also the opposite problem… gods who constantly meddle, and intervene at the slightest hint of an excuse. I’ve long been a fan of the Malazan novels, or the Black Company stories that inspired them, and I do like the idea that you can call on a god to bail you out of trouble… but you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of that call.
That’s why I like the Greek pantheon. Sometimes they’ll help, but sometimes they won’t. This isn’t because there are situations where they can reasonnably intervene, and others where they have good reason to hold off. No. This is because they’re all a bunch of petty jackasses and sometimes they just don’t feel like it. Even the goodest of them can flip their lid and curse you or some stuff.
I view this as less “absent” and more “preoccupied.” You are, presumably, not the only cleric of this deity. You’re certainly not the only one praying to them. And that’s putting aside any duties they may have in the setting’s greater cosmology.
Yes, you get filtered into the “Important” folder of the Divine Inbox, but there’s a lot going on and omniscience isn’t guaranteed. I imagine a lot of failed Divine Intervention rolls end up with a miracle occurring a few hours late with “Sorry, I just saw this” echoing from the heavens. (Alternatively, the gods hold a quick tribunal to see if this is a permissible case for direct intervention. Forget how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, how many cases can the divine court hear in a moment?)
My favorite reason for the concept of the gods not helping all the time is pretty simple and weirdly relates to Bruce Almighty’s perfect depiction of a god trying to say yes to every prayer in the form of everyone who asks to win the lotto jackpot, winning… less than a penny, because more people play than there are pennies to win.
But in a fantasy world where death doesn’t mean the end of adventures, it is even easier to explain as well. The gods you so desperately seek for aid in the most desperate of times, they have lives and go on their own insane godly adventures too. They are just level XYZ of about 40 different classes, subclasses, prestige classes, and other classes that aren’t listed anywhere in the manual, because they are gods and have moved well past the usual written material and are on to cosmic rulebooks now.
Sometimes the listen, sometimes they can’t, sometimes, hey, they fucking won’t listen, and it is not up to them to justify that lack of coming to your aid… it is not even up to you, the faithful to justify it, because it shouldn’t need justification. You either have faith or don’t, and really, even the amount of faith or lack doesn’t change the power the gods have or don’t (unless that is also a core building block of your universe setting of course), so you just roll the dice and hope you get under your level, because when it happens it is literally… a god send.
🙂
Usually with deities their lack of divine intervention is due to effectively divine politics or agreements not to act directly unless an egregious offense is committed or a massive favor is done. Cause sure, your deity could blow up the BBEG’s lair, but then the BBEG’s equally bad deity might blow up your home town in a ‘eye for an eye’ fashion.
Plus, divine intervention tends to be a problem when your devout need to earn their afterlives without your help and through sheer belief in you.
My setting has a county-sized anvil shaped hole in the mountains from the last time the gods decided to intervene without going through a cleric. The easy solution I’ve come across is that the gods don’t come with a dimmer switch. If they’re going to manifest in all their deific glory, you’re going to get your world hit with all their deific glory. Makes it really appealing as a weapon of last resort, because the world won’t end, but you might end up obliterating a civilization or five.
The solution for my setting is as follows:
1: The deities currently in control are not the ones who actually made the world, they are the mid-level managers (children) who got left in charge when the actual creator had to step out (theologies vary on the reason).
2: Interacting with the mortal world causes them to expend power, they have a lot of it, but since they are in competition with each other, they try to only use that power when absolutely necessary. The more they interact, the more tied to the world they become. They gain more influence on its affairs, but conversely are more easily influence by it. They also have less ability to interfere or defend from each other.
3: They have difficulty with “subtle”. They have to work in deity sized units of power. Scaling down is difficult and can come with unintended consequences. Mortals are the preferred interaction for small scale interventions.
My favorite answer to a player doing something like this if they have played a pious character is to answer. “That’s what I sent ‘you’ here for.” Followed by a helping of power, just enough to make sure the scale can tip either way, now it’s up the to the players.
I’m writing in my spare time and I decided to draw inspiration for the gods from my Dog (it is god spelled backwards after all).
Specifically, how my dog interacts with the family and vice versa. If the Gods are supposed to be full of greater knowledge and power, then can I not extrapolate from Humanity to pets or perhaps toddlers? I decided to make the pantheon off of common interactions with pets. Some adore them, spoil them, fear them, ignore them, perhaps even abuse them. This gives a multitude of “personalities” even outside of how I’d define them on the good to evil spectrum.
However, if your pet wants something, it can hard to tell what, especially if the pet is new or not “yours.” When my dog walks over to the garage door and stands there with his head to the left of the doorknob but his tail to the right and looks at me, he’s probably indicating “I want to play” but if he sits against the door, he’s saying “i want to go out.”
Probably anyway. That lack of communication is key though. In your example, the Gods may or may not even understand the prayer; they got the faith and they might even realize its coming from a place of panic. The higher your levels in cleric, the more likely they are to actually understand that you have a problem right now. You’re their pet and they’ve learned more of your nuances.
In this idea. prayers are the commands that both sides have taught one another. My dog “prays” to me for the towel game or to play ball by bringing said toys while I give divine decrees to bark when he comes to the garage door; doing so will cause me to open said door.
It also allows a degree of… randomness into the equation. The Gods might move to save City of Orphaned Puppies even without a prayer, but only at the last minute when they saw the problem. Or perhaps they removed the horde before it even started moving, because they’ve seen this before and know the result.
I, Mindsword, can control the weather in my house; the thermostat and showers are mine to command. I cannot do it outside though, no matter how much my dog begs me to. It might be dealing with the Horde is outside my divine mandate, even if it would seem like it is to my pets.
My favorite explanation pulls from the idea of, “As above, so below.” Namely, if you’re defending the city of orphaned puppies, somewhere your god is fighting alongside the GOD of Orphaned Puppies against the forces of He-Who-Kicks and his other quasi-divine cohorts.
Now being cosmic multi-dimensional beings, they can also be kicking it in a marble temple, eating grapes and answering questions three for their patrons elsewhere, but some part of them, the part you’re calling out to, is fighting there right along side you, and the strength of your faith and the whims of the cosmos determines whether they can spare the cosmic attention-pool to run a divine Hail Mary past the enemy divines.
I’ve always been fond of D&D 4e’s Points of Light setting’s explanation for this: the gods and primordials kept waging war and the natural world was collateral damage one too many times.
The primal spirits of the world collectively decided “screw that noise” and grew its own defense system, which came to be known as the “primal ban”. Now the powerful immortal being of the astral plane (ie, gods and primordials) are stuck working through intermediaries to influence the natural world.
A cleric or somesuch can draw their god’s power to them, earned by following their will, but the reverse never works; the gods can’t just do things on their own or arbitrarily power people like an Oracle in the Golarion setting.
I just use the OOTS rules; gods are primarily limited to their clerics out of mutual agreement. Evil gods outnumber good gods (even if not as well represented among civilized factions- the number of pious bandits really adds up) and if gods were allowed to meddle, the world would be far worse than it currently is (evil gods approve of the arrangement because odds are it wouldn’t be THEIR kind of evil, it’d be a different evil god’s, and that’s bad!), so mortals are on their own or have to really work (take Cleric levels) to get divine power flowing.
in my games the deities exist in their respective plains separate from the Material World.
That means that to get in contact with them is needed a ritual (worship and prayers) that takes time to prepare and realize (A reason of why Clerics need 1 hour to pray for spells). Even if you have the time to pray to contact with your deity and the deity is right now not occupied with deity stuff (Among other things mantaining good relationship with their allies) any help they can send is in another plane and needs to cross to yours.
Thing of it as if you were a high level hero and someone at the other side of the world needed your help. Even if you received the message in time and you weren’t in mid of a very important quest, by the time you arrive it could be to late.
Also, by the same rule of: “Demon Lords can’t just Plane Shift into the Material World and breck everything” a deity can’t just enter into the material plane. My interpretation is that at certain level of power how more powerful you are the harder is to move between planes, so they also need time to prepare the help and send it there.
So basically, if a party is in the middle of fighting the BBEG they are losing and they send a cry to the heavens from help is almost imposible that their deity can hear them or send help in time. If the party are preparing and do the rituals and prayers to contact their deity to ask for help in a few days they might receive the visit of some outsiders and or clerics of the deity to aid them, if they are in a hurry at the end of the day a powerful outsider might arrive to help them, if they really need the help now the deity can bless them with… I don’t know… Divine Spells? You know? That class feature that you used since level 1? That Cure Light Wounds is a genuine miracle, you know?
Also, the party are not the only followers, for all their know their deity could have all their atention getting help for another party that is saving the world right now. Even All Powerfull deities can do just so many things at the same time.
In my games we’ve had a number of approaches:
1) In anything based on Fritz Leiber’s Newhon stories, the gods aren’t that powerful and generally don’t care about mortal squabbles.
2) Home-made D&D deities are notoriously flaky. They legitimately might have put their phone on ‘silent’ while they ate a sandwich.
3) Odin and Zeus (and a few others) may be nigh-omniscient, but they tend to follow their own inscrutable agendas and whims. “Petty and cruel and plagued mankind with suffering.” https://www.tokyvideo.com/video/hercules-the-legendary-journeys-intro
4) Even an allegedly benevolent all-powerful deity can pick the nuclear option for their own reasons, choose to forgo said annihilation, or be reasoned with by a high enough level cleric– q.v. the book of Genesis and the Great Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (save for a righteous handful, 10 would have been enough to spare it, so the survivors must have numbered fewer than 10), the plagues of Egypt, and the non-destruction of Nineveh (after enough people said they were sorry). Said all-powerful beings rarely explain themselves and tend to get really defensive and angry if some mortal dares to ask them “why?”
The God IN Lankhmar weren’t that powerful, but the Gods OF Lankhmar were.
Point taken. In decades of running games in that milieu, though, no PC was ever dumb enough to mess with the demigod/lich-lord/protectors of the city.
Smart players! I never gave them a chance, because I have had players that would look on that as a challenge. You know the kind, the ones you’re always saying, “You SURE you want to do that?” to.
I think I said before that the gods in my world are VERY involved in the mortal realm. After all that’s where their power comes from. They’ve already been through millennia where no one believed in them and they don’t want to do that again.
I also allow ANYONE to make a god call. Certain things modify the call to increase or decrease the chance of getting through to someone who can help, but it will seldom be the actual god. Chain of command sort of thing, you know. So a priest calling to their particular god will have a much better chance of getting through, than an evil assassin having to ask a favor of a good god.
Then there is the type of god call. Unlike wishes in my world, the KISS principle doesn’t apply. The more specific you are about the type of help you are asking for means a better chance of it getting routed to someone who can actually help. Specifying who you are calling is also EXTREMELY important. A general “HELP” call is allowed, but then it’s totally random who and what you’re going to get.
Then there is location. Sneaking a god call into your prayer at your local temple, so you don’t have to go through the priests and pay a tithe, tends to be frowned on. Especially if you roll really, REALLY well and your god shows up. You better have your speech to talk yourself out of that one, ready before you start. Same if you are running around the Hells and call on your lawful good gods. Just about anyone in that particular hierarchy is going to be VERY unhappy about being in enemy territory and glowing like the Alexandria lighthouse.
Finally, depending on how bad the situation is and how much whoever showed up has to exert themselves, you have “owe me” parties. Seldom will a god call be answered without incurring a debt to that particular god. This can be a major issue for the party, especially if it was a general god call and they got hold of a pantheon that is more than happy to screw the party over later for a little help today. Most aren’t called in right then, but I ALWAYS call them in. This keeps the god calls down a reasonable level. This is one of my favorite hooks to use when I’ve set up a story arc I want the group to go through, but I’ve also used them to add to a player’s character’s background.
My pantheon’s aren’t Christian god powerful or knowing and the power structures are usually more fluid than they were in history. Odin had to have a serious talk with Tyr about his wife setting up temples all over the place (she’s my paladin and she’s been doing that since she was about 5th level. Long story.) because Tyr was becoming more powerful than him. They worked it out and now the temples she builds are for the whole pantheon (minus Loki, again long story).
I’ve got GMNPC’s running around in my world that are far more powerful than the gods and have been known to step in and lay the law down when two deities or pantheons have disagreements and they are getting out of hand. They aren’t available for god calls, but will sometimes interact with the party.
In the past, when players call out to the Great Beyond for some sort of intervention, usually if a TPK is imminent, I usually ask them to roll a check of some kind. Persuasion, religion, whatever. Roll well and maybe you get the help you want. Roll poorly and maybe what answers isn’t what you were hoping for.
“Some believe the fate of our worlds is inflexible. My employers disagree. They authorize me to… nudge things in a particular direction from time to time. What would YOU want nudged, Ms. Vance?”
(Also, I feel like the G-man would make a great warlock patron.)
The best answer I can think of is “the god is busy, yo”, but that answer requires a little less omnipotence from the god in question.
And now I’m reminded of my character whose schtick is that they are ON CALL with their god, who they treat like an annoying boss. I need more Bast-appropriate insults.
Make direct divine intervention impossible. The gods are ambiguously real, or dead, or limited in power, or just not the kind of gods that do direct intervention. There are very few stories which are improved by making a literal deus ex machina theoretically possible.
Thanks for communicating with the gods, your prayer is very important for us:
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0040.html
“There’s a clear interaction metaphor here.”
Actually it’s a pretty murky interactive metaphor… level has less to do with ‘devotion’ than it does with ‘time in service”. Can you really say a level fifteen is more devoted than a level 1, when the penalties for straying for the level 15 are so much harsher than for the lvl 1? The level 1 can f-off and do whatever with no suck costs, but the level fifteen would be throwing their life away to stray from the path. Isn’t it more devotive… devotional… ahhh more devotionnessry… isn’t the level one showing more devotion to pick the singular path when at that initial crossroads, than the level fifteen who has the deep rut of their class dug by their own history?
Anyway, why worry about why DEITY isn’t answering their pages? DEITY works in mysterious ways.
I mean unless it’s important why the call is going straight into voice mail or getting lost int he automated system. If it’s important, then of course, by all means, figure out why and lay it on thick. But usually it’s not important that DIETY answer to their petitioners, I mean who’s the god in this relationship?
My favorite explanation is the same one the Greeks used in the Iliad when Troy was overthrown, despite Troy being one of Zeus’s favorite cities and with all of Troy praying to not be overthrown. Basically, while it was one of Zeus’s favorite cities, it was Hera’s most hated city (one caused the other, it was not a happy marriage). Both Zeus and Hera were pulling out all the stops and calling in all the favors, and Zeus was of course nudging things towards his end, but a big scene in the Iliad is Zeus having to have a one-on-one talk with one of his many children to explain to her that there are limits to what even he could do. He could call in favors and heroes, cheat and lie and nudge all sorts of things for his preferred outcome, but there is a line he cannot cross. If he directly intervened, like directly smiting the entire opposing army, then that invites another god like Hera to lean in and smite all of Troy in return. Or worse, smite Zeus directly in the face, starting a huge battle and destroying any hope of divine peace, starting a war and wrecking several planes in the process (most importantly, the one all of the lowly mortals live on). Sometimes the matter is personal, and they can just smite their enemies into dust. Sometimes things are more difficult, and they have to be more careful and sneaky about their assistance.
And sometimes, the celestial red tape is so binding and so complex that the gods best choice is to go “hey, you lot are pretty protagonist-y, go wander in this direction and try to fix the problem.” Just like actual gods, their reasons and promises and agreements are not understood by us mortal folks. But surely there’s a reason the evil god of death has to make archliches and avatars instead of just saying “everything alive is dead now”, and it’s the same rules that prevent gods of purity and righteousness from just saying “everyone who commits a sin immediately dies”.
Dragonlance answers that by having the gods constantly interfere, but they are more like Greek Gods in power. They are no almighty, they don’t know everything, and most importantly, there are other gods interfering just as much.
In my game the gods are very much nose-prodding and meddlesome (think old Grych myths but with them actually paying attention to their portfolios.)
One of my players had a talk with Droskar (NE. the dark smith, Areas of Concern Cheating, slavery, toil) and after Droskar showed that he has on-hand information from the adventurer’s guild the player asked him how come he has such fine knowledge. the answer later on got into our saved quotation section:
(Droskar):
“About the information from the guild. You need to understand the sheer chaos and work that happen there on a daily basis. There were some order-oriented sects who were asked to join hand and help with it all. they gave up eventually.
Old Asmo’s high priest pretty much nailed it when he said “This is like being a shepherd to an ant-hill during a blizzard”. It was way too chaotic for order to be maintained.
Take the nomination list for example, just keeping track of all who died, joined, died, lost, died or resurrected-and-then-die
-it’s a huge amount of wonderfully endless toil.
I have long ago indoctrinated the guild reception members into my clergy. I believe their unofficial moto is:
‘We’re truly neutral but our boss is true evil’
They are just a bunch of non-evil-wannabes.
Some wanna be free, some wanna be evil, some wanna be on a work break.
You know? wannabes”
I mainly envisioned the guild receptionists from goblin slayer abridged when I made that connection.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DF9NNWG_fs)
How busy a deity is scales directly with the deity’s capacity to help. Your supreme sun god types have to deal with the needs of millions of followers as well as making sure the sun rises and darkness doesn’t triumph over light. Your local hero god is much more likely to be free but also has a much smaller repertoire of tricks
“Preferably politely”
Dwarves consider being overly polite with friends to be a sign you’re being manipulative and don’t value their friendship, why would their deities be the same.
“Hey, buddy, can you do me a favor” is for people you don’t know. With friends it’s a faux-pas.
“Hey fuckface, I need something!” If you’re really good friends this is the appropriate response.
As usual, I praise the way paizo has written deific intercessions for pathfinder 2e. Each deity gets a list of six intercessions- three boons and three curses. These are the way they’ll directly interact with pcs beyond things like granting a cleric casting- and it generally gives ideas of situations in which a deity may grant that boon. For example-
Sarenrae, Minor Boon: Your healing hands glow with a warming flame. Just once, when you heal another creature, it is restored to full health instead of the amount you would normally heal it. Sarenrae usually grants this boon in situations where the healing could mean the difference between life and death.
It’s clear on what sort of circumstances may bring it up, and it makes it clear that this happens *once.* You aren’t begging the gods to save you every time you get in danger, you’re getting a one-time bailout.
It also posits that the reason gods don’t constantly intervene is to avoid constant crusades. Golarion has suffered greatly from divine crusades and the gods acting too personally in the past (Rahadoum suffered so much they banned religion altogether, and merely posessing a holy symbol is a capital crime within the borders.) to the point where, if I’m remembering my lore right, Asmodeus drafted a set of rules for the gods that define when and how they can intercede.
“So for today’s discussion, what do you say we brainstorm a few reasons for absent gods? Why don’t they interfere all the dang time? What’s your favorite explanation for this biz? Give us your best apologia down in the comments!”
If gods act freely in the mortal realm they wouldn’t need Clerics.
I’m partial to the 4E explanation: The gods physically cannot go to the world. They can only interact through followers. In the Divine Intervention example it’s very difficult for the god to even pull it off.
This is why the big settings have some hard and fast rule keeping the gods out – Ao babysitting them all in Forgotten Realms, the Divine Gate in Critical Role, etc. Where Divine Intervention is trying to generate an opportunity for them to act at all. But personally I prefer Eberron, where Gods are no more real than they are in our own world.
I tend to favor the “there are rules set in place to limit exactly what the gods can do” explanation, tweaked as necessary to fit your particular flavor of divinity. Perhaps the gods set the rules in place to keep themselves from wrecking the mortal plane in their conflicts (even the Evil gods generally don’t want the mortal world destroyed because that’s where they draw their faith from), or perhaps the gods feel that if you solve everything for the mortals, that would be boring and the mortals wouldn’t grow and mature, or perhaps the Overdeity actually created the world and imposed rules for his children to follow while they play with the toys he created for them.
Another story that approached this in an interesting way is Bujold’s Chalion series. In that world, the Five Gods have absolute dominion over the realm of spirit. They can create omens, send prophecies, manipulate souls, and craft all manner of curses and boons. But, as creatures of pure Spirit, they can only directly affect the physical world through “saints”, people who have voluntarily laid aside their free will and opened themselves to act as channels for divine power. The problem, of course, is that very few people are willing to completely surrender themselves in this fashion, and even fewer are actually psychologically capable of doing it.
For example, the plot of the first book revolves around the gods trying to get rid of a curse of misfortune on the rulership of the realm of Chalion. The trick is, this can only be done through a man who willingly lays down his life three times for the royal house of Chalion. This is not because the gods like imposing arbitrary conditions. Rather, the first two “deaths” are necessary as practice so that when it happens for the third time and a god actually reaches through the sacrifice, he is able to properly empty himself and allow the divine power to work through him.
Pretty sure this has come up already – but D&D gods are like Greek gods, only typically even more weak-sauce. They’re not omnipotent or omniscient, some are even statted out and could get ROFL-stomped by a mid-level party. So the first question about divine aid is: can your deity actually stop that goblin army? The second is, given that goblins have clerics too, how badly to you want to get gods involved here (Orcus, I hear, dislikes puppies)? The third is how good of an idea your god thinks getting gods involved here is or isn’t. And so on.
Think of involving a god less through the monotheistic uber-deity lense and more like calling up your company’s CEO. At that point bad things happening in spite of good gods becomes a lot more understandable.
If one’s playing in a world with omnipotent gods, on the other hand, then one has to consider that NOTHING happens without the tacit approval of said gods. So the puppies are getting bulldozed for a reason, and your request for intervention is actually an attempt to change the mind of an omnipotent god! If that god is ‘good’ then you’re probably about to do something very stupid.
They’re actually more of an unsatisfying middle-ground where they’re not weaksauce by any metric and yet are still woefully inadequate to actually preside over their divine portfolio. In 3e almost all deities have an ability called Alter Reality which allows the use of 9th level (and lower) spells at will. Which is stupidly overpowered and yet woefully insufficient to do something like moving the sun; and even for many more mundane things it would require that they either show up in person or else constantly be passing items and information to people and teleporting them around and stuff in order to get anything done with regard to controlling the weather or turning the tide of wars or things like that. (As an aside it’s also woefully inadequate to do the job of Santa Claus; if we assume he has 36 hours because of time zones that’s 21600 rounds, Time Stop raises that to 108000, assuming he teleports from house to house that’s the base population of children he can handle. If we further assume 2.5 children per house that can be delivered to simultaneously and that furthermore he only delivers to children who are lawful good and so he can skip 8 houses out of every 9, that brings the number up to 2430000, which is still way less children than there are out there). They would have to intervene constantly just to get anything done. And maybe the readon a particular intervention doesn’t happen is because they’re already too busy intervening elsewhere (although this raises the question of why the divine interbentions that do happen aren’t much larger)
I’ll grant you all of that, and also raise that a ‘City of Orphaned Puppies’, when you think about it, should be a lot more sinister than it initially sounds. Such a thing couldn’t just happen, after all. I’m thinking world’s worst puppy mill, for a start. Maybe it’s constantly releasing packs of feral dogs into the countryside? Perhaps the goblins have good reasons to attack it?
Oh, and one other thing: in myth there’s a name for agents of the gods – heroes. D&D being a game about epic heroes it stands to reason that your god has already done their due diligence here. They sent you. Your job being to fix the problem, not complain about resources. :p
The primal gods are asleep in the cocoon of the omphalos after the strain of creating existence, dissolving in their dreams as they are reshaped anew. Their dreams are sent to the mortal plane, where they are interpreted by clerics. The clerics, in turn, form sects which seek to carry out what they believe that god wants. These sects do not always agree. Some think that by making their dogma dominant, that it will solidify the dreams of their god as it takes further shape to suit it. The gods will all arise again at the same time, but until then, only those appointed by fate, whim, or luck may be considered dependable, mortal-friendly conduits for their overwhelming power.
I run 2E Al-Qadim. Nobody denies the gods exist. But unlike the rest of Faerun, the Zakharan pantheon doesn’t have avatars running around at the drop of a hat.
However, everyone also believes in Fate, a force to which gods and genies both bow. The intercession rules give you a small chance of calling on Fate and succeeding. But there is a chance.
The one time it was tried in the 20 years of my on-and-off campaign, it was successful. At a thematically appropriate moment. Spur-of-the-moment worked by the least enthusiastic player in the group (she’s more there for the socialization than the game; we all know this, and it’s cool; she still is taking part, after all). She resurrected a fallen comrade.
And the crowd went wild.
My ruling is simple. The gods(I prefer to refer to them as Spirits, but I’ll use your term) are never absent, nor are they ever present. The gods are diffused throughout existence and normally have no sentience, let alone sapience. However, when someone or something(a cleric/paladin, for example) has a powerful connection with one of the gods, the god coalesces around them. When the god coalesces, it starts to gain sentience. Divine intervention consists of trying to draw the coalescing gods attention. The higher your cleric level, the more powerful your connection, the more sentient your god, and the more likely it will notice and heed your request.