The Outer Planes, Part 7/8: Judgement of the Gods
If you’d like to argue about alignment, be my guest. The comments section is there for you as a resource. Feel free to yell into that empty white void for as long as it takes to feel better. For my part, I’ll confine my remarks to “Mean Girls, Parts 1-3.”
Even though alignment is the punchline of today’s comic, The Anti-Party’s quest for the upper planes is about more than moral superiority. Seeking answers from the gods may be a fine and noble quest, but there’s a problem. It’s only worthwhile within fiction. If you come at an NPC with one of life’s unanswerable questions, it doesn’t matter whether you’re seeking an audience with Iomedae, goddess of justice or Meepo, kobold of memes. You’re only going to get one character’s perspective. And if you (the player) or you (the character) happen to disagree with that perspective, deific certitude becomes a tough pill to swallow.
What is my purpose in life? What is it to be a good person? Do I have free will?
When the gods are fallible, these questions are a non-issue. The divine NPC (or wise sage; or mighty oracle) provide their philosophical viewpoint, and the PCs respond accordingly. If you’re adventuring in a setting where capital-G Good is supposed to be infallible, however, your GM is going to have a tough time coming up with a satisfying answer.
This is why I prefer a bit of ambiguity in my own games. And it’s also why I like Julie Taymor’s Titus. Ya know… The weird Shakespeare adaptation with Anthony Hopkins in the lead? It’s an odd touchpoint for RPGs, but I think it’s relevant here. That’s because Taymor and Hopkins had differing opinions about one of the play’s key questions. Here’s the relevant bit of trivia from IMDB:
Writer, producer, and director Julie Taymor and Sir Anthony Hopkins disagreed about Titus’ mental state throughout production, with Taymor feeling that Titus is feigning a kind of madness, but is in fact mad himself, but with Hopkins feeling that Titus is feigning madness, and is in fact totally sane. They never resolved their differences and on their respective commentaries on the DVD, they mentioned their differing interpretations.
We usually don’t get to see this kind of split decision within the medium of film. You only have one version of the finished production after all, and filmmakers are rarely so forthcoming with personal interpretations. But for us as roleplayers, I find this difference of opinion endlessly fascinating. That’s because we glimpse a pair of co-creatives who were able to tell a single story with two contrasting visions. Both are valid, and both are present, but neither one is definitive. Just something to think about next time your local rogue and paladin start squabbling about who the real protagonist is.
Question of the day, then! Have you ever encountered a deity in a game? Did they provide disappointing certainty, or interesting ambiguity? And more generally, how do you like to represent divine wisdom in your own games? Tell us all about your pronouncements from on high down in the comments!
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“Darn it, how the heck do I explain a concept like this to creatures whose language descends from noises meant to tell primates where the ripe fruit is?”
But seriously, explaining the whole thing would probably take a lot of time, diagrams, and possibly the need to create new languages. You know, the kind of thing you typically have more time for once you’ve shuffled off the mortal coil and can devote a couple of centuries to perfect understanding.
What does that look like in an actual game? Pretty much that speech?
Probably more something like: “You are not yet ready to understand the answer to your question.”
If I got this kind of answer at the pearly gates, I’d be pissed. But it works as a handwave for a D&D game.
You’ve got better things to do in all eternity than gain complete understanding?
If you have an eternity to contemplate morality, you have an eternity to contemplate how to explain your ideas to others. Doubly true if you started as a supremely wise and powerful god/angel/etc and not just a random dude from Athens or Kaifeng or Detroit or whatever.
Given his family connections and direct contact with Demon Queen, I’m rather surprised that Sorcerer can stand in this place without celestial security grabbing him by the collar and taking him in for questioning… or just kicking him out point-blank.
Makes you wonder how much Paladin knows about Sorcerer.
At the very least, after Sorcerer’s explanation of his theories on travelling by Fireball, Paladin should know he’s probably not invested a lot in Intelligence or Wisdom…
Perhaps a fireball powered hot air balloon….
Actually, I think Burning hands could work. Provided the caster’s aim is good.
As for meeting deities… During the big Ravenloft game, the party was faced with the judgment of what appeared to be the Egyptian pantheon.
Gameplay-wise, it was pretty satisfying. We got to plead our cases on behalf of a party member with a very gruesome past (a Vorostokovian ex-pat who wound up in Falkovnia, now an ex-Talon), and if we got it right, the conclave would say that the one who had spoken, did so with the authority of one of the gods.
Several of them were pretty obscure, so it was fun looking them up, too.
Apart from the gameplay aspect, I found the experience creepy and impressive, which was appropriate.
On the other hand, when I was running a rather silly Advanced Fighting Fantasy-game, the party had the following experience.
The party Cleric was praying to Usrel, goddess of peace, for some divine intervention. I don’t quite recall why I did it (none of us were taking the game too seriously, and possibly the party should have been trying a little harder to solve their own problems), but unto the Cleric came a message from on high: “All lines are currently busy. Please stand by. Here at Usrel Ltd., your prayers are very important to us.” Then there was some music…
In my defense, this had my players in stitches.
Heh. I actually did the call service center in Exalted once. It kind of makes sense since the Unconquered Sun is MIA.
My players loved it. If memory serves, they tried to leave a message and/or talk to the operator to see if they could reach another deity. 😀
In addition to making sense it’s even canon that most of his prayers gets answered by his secretaries/a bunch of subservient gods employed specifically for that purpose (well most of the ones that don’t just get ignored).
Or at least it was canon in second edition, pr. Glories of the Most High: Unconquered Sun, I don’t think they have gone that much in detail about the celestial bureaucracy in third edition.
What few gods I’ve met were either the chaotic trickster type, for whom telling me the exact nature of good and evil is both boring and highly biased, or Fey gods for whom humanoid morality was never in their wheelhouse in the first place. That being said I have been in a game where there was only one Big G, and an innumerable amount of demons, and my character was a Paladin who very much DID NOT like this God and it was his entire purpose to seek this god out and question him for what purpose their suffering is meant to contribute towards beyond his service, as this same Paladin was a former slave in your typical quasi Roman Empire who had moral men basically doing the same thing (worship me and I will protect you from the suffering that I created to be used against you).
Unfortunately that tripped up the DM because he was under the impression I was your typical Deus Vult crusader and not a nihilistic godseeker who intends to question everything about life, the world, and his purpose. Campaign does not long after I pointed out some other flaws in the world and the game as a whole, and frankly the whole thing taught me that mortal men have no place in dictating divinity. But I digress.
More often than not the gods are either fairly normal people but with powers well beyond mortal ability, or more akin to a vast magical force given context and lore, but no definite form. Every race and culture has a war god and there’s some divine force out there that caters to those who worship war and violence, whether they call that god Ares or Gorum. Finding out who the real war god is, is a problem for mortals to hash out with each other (usually via crusades).
Personally? I use a mix of both. Gods are indeed not infallible nor the final authority when it comes to morality. Indeed, entire pantheons exist dedicated to different deities and how to represent different interpretations of concepts and morals for better and for worse, and they often are not allies. Gods of honor have the good side where you got gods who represent self-sacrifice, promises kept, and valor mirrors by gods who perpetuate cycles of revenge, refuse to acknowledge changes in culture or time, and cold contractual obligations. Indeed the fact there is no one true god is itself a reason why the gods are usually not able to directly intervene and help out their followers: they have their own battles just trying to maintain control or balance over the domains they represent, same as their followers.
I think that our own cultural touchstone of monotheistic evangelizing is tough to get around when you’re RPing in a polytherlistic setting. You gotta figure that attitudes would be fundamentally different when multiple divine figure are at canonical odds.
It doesn’t help that, while perhaps a controversial opinion outside of the context of D&D, gods or god usually DOES NOT grant you any notable powers or blessing beyond anything any human could gain, or someone you’re close too already gained i.e. having rich parents. Hard to say if the Big G god is better than the Banana God when both worshippers can cast cure wounds and smite at equal strengths
The only time I worked a god into the story was as a plot catalyst. Specifically, one of the chaotic gods accidentally dropped a can of her favorite energy drink into the Prime Material Plane. After fending off mad alchemists and aluminum elementals, the party managed to reach the divine ambrosia just in time for the thing to burst, blasting them in their respective faces and kicking off my group’s experiment with Pathfinder’s mythic rules.
Well, it would’ve, but we never actually came back to that campaign…
Heh. The gods must be crazy. Nice.
Was it a can of Red Aurochs? 😉
By the way, I loved the idea of aluminum elementals trying to get at the can. ^_^
In the last campaign i ran, i had the primary spellcasters have a vision with the goddess of magic, Hecate, when they tried to get the Wish spell. They had to persuade her that they were worthy of that kind of power and wouldnt misuse it or become a big dumb magical threat to the world. It was fascinating to hear the bard talk about how generally awesome he was, compared to the wizard with a wisdom of 1, who really just wanted it to fix his wisdom so he would stop being a burden on the party and others. Both of them got it, of course, but it was great fun watching them sweat trying to explain how their characters wouldnt be a menace.
Just how did that poor guy wind up with a Wisdom score of 1? 0_0
Justifying yourself before the gods sounds like a solid RP opportunity. Same sort of thing as the personal demons in the last comic.
This is probably why the Transcendent Pig keeps his mouth shut.
The what now?
Diane Duane wizards book – entity across space and time, shaped like a pig. Will answer a question if you can stump him, but you can’t. Wizards instructed to always first ask it ‘What’s the meaning of life’ in case he slips up and blurts something out.
No one’s sure why, he’s just kind of there in the setting.
oh shit. i haven’t thought about those books in ages! always wanted a laser-firing car antenna…
I’ve really only had one character who has encountered their “deity” up close and personal, and it’s always bad news for the neighborhood… my Psi/Sage/Cultist of YOG-SOTHOTH has met his deity a few times, usually when an invocation for power got a little too personal for the vast entity which was and shall be again and is ever present outside of space of time. Good old YOG pops a few tentacles through the portal and turns the subdimension inside out with (as far as my character is concerned) a few grumbles about “whippersnapper portals on my lawn”.
Eldritch entity type deities are their own can of worms. Probably ought to do a comic on the topic one day. Maybe a good Warlock comic….
My players largely are thrilled when they first gain access to more powerful divination spells, then lose their enthusiasm gradually when they discover the results. Specific questions about things they could discover for themselves or overreliance on a neat campaign feature lead to diminishing returns:
a) “00” on a “divine intervention” roll (which happened so often, I really should have inspected those dice) brought not the benevolent and intrusive demigod they’d hoped for, but Haark (or his twin Harold), professionally-bored aasimar messenger.
b) I wrote the answer in rhymed couplets, then passed it through Google translate a few times to and from random languages until it was incomprehensible mush.
c) After overuse of the WorldSerpent Inn to cross dimensions and outer planes, I let one PC’s actions start a “bar fight of the gods.” The battle waged on for months IRL. The PCs would summon the doorway, hear the noise of combat, and take the hint. EXCEPT for the Fighter/Mage, who insisted on wading in–In round 1, Thor used him as a thrown weapon against Coyote. There was no round 2 for him.
d) The halfling blacksmith who visited a pocket version of the Green Fields (halfling heaven), got souvenirs, pie, and a not-so-subtle admonishment that they were his native pantheon, and not Moradin of the dwarves, and that halfling communities could use a good role model like him if he were a little more devout.
The counter example is my method to avoid prepping my DM/PC cleric to not automatically counter every threat in the dungeon without having him memorize nothing but useless spells, either: the very non-specific casting of Divination “Which of my spells are most likely to be useful in the adventure before us?” The resulting list tells what could help (if used at the right time, in the right way) without explaining how and when they should be cast, or on who, and inevitably there are more higher-level spells than the cleric has slots available. Time to check the spell lists of the rest of the party! “Um, hey…guys? Zeus basically gave us this shopping list, and I’m broke.”
Heh. Fighter/Mage got to do “get help.”
Meat technique on spell prep there. Do you just go through the list there at the table? Or do you plan it as a handout ahead of time?
I loathe on-the-spot Divinations so much, I try to build them into the setup for an adventure. I’m a compulsive list maker, too, so I have the list ready as a handout ahead of time with Cleric saying “Hey, [character class], I know you might be able to cast [item on list] cause Spellcraft tells me it’s on your class list. Is that one you can memorize for us?” Rarely does anyone say “Nah, I don’t care what the gods suggest, there’s no way I’m wasting a slot on that.” (That’s just tempting the DM.) The real fun is when, say, Death Ward, Dismissal, Neutralize Poison, and Restoration are all on the list, and Cleric only has two slots available. No one else in the party can cast them, so which do you choose?
I also love the faces of the players as they look at the recommended spell list and try to guess what fresh Hell is waiting behind Door #2.
Not Haark T. Harold?
Best bar fight ever.
It’s not particularly subjective. It’s just a lot of people misinterpret it.
I’m pasting this from elsewhere. Here’s a basic outline of the alignments:
Do people have an innate responsibility to help each other? Good: Yes. Neutral: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Evil: No.
Do people need oversight? Lawful: Yes. Neutral: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Chaotic: Don’t tell me what to do! The axis isn’t necessarily how much you obey the laws of the land you’re in. A Lawful Good character wouldn’t have to tolerate legal slavery, nor would a Chaotic Good character start enslaving people in an area where it’s illegal.
Lawful Good believes that rules and systems are the best way to ensure the greatest good for all. Rules that do not benefit society must be removed by appropriate means from legislation to force. They’re responsible adults. 90% of comic book superheroes are examples of LG.
Neutral Good believes in helping others. They have no opinion on rules. They’re pleasant people. Superheroes who aren’t LG usually fall here.
Chaotic Good believes that rules get in the way of us helping each other and living in a harmonious society. They’re hippies.
Lawful Neutral believes that rules are the thing that keeps everything functioning, and that if people ignore the rules that they don’t think are right, then what is the point of rules? They believe that peace and duty are more important than justice. Inspector Javert and Judge Dredd are iconic examples.
True Neutral doesn’t really have a strong opinion. They just wanna keep their head down and live their life. Most boring people you pass on the street are True Neutral.
Chaotic Neutral values their own freedom and don’t wanna be told what to do. They’re rebellious children. Ron Swanson is the iconic example.
Lawful Evil believes rules are great for benefiting them/harming their enemies. They’re corrupt politicians, mobsters, and fascists.
Neutral Evil will do whatever benefits them/their inner-circle, crossing any moral line. They’re unscrupulous corporate executives at the high end, and sleazy assholes at the low end.
Chaotic Evil resents being told to not kick puppies. They’re Ayn Rand protagonists at the high end, and thugs at the low end. Rick Sanchez is an iconic example.
In addition to the official alignments, there are 6 unofficial alignments based on combining one axis of the alignment with stupidity. You can be multiple stupid alignments simultaneously, such as the traditional badly-played Paladin being known for being Lawful Stupid and Stupid Good at the same time.
Stupid Good believes in doing what seems good at the time regardless of its’ long-term impact. They would release
fantasy-Hitler-analogue^TM because mercy is a good thing.
Lawful Stupid believes in blindly following rules even when doing so is detrimental to themselves, others, and their goals. They would stop at a red light while chasing someone trying to set off a nuclear device that would destroy the city they’re in.
Chaotic Stupid is “LolRandom”. They’ll act wacky and random at any circumstance. They’ll try and take a dump on the king in the middle of an important meeting. It can also be a compulsive need to break rules even if you agree with them. If a Chaotic Good character feels the need to start enslaving people because slavery is illegal they’re being Chaotic Stupid.
Stupid Evil is doing evil simply because they’re the bad guy with no tangible benefit to themselves or harm to their enemy. They’re Captain planet villains.
Stupid Neutral comes in two flavors; active and passive.
Active Stupid Neutral is the idea that you must keep all things balanced. Is that Celestial army too powerful? Time to help that Demon horde.
Passive Stupid Neutral is the complete refusal to take sides or make decisions. “I have a moderate inclination towards maybe.”
Do you feel better?
You really didn’t have to do that.
Not a deity, but the closest would be a nearly infallible androsphinx. One of our party members immediately proved him fallible by betraying the party and stealing a planar-traveling Well of the Worlds, along with the macguffin we’d been looking for advice on handling.
Honestly, an easy way to handle things is to make the alignments cosmic forces, with each god being an interpretation of how that cosmic force is expressed. And none of them are infallible, as they are limited in their domains and are competing with and interfering with each other’s spheres of influence and knowledge. The Shin Megami Tensei series is good at showing Law and Chaos’ eternal conflict, and how they are both different yet similar (both want power and are both assholes about it).
That Sphinx: “I knew you would do that! All according to plan… Hue hue hue.”
Having two sets of opposed fundamental forces is perfectly fine, but things get touchy when those objective forces are assigned values like Good and Evil. I’d rather just pretend alignment didn’t exist.
This reminds me of the pantheon in Raymond E. Feist’s Riftworld saga.
In one book, a high priest of Sune the Pure admits that higher-ranking clerics can easily access the same powers as clerics of other, even supposedly opposed deities can. He puts this down to gaining a greater understanding of the gods.
Pug, archmage par excellence, learns that clerical spells aren’t even directly granted by the gods; instead, it is magic shaping itself in accordance with their beliefs. This does not mean the gods are uninvolved or that the prayers are useless – they’re essential – but even most clerics don’t have a proper understanding of the way the gods work.
(Heck, Pug manages to access cleric spells in spite of not having a specific patron and despite not being a cleric.)
Later, it’s shown that the pantheon actually works together for the sake of the balance and the preservation of life and existence. Even extreme conflicts such as between Good and Evil, as embodied by two of the Greater Gods, are put aside for a conflict that threatens the multiverse – and the two deities embodying it are actually fairly cordial to one another in the one scene where they interact, with the god of Evil addressing the goddess of Good as “old enemy”.
Much of mortals’ interactions with and conceptions of the gods is more a matter of their perspective and limited understanding than the actual, essential nature of the gods, who mostly just seem to want get on with the job at hand.
Having gods intervene any fantasy story (or, worse, a non-fantasy story) is a can of worms. Any being who possesses even a pale shadow of the power Western audiences associate with the label “god” is going to throw off the “power balance” in your story, unless characters with godlike power are common, which is its own can of worms (cit. Silver Age Superman).
The obvious pitfalls are the famous Deus Ex Machina and the TV-Tropes-famous Diabolus Ex Machina—respectively, problems being either solved or created with extreme ease and minimal agency for the main protagonists and antagonists. But refraining from doing so has its own problems. Anyone familiar enough with Middle Earth can explain why the Fellowship would be fools to fly into Mordor, but that would be harder if the eagles had power equalling or exceeding Sauron’s. If you have gods who actively intervene in the plot, you need to explain why they don’t Deus Ex Machina the plot into irrelevance. There are plenty of ways to justify gods intervening, and plenty of ways to justify gods not intervening, but justifying gods intervening sometimes and not others is tricky.
All that to say, I generally don’t see the point in having gods physically present in D&D games. I’m happy having them be abstract sources of power for clerics, prestige for high priests, and inspiration for the faithful.
If I was going to change that policy, I’d discard D&D’s pantheon and assumptions about gods for either a Classical/Norse/etc model where gods are generally selfish, fickle, and petty, or a more Eastern-inspired model where gods are generally moral, honorable, or at least dignified, but nowhere near as powerful as the big G. (Which arguably fits Classical and Norse gods to some extent, but we don’t usually think of them that way.)
A significant element of gods’ behavior in The Gods Are Bastards (a web serial story) was that if they all intervened against each other at full power, the world would soon be destroyed, so they have a bunch of gentleman’s agreements about what constitutes acceptable intervention, mostly in the form of empowering their chosen servants in pre-established fashions.
Yeah, some variation of “The gods have an agreement not to interfere to much because X” is pretty common. But if the gods still sometimes act as agents within the plot, it doesn’t take long for those rules to feel really friggin’ arbitrary.
Didn’t 1e have the Norse and Egyptian gods as its pantheon options?
Pillars of Eternity SPOILERS AHEAD, on the backstory and main story the player gets to know that the engwithians, a civilization from old who’s ruins you can ransack got questions for the gods. They saw the wars between religions, the hate and fights that comes from them. They seek out the gods to know what they should do with their lives. They found nothing. There were no gods, no truths and lots of dead people for nothing. So they make gods, real gods and several so that people could find what truth they wanted. SPOILER END
That always stuck me as a good idea philosophically. Lets say that life got a meaning, just one. How many people would have live without fulfilling it? If life got no meaning you can give it what meaning you want. Create your own meaning on life is good. Yet if gods exist and they are the ultimate judges things get complicated and that is something we talked while playing. I told my friends that a god doesn’t make his truth truer, he just enforces it more or less on his believers. Like a god is so powerful that whatever he says is true for he backs that with his power. A god could rape a priestess on the best Zeus way while saying how bad rape is and that would be good for getting smitten on person for disagreeing with your god is pretty much a good argument you were wrong. The power breach between gods and mortals is too great. They are right and if not they enforce their rightness. So don’t meet your gods is a very good thing to do for even the best are flawed on our setting. That is why they are gods but not Gods. Power can makes right for you can smitten those who don’t accept that you are right. That is the divine wisdom and whatever thing gods got the fancy to say to their followers. gods don’t bring answers, they make them and the good ones just allow them to not accept that. The truth is that there is no truth beyond what the pc can make or the gods can enforce. Think of when Durkon meets Thor and he gets to know about the previous world and other divine secrets. Even direct audience with his god didn’t helped Durkon get a more eco-friendly dogma 🙂
Now Paladin… he just will take whatever his gods gives him and take it as sacred word. He is too Legal to not accept that. If his god says so, so it’s 🙂
Divine answers are easy once you realize that no matter what the DM doesn’t truly gives answers. If no matter what he says, the answer isn’t an answer you can roll with it and keep roleplaying. Make your PC accept the divine revelation whatever is a burden to know or fight it for they can’t or want to accept it. Roleplaying the reaction to those answers is a good thing too 🙂
Roleplaying is an exercise in existentialism? Fair enough.
What if i told you that Existentialism is an exercise on roleplaying? 😛
I’d think you read your Goffman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life
Never heard of that book until today but thanks for the reading materiel 🙂
I don’t care what anyone else claims, law/chaos and good/evil alignments don’t make sense in a 9 square grid unless you use this method:
Good – Selfless
Neutral – Selfless, but not at the expense of themselves, Selfish, but not at the expense of others
Evil – Selfish at the expense of others
Lawful – Morals are a code determined by society they are part of. If they move to a new society, that code will change to fit that new setting
Neutral – Morals are a code determined by themselves. If they move to a new society, that code will not change.
Chaotic – Morals are indeterminate and based on emotional state at any given time, and may be hypocritical when compared to other moral decisions.
Without that interpretation, the only thing that makes sense is Good/Evil Law/Chaos, with “neutral” not actually existing except as a percentage between the two sides. In this case, “neutral” is either needing some “perfect balance” that cannot be realistically maintained, or is so nebulous and all encompassing, that EVERYTHING should be considered neutral unless it is 100% good/evil/lawful/chaotic.
Do you feel better?
We met a deity in an official AP, after rescuing a few souls of their clerics that were stranded for a long time.
My wizard identified said deity and, though he was devoted to a different deity, made note to be respectful of the being that could annihilate him with a thought.
Our other party members ranged from ‘oh crap’ to ‘oh wow’ to our resident atheist being disrespectful to it. Despite the sass, they gave us a very nice boon that came in handy later, a one-time divine intervention to prevent an otherwise lethal attack.
In another AP, my character met a deity in a dream after a particularly troubling set of events – his girlfriend dying in a horrible fashion led him to almost quit adventuring (IC I had trouble justifying him remaining after some iffy drama), but Desna convinced him otherwise with a sort of dream-vision pep talk.
Oh hey, I just realized we’d kind of done this topic before:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/tropic-of-evil-part-5-5-volcano-god
Forgot about that one. :/
I’m not sure if they qualify as deities, but one of my characters got to chat with Death for a bit. And Death was really morbid. He was all “Why do we live only to suffer?” Stuff like that. And my poor little orc bard was just “I have a little sister. She makes me happy. Why do I need to think more than that?” Death just couldn’t understand it.
I’m re-reading Sandman at the moment. Cheerful Death is a trip.
I have let my players meet Gods a couple of times in my campaign.
One was She-Who-Laughs, the goddess of the ocean and the, secret, grandmother of the bard. She basically appeared like the mother in Ponyo, a giant woman made of water, forming and moving around the players. She is ill-tempered and is mainly motivated by things that amuses her. Through she does tend to dote on her relations. So most of the partys conversations with her was the party sorta trying to figure out how much they could backtalk her, while she varied between doting on the bard and casting misery on the others for her own amusement. She only gave them straight answers if she thought it would lead to something amusing.
I also had a campaign where the Gods wandered the earth in the form of great beasts. So the players regularly interacted with them, but never spoke with them. So most “conversations” with them consisted me of building an atmosphere as they interacted with the God.
In my other, current campaing (The Githyanki egg one), the gods are dead and the world was crafted out of their corpses by the precursors. The Gods still live in the dreamworld, where most have gone mad, been enslaved by mindflayers or both. The closets thing the players have gotten to interact with Gods in that setting is a powerful Angle, who basically acted like the last guy in a department after everyone else was fired, the boss died and now they has to try and keep the ship afloat or thousands upon thousands of people will die. So the closet thing to god in that setting basically acts very stressed and high strung. And with precious little time for stupid questions about reality. When they answered them it was mainly in a brutally honest and very existentially horrifying manner as they described how badly reality was doing.
Apart from that, if it is just a minor encounter it depends on the god. Most have a very “I don´t have to take your bullshit you uppity mortal” thing going, but how much depends on the god. I once played one of the players good aligned God of the morning as being utterly loving and supportive. Which lead to some odd, and every sweet, interactions when he spend some time talking with the groups chaotic neutral trash goblin.
Love that you’re exploring variations on “the god encounter” rather than settling for a single option. That’s how you keep settings fresh right there.
You’ve got me curious about the trash goblin though. How did that conversation play out?
It started with the Goblin jumping in at random whenever the Cleric talked to their god and then the god would basically just be incredibly supportive and encouraging towards a creature that spend 20 minutes fighting a racoon over a tin can. After a bit the God would also just start asking the Cleric how the party was doing and do a bit of small talk with each of them.
It was basically the first time someone had 100% believed in the goodness and dreams of the goblin, so he ended up being quite attached to the god and it actually led to him becoming a, somewhat, better person as he tried to impress the god.
It also led to the god encouraging the goblin to follow his dreams of building an empire of garbage, after the other players had spent many session trying to get the goblin to stop filling every bag of holding they owned with literal garbage. I mainly played the God as someone who were almost incapable of seeing the bad in people. The worst thing he said about someone was that he was disappointed in one of the villains, which was all the party needed to know to be utterly on board with killing him.
Well, our party was put on a trial by an empyreal lord of justice and executions after we shifted a few evil artefacts and monsters to Heavens. It was cool, we managed to call our late party member as a witness and apologise for teleporting him to his death, I got to use Profession (lawyer), we got a receipt for one extremely evil cauldron, and were ordered to do some community service slaying some demons. The only ambiguous part was whether or not they would let us keep shifting evil to angels so we didn’t anymore.
Nice! We did something similar in my megadungeon.
It was a quest to resurrect the party’s paladin. He’d been hit with a wail of the banshee trap, but the come-back-to-life spells failed to find him. That’s because he’d been coopted by a chaos elemental in a plot to overthrow the City of Law.
Bascially, the paladin’s soul was put on trial for minor infractions. It was an open-and-shut case, but the PCs got to go up to the Celestial Courtroom and argue on their buddy’s behalf. Witnesses were called, an avatar of the paladin’s deity took the stand, and everyone got to fight the chaos terrorists when they tried to poison the Supreme Principle of Law in its own courtroom.
My favorite part of the whole setup was the local election going on back in the prime material. Another PC wanted to run for the town council. And as the battle between law and chaos raged, I kept cutting back to the vote tally: now the votes were 100% for one character, now there was nothing but write-ins for chickens, now there were not votes at all. Lots of fun watching celestial battles play out in the real world.
In my setting, gods are just the biggest fish in an infinite sea. There are gods, and gods of gods, and so on up to the very highest levels of power, and many of them have moral opinions that they’ve hardwired into reality such that you’ll be punished if you disagree with them, but none of that makes then right about them. In fact, given that most of those views are created to perpetuate the power of those divinities, despite their comparatively great wisdom you might be a better person if you ignore all of them.
That, of course, raises some really interesting questions. What do you do when you’re certain of the morality of the utilitarian ethic, but the gods have set up the world such that unless you behave deontologically, you are going to hell?
My players have met gods or near-divine brings on several occasions. Most of them have been disappointments in the senses you’d expect from the above, although not, I think, I terms of their impact.
Now see, I’m only interested in that question if it’s staged dramatically in an adventuring context. As a point of philosophy, it’s all well and good for a single playing to contemplate this biz, but I get tired of the Ethics 101 stuff pretty quickly these days. YMMV of course. 🙂
Kingmaker caused a big row in our group when it first came out. There is a quest about a priest of a certain Lawful Good deity that was in some trouble and had kind of gotten sick of not being able to save people from trolls. So, he does this big ritual, prays really hard, and the god does pretty much nothing to help him. So, being the limited mortal he is, he kills one of the god’s special creatures on the altar and calls out to anyone who will listen. Said god decides to Smite him, which would normally be a kind of “Richard, but fair” moment. Except he smites him by turning him into a permanently sickened bear for whom the sound of human speech is like the stinging of bees to his ears. So he turns him into an enraged murder bear that will totally try to kill any human he comes across. Then, he sends one his priests to “reclaim the altar”…without telling said priest about the murder bear.
Kinda really made us question Paizo’s idea of Lawful Good.
That’s the problem with having god take direct action. If they personify [insert ideal here], any quantifiable action they may take is subject to questioning. And making the ineffable effable takes a lot of the mystery out of divine mystery… if that makes any sense.
This comic triggered a memory of Obi Wan telling Luke Skywalker, “…what I told you was true – from a certain point of view.” The subsequent conversation highlights our collective grappling with an emotionally dissatisfying rationale. Apparently, we still haven’t been able to discover, through our play, an answer to our philosophical questions. But, hey, did we have fun this session?
Grappling with the questions is fine. It’s why we engage with art in the first place. Expecting answers — and then getting upset when they fail to appear — is where the un-fun sets in. 🙂
I usually default to having the gods be AFK, either not interested in or unwilling to intervene in my D&D games, tends to make things simpler and saves the headaches for me as a DM.
That said, I’ve had Azuth personally tutor one of my players when he started mistakenly praying to Mystra (the first one, I don’t remember how the names changed after she died twice but the first one), though that wasn’t an education on magic theory as much as a “please stop calling my boss by the wrong name, she gets touchy”
insofar as alignment, especially if you’re playing by setting rules like say, Faerune, shit gets confusing QUICK, I mean there are like a dozen good deities and whose to say which one of them is right or wrong?
My good old friend handwavium tends to take care of most of these situations though I’ve had one player on a quest for enlightenment question Lathander who mostly avoided the question and acted as a divine guidance counsellor, I think that’s the most elegant way to handle those situations, especially at a table with one or more religious players, its a bit hard to start throwing in concepts like fallible divinity or non-absolute benevolence in your supposedly good diety without rubbing up against some raw nerves.
and hey, we’re all just here to have fun right?
In my high sci fantasy games, there are gods and Gods. Gods are the manifestation of concept. If the concept is around they will be around. gods are those civilizations who have attained ridiculous power. They also typically manifest as single entities as all are essentially gestalt conspildations of their hyper advanced civilizations. So the god of Time would essentially be a Timelord type civilization but “ascended” through consolidation of power.