How many gods is too many gods?

If it is more than 5 gods I simply stop bothering. I even prefer 1 or 3 to that.
Thing is, you can just give a single god more than one aspect and make him interesting, you don't have to split hairs and give names nobody even cares to remember anyway. If there are 20 gods I just strg+f the one that has the right aspect and ideology to suit the character I want to play and roll with it. If the DM wants to confront me with the other 19 I kinda always ask him what I am supposed to know about them anyway and its not like those gods even matter for 99% of the worlds they are supposed to be relevant too.

"Oh... a drought... please *mumble mumble* send us your aid!"
"Did you just pray to *mumble mumble* when this season its certainly *waffle waffles* domain to care for the crops?!"
"Who here invoked the name of *waffle waffle*, the Arch-Nemesis of *mumbo jumbo*?! I shall smite ye!"
"You are a servant of *mumbo jumbo*? That makes you a follower of the *woop woop* Pantheon! Commandment 34b-2 requires you to aid me with these Rats that have infested my Tavern Cellar!"
"Fear not Fair Maiden, the righteous Servants of *woop woop* always lend their Aid! Unlike those treacherous followers of *weep weep*!"

Uh. My world has 250+ deities (I've actually never counted them, but keep adding to them as I go about the process of worldbuilding), only about 9 of which the players have even heard of in game or have a direct impact on the campaign itself. In addition, my player's guide only lists about 30 of them, mostly tied to the area in which the campaign is taking place, with important exceptions noted. I include deity-like creatures, as well, like demon lords and arch devils in the above number, of course; in my world, demon lords and arch devils of sufficient power can grant cleric abilities and have other traits associated with deities.

Celebrim said:

That said, I don't actually agree that 5 is perfect (and I disagree with many other details of the still interesting essay as well).

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That's fair enough. My reason for posting the link was to attempt to further discussion, rather than any attempt at a last word - I find Angry to be generally useful, but certainly don't agree with everything he writes!

My basic objection is that while a particular campaign would do well to cover 5 possible thematic conflicts, there are actually far more than 5 conflicts over which people disagree.

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While that's true, I'm not sure it's actually desirable for a D&D setting to even try to encompass everything that people might disagree about. I'm generally inclined to the view that a setting is likely stronger if it has a small number of powerful themes, rather than trying to be model anything like the complexity of the real world.

I also note that while he's defined a nice family of gods with a broad set of human conflicts to drive family conflict, he's not really put the conflicts in the starkest terms. We might well think that all 5 of these deities are basically "nice" and while they have disagreements with each other, none of them rise to warfare levels, and that they normally exist in balance and harmony.

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I'm not keen to debate the example he happened to give, mostly because it is just one example.

Where I think he has it right, though:

- Fewer well realised gods are probably better than many undefined ones. (Indeed, IMO the worst bit of "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes" was the big lists of racial deities, many of whom got nothing beyond a name, province, alignment, domain, and symbol.)

- An odd, and indeed prime, number of gods is better than the alternative, to prevent balance and thus to generate conflict.

- It's probably better if deities are not simplistically aligned to Good and Evil - better if you can make a strong argument for both sides of a conflict.

- It's also not wise to be too systematic in the way things are laid out. Yes, there's a certain joy in symmetry and neatness... but it's more interesting to have oddities, gaps, and the like.

Of course, flipping it on its head, another part of me entirely thinks that D&D should treat gods as just another monster type, little different from other Outsiders. In this model, they would range from Household Gods at, say, CR 5, right up to the Greater Gods at CR ~40 - among the most powerful monsters in the game, certainly, but not completely beyond the ability of the mightiest of mortal heroes.

Doing that makes for a very different style of campaign, of course. But I'm not sure that's a bad thing, at least as an option.

Another thought would be to use something like Mike Mearls is doing for his homebrew version of Nethir Vale: every (non-CE) god has a demon lord or CE god opposing them. If you have a set of cosmic evil types that you plan on using in your campaign, then you can set the number of gods equal to them. If the campaign is a 20-level slog against Orcus, then only one god (or life or at least opposed undeath) is needed.

delericho said:

Yes.

Most people can handle between 5 and 9 options (with 7 being the sweet spot). So once you get to 10 deities, you've got too many.

The Angry DM has actually addressed this recently - his argument is that 5 is the perfect number of deities. (Skip down to "Five is the Perfect Number" for his explanation of that particular claim.)

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BAH! Madness.....MAAAAAADNEEEESSSSSSS.

What to do depends on the answer to a couple of questions: Do you, the DM, enjoy creating deities for your world, purely for the fun of it? And are you willing to accept that your players will have zero interest in your Catalogue of Divine Beings?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then go wild. If not, then I would suggest writing up details for the overdeities, and for the rest, just give them names and a one-sentence description: "Flumph is the god of silly monsters and tradition." You can always flesh out the details later, when a player expresses interest in a deity or you decide you want that deity's church to play a role in an adventure.

Plutancatty said:

8 Overdeities- ...
32 Greater deities...
About 20 racial deities...

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First, you have too many Overdeities. They don't even exist in most D&D worlds, and in ones where they do there is only one of them (Krynn might possibly have two).

You want those 8 to be Greater Deities. For the remaining 50+, you can just make them all Lesser Deities (or maybe leave a few as Greater Deities).

Now, as to the general concept...

You can't have too many unless you have more than you want. There is no objective standard of too-maniness here. What I would suggest, however, is to determine what role they will play in your world, and how you want the finished product to look.

A friend of mine has a world with basically one deity for each of the alignment axes, and then another one or two I think, because he doesn't want to mess with more. I have a more in-depth one for my main world because I like the detail.

Some people will tell you not to make more than your players will need. Hogwash. Make as many as you want. Just decide how much you care if your players know about it. Most players aren't very interested in reading all of our world-creation materials, but that doesn't mean they are a waste if having it enhances your experience as a world-builder and DM.

So for my world, for instance, I use all the non-human pantheons from official D&D sources for the non-humans. So I only have to make human pantheons. If you aren't familiar with the non-human pantheons that have been published, pick up some of the newer 5e books (Volo's Guide and Mordenkainen's Tome) or head over to DMsguild and grab some classics like Monster Mythology. No need to reinvent the wheel unless you want to.

The results that I wanted were a medieval feeling orderly church, contrasted with a more organic and chaotic collection of deities with more of Celtic feel. At the same time, I wasn't interested in having two completely unrelated pantheons, so I made two pantheons but made them related.

First, you have the Empyrean Powers. These guys basically all work together to support a functioning society. They each do something different. For instance, if you go to church, you go to the church of Illustrien, the NG god of hope and deliverance. If you are part of the nobility, you can skip attendance there and go to "noble only" meetings at the cathedrals of Pallatros, the LN god of law and civilization, but for everyone else it's Illustrien. There is a god whose priests train paladins and serve as military chaplains, one whose monks live at monasteries and gather knowledge, another one with particularly ascetic monks who focus on death and the afterlife, one whose priests officiate at celebrations and give life counseling to people, one whose priestesses run hospitals and orphanages, and one who inspires solitary mystics. These are distributed in a somewhat balanced way amongst the non-evil alignments, and they cover most of the domains. Then there are three evil ones, one of each alignment. They are enemies of the others, but got let into the pantheon before the world got created, because they convinced the others that at least they would know where to look and who to blame when things went wrong (basically).

Second, you have the Powers of the Aerth. This is the younger batch, and they look much more like a typical historical pantheon (or at least, a D&Dized version of such). They lack the "planned" looking nature of the Empyrean Powers, but cover most of the bases, with some internal overlap and such. In socities where the Power of the Aerth are dominant, the primary priests are druids, who are devoted to the pantheon in general. In a location or community where a cleric of any of the other the specific deities are present, their clerics take over handling things that relate to their deities, and the druids get more free time.

Then, to explain how these pantheons are actually related, you have the Primal Powers. These include a Father and Mother, as well as a Great Dragon that carries the world in its claws (that's literally true, 'cause why not?), and finally a sort of cosmic boogeyman that probably spends most of its time stuck in the Far Realm and wants to basically destroy everything. The priests of these deities (the boogeyman doesn't have any) tend to be more distant and have unusual functions compared to the others. Both people who follow the Empyrean Powers and people who follow the Powers of the Aerth recognize the Primal Powers as part of their pantheon. There also a few other interesting connections. Those who follow the Powers of the Aerth claim the deities of Life (the ones with those hospital priestesses) and Death (those ascetic monks) as their own, and have their own priesthoods devoted to them. Those who follow the Empyrean Powers honor the goddess of valor and chivalry (who is actually a Power of the Aerth), whose husband is that Empyrean Power whose priests train paladins and serve as chaplains.

How people see these pantheons and the interactions between them varies drastically by their culture. In some cultures, one pantheon is revered and the other is shunned, and people believe the pantheons are in conflict. On the other end of the spectrum, in some cultures they are seen as a single united pantheon. And it isn't terribly uncommon for an area to follow the Empyrean Powers, and then add in a couple favorites from the Powers of the Aerth (the opposite is less likely). In areas that favor the Powers of the Aerth, the people may not take an active interest in all of them. They might have a few local favorites, with the rest more or less being on a list the druids know.

I created all of that (although I haven't actually gotten around to creating the Powers of the Aerth yet...it's quite a bit of work) to evoke the specific feel and themes that I want there to be in the world's society, as well as to give options for clerics to select various domains. Most of the gods have only a single domain that their clerics have access to. When one has more than one domain, they represent distinct orders of priesthood. For instance, Illustrien has one order whose followers tend to be the ones who man the churches and see to people's needs, and another who strap on armor and go fight against the creatures of the night like undead and lycanthropes, and root out dark magic.

Now I just have to figure out fun ways to show more of this stuff to my players next time we get back to my world (we plane-hop).

If the number of anything is more than you can count on your fingers, anyone who isn’t significantly invested will struggle to remember them. If it’s more than you can count on one hand, anyone who isn’t more than casually interested will struggle to remember them. This doesn’t mean 6+ gods is too many, or even that 11+ is too many, it’s just something to be aware of; how much investment do you want your world to require to get into?

For a world that aims to be broadly approachable, about five major gods is ideal. Lesser deities are generally only going to be of interest to folks who are more than casually invested anyway, so you can get away with more of them. Maybe 5-10 per major god.

For a world that wants a little more depth, at the cost of being a bit less approachable, go for around 10 major gods and as many minor deities as you like.

For a world that doesn’t care how approachable it is, knock yourself out. Put in as many as you like.

I think it is better to work from the bottom up than the top down.

Instead of starting with 'in the beginning...'

Start with who the people are and why are they worshiping.

Gods don't exist if there is no one around to worship them/they don't affect anyone.

When you have figured out the different sorts of religious things you are going to have in your world, you will have naturally sorted out who the gods are.