D&D 5E Life Without "the Gods" or Playing D&D without the DDG.

[steeldragons]

(@Yaarel)

It came up in the errata thread [EDIT: no it was one of the psionics ones /EDIT] and in an effort not to derail that thread further, and just because I love these sorts of world-building questions/issues, I thought I'd make this separate thread to explore/expand the discussion...

It has been proposed that one can not play/use clerics, or the whole 5e system, specifically (but any edition seems fair game) without incoporating the "baked in" assumption of deities.

How do you play D&D without deities? Can you? Have you created a world without gods? How did you do it? How did your players like it?

Anything's pretty much fair game on the topic.

I would submit it has already been done, and quite easily and successfuly in BECM. The Mentzer Basic [red book/box] even called it out specifically, that they were not touching religious belief or the question of deities with a 10' foot pole. Clerics gained their spells and abilities based on the strength of their "beliefs". That was as far as it went. There was no presumption of deities in the game world and it was left to individual tables how much or little they wanted to include the concept of "religion" at all.

Clerics could still "turn undead", they hasd spells like Bless, Cure Wounds, Light and various divinations ["Detect" spells]. But all of that, for lack of a better way of putting it, was just because you [the cleric] were different. You had stronger beliefs in...whatever...that granted you this level of power. Call it "enlightenment." Call it "fervor" or "passion." Call them virtues or ideals. But there wasn't a deity to be found, spelled out, in BECMI from which you were "granted" powers.

So it most certainly is possible to have and play D&D without any gods. And, while, 1e didn't shy away from the topic of religion in the game world quite as much, Deities & Demigods [later Legends & Lore] read like a Monster Manual. The gods all had stats. It was a presumption of the game that the PCs, at some point, could/might conceivably MEET and even FIGHT gods (due in no small part, I am sure, from source material like Conan, Elric, or the works of Lovecraft, not to mention more than a few real world mythologies, where heroes did battle and made deals with "gods" relatively often).

But even in 1e, you could easily have a cleric character and never brooch the topic of "What god do you believe in/serve that gives you your powers?"

It really was the advent of setting creation and publication where a certain suite of deities became "the norm"/necessary for a setting's given verisimilitude...as what civilizations in "real world" history were ever created without some mythology for people to "follow."

So, now, yes, the belief in a deity is a given for a Cleric in the game we have today. The domain mechanics help to pull that further in [as was introduced with 2e], but I am struggling to understand the view that one would not be capable of pulling that out/ignoring that fluff of the class and using it as is...just on the narrative of "It's the Cleric's personal strength of belief/ideals/virtues [however one is to personally define them, out of game] that fuels their powers" vs. the accepted assumption "it comes from the gods."

So...there...go! haha.

Have you done clerics without deities? How did it work? How did it play? What changed/was different than playing with the deific fluff?

 

[Parmandur]

The DMG covers this; the domains help, as they can be easily refluffed: a Nature Cleric is empowered by raw nature, rather than a nature deity.

Makes Monotheism pretty simple, too, compared to 3E.

 

[Irennan]

Yeah, assuming that divine casters draw their power from concepts or forces is a quick way to make them work in a godless D&D setting.

 

[Parmandur]

The Weave seems to offer one good, non godish explanation: Wizards are hackers who have applied their intellectual understanding to manipulate the magic suffusing the world, but a cleric (refluff them as Jedi, whatever) manipulates the Weave through sheer willpower (Zen like mental disciplines stand in for prayer, divine focus is a Ki-focus or what have you).

 

[halfling rogue]

sort of the fallback setting that we play in one of my groups is functionally a copycat of Tolkien's cosmology. Where there is one god and many created 'angelic' beings that have powers over certain domains. These 'powers' are rarely if ever seen or ritualistically worshipped by PCs, much like in Lord of the Rings. They are there but in the background. Powers that clerics possess are recognized to be coming from power beyond, but there's not much more fuss. Bad guys on the other hand have retained rituals/etc.

I know the OP specifically mentioned no gods, but this is how we've dealt with it for the most part. Really it isn't even thought about that much and doesn't come up too much.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

(@Yaarel)

It came up in the errata thread [EDIT: no it was one of the psionics ones /EDIT] and in an effort not to derail that thread further, and just because I love these sorts of world-building questions/issues, I thought I'd make this separate thread to explore/expand the discussion...

It has been proposed that one can not play/use clerics, or the whole 5e system, specifically (but any edition seems fair game) without incoporating the "baked in" assumption of deities.

How do you play D&D without deities? Can you? Have you created a world without gods? How did you do it? How did your players like it?

Yes. I do this exclusively. Inspired by Dark Sun's Sorcerer Kings and elemental vortices, in my campaign clerics may claim to represent gods or ideals (e.g. I've got a tempest cleric in my campaign who worships "the sky" in a shamanistic sort of way, as opposed to an anthopomorphic way), but in reality they're just intuitively manipulating planar magic. (Specifically, differentials in energy potentials between planes--whereas wizards manipulate the ambient energy within a plane. That's why wizard magic works in the phlogiston and cleric magic doesn't.) It has never caused any issues, and the players are fine with it. Narratively it's much cleaner not to have a whole raft of quasi-omnipotent-yet-mutually-opposing extraplanar entities meddling offscreen in PC affairs--getting rid of "gods" serves my overarching goal of emphasizing player agency.

That doesn't mean of course that there aren't entities who claim to be gods. But I as the DM know they're deluded and/or lying.

 

[Staffan]

Eberron is a mostly agnostic world. People believe in gods, but there's no hard proof of them. Spells like commune contact powerful extraplanar beings who don't have any direct connection to the gods either, but do believe in them and/or their ideals. Cleric spells in Eberron are primarily based on the cleric's belief that he's right and in tune with his deity's desires, which also means that clerics aren't alignment-restricted (though you'd need to justify how your alignment meshes with your view of what your deity desires). Some people theorize that "divine" magic comes from the Ring of Siberys, the remains of one of the progenitor dragons which now encircles the world.

There are forces and philosophies in the world that are non-personified and people who believe in these can gain clerical power as well.

 

[Ashrym]

The easiest option is to say clerics learn their own magic basement.philosophy instead of religion. Animism works, or monotheism, or more direct ancestral reverence.

Or a person could just ban the cleric class and play, completely ignoring playing with the gods.

It's not particularly challenging to make a group with no religious characters and play adventures that don't include religious traits, simply ignoring such as background fluff.

I'm not sure how this became an argument and didn't follow that thread. D&D has a history of using pantheons because that's common in mythology, but alternative systems have also commonly been suggested. 2e' philosophies or divinity of mankind were common in games I played then. A cleric can be special and the source of divine spark without a a religious system.

 

[Minigiant]

My setting has only one deity and he makes Ao look interactive.

In his place are Avatars, mortals made immortal by finding the Avatar Stone while one Avatar is dies. Each Avatar embodies a force: light, darkness, life, death, war, peace, storms, seas,

Divine magic is gained just by asking one for it and them for it. Most avatars don't demand worship for it, they typically just want you to kill people out to kill them. And since avatar can be replaced once killed, clerics might hate their current avatar. The Church of Life are in a crusade against the current Life Avatar who killed the previous one for the lulz.

 

[Irennan]

The Weave seems to offer one good, non godish explanation: Wizards are hackers who have applied their intellectual understanding to manipulate the magic suffusing the world, but a cleric (refluff them as Jedi, whatever) manipulates the Weave through sheer willpower (Zen like mental disciplines stand in for prayer, divine focus is a Ki-focus or what have you).

The Weave isn't exactly the best example IMHO. In the Realms the Weave basically is Mystra, their existences are deeply entwined and the characteristics of the goddess of magic and the properties of the Weave are also related. That is unless you are taking the Weave without Mystra, but then it would be just generic ''magic power'' that permeates and flows through everything.