D&D 4E 4e Races and Classes: "Why we changed the gods"

[Li Shenron]

There are two opposite attitudes with which a group may want to play a RPG: one is based on placing the PCs in a full-blossomed fantasy world that makes a lot of sense and has a lot of details, at the expense of carrying a certain baggage; the other is based on action! and who cares about everything else. I've found my own favourite balance between the two. It looks like the main choice of 4e is to support the latter, but to leave groups alone if they want the first.

But anyway, this long explanation about how NEW is the 4e pantheon... can you guess what it means at the end? That we will finally have a god of magic, a god of death, a god of war, a god of nature, a god for paladins, a crazy CE god, a tyrant LE god, a god of luck, a god for rogues... just what we ALWAYS had.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Wyrmshadows...

I disagree that "pilfering the good ideas and leaving the rest" and "expanding on the stuff in the PHB and turning it into a full homebrew" are somehow different than "using the default fluff", or are contrary to the intentions of the game developers.

You yourself are saying that it can be pilfered for good ideas, and used as a jumping off point for a homebrew. Isn't that all you can ask from a Player's Handbook, rather than a setting book?

It seems that you consider the "top-down" model of setting/homebrew design to be the better "good DM" way, while the "bottom-up" model of design (the basis for the Points of Light concept) is the inferior "novice DM" way. I disagree. Both have a lot of good aspects to them, and what is given in the 4E PHB will be more than enough to get a good setting started for the "bottom-up" approach.

As a novice DM, I immediately fell into the trap of over-designing homebrew settings from the top-down, and not thinking about how they will play out in actual campaigns. It is the fluff hinted at for 4E, and the idea of Points of Light, that is actually inspiring me to build things the other way around with a better emphasis on the players and the story of their characters, and I think it is going to help me become a better DM.

 

[TwinBahamut]

As for the particular issue of a god of agriculture...

I think it is easy enough to just dump the agricultural portfolio onto any god that is reasonable. For example, Pelor makes a great god of agriculture, in addition to everything else a Sun God can be. Obad-Hai is another great candidate.

 

[Voss]

There are two opposite attitudes with which a group may want to play a RPG: one is based on placing the PCs in a full-blossomed fantasy world that makes a lot of sense and has a lot of details, at the expense of carrying a certain baggage; the other is based on action! and who cares about everything else.

Not sure why these are opposites. I want a full world and action. Simultaneously.


I want a goddess of beauty, one of childbirth and fertility, a god of agriculture and the seasons. Having them present in the world doesn't reduce the amount of action in the world. But not having does start to reduce the game to a board game or a war game. Or a Roguelike, with the town on top of the dungeon, and the only shops sell adventuring gear, and you just go down, down, down, through a series of random encounters without rhyme of reason.

 

[Li Shenron]

Not sure why these are opposites. I want a full world and action. Simultaneously.

Yeah but I want both of them as well. I said opposites but maybe I should have said "concurrent" for the sole reason that world-building carries baggage, and baggage gets in the way of action. A book has to balance between the two because it has a limited space.

 

[Simon Marks]

I read

In your campaign, you can have as many deities as you want, but in order to design classes, a cosmology, and products that work well together, we wanted a good set of deities that cover most players’ needs without that pantheon being too complex and cumbersome.

and failed to see the reason for gnashing of teeth in this.

"Which gods should we put in the default backgrounds?"
"The ones the players are most likely to either follow or oppose"

Works for me.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Wyrmshadows...


You yourself are saying that it can be pilfered for good ideas, and used as a jumping off point for a homebrew. Isn't that all you can ask from a Player's Handbook, rather than a setting book?

Every DM pilfers, borrows, seeks inspiration, etc. from myriad sources and makes it his or her own by tweaking it until it is an optimal fit with his or her vision. I am not criticising this in any way.

I might ask that some other play styles besides "let me bash its skull in until it falls and then rob it" be supported. If gods like the a god of agriculture, who is probably one of the most significant gods of civilized species, is not going to be included because s/he isn't about merely killing stuff and looting the corpses what I see is D&D harkening back to the days when I was 10-12 when stuff like depth didn't matter. Maybe I Ask too much, maybe not.

What is presented in the PHBs and DMGs are default assumptions of how the game is supposed to be played in the minds of many new DMs and players alike. Its formative and IMO not, as may be presented condusive to multiple play styles.

It seems that you consider the "top-down" model of setting/homebrew design to be the better "good DM" way, while the "bottom-up" model of design (the basis for the Points of Light concept) is the inferior "novice DM" way. I disagree. Both have a lot of good aspects to them, and what is given in the 4E PHB will be more than enough to get a good setting started for the "bottom-up" approach.

Either way works fine. However, the core implied setting is ultimately a never to be developed setting. It won't even have a name....probably ever. It is just a placemarker for core concepts and something easily usable by those new to the game. IMO DMs should feel free to not give a rat's arse one way or another about which gods are removed or added and run things their own way in their own settings borrowing ideas as necessary but dumping what doesn't fit.

Unfortunately all too often what appears in core whether in rules, classes or underlying philosophy often feeds "One True Wayism" and puts a spin on the way the game must be played in the gaming community as a whole and feeds a certain perception of what D&D is supposed to be about.

As a novice DM, I immediately fell into the trap of over-designing homebrew settings from the top-down, and not thinking about how they will play out in actual campaigns. It is the fluff hinted at for 4E, and the idea of Points of Light, that is actually inspiring me to build things the other way around with a better emphasis on the players and the story of their characters, and I think it is going to help me become a better DM.

I'm with you on that, I did the same thing.

As I said above, all DMs take inspiration from other sources than their imaginations alone. My point is that ultimately the fluff for the 4e core setting is really not a setting at all but a never to be developed setting that may inspire a whole new generation of gamers the same way Dragonlance was formative for me at age 14.

We'll see if its for good or ill.

Oh yeah, and don't even get me started on the "If it appears in the game it must be killable" meme that inspires designers to insist that the gods (not merely their avatars) are killable. This meme suggests that PCs should, by being merit of being PC, given enough magic and power, have the ability and or ability to face off with anyone and anything in a given setting. I can see this on a setting by setting basis, I just don't like it as a core assumption.



Wyrmshadows

 

[Zweischneid]

Love it or lump it, the god of agriculture if done in a way which doesn't invite adventure is basically eating up page count. People complain about stuff getting cut all the time, think of this as a preventative measure.

I don't know... a god of agriculture doesn't lend itself to adventuring better or worse than, say, a god of death or a god of warfare. Followers of the former would likely man funerals and death rites (just as his agriculture counterparts attend harvest and fertility rites) and followers of the latter would be tied to large bodies of armed men, unlikely to go treasure-hunting on their own.

So some effort is needed in either case to turn them into adventurers... short of a god of adventuring, I don't see much differences between the types of gods as far as their "adventurability" is concerned.

 

[delericho]

I have yet to meet anyone past the age of 14 who actually plays or DMs in the "World of Dungeons and Dragons?", the uncharted, unnamed, undeveloped "world" that all these fluff changes represent.

I have, many times. Sometimes, I just want to play, and not worry about a world-spanning epic across the vista of a lovingly-detailed game world developed across twenty years of effort.

To that end, I would prefer the default pantheon be something that I can use for my games as-is, without the need for modification. It doesn't actually matter a jot if the pantheon changes from 3e to 4e, provided it remains usable. My preference, however, would be to not see Bane rubbing shoulders with Pelor - the admixture of settings that that represents would be jarring to several of my players.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

My implication is that a setting without nice solid fluff whether homebrew or published is nothing more than life support for dungeon crawls. The core fluff presented so far seems quite good to me, however, the implied setting for 4e (as it was in 3/3.5e despite the Greyhawk name) is nothing more than a scaffold upon which can potentially build a rich homebrew setting. However I would argue that the implied setting will require so much work to flesh out to any degree one might as well create something new whole cloth.

I disagree. I can, and likely will run a campaign entirely from the fluff in the PHB, DMG, and MM.

I mean it's not that difficult at all.

The PCs start in the starting town in the DMG. They are given the choice to worship the gods in the PHB. They hear that there is a cave nearby which apparently contains the riches of a lost empire but no one has been foolish enough to enter it in decades and the last person to try never came out.

They go inside where they find ancient traps, strange magic, and horrible beasts and come out with treasure and a map that must be hundreds of years old. On it is a prophecy saying that Bane will awaken and walk the world and wreak havoc on the world on the day that this map is again seen by mortal eyes but that he can be stopped by finding the artifact created by a powerful mage and the map leads to its location.

There you have a basis for an entire campaign and all I had to do was make up one dungeon without creating any new fluff or gods at all.

The only reason I'd even need to mention a god of agriculture at all is if one of the players decided specifically that he wanted to play a character who worshiped agriculture(unlikely to say the least) or started asking around town to see where all the farmers worshiped their god of agriculture.

I even think that things like agriculture will be part of the gods' portfolios in the PHB. I think they point they were making is that a god of Magic, Weather, Nature, and Agriculture (in a world where people believe that magic comes nature) is a much better god for a world than having one god for each of those things. It allows the players to easily remember which god is which and have a GOOD reason for a cleric of all of of the gods to be a member of an adventuring group.

I mean, I can come up with a reason to have an agricultural god's cleric adventuring but it will either sound forced or require me to tie the entire plot of my game to that one character.

On the other hand, it's easy for me to say "You worship a god of magic. Part of the mandate of the god is to uncover ancient magic. You want to find dungeons and places of power. You also want to make contacts to learn new magic. You also want to use magic whenever possible. You get much more opportunity out adventuring than you do sitting at home."