Shemeska
Adventurer
Tharen the Damned said:
Archfiends (and other planar lords) are physical manifestations of their alignment abstracts, personifications of bedrock elements of the multiverse. Hextor and Vecna might be evil aligned, but Demogorgon, Dispater and Daru Ib Shamiq, etc are evil taken physical form. The various archfiends understand the essence of evil on a level that simply isn't possible for an evil god, though to be honest it's probably irrelevant as far as a mortal might be concerned.
Gods are mortal beliefs, faith, and worship congealed into and embodied. Gods can form naturally from mortal belief (and the first gods in the multiverse would seem to have originated in this matter), and they can also be elevated mortals who transcend mortality and then become empowered and transformed by the influx of worship, or power gained from a deity already tapping into that source of faith etc. But while this gives an extraordinary level of power to deities, they're also dependant upon it, and if their worshippers abandon them, they'll suffer the deific equivalent of starvation before slowly slipping into the Astral as a solidified husk of a godisle. They aren't dead in the mortal sense of the word, just atrophied of their empowering substance.
Archfiends aren't dependant upon belief. Mortal belief may shape the outer planes and mold its natives on some level, but the alignment abstracts and their earliest forms entirely predate the existance of gods and mortal life. The most primordial of the archfiends like the Obyriths, Ancient Baatorians, perhaps Asmodeus, Apomps the Triple Aspected, and certainly the Baernaloths, they're effectively qualia of Evil, existing seperate from and unchanged by the flux and flow of the tide of belief shifting around them. Gods are children to such beings, albeit incredibly powerful children that should be treated with a deft and subtle hand, but deities are still transient little construts of faith so far as they're concerned, something to be dealt with till they eventually slip into the silvery twilight of the Astral.
Archfiends are limited in their power by comparison to gods, in that they're shackled to their alignment/plane rather than to the vine of mortal belief. Gods might be liable to the supply of souls and worship, but their power isn't restrained to a specific plane in most cases. Gods might pale at the thought of fighting an archfiend on its home plane, but the fiend won't have that same level of power outside of that plane and possibly its adjacent planes. Mydianchlarus the Oinoloth might be able to tell Cegilune or Hades to go screw themselves, but he wouldn't be able to enforce his words directly outside of the Gray Waste, or potentially Gehenna and Carceri to a much lesser extent. If Dispater and Pelor fight in Baator, then Pelor is going to get snapped like a twig, but if it happened in say, Arborea, then the reverse would very much be true.
It's really a trade-off not in terms of overall power, but in reach of power, limits of power, and the limitations and liabilities imposed by the source of your power. Neither god nor archfiend trumps the other in all cases. Rather it's entirely dependant on where we're talking about them getting into an argument or trying to enforce their whims.
