D&D General Gods, huh, what are they good for?

[Indagare Nogitsune]

So while there are settings where the absence of deities tends to cause issues (Athas most notably and Ravenloft to some degree), there seems to be no reason deities actually have to exist in a setting; besides giving Clerics spells, divine beings seem to do very little else. Unlike in RL religions where the divine were literally responsible for various natural phenomena (and were supposed to be in charge of some Human-made things too), the D&D deities tend to be very aloft, even to the detriment of the world they're attached to (I'm looking at you Krynn).

There are usually reasons given for why this is the case (generally amounting to some sort of treaty between them and powerful infernal beings), but it often feels like they'd not intervene even if there were some world-ending crisis. Of course, the other side of this is that it's to empower the PCs to really help shape events--no matter how bizarrely one-sided it may be.

A problem I am facing as I try to develop my setting is that I want a closer connection between the divine and mortal realms. This is partly because I imagine the deities to be archfey (a concept explored in the Gargoyles tv series). Some of my thoughts running thus:

1) Where the Other World touches the Prime, various types of circles form. Most common are fairy circles. Larger and less common are crop circles. And, finally, there are henges. The henges are sites of worship, and I could easily imagine some round temple forming in its center or somewhere close by where the resident archfey resides (when it so desires).

2) There's no technical reason Archfey can't have Clerics given fey deities do exist. However, it still leaves unresolved what the difference would be between a Cleric and a Warlock in terms of worship vs pact.

3) If the Fey are involved more in the Prime and even responsible for various natural phenomena (if the Spring Sprites don't show your area gets literally stuck in winter; the Fey in charge of the sea can literally save your ship or sink it, etc.), then how is best to work this all in without it becoming too much? It's one thing to imagine a world not too dissimilar to that of Disney's The Nutcracker Suite combined with The Pastoral Symphony; it's another to figure out how that sort of thing works in practice (having house-hold protectors would make thieves have issues, but also PCs who need to get into a stronghold).

How do deities figure into your campaigns? If they are an engaging bunch, how do you keep things interesting? If they're not, why not?

 

[payn]

I had a homebrew for a hot min with my own take on deities. Instead of basing them on people or tangible figures, the deities were more like forces of power. Tapping into certain leylines and unleashing soul bound energy required a certain understanding of the nature of these deity forces. Thing is, nobody completely understands them. Which is where much of the conflict comes from. Being a good person is seen as a key to unlocking beneficial abilities and powers. However, being evil also unleashes beneficial abilities and powers of another nature. Since its not completely understood how these forces came to be, or any way to directly communicate with them, mortals are left to devise meaning from them on their own. Which, of course, causes quite a bit of conflict as folks naturally disagree with the best most virtuous approaches to tapping this mysterious power.

 

[aco175]

One of the things I would be thinking of is how much to have them in the game. Why do the people need heroes if the 'gods' just interact and I can go ask them. This is especially true when there are lots of fey doing the bidding. It is a cool idea to have a bunch of sprites fly over and make the spring come, but the farmer can just ask one of them to bless his crops or make his fields more bountiful. When things become common, it becomes watered down. I.E. every class now having magic using subclasses so it makes the overall feel of magic just common. Depends of your game I guess.

 

[Zardnaar]

Technically you dont need gods for clerics.

Reason you need them/theyre in.
D&D hits a lot of cultural tropes and basic storytelling going back millenia. Its a pastiche of ren faire and mythology and legends.

Basically gods are to baked into the D&D formula as it were.

Its the reason D&D has always been mumber 1 for the most part and will be for the foreseeable future.

Vast majority of humanity has beliefs in that direction. Every culture has these touchstones and D&D draws on that.

Fantasy genre also draws hard on that from Lord of the Rings onwards.

Removing them is kinda like taking blood out of horror genre. You can so it with specific setting eg Darksun but at this point its to much of a sacred cow. Pardon the pun.

FR big appeal is the God drama. Think Baldur's Gate 3. That's FR thats D&D its what people respond to. Great wheel, the multiverse and the gods Pelor, Shar, Mystra, Vlaakith, Gruumsh, Ehlonna, Dead 3 all of it.

 

[Necropolitan]

The Forgotten Realms is a great example of how you can have active deities while still preserving PC agency.

The gods of the Forgotten Realms don't get involved all the time, but their presence has enough of an effect on everyday life that only a fool would deny their existence.

For example the goddess of the ocean Umberlee might not sink every ship that refuses to pay her tribute, but ships with her Clerics on them definitely don't get sunk and her worshipers use that to run waterfront protection rackets.

 

[Charlaquin]

D&D really wants to emulate stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey where the gods regularly show up and directly interact with the heroes, but it struggles because it’s written by people who’s direct experience of religion is almost exclusively abrahamic. So, you get a pantheon of personified deities with specific purviews, but they’re also seemingly near-omnipotent, near-omniscient, distant, and non-interventionist. It’s a very confused mix.

 

[Celebrim]

So while there are settings where the absence of deities tends to cause issues (Athas most notably and Ravenloft to some degree), there seems to be no reason deities actually have to exist in a setting; besides giving Clerics spells, divine beings seem to do very little else. Unlike in RL religions where the divine were literally responsible for various natural phenomena (and were supposed to be in charge of some Human-made things too), the D&D deities tend to be very aloft, even to the detriment of the world they're attached to (I'm looking at you Krynn).

This is a setting decision just as the decision to have abstract or nonexistent deities are. It doesn't reflect how gods are observed as active in source material like Greek myths, or even how the Greeks and Romans recorded their own histories.

In my homebrew, you can make divine intervention checks. NPCs can make divine intervention checks. The gods intervene often enough that most people will perceive some sort of miracle or intervention in their lifetime, however minor. In the seven year long campaign I last ran, the PC's received miraculous divine intervention (not PC spellcasting) like 5 times - including a celestial sent to intervene in the life of a cleric, a sanctuary spell granted to a paladin to allow him to survive an attack by hellhounds, and an obscuring mist granted to a sorcerer to allow them to flee unobserved. The gods were also active in all sorts of other ways, sending dreams and omens and sending secret emissaries to fulfill various duties - both on the side of or against the PCs. Generally speaking, a PC party can expect to encounter a god at some point in the campaign, an event that if it becomes known makes the "saints" in the parlance of the world - people who have been face to face with a deity while yet mortal.

Dragonlance famously is like this. Once they intervene again, the gods are everywhere. Greyhawk is only slightly less populated with the divine. And while I think the Forgotten Realms have the problem of gods (like every other powerful NPC) stealing the PC's protagonism and maybe that's why they've moved away from it, it's not a requirement of a D&D world that gods be aloof.

 

[jayoungr]

So while there are settings where the absence of deities tends to cause issues (Athas most notably and Ravenloft to some degree), there seems to be no reason deities actually have to exist in a setting; besides giving Clerics spells, divine beings seem to do very little else.

I feel like your premise here is flawed, because we have no way of knowing what deities do or don't do in people's individual games. Every GM is free to use deities as much as they like or don't like.

 

[AlViking]

Gods in my campaign are very active - but not necessarily active in the prime material plane. First of all, gods have their own concerns and issues and their priorities don't always have much to do with mortals. There's also a feedback loop, the more worshippers a specific god has the more power they have to alter the lives of mortals. There are "lost" gods, gods that were once powerful and worshipped who now have minimal impact although a few occasionally try to make a big comeback by expending what little reservoir of power they still have.

Many supernatural beings can be raised to the point of being considered a god with corresponding influence the prime material world. At times archfey have been worshipped as gods but over time they lost more and more followers. Those archfey are still out there doing their thing but it rarely involves the prime material except through the occasional warlock or small cult. Meanwhile fiends can also affect the mortal world, to a certain degree by being worshipped but also by collecting souls.

For the most part gods don't directly interact with the world they act through emissaries such as clerics, archons and angelic beings. On the other hands if the gods go to war the mortal world can shake with battles being held on other planes. So it's not that gods aren't powerful, it's that their power to affect the mortal world is a reflection of the belief of mortals that they have the power to do so.

 

[Necropolitan]

The Scarred Lands aren't official but they also have real and active deities in them.

PCs can even petition them and gain mechanical benefits for doing so.