Kill the gods, your experience

[Teflon Billy]

Early on in my D&D life (Mid-1980's?) I played in campaign whose whole point was killing Kurtulmak, God of the Kobolds.

For a God, he was (as written) not all that tough.

Which was kind of appropriate I guess

 

[BlackMoria]

My group over the years (different campaigns) has whacked

Iuz (demigod)
Zuggmoty (demigod)
Vecna (on the verge of demigod hood)
Acerak (on the verge of demigod hood)
Kyuss (re-emergent god)
Velshoun (demigod)
Bhaal (greatly weakened god - during ToT in FR **yes, I played that railroady avatar trilogy.... someone had to whack 'em***)
Myrkul (greatly weakend god - during ToT in FR)
githyanki lich queen (can't remember name but supposedly a god figure for the githyanki)

Probably missed remembering a couple more.

Edit: Oh, yeah. A couple more I just recalled. We also whacked Lloth, Tiamat and Orcus.

 

[lukelightning]

Don't forget Lolth! She was practically invented to be killed, hence the Q1 module. 88 Hit points! Of course, that's back in the godd old days when she was more a Demon Queen and less of a Goddess.

Yeah, some people think it's stupid when PCs kill gods, but man, that was fun. We went in to the depths of the Abyss to confront evil and defeated it. It was a challenge but it was worth it.

And I don't care for the whole "avatar" thing. If you give the PCs a god to kill, if they manage to do it, don't steal their victory by saying "nyah nyah, it was just an avatar" unless you plan to let them eventually confront the real god later.

 

[Dykstrav]

For a campaign that features gods that can be killed, I'd recommend that you simply make deities as ordinary characters, but make their divine rank a flat sacred (or profane) bonus to every check the deity makes and every reactive thing he has too. For example, maybe Boccob is simply a 20th-level wizard, but with a divine rank of 17 he gets a +17 bonus on every attack, skill check, damage roll, hit points rolled for each hit die, to the damage of all spells, caster level, all saves and AC...

Just a thought, but treating divine rank as simply a flat bonus to everything would greatly simplify all the divine stats (if you think such things should exist, anyway). It'd also make it possible for characters to kill a deity, although much more difficult than taking on a regular NPC of those levels.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I tend to fall into the "most deities would squash a party of high-level PCs like bugs" camp, though I've had parties deal directly with (or against) greatly-weakened deities e.g. Tharizdun in his Forgotten Temple.

I never understood why the deities were statted out at all, as giving them stats implies they are...somehow...defeatable. When I started DMing, one of the first changes I made was to decide the divine stat blocks presented in Deities and Demigods simply did not exist, period. The way I see it, even a deity cannot kill another deity directly; deities get their power from their followers, so to weaken the deity you need to take out all the followers...and for quasi-universal deities such as Moradin and Corellon, with followers on just about every world ever played, that's gonna take a while.

Lanefan

If I may, the original idea behind "statting the gods" as presented in SUPPLEMENT IV: GODS, DEMI-GODS AND HEROES was to point up the absurdity of having characters who had basically nearly as many hit points as Odin the All-Father (who had a "mere" 300HP) in an effort to say "Hey, you Dungeon Masters! Tone it down! These are gods!")

Of course the first instinct of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS player is, upon finding out that a creature has stats, to try and kill it.

Jim Ward mentioned, over in his Q&A thread at Dragonsfoot, that the "stats as given" for the gods in SUPPLEMENT IV:GODS, DEMI-GODS AND HEROES and then later in DEITIES & DEMIGODS (neeLEGENDS & LORE) were for a bare-minimum, the-god-decides-to-walk-among-mortals-today "mode". Further encounters with them were to be treated with a bit more care.

And to the people who've done the whole "kill all the gods in DEITIES & DEMIGODS" how did you get past restrictions on not directing any acts of evil or violence against that Japanese goddess of mercy and love?

 

[lukelightning]

And to the people who've done the whole "kill all the gods in DEITIES & DEMIGODS" how did you get past restrictions on not directing any acts of evil or violence against that Japanese goddess of mercy and love?

I figure she dies out of her compassion for all the other gods who've died. You can't kill her, but she can commit suicide. "See, even you, the ultimate force of mercy, could not save *insert good dead god here* from death. Therefore mercy doesn't truly exist, and therefore neither do you.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I figure she dies out of her compassion for all the other gods who've died. You can't kill her, but she can commit suicide. "See, even you, the ultimate force of mercy, could not save *insert good dead god here* from death. Therefore mercy doesn't truly exist, and therefore neither do you.

...

...

...

Dude. That's just f------ mean

 

[Mark Hope]

At the end of a long-running (18 years) B/X, AD&D 1e and 2e campaign, a godswar broke out and the PCs (then 17th to 22nd level) got involved. Armed with mcguffiny doohickeys, they personally offed Tiamat and Asmodeus and caused the destruction and reintegration of three other deities (Io, Death and a Trickster god) into a single new form. And then the campaign ended and a bunch of the PCs became deities themselves. Game over. No other way to do it imho. You can't really go anywhere from there in those circumstances. Good way to wrap things up with a bang, though.

 

[mmu1]

I prefer gods of the "I think about it, and you cease to exist" ilk, that are, for whatever reason (an endless detente between good and evil, a controlling overgod, inability to appear directly on the mortal plane) unable to affect the world directly and instead rely on working through their worshippers and clerics.

If I were going to run a campaign in which gods could be killed, I'd in all likelihood make it a grittier, lower-magic game, in which gods would simply be high-level multiclass characters (I figure virtually all would need some magical ability, no matter their portfolio) without a divine rank and with a handful of supernatural abilities, and would be unable to grant their followers spells, or affect reality on a scale greater than that allowed by, say, Wish or Miracle.

 

[sniffles]

I have played in a "kill the gods" campaign, but not using D&D rules. I prefer to think of D&D gods as far too powerful for even epic-level PCs to handle. I don't even like it that the gods have been statted out.