Kill the gods, your experience

[Aaron L]

One of my campaigns was set to have the PCs eventually face a demigod. It petered out before it got that far, but it looks like we may be picking it up again before long.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

It all depends on the campaign setting. Take Exalted, for example - there are many millions of them, and a great number of them are weaker than the average starting character. So slaying, say, the god of a single city shouldn't be too difficult, as long as you have the right abilities that allow you to affect him at all.

In more "standard" D&D settings, like the Forgotten Realms? That's trickier. I would allow the attempt, as I would allow most things the PCs attempt, but they'd better be really well prepared, have a very good plan, and are powerful enough to pull it off - presumably they are in the epic levels.

 

[GwydapLlew]

My long-running FR campaign has the ultimate goal of Auril dying. The backstory is a bit complicated, but the PCs are being given a grand tour of the Realms in a slow-paced attempt to figure out how to commit deicide - Shar and Jergal are giving the assist, so it's not just PC vs Deity, it's divinely-aided-PV vs Deity.

Hopefully the PCs will survive to the level required of them.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

In D&D? No.

In Rifts, however, I had a party of 5th level characters that beat Ares bad enough to make him flee the battle. That was about the time I realized how ridiculous Rifts had become.

 

[Vedic Wizard]

A friend of mine owns the original 1st Ed Gods and Deities book with the Cathulu pantheon. We did a one off special adventure where our characters were responsible for stopping Cathulu & Hastor coming into our universe. First we had to locate the "Elder sign" then locate a portal that would take us to the realm where Cathulu and Hastor hang out.

In the big finale we had to battle the two deities. We saw them off, though they retreated rather than allow us to finish them off. It was all great fun, and done in a way that would have made Lovecraft proud.

I don't have a problem with Deicide so long as it has some kind of grand theological basis (the characters have the item that's the god's bane, or are allied with the person it's said will bring the god down) after all it's not like gods dying doesn't have a basis in myth and legend.

 

[lukelightning]

I think she only had 66 hp, but she was AC -10!

I remember seeing her low hit points (the idea that sneaking peeks at Deities & Demigods is cheating/metagaming never dawned on us; we had no notion of the concept of "metagaming) and thinking "oh yeah, one fireball and a few arrows and she's dead!

Then I fireballed her and failed to overcome her magic resistance. Bleah. And I think maybe she was immune to fire or something.

I vaguely recall that my disintegration saved the day.

 

[RFisher]

In a polytheistic world, we have to give up the idea of gods weilding absolute power. Otherwise we have to explain paradoxes all over the place.

I didn't mean to suggest that we considered all the D&D deities to be omnipotent. Just that they were so much more powerful than mortals could ever achieve that it wasn't worth trying to codify their power.

But, I do think the (at least potential) difference between monotheism & polytheism several posters have mentioned is quite interesting. In fact, that is an element of my idea for a deicide campaign.

 

[Dykstrav]

I didn't mean to suggest that we considered all the D&D deities to be omnipotent. Just that they were so much more powerful than mortals could ever achieve that it wasn't worth trying to codify their power.

This is largely true if you run a 'typical' D&D game that tops out in the 15th-18th level range. But as other posters have mentioned, there are several instances where deities fight each other and even kill each other. For events of such world-shaking importance, it is best for the DM to decide what kind of game he wants to run and let that decide what happens rather than trying to play out the overthrow of the titans with a ream of divine character sheets and fistfulls of dice.

Deities and Demigods makes it abundantly clear that the deities it presents are not omnipotent, not even Taiia from the example monotheistic faith. In essence they are just extremely powerful creatures in terms of their abilities and crunchy bits under the rules. As a practical matter, they may well be percieved as omnipotent, because who's really going to cast a gate spell and go spank a deity until it cries uncle?

Despite the fact that I've never used the statistics for deities, I like the fact that they are statted out and there are rules for making your own deities. We've all seen 1st-level characters, so we know where the bottom rung for power is in the typical campaign. Adding deities with stats sets the other end of that spectrum in a concrete way. As a DM, I dig the idea of being able to read over a creature knowing that it's one of the most powerful in the game and there's (usually) not much that the characters can do about it.

 

[sniffles]

This is largely true if you run a 'typical' D&D game that tops out in the 15th-18th level range. But as other posters have mentioned, there are several instances where deities fight each other and even kill each other. For events of such world-shaking importance, it is best for the DM to decide what kind of game he wants to run and let that decide what happens rather than trying to play out the overthrow of the titans with a ream of divine character sheets and fistfulls of dice.

Deities and Demigods makes it abundantly clear that the deities it presents are not omnipotent, not even Taiia from the example monotheistic faith. In essence they are just extremely powerful creatures in terms of their abilities and crunchy bits under the rules. As a practical matter, they may well be percieved as omnipotent, because who's really going to cast a gate spell and go spank a deity until it cries uncle?

Despite the fact that I've never used the statistics for deities, I like the fact that they are statted out and there are rules for making your own deities. We've all seen 1st-level characters, so we know where the bottom rung for power is in the typical campaign. Adding deities with stats sets the other end of that spectrum in a concrete way. As a DM, I dig the idea of being able to read over a creature knowing that it's one of the most powerful in the game and there's (usually) not much that the characters can do about it.

You make some good points. I may not care for statting out gods, but it does give a GM somewhere to go should he want to run a campaign in which the PCs have an opportunity to become gods.

I have played in a D&D campaign in which one of the PCs became a lesser deity. We ran through the Avatar Trilogy/Time of Troubles module and one of the PCs became romantically attached to Midnight. When she ascended to godhood and took the role of Mystra, she elevated the PC to divinity too.

Now the GM of that campaign is running another Forgotten Realms game, and in his new game that former PC continues to be a member of the Faerunian pantheon.

 

[jollyninja]

I recently ran a game where the climactic battle to end it was with Bane. He was making his play to rule the world with all of his forces going on the offensive across the world. The other gods had been weakened by a ritual that bane had spent years working on and many of them had been killed. those that remained were able to create an artifact that would prevent Bane from escaping. It was a near TPK as only one of the character's survived.

good times.

the problem was many of the players didn't really believe they should have been able to do it. they said it felt a bit forced and that Bane should have been more powerful.