The New 4th Edition God-Killing Rules

[Negflar2099]

This is (IMO) incredibly cool. While not right for every campaign killing the Gods is an awesome option and by the sound of it if the DM didn't want to allow that all they have to do is keep the PCS from getting their hands on the tools they need to really do the deed.

Basically there's one view of Gods where they are capital G GODS that are meant to beyond a mortal character's (or his players) understanding. This is a very modern western view of Gods that is based on the idea that these (or the one and only) beings is all powerful and all knowing and immortal. Much like finding out how sausage is made seeing the stats of a God takes away some of the magic for some people reducing Gods to gods and basically making them like every other mortal being. Under this view Gods would have infinite abilities that could never be shown on a stat block.

But that's not the only view of Gods that exists. Other cultures (Greek and Romans for one) saw Gods as very much like mortal beings with mortal likes and dislikes and with mortal failings and flaws. While insanely powerful these Gods were not all knowing or all powerful and certainly could be killed. Ragnarok is all about the Gods dying after all. If the Gods can be killed that means they have finite abilities and any finite ability (no matter how powerful) can be made to fit into a stat block.

Now the way D&D does it (and has always done it) is to follow the second path and make Gods flawed and ultimately killable beings. If you want to change that for your own game that's fine (and in fact Eberron pretty much goes in that direction on some levels) but realize that's not the usual D&D concept. Maybe that turns the magical into mundane but not everybody sees it that way. Like I said Ragnarok was about killing the Gods and for a more modern example in comics Gods get hurt and die all the time.

The point is that D&D supports both models. It may favor the second but the first is definitely doable.

But for those who support the second concept I can only say good hunting.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

Basically there's one view of Gods where they are capital G GODS that are meant to beyond a mortal character's (or his players) understanding. This is a very modern western view of Gods...

But that's not the only view of Gods that exists. Other cultures (Greek and Romans for one) saw Gods as very much like mortal beings with mortal likes and dislikes and with mortal failings and flaws.

I think you're right here, except that Greek, Roman, and Norse gods all come from places well west of Israel. That is to say, I want to give you a gold star, but I also want to give you a map.

I do really like how this is set up though. I'm not a fan of having pantheons large enough to have deities to spare, but including quests to weaken the deity's abilities makes them way more scalable -- if you can bring the quest down from fetching the chalice of fire from the Elemental Chaos to fetching the chalice of fire from the heart of the largest volcano in the western mountains, you can bring killing the deity down from a 30th level task to a 10th level task, if you're the sort of person that doesn't care for high level play.

Including quests (and multiple ideas, which helps considerably) means that you can have invincible unkillable gods until you have made a lengthy adventure to weaken them and make them however much weaker suits your fancy. Maybe that means you deign to give them a stat block. Maybe that means you make their stat block weaker. Maybe you use this to mimic the Time of Troubles. Maybe you turn Thor into just another big dude with a hammer. Maybe you turn him into a wiener dude with a hammer and a bad wrist. The point is, this is support for a giant PLOT button whose power is limited only by your own fragile little psyche.

In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say "Shemska, what in the name of gravy are you talking about?" This is, to my knowledge, the first time the game has explicitly supported gods as anything but big monsters at the end of a dungeon. Something about Lolth having 84 hp in first edition springs to mind.

 

[Mallus]

Something about Lolth having 84 hp in first edition springs to mind.

I think it was 66... and she found at the end of a big dungeon.

 

[Alzrius]

Now the way D&D does it (and has always done it) is to follow the second path and make Gods flawed and ultimately killable beings.

That's not the way D&D has always done it.

Second Edition was the era of gods being unkillable by mortal abilities. They could still die, of course, but only if killed by another god, or if they no longer had any worshippers to sustain them. However, no mortal could ever kill a god, and the only stat blocks about them were for their avatars - the gods themselves had none (save for some overarching guides on what the various levels of divinity could and could not do).

It was different from pretty much every other edition of the game before or since, but that was how it worked back then, and while a lot of people, including me, don't miss that, I can understand why others do.

 

[Shemeska]

If a deity is too tough for PCs to take on, sure, there's no point in statting up that deity.

In the wake of some of the general complaints about D&DG and F&P in 3e, that's a pretty sensible stance. But before I get any further, thank you for making some comments on the subject and clarifying against some of the objects I mentioned.

But we're talking about Tiamat, who we consider to be defeatable through combat. The numbers aren't arbitrarily large, and we took pains to make sure a fight against her wouldn't be impossible.

Out of curiosity, what was the grounds for saying that deity X is fightable versus deity Y not being fightable? I would generally put a cutoff point at demigod, and anything possessed of true divinity would literally be the stuff of quests and plot devices rather than a stat block. Just wondering what you guys saw as making something a reasonable target? As gods go, the mother of evil dragonkind would be rather high on my list of 'things you don't mess with regardless of your level unless your worshippers outnumber hers'.

The discorporation ability of deities, and the sidebar that lists some ways you might be able to actually kill the god, is designed to avoid having a deity battle be a "mundane standup fight." You can't just jump in and kill a deity on a whim: You'll go through entire adventures late in the game just to get the tools you need if you really want to destroy a god, and you'll be carrying those tools to the true culmination of your campaign. Killing a god IS A BIG DEAL and doing so is the defining end point of an entire campaign.

However I do have to give credit here for taking some steps to make the act have more in-game substance than a simple 'kill thor and take mjollner and go on killing spree' that's easy to hyperbolize if I felt so inclined.

While I still don't think that statting gods is a great style to emphasize, and some backsliding against the 2e stance that I found preferable w/ respect to giving the divine mystery and allure, I appreciate that you guys expanded the act beyond a straight up fight.

We didn't design this to let parties hop from domain to domain, slaughtering deity after deity. That's not the point. The point is making it so the final battle really is the final battle, and feels like a worthy end after years of play and 30 levels of adventure.

And that's the same thing that I would (and have) emphasized in games where gods, planar lords, archfiends etc were the major PC antagonist. However concrete stats are were I still feel it's a misguided approach, but in the end that's just a style issue, and admittedly I'm having to fight a bit of an uphill battle versus the nostalgia of 1e god stats in the process. You can have conflict with combat, and deicide without any crunch involved at all (which I find limiting and counterproductive on a few levels).

But Logan, thanks for clarifying on the topic for me. It's appreciated.

 

[mach1.9pants]

That is what we meant. I'm glad you like Tiamat and the quests, and I hope you look forward to the other deities that are on their way!

Any chance we could get a full epic module that climaxes in the death of an evil god?
Any 3PP's listening

 

[Celebrim]

I believe the best written D&D supplement of all time is 'The Book of the Righteous', published by Green Ronin, and written by Aaron Loeb. That's the only 'dieties and demigods' book that has ever given me enough to run a pantheon 'out of the box'.

So, for those of you familiar with the work, that should give you a good idea how far away I am from the ideology apparant in 4e.

Fundamentally, I'm not opposed to the notion of god-slaying, but if gods were so easily slain that all it took was a few epic quests and five or so epic mortals, then long long long ago all the gods with their greater knowledge, power, and resources would have managed to kill each other off. If the PC's could manage to arrange to kill Tiamat, then surely Bahamat or one of her other divine foes could have managed it centuries before they were born.

In many ways this is similar to the question, "If the treasure is easy to find, why is it still lying here?"

For all the people trumpeting how 4e is bringing the change, I don't see this as a fundamental change in ideology compared to 3e. In both cases, we are seeing gods presented as uber-monsters - powerful to be sure - but for the sufficiently powerful really no different than facing ogres or dragons at earlier levels. Some of the window dressing has changed, but a book of dieties presented this way would just be the 1st ed. and 3rd ed. monster manual all over again. At least in the 3rd ed. book, some effort had been expended explaining why all the gods hadn't been long since murdered.

I don't think my take on polytheistic pantheons is quite as extreme as the take Loeb takes - I don't think anything in a game should be unstatable - but I definately lean more toward 'gods are so far beyond mortal powers as to be incomprihensible' than I do gods as simply epic boss monsters, if only because logical necessity would seem to drive in that direction.

 

[Shemeska]

Super NPCs fighting the boss is a no-no. Does not matter is that NPC is named Eliminster, Orcus or DMPC, the players are the ones who need to be the main threat to the BBEG. They may need a plot device +12 to have a chance, but that plot device better damn well better be in the Player's hands. Bonus points if the plat device has multiple parts so everyone has a piece of the action

I never advocated taking the action out of the PCs hands and making them play second fiddle to powerful NPCs to do their dirty work of a campaign. Involving other powerful and interested entities can ultimately provide PCs with what they need to take down a deity or archfiend that otherwise would be beyond their capacity as mortals:
Hey, Malcanthet, tell me Pelor's one hidden vice.
Harishek ap Thulkesh, divine for me the moment at which Shar's divine gaze will be averted elsewhere.
Dispater, there's an artifact within your domain that might prove useful to me, and my using it will conveniantly allow you to escape retribution from Pelor's allies.

That sort of thing. By no means do you need to let an NPC do the PCs work for them. Let me be very clear on my stance there. And when I ever manage to finish my first Storyhour, folks can see very clearly that I'm not averse to allowing mortal PCs to best gods or planar powers. There's just never anything so conventional as pitting stats against stats, because I think that makes for too mundane of a victory for the PCs, and they deserve something better.

 

[Kaodi]

I think it is rather ironic that Tiamat is the first deity to be doled out. Consider how she and Bahamut were born. Do you really want to find out the hard way if death is only the beginning? hehehe...

 

[Shemeska]

Now the way D&D does it (and has always done it) is to follow the second path and make Gods flawed and ultimately killable beings.

In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say "Shemska, what in the name of gravy are you talking about?" This is, to my knowledge, the first time the game has explicitly supported gods as anything but big monsters at the end of a dungeon. Something about Lolth having 84 hp in first edition springs to mind.

Gods were explicitly more than big monsters for the entire tenure of 2e. It was also the edition that gave us the most flavor text on gods, their followers, beliefs, etc. It's tempting to suggest that the design focus once moved away from the crunch of god-stats flowed into other things.

And not just gods, but in many instances during 2e the same stance was also applied to archfiends and other planar entities. Such things are beyond the stuff of flesh and bone. They are transcendant things of belief and the very principles that define the cosmos, so don't expect to fight them in a dungeon, extraplanar or otherwise.

I adore the mid/late 2e design stance as it pertains to gods, archfiends, etc. It's not everyone's favorite, especally if you played during 1e and remember the 66HP Lolth, but it's a style that I hate to see moved away from more and more. Actual stats for tangible fights versus the divine takes away the magic and majesty of it all for me.


Mildly amusing tidbit:
And yes, there's also some irony here when the late 2e design focus (by McComb and some others) promoted the idea of gods being lesser beings than the planar lords in many instances, and I'm currently working on a cosmology for Paizo wherein gods are very much the biggest things on the block. Don't think I can't have fun and make cool things in someone else's sandbox under their design quirks even if they don't exactly mirror mine. But damn they come close on a ton of other aspects, planar-wise.

Edit: And Alzrius beat me to the punch on 2e.