The New 4th Edition God-Killing Rules

[cignus_pfaccari]

What about the ramifications of deicide? If the GM is running a game where the players on plane hopping adding to list of slain deities, what happens when all the gods are dead? Granted it wouldn't be easy topull of such a feat, but it should at least get mentions somewhere.

Well, there are 4-5 possibly proto-gods by the deity's cooling corpse that could take over.

Or one of the deity's exarchs could seize/inherit their portfolio/Word/what have you. Heck, they may have even helped nudge their boss along as part of that epic quest.

Brad

 

[Xris Robin]

EDIT: Nevermind, didn't see the other pages.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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.

There are dead gods, right? So presumably, this actually happened before.

It is trivially easy for humans to kill each other. Yet they rarely do so. It happens, but these people are usually punished by the society, unless the entire society supported the murder.

And that's probably the same for gods. Maybe Bahamut could try to kill Tiamat - or the other way around. But Bahamut - he would be setting a bad example and might fear the repercussions. Tiamat knows that Bahamut has allies that might come kill him. So they arrange with each other, and to solve their conflicts on the material world, among followers and angels.

But there is another problem - if gods actually first have to complete some kind of quest to commit a murder among each other, this is a lot of prepwork. If the only way to kill a human was to first travel half the world and buy a bazooka, how many murders would still happen? How many could hope to go unnoticed? Even if you "hire" someone else to do it - how likely is it he gets stopped?
How many epic heroes fail their quests? How many epic heroes even exist?

 

[delericho]

The first describes the deity's special rules. There's a few nifty things like not being able to be attacked by anyone not in the epic tier, being able to do a savings throw against any effect immediately, and then the bit about "Discorporation"...

This leads to the second column, called "Destroying Tiamat". It contains 3 hooks for quests that once completed, allow you to truely destroy her...

Discuss!

Sounds like they've got it exactly right.

For those groups that don't want gods to be killable, they can either simply not use the rules or make the quests impossible (or, you know, just don't have quests to kill gods). For the groups that do want those rules, they're there. What's more, it looks like the stat-blocks are now not so massive as to make "Deities & Demigods" (or its 4e equivalent) almost completely useless.

 

[Dire Bare]

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.

Heh, this made me laugh a bit. All it takes is a few epic quests and five or so epic heroes . . . 'cause you just can't swing a dead cat without hitting epic heroes in most fantasy settings . . .

Epic heroes taking epic quests are not common occurences. They happen every couple of millenia or so . . . it just so happens that the current epic heroes out to slay Tiamat permanently are the player characters!

And as another poster pointed out, just because you have the physical or magical power to kill someone, doesn't mean you will or it's simply "that easy". All I need is a knife to kill a person (in fact, I don't really even need that). But yet, I never have (even though I do think there are people out there who probably deserve it). And it probably wouldn't be as easy as walking up to them and just hacking away. And if I did pull it off, there would be repercussions. It's not any different at the divine level. Bahamut might think offing Tiamat sounds like a great idea, and he certainly could take on those crazy epic quests himself and then take on Tiamat personally . . . but would it really be just "that easy" for him? Only if the DM is a poor storyteller . . .

 

[ferratus]

Again, if you don't want players killing gods, it seems to me that you just don't allow the game to advance beyond level 20... just like in 2e.

People did read about the heroic, paragon, and epic tiers right? It seems half the complaints about 4e not fitting their preferred play style or type of campaign world on enworld could be resolved by ending the campaign earlier.

 

[Scribble]

Reminds me of the Dragonlace Legends series where Raistlin has to do a bunch of stuff (Including gettin it on with a good cleric woohoo!) in his quest to take on Tahkisis...

 

[Cam Banks]

Reminds me of the Dragonlace Legends series where Raistlin has to do a bunch of stuff (Including gettin it on with a good cleric woohoo!) in his quest to take on Tahkisis...

First of all, Raistlin's not exactly a good example of a player character. Caramon, on the other hand, is a perfect example.

Secondly, I'm OK with Tiamat being an antagonist that epic characters can kill if they're lucky, but if anybody starts equating her with Takhisis I'm going to scream. One's a big five headed super-dragon, the other's a greater god who happens to take the form of a big five headed super-dragon when she's slumming in the Temple of Neraka.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Scribble]

First of all, Raistlin's not exactly a good example of a player character. Caramon, on the other hand, is a perfect example.

Secondly, I'm OK with Tiamat being an antagonist that epic characters can kill if they're lucky, but if anybody starts equating her with Takhisis I'm going to scream. One's a big five headed super-dragon, the other's a greater god who happens to take the form of a big five headed super-dragon when she's slumming in the Temple of Neraka.

Cheers,
Cam

You say Tomato, I say greater god who happens to take the form of a big five headed super-dragon when she's slumming in the Temple of Neraka.

Seriously though... in the art of Dragonlance book there's this picture of raistlin all tied up in the abyss while Tahkisis watches over him... She's pretty dang hot in that 80s pornqueen look Elmore does so well!

 

[avin]

She's pretty dang hot in that 80s pornqueen look Elmore does so well!

We have a winner \o/